Global governance

Geopolitics and
international
relations
 sovereignty, anarchy and
global governance

Anarchy is basic to state-centric International Relations because

sovereignty
is basic to state-centric International Relations (XVI – XVII
CENTURIES)
Westphalia Peace Conference

In any event, the absence of an external superior implies the

absence of
‘government’, which is the definition of anarchy

Sovereignty - juridical status

-political concept
Juridical Status – state legal position in the world,
namely that it recognizes no legal superior, that it is
not, for example, a
colony or part of a suzerain system (STATUS Possess or
not)

Political Concept - implies that it possesses certain

sorts of capacities; the ability to act in certain kinds of
ways, to perform certain tasks. One essential
difference between these two meanings of sovereignty
is that the first is unqualified – states either are, or are
not, legally sovereign (bundle of powers and
capacities)
 The industrialized world aloud to
create wider markets the rage of
economic activity explanded

From 1860 regulatory international

bodies were created
• The international telegraphic
union (1865)
• The international bureay of
weights and measures (1875)
• International labor office (1901)

The league and UN system accelerated the

institutionalization of functional
cooperation and institutions such as the
IMF, the World Bank and the WTO
attempted to regulate ever wider areas of
state activity
this process of institutionalized regulation is also the case that the
most basic external capacity of the state – the capacity
to make war – is now regulated

global governance is not the same thing as global government –

much less responsible and representative government;
the extent to which the world as a whole is orderly and norm-
governed should never be exagerated.
FUNCTIONALISM
is the most elaborate, intellectually sophisti- cated and
ambitious attempt yet made not just to understand the growth
of international institutions, but also to plot the trajectory of
this growth into the future, and to come to terms with its
normative implications

Functionalism is certainly the most important approach to

international institutions to have emerged in the twentieth
century – which is not to say that all of its ideas, or even most
of them, stand up to critical scrutiny
Form follow funtion
Coopertation-funtion

Peace in parts
Collective outcome
 INTEGRATION THEORY:
FEDERALISM AND
NEOFUNCTIONALISM
Functionalism looks to the creation of a new world order in which the
sovereign state takes a back seat. By way of contrast, integration theory
looks to the creation of new states by the integration of existing states,
generally on a regional basis and possibly, in the long run, to the creation
of a single world state.
Global economic institutions: Bretton
Woods and after

Before 1914: The world economy was nominally “self-regulating”

• This economy collapsed under the strain of war.

• Going off the gold standard.

1920 – 1930:

The Wall Street Crash of 1929

Bank failures in Europe 1930
• When recovery began in the
1930s it was on the basis of
trade blocs – the Dollar Area,
the Sterling Area, the Gold
Franc Area.

• US wished, in principle, to
remove power considerations
from institutional arrangements.

• 1944: The British and

Americans met at Bretton
Woods, New Hampshire, to
negotiate the shape of the post-
war economic order, which thus
became known as the Bretton
Woods System (BWS).
 International Institutions
• International Trade Organization (ITO)
would handle trade matters.

• World Bank would handle capital

movements.

• International Monetary Fund (IMF)

would deal with international money and
balance of payments crises.
• In the immediate post-war period it was impossible to bring these
institutions on line. No country in the 1940s was able to compete
with the United States, which was the home of over half the
capitalist world’s industrial production.

• for two decades after the early 1950s the world economy
experienced unprecedented growth and prosperity.

• By the end of the 1950s most of the leading economies had re-
established currency convertibility, and the GATT ‘rounds’ of tariff
negotiations were well under way.
International regimes and regime theory
• International Regimes is defined as “Implicit or explicit
principles, norms, rules and decision-making
procedures around which actors’ expectations
converge in a given area of international relations

• The International Monetary Fund, Biological Weapons

Convention, and Kyoto Protocol are other examples of
international regimes. The number of international
regimes has increased dramatically since the Second
World War, and today regimes cover almost all
aspects of international relations that might require
coordination among countries, from security issues
• Regime Theory is a theory within international relations
derived from the liberal tradition that argues that
international institutions or regimes affect the behavior of
states (or other international actors). It assumes that
cooperation is possible in the anarchic system of states, as
regimes are by definition instances of international
cooperation.
• there are three main approaches to regime theory: the
dominant, liberal-derived interest-based approach, the
realist critique of interest-based approaches, and finally
knowledge-based approaches that come from the
cognitivist school of thought (The first two are rationalist
approaches while the third is sociological.)
Global governance and (collective) security

• The basic idea of these projects was clear, even

though they differed markedly as to detail (Hinsley
1963). In order to overcome the scourge of war, the
states of Europe would form a kind of parliament or
federal assembly wherein disputes would be solved.
Projectors differed as to such matters as voting
mechanisms and enforcement procedures, but
collective decision was central – states would no
longer have the power to act as judges in their own
cases. Impartial rules would be impartially applied to
all.