While globalization has challenged and restricted democracy within the state, it has also changed the nature of global politics in ways that have opened up democratic possibilities. In particular, the development of global forms of governance and networks of transnational civil society have changed global politics to such an extent that the global agenda now routinely includes moral and political debates about democracy. This is a remarkable turn of events. In the 1960s, the International Relations scholar Martin Wight (1966: 26) claimed that the international realm is “the realm of recurrence and repetition” where ethical claims are limited. This argument was based on a sharp distinction between the domestic realm of “normal” politics within nation-states where ethical reflection is legitimate, and the international realm of anarchy where state survival overrides ethical purposes. As Wight explains (1966: 33):
Political theory and law are maps of experience or systems of action within the realm of normal relationships and calculable results. They are the theory of the good life. International theory is the theory of survival. What for political theory is the extreme case (as revolution, or civil war) is for international theory the regular case.
Today, it would be a brave observer to claim that the international realm is only a realm of survival. In the fifty years since Wight made this claim, the international realm has clearly become more interdependent, globalized and institutionalized. Furthermore, the geopolitical tensions that underpinned the Cold War have been moderated by various forms of global dialogue that are subject to the moral and political interventions of IGOs, NGOs, and other transnational actors. Generally speaking, people are more aware of a range of cross-border social, economic and ecological problems that endanger present and future generations. In recent decades, complex forms of international cooperation and a variety of transnational social movements have been created to address these problems.
But serious questions remain as to whether the international realm is sufficiently analogous to the domestic realm to permit discussions of the “good life” or arguments for democracy at the global level. Indeed, in order to support the idea that international relations is a realm where ethical projects can be realized, it is necessary to consider how contemporary global governance shapes moral and political possibilities beyond states. In this chapter, global governance encompasses official forms of cooperation and organization established by states and the various non-state influences such as private regulation and transnational civil society, which help to establish rules that govern specific aspects of global political practice. The term suggests that the activities of states, IGOs and transnational actors are heavily intertwined in practice. As such, this chapter first examines the history of IGOs and the development of contemporary global governance. Second, it identifies the purposes and problems of contemporary global governance, including important concerns about the legitimacy of global rules and decision-making processes. The third section examines the nature of transnational civil society and the possibilities of harnessing it to democratize global institutions. Finally, the chapter examines how the relationship between democracy and global governance has become an increasingly important issue for international theorists in a rapidly expanding literature of global democratic theory.
In order to map global governance and its implications for democracy, it is first necessary to examine the meaning of the term “global governance.” In a generic sense, global governance refers to cooperative problem solving and rule making arrangements for managing global processes. In a more specific sense, global governance commonly designates the system of institutionalized cooperation that emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War with the formation of the UN and a host of sector and issue-specific institutions ranging from the Bretton Woods organizations to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Here, global governance refers to an array of disaggregated institutions established by states as well as the activity of individuals operating through NGOs, social movements, and private business associations. Governance thus suggests the forms of authority, cooperation or management – be they public or private and formal or informal – that lead to the achievement of collective goals. According to The Commission on Global Governance (1995: 2–3):
Governance is the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. It is a continuing process through which conflicting or diverse interests may be accommodated and co-operative action may be taken. It includes formal institutions and regimes empowered to enforce compliance, as well as informal arrangements that people and institutions either have agreed to or perceive to be in their interest.
While governance involves the exercise of authority, global governance does not mean global or world government. Government generally refers to authoritative political institutions of a territorial community. Governance, however, is a broader, more encompassing phenomenon that refers to the development of common rules of cooperation underpinned by coercive force or voluntary compliance. That is, global governance refers to a variety of decision-making structures at the global level that may involve governments, but together do not amount to a centralized global government. Broadly speaking, global governance attempts to address problems that no individual state can address in isolation as well as enable productive interconnections across territorial borders, especially those needed to sustain global capitalism.
It is therefore important to recognize the role played by international treaties, IGOs and transnational actors in the architecture of global governance. International treaties are official agreements by states concerning a specific issue that are not supported by a formal organization presiding over the agreement. IGOs, in contrast, are formally established by states as legal bodies for making and enforcing cooperation. IGOs can be regional or global in scope and can regulate an entire sector (e.g. global trade), one specific issue (e.g. climate change), or sometimes multiple related issues (e.g. the UN Economic and Social Council). These organizations exist to serve state goals and can normally only make decisions with the consent of member governments. However, sometimes IGOs can acquire their own agency and hence develop interests and goals of their own. IGOs contrast with international treaties because international cooperation often outgrows international treaties administered by member states and requires an IGO with its own independent structure. This may be due to the complexity of the issue-area or the need for an autonomous actor to administer the treaty system, lead negotiations, and advance cooperation in the collective interest. A key example is the transformation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) regime into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, which supplemented the treaties with a secretariat, a dispute resolution system, a court to hear appeals, and a body to supervise national trade policies. The number of IGOs has risen dramatically since 1945 and developed forms of governance for a range of issues from international security and trade to transport and fisheries. Alongside these treaties and IGOs, global governance also involves transnational actors that operate across the territorial borders of nation-states, including NGOs, social movements, corporations, and organized business interests. As explained later in the chapter, transnational actors play a crucial role in influencing the development of the rules, ideas and policies that frame collective goals concerning the regulation of global processes.
