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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The issues that increasingly dominate the 21st century cannot be solved by any single country acting alone, no matter how powerful. To manage the global economy, prevent runaway environmental destruction, reign in nuclear proliferation, or confront other global challenges, we must cooperate. But at the same time, our tools for global policymaking - chiefly state-to-state negotiations over treaties and international institutions - have broken down.
The result is gridlock, which manifests across areas via a number of common mechanisms. The rise of new powers representing a more diverse array of interests makes agreement more difficult. The problems themselves have also grown harder as global policy issues penetrate ever more deeply into core domestic concerns. Existing institutions, created for a different world, also lock-in pathological decision-making procedures and render the field ever more complex. All of these processes - in part a function of previous, successful efforts at cooperation - have led global cooperation to fail us even as we need it most.
Ranging over the main areas of global concern, from security to the global economy and the environment, this book examines these mechanisms of gridlock and pathways beyond them. It is written in a highly accessible way, making it relevant not only to students of politics and international relations but also to a wider general readership.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Figures
Boxes and Tables
Boxes
Tables
Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction
The Postwar Legacy
Overview
1: Gridlock
Building the Postwar Order
Explaining the Postwar Order: Hegemony versus Institutions
The Effect of the Postwar Order: Self-Reinforcing Interdependence
Roads to Gridlock
Conclusion
2: Security
Introduction
CHANGES IN THE NATURE AND FORM OF SECURITY
The Interstate System
Postwar Developments: From the UN to the Cold War
Institutional Developments and Successes
Shifting Principles of Global Order
Post-9/11 Global Security
GRIDLOCK: DYNAMICS OF INSTITUTIONAL DEFICIT AND MALFUNCTION
The UN Security Council and the Disarmament Regime
Complex Intermestic Issues
Paradigm Shift or Realist Status Quo?
Conclusion
3: Economy
Introduction
THE EVOLUTION OF GLOBAL ECONOMIC GOVERNANCE
The Imperial System and Its Demise
Bretton Woods and the Creation of Multilateral Economic Institutions
Self-Reinforcing Interdependence and the End of Bretton Woods
GRIDLOCK IN GLOBAL ECONOMIC GOVERNANCE
Gridlock in Multilateral Trade Negotiations
Gridlock in Global Financial Governance
Global Financial Governance Reform
Conclusion: A Reembedded Global Market?
4: Environment
Introduction: A Zanjera for the Globe?
GLOBALIZATION OF THE COMMONS AND PARTIAL GLOBALIZATION OF THEIR MANAGEMENT
Industrial Globalization and the Origins of Modern Environmental Governance
Postwar Internationalization
The Modern Environmental Movement
An Environmental “Bretton Woods”? The Stockholm Compromise and UNEP
Early Successes, Lingering Challenges
A New Foundational Moment? From Compromise to Gridlock at Rio
ENVIRONMENTAL GRIDLOCK
Self-Reinforcing Interdependence and the Global Environment
Forests
Climate Change
Conclusion: Increasingly Linked Problems, Increasingly Fragmented Governance
5: Beyond Gridlock?
From Self-Reinforcing Interdependence to Gridlock
Trends toward Deepening Gridlock
National Trends and Gridlock
The Changed Global Landscape
Pathways through Gridlock
Politics beyond Gridlock
References
Index
Copyright © Thomas Hale, David Held, Kevin Young 2013
The right of Thomas Hale, David Held and Kevin Young to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2013 by Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6238-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6239-8(pb)
ISBN-13: 9780745670102 (epub)
ISBN-13: 9780745670119 (mobi)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Figures
1.1 Self-reinforcing interdependence in the postwar period
1.2 Changing contributions to global GDP by region
2.1 Number and type of armed conflicts, 1946–2011
2.2 Battle deaths by category, 1989–2010
2.3 Incidents of terrorism, 1970–2010
3.1 Increased volume of world trade, 1948–2011
3.2 International financial integration, 1970–2007
3.3 KOF index of economic liberalization, 1970–2009
3.4 Average levels of capital account openness, rich countries and developing countries, 1970–2009
3.5 Ratio of total global exports to global GDP, 1960–2010
3.6 Dimensions of financial crises, periods compared between 1880 and 1997
3.7 Number of banking crises occurring in a given year, 1970–2008
3.8 Cumulative number of preferential trade agreements in force, 1950–2010, notified and nonnotified, between country groups
3.9 Global capital flows, 1975–2009
3.10 Percent annual change in global GDP and trade volume, 1994–2013 (projection)
3.11 Global imbalances, as represented by current account surpluses and deficits, 1996–2012, with projections to 2016
3.12 International reserve holdings, 1995–2012 (US$ trillions)
4.1 Environmental treaties created per year, 1868–2012
4.2 Production of ozone-depleting substances, by select countries and regions, 1986
