A priori, the idea that the state remains the central unit of political power as well as the main ‘arena of collective action’ to face and resolve social problems shared by the constituting community seems self-evident. Indeed, over the last two centuries or so, the centrality of state structures has been bolstered by copious economic development, mainly grounded in Europe’s state-based imperialism and the Second Industrial Revolution.
Industries, banks and tax systems all became tied into what was to be conceptualised as Weberian state structures, be they of a more statist nature such as in France, or more free trade oriented like in Britain. In addition, the progressive state monopolisation of the legitimate use of force, and the cultural integration towards a national family, both contributed to the creation of what today we call the nation-state.
However, this ‘realist’ - in political theory terms - world-view, whose seeds were largely planted in the mid-17th century by the Treaty of Westphalia and Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, has not been left unchallenged. On the contrary, globalisation and its multiple tenets have casted severe doubts on the predominance and centrality of the state in global politics. Among other things, the liberalisation of trade, the financialisation of economies labelled the ‘third industrial revolution’, and the transnationalisation of production chains raise a host of questions. Do these streams of globalisation render the interlinked economies more efficient? Is the financial sector really fit for the reallocation of capital for economic progress, or does it instead lead to new forms of global cartelisation? And how hegemonic is the ideology of neoliberalism that considers the individual to be the main economic actor, and forces competition upon and among citizens in ever more spheres of their daily lives?
Scholars of international relations, global governance, and political theory have undertaken countless attempts to conceptualise and describe these developments and their implications for the realists’ presumed supremacy of the state. Are we witnessing what James Rosenau has called ‘fragmegration’ - a mix of fragmenting and integrating processes that transcend the distinction between national and international? Are states disaggregating because of expanding ‘transgovernmental networks’ that increasingly incite interaction and imitation between regulators and legislators from various domains, as Anne-Marie Slaughter, drawing upon Keohane and Verba, has suggested? Are states taking on the more limited role of a mere ‘competition state’, to use Prof Cerny’s words, whose main objective is to facilitate and support competitive economic activity at the expense of welfare provisions, for instance? Has economic policy undergone a shift towards ‘financial Keynesianism’ of quantitative easing at the core of the new ‘bail-out state’, as described by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone magazine?
At first glance, the forces of globalisation raise more questions than could possibly and consensually be answered. And yet, the real novelty of this era, Prof Cerny insists, is the fragmentation of the state itself, triggered by an unprecedented transnational dimension of globalisation that cuts across landscapes, policy areas and realms of authority; or what Cerny calls ‘neopluralism’. Drawing on Robert Dahl’s conception of domestic pluralism, neopluralism thus maintains a globally ‘durable disorder’ - also qualified as ‘neo-medievalism’ by Prof Cerny and others.
This leaves us with two competing schools of thought: realists on the one hand and globalisation theorists on the other. Maybe not least because of the very scholarship’s predominant and dazzling conceptual pluralism, Prof Cerny himself remains rather sceptical of what global governance scholars seem to assume and suggest. In his view, wherever you find and whatever you call the state’s supposedly emerging competitors, they can hardly pass for autonomous actors. Even if they are trapped in webs of power, states continue to exist. In other words, states remain distinct and embedded institutional structures capable of managing national, as well as international, affairs, recalling the two-faced Roman god Janus. Of course, this argument is not easy to dismiss as such.
Nonetheless, the idea that states themselves are part of the process of transformation fuelled by globalisation is not extraneous, but in my view, rather intrinsic to Global Governance as a field of theory and research. First of all, globalisation is not on a par with global governance. We need not presuppose convergence at a higher scale to invoke the idea of some form of global governance. If we recall that the term ‘governance’ originally denoted a collection of informal political processes in opposition to formal institutions, it becomes clear that the field of Global Governance is less concerned with yet undiscovered broader superstructures than it is with trying to track new modes and potentially ad hoc, mutant mechanisms of power. In light of this nuance and of the intriguingly diverse globalisation literature touched upon earlier, it thus appears as though the burden of proof does not entirely lie with those defending the relevance of global governance.
In fact, after this panoramic, but necessarily patchy, overview, a crucial but underestimated question is whether political actors - interest groups and social movements - that span across the global and are co-constituents of the previously-evoked neo-medieval system, will become regularised in any way over time, and whether their regularisation and re-embedding within more formal structures will require a ‘revolution of rising expectations’, to use the phrase attributed to Adlai E. Stevenson, former Governor of Illinois. If the OECD is right in predicting that the world’s middle class will expand from 2 to almost 5 billion over the next fifteen years, questions about the future of governmental and governance structures below, above, across and beyond the state, remain paramount, and the consequences of this transformation, all but unforeseeable.
In light of this, we do not need to conclude that it is merely rational to assume - following the logic of Pascal’s wager - the existence of emerging global governance for which we still lack evidence. On the contrary, scholars already inquire and bring forward innovative mechanisms of regulation which partly and even fully bypass states - work which will save us from one day finding ourselves analytically empty-handed.
Watch the Video