Against this background, it is clear that global governance is a historical product of political action rather than a natural or inevitable feature of global politics. The history of interstate relations demonstrates the importance of key political actors such as great powers in creating cooperative institutions as well as shaping their continually evolving objectives. Well before the formation of the UN and Bretton Woods organizations there were significant forms of international agreement between states directed at common goals. Indeed, there are three overlapping phases where particular dynamics of governance became apparent. The first phase is evident from the 1600s in the form of international coexistence underpinned by the mutual recognition of sovereignty. Signs of a common society of states can be found in post-feudal Europe where emerging states did not merely interact with each other based on strategic considerations, but also at the level of mutual recognition, agreement and cooperation (Bull 1995 [1977]). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European states agreed that values of sovereignty and international peace should be jointly pursued so as to enable mutual coexistence. In order to maintain this coexistence, these states needed to recognize each other as members of a society of states bound by certain rules; not as isolated units in a system of states where war is ubiquitous, or as constituent parts of an empire where sovereignty is subjugated. The mutual recognition of sovereignty among European states eventually led to institutionalized practices such as diplomacy and international law that maintained order in European international society and continue to form the bedrock of international relations.
A second phase in the history of global governance is evident from the late 1860s in the form of multilateral cooperation. While the European society of states was a loosely arranged form of institutionalization, there were efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to establish more formal institutions directed at international cooperation rather than mere coexistence. In the late nineteenth century, cross-border governance tended to focus on the low politics of technical cooperation in response to new technologies and industries, leading to the development of the International Telegraph Union in 1865 and the European Rail Union in 1890. In the first half of the twentieth century, however, there were grander efforts and dismal failures to develop forms of global governance to assist in the high politics of state security and the prevention of war. Reflecting the growing influence of liberal ideas in global politics, the League of Nations was created after the First World War to manage the growing military problems of the 1920s and 30s, but ultimately failed to create a universal organization with enough power to pacify international relations or address the socio-economic malaise of the Great Depression that was generating so much domestic and international instability. The ensuing “Twenty Years Crisis” culminated in the horrors of Second World War (Carr 1946). This experience of conflict and human suffering provided a strong motivation to undertake renewed efforts to promote multilateral cooperation after 1945. Multilateralism entailed common rules and reciprocal cooperation between multiple states and culminated in the framework of post-war international institutions which had their roots in the planning for a new political and economic order that took place in the closing stages of the Second World War and led to the founding of the UN and the IMF, World Bank and (eventually) the GATT at Bretton Woods.
We can speak of international cooperation in this sense largely because of the influence of liberal ideas in global politics evident in the multilateral development of the UN and Bretton Woods institutions after the Second World War. Indeed, the UN is evidence of a widespread commitment to moderating war and promoting social and humanitarian ends more generally, and is evidence of a shift from interstate coexistence toward interstate collaboration with regards to a range of mutually valued goals. The Great Depression and Second World War provided a strong motivation to promote multilateral cooperation after 1945 in the form of IGOs set up by states. While the UN had a strong focus on preventing war in its charter and via the formation of a United Nations Security Council, its mandate also focused upon liberal commitments to promoting human rights, development and humanitarian ends (Jolly et al. 2005). These goals were pursued by a range of specialized agencies and organs on a grander scale than the League of Nations. Indeed, the UN has been described as “the most ambitious experiment to date in multilateral management of world society” (Reus-Smit 1998: 3). Furthermore, the establishment of economic institutions established at Bretton Woods have also been central to liberal efforts to support post-war international trade and global capitalism. These developments reflect a profound historical shift from interstate coexistence toward ambitious international collaboration on a range of collective goals in global politics.
