The interregnum: Governance in the new world disorder

The interregnum: A new world disorder

Global politics in the early part of the twenty-first century has been dominated by gruesome acts of rampant terrorism, multilateral and unilateral reprisals, global economic downturns, hyper-globalization, deglobalization, mounting civil strife, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. This turbulent time reveals cracks, if not a total breakdown, in the prevailing global order and has led to ever-louder demands for the establishment of new institutions of global governance to replace or at least complement the worn existing ones.

This is not the first time in world history that prevailing systems of governance have been challenged by pronounced structural forces for change. In past centuries there have been repeated attempts at reforming existing institutions or creating new ones to tame the conflicts and disorders of those periods. More recently, during the immediate post–Cold War period, we witnessed the removal of some of the structural and ideological underpinnings of superpower conflict that characterized the last half of the previous century. This changed structural condition not only relaxed global tensions but also ostensibly reduced the major security threat that the world faced during the Cold War, namely, the threat of nuclear war between two heavily armed military camps, which could have resulted in Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).

But the end of that precarious balance of power between the two superpowers (the USA and the USSR) created a climate of uncertainty with the rise in several civil conflicts and the spread of internecine violence in places like Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, and the former Yugoslavia. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been approximately ninety-three conflicts around the world in which over 5.5 million people were killed—75 percent of them civilians. ⁴ Almost all these conflicts were intra-state, thus explaining the disproportionate number of civilian casualties.

This immediate post–Cold War period also was characterized by an exponential increase in transnational challenges. These challenges included: the horizontal proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; the spike in the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons (SALW); the spread of hate material and ideologies of hate; the increased consumption of pornography and sex slavery; computer hacking, cyber theft, and cyber warfare; an increase in drug trafficking; trafficking in women and children; an increase in mass migration and the number of internally displaced persons; forced labour and organized criminal activity; financial and market collapses; piracy on the high seas (especially in the Straits of Malacca and off the coasts of Somalia and Nigeria); and the circumvention of national regulatory policies and taxes.

Clearly “the national institutions that are supposed to express people’s preferences in these matters are increasingly ineffective in coping with them.” ⁵ And by the end of the Cold War era, the post–World War II international institutions that were designed to address inter-state issues were suddenly showing signs of inefficiencies, ineffectiveness and, quite frankly, irrelevance. Many of the regional institutions did not fare any better. This raised an alert amongst international politics observers, scholars, and practitioners of the need for a new global governance architecture that would deal effectively with transnational and intermestic issues.

The debacle in Somalia, the Rwandan genocide, the at-times indiscriminate but politically-motivated slaughter in the DRC, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mozambique, Côte d’Ivoire, and the continued violence in other places such as the Middle East, Asia, Chechnya, and Latin America all indicated a persistent adherence to a culture of violence, as hyper-nationalism, terrorism, and long-suppressed ethnic conflicts reared their ugly heads in the latter twentieth century.

Other human tragedies and gross violations of human rights occurred in so-called “failed states” where the degeneration or total absence of national governance structures meant that civilians were particularly vulnerable to concatenated and at times random acts of violence (kidnappings, murders, sexual assaults). Millions of innocent people fleeing violence became refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs)—and thousands of children were, and continue to be, recruited as child soldiers by both government and rebel forces.

During the immediate post–Cold War period, the destruction of national infrastructures and governmental and societal institutions worth billions of dollars was due at times to internecine violence, but also at other times to disasters of both natural and human origins. Again, national governments found it difficult to address the spillover problems associated with internal conflicts and humanitarian disasters. Similarly, international governmental organizations (IGOs), like the UN system, and regional intergovernmental bodies, like the African Union (AU), struggled to cope with the increasingly transnational and intermestic nature of these problems, in large part because these institutions are comprised of decisions frozen in time.

