Gridlock

Why Global Cooperation is Failing when We Need It Most

Thomas Hale, David Held, Kevin Young

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745670102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The issues that increasingly dominate the 21st century cannot be solved by any single country acting alone, no matter how powerful. To manage the global economy, prevent runaway environmental destruction, reign in nuclear proliferation, or confront other global challenges, we must cooperate. But at the same time, our tools for global policymaking - chiefly state-to-state negotiations over treaties and international institutions - have broken down.

The result is gridlock, which manifests across areas via a number of common mechanisms. The rise of new powers representing a more diverse array of interests makes agreement more difficult. The problems themselves have also grown harder as global policy issues penetrate ever more deeply into core domestic concerns. Existing institutions, created for a different world, also lock-in pathological decision-making procedures and render the field ever more complex. All of these processes - in part a function of previous, successful efforts at cooperation - have led global cooperation to fail us even as we need it most.

Ranging over the main areas of global concern, from security to the global economy and the environment, this book examines these mechanisms of gridlock and pathways beyond them. It is written in a highly accessible way, making it relevant not only to students of politics and international relations but also to a wider general readership.

1

Gridlock

Ambrogio Lorenzetti learned the virtue of effective governance by being born in Siena, in what is now the center of Italy, in 1290. His city had won its independence from the Church in 1167, and by 1169 had written a constitution that invested decision-making power in a council held accountable, under law, to a broadening proportion of the population. This government kept the peace, enforced the law, and invested in beneficent public works. Prosperity and culture followed. At a time when most of Europe was trapped in feudal misery, the Sienese – and their counterparts in Florence, Venice, and the other centers of what would become the Renaissance – flourished.

Lorenzetti was very clear on the causes of this success. Inside the Palazzo Pubblico, which anchors the unparalleled geometry of Siena's central square, he painted a series of room-sized frescos on both the promise of government (The Allegory of Good Government, The Effect of Good Government on City Life, The Effect of Good Government on the Countryside) and its peril (The Allegory of Bad Government, The Effect of Bad Government on City Life, and The Effect of Bad Government on the Countryside). Under good government the citizens look prosperous, harvests are rich, and even the pigs are plump. Under bad government, buildings have fallen into disrepair, citizens lie dying in the streets, and flames rise from the fields. No pigs can be seen.

The simple idea captured in Lorenzetti's paintings goes a long way toward explaining why polities with what we would now call “good governance” were the first to lead Europeans out of the Middle Ages.¹ That idea has reached its apogee (thus far) in the modern, liberal, social democratic state. By facilitating political conditions in which public needs can be articulated and collective solutions applied, and by balancing private gain and public good, the modern state has shown that the “effects of good government” can extend far beyond a city-state and its surrounding fields. And while the modern state, even in its law-based, constrained, and democratic form, is certainly capable of great wrongdoing, it is arguable that under no other set of institutions in the historical record have so many lived so well.

But some problems defeat even the best governments. In 1348 Yersinia pestis, a rod-shaped bacterium, entered Siena inside fleas carried on the backs of rats and inside the clothes of merchants trading with the cities of the eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor. Within a matter of months more than half the city's population had died, along with, in just a few years, a third of all Europeans – including Lorenzetti himself (Bowsky 1964). Ironically, the speed and devastation of the Black Death were facilitated by the trade routes that had helped to make Siena and the other Italian cities wealthy (Benedictow 2004).

Today, many important policy problems are like the plague; they do not fit neatly into jurisdictional boundaries. And while our governments have (mostly) grown from city-states to nation-states, we do not have a global state – like the one envisioned by Lorenzetti's contemporary Dante in his De Monarchia (1312–13) – to tackle the many problems too big for any one country. So how can we bring the “effect of good government” to our globalized society?

Unlike in Renaissance Italy, our society has created a series of powerful tools to manage common problems beyond the state: multilateral institutions. These operate through a logic of intergovernmental cooperation. To solve joint challenges and provide public goods, governments must negotiate with one another to mutually adjust their policies so that the actions of one country help other countries realize their own objectives, and vice versa. A gives B a bit of what B wants, B gives A a bit of what A wants, and everyone is better off.

International institutions are both the products of this process and its facilitators (Keohane 1984). Cooperation is hard. What if one party goes back on their commitment? Or what if there is no clear standard by which to measure compliance? What if you simply can't ascertain whether your partners are complying or not? These kinds of doubts often discourage countries from making mutually beneficial deals. International institutions like the UN or the WTO serve to alleviate these problems in various ways. They act as forums to provide information about other countries’ views and actions. They often monitor treaty commitments, like the International Atomic Energy Association's search for illicit nuclear weapons, or adjudicate and enforce them, like the WTO's dispute settlement mechanism. They also define and codify norms of appropriateness that help guide actors’ behavior. These functions help countries to cooperate and provide the governance structures needed in a world where risks – like fleas – spill easily across borders.