During the Cold War, global forms of governance faced considerable uncertainty. Many of the UN’s core goals were not effectively pursued due to the paralysing effects of superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, particularly in the Security Council. In the 1950s and 1960s, Cold War divisions also meant the Bretton Woods organizations remained limited in scope to the Western Bloc of liberal democratic countries. Furthermore, the process of decolonization that began in this period dramatically transformed international politics and the membership of the UN by creating a host of new and economically underdeveloped nation-states. During the 1950s and 1960s, there were also new developments in regional governance such as the European Economic Community, which became the European Union (EU) in 1993. Another notable feature of this period was dissolution of the original mandate of the Bretton Woods system. In 1971, the US government under President Nixon announced that it was suspending the convertibility of the dollar to gold because of economic stagnation and high inflation in the US. This abandonment of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates precipitated a shift to a neo-liberal policy framework in the IMF and World Bank that carved out new roles in the global economy centred on structural adjustment, economic development, and poverty alleviation projects in developing countries (Cerny 1997: 259). While this system of multilateralism played a key role in enabling global interdependence, it was beset by an ever changing array of challenges.
A third phase is evident from the 1970s in the form of increasing transnational coordination which involves both multilateral cooperation and the involvement of various transnational actors and networks in global policy-making. Global cooperation clearly lies in inter-state collaboration and the growing number of IGOs creating frameworks of international law that establish principles for legitimate political action. Indeed, the number of IGOs has risen dramatically since 1945 to reach over 2000 today, reflecting an unprecedented demand for global governance institutions (Hale and Held 2011: 5). However, while sovereignty and multilateralism still influence the contours of global governance, in many respects multilateralism has been so successful in enabling interdependence and globalization among a growing number of states that this system has become overloaded and gridlocked in attempting to create mutually binding responses to a range of economic, security and ecological issues (Hale and Held 2012; Hale, Held, and Young 2013). Consequently, the greater awareness of economic interdependence between the world’s major economies and concerns about the efficacy of existing forms of multilateralism in the 1970s led to the formation of new forms of governance, such as the informal Group of 7 (G7) to coordinate economic policies of the world’s wealthy industrial states in North Asia, North America and Europe. The G7 expanded to the G20 leaders forum in 2008. Likewise, informal networks of states with similar interests such as the more recent BRICS arrangement comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa is a coalition of states that attempt to foster cooperation between smaller groups of member states.
Alongside these developments, advances in communications technology have led to the development of forms of global governance which include non-official agents such as NGOs, TNCs, think tanks, and business groups, as well as social movements that operate within a broader transnational public sphere or civil society (Hale and Held 2012). The inclusion of these transnational actors in global governance blurs the lines between official state or IGO authorization and transnational activism (A. Slaughter 2004; Stone 2008; Hale and Held 2011, 2012). In recent decades, we have seen the rise of transnational policy networks where
a plethora of institutions and networks negotiate within and between international agreements and private regimes have emerged as pragmatic responses in the absence of formal global governance … This is a double devolution; first, beyond the nation-state to global and regional domains; and second, a delegation of authority to private networks and nonstate actors. (Stone 2008: 24)
In this context, a variety of transnational networks are clearly operating as forms of global governance by seeking to influence the policies of existing IGOs or indeed create novel forms of transnational rule setting and policy-making. New forms of transnational governance also include public and private arbitration bodies, multistakeholder initiatives, voluntary regulation systems and transnational financial mechanisms (Hale and Held 2011). Such arrangements include innovations such as the development of public–private partnerships such as The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in 2002, which has outlaid more than 22 billion dollars since its establishment to tackle these diseases; and voluntary initiatives like Fair Trade and the Kimberley Process to track diamonds sourced from war zones.
In these forms of transnational governance, the state is not the primary actor involved in coordination and rule-setting, if it is involved at all. Thomas Hale and David Held (2011) have thoroughly mapped the wide array of transnational forms of governance which include public and private activity that utilize forms of arbitration, voluntary regulation and transnational financial mechanisms to influence the activity of governments, businesses and individuals. Private certification initiatives like the Rainforest Alliance, for example, are increasingly important forms of regulation that are changing political and consumer behaviour around the world. We can also see private forms of regulation in the various standard-setting agencies within global capital markets, such as the financial reporting standards contained in the International Accounting Standards Board and monetary policy issues covered by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (Hale and Held 2012: 170–3). These private forms of authority are frameworks that shape the rules that constitute global governance, despite not being constituted by states. The picture is complicated further when we recognize that the divide between public and private can be blurred by various forms of public–private partnership, not least in the area of international development where a host of agencies contribute (and sometimes compete) in policy-making and implementation in developing countries (Hale and Held 2011). The interaction and overlap of these official and non-official frameworks produces a complex network of political authority that reflects the variety of agents and impulses shaping contemporary global governance.