4.3 Production of ozone-depleting substances, by select countries and regions, 1986–2011
4.4 Changes in Earth systems, 1750–2000
4.5 Oil consumption, by select countries and regions, 1965–2010
4.6 Coal consumption, by select countries and regions, 1965–2010
4.7 Consumption of selected forest products by region, 1992–2011
4.8 Atmospheric CO2 concentration from the Vostok ice core record with recent human perturbation superimposed
4.9 Likely impacts of climate change over the next century
4.10 Change in greenhouse gas emissions of Annex 1 countries, 1990–2009
4.11 Regime complex for climate change from Keohane and Victor 2010
4.12 Growth of transnational climate governance by type, 1990–2010
4.13 Cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, 1850–2008
4.14 Greenhouse gas emissions, 1850–2008
4.15 Emissions and projected emissions, 1990–2035
Boxes and Tables
Boxes
2.1 The UN Charter model
2.2 NATO members
Tables
1.1 Pathways to gridlock and their mechanisms
1.2 Comparison of world economic powers of 1960 with world economic powers of 2010
2.1 Selected major wars, UN mandates, and conflict-related deaths
2.2 Key developments in arms control and disarmament post–World War II
2.3 Selected developments in the law of war
2.4 Selected human rights agreements
2.5 UN Security Council P-5 vetoes, 1945–2011
2.6 Incidents of pirate attacks, 2002–2009
2.7 Military expenditure by country (P-5) (US$ millions)
3.1 Major multilateral trade meetings, 1946–present
3.2 Distribution of MNCs by location of parent company, 2009
3.3 Central features of the Washington Consensus and augmented Washington Consensus
3.4 Selected transnational financial governance institutions
3.5 Exports to GDP ratios, selected years, 1870–2008
3.6 Selected major events in the Doha Development Round negotiations
3.7 Annual real GDP growth rates, by region and country groups, 2007–2016 (projected)
4.1 Components of the ozone regime, 1977–1999
4.2 Components of the forest regime
4.3 The “Forest G20”
4.4 Components of the core climate regime
5.1 Selected issue areas in which gridlock mechanisms predominate
Abbreviations
Preface
The arguments in this book developed after the authors attended various lectures on why the outcome of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in 2009 had been so unsatisfactory. The question put by lecturer after lecturer was: why had the negotiations on climate change stalled? While the lectures were invariably engaging, they shared the questionable assumption that climate change negotiations could be understood sui generis and independently of wider geopolitical transformations. The questions about climate negotiations, however, could easily have been asked about the current state of trade, finance, nuclear proliferation, small arms, biodiversity and an array of other topics. In each of these areas international negotiations have either failed to make breakthroughs or have had only limited success.
The issue seems to be not why Copenhagen and subsequent climate negotiations have produced so little but, rather, why international negotiations in general are increasingly stalling in the face of growing differences among national interests, strident voices of leading and new emerging powers, and the sheer complexity involved in coming to agreement on issues that transcend national boundaries. Reflecting on these concerns, it seemed to us that the fundamental question was: why is a state of “gridlock” increasingly characteristic of international negotiations and organizations?
This book grapples with the causes and consequences of gridlock across leading sectors of international concern: security, the economy, and the environment. It develops a theory of gridlock and then explores it across these sectors. Having done this, the book ends by examining worrying scenarios of continued gridlock as well as pathways beyond it. The latter involve new kinds of political movements, institutional strategies of adaptation and more ambitious programs of the reform of global governance. But the way ahead is not clear and gridlock may yet remain the most pervasive feature of the global order.
Why does this matter? It matters because some of the most pressing global issues we face, from nuclear proliferation to global economic imbalances, and the degraded nature of our planet, will not be resolved unless new ways are uncovered for addressing them effectively and in such a manner that is representative of the diverse stakeholders they affect. As things stand, the global order is drifting into highly uncertain territory which, in sector after sector, may well involve cataclysmic moments which become the cause of a wider crisis affecting the life chances and life expectancies of people across the world. These are not worries for some remote future; they are concerns for the here and now. They imply some fundamental questions: what explains the development of gridlock in our international and transnational organizations and institutions, and how can these more effectively and legitimately address the global bads that threaten us, as well as the global goods we need for the development of our political and social lives?
