Critical Perspectives on the Crisis of Global Governance

Reimagining the Future

S. Gill

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137441409
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Trade & Tariffs
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The contributors highlight alternative imaginaries and social forces harnessing new organizational and political forms to counter and displace dominant strategies of rule. They suggest that to address intensifying economic, ecological and ethical crises far more effective, legitimate and far-sighted forms of global governance are required.

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Reimagining the Future: Some Critical Reflections

Stephen Gill

This introduction reflects on some of the principal theoretical perspectives on global governance in relation to the critical purpose of this book: to analyse global governance as it is, and as it ought to be, at a crucial historical conjuncture. This is followed with a brief outline of two dimensions of the current organic crisis of global governance. The chapter concludes with a brief summary of the contributions.

Global governance as it is and as it ought to be

It is important to note at the outset that the purpose of this volume is not to offer a single perspective or voice on these questions; rather it provides a continuum of perspectives encompassing not only varieties of critical theory but also what I call ‘critical problem-solving’. The latter is exemplified by the contributions on aspects of the global political economy that analyse in detail key technical and legal aspects of global economic governance, world trade and investment.

With this caveat in mind, first, then, what do we mean by global governance as it is? By this, contributors to this book largely refer to the dominant projects of rule associated with the post-Cold War world order and the main governance mechanisms that seek to stabilize, modify, extend and legitimate the ruling institutions of the global status quo, such as NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, the US, the European Union (EU), the G8 or the G20 groupings of economically powerful nations. In this sense global governance today involves devising durable methods, mechanisms and institutions – including the use of organized violence – to help sustain an unequal international order that is premised on the primacy of capital, the world market and US geopolitical power as the key governing forces of world politics.

This is also what the World Bank and the IMF refer to in more normative terms as ‘good governance’. The latter is often associated with efforts to entrench global ‘best practices’ and it promotes a concept of limited government, self-regulation of business and finance, and pro-market reforms, locked in by the new constitutionalism (discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 by Claire Cutler and Scott Sinclair). It is backed by the systematic use of military power and related geopolitical practices, often justified or camouflaged by the expediency of forms of international law applied in arbitrary and unequal ways, e.g., the Non-Proliferation Treaty (see Chapter 2, by Richard Falk). Also involved are practices of diplomacy, intelligence and surveillance and covert mechanisms of intervention – as Wikileaks revealed on a daily basis when it released batches of US Embassy cables.¹ Subsequent revelations that emerged in 2013 and 2014 provided by the former CIA and NSA employee Edward Snowden suggest that the US has been actively seeking to develop what I earlier called a ‘global panopticon’ (Gill 1995b): technologies of power premised upon the dystopian vision of placing everyone and everything under ongoing and constant surveillance – or at least everything that moves through the Internet and other interconnected transactional and electronic communications mechanisms.²

However, judged on its recent record, one must conclude that global governance as it really is, has neither stabilized nor legitimated the existing order. Indeed it may actually be undermining the social well being of a majority of people, on a planet characterized by increasing health, food and energy crises linked to wider crises of accumulation, exploitation of human beings and nature, dispossession of livelihoods and the commons, amid widespread ecological destruction (Gill 2012a; see also Chapter 9 in this volume). These developments combine in a situation that I have elsewhere described as one of global organic crisis, a point that I discuss in the following text.

Indeed, the crisis of neoliberal capitalism has placed this perspective of global governance as it is under growing scrutiny as deepening inequality has come to occupy a growing centrality in political discourse and debate, including the agendas of the plutocrats and public and private élites who meet annually at the World Economic Forum to network and develop strategies. Indeed Barack Obama invited to the White House the author of what astonishingly became a best-selling book, Capital in the 21^st Century, by the French economist Thomas Piketty (2014). This book shows how deepening inequality has been historically related to the most severe crises of accumulation in the history of capitalism. (The problem of inequality and its relationship to political and economic discourse is the subject of Chapter 3 by Janine Brodie).

Thus a second set of more critical perspectives brings ethics and justice, as well as power, political economy, and questions concerning the legitimate rule of law to the centre of its analysis. It asks, global governance of what, for whose benefit and why?

