WORLD POLITICS Lecture 18

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WORLD POLITICS Lecture 18
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POLITICAL GLOBALIZATION
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The New Contexts of Politics

• Political events in one part of the world can
  rapidly acquire worldwide ramifications.
• As a result, developments at the local
  levelwhether economic, social or
  environmentalcan acquire almost instantaneous
  global consequences and vice versa.
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• The idea of global politics calls into question
  the traditional demarcations between the domestic
  and the foreign, and between the territorial and
  the non-territorial, found in modern conceptions
  of 'the political.
• Global problems highlight the richness and
  complexity of the interconnections that now
  transcend states and societies in the global
  order .

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Multicentric Governance 

• States no more the main actors
• Multilateral international dependence
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• A new era of trans-governmental regulatory
  co-operation
• Trans-governmentalism distinctive mode of global
  governance horizontal rather than vertical,
  composed of national government officials rather
  than international bureaucrats, decentralized and
  informal rather than organized and rigid

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Foreign and Domestic Policies

• Foreign and domestic policies have become
  chronically intermingled.
• The coordination and control of government policy
  is increasingly complex.
• A thickening web of multilateral agreements,
  institutions has evolved over the last five
  decades, regulating many aspects of national and
  transnational life.
• This evolving global governance complex is far
  from constituting a world government, with
  ultimate legal authority and coercive powers, but
  it is much more than a system of limited
  intergovernmental cooperation.

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Dialectic of Two Trends

• The new trans-governmental networks lack the kind
  of centralized, coordinated political program
  that is associated with national government.
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• A growing intrusion into the domestic affairs of
  states example WTO's trade dispute panels.
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• Many new sites of rule-making and lawmaking have
  emerged
• There is no longer a strict separation between
  public and private or domestic and international
  legal procedures and mechanisms models of
  lawmaking and enforcement no longer simply follow
  the form and logic of the states system.

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EUs Example

• Complex pattern of global governance and
  rule-making can be added to the new
  configurations of regional governance.
• The EU has, in remarkably little time, taken
  Europe from the edge of catastrophe in two world
  wars to a world in which sovereignty is pooled
  across a growing number of areas of common
  concern.

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The End of Self-help

• Few states, except for the US and China, can now
  realistically contemplate unilateralism or
  neutrality as a credible defense strategy.
• While the Iraq war dramatized the military power
  of the US and its willingness to deploy this
  massive capability, it also highlighted how
  complex security challenges and threats cannot be
  managed satisfactorily by states acting alone, or
  even in small alliances.
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• For the first time in history, national security
  can now be realized effectively only if
  nation-states come together and pool resources,
  technology, intelligence, power and authority.

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The Reconfiguration of Political Power

• At the core of these developments is the
  reconfiguration of political power.  
• Supremacy of the states legal claim over what
  occurs within their own territories in
  juxtaposition with, and understood in relation
  to, the expanding jurisdiction of institutions of
  global and regional governance.
• Globalization is associated with a transformation
  or an unbundling of the relationship between
  sovereignty, territoriality, and political power
   
• Extraordinary growth of institutionalized arenas
  and networks of political mobilization,
  decision-making, and regulatory activity
  transcend national political jurisdictions.

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Globalization and the Challenges to Governance

• Effective power is shared.
• Bartered and contested by diverse forces and
  agencies, public and private, crossing national,
  regional and international domains. 
• A jurisdictional gapgiving rise to the problem
  of externalities such as market volatility or the
  degradation of the global commons, the problem of
  who is responsible for them, and how they can be
  held to account.

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Globalization and the Challenges to Governance
(Cont.)

• Among the political difficulties produced by
  these interlocking challenges (regulatory and
  moral) is a growing imbalance in global
  rule-making and enforcement.
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• Rules that favor global market expansion have
  become more robust and enforceable in the last
  decade or twointellectual property rights, or
  trade dispute resolution through the World Trade
  Organization.
• Rules intended to promote equally valid social
  objectives, be they labor standards, human
  rights, environmental quality or poverty
  reduction, lag behind and in some instances
  actually have become weaker.

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The Reform of Global Governance

• Strengthening global governance
• To restore symmetry and congruence between
  decision-makers and decision-takers, and to
  entrench the principle of equivalence in a manner
  that is consistent with inclusiveness, requires a
  strengthening of global governanceinstitutional
  competition, overlapping jurisdictions, the
  excessive costs of inaction
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• Developing multilateral rules and procedures that
  lock in all powers, small and major, into a
  multilateral framework.
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• Systematizing the provision of global public
  goods requires not just building on existing
  forms of multilateral institutions, but also on
  extending and developing them in order to address
  questions of inadequate provision, accountability
  and democracy.

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Global Issues Networks

• Global Issues Networks (GINs)requires a distinct
  global issue network for each urgent policy
  problem.
• A norm-producing phase, beginning with a rigorous
  evaluation of options and alternatives.
• GINs would seek to set out new standards of
  behavior required of key agents to solve global
  problems, and would then act as a kind of rating
  agency to expose countries, businesses or other
  players that were not living up to the new
  standards.
• They would regularly name and shame governments
  that had not passed legislation conforming to the
  standards, or had not ratified or enforced a
  perfectly useful treaty, or had not altered
  domestic policy where it mattered.

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Social democratic multilateralism

• Global social democracy must involve the
  development of both independent political
  authority and administrative capacity at regional
  and global levels.
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• Seek to entrench and develop political
  institutions at regional and global levels as a
  necessary supplement to those at the level of the
  state
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• Forge an accountable politics at local levels
  alongside the establishment of representative and
  deliberative assemblies in a the wider global
  order.