Crippling Epistemologies and Governance Failures: A Plea for Experimentalism

CHAPTER 9: Foreign policy: the many are smarter than the few

The cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy. — john dewey This chapter was first presented at a conference with a captivating, perplexing and exceedingly circumspect title: “Polycentric Governance?: Subnational Governments and Foreign Policy in an Age of Globalization”. First, such a title plainly stated a fact of life: the presence and importance of subnational actors of all sorts (regional, sectoral, sectional) in the making of foreign policy, just as in the making of most domestic policies around the world. Second, it unexpectedly put a question mark after the expression “polycentric governance”, as if it were merely a conjecture rather than a fact. Third, for reasons that were not made entirely clear, it appears to draw attention mainly to subnational “state” actors, to the exclusion of all others, thereby occluding whatever is not “public governance” stricto sensu (Ladeur 2004). In light of this cautious problematic, this chapter is somewhat radical. It takes as a point of departure the concluding remarks made by James Rosenau in his book Distant Proximities (2003): that the world is confronted with the challenge of “Möbius-web governance”, CHAPTer 9 Foreign policy: the many are smarter than the few 206 CRIPPLING EPISTEMOLOGIES AND GOVERNANCE FAILURES a multipolar/multidirectional, mixed formal/informal mode of governance that mobilizes the contribution of all actors, from the public, private and social sectors, as producers of governance. This eye-catching label was inspired by the Möbius strip, where the inside and outside are one and the same. Rosenau looks into this abyss, cosily nests this daunting mode of governance within a typology that also accommodates a variety of more traditional genres of governance (top–down, bottom–up, market, network, side by side), and then walks away, leaving this terra incognita for another voyage . This chapter makes the case for the effectiveness of a very bold version of such an approach: open-source Möbius-web governance. The argument is built in four stages. First, I shall briefly underline some major developments of great consequence in world affairs: the relative decline in the role of the state and the state’s disaggregation into subnational fragments; the parallel emergence of multisectoral and multi-level governing mechanisms; and the illiberal flavour of the state-centric culture of adjudication that attempts, in the face of new and complex situations , to grant ever more arbitration power to the state’s supertechnocrats. Second, I shall suggest that, while this rearguard action by states is unfolding, new units have coalesced at the infranational and cross-national levels that are new loci of productivity growth and innovation. These new nests of actors have not only important stakes in domestic and foreign policy in a Möbius-web world, but also much of the knowledge and power needed to take part in this governing process. These units and actors are often non-governmental or non-state units and actors. Indeed, they are often the result of cross-sectoral arrangements and mixing, and demand more and more access to the policy process at the domestic and international levels. This is not the place to document the damage done by national governments’ top–down, one-size-fits-all PART III: LESS THAN EFFECTIVE BRICOLAGE 207 counter-approaches to these emerging forces, and by their propensity to coerce and adjudicate in order to maintain their hegemony. Suffice it to say that the new dynamic units are actively seeking ways to take part in the construction and maintenance of a multiplicity of regime-like arrangements that challenge the assumption of nation states and regional governments that they have the only legitimate and authorized voices in policy-making. Third, I shall argue that open-source Möbius-web governance offers an opportunity to build a very resilient foreign policy, piecemeal and bottom up, through effective prototyping and “serious play” (terms that will have to be added to the vocabulary of international relations), and that the fear of chaos evoked by traditional statecentric Jacobins, fighting any effort to construct such a regime of governance, is much exaggerated. Fourth, I shall examine the feasibility of such a transformation of the Canadian foreign policy process on the basis of both the experiences of the World Trade Organization and cognate international organizations, and the current discussions inside Canada about opening up the process. While international forums give plenty of evidence of an evolving open-source international policymaking process, it would not be unfair to...