During this phase of increasing transnational coordination, global governance began to have significant impacts on economic debates, particularly with the dissemination of neo-liberal and free market policies of the “Washington Consensus” by the IMF and World Bank in the 1980s. This development had controversial impacts across the world and demonstrated the significance of thinks tanks and organizations representing transnational business interests, such as the Trilateral Commission and the World Economic Forum (Gill 1998; Harvey 2005). The influence of neo-liberal ideas was also evident in the transformation of the GATT regime into the more powerful WTO in 1995, as well as various forms of market surveillance and self-regulation evident in the rising profile of credit rating agencies such as Moody’s Investors Service. For over a decade economic negotiations concerning a new “Doha Round” of trade agreements in the WTO have been stymied by a lack of international support and serious disagreements between developed and developing countries about fundamental issues like agricultural protection. Moreover, the influence of neo-liberal ideas in shaping patterns of transnational coordination has continued despite the 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath (Gill 2012). The crisis demonstrated a failure of national banking regulation in the US and Europe and the slow and problematic nature of global forms of economic governance. There was also recognition that existing institutions such as the IMF were not only insufficiently resourced, but also did not give sufficient representation to emerging economies like the BRICS countries, especially given the rising significance of China. Consequently, the development of the G20 sought to balance representation and effectiveness by providing a forum for the leaders of the world’s economically significant states to include both emerging economies and established industrial countries to coordinate their economic policies and prevent global crises.
Global governance as both international cooperation and transnational coordination has continued to be profoundly influenced by geopolitical forces and events. For example, after the end of the Cold War, the UN also increased in prominence through Security Council resolutions that allowed military intervention in Iraq in 1990–1 and the rising importance of humanitarian and human rights discourse in response to the humanitarian atrocities of the post-Cold War period. During the 1990s, the UN – supported by member states and NGOs – expanded peacekeeping operations, responded to cases of humanitarian suffering, and sought to create new institutions such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. New humanitarian ideas like “human security” and the “responsibility to protect” emerged through UN dialogues in this period and sought to shift the emphasis from state security to the security of individual human beings (Jolly et al. 2005). Some nation-states championed humanitarian ideas by creating the “Human Security Network,” which grew out of a bilateral arrangement between Canada and Norway but expanded to include over a dozen countries from all regions of the world and some non-governmental organizations (Jolly et al. 2005: 33–4), indicating the ways in which multilateralism can intersect with transnational networks. Global cooperation was also significantly shaped by the 9/11 attacks and subsequent US-led “war on terror.” Confidence in global security governance was undermined when the US and its allies bypassed the UNSC and invaded Iraq in the face of widespread international opposition and significant public protests all over the world (Hale et al. 2013: 281).
The history of global governance demonstrates overlapping logics of coexistence, cooperation, and coordination as well as the growing complexity of international institutions the global level. Frameworks of global governance are now created by the official authority of states as well as by the political action of transnational actors that establish rules governing specific aspects of global politics. These contemporary forms of global governance operate at a distance from the democratic participation and oversight of citizens, which leads to charges that these institutions have “democratic deficits.” In this context, the accountability of these forms governance to people affected by the decisions emanating from these bodies is not straightforward or clear. The formal nature of multilateral IGOs may privilege government agencies involved in advancing national interests and limit transparency and responsiveness to the wider public (Steffek 2010). Conversely, the informal and voluntary nature of many transnational forms of governance may allow powerful and wealthy actors to avoid meaningful restraint in the short term. These forms of governance may be more responsive to market actors that are involved in these schemes than to any notion of the public good, and thereby be dependent on the oversight of NGOs and transnational activist networks for any form of accountability (Hale and Held 2011: 29). In this context, these forms of transnational governance and the related networks of policy-making may assist the coordination of economic and social activity in an era of globalization, but their democratic credentials are unclear at best.
Given this complex picture, how can we make sense of the purpose of global governance and related questions of power and legitimacy? It is difficult to discern any single and specific purpose given that global governance is constituted by rules, principles and institutions created by an array of actors which possess multiple – and often contradictory – political and normative purposes. Nevertheless, it is generally held that since the end of the Second World War, liberal principles have been particularly influential in developing multilateralism and shaping the main contours of global governance in order to promote stability and address global problems. Liberalism has been prominent in official policy-making circles such as the UN system, but has also given considerable latitude to transnational actors through institutions supportive of capitalism and human rights. We can also see that liberalism has been influential in terms of economic orthodoxy, but has shifted from the Keynesian liberalism of the post-war period to the rise of the neo-liberal project in the 1980s (Harvey 2005). This form of free market liberalism led many states to embrace free trade, but also provoked concerns from some states, NGOs and other civil society groups involved in the anti-capitalist movement, which were vividly displayed at the 1999 Seattle protests against the Ministerial Meeting of the WTO. However, not all elements of global governance are consonant with liberalism and the future of liberal influence is unclear. A variety of other impulses also shape global governance, particularly in the realm of security where the military objectives of states often trump liberal concerns with the human rights of individuals (in the “war on terror,” for example). Indeed, the rise of emerging economies including China and India casts an uncertain light on the future of liberalism given that these countries have different political cultures to the North American and European countries which championed the emerging liberal order in the post-war period. In this sense, the influence of liberalism may be ephemeral to other underlying political drivers.
