Global Governance

Evaluating the Liberal Democratic, Chinese, and Russian Solutions

Edward A. Kolodziej

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000509069
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How do we prevent the next pandemic? Will governments successfully tackle climate change? Will they find ways to close the gap between the haves and have-nots and to eliminate poverty? Which solution – democratic or authoritarian – will determine the global governance of a f lawed nation-state system?

This unique contribution to global studies advances a multidisciplinary theory that the governments of all human societies are the tenuous outcome of the competing solutions to the Imperatives of Order, Welfare, and Legitimacy (OWL). The OWL paradigm provides a common framework to evaluate the contrasting responses of the liberal democratic, Chinese, and Russian solutions to global governance. Underscored is the volume's contention that global governance is the overriding issue confronting nation-states and the diverse and divided peoples of what is now a global society for the first time in the evolution of the species.

The volume addresses a wide spectrum of audiences, united in their shared resolve that the democracies prevail in a projected century-long struggle between democratic and authoritarian regimes to determine global governance. Scholars, teachers, students, elected officials, policy analysts, media professionals, and engaged citizens who make self-government work will profit from this visionary and provocative study.

1 Toward a theory of governancePursuit of Order, Welfare, and Legitimacy (OWL)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003246572-1

Let me stipulate at the outset what we all already know: with expanding reach and accumulating depth, humans are globally connected as never before in the evolution of the species. ¹ They are entwined by multiple digital and media networks as well as interlocked by ground, sea, and air transportation systems. More entangling still is their unprecedented interdependence. What an individual, community, nation, or state may want depends on the cooperation of other actors, most of them anonymous. No need for additional examples than the coronavirus and global warming threats to all humans and the need for cooperation to cope with them, if not necessarily to fully resolve them.

We need not dwell on the obvious that globalization, as the product of connectedness and interdependence, is now profoundly embedded in the biological, psychological, social, political, and moral composition of all humans. Humans are now members of a global society of their own creation, whether they consciously acknowledge or deny this transformation of the human condition or whether they are merely observers and free riders on those engaged in its doings. Much hangs on whether humans, having constructed this society, an amalgam of deliberate choice and accident, will collectively make the necessary and difficult choices to affirm what they have wrought for their mutual benefit or whether they will allow their differences and disputes, deep and abiding, to plunge them unwittingly into a regressive spiral to their undoing. The decisions made by the world’s populations and their social agents in addressing their shared and multiple and multiplying problems will determine to which endpoint they will be directing their common fate.

In positing what’s real, namely the existence of a global society, it becomes readily apparent that, in light of the millennial experience of the species, no human society – and now a global society – can replicate itself over time, survive, and thrive in the absence of a government. ² What is tantamount to a tautological proposition raises the challenge posed by this volume. What we need is a provisional theory of governance that can conceivably be predicated of any human society beyond the particulars of time, place, and circumstance associated with each human society and epoch. What are, analytically, the common structures of power, decisional processes, and the actors executing the tasks and functions of governance and empowered to rule? Such a theoretical framework, however provisional, is needed to evaluate the current competing solutions for global government of the liberal democracies, China and Russia.

This chapter lays out a template within which to evaluate these competing models for the governance of globalization. It makes no pretense to being a theory of government. Its principal use is as a framework to assess the rival claims of these leading candidates to govern the interdependent transactions of the states and peoples of the world society.

The template rests on the conjecture that every human society must respond simultaneously to three competing imperatives in fashioning a government that works for that society: The Imperatives of Order, Welfare, and Legitimacy (OWL). ³ Solutions to these imperatives are innumerable over the evolution of the human species and over the countless societies, which humans have constructed. What is constant are these three competing underlying imperatives of governance. Each represents a distinct structure of power, incentives for rational decision-making to realize the endgame of each imperative, and in complex societies differentiated actors associated with each imperative.

These imperatives are not derived out of thin air. Their roots are embedded in the thinking and behavior of all human societies since the first creation of government among hunter-gatherer tribal groupings. ⁴ They are also revealed in the contributions of theorists who identified the relevance of a particular OWL imperative to a theory of government. I rely on Thomas Hobbes for Order, Karl Marx and Adam Smith for Welfare, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau for Legitimacy. Their thinking scarcely exhausts what remains to develop a tested theory of government through rigorous and comprehensive empirical and historical analysis. OWL imperatives are a starting point. They provide useful analytic tools to diagnose the governing health and ills of a global society.