Fourteenth-century Europeans did not understand the epidemiology of the plague, but they did grasp that it could be spread from infected individuals to healthy ones. Once news of the plague reached a city, the inhabitants would typically bar the gates in a (usually futile) attempt to keep the sickness outside. But this meant that refugees from infected areas would just continue on to the next city, helping the plague spread. Imagine how history might have been different had the cities of northern Italy been able to coordinate their response through something like the World Health Organization (WHO), agreeing to contain infected individuals in a single geographic location. If Lorenzetti were painting today, he would have to title his fresco The Allegory of Good Government and International Cooperation.

The premise of this book is that this crucial political institution – institutionalized intergovernmental cooperation – is facing a period of crisis, which we term gridlock. Global governance has certainly never been easy, but it currently faces a new set of challenges. In this chapter we identify four mechanisms that have rendered multilateral cooperation increasingly difficult, four routes or pathways to gridlock. First, the diffusion of power from what used to be known as the industrialized world to the emerging economies has increased the number of actors who must agree – and the diversity of interests that must be accommodated – in order to achieve meaningful cooperation. Second, the institutional legacy of the postwar period has “locked in” policy-making processes that have now grown dysfunctional. Third, the easier items on the cooperation agenda have already been dealt with; yet deeper interdependence creates a need for more sophisticated, complex, and powerful institutions, which are harder to create. Fourth, a proliferation of institutions has led to fragmented “regime complexes” (Raustiala and Victor 2004) that can impede effective cooperation instead of facilitating it.

These reasons share, in part, a common origin. They are all to a significant extent consequences of previous, successful attempts to cooperate multilaterally. Over the last half-century, the postwar order has allowed for a cycle of deepening cooperation and globalization, a process of self-reinforcing interdependence. This process, along with other important factors such as technological innovation and the basic logic of capitalist expansion, has led to a deeper level of interdependence than has ever been experienced by the world, one that current multilateral institutions are less and less able to manage effectively. In other words, the postwar order has produced conditions, intended and unintended, which impede further cooperation even as they make it more necessary. The current situation of gridlock is thus not only historically contingent, but is also in crucial ways endogenous to the process of cooperation itself. As such, the four mechanisms highlighted in this chapter can be thought of as “second order” cooperation problems. Rather than stemming from the innate problems of cooperation per se, which are difficult enough, many current problems derive, at least in part, from the very fact of earlier cooperation.

The goal of this chapter is to illuminate the logic of each of these pathways to gridlock. Later chapters will demonstrate how they have made cooperation more difficult in specific policy domains, and indeed, how they can overlap and reinforce one another. Here, however, in the interests of clarity, they are presented as distinct causal pathways. The chapter proceeds as follows. First, we discuss the post-1945 settlement that established the basic institutional building blocks of the postwar order. The decision to establish bodies like the UN or the Bretton Woods institutions proved enormously significant, we argue. Though intimately tied to American power, these institutions also embodied the logic of negotiated international cooperation discussed above. Because they were useful ways for states to manage the challenges of interdependence, they persisted even following the relative decline in American hegemony in the 1970s. Indeed, they facilitated a process through which the world grew ever more institutionalized and interdependent. While conventionally we think of institutionalization as a response to interdependence, here we emphasize that it is also a cause. A relatively stable, peaceful, liberal global order facilitated the radical economic globalization of the postwar era, creating an unprecedented degree of interdependence, partially endogenous to the process of cooperation itself. Though this increase in economic interdependence over time was foreseen and desired by the institutional architects of the 1940s, they could not have imagined how deeply it would alter the world, especially in two unforeseeable ways. First, interdependence spread far beyond its original nexus among the advanced industrial democracies to encompass almost the entire world. Second, previously “domestic” issues like the environment, health, or policing increasingly spilled across borders, acquiring the attributes of interdependence. Indeed, interdependence has grown so pervasive that it has outstripped the traditional mechanism through which governance was “supplied” – state bargaining over institutionalized cooperation. This creates gridlock.

Building the Postwar Order

Before describing how the postwar order initiated a cycle of self-reinforcing interdependence and institutionalization, it is worth noting the monumental tragedy that created the conditions under which such an order could be constructed in the first place. As noted in the introduction, World War II, in which some 50 million people died, made clear the need for an institutionalized system of global governance to maintain peace and prosperity. Indeed, though of course the war had many causes, the weakness of global institutions for both collective security and economic stability was one of the biggest. Consider each in turn.

