Global Governance: Holy Grail, Dangerous Mirage, or Red Herring?
Does global governance need to be significantly improved to respond to global crises such as climate, disease and inequality? Is the Westphalian nations-state past its sell-by date? I join the debate.
I was delighted to join the conversation on global governance, on a New Left Radio podcast. Here is a link to the podcast (audio only).
I intend to write a new post on the topic, reflecting on issues raised in the podcast and my own thinking on the subject. In the meantime, I share a piece I wrote for the Mint, where I was a columnist for many years. The piece, in its published version, May 18, 2021, may be found here.
Note that the text pasted below, which was the text filed, may differ very slightly from the published version, due to copy edits for house style.
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In an essay published in 1979 (“Pour une morale de l’inconfort” — “For an ethic of discomfort”), French philosopher, Michel Foucault, posed these uncomfortable questions and an unsettling observation: “On assiste à une mondialisation de l'économie? À coup sûr. À une mondialisation des calculs politiques? Sans doute. Mais une universalisation de la conscience politique — certainement pas.” These words, as translated into English by cultural theorist, Homi Bhabha, in a 2004 lecture, read: “We are witnessing a globalization of the economy? Quite possibly. A globalization of political calculations? Without a doubt. But a globalization of political consciousness — certainly not.”
While Foucault, who died in 1984, has recently faced allegations of sexual misconduct, and his life and work stand to be scrutinized, the questions and observation he posed about the incomplete project of globalization remain pertinent, and they cannot be “cancelled”.
At the very beginning of the process that we call globalization, Foucault was far ahead of his time in recognizing that a globalization of the economy, and at the same time of political calculus, was in train. Equally, he recognized that these developments had not fostered, nor were likely to, a globalized political consciousness. We may read Foucault as understanding that the globalized world of trade, financial flows, and the pervasive reach of multinational firms, which perhaps reached its peak in modern times just before the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007 - 8, had not generated a concomitant global political and social response — whether relating to education, health, the environment, or inequalities of wealth, income, and opportunity.
In simpler terms, a globalized economy has not engendered any correspondingly meaningful system of global governance. This has been increasingly on my mind, as the world copes with a two-speed response to the current COVID19 pandemic. While parts of the rich world are speeding towards normalcy, much of the the developing world is yet meaningfully to begin a vaccination drive. For example, while the tiny British colony of Gibraltar is fully vaccinated, many poorer countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia have given a first vaccine dose to only 1 - 2 percent of their population, with almost no one having received the second dose, giving full vaccination.
Even India, with indigenous vaccine manufacturing capability, and its own home-grown vaccine as well as a license to manufacture the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, both putting it in a far more advantageous position to most developing countries, is in the grips of a devastating second wave of the virus that is ripping through the population. While domestic policy failures play a significant role in the current Indian situation, it cannot be gainsaid that the proposition of vaccinating a billion people, many of them poor, in a reasonable span of time, was always going to be a tall order. This is even truer for developing countries lacking India’s advantages as a large producer of vaccines.
The globalization project, beginning in earnest in the early 1990s, always conceived of a world of ever freer flows of goods, services, capital, technology, and (to some extent) people, envisaging a tide of prosperity lifting all boats, but the missing link was always a creaky non-system of global governance built on the tottering foundations of institutions created in the dying days of World War 2. Thus, there were no mechanisms adequate to address gaping and widening global inequalities in wealth and income, to say nothing of combatting the scourge of climate change, which necessarily requires a global, coordinated solution, given the spillovers across national borders. Greenhouse gas emissions, after all, contribute to the global stock, no matter which country is the emitter. Even on a relatively arcane and technical subject such as the coordination of national monetary and exchange rate policies, to mitigate cross-border policy spillovers, often most damaging to developing countries, there was occasional talk, especially after the global financial crisis, but no real action.
The assumption that the world could muddle through, with a globalized economy but without any serious effort to create institutions of global governance that could manage the social, environmental, and other dislocating consequences, was barely tenable in the wake of the financial crisis. Indeed, one of the fallouts was the rise of economic nationalism that, in effect, has attempted to unwind globalization, at least partially — everything from former US President Donald Trump’s “Buy America” policy, which has been continued without missing a beat by his successor President Joe Biden, to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Atmanirbhar Bharat policy of self-reliance.
What financial crises and the rise of populistic politics could not quire manage to do in the span of several years, the COVID19 global pandemic has succeeded in accomplishing at one fell swoop: which is to cast into sharp relief the fractures of a partial and incomplete globalization, that abetted the rapid propagation of the virus and its variants around the world, but has also created a world of vaccine haves and have-nots. While Americans and Britons relish the return of restaurant dining, concerts, and the other manifestations of normalcy, and this is in prospect in the coming months for the rest of the advanced world, most of the developing world remains vulnerable to the prospect of infection, disease, and death, on a large scale.
The advanced world ignores this possibility at its peril. Unlike our imperfectly globalized world and its faltering institutions, the virus treats every person, and every country, equally.