The narrative related above is a quick panoramic scan of what can only be described as “a new world disorder”—an environment of turbulence, flux, fragmentation, disequilibrium, and uncertainty that cries out for the establishment of novel forms of global governance processes and institutions, since the existing ones seem woefully ineffectual. But this picture is only one part of the puzzle of this interregnum. There are other integrative and fragmentary forces at work which are also putting pressure on the existing global governance architecture.

Modern technology and double movements

The late James Rosenau alerted us to some of the ways in which the advent of dynamic technologies has resulted in a decline of distances in the modern world (what he called “distant proximities”). Technological advances in communications and transportation have resulted in an increase in the level of complex interdependence (to use a phrase coined by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye). ⁶

Modern communications (via newspapers, radios, televisions, telephones, fax machines, computers, the internet, email, and social media) appear to be producing contradictory outcomes: uniting and fragmenting audiences; exacerbating social cleavages as well as bringing disparate groups together; heightening existing antagonisms as well as providing means through which such friction can be resolved; eroding national boundaries as well as propelling ultranationalist fervour; increasing political cynicism as well as raising the level of civil society’s political consciousness. There is no question that individual citizens have been empowered as the result of the media’s influence. At the same time, because of their adeptness with the utilization of modern communications systems, state leaders and powerful elites have also been empowered vis-à-vis civil society. Moreover, modern modes of transport have allowed people of formerly distant societies to interact more frequently. They act as a conduit for bringing together individuals with similar interests from different countries. But they have also served to facilitate transnational criminal activities and exacerbate social cleavages.

The overall effect of the above is described by Joseph Camilleri and Jim Falk as the shrinkage in social, political, economic, and cultural distances. Because of this phenomenon, formerly dense and opaque frontiers are being dissolved, thus breaking down the Westphalian notion of “inside versus outside.” National boundaries are no longer able to divide friend from foe. ⁷ But the technological revolution also has the potential of creating a sense of global citizenship in the minds of many people around the world, which could result eventually in the transfer of individual loyalties from “sovereignty-bound” to “sovereignty-free” governance bodies.

The changing relationship between public and private spheres and the virtual collapse of the dividing line separating the domestic from the external environment suggest a fluid but closely integrated global system substantially at odds with a fragmented system of nationally delineated sovereign states. Although a global civil society has not yet been formed, one can argue that such an entity may be in an embryonic stage.

Aided by the technological revolution, globalization has contributed to global space and time shrinkage. The globalization of trade, production, and finance has resulted in a marked decline in some governments’ ability to control these sectors and has challenged the traditional concept of state sovereignty. ⁸ It has also expanded the number of players that can be involved in multilateral processes. The globalization movement and the seemingly paradoxical adherence to territorialism (deglobalization) are two concepts of world order that stand in conflict with each other but are also interrelated. The globalization of economic processes “requires the backing of territorially-based state power to enforce its rules.” ⁹ But post–Fordism, the new pattern of social organization of production that is congruent with the globalization phenomenon implicitly contradicts the lingering territorial principle that has long been identified with Fordism.

The results of post-Fordist production have been, inter alia, the dismantling of the welfare state and the diminishing of the strength of organized labour. But it also has had the effect of increasingly fragmenting power in the world system, providing fodder for “the possibility of culturally diverse alternatives to global homogenization.” ¹⁰ If Robert Cox is right, we can see how this dialectical “double movement” of the globalization process can alter the relationship people have with the political arena and how it eventually can cause a reaction leading to what James Rosenau terms “explosive sub-groupism,” ¹¹ as seen in the many antiglobalization protests. This sub-groupism has already spurred the revival of what can be called “civilizational studies” that are further unearthing deglobalization ¹² movements and ideas and contributing to an embryonic bottom-up form of governance.