This book has benefited enormously from the conversations the authors have had with each other in a diversity of places over the last two years. These have defined the theoretical framework we develop in this volume and how we apply it to the major sectoral issues examined. For the authors, at least, it has been a hugely productive discussion. The discussion has been added to in multiple ways by Kyle McNally. He has worked with us throughout, providing outstanding research support, detailed editorial contributions and a fine sense of the issues as they developed throughout the text. His overall contribution has been immense and we are deeply indebted to him. His academic achievements will stand out among the best as time evolves.
We are grateful to Robert O. Keohane and Jessica Green for thoughtful comments on parts of the manuscript, as well as to Irene Spagna, Danielle Stein, Troy Nichols, and Brent Ramsey for providing helpful research assistance at different stages of the project. We would also like to thank Jennifer Jahn, Neil de Cort, and Breffni O'Connor from Polity Press for turning our manuscript into the volume now in your hands, as well as the extraordinary Ann Bone for editing the text with skill and insight. For all worries about the future of publishing, it is striking how high the level of skill and dedication is in producing books and distributing them across the world remains. We are deeply appreciative of these efforts.
Tom Hale
David Held
Kevin Young
Introduction
The director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) recently spoke proudly before a gathering of distinguished physicists to announce the discovery of a Higgs boson particle. This fundamental building block of our universe, the so-called “God particle,” had been theorized by physicists in the early 1960s, but it took them another 50 years to prove its existence. His comments were brief, but he took care to stress the following to his audience: “It is a global effort, it was a global effort, and it's a global success” (BBC 2012). Behind this triumph of science lie four decades of coordinated intellectual and engineering efforts made possible by international cooperation. Finding the Higgs Boson required the work of thousands of scientists from across the globe working in concert toward a common goal. More specifically, work on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which made this discovery possible, involved research work from 608 institutes and universities, carried out by individuals representing 113 different nationalities. The LHC cost approximately £3.5 billion, which was paid for mostly by member and observing countries (20 European, and 6 others, respectively), with continuing research funded by those participating physicists and their organizations. The overhead costs for CERN, an intergovernmental organization founded in 1954, are proportionally distributed among the member countries according to their level of GDP considered in three-year cycles. This complex system of international collaboration has arguably produced one of the most profound discoveries that science can claim to date. Moreover, and simply put, it has been made possible by mechanisms of effective global collaboration.
This kind of success, in which countries work together to achieve a common goal through international institutions, is increasingly rare. The Higgs Boson discovery represents an exception to the rule of growing failure in global governance. Across a range of pressing global issues, countries have proven unable to cooperate effectively on issues of pressing global concern: the acute economic disparities across the globe, growing economic imbalances within and across countries, the lack of effective environmental governance in a world increasingly vulnerable to climate change, the proliferation of nuclear arms and the basic insecurities that persists from violent conflicts, to name just a few. To be sure, effective international cooperation has never been easy, but in recent years the problem seems to have grown worse, making the CERN success all the more remarkable. Why is this so?
This book seeks to answer that question – why and how current efforts to address the most pressing issues of our time seem to have stalled. The Earth has become a “smaller” place over the past century, as our individual and national fates are increasingly intertwined. Our world is now highly enmeshed as trade, finance, communication, pollutants, violence, and many other factors flow across borders and lock the well-being of countries and individuals into common patterns. This has created a system of structural global vulnerability; our actions directly affect the lives of others in distant corners of the world, and vice versa.
Collectively, the world community has sought to establish and maintain institutions that govern its common affairs. These take many forms, but by far the most important have been formal international agreements through which countries bind themselves, under international law, to negotiated commitments. These agreements are often supported by interstate organizations like the United Nations or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which states create to manage issues or implement policies. Such organizations have mushroomed over the twentieth century. In 1909, 37 intergovernmental organizations existed; in 2011, the number of organizations and their various components had grown to 7,608 (UIA 2011).
Many of these institutions, like CERN, work quite well. Entities like the Universal Postal Union, the International Civil Aviation Organization, and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) provide extensions of public goods offered by individual states, producing services that no party alone could attain on its own (Burnheim 1986: 222). Much of the day-to-day work of the UN specialized agencies and the technical or adjudicative functions of the World Trade Organization (WTO), IMF, and World Bank are similarly effective. By reducing the costs of complex coordination problems they create global public goods that are mutually beneficial for all participants.