Consequently, in order to consider the various influences operating with respect to contemporary global governance it is instructive to briefly consider the different ways in which global governance is understood in IR theory (see Held and McGrew 2002; Barnett and Duvall 2005). First, there is the realist contention that global governance is the outcome of strategic interaction between states – especially powerful states – and the divergent interests and power these states possess. Global governance, in this view, is essentially epiphenomenal to the power of states in the sense that it is a byproduct of the imperatives of great powers to coordinate action in ways that serve their own interests. Non-state actors like NGOs and corporations do not substantially influence the structures of global governance and are thus largely “rule takers” rather “rule makers” (Waltz 2000). Second, there is the analytical claim of liberals that global governance is the outcome of preferences of states to pursue cooperation in order to achieve mutual gains and address common global problems that no individual state can address in isolation (Keohane and Nye 2001b; McGrew 2002a). This view maintains that NGOs and markets can influence the level of interdependence that exists between states and therefore increase incentives to cooperate. From this perspective, global governance therefore consists of structures that are at least partially independent from state interests. Third, there are various social theories of IR such as English School theory, constructivism and the various forms of critical international theory that contend that ideas, ideologies and discourses play an important role in structuring and constituting states as well as other actors and institutions in global governance (Barnett and Duvall 2005: 18–22). These perspectives place importance on the ability of non-state actors to influence states and IGOs through the development of particular norms and discourses (like human rights or sustainability) (Dryzek 2006). These perspectives emphasize the importance of political dialogue and communication with respect to the changing operation and legitimation of global governance.
Against this theoretical background of different perspectives on the dynamics shaping global decision-making, a number of problems concerning contemporary global governance can be identified. Perhaps the most important is the overarching problem of effectiveness in terms of preventing and addressing global problems, enabling transnational interconnections, and providing global public goods. Clearly, issues requiring collective action now extend beyond nation-states but they are often subject to weak, incomplete, or non-existent forms of global governance (Scholte 2011a: 111). David Held (2010: 143–6) calls this feature of the contemporary world the “paradox of our times” and highlights the ineffectiveness of global governance in addressing climate change, achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and halting nuclear proliferation. These deficiencies are not surprising when we consider that practices of global governance reflect the priorities of powerful actors that dominate the creation of rules and institutions. All actors in global politics act in accordance with their own understanding of major problems and the appropriate structures needed to address them. However, they vary considerably in their capacity to force their concerns onto the global agenda and must cooperate with partner organizations in order to create lasting institutions. As such, global rules and processes are patchy and incomplete rather than a coherent and integrated system – and they fundamentally reflect the uneven capacity and willingness of state and non-state actors to pursue institutionalized cooperation in areas of shared interest. Clearly, states have the greatest resources at their disposal in enacting global governance, but non-state actors also have the capacity to influence political outcomes through agenda-setting and networks of collective action. In this regard, NGOs and TNCs have a much greater capacity to affect global politics than in the past. For example, in recent years we have witnessed the destabilizing impact of corporations like Lehman Brothers in the 2008 global financial crisis and the transnational activism of WikiLeaks in publicizing secret diplomatic cables.
These problems concerning the effectiveness of global governance institutions are difficult to disentangle from problems of legitimacy. In some cases, global governance faces significant questions about whether basic standards of justice are realized. The debates since the mid-1990s about the appropriateness of the policies and processes of the IGOs like the IMF and WTO demonstrate how many people see deep injustices in the social outcomes of global capitalism promoted by these organizations and a lack of representation by affected societies (O’Brien et al. 2000; Scholte 2011a, 2011b). Legitimacy exists when an institution is considered to have the right to govern and has political support from the relevant public constituency (Reus-Smit 2007: 171). The process of legitimation involves dialogue and justification between the authority or institution in question and its relevant constituencies which involves judgments about “rightful membership” (are the relevant actors included in the institution) and “rightful conduct” (does the institution accord with prevailing normative expectations of procedural and substantive action) (Clark 2005: 25)? Legitimacy matters because if an institution does not have a significant degree of support by the relevant constituencies its authority will be compromised. A lack of legitimacy can produce a range of social costs which can adversely affect the power, effectiveness and efficiency of an organization (Reus-Smit 2007: 163–5), which can mean the institution or its supporters must spend political and economic resources to explain or articulate its policies in ways that can slow and weaken the operation of the institution. At worst, it can mean the dissolution of the institution in question.
