Micro and Macro Global Analysis

¶ … CNN, referring to the decision by the Russian Federation to call to Moscow its ambassador for NATO, for consultations (http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/03/world/europe/ukraine-crisis/). This comes as a measure against rising tensions, following Russia's actions in Ukraine and it decision to annex Crimea.

Before starting a discussion as to how a strong governing structure would have handled a situation such as the one in Ukraine, a first comment needs to be made about the statement "one of the defining features of contemporary global politics is the lack of a strong central governing structure" can be seriously nuanced. Certainly, this is true at a global level, but it becomes more and more applicable at a regional level and not for any region, but for Europe, a populated and developed continent.

The European Union is a good example in this sense: it is an organization that has continuously integrated, economically at first and, subsequently, politically. It now has a central governing structure (the European Commission), which is becoming stronger and able to successfully integrate the decision making process from 28 countries in many areas, ranging from economic to financial and, more and more, to the political sector.

However, it is difficult to project the image of the European Union at a global level. The primary reason for this is that there are two examples in history where such as central governing body was attempted. One was a failure, the League of Nations, highly unsuccessful from 1919 to 1939 and unable to fight against the conflicts outburst throughout Europe and the world.

The second is the United Nations, a governing structure that had limited success. It was somewhat successful in conflict prevention, including through different UN mission, and it was also successful through the different resolutions that the Security Council, the central governing body of the UN, put forward, condemning different actions, taking certain positions against actors that did not abide by the general framework of rules and regulations set up in the world. However, this is not a body that proposes to govern the world, only to lay down some basic, general rules and ensure that these are respected.

The problem with such a system of global governance is that, just in the case of the UN, the governance is split between the most powerful actors, with these imposing their influence on all the other members of a global organization. In the case of the UN, most of the decision making is done at the level of the UN Security Council, where the permanent members (China, Russia, the U.S., France and Great Britain) play the most important part.

This does not occur in the European Union, where decision-making is unanimous and whether all the members have the same rights and responsibilities. Although the EU has some of the most important actors in the world, from a political, military and economic perspective (Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy), they still abide by a regulation framework that provides equal rights for all, despite the fact that a country like Germany provides 25% of the EU budget.

This cannot and will not work in a global context, where the U.S. And other powerhouses, such as China or Russia, will never agree to share their power and their decision making with a small country in Africa, for example. Today, in the European Union, Bulgaria, Croatia or Luxembourg have the same rights as Germany and France. It is absolutely inconceivable that this would also be the case with the U.S. And Malawi or with Russia and Nicaragua. The U.S. would still be the policeman of the world and Russia and China would still context the unipolar world that exists today.