Yet other international organizations and negotiations are wrought with seemingly intractable disagreements: multilateral negotiations in the WTO and the UN Security Council, for example. Preoccupied with questions of war and peace, rule-making and resource allocation, these bodies have always been highly politicized and confrontational. The starting premise of this book is that these perennial difficulties have taken on a new character. In our increasingly interconnected world, global problems, from climate change to financial market crises, call for increased collective and cooperative action, but multilateralism's ability to achieve this has eroded relative to the challenges it faces. Indeed, the massive growth in postwar institutions has begun to slow. Between 1990 and 2000, countries registered 406 new multilateral treaties with the UN Secretary General, as well as 12,566 bilateral ones. In the following decade, they submitted only 262 and 9,484 respectively.
This book focuses on the growing gap between our need for global solutions and the flagging ability of multilateral institutions to meet that need. This represents a breakdown of global cooperation that we call gridlock. As used in this book, the term refers to a specific set of conditions and mechanisms that impede global cooperation in the present day. The rise of new powers representing a more diverse array of interests makes intergovernmental agreement more difficult. The problems themselves have also grown harder as global policy issues penetrate ever more deeply into core domestic concerns. Existing institutions, created for a different world, have locked in dysfunctional decision-making procedures, while the proliferation of different organizations renders the institutional architecture ever more fragmented. Together these processes have blocked global cooperation even as we need it more.
We do not agree that gridlock is a complete explanation for all failures in global governance. Nor do we systematically test the basket of factors we term “gridlock” against alternative explanations. Instead, the book seeks to provide an innovative and systematic interpretation of the present challenges facing the multilateral system.
Three characteristics define our argument. First, we show how the multiple factors and pathways mentioned above combine to block cooperation. The drivers are many, but their outcome is the same: a “governance gap” in which crucial needs go unmet. Second, these common blockages can be observed across nearly all areas of global governance, not just within a single issue. In other words, gridlock is a general condition of the multilateral system. Third, the mechanisms we consider are historically contingent, specific to global governance today. Indeed, many are in part products of previous, successful efforts to cooperate across borders. In this sense, they can be thought of as “second order” cooperation problems. Over the postwar period, growing institutionalization has fed interdependence, and greater interdependence has in turn demanded more institutionalization. Through this cycle of self-reinforcing interdependence, multilateral institutions have helped create conditions that, ironically, now impede their effectiveness.
The Postwar Legacy
This is a book about the current state of a political system that traces its origins to the end of World War II. Our analysis therefore focuses on the challenges of the present and the near future with an analytic eye to the past. While the book explores international institutional developments prior to World War II, it is this war that provides the crucial backdrop to the story that is set out here. World War II was a calamitous moment not just in European history, but across the world. It reached across continents to create an axis of conflict that pitted countries against each other in a catastrophic war. The death and destruction was of a scale nearly impossible to comprehend, leaving Europe devastated and much of East Asia traumatized. The rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe created in its wake a horrific new form of industrial killing focused on Jews, political dissidents, and many minority groups. The Japanese invasions of China and Southeast Asia were marked by a trail of brutality, as was the march of Stalin's armies through the “bloodlands” between Moscow and Berlin (T. Snyder 2010). The other Allied forces also pushed the boundaries of violence; not only, for instance, in the fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, but also in the first use of nuclear weapons, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In these cities men and women were going to work, children were playing, and “more human beings died at once than anyone thought possible” (Kingsolver 2001). World War II brought humanity to the edge of the abyss, yet not for the first time in twentieth-century history.
Politicians who gathered from 45 countries in San Francisco in 1945 were faced with the choice of either allowing the world to drift in the aftermath of the shock of the 1939–45 war, or to begin a process of rebuilding the foundations of their own societies and the international community. Having seen into the abyss, these individuals might have been tempted simply to defend the positions of their own countries and close the shutters on the rest of the world, as, indeed, many had in the 1930s. Yet they understood that doing so would simply reproduce the pattern of economic and political disaster that had spanned the first half of the twentieth century. Accordingly, they set about creating a world order that would be robust enough to sustain peace and economic prosperity. At the center of this vision was the drafting of the Charter of the United Nations which, in its preamble, emphasized that it could no longer be states alone that ordered the world for their own interests. Rather, it must be “We the peoples” who should be bound together in the United Nations.
