The Development of Global Governance from the Catholic Church to the United Nations: The Pazzi Conspiracy and the Sanctioning of Iraq
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Date
2025-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
This paper seeks to understand how global governance institutions have changed over time by exploring the similarities between the United Nations at the turn of the millennia and the Catholic Church of the 15th and 16th centuries. By suggesting that the institutional structure and the political nature of the Catholic Church serves as a proto-United Nations, it challenges existing theories about the emergence of global governance by suggesting that versions of global governance had begun to appear as early as the medieval ages. This also challenges the distinction between secular and theological institutions that marked the post Westphalia world by examining linguistic overlap between the documents produced by both secular and religious institutions.
To gain leverage on the relationship between these two institutions, I use two methods: a qualitative case analysis comparing logic and actions of the Catholic church and the UN during their respective cases: Interdict of Florence following the Pazzi Conspiracy and the UN sanctions placed on Iraq following the invasion of Kuwait; and a quantitative analysis comparing the linguistic overlap of documents produced by both institutions. By running each document through Word2Vec, I am able to get vector representations of the words within each document and average to place the two documents within a 300-dimensional space. Then by taking the cosine of the angle between the two documents the linguistic overlap can be represent on a scale from -1 to 1 with the higher number representing higher overlap.
Both the qualitative case study and quantitative textual analysis of this paper confirm the hypothesized relationship between the two institutions. The fact that these two institutions exercise similar authority through similar mechanisms has significant implications for the theory and practice of global governance today.
Description
Denman Undergraduate Research Forum 3rd Place
Keywords
Catholic Church, United Nations, International Relations, Global Governance, Textual Analysis, Medici