There are other ways in which globalization is facilitating the dissolution of formerly dense and opaque boundaries. For instance, economic globalization has resulted in a global division of labour that hardly respects state boundaries and sovereignty. To a large extent, it has been responsible for the feminization of work, particularly in the developing world, which penetrates traditional gender boundaries. The international movement of capital via electronic transfers has also had a major effect on the relocation of authority and power structures. ¹³

Similarly, media globalization—via satellite news networks like CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and the internet superhighway—has contributed to the diffusion of power. Its impact raises the possibility of the development of a truly global civil society; something that could again transform the nature of multilateralism and the way we view governance. At the same time, global media ownership is becoming so concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy and powerful individuals and conglomerates that the result is reduced competition, increased homogenization of content, and, in some cases, the reduction in media integrity. ¹⁴

Another challenge to the traditional notions of multilateralism and governance has to do with transnational and intermestic issues: for example, environmental pollution; global warming; currency crises; the drug trade; human rights degeneration; terrorism; refugee flows; gender inequality; and the AIDS, SARS, Ebola and COVID-19 epidemics as well as the threat of Noncommunicable Diseases (NCDs). By their very nature, these issues impel cooperation on a transnational scale, since in most cases they cannot be resolved by individual states acting on their own or even bilaterally.

Multicentric actors have pushed many of these issues onto the global agenda. The effect of the multiplication of transnational and intermestic issues is that state-centric multilateral intergovernmental institutions, like the UN system, have had to find ways of acknowledging, if not embracing, the input of NGOs and other civil society actors who formerly would not have been considered important players on the international stage. The alternative to embracing these entities could very well be the establishment of parallel multilateral arrangements that bypass existing state-centric multilateral bodies or compete with them.

As James Rosenau reminded us, we live in a messy world, a world that is in disarray due to high levels of poverty, division, ethnic and cultural conflicts, terrorism, overpopulation, pollution, and other forms of environmental degradation. ¹⁵ Our world is a postmodern one of extraordinary complexity and uncertainty as contradictory forces are unleashed by the intensification of globalization and counterforces of deglobalization. It is a world in which integrative forces coexist alongside fragmentary ones and homogenization is challenged by localization and civilizational diversity.

What is clear from the above overview is that the clash between complex interdependence and globalization phenomena, on the one hand, and isolationist and disentanglement forces, on the other, is challenging international governance and raising the possibility of the emergence of other forms of governance at the global level aimed at adequately addressing transnational and intermestic issues and problems.

The UN system: A decision frozen in time?

The demise of the League of Nations once World War II began clearly indicated that the system of governance via intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) needed to be reformed, at the very least. In August 1941, just months before the US (at that time, the emerging great power) entered that war, the US president Franklin D. Roosevelt joined with the British prime minister Winston Churchill to establish what became known as the Atlantic Charter. That Charter formed the basis for the Declaration of the UN, which was signed by some twenty-six governments on 1 January 1942 in San Francisco. In essence, the declaration was an attempt to introduce a permanent governance system to ensure general global security once the war was over.

The victorious Allied countries were envisioned to be at the centre of this new system which, in effect, was expected to constitute the institutionalization of the immediate post–1945 world order. In San Francisco on 25 April 1945, two weeks before Roosevelt’s death, the UN system was ushered into existence on the promise that it would not be a house of cards, like its ill-fated predecessor, but rather a stable and authoritative base for global tranquility and a mechanism for preserving international peace and security. The UN was supposed to be a much more powerful intergovernmental governance instrument than the League of Nations had been. And in many respects, it was.

For instance, with six main organs, a permanent secretariat, and subsidiary bodies, as well as many specialized agencies, functional commissions, regional commissions, committees, programs, funds, research and training institutes, and related and affiliated bodies, the UN’s institutionalization apparatus was much more extensive than the League’s. The UN Charter listed some key governance goals that went beyond the maintenance of international peace and security, including: developing friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples; achieving international cooperation in solving global socio-economic, cultural, and humanitarian problems; encouraging and promoting respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all; and becoming the centre for harmonizing the actions of nations to attain the above common ends.