The UN Charter affirmed the importance of universal principles, human rights, and the rule of law as the cornerstones of the new international order. Its drafters placed the irreducible moral worth of each and every human being at the center of their thinking, along with the principles of equal respect, equal concern and the priority of the vital needs of all people. In so doing, they rejected the view that human well-being can be defined by geographical or cultural location, that national or ethnic boundaries should determine the limits of rights or responsibilities for the satisfaction of basic individual needs, and that belonging to a given community must limit and determine the freedom of individuals. Accordingly, it was envisaged that the United Nations should foster tolerance across the world, develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination, create unity in strength to maintain international peace and security, establish principles and the institution of methods that would prevent the use of armed force save in the common interest, and would build international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples (UN 1945). Such an expansive and radical idealism could only have been forged in a cataclysm on the scale of World War II.
It is, of course, commonplace to criticize the UN for the many ways it and the nations that created it have fallen short of these ideals. Subsequent chapters will discuss these at some length. Yet it would be utterly mistaken to underestimate the successes wrought by the UN system overall and the geopolitical stability that followed its foundation. The decades that followed World War II were marked by peace between the great powers, although there were many proxy wars fought out in the global South. This relative stability created the conditions for what now can be recognized as the almost unprecedented period of prosperity that characterized the 1950s onward. The UN is central to this story, although it is by no means the only important institutional innovation of the postwar settlement. A year prior to the founding of the UN, the Bretton Woods organizations were established in an effort to foster economic cooperation and a prosperous global economy: the IMF and the World Bank (previously the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development). The former focused on exchange rate stability and balance of payments assistance, while the latter on long-term economic development. A sister institution, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which would later develop into the WTO, committed countries to open their borders to foreign trade.1 These institutions and many more specialized ones lay at the heart of postwar economic globalization. While the economic record of the postwar years varies by country, many experienced significant economic growth and living standards rose rapidly across many parts of the world. It was not just the West that was redefined by these developments; a global division of labor emerged which linked economic flows across large swathes of the world. In the wake of these changes, the world began to shift – slowly at first, but later more rapidly – from a bipolar toward a multipolar structure. By the late 1980s a variety of East Asian countries were beginning to grow at an unprecedented speed, and by the late 1990s countries such as China, India, and Brazil had gained significant economic momentum, a process that continues to this day.
The geopolitical stability engendered throughout the postwar years was a precondition for economic globalization, which subsequently transformed the way business and commerce were organized. Markets that were first and foremost domestic networks increasingly took on global dimensions. National economies became heavily enmeshed in the global system of production and exchange. Multinational corporations, many of which came to enjoy turnovers that dwarfed the GDP of even medium-sized nations, expanded across the globe. Financial markets exploded into a world of 24-hour trading, aided by competition between states eager to attract increasingly mobile capital flows. Economic globalization, with all its benefits and costs, winners and losers, came to embrace all regions and continents, and global interdependence deepened to a hitherto unknown degree.
Meanwhile, international cooperation proceeded at an impressive pace. Whereas once participation in the multilateral order was sporadic and tenuous, it became both more entrenched and regularized. The most obvious illustration of this is the rapid emergence of diverse multilateral organizations and transnational agencies. New forms of multilateral and global politics became established, involving states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), and a wide variety of pressure groups. The numbers of active IGOs and INGOs increased exponentially (UIA 2012). There was substantial growth in the number of international treaties in force, as well as the number of international regimes, formal and informal, altering the political and legal context in which states operated (Held et al. 1999: chs 1–2; Held and McGrew 2007: ch. 7). To this dense web of mechanisms of coordination and collaboration can be added the routine meetings and activities of the key international policy-making fora, including not only the UN and Bretton Woods organizations, but also the G-groups (the G5, G7, G20, etc.). Whereas in the middle of the nineteenth century there were just one or two interstate conferences or congresses per annum, the numbers increased into the many thousands each year (UIA 2012). Accordingly, states became enmeshed in an array of global governance systems and arrangements.
At the same time, new kinds of institutional arrangements have emerged alongside formal intergovernmental bodies (Hale and Held 2011). Networks of ostensibly “domestic” government officials now link with their peers across borders (Keohane and Nye 1971; Slaughter 2004b). Different kinds of actors, public and private, form partnerships with each other to tackle issues of mutual concern. And purely private actors have created an array of their own governance institutions, ranging from voluntary regulations to private arbitral tribunals (Büthe 2010). In some ways these new institutions show the adaptability and flexibility of global governance. But they also, we argue below, face significant limitations.
As forums for collaboration and engagement multiplied, they facilitated direct links between world powers, regardless of how explosive the rhetoric between them sometimes became, and opened the door for peripheral states to participate in the global order. Significantly, however, these institutions also embedded in their infrastructures and modus operandi the privileged positions of the 1945 victors. This was, arguably, a compromise needed to give incentives for great powers to participate in the new multilateral order.
