2 The Great Descent: ‘Global Governance’ in

Historical and Theoretical Perspective

Daniel Deudney

Introduction
Efforts to think about, and bring about, world political arrangements
that significantly reform, subsume or replace the Westphalian state-
centric world order in order to deal with problems that are ‘global’ in
character have been salient and growing features of both the world
political scene and theorizing about world politics for at least the last
century. Unfortunately, despite the growing number and significance of
problems that appear to be in some significant way ‘global’ in character,
political efforts to move beyond, or significantly alter, the state-centric
world order to address these problems appear to be largely stymied,
even in retreat, and many efforts for international cooperation, institu-
tions and organizations are declining and weakening. There is a wide-
spread sense that problems are growing faster than solutions, producing
a ‘governance gap.’
As this sense of a critical shortfall has grown over the last several dec-
ades, it has become increasingly common to refer to the overall enterprise
of ‘global problem solving’ as ‘global governance.’1 This turn to ‘global
governance’ is in part a reflection of the difficulties of global problem
solving through other means, and in part related to a growing sense that
new ways of ‘governance’ may be better suited to solving global problems
than ‘government.’2 Anything approaching a full assessment of ‘global
governance’ in practice and theory is a vast and difficult undertaking,
due to the sheer extent and diversity of contemporary activities that

1
James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel, eds., Governance without Government
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
2
Among recent statements on the governance gap, see Stewart Patrick, “The Unruled
World: The Case of Good Enough Global Governance,” Foreign Affairs (Jan/Feb 2014);
Thomas Hale, David Held and Kevin Young, Gridlock:Why Global Cooperation is Failing
When We Need It Most (London: Polity, 2014); Thomas G. Weiss, Global Governance:Why?
What? And Whither? (London: Polity, 2013); and Ian Goldin, Divided Nations:Why Global
Governance is Failing, and What We can Do About It (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013).

31

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 32 D. Deudney

appear to be parts of ‘global governance,’ as well as the large policy and

social science literatures on this topic. This chapter attempts to look at
global governance with very wide lenses, looking for some larger patterns
and trends across time, space and issue area.
The first main claim of this chapter is that ‘global governance’ is the
culmination of two successive broad secular ‘descents’ regarding the
locus or ‘level’ of authority, away from configurations which are ver-
tical, hierarchical and ‘from above,’ and toward those which are hori-
zontal, ‘republican’ and ‘from below.’ The first ‘descent’ has occurred
over the last five hundred years, as empires came to be replaced with
a state-system, and as internally hierarchical states have been progres-
sively ‘republicanized.’ The second ‘descent’ has occurred across the last
century, in thinking about various forms of ‘international government’
capable of effectively dealing with new sets of the problems of ‘global’
scope that are fundamentally related to technological change. Across the
long twentieth century expectations about trends and imperatives lead-
ing to some form of ‘international government’ have successively been
marked by a descent. This begins with the anticipations (and fears) of the
‘global geopoliticans’ of the emergence of an ‘empire of the world’ and
the conviction of the ‘nuclear one worldists’ that a world state was the
only alternative to nuclear catastrophe – both of which turned out to be
largely unfounded. In contrast, a path ‘down’ and ‘from below,’ initially
sketched by early twentieth-century pragmatic progressives and liberal
internationalist theorists, has provided the conceptual foundations for
the emergence of an historically unprecedented explosion of interna-
tional charters, treaties, and laws, and institutions and organizations.
These broadly liberal international forms are also marked by a further
succession of moves ‘down’ as they have been developed by the theo-
ries and practices of ‘international functional authorities,’ ‘regimes’ and
‘transnationalism,’ and then ‘global governance.’ The major contempo-
rary ‘issue area’ of ‘global environmental governance’ seems to have gone
‘all the way down,’ with agendas for mundane very ‘low politics’ activi-
ties at very small, municipal and individual scales, in effect a networked
‘micro-republicanism.’ There has been a waning of delegating and nego-
tiating ‘up’ toward the creation of international authorities with legal and
administrative capacities, and a corresponding increase in ‘direct action’
approaches in which individuals and small groups alter their material
practices in ways that are intended to directly solve some part, however
small, of ‘global problems.’ Thus, attention to ‘global’ problems increas-
ingly entails the growth of new forms of the ‘local,’ bringing the republi-
canization of the human order back full circle to its civic municipal and
virtuous individual beginnings.

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 The Great Descent 33

The second main claim of this chapter is that the downward trajectory
in the theory and practice of global problem solving is intimately linked to
changes in both the distribution and composition of material power, and
to new understandings of the material features of global problems and
their solutions. This starts with the ways in which changes in the distribu-
tion of the power between units, and between groups in units, propels the
first sequence of decent down from universal empires and toward a state-
system populated by more republican units. It continues with arguments
about how changes in material interdependence, interaction, complexity
and speed stemming from the wide deployment of a cascade of mod-
ern industrial technologies produce the emergence of ‘global’ problems,
and define key aspects of solutions to them.3 The distinctive features of
major ‘internationalist’ and ‘global governance’ projects, most notably
nuclear ‘arms control’ and combating climate change, rest to a signifi-
cant degree on claims and characterizations about the changing contours
of the material aspects of the human world brought into existence by the
explosively disruptive deployment of modern science-based technologi-
cal capabilities.
Thinking about ‘global governance’ as an agenda of ‘municipal repub-
lican world government’ is, for most of contemporary ‘IR theory,’ either
oxymoronic, or a sharp break, rather than an incremental step in this
direction. This is in part because of the fragmentation of conceptual
vocabularies, but also in part because most IR theorists have tended,
erroneously, to think of ‘world government’ and ‘international govern-
ment’ as being ‘above’ states and the Westphalian state-system, and thus
as a ‘post Westphalian system.’ This error is rooted in a much more basic
and widespread ‘geographic’ way of thinking about the ‘global’ as a ‘level’
or ‘layer’ that is ‘above’ the ‘international’ rather than something which
subsumes the state and the state-system ‘from below’ and which is very
low and wide and thick.