While the primary purpose of the UN system was to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” the organization was mandated to address a variety of other issues. For example, the UN was expected to address issues such as economic development (UNDP), health (WHO), communications (ITU), human rights (OHCHR), refugees (UNHCR), women (UNIFEM), ¹⁶ research and training (UN-INSTRAW), and children (UNICEF). The UN Charter placed state sovereignty and non-intervention in the internal affairs of states as a central norm of the organization and, for this reason, the UN is considered a “sovereignty-bound” entity. The UN, from the time of its founding, became the principal forum in which newly independent states would seek recognition and confirmation of their de jure independence and sovereignty. At the same time, the organization was perceived by human rights advocates as the organization through which the “rights” of individuals would be advanced and ultimately protected. However, the sovereignty-bound nature of the organization has made it difficult to accommodate non-state actors that pursue some of the same goals as the UN system. ¹⁷

Furthermore, this universal intergovernmental body has not always been successful in addressing many of the different representational concerns of its member governments. This explains in part why there has been a proliferation in regional and sub-regional IGOs (some multi-purpose and some single-purpose) as well as attempts to construct alternative institutional frameworks (hybrid global governance bodies) to meet diverse sets of interests. In some cases, these bodies are viewed as alternatives of a complementary sort, but some of them can also be seen as substitutes that challenge the very legitimacy, credibility, and relevance of the UN system.

If the contemporary global agenda seems crowded by the number and scope of activities that occur in so many different sectors, the response in governance terms is equally staggering. While the total number of governance mechanisms is seemingly countless, the diversity and variety are clear. At the inter-state level alone, there are numerous formal groupings: for example, G2, G3, G7/8, G20, G21, G25, G77, and G90. There are also now seemingly ubiquitous “coalitions of the willing.”

This considerable variety of intergovernmental bodies forms only one element of global governance. Tanja Bruhl and Volker Rittberger make a conceptual distinction between international and global governance. They suggest that international governance consists of the “output of a non-hierarchical network of interlocking international (mostly, but not exclusively, governmental) institutions which regulate the behaviour of states and other international actors in different issue areas of world politics.” For them, global governance is the “output of a non-hierarchical network of international and transnational institutions; not only IGOs and international regimes but also transnational regimes that regulate actors’ behaviour. In other words, they differentiate global governance from international governance by suggesting that in the case of the former there is a decreased salience of states and increased salience of non-state actors in the processes of norm-building, rule-setting, and compliance monitoring that occur at the global level. ¹⁸ They also equate global governance with multi-level governance involving the management of the above processes at sub-national, national, regional, transregional, and global levels.

Summative governance: The emerging paradigm

The recent interest in multi-level global governance stems in large part from a recognition of the scale of global change; the shrinkage of time and space witnessed over the past seventy years; the emergence of a transnational civil society; ¹⁹ rising interdependence among state and non-state actors within international society; the rise in the number and complexity of transnational and intermestic issues that cannot be addressed adequately by the UN intergovernmental system; and national governments’ failure or inability not only to deal with the transnational and intermestic issues but also to provide common goods and security guarantees for their citizens.

Particularly since the end of World War II, we have witnessed at least three different challenges to traditional Westphalian international governance as represented in institutions like the UN system. First, technological revolution has made it possible for many other actors besides states to enter the world stage and demand a role in decision-making that affects them directly. Second, the intensification of globalization has altered the relationships between citizens, the state, and IGOs. Globalization has facilitated greater participation of non-state actors in governance processes normally reserved for state actors. But because globalization is a double-edged sword, it has also made it easier for transnational criminal organizations and terrorist groups to command the attention of governance bodies at all levels. It has also widened the gap between the rich and the poor, thereby increasing the challenge to intergovernmental bodies. Third, the end of the Cold War can be seen as an historical turning point for intergovernmental institutions. It has resulted in an exponential expansion in the scope and agenda of IGOs, so much so that these organizations are having to contract out certain services. ²⁰

