The Architecture Of Global Governance

An Introduction To The Study Of International Organizations

James P Muldoon, Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429976469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

A beautifully illustrated textbook of the history, theory and current state of international organizations which increasingly oversee aspects of international affairs and the world's transition to a new global order.. This new and timely textbook recounts the historical and theoretical development of the international system in a lively analysis o

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Introduction: In Search of Global Governance

On September 11, 2001, the world was turned upside down. The unthinkable unimaginable happened—the greatest power on earth had become the victim of the most spectacular acts of terrorism in world history. The “new” world order, barely a decade old, was being challenged, but not by conventional foes and means as in the Persian Gulf war. A much more insidious, elusive enemy was the perpetrator—a global network of militant Islamists called A1 Qaeda. The first “war” of the twenty-first century was declared and the international machinery geared up to vanquish not only A1 Qaeda but also the multifaceted, disembodied, complex phenomenon of terrorism as a whole.

September 11 (or 9/11 as it is now commonly called) was a wake-up call for the international community, pointing out the inadequacies of the interstate system to govern a rapidly changing, globalizing world. The underside of globalization had demonstrated its destructive power and ability to exploit the international system’s vulnerabilities. Reflecting on the condition of international politics since September 11, Professor Fred Dallmayr of the University of Notre Dame writes:

In many ways—to use currently fashionable vocabulary—the international arena hovers precariously between “clash” and “dialogue” between civilizations. Stated in different and more customary terminology, the arena is wedged between inter-nationalism and trans-nationalism, that is, between traditional inter-state politics and emerging transnational or global politics (possibly guided by a hegemonic superpower). This situation is risky and hazardous because of the lack of historical precedents and clear guidelines. There have been frequent assertions in recent times, by experts and non-experts alike, concerning the imminent demise of nation-state politics; but the alternative is far from obvious or readily intelligible.

The hazards of contemporary international politics were clearly brought out into the open by September 11 and its aftermath: the so-called “war on terrorism.” From the beginning, this war was ambivalent and amorphous. The initial attacks were launched not by a state but by a private “war-lord” and his followers (although they may have enjoyed the protection of a regime). The American response was swift, but also ambivalent. In the press and the media, the response was firmly proclaimed as a “war”—evident in the rhetoric of the “war on terrorism” or “America’s new war.” But a war against whom? Against a public regime or state (say Afghanistan)? In that case, the normal rules of warfare applied (ius ad bellum, lus in bello). Or was it a military action against a private band of outlaws or terrorists? In that case, the action hovered in a legal vacuum—since neither international norms nor domestic civil laws (of America or Afghanistan) could be invoked. The hazards of the situation were further illustrated in later phases of the military campaign, when large numbers of Taliban and other enemy fighters were captured. Given the repeated designation of the campaign as a “war,” one could with reason expect that fighters captured in that war would become prisoners of war (POW) entitled to the protection of familiar international conventions. When the United States suddenly chose the term “detainees,” it seemed to indicate that the campaign had not been a war after all, but rather something like a global police action or global “domestic” conflict (akin to a global civil war). But what are the rules authorizing or regulating such action?

In this respect, September 11 brought into the open a global political “deficit”: the lack of norms and institutions mediating, or bridging the gap, between the emerging globalism and the traditional system of nation states. Here a major lesson comes into view: the need to build viable institutions and multilateral conventions able to remedy the dangers implicit in the mentioned legal vacuum or no-man’s land. (Dallmayr 2002, 9)

Dallmayr’s conclusions echo the analyses of many other scholars and specialists that have emerged since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989–1990. The major lesson from all the post-Cold War conflicts and humanitarian emergencies (Somalia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Balkans, Kosovo, East Timor) is the same: The architecture of the international order—international institutions and organizations—needs to be strengthened and buttressed with additional resources and structures. International organizations, despite their many problems and limitations, are essential building blocks of a global governance architecture. They form the core of an evolving infrastructure of global institutions that will shape the way cooperation is organized and complex interdependence is managed. In other words, multilateralism matters.

Governing the Global Village

The world of 2002 is a sharp contrast to the kind of world many analysts and political leaders had thought would emerge after the Cold War. Initially, there was a naive belief that the demise of the Soviet Union and communism had ushered in a “New World Order” of peace and prosperity based on core Western values—justice and democracy, free and open trade within a global market economy, and international security—and secured by the unprecedented harmony that had emerged among the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. “As the cold war ended in 1989, revolution in Central and Eastern Europe extended the movement towards democratization and economic transformation, raising the prospect of a strengthened commitment to the pursuit of common objectives through multilateralism. The world community seemed to be uniting around the idea that it should assume greater collective responsibility in a wide range of areas, including security—not only in a military sense but in economic and social terms as well—sustainable development, the promotion of democracy, equity and human rights, and humanitarian action.” (Commission on Global Governance 1995, 1) But, over the course of the 1990s, the commitment and “unity” fractured under the pressure of a string of events—the increase in intra-state conflicts in places like the Balkans (Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo) and throughout Africa (Somalia, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia/Eritrea); crises in the global economy such as the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998, the crash of the Russian ruble in 1999, and the debt crisis of developing countries (particularly the Least Developed Countries in Africa); and humanitarian calamities like the HIV/AIDS epidemic, burgeoning flows of refugees and the rise in the numbers of people internally displaced, and a range of natural disasters (drought, famine, and earthquakes). Today, we know how misplaced the optimism was at the time and that it was dangerously premature to believe the end of the ideological conflict between the Soviet Union and the West was sufficient for world peace and prosperity to reign.

