A World of Struggle

How Power, Law, and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy

David Kennedy

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781400889396
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: International Law
• Index: Law

How today's unjust global order is shaped by uncertain expert knowledge—and how to fix it A World of Struggle reveals the role of expert knowledge in our political and economic life. As politicians, citizens, and experts engage one another on a technocratic terrain of irresolvable argument and uncertain knowledge, a world of astonishing inequality and injustice is born.In this provocative book, David Kennedy draws on his experience working with international lawyers, human rights advocates, policy professionals, economic development specialists, military lawyers, and humanitarian strategists to provide a unique insider's perspective on the complexities of global governance. He describes the conflicts, unexamined assumptions, and assertions of power and entitlement that lie at the center of expert rule. Kennedy explores the history of intellectual innovation by which experts developed a sophisticated legal vocabulary for global management strangely detached from its distributive consequences. At the center of expert rule is struggle: myriad everyday disputes in which expertise drifts free of its moorings in analytic rigor and observable fact. He proposes tools to model and contest expert work and concludes with an in-depth examination of modern law in warfare as an example of sophisticated expertise in action.Charting a major new direction in global governance at a moment when the international order is ready for change, this critically important book explains how we can harness expert knowledge to remake an unjust world.

PART I

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND STRUGGLE

CHAPTER 1

POLITICAL ECONOMY: WORLD-MAKING STORIES

An idea about the way the world is organized can be so widely shared that it sinks into the semiconscious space of common sense. If everyone thinks the world is flat, it is unlikely someone will to try to sail around it. As ideas about the world change, different people are empowered, different projects sped forward or impeded. If it goes without saying that politics ought not to interfere in the economy, different people will be empowered to do different things than if it seems obvious the economy is always already a product of political activity. World pictures are complex and layered. When people speak about big systems like mercantilism, feudalism, imperialism, capitalism, or liberalism to characterize the global order as a whole, they have in mind lots of typical micro practices and significant players, characteristic midlevel organizational structures and political projects, as well as big ideas about what the world is like and what people in various roles should try to do. Other world pictures are less well integrated, but may also bring together small details and large stories.

The worlds imagined by different professional disciplines diverge. Do we live in a world of states—or in a global economy? Is humanity organized by culture and religion—or by levels of development? Where anthropologists see cultures, economists see national economies and global markets. International lawyers see nation-states, tempered by all their profession’s efforts to transcend, organize, legalize, and govern the interactions among them. To become a professional is partly a matter of learning to see the world as others in the profession see it. One becomes how one sees and struggle over the world is also a struggle to become oneself.

The worlds people imagine and build change over time. We are losing track of boundaries that once defined a world of aristocratic families. The nineteenth-century world of hierarchically arranged races and civilizations is fading, although the early twentieth-century world of secular and religious states may be back on the rise. Imaginary worlds also have imaginary histories: the “state system” is routinely dated to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which is said to have turned a world of religions into a world of sovereigns. In fact, it took another three hundred years to build a world whose politics were organized along state lines. During that time sovereignty and statehood meant many different things. Nevertheless, origin myths are as important for world building as they are for religions, families, or cultures.

Different worlds have different senses of time, of things that are recent and distant, urgent and inconsequential. For some the future stretches out majestically, for others we are living in end times. International lawyers and policy professionals who work to build the machinery for global governance often imagine a kind of middle distance in which their partial efforts will add up to a more perfect global public capacity. People have different ideas about what drives the present—a clash of civilizations? The rise of Asia? And different ideas about what we can expect and what would count as progress.

