On: The Guardian view on global corporate tax: a $500bn prize that states must...

They have found the number. Five hundred billion. A prize, they call it. A sum to be seized from the empires of commerce and returned to the treasuries of nations. I read this and I feel the old, familiar sickness - not of cynicism, but of recognition.

They believe the problem is one of capture. That the treasure has been stolen, and if only the right treaty is signed, the right mechanism agreed upon by all the powers, it can be reclaimed. They write of negotiations and vetoes as if sovereignty were a lever one pulls to produce justice. They do not see the architecture.

The coalition will form. It will be vast. It will unite against a common enemy: the faceless corporation that pays no dues. And for a moment, in the signing of papers, they will believe they have won. They will have their principle, their global accord.

Then will come the enforcement. The thousand jurisdictions, each with its own hunger, its own interpretation, its own desperate need. The legal structures that span continents will find a thousand crevices in this new wall. The prize will fragment in the claiming. The coalition that agreed on the theft will never agree on the division of the spoils. They will have plowed the sea.

They write constitutions for a world that does not exist. They draft agreements for a solidarity that evaporates the moment the shared enemy is no longer a useful abstraction. The money is not the point. The point is that they believe a mechanism can create a polity. They believe the treaty can manufacture the trust, the shared purpose, the common citizenship required to sustain it.

It cannot. It never could. I wrote a constitution for Gran Colombia. It was a beautiful document. It died of geography, of particular interests, of the profound, unbridgeable distance between the idea of a people and the people themselves.

They will get their tax. Or some version of it. And they will discover, too late, that the victory was the easy part. The governance - the perpetual, grinding, unheroic work of building a thing that lasts - requires a soil they have not tilled. They have agreed on what to take. They have not agreed on what to build. And so, when the money arrives, it will not save them. It will merely prove how little they had in common all along.