Various forces of globalization have changed the political, economic, and social landscape, eroding sovereignty—the core principle of the international order—and redistributing power within the international system away from the nation-state to new international non-state actors. “The end of the Cold War has brought no mere adjustment among states but a novel redistribution of power among states, markets, and civil society. National governments are not simply losing autonomy in a globalizing economy. They are sharing powers—including political, social, and security roles at the core of sovereignty—with businesses, with international organizations, and with a multitude of citizens groups, known as non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The steady concentration of power in the hands of states that began in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia is over, at least for a while.” (Mathews 1997, 50). Immense changes on a global scale—some of it integrative, and some disintegrative—continue to unfold; new patterns of interaction are being developed; a global system is emerging. But the most important and difficult challenge to meet has been and continues to be establishing a new world order, a global order. Today, the challenges of globalization are just as pronounced and complex as they were in 1989, as are the challenges of governing the seemingly unending turbulence in the world that globalization creates.

Governance and Order

For thousands of years, humanity has searched for the best form and method of organizing itself. It is an endless journey, a perpetual quest for answers to fundamental questions—How should or could the world be organized? What are the rules and laws that people should follow and obey? And, who shall govern? As we enter a new millennium, this quest begins anew. However, the dimensions of the search have dramatically changed, even if the questions have not. Today, we are exploring the global dimension for the first time, a dimension no longer constrained by physical or temporal realities of previous eras. Embarking on this latest adventure, humanity once again is asking itself these perennial questions and in so doing is taking a fresh look at the architecture of global governance that has been built.

The idea of global governance is not necessarily new. It stems from a long history of thought on and experience with various ways of ordering and organizing political, economic, and social relations. The concept of global governance has been bundled up in the expansion of the system of sovereign nation-states and discussed as part of the notion of an international society or world polity. Seyom Brown argues:

For three centuries the world polity has been premised on a particular pattern of governance/society congruence: the expectation that the most intensive patterns of human interaction would take place within territorially defined jurisdictions, each having its own regime of governance (or “state”) whose supreme authority over what happened in its jurisdiction would be recognized and respected by the other states. Attempts to intervene in another’s jurisdiction would be considered illegitimate, and grounds for war.

Each of the presumably sovereign states would control interpersonal and intergroup behavior within its jurisdiction so as to provide at least the minimum personal and institutional security necessary for the performance of basic societal functions: the protection of persons and property from physical attack; the enforcement of laws and contracts; the orderly exchange of goods and services; the husbanding of resources essential to the healthy survival of the population; and the maintenance of the society’s cultural, moral, and legal norms, including the rights and obligations of individuals and standards of distributive justice.

Because these basic functions of society and governance in the traditional world polity were to be provided within each of the sovereign “nation-states,” international or transnational interactions could be relatively sparse and could be managed for the most part by negotiation or periodically (in cases of conflict unresolvable through peaceful bargaining) by war. Looking at the world from this perspective, there was no crucial incongruence between the configuration of global society and the anarchic structure of global governance, for global society itself was compartmentalized into national enclaves of human interaction. Most countries would be willing to take their chances in the anarchic world polity when it came to handling international relations, in preference to subordinating the sovereignty of their territorial unit to “supranational” governing bodies purporting to act on behalf of some larger inchoate international community, let alone a nonexistent worldwide community of humankind. (Brown 1996, 108–109)

The anarchic structure of global governance is inherent to international society, according to Hedley Bull, and “the fact that states form a society without government reflects features of their situation that are unique.” (Bull 1995, 49) International order is possible without world government because states have come to recognize that they do have certain interests and some values in common, regard themselves bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions (for example, diplomacy, war, international law, balance of power) (Bull 1995, 13). The point is that governance is present when there is order in a system; government is not a necessary condition of social order. In this regard, James Rosenau argues that “governance and order are clearly interactive phenomena. As intentional activities designed to regularize the arrangements which sustain world affairs, governance obviously shapes the nature of the prevailing global order. It could not do so, however, if the patterns constituting the order did not facilitate governance. Thus order is both a precondition and a consequence of governance. Neither comes first and each helps explain the other. There can be no governance without order and there can be no order without governance (unless periods of disorder are regarded as forms of order).” (Rosenau 1992, 8)

