Global governance frameworks and institutional structures

Global Governance

An Analysis of the Debate Surrounding Global Governance

Ulrich Brand's "Order and Regulation" is less a discussion of global governance and more a discussion about the discussion -- a Foucauldian analysis that attempts to be circumspect by first rooting out the causes of the discussion. In this sense, Brand classifies the discussion of global governance among other social, political, and economic fear factors such as hegemony, post-Fordist politics, the crisis of neoliberal globalization, all from the vantage point of Foucault and regulation theory. Brand asserts that "as a discourse the concept is a part of the search process of emerging post-Fordist politics and the latter's scientific and non-scientific substantiation" (156). Similarly, James Rosenau calls for a new ontology regarding the study of global governance due to the fact that the present research models are anachronistic. Lynn Miller takes a more direct approach to the subject, attempting to explain it without any preliminary ontological debate or discussion concerning theoretical frameworks. Likewise, A. Claire Cutler provides a concise definition of global governance. This paper will define global governance by uniting all four perspectives as well as two from Vladimir Putin and Carlo Scarfone, which help show global governance as a new strategy for hegemony and how it may be assessed as "old wine poured into new bottles."

This paper will be structured accordingly: first, it will address the question surrounding global governance -- how the idea behind it originated and what it has become today; second, it will show that global governance is not the product of a new ontology but the outcome of a new hegemony.

The Question of Global Governance

According to Cutler, global governance has its origins in the Peace of Westphalia. Yet, such an origin seems slightly arbitrary, and Cutler admits that ideas relative of global governance can be found in ancient philosophers, from Plato to Augustine to Aquinas and Erasmus, all of whom "called for war to be justified and measured" (513). But is this the measure of global governance? Is it merely international law? And if so, does international law even still exist today, or is it merely pretense? Vladimir Putin (as reported in Moscow in 2007) argues that all facades of international law are being knocked down by American intervention in the Middle East: "We are encountering a dangerous disdain for international law, ambitions to use military force to achieve personal interests,' Putin said, in what appeared to be a veiled reference to the United States" ("Putin Warns Against Flouting International Law"). Global governance, therefore, may exist theoretically, but in reality it appears to be a different matter.

However, post-Fordism may have something to do with the debate concerning global governance. Post-Fordism has essentially created a new school of social, political, and economic thought, in which the rules of global governance and international law are being re-written. As Carlo Scarfone states in "Immaterial Labour and Post-Fordism":

In Postfordism the coincidence of production and communication becomes the driving force of economic development, simultaneously causing a short-circuit in the institutional transition from individual to collective interests. Representation in the form of a party of class, rank, social group, becomes increasingly complex. Each individual tends to represent himself. 'The entrepreneur, by virtue of being such, becomes politician, subject of government, writing off the separation, typical of representative democracy, between the economic and the political sphere'.

What this means is that the shift in the way international business is conducted has brought about a shift in global governance and international law. As Brand attempts to illustrate, global governance has now become a discussion about hegemony and a new kind of corporate imperialism.

Old Wine and New Bottles

Cutler shows how "international governance was…born out of war and linked intimately to peace," (513) yet international capitalism has forced global governance into a kind of hypocritical position. The peace (essentially established in Westphalia) merely provided a pretext for liberty. As free market enterprises adapted to new ideas of liberty, the very security that the former liberty promised gave way to a new threat of domination through war. Putin is quite correct to assert that international law is being flouted by America: American corporate interests have larger concerns that the maintenance of international law: their business is business -- not peace. Such, of course, is problematic for any continuation of global governance, unless hegemony of a single governor takes the reigns.

Lynn Miller states as much when she says "that the peace of the international community can be maintained [only] through a binding, predetermined agreement to take collective action to preserve it. It says that any illegal threat or use of force by any sovereign member of the international community against any other…should trigger the combined force of all the rest" (172). Yet, while American forces flout international law, at least according to Putin, little resistance to such actions is shown by Western powers. It would appear that American hegemony is redefining global governance according to its own interests -- which suggests that other powers may well do the same.