Читать книгу Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 213

As globalization progresses, existing political structures and models seem inadequate for a world full of challenges that transcend national borders. In particular, national governments cannot individually control oil and energy prices or the spread of disease pandemics, tackle global warming and organized crime, or regulate volatile financial markets. There is no global government or world parliament and no one votes in a global election. And yet,

… on any given day, mail is delivered across borders; people travel from one country to another via a variety of transport modes; goods and services are freighted across land, air, sea and cyberspace; and a whole range of other cross-border activities takes place in the reasonable expectation of safety and security for the people, groups, firms and governments involved … This immediately raises a puzzle: How is the world governed even in the absence of a world government to produce norms, codes of conduct, and regulatory, surveillance, and compliance instruments? (Weiss and Thakur 2010: 1)

The question is apposite, but on reflection we can see that it conflates government with governance. While government is a set of institutions with executive power over a given territory, governance is less tangible. Precisely because there is no world government or any prospect of one, some scholars have called instead for more effective global governance as a way of addressing global issues. The first book title on the subject was published in 1993, but since then there have been well over 500 academic books on global governance (Harman and Williams 2013: 2).

Global governance is a concept that aims to capture all those rules and norms, policies, institutions and practices through which global humanity orders its collective affairs. In this sense we already have some global governance in the form of international law, the UN Security Council, the International Atomic Energy Agency, multilateral treaties, and norms of conflict and conflict resolution, alongside institutions such as the United Nations, World Health Organization, International Monetary Fund and World Bank. In 1995, in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, a UN report, Our Global Neighbourhood, argued for a version of global governance: a ‘broad, dynamic, complex process of interactive decision-making that is constantly evolving and responding to changing circumstances’ (UN Commission on Global Governance 2005 [1995]: 27). It also suggested that a shared, global, civic ethic needs to be developed.

However, the architecture of global governance remains largely inter-national rather than truly global, as it was designed in an age of competing nation-states, assumed the state was the primary actor, and relied on powerful states to enforce the rules. The Covid-19 pandemic of 2019–20 saw individual nation-states pursuing a range of strategies to protect their own citizens, with no coordinated set of actions. The WHO produced data on the global spread of the virus and some general guidance on infection control measures, but it was nation-state governments which made the key decisions on how to tackle the pandemic. Similarly, the EU was slow to provide financial assistance to the union’s worst affected countries – such as Spain and Italy – amid differing views on how to help and at what level, before finally agreeing to a €540 billion recovery fund (The Guardian 2020a). National governments were clearly in control.

Yet global issues and problems are outgrowing the state-centred international system. Although the case for strengthening global governance appears sound, it is far from easy to achieve. Nation-states and large corporations compete with one another, while citizens’ affiliation to their imagined communities represented by ‘the nation’ is as much an emotional matter as a logical or rational one. Moving beyond nation-state-based thinking is implied in theories of globalization, but there is some evidence that globalization also produces a nationalist and populist backlash (discussed above) (Rodrik 2018). Some activists are also suspicious of the very idea of global governance, which they fear may be just a dangerous but acceptable term for an emergent and possibly tyrannical ‘world government’ by political and economic elites (Sinclair 2012: 6).

There is a discussion of global governance in chapter 20, ‘Politics, Government and Social Movements’.

It may seem optimistic, even unrealistic, to speak of global ethics or governance beyond the nation-state, but perhaps these goals are not quite as fanciful as at first they sound. The creation of new rules and norms and more effective regulatory institutions is certainly not misplaced when global interdependence and the rapid pace of change link all of us together more than ever before. Indeed, as the global issues of terrorism, pandemic control, environmental damage, climate change, transnational criminal networks, human trafficking and global financial crises show, better global governance is becoming ever more necessary.