Empires and Republics

From ‘Universal’ Imperial Governments to the Westphalian System

On a multi-millennial time-frame, a great descent in the locus and ver-
ticality of power and authority has occurred with the decline in empires

3
For interaction capacity and interdependence, see Barry Buzan and Richard Little,
International Systems and World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For
the scaling up of ‘republican’ forms and degrees of violence interdependence, see Daniel
Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

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 34 D. Deudney

and the spread of an ‘anarchic’ state-system. The notion that there should
be some form of overarching political order encompassing the entirety
of humanity has been articulated across many thousands of years. Until
the early modern period, the projects of universal government had two
overwhelmingly important features. First, they were almost entirely asso-
ciated with empires and hegemonies that were largely built and sustained
by military conquest and force. And second, these ‘universal empires’
were anything but actually universal, being at most regional in their
scope, because an actual government for the whole human world was a
practical impossibility due to limitations in human transport and com-
munication capabilities.
The first political system that actually became effectively universal
in scope, encompassing all of humankind, was not, however, a uni-
versal empire. Rather, it was the near antithesis of a world empire, a
state-system, or what is now widely referred to as the ‘Westphalian
system.’ Unlike the ‘vertical’ and ‘top-down’ patterns of authority and
capability associated with empires, the Westphalian state-system was
marked by a much more ‘horizontal’ arrangement, in which territori-
ally circumscribed states were autonomous self-governing entities that
extended mutual recognition of their autonomy, or ‘sovereignty,’ to
each other, and that self-regulated their interactions to some degree
with the dictates of ‘public international law.’ State-systems had long
existed in many parts of the world, but they were commonly eventu-
ally extinguished by successful empire-builders.4 The Westphalian ver-
sion of the state-system, emerging in the region of peninsular Europe
in early modern times, was the first state-system to become globally
universal.
The idea that the early modern European system was in its essential
logic the antithesis of the large empires common elsewhere, was clearly
articulated by European thinkers by the eighteenth century, in their
characterization of the European state-system as a type of ‘republic,’ by
which they meant a political order based in restraints and marked by
rough equality among its leading ‘citizens.’5 Thinking of a state-system
as a type of ‘republic’ seemed particularly appropriate because defin-
ing features of previous ‘republics,’ namely the ‘balance of power’ and
various ‘divisions’ and ‘separations’ of power, were thought to be the
decisive reason why a state-system could persist in the face of efforts
to establish ‘universal empire’ in the European region. Thinking of the

4
Stuart J. Kaufman, Richard Little and William C. Wohlforth, eds., The Balance of Power in
World History (London: Palgrave, 2007).
5
Deudney, “The Natural Republic of Europe,” Ch. 5, Bounding Power.

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 The Great Descent 35

Westphalian state-system as a species of ‘republic’ also underscores the

extent to which state-systems, as opposed to empires, are ‘freedom sys-
tems,’ in that they preserve the autonomy and sovereignty of states, and
prevent rule by those ‘outside’ or ‘above.’
Outside of Europe, several European states (among them the states
which were most effective in thwarting empire-building in Europe) suc-
cessfully built vast empires with global, multi-continental reach, con-
quering and coming to dominate nearly all the regional imperial orders
and state-systems which previously had been driven largely by regional-
continental scale power dynamics. As a result, Europe’s Westphalian
interstate ‘freedom system’ based on anti-imperial successes in Europe
was nested within a historically unprecedented imperial and colonial
system with global reach. Europe may have been a ‘republic’ based on a
‘balance of power’ internally, but externally it was a set of vast empires
created by power asymmetries, and thus a near antithesis of a ‘repub-
lic.’ The Europeans did not invent imperialism, empire and colonial-
ism, but they were spectacularly successful at it. But unlike the previous
pattern of regional imperial systems, where one group achieved domi-
nance, the European empire builders were in continual imperial warfare
with each other. The first multi-continental ‘world war’ in the eight-
eenth century was a primarily a struggle among European states across
global distances. Compared to the military difficulty of mastering rival
European states, conquering and colonizing non-Europeans was often
relatively easy.
For societies outside of Europe, this imperial expansion of European
states was catastrophic.6 In responding to, emulating, and eventually
overthrowing these European empires, a global scale version of the
Westphalian system emerged. The tide of anti-imperialism has been
steadily rising, as the sprawling global reach of European empires has
disintegrated in the face of successive waves of ‘de-colonization,’ stretch-
ing from the colonial revolts in the Americas (1775–1824), to those in
Asia and Africa (mainly between 1947 and 1965). As a result, conquest
empires have almost completely vanished by the turn of the twenty-first
century. Both the origins and demise of the vast European ‘overseas’
empires were intimately connected with the fact that they were built by
rival states. Had the Europeans not been so violently competitive, their
expansion might have been much less rapid and extensive. But had the

6
For a power-centered account of the growth and limits of European imperial and colo-
nial expansion, see Daniel R. Headrick, Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments,
and Western Imperialism 1400 to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2012).

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 36 D. Deudney

European colonial states been united as an ‘ultra-imperialism,’ the strug-

gle to escape them might have been much more difficult.
The Westphalian system grew to universal global scope because
anti-imperial resistance and independence movements were enabled
by the diffusion of material capacities, and fueled by freedom ide-
ologies.7 The distribution of power capacities has become more ‘bal-
anced’ as power has slowly but surely diffused to more actors, giving
them the ability to avoid being coerced and dominated from ‘outside’
and ‘above.’8 At the same time, and surely closely related, ideologies
of ‘freedom’ have become very widespread, and they have come been
expressed in many conceptual vocabularies. During the initial, late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century ‘de-colonization’ of most of
the Americas, the freedom claims were cast in republican and lib-
eral democratic terms. During the nineteenth century, ‘national lib-
eration,’ first in Europe and then in the broader colonial world, was
widely claimed, often with great success. During the later twentieth
century, during the de-colonization of much of Asia and Africa, ‘wars
of national liberation’ were fought, and the Soviet successor state
of the Russian empire broke apart due to various ‘freedom’ agen-
das. Sometimes the lineage of these liberationist claims was liberal
democratic, and sometimes it was in ‘people’s wars’ and the idioms
of Marxism, which despite being the great rival of liberal democratic
freedom agendas, advanced itself not as the negation of freedom but
as a superior path for its realization. Not every movement has been
able to deliver on promises of ‘liberating the people’ (and many have
been disastrously oppressive), but the overall ideological hegemony of
‘freedom’ and the ‘right of the people to rule’ is reflected in the fact
that virtually every state on the planet makes prominent appeal to
them in their official ideologies.9
With the founding of the United Nations in the middle of the twen-
tieth century, the institutionalization of horizontal power relations asso-
ciated with the Westphalian system took a major step forward. Despite
aspirations (and fears) of the United Nations evolving into a world gov-
ernment, it has remained essentially a ‘state club,’ embodying and insti-
tutionalizing, not challenging, the dispersal of authority into a wide strata