All three challenges have created new problems for governance and ensured that even more actors be involved in managing those problems. Apart from states and IGOs operating at multiple levels, today we have a plethora of non-state actors vying for attention on the world stage: transnational corporations, business associations, public-private consortia, bond rating agencies, transnational social movements, transnational advocacy networks, epistemic communities, coalitions of non-governmental organizations, terrorist groups, security communities, and so on. ²¹

Recently, there has been a plethora of critical works that have tried to stand outside the prevailing thought about multilateralism and global governance to give those concepts new meaning in what are considered to be changed circumstances. The most influential of these works was initiated by the late Robert Cox through his “Multilateralism and the United Nations System (MUNS)” research project that began in 1992. Because the MUNS program focused on long-term structural change, it was cognizant of attempts by the less powerful in society to create space for themselves in multilateral activity. Indeed, an explicit goal of the 1992 Fiesole symposium was the consideration of a future “new multilateralism built from the bottom up on the foundations of a broadly participative global society.” ²² This bottom-up multilateralism is conceived as organic and network-based with discourse mechanisms as well as democratic structures to ensure accountability to the world’s peoples. At the same time, MUNS researchers were cognizant of the constraints imposed by the more powerful on the attempts of the less powerful to play a greater role in global governance.

What emerged from the volumes of literature published by MUNS was an expanded and historically sensitive view of multilateralism obtained through careful empirical observation as well as the questioning of conventional and traditional analyses of the phenomenon. Multilateralism in the MUNS orientation is accorded a broad meaning that encompasses all those entities that may be (or may become) relevant in dealing with general or sector-specific areas of policy that have relevance for the globe, whether they are transregional, regional, inter-state, state, or sub-state. Thus, the units of analysis for the MUNS group not only included the state but also encompassed forces in civil society, above and below the state. ²³

Another related paradigmatic shift in conceptualizing both governance and multilateralism is linked to a movement towards establishing a post–Cold War global agenda that has given rise to what Richard Falk calls a potential “counterproject” to that of post–Cold War geo-politics. ²⁴ At the base of this counterproject is a normative preoccupation with strengthening the role of civil society (sovereignty-free actors) in matters of world affairs at local, regional, and global locales to balance the influence of sovereignty-bound actors. This is now generally viewed as an essential “bottom-up” counterbalance to the state-centric “top-down” views of world order and global governance that are so deeply entrenched in much of the neo-realist and liberal institutionalist thinking and scholarship. In some respects, this conception of the counterproject has been borne out in the rise of subaltern positions as well as antiglobalization protests and peoples’ movements.

The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first proved to be a defining moment for bottom-up struggles against top-down governance at the global level—what some have called a “Grotian Moment.” ²⁵ For many commentators, this defining moment began around the end of 1999 when the WTO’s Third Ministerial meeting collapsed because of the antiglobalization and anti-capitalism protests in Seattle, Washington. But the contestations between governmental and intergovernmental bodies versus non-state actors can be traced earlier to the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the embrace of democratization in formerly authoritarian states. Mary Kaldor discusses civil society movements that sprung up against authoritarian states and brought down some of those regimes. ²⁶ The end of several authoritarian governments from Central and Eastern Europe opened the door for the formation of several social countermovements. This wave also coincided with the emergence of a transnational, militant Islamic movement as well as the coalescing of several other social movements (environmental, slow food, human rights, feminist, Indigenous, 2SLGBTQIA+, the Arab Spring, and the colour revolutions). ²⁷

I consider the Seattle protest as the turning point in the clash between bottom-up and top-down forces struggling to determine how the global economy will be governed in the future. ²⁸ That protest involved an estimated 50,000 people as well as “the rebellion of developing countries delegates inside the Seattle Convention Centre.” Although it may have been difficult to pinpoint all of the protesters’ positions, what unified them was “their opposition to the expansion of a system that promoted corporate-led globalization at the expense of social goals like justice, community, national sovereignty, cultural diversity, and ecological sustainability.” ²⁹ This largely peaceful protest was met with a major assault from Seattle police in full view of television cameras. Similar antiglobalization protests occurred in 2000 in Bangkok and in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in Washington, DC, in Melbourne, Australia, and in Prague, Czech Republic.