Many contemporary books about the world begin by nodding to the powerful economic, social, and technological forces of “globalization.” The world is interconnected, local problems have become global, global problems have become ever more threatening and intractable. This kind of world cries out for governance, counsels cosmopolitanism, and places parochial concerns in a past we can no longer afford. History challenges an ill-equipped governance system and managerial class: will we rise to respond? There is a lot of truth in such stories, although one also encounters stories that stress the rise of fragmentation and sectarianism in today’s world. As I was finishing this chapter, the Boston Globe ran a prominent feature headlined “The Great Deglobalizing: Our Interconnected World Is Shrinking Back toward Its National Borders—And That’s a Problem.”¹ Author Joshua Kurlantzick of the Council on Foreign Relations urged his readers to worry that our world was plunging into protection and isolation, citing falling cross-border capital flows, trade volume declines, rising hostility to immigration, and an upsurge in populist nationalism. Stories of both kinds are told for a purpose: to embolden those seeking local self-determination or, in Kurlantzick’s case, to redouble the countervailing efforts of cosmopolitans. The goal is not only to “get it right” on global trends, but also to encourage action and support one or another broad orientation among the policy class.

As a result, ideas about the world are often hotly contested. Decades of argument about whether the world is warming, how fast and why reflect the intuition that getting people to think it is warming will make it easier to mobilize resources to do something about it. Or, to take an example from economics, if for a generation everyone thinks an economy is a national input/output system to be managed, and then suddenly they all become convinced that an economy is a global market for the allocation of resources to their most productive use through the efficiency of exchange in the shadow of a price system, lots has changed. That is also governance, the exercise of power, the reorganization of possibilities for people in political and economic struggle. We can expect that people would periodically try to bring these large images into conscious dispute as they struggled for advantage, developing the rhetorical tools to promote one grand idea against the other.

It is a staple practice of the policy intelligentsia to argue for an adjustment in background ideas about how the world works to make some kinds of policies more likely, others less defensible. Thomas Friedman’s bestseller The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, for example, was a prominent earlier intervention in these background images.² He urged leaders and the informed public to update their conception of the world: nations matter less, economic ties matter more, distance matters less, communication technologies matter more, political divisions matter less, knowledge matters more, the poor have more opportunities to compete, bulky consolidated political and economic actors are less likely to succeed. Friedman sprinkled the book with suggestions about how appreciation for these facts should change priorities for business and government.

Each image that conjures a world also suggests a project, a practice. Someone must see it, say it, divine its meaning, communicate what is to be done and mobilize others to do it. A “balance of power” story casts the “balancing power” in a heroic role, stabilizing the global order, rather than as an unreliable ally struggling for advantage. To imagine a world and read its implications for human organization is work: creative and imaginative work, interpretive and diagnostic work, programmatic and practical work. And work in a setting where others are seeing different omens, auguring different meanings, proposing different projects. This is not only interpretive work. It is also necessary to build the scaffolding, the institutions, the media enterprises, the academic institutions, the professional guilds from which the world can appear this way and from which such projects can be undertaken. To build such structures is also to empower people—create people—who see things from this perspective. The existence of the United Nations with a tall building in New York and thousands of employees reproduces the world seen by its creators among those who work in its shadow. The UN secretary-general brings the authority of his office to bear on the world through the structures of diplomatic life. But the world imagined by his office and reinforced by the community of diplomats is also brought to bear on him, on his goals, projects, and capabilities. It is hard to function at the United Nations without seeing a world of “member states” and global problems and trying to invent technical programs for their resolution.

WORLD-MAKING STORIES: BACKGROUND IMAGES AND REFORM TRAJECTORIES

Stories make the world not through direct implementation by devoted acolytes but through a complex interaction with technical knowledge and professional practice. To explore how that might happen, let me begin with a dystopic and common interpretation of what have become the well-known challenges posed by economic globalization. Imagine the following story, which I have cobbled together from a variety of recent left liberal and progressive opinion pieces and news articles. It combines a range of “observations” and focuses on the problematic separation of economic life from political control.