7
For an account of the overall patterns of de-colonization and anti-imperial success, see
David Abernathy, The Dynamics of Global Domination: European Overseas Empires, 1415–
1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
8
For diffusion, see Daniel H. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the
Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
9
Christain Reus-Smit, Individual Rights and the Making of the International System
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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 The Great Descent 37

of states. Inequalities in the actual power of states persisted, and indeed

were registered in the select membership of the UN Security Council.
But this body, far from being a nascent hierarchical world government
has, in its veto powers, a strongly ‘republican’ element of restraint at its
center. The UN is a ‘Westphalian plus’ feature of international order not
a ‘post-Westphalian’ one.
There are important legacies for contemporary ‘global problem
solving’ stemming from the globalization of a balance of power based
state system and the pervasiveness of hydra-headed ‘freedom’ ideolo-
gies. The prospect that ‘global problem solving’ will produce anything
approaching a world state or empire with ‘vertical’ hierarchical lines
of authority is extremely unlikely due to the extreme diffusion of vio-
lence capability in the international system. Nevertheless, many fear
that ‘global-problem solving’ is a ‘slippery slope’ to oppressive ‘world
government.’ Another important legacy, largely assumed in contem-
porary theory and practice, is that not much is possible unless states
agree to act. It is now largely taken for granted that global problem-
solving requires interstate negotiations, and prospects for successful
negotiations largely rests on the ability to gain the ‘consent of the
governed’ or ‘consent of the stakeholders.’ The necessarily negotiated
character of any significant action also makes international politics
increasingly like the ‘domestic’ politics of republican polities.
Another important legacy shaping the prospects for contemporary
‘global problem-solving’ stemming from the imperialisms and anti-
imperialisms that have raged across the modern centuries of ‘glo-
balization’ is stratification. In part due to their earlier adaptation of
modern industrial technologies and the institutions to generate and
operate them, in part due to the spatially uneven distributions of
natural barriers to ‘development,’ and in part due to the predation
of wealth from imperialism, some parts of the world are ‘developed’
while others are ‘underdeveloped,’ making the globalized world very
‘uneven’ in the distribution of wealth, institutional capabilities, and
many forms of power. As a result, virtually any attempt to ‘solve global
problems’ is forced to deal not just with the problems themselves, but
with the claims of the ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘post-colonial’ world for
various substantial rectifications of stratification.10

10
Manjari Chatterjee Miller, Wronged by Empire: Post-Imperial Ideology and Foreign Policy in
India and China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); and Andrew Hurrell, On
Global Order: Power,Values and the Constitution of International Society (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007).

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 38 D. Deudney

The Spread of ‘Republican’ States

The spread of anti-imperial and anti-hierarchical political forms has
also occurred within the ‘units’ of the system through the spread of lib-
eral democratic constitutional political forms. Republics are a type of
domestic government that is marked by substantial individual liberty, the
empowerment of the people generally, and constitutional arrangements
that restrain and impede the exercise of centralized power. Before the
modern era ‘republics’ were quite marginal, being confined to city-states.
But over the last several centuries, ‘republics,’ now commonly referred
to as ‘liberal democracies’ or ‘constitutional democracies,’ have become
increasingly widespread.11
Republican states have played leadership roles in most of the recent
‘global problem-solving’ and ‘international institution-building’ that has
actually occurred during the twentieth century. Starting with the League
of Nations and the United Nations, and extending to the numerous inter-
national treaties, organizations, courts, and regimes built since World War
II, these efforts have been mainly the work of liberal democratic states,
particularly the United States.12 In part this is a reflection of the fact that
no other coalition of states has come close to matching the organizational
and material resources of republican states. This is also because most of
the problems that have been defined or experienced as ‘international’ or
‘global’ in character have been most extensively produced and experi-
enced by the ‘advanced industrial’ states, most of which are democracies.
Another significant consequence of the rise of republican states is the
rise and spread of claims of ‘human rights’ in world politics. The construct
of ‘universal human rights’ is the product of a long historical process of
generalization from much less inclusive ‘rights’ that were originally suc-
cessfully asserted within ‘republics.’ Beginning with the rights of barons
against the English king in 1215, broadening in the English, American
and French revolutions, and then being progressively expanded in the
nineteenth century with the broadening of the franchise, the empower-
ment of women, and the protections associated with the modern ‘welfare
state,’ the expansions of the scope of ‘rights’ deemed ‘human’ has been
mostly the work of revolutionaries and reformers within liberal democra-
cies. At various junctures in their histories, republican states have mas-
sively violated ‘human rights’ of various less powerful peoples, most

11
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992);
Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2000).
12
G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the
American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

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 The Great Descent 39

notably with slavery. But it is also notable that slavery, which was not
invented by ‘the West,’ was decisively pushed close to universal abolition
by the actions of Britain, the United States, and Brazil in the nineteenth
century. In the twentieth century, rights claims have become increasingly
universal, serving as powerful ideological weapons for colonized peoples
seeking liberation from imperial bondage. With the recent addition of
major world historical figures such as Gandhi, Gorbachev and Mandela
to top tier of the pantheon of ‘freedom fighters,’ the overall liberal demo-
cratic project marks its global reach. If the process of ‘liberalization’ and
‘democratization’ so evident across the last two centuries stalls or signifi-
cantly reverses (as it did most extensively in the years before World War
II), then the prospects for common problem-solving will diminish.
These freedom legacies, and their historical origins, heavily shape the
prospects for contemporary ‘global problem-solving.’ To the extent large
scale or acute depravations of ‘human rights’ are themselves considered
a ‘global problem,’ circumstances and situations that had long existed
become ‘global problems’ because of the spread of human rights stand-
ards. Also, due to the power of human rights claims, any attempt to ‘solve
global problems’ coercively and violently are much impeded. But many
states, whatever their public claims, are not republics, and many engage
in significant violations of human rights. As a result, such regimes view
claims of human rights as threats to their sovereign autonomy, and are
suspicious of ‘global-problem solving’ led by liberal states as potential
‘Trojan horses’ for outside influences. And as the ‘rise of the rest’ contin-
ues, the prospects for common problem-solving will hinge on the foreign
policy goals of states such as India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and
Indonesia, whose domestic democratic institutions are often weak, and
whose orientations to the international system generally have been heav-
ily shaped by their experience as colonies and their anti-imperial strug-
gles against ‘Western’ former powers.