In 2001, despite the attempts by government leaders of industrial states to find ways to keep demonstrators away from major summit meetings, we witnessed largescale civil society demonstrations in Windsor, Ontario, Canada at the Summit of the Americas and in Genoa, Italy, where one protester was killed and many injured. The lack of civil society’s confidence in state governments and intergovernmental institutions was a sure sign that these top-down governance bodies were beginning to exhibit a loss of legitimacy. These protests represented the clash between two worlds: a state-centric one and a multicentric one.

Rosenau and Durfee note that “alongside the traditional world of states, a complex multicentric world of diverse actors has emerged, replete with structures, processes, and decision rules of its own.” As these two sets of structures intersect, one should expect that multilateralism at that specific juncture would be different in character from the multilateralism that emerged out of the immediate post–World War II period. Certainly, the empirical evidence points to a changed socio-political environment within which multilateral institutions are forced to operate today. The global stage is “dense with actors, large and small, formal and informal, economic and social, political and cultural, national and transnational, international and sub-national, aggressive and peaceful, liberal and authoritarian, who collectively form a highly complex system of global governance.” ³⁰

The large number and vast range of collectivities that have clambered onto the global stage exhibit both organized and disorganized complexity. ³¹ Thousands of factions, associations, organizations, movements, and interest groups, along with states, now form a network of interactions which reminds one of Burton’s cobweb metaphor. ³² The advent of this bifurcated system of governance does not mean that states are in the process of disintegrating. The inter-state system will continue to be central to world affairs for decades to come. Indeed, recently we have witnessed the resurgence of states as they try to recover some control over their sovereignty. One-party oligarchic states like Russia and China have been reasserting their notions of state sovereignty and pushing back against any attempts by elements within global civil society to dictate how they should treat people living within their territorial boundaries.

China, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, has become a defender of the Westphalian norm of sovereignty and considers state sovereignty as one of its non-negotiable “national core interests.” This position allows the Chinese Communist Party to continue its monopoly on power and to authorize the arbitrary detention of over one million Muslims, including ethnic Kazakhs and Uzbeks, from China’s Xinjiang region in what some have labelled as “cultural genocide” and what the UN Human Rights Council considers as “crimes against humanity.” ³³ The Chinese government also uses the norm of sovereignty as an excuse for repressing the people of Hong Kong who hoped for a degree of autonomy from the mainland after the British government handed over Hong Kong back to China in 1997. The tensions between the norm of sovereignty and the norm of human rights have been present within the UN system from its founding. The fact that a permanent member of the UN Security Council can use its veto to counter any attempts by the UN to protect civilians who suffer human rights abuses by the government of that permanent member, and use the sovereignty norm as justification, reflects a “decision frozen in time.”

Russia, another permanent member of the UN system, has used its veto in the UN Security Council to stymie any attempts by the world body to halt Russian aggression against Ukraine. Despite the UN General Assembly’s strong condemnation of the illegal invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin, ³⁴ the UN system has been unable to rein in a member of the P5 because of a decision made in 1945 that gave five members of the UN the power of the veto. ³⁵ There is no question that non-state actors need to be better represented and integrated in the global governance architecture, but there is considerable pushback from sovereignty-bound entities against this idea.

But the proliferation of sovereignty-bound and sovereignty-free actors suggests that existing international governance systems have failed to deal adequately with the new transnational problems or with the aspirations of new actors. It seems as though international governance has been reflexively adapting to these challenges in two ways: grafting new elements and transforming itself. But certainly, the concept itself is undergoing change at this moment—which I label as “the interregnum.”