The problem here is that the appropriate constituency for an IGO is not always clear. Much of the issue of legitimacy thus relates to identifying what community or society an actor is meant to be acceptable and appropriate to (Clark 2003: 95). We could speak of the international legitimacy of an IGO with respect to the states in international society, or we might refer to its public legitimacy with respect to the public of states that create and support the organization as well as the transnational networks of NGOs and social movements that engage with it. Indeed, the importance of public legitimation has risen in significance in light of the growing intensity of transnational forms of media and activism (Clark 2003: 95). Not only are states and IGOs not alone in making political decisions, but they increasingly have to interact with NGOs in order to work effectively and legitimately. These forms of public engagement and contestation are not only about the level of support for global governance agencies like the UN or G20, but more profoundly about the question of what principles of legitimacy should exist in global politics. While it is difficult to create a comprehensive or widely accepted list of principles to secure legitimacy, there are emerging signs that organizations in global governance are expected to be accountable to states and people they affect, actively deliberate with those states and people, and be willing to change their policies and processes to better represent the voices of the world’s population and address the issues these organizations were set up to deal with.
From this angle, the issue of reform is another key problem in global governance. Many of the IGOs created after the Second World War have struggled to adapt to new conditions and emerging issues. Perennial efforts to reform the UN are emblematic of the difficulties associated with updating the policies, principles, procedures and membership of key global governance organs. Although the UN has updated its activities to better address civil conflicts and problems not specified in the UN Charter (such as environmental issues), it is widely argued that more reform is required to make the organization more effective and representative of the current distribution of power and resources (Held and McGrew 2007: 195–6; Mingst and Karns 2007: ch. 8). For example, it is often pointed out that the membership of the Permanent Five (P5) of the UN Security Council – the US, Russia, Britain, China, and France – reflects the power realities of 1945 rather than the contemporary geopolitical and demographic significance of India, Germany, Brazil and South Africa. From the perspective of public legitimacy, it is widely accepted that more also needs to be done to increase the involvement of NGOs and civil society in the UN (Mingst and Karns 2007: 246–7). The problem of reform is also significant in economic organizations like the WTO which has faced pressure to change its procedures to include more input by smaller, developing states and emerging powers, as well as the publics of member states (Esty 2002). Underlying these debates about what reforms should be enacted is the lack of clear consensus about how the issue of reform in global governance should be discussed and who should be included in these discussions – questions that relate to fundamental democratic questions of representation and accountability.
Most strikingly, there is a lack of leadership concerning the future of global governance. In order for governance structures like the UN to be effective there needs to be long term vision and commitment by societies, governments, and leaders toward making global governance work. This kind of vision has been in short supply in recent years. The focus has tended to be on short-term fixes and crisis-management that is doing little to create more effective governance arrangements for addressing insecurity, suffering and instability on a global scale. It is not clear what factors will prompt the world’s states to act more cohesively. Leadership from NGOs and civil society can be an important impetus for reform when states are unwilling to act. It may also be the case that worsening global problems and catastrophes will provide a strong motivation. States around the world might cooperate to reform and better resource global governance, or increasingly cede sovereignty to IGOs, if global problems such as poverty, climate change, or terrorism continue to mount or have sudden or overwhelming impacts. It must be remembered that the League of Nations did not seem realistic before the First World War, and an organization like the UN did not seem feasible in 1938, so strengthening global governance may suddenly seem “realistic” if political circumstances change. Far from being purely strategic or diplomatic questions, these issues of reform and leadership with respect to global governance have a clear political and normative importance for the future of humanity and consequently are important concerns for political and democratic theory.
In summary, we can see that cooperation in global governance is a crucial element of contemporary global politics but it suffers from a range of effectiveness and legitimacy problems. It is based on both the rules and institutions created by states and a broader world of transnational activity stemming from NGOs, social movements, corporations and individuals. This makes global governance structures incredibly complex and inherently controversial policy-making arenas where questions of representation and accountability are paramount. Questions of power, legitimacy and justice have thus taken centre-stage in contemporary debates about global governance and questions about the democratic reform of these structures are becoming increasingly important in transnational civil society.
As indicated above, global governance includes various rules and forms of influence developed by transnational actors operating outside the authority of the state. These transnational actors include NGOs, social movements, think tanks, corporations, lobby groups, unions, religious groups, and intellectuals (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 29–31). Such groups include long-standing organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross and more recent organizations like Greenpeace and looser networks like the anti-capitalist movements. These actors are able to operate transnationally because the development of technologies has enabled them to easily function and communicate beyond national borders. Crucially, these developments point to the existence of global or transnational civil society as a sphere of politics typified by the dispersal of information and public deliberation (Dryzek 2012, Castells 2008; Scholte 2011b). Civil society commonly refers to the existence of a domain of associational life that exists above the individual and below the state comprised of complex networks based on interest, ideas or cultural affinity. Some definitions of civil society include businesses, some others exclude them, but the emphasis is generally on political activity where people pursue various aims outside the official ambit of the state (Walzer 1995: 7). Civil society is the domain where political issues are debated, and in doing so determine what ideas become influential in political practice. Indeed, transnational civil society contains a wide variety of political perspectives ranging from radical anarchists to religious conservatives. Groups like the anti-capitalist movement, for example, seek to radically contest contemporary political structures and engage in the “politics of disclosure” which is concerned with opening up global governance (Weber 2009: 438). Some seek to pragmatically introduce ideas in the global policy-making or attempt to introduce democratic reforms into global governance, including into global markets and the supply chain of corporations (Macdonald 2010). Some groups are animated by anarchist and libertarian impulses, as evident in the leaking of diplomatic and other official information in 2010 and 2011 by the WikiLeaks network. Other more conservative activist networks actively seek to suppress attempts to entrench human rights and social justice.