Global Technological Interdependence and the

Problem of ‘International Government’

Industrial Revolution and Interdependence

Across the twentieth century, and particularly its second half, the
increasingly decentralized ‘horizontal’ Westphalian world political order
has increasingly been forced to deal with a new set of growing prob-
lems associated with rising levels of interdependence, which it appears
to be significantly ill-equipped to handle adequately. These problems,
increasingly characterized as ‘global’ in character, are widely perceived to

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 40 D. Deudney

stem from the great and accelerating expansion in human technological

capabilities. The rising recognition of the problems of interdependence
has stimulated extensive efforts to bring about, and think about, very
significant, even revolutionary, changes in the Westphalian state-centered
world political order.
The problems posed by interdependence are significantly different
than those posed by outside domination or conquest, both within and
between polities. An interdependent world creates the need for basic
government to cope with problems produced by greatly increased levels
of interaction and interdependence. Interdependence with regard both
to both security-from-violence and habitat services has long been recog-
nized as a basic reason why authoritative governments have been estab-
lished all across human history. But starting five centuries ago, the levels
of interaction and interdependence previously associated with relatively
small spaces have been increasingly present across much larger spaces.
Due to successive advances in technology, interaction at worldwide dis-
tances has become increasingly possible, and by the twentieth century
levels of interaction on a worldwide, or global, scale had become more
extensive than they had ever historically been at any scale above the
very local level. This development, working unevenly but inexorably,
has progressively created the increasing need for government and gov-
ernance at successively larger scales, at the same time that authority and
capacity have become increasingly dispersed and decentralized.

Anticipations of World Empire and World Government

For much of the period between the late nineteenth century and the
middle years of the twentieth century, it seemed to a great many peo-
ple, both the leaders of states and theorists of world politics, that the
new industrial technologies, and the opportunities and problems associ-
ated with them, were pushing the world inexorably, and perhaps rap-
idly, toward the termination of the plural state-system and the erection
of a world empire or government. Briefly recalling these earlier bodies
of thinking about the prospects and necessities of a worldwide impe-
rial or state consolidation of capability and authority helps establish just
how far more recent approaches to solving global problems, particularly
‘global governance,’ have ‘descended’ in their expectations and aspira-
tions, and in the ‘level’ and ‘verticality’ of the worldwide arrangements
they anticipate and advocate (see Figure 2.1). Late modern thinking
about a world empire and state occurred in two fairly distinct waves,
first during the decades around the turn of twentieth century, and then
in the early nuclear era.

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 The Great Descent 41

World Empire
World Empire Federal
FederalRepublic
Republic

SYSTEM

UNIT

FUNCTIONAL AUTHORITIES
FUNCTIONAL REGIONAL
REGIONAL&&
GLOBAL
GLOBAL
GOVERNANCE
GOVERNANCE

SYSTEM

UNIT

SOCIAL
SOCIALMOVEMENTS
MOVEMENTS

Figure 2.1 The Great Descent

During the late nineteenth century, as the capabilities of destruc-

tion, communication and transportation produced by the Industrial
Revolution were deployed extensively, a large body of work about the
implications of these material transformations was produced by a net-
work of theorists known as the ‘global geopoliticans.’13 These theorists
started with assumption, widely held and seemingly vindicated by the
vast size of some modern states and empires, that the new industrial
capabilities tended to ‘abolish distance’ and to favor large-scale polities.
It thus seemed there was a very real prospect that the pattern of ‘scaling
up’ would culminate in the creation of a universal state or empire. These
theorists argued about the location of the nucleus of such a universal
empire, and about strategies for smaller (or less ambitious) states to sus-
tain a balance of power on a global scale, and thus preserve a system of
independent states. These theorists, almost all Europeans and Americans,

13
Geoffrey Parker, Western Global Geopolitical Thought in the Twentieth Century (New York: St
Martin’s, 1985).

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 42 D. Deudney

tended to view the historical emergence and persistence of the European

state-system as an historical anomaly, and instead took regional ‘univer-
sal empires’ elsewhere as their presumptive model of large-scale politi-
cal patterns. In retrospect, no such global military consolidation took
place in the ‘world wars’ of the twentieth century, as coalitions of anti-
imperial states were able to frustrate the aspirations of great states pursu-
ing system-wide domination.
These anticipations were abruptly supplanted by questions about the
political implications of nuclear weapons, which were associated with
world government from their earliest anticipations during the first dec-
ade of the twentieth century. In the wake of their construction and use
during World War II, nuclear weapons triggered a large outburst of think-
ing about a world state. Many theorists of this period, led by some of the
eminent ‘realist IR theorists’ of the time, most notably Hans Morgenthau,
argued that protection from the dangers of nuclear weapons held by
multiple states created a paramount need for an effective sovereign with
global scope possessing a centralized monopoly of nuclear violence capa-
bilities.14 These ‘nuclear one worldists’ generally viewed the erection of
a world state in the nuclear era as the continuation of historical patterns
of political consolidation for security reasons, even as they differed on
its more specific features. They were also keenly concerned that a world
state might, if unchecked or unaccountable, become a severe threat to
freedom. Their main response to this problem of a world tyranny was
to posit the extension of the power-restraining features of liberal demo-
cratic constitutional states, making much of nuclear one wordist thought
‘world federalist’ and ‘world constitutionalist’ in character. They were
also keenly aware that differences in cultures and inequalities in wealth
and power posed grave problems for the feasibility of their institutional
solutions.
Against this backdrop of arguments and expectations, it is revealing
to examine what has actually happened regarding the role of nuclear
weapons in world politics. Early thinking about the need for a world
government for nuclear security was based on the assumption that states
would continue making war on one another. Instead, seventy years into
the nuclear era, there is a robust consensus that nuclear weapons impede
war-making. This ‘deterrence’ centered view of the nuclear revolution
holds that as long as states are able to retaliate against an attack, then the

14
For nuclear one worldism, see John Herz, International Politics in the Atomic Age (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1959); Campbell Craig, Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total
War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2004); and Wesley Wooley, Alternatives to Anarchy (Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press, 1988).