Following World War I, the victors – especially US President Wilson – attempted to create a system of collective security to ensure that the “war to end all wars” was just that. In creating the League of Nations, countries committed “to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League” (Article 10). But this commitment did not prove credible, for reasons of both design and implementation. The League operated under a principle of consensus, with all countries holding, effectively, a veto over substantive policy decisions (but not procedural matters). This meant that the very countries causing a problem could block efforts to address that problem. But even if the League had been better designed, it was unlikely to succeed because the world's strongest state never joined. President Wilson had lobbied his European allies to adopt a collective security arrangement, only to discover that his own Congress, dominated by isolationist Republicans, refused to join up. Deprived of American support, the League became a noncredible deterrent, and proved toothless against the aggression of the new fascist powers.

At the same time that the League was experimenting with a new form of collective security, global economic governance was in a period of transition and crisis. Prior to World War I, the British Empire had provided the functions needed to sustain economic globalization. British markets bought vast amounts of foreign products. British sterling, linked to gold, provided a stable currency of exchange. British capital financed growth from Patagonia to the Yangtze River Delta. British bankers acted as lenders of last resort to financially distressed markets. And, of course, British gunboats and soldiers eliminated any who threatened economic flows (Kindleberger 1986). These public goods were not provided altruistically; they benefited Britain, its factories, its workers, and its capitalists first and foremost. And cases like the Opium Wars, in which the UK forced the Chinese government to allow its people to buy the narcotic (grown in British-controlled India) so that the UK could balance its current account, showed exactly how vile the nexus of military power, economic interest, and colonial domination could be. And yet the aggregate effect of these policies was to sustain a globalized economic order of unprecedented proportions. The economist John Maynard Keynes described the world before World War I in terms we would find familiar today:

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend. He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could dispatch his servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference. (1920: 11–12)

After World War I this system became untenable. The war sapped Britain's capacity and willingness to pay the costs of empire. At the same time, the economic rise of countries like the United States and Germany had challenged Britain's ability to dictate global economic policy, just as the consequences of war reduced Britain's military capacity to enforce it. The functions required to maintain a global economy – open trade, stable exchange rates, basic macroeconomic management, etc. – went unmet.

As Kindleberger (1986) points out, the world's newly minted economic superpower, the United States, might have stepped into this role. But, as with the League of Nations, isolationist impulses concentrated in the Republican Party – which held power for most of this period – won out over internationalist ones. Instead of providing an open market for foreign goods, the United States raised tariffs. Instead of providing liquidity to countries in financial crisis, the United States demanded repayment of outstanding debt. And instead of using its bargaining leverage to push liberal policies on other countries, the United States looked away as country after country emulated it and adopted isolationist, “beggar-thy-neighbor” trade restrictions and currency controls. When the global economy largely collapsed in the 1930s, Britain was unable, and the United States unwilling, to do anything about it (Kindleberger 1986). The resulting worldwide depression laid the social and economic groundwork for extremist politics in Europe and, with it, World War II (see Polanyi 1944).

The victors of World War II were acutely aware of these earlier failings. Global governance had failed in the 1930s, and failed catastrophically. The isolationist policies of the US Republicans in the 1920s and 1930s were a major cause. Seeking to break from earlier patterns, the architects of the postwar order, largely from the Democratic Party, but also including internationalist, anti-communist Republicans, built an international system with an ambition forged in the horrors of the previous decade. The results, though flawed, have underwritten three generations of relative peace and prosperity for much of the world.

As we detail in chapter 2, multilateral approaches to security were institutionalized in organizations such as the United Nations, and expanded in the structures of an emergent body of international law. Whereas previous attempts at global security governance had failed, the United Nations succeeded in key respects. The participation of leading state powers gave the UN system a degree of legitimacy and credibility. However, the UN has not been the only forum for security governance. The tensions of the Cold War facilitated greater interaction between states, and this interaction led to bilateral treaties, regional security communities like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), and a growing human rights regime that has gradually reshaped the meaning of security in significant ways.

The governance of the global economy was also subject, for the first time, to a set of rules and institutions which sought to generate the conditions for collective global economic prosperity through multilateral cooperation. Institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, international trade agreements like the GATT, and the plethora of “transgovernmental” organizations that we discuss in chapter 3 represent the outcomes of such efforts. Between the end of World War II and the 1973 oil crisis, the world experienced one of the longest periods of global economic expansion on record. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Figures
• Boxes and Tables
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1: Gridlock
• 2: Security
• 3: Economy
• 4: Environment
• 5: Beyond Gridlock?
• References
• Index