Beyond Gridlock

Thomas Hale, David Held

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509515752
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

It is now conventional wisdom to see the great policy challenges of the 21st century as inherently transnational. It is equally common to note the failures of the international institutions the world relies on to address such challenges. As the acclaimed 2013 book Gridlock argued, the world increasingly needs effective international cooperation, but multilateralism appears unable to deliver it in the face of deepening interdependence, rising multipolarity, and the growing complexity and fragmentation that characterise the global order.

The Gridlock authors have now partnered with a group of leading experts to offer a trenchant reassessment of elements of the argument. Comparing anomalies and exceptions to multilateral dysfunction across a number of spheres of world politics, Beyond Gridlock explores seven pathways through and beyond gridlock. While multilateralism continues to fall short, Beyond Gridlock identifies systematic means to avoid or resist these forces and turn them into collective solutions. This book offers a vital new perspective on world politics as well as a practical guide for positive change in global policy.

1
Introduction
Pathways beyond Gridlock

Thomas Hale and David Held

Conventional wisdom now sees the greatest challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century as inherently transnational. From climate change, to economic stability, to deadly pathogens, to migration, to criminal networks, to terrorism, the issues governments must address often ignore the borders that divide political authority between sovereign states. It is no exaggeration to maintain that human welfare depends more than ever before on effective trans­border governance at all scales.

Conventional wisdom also holds that we lack the effective international cooperation we need to meet transnational challenges. Contemporary global governance has been called “unfit for purpose” (Goldin 2013), in a state of “permanent deficit” (Lamy 2014), and, in our own formulation, increasingly “gridlocked” (Hale, Held and Young 2013). Even while our need for cooperation grows, our ability to achieve it seems to be flagging.

The dangers of persistent gridlock in global governance are difficult to overstate. As our response to collective action problems fractures, states devise strategies in isolation and according to short-term self-interest. These challenges have grown even starker in recent years as nationalism has risen in nearly every corner of the world. This anti-global backlash can be seen as part of a negative cycle that compounds gridlock. In part driven by a failure to manage globalization and interdependence effectively, nationalism further erodes our ability to cooperate through international institutions. It is, at one and the same time, a consequence of gridlock and a reinforcing factor.

While the conventional wisdom carries considerable weight, it is time for a reassessment. Any evaluation of our capacity to resolve twenty-first century challenges needs to be mindful of the complexities and nuances that characterize individual problems. Not all areas of world politics exhibit the same degree of gridlock. Moreover, beneath the surface of deadlock and drift, movements can be detected which, in a number of cases, reveal instances of policy reform and fresh pathways through crises. Such developments emerge from varying circumstances. For example, in the climate realm shifting institutional models at the 2015 Paris climate summit helped recalibrate the regime after the two decades of lacklustre multilateral negotiations. Questions about the future ability of the International Monetary Fund to manage global crises come alongside new arrangements for monetary cooperation in the global South. And in trade, the death of multilateral negotiations in the Doha Round and “mega-regional” trade agreements across the Atlantic and Pacific has coincided with other proposals, such as China's Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership or the “One Belt, One Road” programme of investment to link the economies of Central and Southeast Asia. In sum, gridlock is a central condition of contemporary global governance, but is it the whole story?

This book takes the dominant trends that cause gridlock and stagnation in international cooperation as a starting point, but, at the same time, asks if there are systematic pathways through or beyond gridlock that we can detect and build on. The pages that follow do not simply attempt to list exceptions or qualifications. Rather, any good theory must use anomalies to consider if such evidence reinforces, alters, or even overturns previous understandings. Our goal, then, is not just to assess gridlock, but to learn something more general about the patterns through which, and conditions under which, multilateral blockages are created, adapted to, and potentially overcome in contemporary world politics.

To achieve this, the book compares different issue areas. It explores gridlock, and systematic exceptions to it, in global governance and uses the results of that analysis to evaluate prospects for more effective global governance going forward. We focus on a significant range of policy sectors in order to explore whether and how change is possible. By identifying pathways through and beyond gridlock in these sectors, the book shows which pathway (or pathways) explain change in which policy sectors, and why. It allows a comparison of what works where, and thereby helps illuminate which pathways are most likely to yield significant policy shifts in the direction of a more effective governance, and under what circumstances. While this book is, at core, a social scientific effort to compare current and past trends in global governance, it is prospective and normative as well.

This introduction begins by recalling the thesis set out in the book Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most (Hale, Held and Young 2013). The sections that follow highlight the debate about this book and criticisms levelled at it; identify exceptions and anomalies that compromise, qualify, or enrich the argument; and explore the steps needed to examine how gridlock can be overcome. It remains our judgement that the dynamics discussed in the following chapters do not overturn the relevance of the core gridlock argument (see below); rather, they explore and highlight how global governance can adapt, modulate, and even succeed despite – and even, in some cases, because of – gridlock. In this way, the book seeks to create an evidence base for more effective management of global challenges in the twenty-first century.

