Governing the World: The History of an Idea. By Mark Mazower. Penguin Press; 475 pages; $29.95. Allen Lane; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

ON THE sidelines of the recent Democratic National Convention that nominated Barack Obama to seek a second term, one symposium saw a clutch of American grandees take questions from invited foreign politicians. A man from Bahrain asked about the Arab spring. A woman from the Afghan parliament voiced fears about democracy in her homeland. Then came a more querulous intervention. A Belgian member of the European Parliament demanded to know why the European Union had not yet been mentioned. From the stage, Madeleine Albright, a former secretary of state, suggested that the world was waiting for Europe to pull its weight. The room erupted in scornful applause, delighted by the put-down.

Gone are the days when representatives of transnational clubs such as the EU enjoyed special regard in foreign-policy circles, simply by embodying a form of governance that rose above the selfishness of the nation state. Nor is the United Nations in brilliant shape, as Chinese and Russian vetoes at the Security Council block robust UN action to stop the massacres in Syria. This is, then, a brave moment to bring out a book devoted to the history of international governance, from 1815 to the present day.

Mark Mazower, a British historian at Columbia University, New York, presents his work as a stocktaking: a chance, just as the West is seeing power shift to emerging giants in the East, to ponder how Europeans and Americans crafted the present web of international institutions, from the UN to the World Bank or International Monetary Fund.

The reader is given much to ponder. The 19th century emerges as a ferment of competing schemes and fantasies of European federalism, global brotherhood and world government. Professional men, merchants, lawyers, scientists and revolutionaries all sought to wrest the business of inter-state relations away from monarchs, despots, generals and a diplomatic corps heaving with aristocrats, and onto a more rational, technocratic footing.

One Italian antimonarchist, Giuseppe Mazzini, was already wrestling in 1832 with whether nations had a duty to meddle in the affairs of far-flung countries where grave wrongs were being done, long before today’s statesmen agonised about genocide, the responsibility to protect and limits to state sovereignty. Then came the Saint-Simonians, followers of a French aristocrat and Utopian socialist, who dreamed that global harmony would involve, among other things, better transport links (the builder of the Suez Canal was a believer). Chapters devoted to the 20th century describe the rise and fall of the League of Nations, and the UN’s salvation by such inventions as peacekeeping, by which the meddling of powerful countries is sanctified by magic blue helmets.

The book shrewdly notes the irony that the creed of internationalism has made its greatest advances when idealists are shoved to one side, and established elites co-opt an idea to their own ends. The Geneva Conventions, for instance, are shown coming about when one branch of the peace movement stopped trying to abolish war, and worked with governments to humanise the way that wars were fought.

Yet the complexity of the subject is also the book’s undoing. The author seems unable to decide whether he is trying to tease out historical parallels, which shed light on modern debates, or to provide a comprehensive survey of the wavering fortunes of each competing branch of internationalism. Trying to pull off both, he sacrifices structure and clarity of argument. His conclusion—that the present financial crisis marks a moment of catastrophic overreach for Anglo-Saxon free markets, strengthening the hand of those “who see a more strategic role for the state”—feels abrupt. It also fails to note that Europe’s most statist economies are in even worse shape than Britain or America. Professor Mazower has written some fine histories of 20th-century Europe. His editors should have advised him to give this baggy book a substantial reworking before it was published.