Indeed critical perspectives on global governance put the questions of power and the issue of the making of the future at the centre of analysis and ask questions about the potential for the emergence of alternatives or what ought to be. Such perspectives need to take into account what Upendra Baxi calls, in Chapter 8, the new ‘materialities of power’ associated with scientific and technological revolutions which have transformed capacities for communication, production, destruction and social reproduction.³

Nevertheless there are grounds for being cautiously optimistic concerning future developments, not only as a result of many of the failures of global governance as it is, but also because of new developments in global politics that have been linked to the self-actualization of peoples and new forms of insurgent reason and associated imaginaries of the politically possible – imaginaries that were previously thought to be impossible.⁴ As Richard Falk notes in Chapter 2 this allows us to rethink the idea that history – and the horizons of the future – is made and remade by collective action. Thus a critical perspective on global governance involves not only the demystification of the power relations between dominant and subordinated forces but also assessment of the potential for changes in those relations, and collective consideration of how more socially just and sustainable mechanisms of governance – both local and global – can be actualized.

Liberal, Realist and Cosmopolitan perspectives

With these issues in mind we might note, that within the field of International Relations, notions of ‘global governance’ have been principally associated with Liberalism and Functionalism, and its associated ideologies of progress. Some of this work is premised upon what I call ‘imperial common sense’ on the part of leading American theorists who see it as self-evident that the principal practical and theoretical task is to help to extend US power and dominance of world politics and global governance (Gill 2012b, Chapter 9 in this collection).

Within this broad context, Liberal perspectives have come to highlight contemporary transformations in world order and the crosscutting complexities of a more interdependent set of governance arrangements than is suggested by the Realist image of a world of states.⁵ Here the principal concern has been how laws, norms, rules, principles and institutions could foster peaceful relations between states and facilitate cooperative action across various issue-areas (for an excellent overview, see Murphy 1994). Such ideas have served as an important corrective to approaches that have tended to view the state as the principal actor and sole intermediary between international and domestic spheres of governance.

By contrast, for Realists, and particularly the Neorealists, the basic ontological assumption is that we live in an anarchic, self-help system of potentially antagonistic states, with no single overarching governing authority. Thus from this perspective the problem of governance has been limited to the maintenance of a balance of power to manage the international system where states pursue relative gains (Viner 1948, Gilpin 1971, Mastanduno 1998). This is why some suggest that a Realist theory of global governance may be a ‘contradiction in terms’ (Gilpin 2002: 237).

Another strand of Neorealist thought is associated with the so-called Theory of Hegemonic Stability. This theory holds that stable, cooperative and relatively peaceful international governance systems are dependent on the material preponderance of a single state which has the capacity to provide ‘public goods’ such as the openness of global markets and legal regimes enforcing security of contract and private property rights. This perspective also reflects worries that US relative decline would lead to a collapse in the liberal international economic order perhaps by triggering growing mercantilist rivalries and international conflicts (Kindleberger 1973, Krasner 1976, Gilpin 1981).

However, other scholars, synthesizing elements of Neorealism with a reformulated Liberalism, note that some states do cooperate or create international institutions where their interests coincide, and these may even continue ‘after hegemony’ (Keohane 1984, Grieco 1990: 233–4). This is because of the imperatives of collective governance caused by the condition of ‘complex interdependence’ (Keohane and Nye 1977). Thus, it was postulated, under conditions of increasing economic, political and social interdependence, the probability and utility of military confrontation by states may decrease relative to the mutual and material benefits of cooperation.⁶ This perspective indicated an ontological shift: an incipient transformation of the inter-state system into a more complex global order. Later scholars therefore also highlighted how the concept of ‘global governance’ reflected a paradigm shift within Liberal and Neorealist thinking away from the problem of anarchy and towards the problem of how to manage an increasingly integrated global society (Schmidt 2002).⁷

Some of this paradigm shift was anticipated by Hedley Bull’s (1977) work on the ‘anarchical society’ that described an ever denser network of rules and institutions developed by major powers to regulate their relations. These mechanisms of collective action were creating a society of states with mutual global interests and interconnections.

Nevertheless, with the end of the Cold War, many leading Neorealist scholars continued to predict the collapse of the collective institutions of capitalist cooperation and the fragmentation of the global political economy (Mearsheimer 1990, 1994–5, Gilpin 2000). Their pronouncements, as with those concerning the reported death of Mark Twain, seem in retrospect to have been comprehensively premature.

