Global Governance and the UN: An Unfinished Journey

Foreword

Foreword Global governance is generally defined as an instance of governance in the absence of government. There is no government at the global level: the un General assembly is not a world parliament, and ban ki-moon is not the world’s president. but there is governance—of sorts. moreover, as Thomas G. Weiss and ramesh Thakur indicate, today’s desire to improve the functioning of global governance has little to do with wanting to create a world government—though right-wing bloggers and some politicians still try to mobilize their base by fulminating that it does. Governance is not the same as politics, although they are closely related. Fundamentally, politics is about competition in the pursuit of particular interests, whereas governance is about producing public goods. This is as true internationally as domestically, although the domain of governance apart from politics at the international level is fragile, much thinner, and more fragmented. Governance, at whatever level of social organization it occurs, refers to the workings of the system of authoritative rules, norms, institutions, and practices by means of which any collectivity manages its common affairs. The instruments of global governance take the form of treaties, customary international law, formal organizations such as the un or the World Trade organization (WTo), embedded norms such as those legitimizing certain uses of force but not others, and habituated practices such as pretending that embassies exist in the home country but not the host country and therefore are not subject to local jurisdiction. The prevailing state of affairs in global governance at any given time is shaped by an ever-present tension between the need to internationalize rules and the desire to assert and retain national control. The balance between internationalization and state sovereignty may swing back and forth—for large-scale examples, compare the pre–World War i and post– World ii eras with the interwar period. Today, powerful forces are pushing in both directions simultaneously, and we simply do not know yet whether reconciliation between the two is possible or how to achieve it. xvi Foreword The modern Westphalian system of global governance—if it can be called “global” at all—had two core features. First, it was a state-centric system. The only public interest that had any standing reflected accommodations among different national interests as defined by individual states. states were the sole decision makers in this system of governance. states were also the subjects of the decisions they made: the rules applied to them and only through them to other actors, such as individuals, companies, or armed factions. and states were the enforcers of the rules they made— when they felt like (and were capable of) enforcing them. second, in terms of its spatial configuration, this traditional world saw itself as comprising territorially distinct and separate economic and political units that were engaged in external transactions. The role of whatever governance arrangements states created was to reduce frictions resulting from those external transactions, largely by helping to manage them at the point of entry or exit between the units. This template was enshrined in the post–World War ii institutions of global governance. in the area of peace and security, for example, the un charter rested on the assumption that threats to stability would come from acts of external aggression by states. it included provisions for helping the victim by mobilizing other states—not an international standing force—to repel the aggression. and so its article 2.7 stipulated that “nothing contained in the present charter shall authorize the united nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” Thesamewastrueintheeconomicrealm.TheGeneralagreementon Tariffs and Trade, the WTo’s predecessor, was confined largely to addressing such point-of-entry barriers as tariffs and quotas. The international monetary Fund’s main task was to manage currency exchange rate policies. and although the un charter was drafted in the name of “we the peoples,” its sole recognition of actors other than states and intergovernmental organizations was in its provision that the Economic and social council could “make suitable arrangements for consultation” with international nongovernmental organizations (nGos) that were relevant to its work and with national nGos after consulting their home country governments (article 71). driven largely by the forces of the globalization, the modern system of global governance began to transform slowly but in some respects Foreword xvii significantly over the course of the...