What is going on in the world today? A rapid process of factor price equalization and technological assimilation has allowed people everywhere to aspire to a refrigerator and an air conditioner, along with the public and private institutions necessary to realize those ambitions. On the one hand, globalization has opened the world to miraculous economic possibilities and focused national politicians on providing the essential conditions for economic stability: fiscal responsibility, a strong and reliable private legal order, and security. But change on this scale is profoundly destructive and relative income equalization is an extremely uneven business. A global economy is not a uniform economy. Things turn at different speeds. Millions of people are lifted up. But people are also left out. People are dragged down. When people turn to their sovereigns for help, the results are terribly uneven. Some are too big to fail—others too small to count. Workers, consumers, businesses large and small turn to the nation state for support against the competitive pressures and uncertainties of global markets. Some are given golden wings and strong armor. Many find there is little their sovereign will do.

Unfortunately, neither the creative destruction of global economic flows nor the instability and vulnerability to shocks are amenable to management on the scale of our political life. Governments everywhere are weak, buffeted by economic forces, captured by economic interests, and engaged their own economic pursuits. Global economic actors are increasingly asked to take on public responsibilities beyond their mandate with no incentive to assess the choices they face from the perspective of political constituencies or world welfare. As the weakness of governments has become visible, politicians have learned to operate in the shadow of disenfranchised and disillusioned publics who have lost faith in the public hand. Political life has drifted into neighborhood and transnational networks, been diffused into the capillaries of professional management and condensed in the laser beam of media fashion, transformed into a unifying spectacle. The inability of politics to offer public interest solutions to policy challenges has encouraged political cultures ever less interested in doing so. Politics has come to be about other things: symbolic and allegorical displays, on the one hand, and the feathering of nests on the other.

Meanwhile, unmoored from stable political management, the global economy has become volatile and destructive, veering from boom to bust set free from the stabilizing hand of sound regulatory management. The relative mobility of economics and territorial rigidity of politics have rendered each unstable as political and economic leadership have drifted apart and political leadership has everywhere become peripheral to economic management. In short, the disconnection of economic and political life threatens the sustainability of contemporary political and economic structures.

That all sounds pretty bad. If we accept this interpretation of globalization and want to do something to change it, the story suggests we focus on institutional design. The recurring theme is actors operating in structures unsuited to their tasks: the scope of political power and the range of economic activity are mismatched. An obvious path for reform would be to build global “governance” capabilities, render corporate actors responsible to social concerns, empower new nongovernmental actors to regulate and monitor transboundary activities, and so forth.

Such a story lets many people off the hook. Indeed, its usefulness as apology should make us skeptical. It reinforces a tacit division of labor between economic and political institutions, neither of which appears responsible for the outcomes. No wonder the most powerful governments fail to meet the demands of their constituents: their failures are the product of forces beyond their control. Nor are the institutions of global economic life responsible. From financiers, entrepreneurs, and corporations to black-market traders in drugs, arms, and remittances, economic actors are only doing what makes sense, given their interests and mandate. They can undertake social tasks as a philanthropic exercise in “social responsibility” but have no political responsibilities in this domain. The “global economy” is also a place of necessity: a natural force of “creative destruction” responsible for demolishing industries, impoverishing workers, and disempowering governments. No actual person did anything.

The reforms suggested by such an interpretation are also not very promising. If we want change, we would either have to alter the system structuring relations between economic and political actors or somehow encourage “enlightened” leaders to rise above the constraints and incentives of their position to do something unnatural to their role. Each is very difficult to imagine. Wise leaders rising above their mandate across the world? A structural change in the “state system”? At Davos, even in crisis they shied away from a “new Bretton Woods.” The transformation of global corporations and banks into politically responsible substitutes for government? The emergence of citizen alliances powerful enough to constrain both governments and private economic actors? All very unlikely.

At the same time, each of these things could be attempted. You can establish an NGO to monitor global value chains. You can urge governments to cooperate where interests are shared: combatting terrorism, improving airline safety, collecting taxes. You can convince corporate leaders attentive to reputational risk to prioritize social responsibility. There is work to do that can be understood as a “first step” toward remaking the global system of political and economic actors. You can get a job—or at least a summer internship—doing these things. And what alternatives are there, given this story? How else could the challenges of globalization be addressed other than by this kind of reform: awakening private actors to public responsibilities and strengthening public actors able to operate above and beyond the existing constraints of national government? Although many people who write stories like this urge structural reforms in the strongest terms, the result is a kind of tyranny of no alternatives other than reforms you probably intuit are unlikely to do the trick.