The end of the Cold War and radical shifts in power away from states to non-state actors were the impetus behind the initial surge of interest in the concept of global governance, but in a new way. The state-centric international order was coming undone as the mechanisms of cooperation and coordination among states no longer seemed capable of managing the rapidly expanding global agenda. The architecture of the international order had become too rigid and seemed unable to adapt to the fast pace of change or to accommodate the crowds of non-state actors that were coming onto the world stage. In this confused and conflicted international environment, governments, businesses, and nongovernmental organizations have been struggling to manage and restructure their relationships. For some, the disarray of traditional relationships in international affairs indicates a dangerous deterioration of the international order and portends collapse of the system into chaos or anarchy. Others consider the turbulence of the 1990s as a part of the process of evolution, an inevitable consequence of the transformation of the international system into a global system. In some respects, both are right. The international order has indeed deteriorated into “disorder” in large measure, but there is growing evidence that a global system is emerging out of this “chaos.” Hence, the concept of global governance shifted its focus onto the dynamics of globalization so as to identify the new patterns of interaction between actors, institutions, and organizations on the global level.

Core Characteristics of Global Governance

This shift in focus is reflected in the “rapidly proliferating number of publications, countless conferences throughout the world, blueprints for the future prepared by academic think tanks and international organizations, as well as numerous ceremonial addresses dealing with the far-reaching structural changes that are affecting all spheres of life and have been reduced to the overused, not to say hackneyed, common denominator of ‘globalization.’” (Nuscheler 2002, 156) The “global governance project” has become a vibrant exercise of global thinking and the most ambitious effort to chart a new course for humanity as a whole. It is still a fragile project and its conceptualization is still evolving. At this stage, we can merely speculate as to what physical attributes the still emerging global system may have and the principles upon which such a system is likely to operate. At the same time, there are a few fundamental characteristics of global governance that have emerged:

• Multipolarity of power and decentralization of authority: The traditional hierarchy of power and authority in the world has become more and more flat or horizontal over time. The allocation of power is gradually spreading to new centers and places on the planet. This inexorable trend of decentralization and widening connectivity is not as revolutionary as some might think because it seems to fit a general pattern in human history. As technology and knowledge advance and spread, the form and structure of governance becomes more “universal” and inclusive. Yet, the gradual convergence of governance values (namely, transparency/accountability, participation, fairness in the rule of law, equity and equality, and so on) does not necessarily mean that governance will be “homogenized” into one form/structure or another. Rather, this convergence only reflects an increasing consistency in approach to governance among the diverse collection of organizations and networks.
  The emergence of “new forms of governance without government” (see Rosenau and Czempiel 1992) is a critical aspect of the transformation of the international system to the global. The globalization process of the past decade has increased both the value and significance of non-governmental mechanisms in governance. While nongovernmental mechanisms are perceived by many as an assault on the exalted position of the state in world affairs, the idea of governance without government does not preclude the existence of governments. Rather, it simply points out that non-governmental governing structures will develop and that governments are sharing governance responsibilities increasingly with two other societal actors—namely, markets and civil society.
• Institutions, regimes, and organizations: Historically, societies have created structures to order and regulate human relations. These structures have been established to define and differentiate authority, power, the allocation of resources, and the rules and procedures for intercourse within and among social systems. Such structures are essential elements of governance. Institutions reflect an organized pattern of group behavior that is generally accepted as a fundamental part of a social system or order. Regimes, in much the same way as institutions, are arrangements—a style or tenure of rule or management—for managing and regulating group behavior, but in a specific area. Organizations are the most formal expression of structure that define in explicit terms the relationship of the power and authority of its constituent elements.
  Global governance cannot be actualized without institutions, regimes, and organizations. Such structures are essential intermediaries that tie together the different components of social systems. They are also historical realities in that their composition, raison d’être, and manifest purposes are derived through social experience and evolve out of earlier structures and forms. Therefore, the transformation of international institutions, regimes, and organizations will likely retain many of the features that currently define them and add new features as needed or desired to address the particular, unique, or distinct demands of the global system in the future.
• Stability, responsiveness, and order: People establish institutions, regimes, and organizations to meet several categories of needs. Among these categories three are essential to the emerging global system—stability, responsiveness, and order. J. Martin Rochester argues that these three categories are key factors of system transformation and the political development of the international system. Global governance is closely tied to the international system’s “capacity to cultivate a political order which combines stability with responsiveness to new demands and, hence, avenues for peaceful ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures, Tables, and Maps
• List of Acronyms
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: In Search of Global Governance
• PART 1 Schools of Thought The Foundations of International Order and Organization
• PART 2 Manifestations of International Order
• Appendix: List of International Organizations by Location and Year of Founding
• Bibliography
• Index