Indeed, one of the most notable developments since the end of the Cold War has been the radical redefinition of both political and civil society along neoliberal lines. This is reflected not only in the dramatic transformation of former communist nations into capitalist states in a neoliberal direction but also in broader patterns of globalization, as well as the extension of mechanisms that attempt to stabilize these transformations (e.g. associated with ‘new constitutionalism’, as discussed in Chapters 5–7).

By the mid-2000s what was emerging was a perspective that encompassed a more complex set of multilayered governance arrangements involving sub-national and supranational regulatory frameworks and a multiplicity of state and non-state actors including social movements, NGOs, civil society networks, transnational corporations, private business associations, capital markets and so on. Central here is the assessment that globalization challenges the state as the principal locus of political authority and that global governance can be used to interrogate the limits and possibilities for increasing the accountability and legitimacy of international rule.⁸

Indeed, theorists of cosmopolitanism such as Daniele Archibugi, David Held, Mary Kaldor and Jan Aart Scholte have also used the concept of ‘global governance’ to criticize both the ways in which the world market and the collective governance of the G8 or G20 are effectively undemocratic and have largely excluded the forces of ‘global civil society’ from effective participation. However in this literature there is a tendency to treat ‘global civil society’ as autonomous from the state and economy, and thus in abstraction from fundamental power relations associated with global capitalism (Pasha and Blaney 1998). Indeed one needs to avoid the tendency to romanticize the forces of global civil society and to bear in mind that it also includes business associations, corporations, media, political parties, criminal networks, terrorist organizations and other non-governmental organizations, and as such is a terrain of complex struggles and interactions.

A more radical and critical concept of global governance can therefore be understood as involving not only an ontological shift in world politics but also a normative dimension: a critical evaluation of existing governing epistemologies and ruling arrangements in light of the exigencies of global problems and the strategic development or prescription of progressive alternatives. It is to this third set of more critical perspectives that we now turn.

Critical intellectual perspectives

Many if not most critical thinkers have argued that global governance arrangements ignore the fact that not all states are equal and that, indeed, there is a hierarchy of states and set of chains of dominance and subordination in which some states may have lost more political authority than others. From this perspective, key questions related to governance of what and for whom are drowned out by the Neoliberal, Neorealist and technocratic discourses that dominate what Baxi, in Chapter 8, calls ‘global governance talk’. The prevailing discourses of global governance are therefore viewed as having a top-down perspective that elides fundamental questions of power and authority in ways that may privilege specific issues at the expense of structural problems of poverty, injustice and exploitation (Barnett and Duvall 2005, Soederberg 2006, Barnett and Sikkink 2008, Gill 2013). From the perspective of some of these authors ‘global governance’ may simply reflect the outlook and interests of the most powerful states.

Most historical materialist perspectives tend to conceptualize global governance in a similar manner insofar as they are associated with questions of state formation and capital accumulation and the degree to which contradictions can be managed collectively as opposed to unilaterally by a (set of) dominant imperialist power(s). These theories of ‘ultra-imperialist unity’ on the one hand (Hardt and Negri 2001, Robinson 2004) and ‘inter-imperialist rivalry’ (Callinicos 2009) on the other, hark back to the early 20th century Marxist debates between Kautsky and Lenin. Indeed there are strong affinities between these theories and the Neorealist Theory of Hegemonic Stability:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• List of Acronyms
• 1 Reimagining the Future: Some Critical Reflections: Stephen Gill
• 2 Horizons of Global Governance: Richard A. Falk
• 3 Income Inequality and the Future of Global Governance: Janine Brodie
• 4 Beyond Inequality: Expulsions: Saskia Sassen
• 5 New Constitutionalism, Democracy and the Future of Global Governance: A. Claire Cutler
• 6 Trade Agreements and Progressive Governance: Scott Sinclair
• 7 Towards Gendered Global Economic Governance: A Three-Dimensional Analysis of Social Forces: Isabella Bakker
• 8 Remaking Progressive Global Governance: Some Reflections with Reference to the Judiciary and the Rule of Law: Upendra Baxi
• 9 At the Historical Crossroads – Radical Imaginaries and the Crisis of Global Governance: Stephen Gill
• Bibliography
• Index
• Index of Legal Cases