Governance can be distinguished from government in that the former is an umbrella concept while the latter constitutes the institutions and agents charged with governing. Government refers to “formal institutions that are part of hierarchical norm- and rule-making, monitoring of compliance rules, and rule enforcement.” ³⁶ It is basically what governments do. Governments have the power to make binding decisions and to enforce those decisions, and they have the authority to allocate values. ³⁷ Indeed, at least over the past two decades, the term “governance” has enjoyed a revival of sorts, linked to attempts by scholars to distinguish between governance and government. ³⁸ And since 1995 in particular, the term “global governance” has become an integral part of the lexicon of scholars and practitioners around the world, in large part because of the emergence of the academic journal Global Governance: A Review of

Multilateralism and International Organizations and the widely distributed report of the Commission on Global Governance titled Our Global Neighbourhood. ³⁹

Why has there been a revival of the concept of governance of late? The answer seems to lie in the paradigmatic crises that occurred in the social sciences during the late 1970s and early 1980s in response to the systemic challenges referred to above. Bob Jessop once put it that the paradigmatic crises were “the possibility of culturally diverse alternatives to global homogenization and the capacity of paradigm in use to describe and explain the ‘real world.’” ⁴⁰

Finkelstein has written that political scientists have been “uncomfortable with traditional frameworks and terminologies associated with the idea of international relations in an inter-state system” ever since the emergence of complex interdependence and what James Rosenau aptly called “the crazy-quilt nature of modern interdependence.” ⁴¹ It should not come as a surprise to learn that the use of the term “global governance” paralleled the advent of the intensification of globalization.

We know there is no world government at this juncture in our history. The reality is that no overarching government exists that can handle all facets of the globalization phenomenon. World federalists are generally impatient with institutions like the UN system because they have not gone far enough in terms of their ability to control, steer, and address all levels of human activity that have transnational repercussions. But there is no denying the fact that while world government is not likely to emerge anytime soon, elements of an embryonic global governance already exist and the activities of such governance can be found at many levels—global, transregional, regional, sub-regional, state, and local. The purpose of global governance is to steer and modify the behaviour of actors operating on the global stage in such a manner that they will avoid deadly conflicts and reduce the level of intense socio-economic and political competition. In the absence of world government, global governance implies a purposive activity and now involves a range of actors besides states. ⁴²

Global governance also refers to more than formal institutional processes. Informal networks and regimes can be involved in global governing. Indeed, the bulk of cross-border transactions these days are managed to a large extent by informal regimes (principles, norms, rules, practices, and decision-making procedures). While national governments and the UN system are very much central to the activities of global governance, they form only part of the overall picture. The Commission on Global Governance defined this form of governance as “the sum of the many ways in which individuals and institutions, both public and private, manage their common affairs.” ⁴³ This definition is broad enough to allow for the participation of state and non-state actors in the schemes of global governance.

During this interregnum, neither the UN system nor any regional or transnational body can hope to perform all the tasks of global governance on their own. Thus, as the recent global pandemic has made clear, the work of global governance requires the actions of a plurality of actors and not just a collection of nation-states. This can include civil society movements, NGOs, MNCs, and even wealthy individuals. Some non-state actors are playing a pivotal role in governance at every level and “changing perceptions and behaviour in fields as diverse as international health, environmental management, peace and security, human rights, and trade.” ⁴⁴

With the additional contributing players, the concept of global governance now has several layers of meaning and subtexts. It implies that there is a measure of control, order, orderliness, and manageability at its core. This is coupled with the implicit notion of functional administration. But added to that is another layer of intersubjective norms, principles, and rules at play. There is also the implication that a global governance regime ought to be accountable and responsive to those it serves (i.e., not just state actors, but also non-state actors and populations at large). Connected to this notion is the expectation of transparency and accountability.

In reconceptualizing global governance during the interregnum, one can adopt at least three separate meanings of the term: (1) the centralization of authority at the global level; (2) authority that is limited to specific situations, levels, and issues; (3) the sum of all diverse efforts of communities at every level to achieve specific goals while preserving coherence from one moment in time to the next. It is the last of these three definitions that seems most applicable in the interregnum, as we moved from one world order to the next. This is global governance as a summative phenomenon. To quote Rosenau, global governance “is the summarizing phrase for all sites in the world where efforts to exercise authority is undertaken.” ⁴⁵ In this light, global governance has not replaced international governance; instead, both forms of governance operate alongside each other, sometimes complementing each other, sometimes clashing with each other.

