for the term. They range from the purely descriptive and technical, to characterizations that give more sense of both the ideological purposes and the real-world implications of the global governance movement.
To start with the technical, Adil Najam, dean of the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, defines global governance very broadly as “the management of global processes in the absence of global government.”8 Another technocratic definition comes from Thomas G. Weiss, director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY: “‘Global governance’ – which can be good, bad, or indifferent – refers to concrete cooperative problem-solving arrangements, many of which increasingly involve not only the United Nations of states but also ‘other UNs,’ namely international secretariats and other non-state actors.”9 In The UN and Global Governance: An Idea and Its Prospects, Weiss and his co-author, Ramesh Thakur, offer a slightly more elaborate definition: “the complex of formal and informal institutions, mechanisms, relationships, and processes between and among states, markets, citizens and organizations, both inter- and non-governmental, through which collective interests on the global plane are articulated, duties, obligations and privileges are established, and differences are mediated through educated professionals.”10 Notice who is doing this very comprehensive governancing, so comprehensive that it sounds like governing the world: “educated professionals,” not elected officials.
A shorter definition that captures the central idea is this: “Global governance or world governance is a movement towards political integration of transnational actors aimed at negotiating responses to problems that affect more than one state or region.”11 The key words here are “political integration of transnational actors.” But the chief merit of this definition is that it describes global governance accurately as a “movement,” rather than focusing, misleadingly, on the innocuous-sounding mechanics of “cooperative problem-solving arrangements.”
GLOBAL GOVERNANCE IS SUI GENERIS – JUST LIKE THE EU
As the definitions above imply, global governance does not mean world government to the great majority of its advocates. For instance, Habermas writes, “The democratic federal state writ large – the global state of nations or world republic – is the wrong model.”12 Rather, he envisions a “politically constituted global society that reserves institutions and procedures of global governance for states at both the supra- and transnational levels.”13 Habermas explains, “one can construe the political constitution of a decentered world society as a multilevel system” in which a “world organization” such as a “suitably reformed” UN could secure peace and promote human rights “at the supranational level” while “at the intermediate, transnational level the major powers would address the difficult problems of a global domestic politics,” such as “global economic and ecological problems.”14 In order to negotiate policy on a level playing field with the United States in such a scenario, “nation-states in the various world regions would have to unite to form continental regimes on the model of an EU equipped with sufficient power to conduct an effective foreign policy of its own.” Thus, there would still be “foreign policy” between nations (or “continental regimes”), but the distinction between domestic and foreign policy would be blurred; a “modified form” of international relations would basically become a “global domestic politics” among the United States and various continental regimes such as the EU.
Nations would continue to exist. There would be no one-world government. But Habermas does not waver from the utopian goals he has for global governance: world peace and worldwide respect for universal human rights. And in order to achieve these goals, there would be a world organization – the UN – that, while purportedly not a world government, would be endowed with formidable power on a global scale, the power to decide questions of war and peace and to enforce those decisions, and to impose globally a particular vision of human rights. This is a level of power that would dwarf that of any nation-state, including the United States, the most powerful nation-state in the history of the world. As Habermas puts it, this would be “a global domestic politics without a world government . . . embedded within the framework of a world organization with the power to impose peace and implement human rights.”15
What does this all mean? Could the democratic nation-state, directly accountable to its citizens, survive in such a system? Are global governance and liberal democracy compatible, or are they mutually exclusive? John Fonte gets to the heart of the matter in his masterful analysis of global governance, Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others? Here, Fonte strips the “postdemocratic and postliberal” agenda of the global governance movement down to the essence of what it would mean for those who cherish self-government: it would “shift power from democracies to supranational institutions and rules, and thus severely restrict democratic decision making in independent states.”16 Although the advocates of global governance may think of themselves as supporters of democracy, “the effect of their policies would be fundamentally at odds with the basic principles and practices of democratic self-government.”17 Ultimately, says Fonte, this is a “moral conflict” revolving around the question: “Do Americans, or other peoples, have the moral right to rule themselves or must they share sovereignty with others?”18
The global governancers, whether they openly admit it or not – whether they consciously realize it or not – believe that people do not have a right to self-government. They subscribe to what they consider a nobler ideal, in which “global norms and universal human rights” constitute the highest authority. As Fonte explains, “They regard the ‘new’ international law, embodying the latest (and most progressive) concepts of global human rights and universal norms, as superior to any national law or the constitution of any democratic nation-state.”19 Accordingly, global governancers aim to establish a “global rule of law” to which all national law would be subordinate.20
This is not about one-world-government conspiracy theories or the black helicopters of the UN. As Fonte explains, the advocates of global governance do not aim to create “a single global government, or any form of tyranny, but rather ‘governance’ through a hybrid of national, transnational, and supranational legal and regulatory regimes.”21 Nevertheless, if a “global rule of law” is to be established under some kind of global authority, “liberal democracy will be replaced by postdemocratic governance.”22 When all is said and done, the global governance ideology is engaging the Western democracies in a zero-sum conflict between two irreconcilable visions for political life, a conflict centering on the most basic question of politics: “Who determines the laws under which we shall live?” Again, this is “a moral struggle over the first principles of government and politics.”23
Regardless of the opposing currents represented by sovereigntists such as Margaret Thatcher, nationalists such as Charles de Gaulle and pragmatists such as Tony Blair, the European project has always been motivated by a vision of supranational governance for Europe and global governance for the world, such as has been articulated by people like Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet, Alcide De Gasperi and Helmut Kohl. It is a grand and attractive and ambitious vision of a better world – a vision that many good people are espousing. John Fonte acknowledges that “the advocates of global governance hope for a better world – more humane, just, and democratic.”24 Indeed, after the bloody conflicts and totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, writes Habermas, “The historical success of the European Union has confirmed Europeans in the conviction that the domestication of the state’s use of violence also calls for a reciprocal restriction of the scope of sovereignty at the global level.”25
Like the desire for peace that underlay the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in the aftermath of World War II, the intentions of today’s global governancers may be good, even noble. But, as Fonte so conclusively demonstrates, “their proposed policies would, in fact, shrink and usurp democratic self-government.”26
