Where have all the leaders gone? Politicians and business people are asking that question as they look for someone to save them from financial crisis or resolve intractable foreign conflicts. The U.S. and Russian presidents, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, are obviously out of the running. Germany and Japan hardly present a rosier picture. Simultaneously, the challenges that require leadership seem to be mounting.

Canada's Financial Post wrote: "The world is beset by an epidemic of smaller-than-life leaders whose failings and inadequacies do not bode well for the future." Richard Semiatin, assistant professor of government at American University in Washington, said, "Leaders emerge in a war or perhaps a severe economic event such as a depression. It's the right person being there at a propitious moment."

On July 17th, 120 member states of the United Nations agreed to create a permanent global war-crimes tribunal, to be called the International Criminal Court. The ICC and other projects like it are signs that the world is getting serious about thinking of itself as a world.

Many projects now try, in the wake of atrocity, to make sense of what happened. One of the main things they have in common is the use of databases. Finding out who did what to whom, where and when, on a national and international scale, requires a sophisticated means of archiving, retrieving, cross-referencing, and analyzing evidence and information. As Patrick Ball, who has worked for the American Association for the Advancement of Science on projects in South Africa and Guatemala and similar ones in Argentina and Haiti, writes in his book, Who Did What to Whom? (1996), "Human rights monitoring work is about information: getting the facts straight is the basic requirement for many organizations' work."

As we envision more and more of these global institutions we are simultaneously confronted with the prospect of more and more databases of increasing size and complexity. The time has come to take a step back and ask the question: Are we ready to live in such a place?

"In the course of an average day," began the dark fairy tale Al Gore delivered in a speech to NYU graduates last May, "you may use your credit card to buy groceries. You may visit the doctor for a check-up, and have your health information punched into a database. You may surf the Web, and send an e-mail to a friend. And at every step of the way, you may be leaving a trail of personal data that can be used or abused by others."

The "data crumbs" that are left behind do not help Hansel and Gretel out of the forest; they only let the witch track them down. Instead of hearing tales of getting lost, today we begin to sense that we cannot hide.

Lexis-Nexis, the information-retrieval service, has more than 7,300 databases. They contain more than one billion documents consisting of more than one trillion characters. Each day 120,000 news articles are added, and 4.5 million documents are added each week. That works out to seven documents every second. The databases grow 40 percent every twelve months. The hardware to store all this data--amounting to four terabytes (or 4,000 gigabytes, or 4,000,000 megabytes) of memory--takes up about 22,000 square feet.

The direct-marketing firm Metromail Corp. claims to have information on 95 percent of American households, and more than 200 million people's consumer data. It's all stored in the largest Oracle database in the country.

The FBI uses databases for its work tracking criminals. Its National Crime Information Computer handles two million inquiries a day and contains almost 8.5 million records, on everybody from license-plate thieves to missing persons to murderers. When you are pulled over for speeding, your highway patrolman checks your plates with the NCIC. The NCIC's most famous recent catch was Timothy McVeigh. Before becoming a suspect, McVeigh was pulled over because he was driving a car without plates. As FBI agent Jeff Thurman said, "NCIC makes it very difficult for someone to flee the area and function in a normal manner." It makes it very hard to disappear, that is.

Health, law, and marketing. The database runs each, and what used to be known as the self or the soul, or just the personality, is now nothing more than quantifiable data, the sum of categorized parts.

"In the project of an international criminal court lies the promise of universal justice," Kofi Annan said to the International Bar Association last summer in anticipation of the ICC summit in Rome. Justice on such a scale needs evidence--forensic data--on an equally large scale. When we say universal justice, we are implying the need for universal data. The more we try to create global organizations, the more indebted we are to the already ubiquitous database. But with each new promise the question remains, what will protect us from the database?

In private parlays from Zurich to Hong Kong, in closed courtrooms from Singapore to Paris, in legal chambers in London and New York, in government offices from Washington to Tokyo, close-knit bands of global planners are writing the rules that will govern the world economy into the 21st century and beyond.

All this work has 2 things in common. First, little of it protects workers or communities or reins in the power of global markets. Instead, it is aimed at making the markets safer, more efficient, and, hence, more powerful.

Second, it is taking place virtually unnoticed and not debated by voters, politicians, or the press. To a great degree, the rules are being written by experts and technicians, with no democratic input.

"Creating the institutions and arrangements for handling globalization is the greatest intellectual challenge now facing the world," said Richard Haass of the Brookings Institution. "A gap must be filled. This is going to be the next great area of intellectual endeavor."

"The challenges of our age are problems without passports; to address them we need blueprints without borders," Secretary-General Kofi Annan observed, pledging the support of the United Nations in this endeavor. The Secretary-General made these remarks during a commencement speech at his alma mater, Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The Secretary-General urged students to adopt a broad outlook, noting that issues before the United Nations, such as the environment, drugs, pandemics and sustainable development, cut across all frontiers. "This is the message we are trying to send to the world," he said. "Yet too many people are still thinking in local terms, constrained by boundaries."

The book "The Great Betrayal," by Patrick J. Buchanan, has the subtitle, "How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy." In it, Buchanan uses quotes from two Clinton appointees to help define the thinking and attitudes of "one world" globalists.

Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, Clinton's roommate at Oxford, wrote this in Time magazine, July 20, 1992: "All countries are basically social arrangements.… No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary.… Within the next hundred years … nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority."

The other quote was made in 1974 by Richard N. Gardner, later to become Clinton's ambassador to Spain: "The 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up…. An end run about national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault."

Buchanan writes: "In the global economy, money no longer follows the flag. Money has no flag." His words echo those of Thomas Jefferson: "Merchants have no country. The mere ground they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."

Buchanan sums it up this way: "An economy is not a country…. The people of a nation are a moral community who must share values higher than economic interests, or that nation will not endure."

With nation linked to nation through the economics of trade and the financial markets, and certain regions of the world almost perpetually on the brink of war, some believe there's a real need for world government.

Author Gary Kah has researched groups which support global government. "I believe that we are quite possibly one major world crisis away from world government becoming a reality," says Kah. "I'm talking about either an economic crisis or a military crisis, or possibly a combination of both."

Kah says war has often been associated with moves toward global government. The formation of the League of Nations followed World War I, and the United Nations was formed after World War II. The 1991 Gulf War brought a lot of popularity to the term "New World Order," a catch phrase often used by President George Bush.

Observers point to a number of organizations they say are leading the way toward global government. They include the Gorbachev Foundation, founded by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Author David Allen Lewis, in his book Signs of His Coming, details a 1995 conference sponsored by the foundation. "The State of the World Forum: Toward a New Civilization" was held at the Fairmont Hotel and the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco. A conference document speaks of a new world civilization.

In the San Francisco Weekly, Jim Garrison, Jr., the head of the Gorbachev Foundation USA, said the planet needs a "Council of Elders" drawn from the highest echelons of politics, science, the arts, and commerce. Garrison predicts that "over the next 20 to 30 years, we are going to end up with world government--it's inevitable."

Some organizations work in the economic and political realms, and others in the spiritual realm, by way of the New Age movement. And Gary Kah, author of the soon-to-be-released book The New World Religion, says there's often a mixing of the two.

David Allen Lewis says that ever since the founding of the New Age movement, a "new" Christ has been foretold.

"If I didn't believe in Jesus Christ, if I didn't believe in the coming of His Kingdom, I think I'd fall right in line with them," says Lewis. "Because, after all, everyone understands you've got to have global control if we're going to have world peace. There will never be world peace without some kind of a global function. But the global function that's going to prevail is going to be the reign of Jesus Christ, not the Antichrist."