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 The Great Descent 43

use of nuclear weapons would be obviously suicidal to leaders, and so is

very unlikely to occur. In this view, nuclear weapons amplify rather than
diminish the restraining effects of the ‘balance of power.’ Furthermore,
states with nuclear weapons have shown absolutely no tendency to dis-
arm and build a world state.
But an ambitious ‘internationalist’ agenda for nuclear weapons has
not disappeared, but instead come to center on ‘arms control,’ whose
programmatic aims are the deceleration of the speed of weapons and the
reduction of environmental effects. All empires, states and republics are
systems of ‘arms control’ in that they are arrangements for controlling
arms. State and imperial consolidations entail coercive disarmament,
while republics arrange arms in patterns in which the people or very
circumscribed delegates of the people possess ultimate ‘arms control.’
In the nuclear era, forms of arms control previously characteristic of the
internal patterns in republican states have emerged as the product of
interstate negotiations and treaties among independent states.
It is hard to look at the trajectory of international nuclear arms control
and see incremental progress toward a world state. Also, the underly-
ing logics of why nuclear arms control advances security rests on their
peculiar material features, most notably the dangers of speed and com-
plexity in nuclear force deployments.15 The core of the arms control pro-
gram is essentially a scheme for the reconfiguration of fissile material,
the industrial apparatuses to produce this material, and ballistic missiles,
the transportation system for ‘delivering’ nuclear explosives at great dis-
tances. Arms control is a program for states to reciprocally re-configure
these exotic materials and machines in order to make their use slower
and more difficult. Also, much of the popular pressures for nuclear arms
control, in eruptive bursts of mass movements, have been triggered by
new knowledge about environmental externalities, such as radioactive
‘fall-out,’ ‘nuclear winter,’ and ozone layer destruction.16 Many of the
most important effects of nuclear weapons were not anticipated, were
often discovered after they had started to take place, and their discovery
required complex scientific measurements and environmental monitor-
ing of various geophysical ‘global commons.’ Much of actually existing
arms control has really been control of ‘delivery vehicles’ (most notably

15
For complexity, see Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and
Nuclear Weapons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). For nuclear arms con-
trol as deceleration, see Daniel Deudney, “Geopolitics as Theory: Historical Security
Materialism,” European Journal of International Relations 6, no. 1 (2000), 77–107.
16
For nuclear environmental arguments, see Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth
(New York: Knopf , 1982); and Carl Sagan, “Nuclear Winter and Climatic Catastrophe,”
Foreign Affairs (1983/4).

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 44 D. Deudney

ballistic missiles) and this effort has been motivated by a realization that
the speed of such technological systems is intrinsically dangerous, mak-
ing much of existing arms control a program to decelerate rather than to
decrease the absolute destructiveness of nuclear weapons use.

The New Industrial Publics and Liberal International Unions

Both the global geopoliticans and the nuclear one-worlders focused on
threats of war and domination amplified by technological advance, and
both tended almost axiomatically to think about governmental outcomes
and solutions ‘vertically’ in empires and states. But other lines of thinking
in the early twentieth century about the implications of the new mate-
rial possibilities and problems created by rapid changes in technology
by various ‘internationalists’ took very different, non-hierarchical direc-
tions. It is widely held that the ‘liberal internationalism’ of H. G. Wells,
Norman Angell, Leonard Woolf and John Dewey was mainly ‘idealist.’
But their internationalism was actually about the implications of new
material realities. They developed ideas about how industrially created
amplifications in interaction and interdependence were creating prob-
lems that could be best addressed with much more ‘horizontal’ insti-
tutional configurations, and transposing broadly liberal democratic and
constitutional domestic forms to worldwide scope.17
Dewey’s conceptualization of ‘publics,’ their problems, and forms of
community and government for dealing with the problems of expanding
publics, often neglected in accounts of the history of ‘IR theory,’ offers
the most generalized treatment on global interdependence and interna-
tional government.18 Dewey argues that ‘publics,’ which are essentially
stakeholder groups produced by interdependence and composed of indi-
viduals and groups significantly affected by the unintentional side effects
of actions, change in their scope and character as technology changes.
Given this, the practical problem becomes what kinds of government
are necessary to solve these problems, and what kinds of community
are needed to create and sustain these problem-solving governmental
arrangements.
Dewey claims that the Industrial Revolution has created publics vastly
larger and more complicated than had previously existed, creating the
need for substantially new forms of government and community. Levels

17
Leonard S. Woolf , International Government (London: Fabian Society, 1915); and
Jaap de Wilde, Saved from Oblivion: Interdependence in the First Half of the 20th Century
(Brookfield: Dartmouth, 1991).
18
John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927).

