I don't believe there is a conscious drive towards a world government. Instead what we are seeing is the entrenchment of political power at national level by an elite that regulates entry to itself mainly through educational attainment. The real hardcore went to Ivy League/Oxbridge, and then there is the Outer Party (so to speak) from the next tier universities. And like any halfway-smart elite they will co-opt people from other areas e.g. cultural influencers or successful capitalists. These people are not driving towards a world government for its own sake, but they like to defer power upwards to international institutions because they control them (in personnel terms, i.e. you have to be elite to work in those institutions), and because it reduces the sphere of decision left to democratically-controlled national governments.
Like any social group, the elite achieves consolidation and cohesion by defining itself against what it isn't. What it isn't is the mass of people in its own countries. The people who live outside the M25 and certain university towns in the UK, or outside the wealthy districts of certain US cities.
The elites generally don't want to abolish democracy formally, because the rituals and processes are a useful way of manufacturing consent / invalidating dissent. But clearly you can't just let the great unwashed vote for what they want, because it might undermine your own privileges. So they need to guide democracy and make sure it generates the right results.
They do it in two complementary ways: 1) emphasising their unique expertise in policy 2) reverse-delegating as much power as possible to international institutions that are independent of national governments and electorates, and which are controlled by members of the elite.
This probably explains the intensity of the narrative around incompetent Boris/Trump, efficient Merkel/Adern. Don't get me wrong, Boris and Trump were/are pretty incompetent. But actual results didn't and don't matter. Hardly anyone in the mainstream elite-serving media is seriously saying we should reassess the judgement based on say faster vaccinations in the UK than Germany, or the shitshow of ongoing lockdowns in NZ.
The expertise is often almost entirely bullshit by the way, in case anyone needs told that. In my own professional area of economics there is a sort of collective suspension of disbelief as we pretend to each other we know what we are doing. I have heard very senior people in private admit openly that we do not.
Climate science and policy is so useful for the elite that if it didn't exist, they'd have had to invent it. Requires expertise, check. Shuts down debate, check. Can only be addressed internationally, check. Costs largely borne by people who live outside densely built-up inner cities, check.
Buying into woke social attitudes and policies is a good way to distinguish yourself from the masses as well.
COVID has been an absolute godsend, although to be clear, I don't think that means it was deliberate.
So it might be a subtle difference and it might look kind of similar in the end, but I think on the whole international/global institutions are used to consolidate political, cultural and economic power at the national level, rather than out of a genuine desire to build a Huxleyesque World State, much less an Orwellian one.
In fact, a real world state might not be so good for the elite because there would be no higher level of authority left to delegate up to i.e. away from the people affected by policy.