Crucially, the success of global cooperation allowed for even greater economic and political transformations. Indeed, once the world started down this path, a self-reinforcing dynamic was created in which interdependence became increasingly institutionalized via interstate cooperation, and institutionalized cooperation created conditions under which globalization could deepen and accelerate, increasing interdependence. At the economic level, the spread of global markets and rapidly expanding economic opportunities created the basis for new powers to enter the world economy. The hierarchical centralized states of the Soviet Union and of Central and Eastern Europe, which could not adapt quickly enough to economic globalization, found themselves outmaneuvered by new patterns of invention, innovation, and investment. When the Cold War ended it was not only because of political pressure and the arms race, but also because of the growing stagnation of the Soviet economy and its satellite states. Economic globalization accelerated the conditions for Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and later China and other parts of Asia to become major players in the global economy. And as they have done so, the level of interdependence linking all of us together has deepened profoundly.
These transformations have now come to alter the ability of states to cooperate multilaterally. That is, economic and political shifts in large part attributable to the multilateral order are now among the factors grinding that system into gridlock. We term these second-order cooperation problems. As new countries emerged to become economic forces in the global economy they sought new forms of political influence and voice. Over time the capacity of the US and Europe to secure or impose international agreements in areas such as trade or security became more difficult. Emerging countries not only wanted a stake in agenda setting and negotiations, they also had the power to get it. Thus, the ground was set for new demands for participation in global institutions and growing expectations of engagement. In many ways, the architects of the UN system could not have known how successful their institutional innovations would become.
However, despite the increase in international and transnational collaboration, the vested interests of the postwar victors remain firmly in place in the core institutional infrastructures of the multilateral order, such as the UN and the Bretton Woods organizations. Whereas once the entrenchment of these interests was key to their participation in building the postwar multilateral order, this dynamic became an obstacle to further multilateral developments as the world became more interconnected. Five states have retained effective control over the UN Security Council (a council comprised of ten nonpermanent members replaced every two years and five permanent members), yet the exclusive privileges of the permanent members (the P-5) are increasingly at odds with the changes in global power structures. All attempts to reform the position of permanent members have failed. In the case of the World Bank, convention dictates that the president is always from the United States, and even when there has been reform, the voting shares of the United States ensures that it retains veto power on all decisions – a privilege also enjoyed by the United States in the IMF.
At the same time, harder global problems have emerged that reflect the deeper level of interdependence made possible by previous cooperation. These problems involve the nature and form of the rule book of the global economy (global financial architecture, trade, investment and competition rules, intellectual property rights, and labor and migration rules), the sustainability of the planet (climate change, biodiversity and ecosystem losses, deforestation and water deficits) and the quality of life chances (global infectious diseases, conflict prevention, combating terrorism, and the fight against poverty) (see Rischard 2002). In other words, they are not merely the distant concerns of diplomats, but rather the basic dilemmas all societies face, penetrating deep into the daily lives of citizens everywhere. And as these new “intermestic” problems arise and new institutions are formed to deal with them (often only partially), the global institutional landscape has grown more crowded and fragmented. Perversely, this ad hoc proliferation of institutions has in some ways reduced our collective capacity to solve new problems as they emerge. Together, these mechanisms have led us to the present gridlock, and are likely to continue into the future.
Overview
The notion of gridlock is explored and more fully developed in chapter 1, which sets out the theoretical foundation for the story that follows. It begins by developing the concept of self-reinforcing interdependence sketched above, and identifies the key milestones in its institutional history. We argue that the previous successes of international cooperation, by facilitating peace and fostering economic linkages, have deepened interdependence to the point where international cooperation is now more difficult. Within this context, we identify four “roads to gridlock” that make up our core argument: growing multipolarity, harder problems, institutional inertia, and fragmentation. These are distinct but interrelated pathways to the present state in which demand for international cooperation exceeds the ability of the multilateral order to supply it.
The chapters that follow explore the onset of gridlock in three sectors of global governance: security, economy, and the environment. We conceive of governance problems as interrelated and overlapping across these different sectors. Indeed, the dynamic of self-reinforcing interdependence we identify in chapter 1 rests on this connection, as peace has facilitated economic linkages and growth, which have in turn created a greater need to manage our global commons. However, we examine each sector in a different chapter for analytic clarity. In each, we begin with the historical context for the institutionalization of global governance. Given the broad range of topics included, these histories are by no means exhaustive, but rather set out the background that is necessary to understand the emergence of gridlock. Having done this, each chapter then examines the causes and dynamics of gridlock that currently pervade existing institutional structures, decision-making, and governance outcomes. Our goal is not to prove, in a social scientific sense, that all the gridlock pathways are the only drivers of governance outcomes in each issue area. Rather, we argue that this basket of factors is responsible for many of the governance failures we see today, and that it is not possible to understand outcomes in each issue area without appreciating the role that these broad, general trends play.