Part of what makes this story seem compelling, if disheartening, is its reliance on differences and distinctions that seem natural and fact-like. Globalization is problematic because it heightens the difference between “economic” and “political” structures and actors. In legal terms, the first are “private” and the second “public.” The story stresses the urgent need to link them more effectively: to find public actors able to regulate outside borders, to find private actors willing to act in the public interest. The commonsense notion that public and private actors or political and economic structures are distinct and different runs deep. It is shared by people with very different, even opposing, interpretations and reform proposals. People who love globalization and people who want an even sharper separation of economic life from political oversight share the commonsense idea that these domains are different.

But the differences between politics and economics or public and private are ideas. Each is more “ideal type” than sociological truth. Such abstract differences cannot help but exaggerate the homogeneity of both global economic and political life. In fact, all governments do economic things and all corporations do political things. All public authorities exercise power tacitly and explicitly outside their “jurisdiction.” A low-wage export strategy works only if it penetrates foreign markets where wages are higher: if the wage rate bargained in the shadow of local rules “applies” in otherwise high-wage foreign markets through the movement of goods. All corporations “regulate” the activities of their employees, customers, and business partners. Or, to be more precise, all so-called governments do things we could easily interpret as “economic” and vice versa. These designations are the product of contested interpretation.³

FOREGROUNDING THE TECHNICAL WORK OF EXPERTS

Getting beyond the tyranny of hapless reform requires bringing the routine interpretive work through which these designations are made and contested to the surface. It is this technical work that already makes and unmakes the boundaries of political and economic life. The more we understand what experts and professionals do when they argue and contend with one another about just where the boundaries should be, the clearer it becomes that global dysfunction arises not from the nature or structure of “politics” and “economics” or from the abstract historical force of globalization, but from expertise: from the global knowledge practices for their differentiation, interaction, and management. The interplay of politics and economics is easily forgotten because the technical work of linking them is understood by those who do it to be knitting domains together or balancing forces that are otherwise distinct and opposed.

The creation of a market is not an exercise of unrestrained factor mobility. Factor mobility is a relative thing: which factors can move under which conditions is determined by legal, social, and cultural mores and institutions. Global economic life is a patchwork of sectors and regions, some of which are tightly integrated, others invisible and impenetrable to one another. The boundaries are everywhere disputed as people struggle for market access and market protection. The active work of national institutions in maintaining global economic life could also be undertaken in various ways. National governments provide the currencies, manage the central banks, regulate the banking, insurance, and transport sectors, construct and empower economic actors, enforce the contracts and property rights and arbitration awards, provide security, and define the lines among white, gray, and black markets.

Just how and where and for the benefit of whom these arrangements should be settled are matters of conflict that are typically resolved as matters of more or less. How independent a central bank? How effective a tax? How tolerated the black market or the demand for corrupt payments? These adjustments are not made by architects of the global system. Resolutions emerge from struggles among people in particular institutional settings trying to gain or hang on to an advantage. In those struggles, technical and professional modes of reasoning, debating, and deciding are used both to make and to unmake the boundary between “politics” and “economics” or to settle it in different places. These struggles are undertaken in specialized languages—often of law or economics—which are only loosely tethered to the more familiar terms of broad debates about the desirability of linking or delinking economic activity from political contest, although the way people interpret the trend (“globalization” or “deglobalization”) can affect who wins in such struggles, who is able to imagine moving a boundary this way or that, and which arguments have wind in their sails. The lines that are drawn and the balances that are struck are tentative. Whether they harden into necessity or get remade tomorrow will be determined by appetite and the power of those who stand to benefit ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Could This Be 1648?
• Part I: Political Economy and Struggle
• Part II: Expertise
• Part III: Law
• Epilogue: Let It Be So
• Afterword to the Paperback Edition
• Notes
• Index