Conclusion

Oran Young once remarked at the end of the last century that “the demands for governance in world affairs has never been greater.” This explains the continued appeal of, growth in, and dependence on international organizations today. But as we find ourselves in this moment of transition, it is evident that the IGOs created at the end of World War II are no longer able to address successfully the myriad problems facing the globe. The massive ideological, socio-political, and economic changes that have occurred, particularly since the end of the Cold War, have put pressure on state-centric organizations to adjust to the postmodern era.

State-centric and sovereignty-bound IGOs like the UN system have tried to institute reforms and adjustments to their structures, processes, and operations. But their efforts have been like changing the damaged wing of an airplane while it is still in flight. Major transformative changes that are required to those organizations are being put off because these organizations are saddled with so many complex and urgent problems. Even though these organizations have expanded the range of their governance, proliferated in number, and increased their influence, major questions remain about their efficiency, their effectiveness, and most importantly, their relevance.

These questions have intensified as the new world disorder has unfolded during this period of interregnum. We are coming to the realization that there is a need for a new conceptualization of global governance to match what is occurring on the ground. Even states have begun to realize that governing the globe requires the cooperation not only of fellow state actors but also of non-state actors. In the past, state-centric IGOs have tended to “act as a conservative force against radical change by conforming to the status-quo and by further institutionalizing the present international framework.” ⁴⁶ But those days have passed. For humankind to survive on this planet, in this global neighbourhood, we need a network of governance institutions that includes multi-purpose and limited purpose international governmental organizations but also embraces international non-governmental organizations, transnational corporate bodies, civil society organizations, and influential individuals.

This is a summative global governance architecture that reflects the character and nature of the new multilateralisms. Anarchic governance is inconceivable in a world that is as interdependent as ours. Hierarchical (top-down) governance served its purpose during the interwar and post–World War II periods. However, both forms of governance have been challenged: by subaltern states as they shook off the chains of colonialism, by civil society groups demanding a place and a voice on the stage of global politics, and by hybrid public-private consortia which operate in a modified capitalist space. As theory catches up with the praxis on the ground, the best description of the emerging and new form of global governance during this interregnum might be “heterarchic governance”—involving the “self-organized steering of multiple agencies, institutions, and systems which are operationally autonomous from one another yet structurally coupled due to their mutual interdependence.” ⁴⁷

As we search for a new paradigm for global governance to help us transition to a new world order, it would be useful to embrace the critical school’s position on multilateralism and global governance. That position offers an approach that looks beyond the tedious details of current events and offers a more holistic and panoramic view of the landscape of global changes to existing ideas, material capabilities, and institutions. This reflectivist turn in the multilateral scholarship has pointed out at least five challenges to the Westphalian state system in which traditional international organization has operated in the past, namely

1. the emergence of bifurcated structures operating at the global level;

Each of these challenges indicates a focus on disjunctures and discontinuities. Understanding the impact of such changes on the existing structures and processes of multilateralism is important for the reconceptualization of global governance. The structural changes that we are now witnessing in the early part of the twenty-first century are producing a complex multilevel pattern of forces that challenge us to discard the oversimplified state-centric vision of world order and replace it with a modified vision of reality. At this juncture of transformation, the interregnum, the governance system for the globe seems bifurcated. The inter-state system of governance is still with us. But we are observing the emergence of a multicentric system of diverse types of collectivities. Combined, we can label this—summative global governance. It is the kind of governance that requires a subsidiarity principle to guide its operations; it is more sophisticated and flexible than previous forms; and it may provide the needed space and time for traditional intergovernmental institutions to make the changes required for a more efficient, effective, and relevant governance system for the globe.