The diversity of solutions to OWL imperatives across time, space, and circumstance does not demonstrate the absence of a universal structure to all human governments. Rather, it invites the search for such a structure. This discussion conceives OWL imperatives as the underlying elements and incentives for human choice in the construction of all governments. These analytic tools are helpful in comparing and evaluating the solutions to these imperatives launched by the United States and the liberal democracies after World War II and, more recently, by the Communist Party of China (CCP) and the Russian Federation under President Vladimir Putin as competing models for global governance.

Thomas Hobbes and the Imperative of Order

Let’s begin with Thomas Hobbes. Breaking with Greek thought and Christian theology, focused on defining and creating an ideal polity on earth, Hobbes posited the Imperative of Order as one of the indispensable building blocks of the theory and practice of government. Hobbes’s ordered society, a social construct of his creative intellect, is conceived to be outside of time and circumstance. That conceptual move permits him to fashion an analytic tool predicable of all societies – his own, most long gone, and still those yet to be constructed. In his imagined state of nature, before the formation of human society, humans are portrayed as in perpetual conflict with each other; all are at war with each other to get what they want and need from others. Left to their own devices, this is the underlying, inescapable nature of the human condition. To escape this fearsome predicament humans enter society to ensure their personal security, property, and freedom to pursue a myriad of other interests. Hobbes’s description of this dismal and no-exit plight still remains telling:

Whatsoever … is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy of every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. ⁵

Only on entry into society can humans escape the unrelenting threat of violence besetting them. Only when humans fashion an order – a government – for a society can morality, norms, rules, and law come into existence. For these salutary benefits of social life to be realized, Hobbes contended that they had to enter into a social compact to consign overwhelming awesome power to a Leviathan. The Leviathan provides order as a prerequisite to realize the benefits sought by humans, which are endangered in a state of nature. He has awesome and overwhelming power to arbitrate differences and disputes between members of a society and to ensure that laws are observed. The tenure of the Leviathan’s monopoly of power depends on furnishing an order for the society. Humans have the reciprocal right to expect order. Absent its provision, a new social contract would then have to be created for a reconstituted Leviathan undergoing a process of transformation likely to be no less violent than those which prevailed before humans entered into society.

There are several implications of Hobbes’s theory of order that are relevant to a theory of government. First, all human societies are rooted in violence, both in escaping a ceaselessly threatening state of nature and in forming a government for society. Second, since force must necessarily be imposed on members of a society because the inclination to use force remains embedded in each person, then it stands to reason that the Leviathan, too, must be wary that its monopoly of power is always under the threat that it can be overthrown, This leads to the ironic conclusion that all solutions to the Imperative of Order are susceptible to dissolution. Each order that is established by force is exposed to being replaced by force again in a never-ending spiral as humans leave and return to a state of nature in each undoing of a seeming stable order.

What Hobbes’s conception of order implies is that all solutions to the Imperative of Order are conventional, temporary, and temporal. In other words, a final solution to the challenge of order as a fundamental component of governance, while theoretically insoluble, is pragmatically attainable for a defined length of time. Much like Sisyphus humans are compelled to construct a time-bound order and government to forestall a downward spiral of perpetual conflict and the re-enactment of the tragedy of being human and prone to violence. The human condition of ever-threatening disruption and disarray can be relaxed and its adverse consequences tolerably lowered and contained, but never surmounted. The rise and fall of countless human societies and of their innumerable solutions to the Imperative of Order through history suggest that the specter of upheaval and dissolution accompanies all humanly devised governments, however creatively or cleverly they may have been fashioned.