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 The Great Descent 45

of interdependence, and thus ‘publics,’ previously present at the local

and municipal level, were emerging at the ‘national’ level, and effectively
solving these problems required fairly significant additional governmen-
tal capacities and forms of community at this level. Looking ahead, and
assuming the further development and deployment of ever more capable
technological systems, he anticipated that high levels of interdependence
would come to characterize the ‘international’ level, necessitating the
establishment of substantive ‘international government.’
Beyond this broad model, Dewey is frustratingly vague about the char-
acter of these ‘international governments,’ but his lack of specificity also
reflects his view that the governments and communities appropriate for
solving the problems of the new extended publics would emerge from
a process of distributed social experimentation and learning. And he
viewed more dispersed and inclusive democratic social forms as being
better at social experimentation and learning than their traditional hier-
archical rivals. This lack of specificity is also associated with a claim or
recognition that a world committed to scientific and technological inno-
vation and revolutions would be in perpetual or permanent change, as
the deployment of new technologies gave rise to new publics with new
problems. With this horizon of change, it became increasingly difficult to
conceptualize and implement anything like the settled or constitutional
arrangements that had previously marked polities, making it necessary
to focus on processes rather than the realization of envisioned politi-
cal architectures. Change was coming from ‘below’ in a seemingly end-
less succession of advances, whose contours and consequences would be
increasingly difficult to anticipate.
Dewey and other progressive liberal theorists also emphasize the grow-
ing importance of complexity. Complexity grows in importance with
advances of technology and in social systems to deploy and regulate their
effects. Complexity also starts to appear in arguments about the superi-
ority of decentralized ‘horizontal’ social formations over hierarchical and
centralized ones, and are particularly salient by the middle of the twenti-
eth century in claims about the ‘mis-fit’ between centralized ‘command’
economies and the constraints and opportunities of late industrial ‘forces
of production,’ and the superiority of decentralized arrangements. These
arguments about complexity as a factor powerfully shaping the appropri-
ate form of problem-solving also become increasingly salient in thinking
about international problem-solving by the later years of the twentieth
century, in formulations about ‘complex interdependence.’
This overall vision of a hopeful trajectory for world political develop-
ment is also captured vividly in Wells’ talk of the emergence of a ‘world
brain’ composed of the interconnection of distributed social knowledge,

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 46 D. Deudney

and of a ‘new republic’ that he thought would combine the horizontal

and democratic features of modern ‘republics’ with a Platonic notion of
the rule of knowledge over tradition and force.19 A ‘world state’ would
emerge, but would be radically unlike previous ‘states’ associated with
the governments of ‘great powers’ and would be both ‘federal’ and ‘func-
tional’ in organization.20

Functionalism and International Authorities

The most substantial exploration of ‘functonalism’ as a way of dealing
with, and theorizing about, solutions to the problems posed by rising
interdependence is provided in the ‘functionalist’ approach laid forth by
David Mitrany and others in the middle years of the twentieth century.21
The functionalist approach hypothesized that incremental interstate
cooperative measures in sectorially segmented domains of ‘low politics’
(understood as being the realm of ‘welfare’ provisioning) to solve dis-
crete, and often highly ‘technical,’ problems arising from interdepend-
ence would constitute a ‘working peace system.’ Over time, such activities
would have political ‘spill-overs’ that would diminish the conflictual
character of traditional ‘high politics,’ making war much less likely, while
broadly advancing the prosperity of states.
Mitrany holds that this ‘functional’ approach is superior to the vari-
ous world federalist schemes for a world federal constitutional govern-
ment that would, their advocates believed, be created in one grand act of
‘founding’ marking a decisive transfer or merger of the sovereignties of
states. Mitrany thought states, in creating various ‘international authori-
ties’ or ‘international organizations,’ would be incrementally delegating
various authorities to these ‘supranational organs,’ and that eventually
effective sovereignty would come to be parceled out into a suprana-
tional tier of largely ‘apolitical’ welfare-providing international bureau-
cratic agencies whose operation would be beneficial to all. This approach
focuses on mundane and technical aspects of human life in the indus-
trial era, which previously had been operating on much smaller scales

19
H.G. Wells, World Brain (London: Methuen, 1938).
20
Wells wrote far too much and did not adequately develop many of his key claims.
The closest to a full statement is in H.G. Wells et al., The Idea of a League of Nations
(Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1919). A particularly good reconstruction of his
overall argument is John S. Partington, Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H.G.
Wells (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).
21
David Mitrany, “A Working Peace System,” and “The Functional Approach and
Federalism,” in A Working Peace System (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1966); David Mitrany,
The Functional Theory of Politics (London: Martin Robertson, 1975).

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 The Great Descent 47

largely ‘beneath’ or ‘within’ the state governing of territorial units, and

not across state borders.

Regimes and Transnationalism

The next substantial body of thought about the politics of solving prob-
lems created by rising levels of interdependence is found in the theories
and practices of ‘regimes’22 and ‘transnational relations.’23 The turn to
regime theory was in part driven by the fact that states were engaging
in increasingly extensive forms of cooperation to solve cross-border and
global problems that did not involve the delegation of substantial author-
ities or capacities to international organs, and that were often continu-
ously being altered through multiple and ongoing negotiations. Regimes
were conceived as ‘institutions’ (composed of ‘rules, rights, and roles’)
rather than ‘organizations’ (with bureaus, buildings and budgets). While
organizations were often players in regimes, their role was supportive
rather than authoritative, and largely confined to being ‘catalysts, coax-
ers, and clearing-houses’ in an extensive web of actors and activities.
The regime approach recognized that robust politics of interest, similar
in many ways to the complex internal interest politics occurring within
advanced industrial states, shaped every aspect of regime formation and
activity. The ‘regime’ approach also continued and expanded on the
functionalist notion that the politics of ‘complex interdependence’ was
marked by a wide number of different domains or issue areas, each with
their own features and logics.24 The regime approach also attributes great
importance to ‘shared understandings’ in the formation and operation of
regimes, and to knowledge produced by natural scientists, thus opening
up questions about the general role of ideational factors and change in
international institutions, and the authoritativeness and consensus of sci-
entific knowledge production. And unlike the world of the functionalists,

22
Stephen D. Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1982); Volker Rittberger and Peter Meyer, eds., Regime Theory and International Relations
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Oran Young, International Cooperation: Building
Regimes for Natural Resources and the Environment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1989).
23
Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, Jr., eds., Transnational Relations and World Politics
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); Sidney Tarrow, The New
Transnational Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
24
For interdependence and complexity, see Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and
Interdependence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977); and Edward Morse, Modernization and
the Transformation of International Relations (New York: Free Press, 1976).

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 48 D. Deudney

populated solely by states and interstate organs, regime theory reflected

the fact that a wide array of other ‘non-state actors’ (most notably busi-
ness corporations and normatively motivated activist organizations and
networks) were part of regimes.
In many ways, the superior fit of regime theory to actual political pat-
terns reflected the fact that Mitrany had extrapolated the experience
of interstate cooperation in wartime, and assumed that the domestic
political economies of advanced industrial states would be essentially
government-dominated social democratic welfare states. But the actual
trajectory of the organization of production and exchange across the
second half of the twentieth century was dominated by corporations,
reflecting their greater efficiencies, dynamism and flexibility, as well as
the strong commitment by major states, particularly the United States,
to an economic system dominated by private property and private pro-
duction. While the regime approach did register the rise of non-state
actors, states remained the pivotal actor in both regime formation and
implementation. Regimes were established primarily by interstate nego-
tiations, typically producing a comprehensive domain treaty, such as
the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, the Law of the Sea Treaty of 1980,
or the Kyoto Protocol of 1990. And the hard work of implementation
was also seen as falling on states, through domestic law, regulation and
enforcement.