While transnational forms of activism and civil society have a long history – as evident in the nineteenth century anti-slavery movement and formation of the International Committee of the Red Cross – in recent decades there has been an escalation in the presence and activity of transnational NGOs and social movements (Dryzek 2012: 102; Scholte 2011b). This appears to have resulted in a qualitative change in the ability of transnational actors to shape political agendas, foster new norms, and influence the development of formal rules in the global public sphere. A public sphere refers to the civil space of communication and dialogue in global politics enabled by various technologies, media actors and platforms, as well as the activity of transnational actors with an array of political interests (Keane 2011: 234). Although the global public sphere is far from universal or undistorted, the existence of these communicative spaces provides an opportunity for a wide range of actors to influence public opinion and play a role “educating publics about the nature and terms of dominant discourses” (Brassett and Smith 2010: 418). This global public sphere includes social media, multi-media and visual components which suggests that this realm is an “affective arena” able to shape perceptions of key global issues (Brassett and Smith 2010: 418). In this context, civil society leaders like Nelson Mandela or Al Gore play an important role as representatives of principles and struggles in transnational advocacy networks (Bray 2011). Within this sphere, furthermore, contending ideological and cultural forces often struggle for dominance to set the parameters of political life. For example, the World Economic Forum and the World Social Forum compete to set the political agenda with their contrasting interpretations of economic globalization. Alongside the anti-capitalist movement opposing neo-liberal capitalism, there are “social movements for global capitalism” that defend the prevailing form of economic globalization (Sklair 1997).
While this myriad of transnational activity points to a political realm far different to the context of interstate survival identified by Martin Wight, there are still important questions to be answered about the impact of non-state actors. It is clear that transnational civil society groups do not possess the types of coercive or financial power of states or corporations. However, Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink (1998: 16–25) argue that networks of civil society have developed a variety of strategies to shift public opinion and shape global policy-making by using their moral influence. First and foremost, civil society networks disseminate useful information across borders about global problems, which contrasts with the information presented by state organizations or mainstream media, and seeks to demonstrate that a given state of affairs is neither natural nor accidental. Second, civil society groups also engage in the use of symbols to simplify and make a sense of situation in order to generate concern and support for the group’s cause. For example, the Kony 2012 campaign used the crimes of one warlord to draw attention to the plight of child soldiers throughout the world. Third, transnational civil society actors develop alliances with IGOs and likeminded states in campaigns to pressure other decision-makers and political actors to change policy or recognize the importance of particular issues. The Make Poverty History Campaign, for example, used allies in European governments to push the idea of debt forgiveness, trade reform, and more aid at the 2005 G8 meeting. Finally, civil society groups attempt to hold policy-makers to account by publicizing the gap between declared polices and concrete action in order to shame their target into rectifying the discrepancy. The repeated calls for states to live up to the human rights conventions they have signed is a prominent example of this accountability strategy.
Recognizing these forms of influence, recent scholarship has suggested that transnational politics has moved beyond activism and is best understood as early stages of an incipient process of transnational democratization (Goodin 2010; Dryzek 2011; Keane 2011; Bray 2011; Bohman 2007; Scholte 2011b, 2014). The claim is that these transnational actors have played increasingly prominent and systematic roles in deliberating global problems and holding power-wielders to account, and in doing so have created new forms of public involvement in sites of global authority. These forms of transnational activity do not necessarily intend to create transnational democratic institutions – let alone a global electoral democracy envisaged by some cosmopolitan scholars – but they do open up more transparent political spaces for democratic communication and contestation of existing forms of governance. As Robert Goodin (2010: 179) argues, “we are still very much in the early days – both of developing a global polity, and still more of democratizing it. What we should be looking for in that context are ‘first steps,’ not final steps.” From this perspective, it is necessary to recognize that even democratic practice within states involves more than elections and the activity of parliamentary representation. In many respects, democratic life increasing takes place in a range of public monitoring instruments and processes which hold power-holders to account via various forms of governmental, quasi-governmental, civil society, and media scrutiny. According to John Keane (2011), these forms of “monitory democracy” run parallel to electoral processes and often escape the confines of the nation-state.