Chapter 2 explores gridlock in the governance of global security. It evaluates the development of sovereignty, international law, human rights, and the general principles of the postwar order. Significantly, these developments gradually changed the meaning of security in the multilateral system. In broad terms the shift from “state security” to “human security” – an incomplete and contested trend – has rendered security issues increasingly interdependent and complex. At the same time, the chapter shows how the development of the UN and the entrenchment of the privileged positions of the 1945 victors have seriously handicapped solutions to traditional issues such as nuclear proliferation and arms control. It also shows how the emergence of harder, transborder problems from terrorism to failed states to piracy are unlikely to be adequately tackled within existing power structures and institutional arrangements. The intergovernmental nature of most security institutions comes into sharp tension with the intermestic issues they now face.
The global economy is taken up in chapter 3. The chapter begins by examining the evolution of postwar global economic governance, tracing the development of multilateral institutions governing international trade and finance. The story of postwar global economic governance is the story of self-reinforcing interdependence par excellence. Existing institutions solve some problems they were initially designed to address, but also fail to address problems which have emerged from the very global economic system they have enabled. Institutional fragmentation in global economic governance is rife; institutional inertia makes many international organizations slow to change even in the face of dramatic governance failures; harder problems have emerged which did not exist during earlier times, and yet the governance capacity to face these problems is weak and often highly ad hoc. Demand has far outstripped supply.
Chapter 4 focuses on efforts to manage our global environment. Since the 1970s scientists have recognized the cross-border and even global reach of environmental threats like air and water pollution, deforestation, species loss, and, perhaps most dangerous of all, human-made climate change. Bluntly put, it will not be possible to maintain our current standard of living, much less provide a better life for the billions who live in deprivation, without better ways to manage these global commons. The chapter shows how intergovernmental efforts to control environmental degradation have been weakened by the gridlock mechanisms. Environmental problems tend to be hard problems, penetrating deep into states to implicate the basic behavior of individuals and companies. They are even more characterized by multipolarity than other issues – China's GDP is half that of the US, but it emits more greenhouse gasses; Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico each have more biodiversity than the US or Europe – and rich and poor countries tend to disagree over how to prioritize economic growth and environmental protection. Moreover, environmental governance has grown extraordinarily fragmented – there are now hundreds of environmental treaties, but no global regulatory body – hampering effective global policy.
Finally, we conclude in chapter 5 by exploring the overlapping nature of these developments. We argue that the mechanisms of gridlock overlap and affect one another across governance sectors, and that these sectors must be considered in relation to one another. The pathways to gridlock in each respective area of global governance vary, but there is a common result for each: gridlock is likely to continue to be pervasive. Indeed, the pathways to gridlock are likely to deepen in the immediate future. We recognize, however, that the state of gridlock which currently besets the multilateral order should not be conceived of fatalistically or as some inevitable set of processes. The potential exists to transcend this current impasse, and our contribution aims to illuminate the paths that have led us to where we are today, and also the roads and choices that may lie ahead. That said, the conclusion contains no list of (silver) bullet points through which policy-makers could, tomorrow, undo gridlock. Rather, the goal is to identify existing areas of institutional innovation and sources of political agency from which more effective global governance may spring.
Before proceeding it is important to clarify the status of our argument and its relation to existing work. Gridlock is a systemic, historically contingent, and compound argument. It runs against the fashion in both popular and academic writing to reduce social theories to a single soundbite, hypothesis, or factor. The urgency and nature of the current multilateral gridlock justify this departure. From a policy perspective, it is easy to see why. Soundbites make for good rhetoric, but rarely capture the nuance needed to make sense of global politics. At the same time, many analyses of global politics are written in issue “silos” that miss trends across issues or overlaps between them. Global public policy problems like climate change, nuclear proliferation, and global financial crises do not differentiate between discrete areas of academic enquiry.
