Post-Sovereign Governance

If world politics is no longer based on the core prin­ciple of sovereign statehood, how is governance being conducted in the contemporary globalizing world? Preceding paragraphs have stressed that the state is still very much in the picture, although its capacities, orientations, and activities have changed with the decline of sovereignty. At the same time, however, other parties besides the state have also acquired important roles in the process of world governance. Their efforts to shape rules and norms sometimes complement the actions of states, but on other occasions they may compete with and possibly override the initiatives of national governments. In any case, world gover­nance is today far from reducible to the states-system.

Substate Global Governance

One striking development in present times of globalization has been the growth of direct trans-boundary links between substate authorities, who "have consequently taken a substantial number of policy initiatives that bypass central governments. For example, various Canadian and Chinese provinces and most of the US federal states now have their own 'diplomatic' missions abroad that operate relatively independently from their respec­tive national embassies. In Europe some fifty regional governments in seventeen countries now maintain direct contacts through the Assembly of European Regions, the European Union's Committee of the Regions, and several other such bodies created since the 1970s.

At a municipal level, too, numerous 'trans-sovereign' policies have been developed by local authorities concerning matters such as pollution control, crime prevention, disarmament, and development co-operation. This trend is hardly sur­prising, particularly in regard to metropolitan centres. Global capital flows, air corridors, and telecommunications webs often connect world cities like Singapore and Frankfurt more to each other than to their respective national hinterlands.

Suprastate Global Governance

At the same time that some initiative in world pol­icy-making has shifted 'downwards' to provincial and municipal governments, numerous other com­petences have moved 'upwards' to suprastate authorities. Intergovernmental regulatory frame-works are by no means new to the second half of the twentieth century, but their number, scope, and impact has greatly expanded with globalization.

For one thing, regional governance arrange­ments have proliferated and grown (albeit to differ­ing degrees) in every part of the world from the Caribbean to South-East Asia. In total over a hun­dred such agreements have been concluded since 1945, twenty-nine of them in 1992-5 alone. The furthest developed regional organization, the European Union, has issued some 20,000 regula­tory measures.

At the same time new and pre-existing world­wide bodies like the United Nations have also seen their tasks enlarged. Indeed, in the light of their increased initiative and influence, what used to be called 'international organizations' might now suitably be renamed, say, 'global governance agen­cies'. In other words, far more now occurs in these quarters than the 'intergovernmental' consultation and co-ordination for which the older institutions were originally established.

The growth of suprastate regulation covers a very wide spectrum, only part of which can be men­tioned here. In the field of macroeconomic policy, for example, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has since the 1960s issued influential guidelines on a whole host of matters, including new information technolo­gies, retrenchment of the welfare state, jobs cre­ation, and a code of conduct for transnational corporations. Since 1979 the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have supple­mented their already significant liquidity and development functions with far-reaching stabiliza­tion policies and structural adjustment programmes in almost 100 countries. In a number of these cases IMF and World Bank officials have been dispatched to occupy and supervise national finance ministries. The World Trade Organization (WTO), established in 1995, covers a much wider range or activities with substantially greater powers than its forerunner, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Meanwhile the Bank for international Settlements has since the mid-1970s undertaken some oversight of global financial markets. In the area of conflict management, suprastate agencies like the United Nations, the Organization of African Unity, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe have acquired much-increased prominence. Suprastate governance has also greatly expanded in the field of human rights, including an unprecedented number of multinational humanitarian interventions during the 1990s. Although the idea of human rights goes back cen­turies, most formalized global law on the subject has emerged since 1960. Beginning with the UN Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, a proliferation of global meetings, legal instruments, and institutions have addressed ecological degradation throughout the world. In regard to electronic media, the handbook of technical standards established by the International Telecom­munication Union now runs to some 10,000 pages. As these examples indicate, rulers and citizens alike have increasingly recognized that the territorial governance offered by states cannot by itself pro­vide adequate management of supraterritorial phe­nomena linked to contemporary information, communications and weapons technologies, global ecological changes, global markets, and so on.

Of course significant limitations to suprastate governance remain. Official global regulation is still considerably underdeveloped in various fields, including competition policy, labour standards, and arms control, for example. In addition, most global governance institutions are inadequately staffed and chronically underfinanced. Poor co­ordination between agencies and the frequent absence of effective enforcement mechanisms have further undermined the reputation of global law. Nevertheless, suprastate regulation has become suf­ficiently widespread and effective that it forms a major part of governance in today's globalizing world.