On Global Governance

All the Way ‘Down’?

The conceptual turns made by the functionalists and regime theorists
in thinking about the politics of solving the problems of global inter-
dependence are further deepened and extended in ‘global governance’
practice and theory which emerged over the last several decades of the
twentieth century. ‘Global governance’ extends the emphasis on mun-
dane low politics in multiple domains that are very complex and filled
with technical issues. ‘Global governance’ also continues the move away
from purely state-centric Westphalian conceptions of world politics, giv-
ing greater roles to ‘private actors’ and transnational social movements.
The ideational aspects of ‘global governance’ have also expanded with
recognition of the role of ‘idea entrepreneurs,’ ‘vernacular knowledges’
and ‘consciousness raising’ campaigns. And the role of ‘networks’ as dis-
tinct social forms has expanded beyond the conceptualizations of ‘trans-
national relations’ theorists. The governments of states are still important
players in conceptualizations of global governance, but much of the

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 The Great Descent 49

action is increasingly understood to be conducted by non-state actors

and ‘substate’ governments, particularly at the local and municipal level.
Analyses of ‘global governance’ offer two very different accounts for
its rise. One the one hand, ‘global governance’ is said to be somehow
better ‘fitted’ or ‘matched’ to actual problem-solving than alternative
approaches. One the other hand, ‘global governance’ is said to be the most
that is possible, given the diffusions of capability, the number of actors
who are stakeholders, and the number of actors who have effective-veto
power, which together create ‘gridlock’ and block comprehensive reach-
ing global agreements.
One reason ‘global governance’ seems well-suited to problem-solving
stems from the pace of technological change and the difficulties of
anticipating the effects of these changes. As the pace of technological
change has accelerated, efforts at ‘technological forecasting,’ ‘techno-
logical assessment’ and ‘future studies’ have flourished in firms, govern-
ments and international organizations. But these crystal balls remain
cloudy, and the future remains significantly inscrutable. The limits of
forecasting make it prudent to ‘expect the unexpected’ and prepare for
inevitable major surprises. Change and anticipations of further change
powerfully subvert the ability and willingness of actors of all types to
make binding commitments and to agree to settled and established
institutional arrangements. Anticipation of continual change provides
powerful incentives for actors to avoid getting caught in commitments
that changing circumstances might make very costly, thus subverting
earlier approaches of law-making, treaty negotiation and constitution-
making. The anticipation that new technologies with important con-
sequences are sure to emerge, combined with great uncertainty about
the contours of these technologies and their consequences, make the
instrumentalism, agility and flexibility of global governance particularly
appealing.25
The global governance approach advances itself as an alternative that is
attractive because of the impasses and incapacities of earlier approaches
to solving the problems of rising interdependence. Advocates of global
governance point out that the capacity and willingness of states to nego-
tiate the kinds of comprehensive domain treaties that were seen as a
hallmark of regime building has greatly diminished over the last several
decades. In part this is ascribed to the complexity of the issue-areas, and
the great enlargement in the number of both state and non-state stake-
holders whose interests must somehow be accommodated. The decline

25
James N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1990).

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 50 D. Deudney

in regime formation in the classic pattern is also widely attributed to the

decline in the capacity and willingness of the United States to play the
role of ‘hegemonic leader’ that it played in the earlier construction of
treaty-centered regimes. And as the relative power of the United States
has diminished due to the ‘rise of the rest’ associated with global dif-
fusion of power and capacity, the ability of the United States to play a
hegemonic leadership role has also declined. In short, ‘governance’ is
all we have left when even semblances of ‘government’ seem so far out
of reach.
In many ways global governance as an approach to solving the prob-
lems of rising global interdependence has taken the final step away
from vertical conceptions of government and international government.
World federal governments, functional international organs and inter-
national regimes centered on interstate treaties have all been conceptu-
alized as occurring ‘above’ states. But with global governance, the claim
of vertical superiority has essentially ended. Global governance is con-
ceptualized as being ‘between,’ ‘outside’ and particularly ‘beneath’ the
governments of states. Increasingly, everyone everywhere all the time is
seen as being part of global governance in some way. With global gov-
ernance, the state and the Westphalian system have not been ended or
superseded; rather they have been enmeshed and submerged in a social
and political formation that is utterly un-state-like, but increasingly all
encompassing.

Global Environmental Governance

Of the many ‘issue areas’ in which ‘global governance’ seems to be occur-
ring, the ‘environment’ has been the most prominent. There are deep
affinities between how environmentalists understand environmental
problems and solutions, and how theorists of global governance under-
stand problems and problem-solving. During the middle years of the
twentieth century, substantial evidence had accumulated, and became
widely known, about the extent and possible consequences of environ-
mental degradation and disruption caused by human activities that was
increasingly described as ‘global’ in scope. Contemporary environmental
problems are in important ways a fundamentally ‘new issue area’ created
by the advances in science-based technology, and one almost completely
absent in the high modernist visions of Wells, Dewey and Mitrany.
While many environmental problems are seen as ‘global,’ the global
environmental governance solution is to ‘think globally, and act locally,’
to look for appropriate problem-solving significantly ‘below’ the inter-
national system, rather than ‘above’ it. In environmentalist thinking,