Political scientists, in turn, tend to pursue general explanations for social phenomena across different times and places. The goal of social science is, after all, to explain the world through patterns and regularities, not just to treat history as “one damn thing after another.” As we discuss in chapter 1, this project has been quite successful with respect to international cooperation. Over the last decades the academic literature has identified a wide range of conditions under which international cooperation is more or less likely, as well as the chains of cause and effect that lead to a certain outcome. We draw heavily on these theories in this book. However, we do not seek to explore the conditions that impede multilateral cooperation generally, but rather the conditions currently impeding multilateral cooperation. Our explanation therefore highlights a range of mechanisms especially connected to the here and now and to the recent past.2 Such an approach is grounded in the importance of history – not simply because current problems demand a context in order to be understood, but also for more fundamental reasons. The fact that current gridlock is, as we argue throughout the book, the result, in part, of the existing institutions means that an adequate understanding of the problem is necessarily contextual and historically produced, rather than abstract and reducible to properties which might exist across time and place. In other words, we seek to apply the insights of political science to a specific, real-world problem, not to revamp our abstract, theoretical understanding of international cooperation.
The book, in overview, sits between two subgenres in the broader field of “world affairs” writing. The first may be described as the “global governance” literature, books that seek to explicate global challenges and propose solutions for them. This genre tends to tilt toward the more academic end of the spectrum. Examples include Jean-François Rischard's High Noon: Twenty Global Problems, Twenty Years to Solve Them (2002) or Thomas Weiss's What's Wrong with the United Nations and How to Fix It (2009). Some edited collections discuss various dilemmas of global governance, for example, Globalization in Crisis, edited by Barry Gill (2011).
The second genre is the much larger field of books that discuss global change, especially why and how the growing wealth and power of various non-Western countries will remake world order (or not). Prominent examples include Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World (2008a), Parag Khanna's How to Run the World (2011) and The Second World (2008), Gideon Rachman's Zero-Sum World: Power and Politics after the Crash (2010), or Ian Bremmer's Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World (2012). Each of these books warns of the dire consequences a dearth of global leadership, or a contest for global leadership, will entail.
Beyond these broad trends, several books have explicitly confronted the failures of multilateralism in particular issue areas, often making broader points about international cooperation as well. Prominent examples include Amrita Narlikar's Deadlock in Multilateral Negotiations (2010), David Victor's Global Warming Gridlock (2011a), and David Humphreys' Logjam: Deforestation and the Crisis of Global Governance (2006). As just the titles of these works make clear, the failures of global governance warrant the type of systemic explanation we offer here.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we hope our arguments reach not just those who write books about global problems, but the people who confront them. It is crucial to acknowledge the debt our argument owes to the diplomats, activists, businesses, social movements, and other “practitioners” who work to provide the global public goods we so sorely need. These individuals are often all too aware of the challenges we discuss. Perhaps we can do no better than quote a Swedish diplomat reflecting on the challenges of organizing a global environmental organization in 1972:
The world is divided into sovereign states that are not willing to give up their formal freedom of action. It is one of the ironies of history that the principle of national sovereignty … received its triumphal confirmation in the Charter of the United Nations at a time when the introduction of atomic weapons, the development of communications, rapid industrialization, and the awakening consciousness of environmental risks, made it unmistakably clear that all of humanity is interdependent and that the old concept of sovereignty is inadequate … Without strong new initiatives from their [specialized agencies'] respective principals they cannot be expected to achieve the effective interdisciplinary co-ordination of environmental endeavours that is now needed. (Quoted in Rowland 1973: 33–4)
Notes
1 As we outline in chapter 3, an International Trade Organization was proposed alongside the Bretton Woods organizations, but countries proved unwilling in the 1940s to commit themselves to hard rules on tariff reductions.
2 The mechanisms we posit are not new, but the combination of them, and their common roots in the trajectory of the postwar multilateral project, have not been recognized by scholars or policy-makers. We do not go as far as some scholars in the “historical institutionalist” field (e.g. Greif 2006), who question the utility of any general social scientific theory of institutions. We do, however, contend that it is intellectually productive for political scientists to apply such theories to specific historical moments.
1
Gridlock
Ambrogio Lorenzetti learned the virtue of effective governance by being born in Siena, in what is now the center of Italy, in 1290. His city had won its independence from the Church in 1167, and by 1169 had written a constitution that invested decision-making power in a council held accountable, under law, to a broadening proportion of the population. This government kept the peace, enforced the law, and invested in beneficent public works. Prosperity and culture followed. At a time when most of Europe was trapped in feudal misery, the Sienese – and their counterparts in Florence, Venice, and the other centers of what would become the Renaissance – flourished.
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