The Gridlock Argument

The impetus for Gridlock came from the observation, particularly commonplace around the start of the decade, that multilateral institutions had stalled across issue domains ranging from the Copenhagen climate summit, to the Doha trade round, to the inability to agree effective financial regulation in the wake of the 2008–9 crisis. The book attempted to offer a general explanation for this phenomenon that made sense of various trends in world politics.

Gridlock is defined as the inability of countries to cooperate via international institutions to address policy problems that span borders. It refers both to deadlock or dysfunctionality in existing organizations and the inability of countries to come to new agreements as issues arise. If we look only at the creation of new international institutions, just one useful indicator for gridlock, we find some disturbing trends. The bars in figure 1.1 show the number of international organizations, plus their offshoots, in the world from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. The line shows the rate of growth of these organizations from year to year. Two striking trends are clear. First, there has been an explosion of formal global governance in the years since World War II, with several thousand international organizations now operating in every domain of human activity. Second, the creation of new international organizations has now essentially stopped, even as interdependence reaches new levels. While there is of course more to gridlock than just the creation of new international institutions, the trend exemplifies the larger problem.¹

Figure 1.1 International organizations and their offshoots, absolute number (bars) and annual rate of growth (line)
Source: Union of International Associations 2016.

The primary goal in Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most was to explain the growing stagnation and deadlock in multilateral governance. We were not alone in recognizing the difficulties of multilateralism at the time (Narlikar 2010a; Victor 2011b; Goldin 2013). At least one book has made the counter-argument that global governance is, if not ideal, at least a marked improvement over previous historical episodes and close to what can be realistically expected of it (Drezner 2014). Our own contribution to this literature argued that the past successes of multilateral cooperation were indeed very significant and generated a deeper level of interdependence; but we went on from here to argue that this higher level of interdependence now makes current and future cooperation more difficult.

Global cooperation, we contended, is gridlocked across a range of issue areas. The reasons for this are not the result of any single underlying causal structure, but rather of several underlying dynamics that work together. In order to understand why gridlock has come about it is important to understand how it was that the post–World War II era facilitated, in many respects, a successful form of “governed globalization” that contributed to relative peace and prosperity in large parts of the world over several decades. This period was marked by peace between the great powers, although there were many proxy wars fought out in the global South. This relative stability created the conditions for what now can be regarded as an unprecedented period of prosperity that characterized the 1950s onwards. Although it is by no means the sole cause, the United Nations (UN) is central to this story, helping to create conditions under which decolonization and successive waves of democratization could take root, profoundly altering world politics. The Bretton Woods institutions created in the wake of World War II were the economic counterparts to the UN – providing a forum for economic cooperation heretofore unseen and mechanisms for economic development. The leading role of the United States in the creation and maintenance of these institutions, and the associated geopolitical and distributional implications, are of course a central piece of this story (Ikenberry 2001), though postwar global governance became much more than an epiphenomenon of US power (Keohane 1984).

The record of postwar multilateral organizations is, of course, mixed. Nonetheless, while the economic performance of the postwar years varies by country, many experienced significant economic growth and living standards rose rapidly across significant parts of the world. By the late 1980s a variety of East Asian countries were beginning to grow at an unprecedented speed, and by the late 1990s countries such as China, India and South Africa had gained significant economic momentum, a process that continues to this day, though some countries, notably China, are beginning to shift to a slower, less export-oriented growth model.

Meanwhile, the institutionalization of international cooperation proceeded at an equally impressive pace (figure 1.1). There was substantial growth in the number of international treaties in force, as well as the number of international regimes, formal and informal. At the same time, new kinds of institutional arrangements have emerged alongside formal intergovernmental bodies, including a variety of types of transnational governance arrangements such as networks of government officials, public–private partnerships, as well as exclusively private governance bodies (see Hale and Held 2011).

All these postwar institutions helped create socio-economic conditions, according to the gridlock thesis, under which a multitude of actors could benefit from forming multinational companies, investing abroad, developing global production chains, forming transnational advocacy networks, and engaging with a plethora of other social and economic processes associated with globalization. These conditions, along with technological innovation and the expansionary logic of capitalism, changed the nature of the world economy, radically increasing dependence on people and countries from every corner of the world. This interdependence, in turn, created demand for further coordination, which states and non-state actors, seeking the benefits of cooperation, provided by creating new and stronger institutions, beginning the cycle anew.

This is not to say that international institutions were the only cause of the dynamic form of globalization experienced over the last few decades. Changes in the nature of the world economy, including breakthroughs in transportation and information technology, are obviously critical drivers of interdependence. However, all of these changes were allowed to thrive and develop because they took place in a relatively open, peaceful, liberal, institutionalized world order. By preventing World War III and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Figures and Tables
• Abbreviations
• Notes on the Authors
• Preface
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Finance
• 3: Monetary Policy
• 4: Trade
• 5: Investment
• 6: Energy
• 7: Humanitarianism
• 8: Human Rights
• 9: Health
• 10: Climate Change
• 11: Cyber Security
• 12: Weapons of Mass Destruction
• 13: Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement