Conceptualizing Politics

3.   Global  governance?
Can globalisation be governed?
We now begin discussing this question, but will be able to complete the discus-
sion only after considering global/lethal challenges in Part 2 of the chapter.
Globalisation means a cleavage in politics, in as much as the problems it raises 
belong to a dimension for which no government exists. This gap between the size 
of the issues and the size of the existing governing activity occurs for the first time 
in history, and makes any political theory obsolete that does not rethink politics 
and government taking the new conditions into account. On the other hand, the 
gap also leads many to the illusion that, given the size of the issues to address, a cor-
responding new size of government and authority will also soon materialise in the 
shape of world government or global governance. This is the residual outcome of a 
comfortable, but shortsighted philosophy of history that states that humanity only 
sets itself tasks it can also manage. Peoples and politicians are reluctant to change 
their habits and systems of government as long as they still see enough advantages in 
sticking to the old, and are not driven by compelling forces to change their routes. 
Are the global challenges of Part 2 compelling enough?
This remains to be seen, while on world government we have said what is neces-
sary in the previous chapter. It is now time to discuss in detail the notion of global 
governance, which has already popped up somewhere in this book. At first glance, 
governance looks like a stopgap notion where no government is possible; but it is 
indeed more than this. Globalisation makes us ask if government as a formal institu-
tion is possible and desirable under all circumstances, and think that in the global 
dimension the absence of government may not necessarily be a deficit. In essence, 
what we need is that the globalised world is somehow governed rather than hav-
ing this done by a government – in the sense of a national government writ large.
Now, to make sense of the notion of global governance, it is wise to keep its two 
prevailing meanings from each other. In the first analytical meaning it is understood 
as a performance of the international system, provided by the accidental combina-
tion of various forces and actions in an impersonal and, as it were, actor-less way; 
this combination of myriads of actions driven by the most different motives and 
goals brings about a degree of governance that takes place behind the actors’ back.
4
 
Not unlike what goes on in the concept of anarchical society, it is ‘as if ’ actors had 
agreed to work for certain shared goals (in this case the governing of global pro-
cesses), whereas we know that they certainly did not. On this count, global govern-
ance is a problem that finds unstable and varying solutions in a world in which the 
space for goal-oriented political management of affairs has become minimal.

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132  World politics and the future of politics
Who is unsatisfied with global governance as extra-political performance of 
the social system handles it as a normative project that has chances to change things 
and needs to be defined. Here, governance results from the planned actions of the 
actors; the open question is how the best (best under a general principle such as 
justice or efficiency) global governance can be brought about. In some versions, 
global governance is more explicitly presented as an anti-neoliberal project, as it 
means providing governance for the otherwise anarchical and therefore unjust glo-
balised world, instead of relying on what worldwide market forces and national 
governments driven by the idea of national interest may bring about; it means to 
organise solutions for what would otherwise remain an anarchical reality, much to 
the disadvantage of the weakest. In this direction one – not necessarily the most 
productive – development is found in the literature related to the topic of global 
justice, which will be dealt with in Chapter 9.
Global governance, however, is not limited to the two theoretical views we illus-
trated, but was and remains also a fledgling activity of international, mostly inter-
governmental institutions such as the Commission on Global Governance, which 
worked between 1992 and 1995, and the UN Global Compact Governance Board/
Office; not to speak of the bodies that, though not working under that headline, 
provide some amount of global governance such as G7/8, G20, the Financial Sta-
bility Board, as well as two UN-based projects: the Millennium Development Goals 
(2000–2015) and the Sustainable Development Goals (2016–2030). It is not our 
task to find out which conception of global governance these bodies heed. Need-
less to say that, through all of this, it is obvious that no form of global governance of 
political affairs is on its way to becoming world government, but rather a piecemeal 
attempt at providing governance of some essential single issue such as health or web 
addresses or missile technology.
5
 Instances of global governance are neither univer-
sal (not all of the countries participate) nor compelling nor always felt as legitimate.
* * *
At midway through our review of global affairs we stop for a while and draw some 
provisional conclusions regarding capitalism, the state and democracy.
Capitalism has once again proven its vitality by globalising itself and changing the 
framework conditions of the economy and politics in the many ways we have tried 
to sketch. But it has failed to rethink its own governance rules under the new cir-
cumstances, in particular after the Great Recession, started in 2008 in America and 
Europe. This event has disproven the myth of the self-regeneration of the market 
as far as it was left free to follow its logic of profit disjointed from production and 
consumption of real goods. Financial capitalism, the motor that cracked in 2008, has 
been largely successful afterwards in impeding a re-regulation capable of preventing 
a rerun of the crisis. The capitalism of the twenty-first century has not been so far 
up to its own Schumpeterian definition as ‘creative destruction’.
The nation state has, on the one hand, acquired unprecedented tools of control 
on the life of society, for example in fiscal, health and security issues; government 

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The globalised world  133
techniques, or what Foucauldians would call governamentality, have become more 
refined due to both technological and organisational advances. On the other hand, 
the weakening and perforation of borders, in a physical (migrants) and what is more 
in a virtual (financial transactions) sense, have deprived states of control mechanisms 
that were an important instance of sovereignty. As we have just seen in the case of 
financial capital, mechanisms nearly as robust as those once put in place by national 
governments have not been established at an interstate level. The only still effective 
national actors in financial and economic policy are the central banks via monetary 
policy, but only in an indirect and limited measure. In a global perspective, the 
erosion and partial impotence of sovereign statehood has created a void that is not 
being refilled by global institutions, but rather left to extra-political forces such as 
financial markets or multinational corporations. This retreat of politics, which reso-
nates with the ‘retreat of the state’ analysed by Susan Strange (1996), is one of the 
most significant side effects of globalisation.
Democracy’s fate in globalisation is highly ambivalent: on the one hand, the 
prevailing state of affairs seems to be democracy’s victory parade across most of 
the planet, though the non-availability of alternative models does not guarantee the 
quality of democratisation.
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 On the other hand, democracy has been losing effectivity 
and credibility, in the first case because not only of the dimensional gap between 
national democracy and issues requiring global governance, but also of the men-
tioned retreat of politics as human agency in shaping communal life. These factual 
changes have percolated into the voters’ minds, particularly among the youth in 
developed countries, and generated waves of disaffection from democratic proce-
dures and proneness to populism or extremism. For situations in which the demo-
cratic institutional framework remains in place, yet the citizens no longer feel they 
can determine the course of public affairs, the keyword ‘post-democracy’ is being 
put into circulation (cf. Crouch 2004).
What democracy can take advantage of is, however, not any effort of an impos-
sible return to its social-democratic or liberal stage in the nation state, but rather the 
invention of a new architecture, both domestic and federative, that fits the complex 
globalised world. This will yet not happen if politics, and democratic politics in