A friendly amendment is necessary to Hobbes’ conception of what it means to be human – ever under the threat of violence being visited on humans – and the assignation to a Leviathan with a monopoly of power to contain that threat. It is important to distinguish between Hobbes’s revelation of the underlying violence of all governments and his then contemporary recommendation of a Leviathan. Hobbes conflates his pure theory of order with his belief that such an all-powerful entity is needed to quell the religious civil wars raging throughout England in the 17th century. From the perspective of a theory of government, the Imperative of Order depends on the choices made by humans as to which social entity they assign, or are compelled to assign, the monopoly of violence to rule them. The choice of a Leviathan admits to countless provisional solutions, whether in a king, chief, charismatic leader, junta, party, oligarchy, or elected representatives. What is inescapable is the response to the Imperative of Order in its pristine form. The “is” of the human condition should not be confused and obscured by the “ought” of what social entity should be accorded a monopoly of coercive power and the mantel of the Leviathan, however conceived, to surmount the underlying condition of a war of all against all.

Karl Marx and Adam Smith and the Imperative of Welfare

To found a theory of government solely on its origins out of force and violence does violence to the theory itself. Two theorists, Karl Marx and Adam Smith, introduce us to the Welfare Imperative. It is an essential element of the governance of all human societies. Responses to the Imperative of Welfare crystallize into an autonomous power structure, decisional-processes, and incentives for actor behavior. These characteristics of the power of the Imperative of Welfare are analytically distinguishable from the Imperative of Order. This distinction holds true even when these two imperatives are conflated, say among hunter-gatherer communities ⁶ or the feudal arrangements of premodern Europe or China. ⁷ The melding of Order and Welfare Imperatives can also be observed in the centralization of the power of these imperatives in the government of the Soviet Union, a solution to governance, which eventuated in the implosion of the regime.

According to Marx, the origins of the Welfare Imperative arise from the bio-sexual composition of humans as social animals:

(M)ankind must first eat, drink, have shelter and clothing before it can pursue politics, science, religion … that therefore the production of the immediate means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained. … in a epoch form the foundation upon which state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even ideas of religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained and not vice versa. ⁸

A century earlier, Adam Smith advanced a complementary starting point for the Welfare Imperative. He stipulated that the drive for human material betterment was endemic to humans as social animals. That precondition disposed humans to rely on each other to foster their shared need to “first eat, drink, have shelter and clothing.” Smith explained that need as the inherent human “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” ⁹ The implication of this starting point of the Welfare Imperative is that humans can be expected to strive relentlessly to adopt best practices as their knowledge expanded of how to increase their material betterment.

On this score, Smith and Marx are in accord. Humans will seek and choose best practices for their individual and collective material advantage, if humans are not otherwise hindered or prevented by the power constraints arising from the Imperatives of Order or Legitimacy.

Several examples illustrate the frustration of best practices. The Soviet Union’s centralized economy privileged the security of the Communist Party over the material benefits of participating in a global free market. For many Muslims, usury is rejected as contrary to their faith. Financing debt to promote economic growth is hampered as a result. Jared Diamond describes how the Norsemen sought to recreate their homeland’s environment in Greenland rather than adopt the successful survival practices of Greenland’s native population. That proved disastrous. Relying on their conditioned solutions to the Imperative of Legitimacy, drawn from their religious beliefs, their flawed responses to the Imperative of Welfare led to the eventual failure and dissolution of the settlement. ¹⁰

While Smith and Marx converge on the human drive to material betterment, they radically departed in their contradictory conception of human freedom to effect this choice. For Smith freedom is the beginning point. Humans, equipped with unlimited tool-making capabilities as well as complementary cognitive and linguistic endowments, unlike brute animals, were able to use these unique animal resources to increasingly improve their material lot. In our epoch the fruits of these endowments and strivings to do better are the Industrial and Informational Revolutions and the global spread of their productive efficiencies through a progressively universal market system.

The road forward, as Smith intuitively grasped, but could not fully foresee, would be wides...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Toward a theory of governance: Pursuit of Order, Welfare, and Legitimacy (OWL)
• 2 The rise of the liberal democratic solution
• 3 The fall of the liberal democratic solution
• 4 China and the Imperative of Order
• 5 China and the Imperative of Welfare
• 6 China and the Imperative of Legitimacy
• 7 The Russian OWL solution for global governance
• 8 A modest way forward
• Bibliography
• Index