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 The Great Descent 51

the micro-scale of the locality and the individual play very prominent
roles in any realistic and appropriate response to many important ‘global
environmental problems.’26 Paradoxically, instead of the ‘global’ charac-
ter of these problems pulling attention and problem-solving ‘up’ toward
the formation of universal organizations and institutions, it has greatly
pulled the focus of efforts ‘down’ to the local and individual practices.27
The complexity of environmental problems means that that ‘one size
does not fit all,’ and that appropriate solution sets vary greatly in many
important ways from one place to another.
These reasons for the attractiveness of local and individual problem-
solving through global governance are all significantly rooted in the
material and technological, ‘brute fact’ aspects of effective environmen-
tal problem-solving.28 The superiority of local and individual problem-
solving stems from the fact that a great many effective environmental
solutions entail changes in small, even micro-scale, material practices
regarding the built environment and individual consumption patterns.
Environmental programs place an extreme emphasis on the mundane
‘material practices’ of widely dispersed humans in highly varied contexts,
their interaction with ‘stuff,’ with tangible material objects, and with
flows of matter and energy. Choices about built environments and infra-
structures are vastly complex and almost completely site-specific, and
they involve large numbers of individuals, firms and local agencies. This
means extremely decentralized problem-solving is particularly effective,
making cities particularly pivotal actors.29 At the level of the individual,
the decisive material practices in the environmental program concern
food. With ‘diets for a small planet’ that are low on meat consumption
(particularly of beef and other large animals), individuals can greatly
reduce their environmental ‘footprint.’30
Over the course of the shift ‘down’ in the great descent from world gov-
ernment to global governance, the roles of social movements and ideas,
knowledge, and information have steadily grown, as has the importance
of ideas and information about material facts. Social movements and the
26
Robert L. Thayer, Jr., Lifeplace: Bioregional Thought and Practice (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007).
27
Harriet Bulkeley, “Reconfiguring Environmental Governance: Toward a Politics of
Scales and Networks,” Political Geography 24 (2005), 875–902.
28
For the role of ‘material practices’ in environmental agendas, see John M. Meyer,
Engaging the Everyday: Environmental Social Criticism and the Resonance Dilemma
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
29
For environmental cities, see Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Eco-Pragmatist
Manefesto (New York: Viking, 2009); and Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World:
Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
30
For individual practices, see Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity (New York: William
Morrow, 1981).

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 52 D. Deudney

role of ideas are widely seen as intimately related, with social movements
being the means by which ideas about problem-solving come to be widely
disseminated. And various new information technologies, most recently
the Internet, are widely viewed as enhancing flows of information, and
increasingly the abilities of social movements to mobilize and solve prob-
lems. Much of the shared understandings and information that are pre-
sent in, and often contested in, global governance boil down to claims
and disputes about geography, about space and place, as altered by tech-
nology. More generally, the ideational content of global environmental
governance can be seen as an attempt to solve a fundamental problem of
‘geographic disorientation’ created by the disjuncture between the local
scale of lived human experience and activity, and the global scale of the
actual consequences of these activities when amplified by technology.

The Limits of Global Governance

Despite many attractive features, the global governance approach is
plagued by several important conceptual questions. The problems plagu-
ing regime theory about where regimes begin and end, and who and
which activities are part of them, are even more extensive for ‘global
governance.’31 It is also unclear whether ‘global governance’ is just a label
for a style of problem-solving that goes on within regimes, or whether
it is something that occurs outside of regimes. Due to the importance
that the global governance approach ascribes to social movements, local
governments, and individual practices and beliefs, it is in important
ways difficult to identify any human activity that is not at least partially
involved in ‘global governance.’
It is also unclear whether ‘global governance,’ as well as regimes and
international organizations, are steps toward the creation of the pre-
conditions for some form of authoritative world government, or steps
that make unnecessary the emergence of such a political arrangement.
Is global governance something that is the best approach now possi-
ble, given that other more ambitious approaches are blocked, or is it
something that can be seen complementing international organizations
and regimes? Does global governance make world government eventu-
ally more possible, or does it offer to make world government ultimately
unnecessary?
The global governance approach to global problem-solving also con-
tains important internal contradictions and tensions that may limit its

31
Robert O. Keohane and David G. Victor, “The Regime Complex for Climate Change,”
Perspectives on Politics 9, no. 1 (March 2011), 7–23.

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 The Great Descent 53

viability, most notably concerning the role of private wealth in relation

to social movements. The growing role of private sector actors is a reflec-
tion both of a widespread view of their superior abilities over government
organs, but is also a reflection of the fact that the fiscal capacities of states
have been diminished as increasing shares of global wealth have come
to be concentrated in the hands of corporations and extremely wealthy
individuals. Although defenders of rising socio-economic stratification
ascribe this outcome to the operation of the ‘hidden hand’ of market
forces operating independently of politics, this shift is also clearly in part
the result of a very political process that has produced the ‘tied hand’ of
the state as an agent for the redistribution of wealth and opportunity. The
highly visible role of corporations in ‘private–public partnerships’ and the
high visibility of private foundations in global governance is potentially at
sharp odds with the agendas of the ‘grassroots’ and popular social move-
ments that are also seen by global governance advocates as essential to
its approach. This raises the prospect that two of the major coalitional
actors supposedly working together for effective global governance could
come into conflict.
Perhaps the most important reason to question the enduring appeal
of the global governance approach is its widely acknowledged inability
to close the gap between the ‘demand’ for problem-solving and the ‘sup-
ply’ of problems. As long as problems are growing more rapidly than the
effective capacity to solve or address them, global governance is insuf-
ficient and is likely to be replaced or supplemented by more muscular
measures. The persisting and growing ‘governance gap’ raises the pros-
pect that the scope and severity of the problems will become sufficiently
great as to produce highly visible and widely felt crises, or some tipping
point in awareness of problems, that would stimulate actions far beyond
the incremental and ad hoc responses associated with global govern-
ance. If the ‘governance gaps’ does persist, and if problems do become
acutely experienced or recognized, then there might occur, in a fairly
short period of time, the erection of substantive international organiza-
tions and regimes with authorities and capacities not seen since the wake
of World War II.
In the face of such a triggering event, the ‘shadows of the past’ that
impede effective global collective action might also be quickly over-
whelmed by the clarifying light of the present, making more compre-
hensive solutions much more feasible. Furthermore, in the face of
acute manifestations of global problems, it is not difficult to imagine
that the seemingly intractable negotiating complexities produced by
the explosion in the number of stakeholders might be overcome by

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 54 D. Deudney

a concert-like coalition of major states, a sort of ‘collective hegem-

onic leadership’ for crisis response. If such acute manifestations of
global problems do arise, and if they do stimulate major institutional
responses, then it is likely that global governance will not be seen as an
advance in global problem-solving, but as the ideology of a period of
stagnation at worst, and preparation at best, for the realization of the
larger internationalist and globalist political project that it now seems
to have replaced.

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