It must be emphasized that transnational civil society will not automatically produce a global electoral democracy and it is not inevitable that these forms of public representation, contestation and monitoring will become more comprehensive or stronger in the future. Nor is there any guarantee that these forms of activity will represent all interests and voices in global politics equally. But the idea of transnational democratization suggests that a general expectation that global governance ought to be publically accountable has taken hold in civil society. It also allows us to see democracy at a global level as a gradual and emerging process. Despite representing a significant change in the nature of global politics, important questions remain about how the increased activity of transnational civil society contributes to the democratization of global governance. First, how genuinely “civil” and “democratic” is transnational civil society? There are important problems with how consistently transnational activists and transnational deliberation accurately represent those groups most affected by global decisions (Bob 2002). Second, to what extent can transnational deliberation hold official forms of global governance to account and enhance the capacity of systems of governance to make better decisions? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to examine whether and how it is possible to strengthen the democratic credentials of transnational civil society and global governance. For this task, these questions need be considered in relation to the empirical and normative frameworks developed in global democratic theory.
In recent decades, scholars in the traditions of IR, democratic theory and political theory have increasingly reflected on the normative significance of political institutions in the context of globalization, global governance and transnational civil society. Entwined in the emergence of globalization has been a changing awareness of practical and normative interdependence in contemporary global politics. Generally speaking, people around the world are more practically interdependent in the sense that what happens elsewhere in the globe affects people in their daily practices, and people are also more morally interdependent in the sense that we are more aware of and concerned about ethical problems and suffering in other parts of the world. Consequently, there has been a revival of normative IR theory since the 1980s after its “bizarre” forty-year detour away from normative reflection during the Cold War (Smith 1992). In contrast to Martin Wight’s pessimism about moral possibilities in the international realm, there is now a considerable amount of IR scholarship concerning the ethical nature of problems in global politics. In addition, while political theory and democratic theory have traditionally focused upon domestic politics and the state, they have recently taken a global turn in light of the impacts of globalization and emerging forms of regional and transnational governance. As Robert Jackson (1990: 270) claims: “political and moral theorizing on international relations is expanding, arguably because the good life is affected more and more by events external to states.” In this context, “global institutions require justification just as much as domestic ones,” even though there are different perspectives concerning what standards should be applied to global governance (Macdonald and Ronzoni 2012: 521). This increased focus on questions of ethics and justice has meant that democratic theory, alongside IR and political theory, has reflected on the possibilities for developing more just, representative and accountable forms of governance in the context of globalization.
Democratic reflection on global governance emerged in the 1990s in response to the impacts of globalization on democracy within nation-states. It was the cosmopolitan writings of scholars such as David Held (1995) and Richard Falk (1995) that were at the forefront of this interest in extending democracy beyond nation-states. However, there is now a large literature on rethinking democracy in a context of globalization where domestic decisions are often overwhelmed by global forces; where many see representative democracy within nation-states as a political system in crisis; and where important questions are being asked as to how citizens should relate to unelected and unaccountable forms of global governance that contain so-called “democratic deficits.” This literature is best understood as “global democratic theory” and in essence centres on considering the ways in which democratic principles can be realized in a context of globalization, including by creating democracy beyond the nation-state. In an analytical sense, it involves considering the problems identified by NGOs, activists, academics and the political significance of their efforts to democratize global governance. In a normative sense, this literature develops and critically examines proposals for democratic global governance. As such, in the following chapters this book will consider the strengths and weaknesses of the most prominent liberal internationalist, cosmopolitan, deliberative, social democratic and radical approaches that engage with global governance and transnational civil society. As will become clear, these theoretical proposals have different conceptions of the core problem of democracy and different accounts of political community, the proper location of democratic authority, and how democracy ought to be institutionalized.
This chapter has demonstrated the importance of global governance and transnational civil society for understanding the problems and prospects of democracy in contemporary global politics. Underlying this chapter and the previous one is the observation that globalization and global governance are placing limits on the practice of democracy within the state. Significant elements of political life have been delegated to IGOs and global forms of governance that blur channels of representation and accountability, or remain completely closed to public scrutiny and participation. While IGOs can pursue worthy social objectives and provide global public goods, they can also pursue political programs that create social problems and advance the interests of specific groups at the expense of others. As such, public responses have been evident in the formation of transnational social movements and NGOs that provide some oversight and contestation of IGO policies and institutions. These developments have led political and democratic theory to consider the possibilities of democracy beyond the nation-state. The next part of the book examines the main approaches of global democratic theory in response to these features of globalization and global governance.
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