Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

New global problems – ‘Westfailure’?
This is a discussion that could be continued more or less indefinitely, but it
is necessary to move on and look at some of the specific problems raised by
globalization. The central issue here is the apparent inability of our present
global political system to cope with the problems created by globalization.
Although she hated the latter term, the British scholar Susan Strange provided
a good account of the dilemma here in her last, posthumously published,
article, ‘The Westfailure System’ (1999). She begins by arguing, uncontro-
versially, that sovereign states claiming the monopoly of legitimate violence
within a territory grew up in symbiosis with a capitalist market economy,
but then argues that the latter now poses problems that cannot be solved
within the terms set by the former. Specifically, these problems concern: the
global credit/finance system which is a source of recurrent crises that are
irresolvable because states are unwilling to give power to an international
central bank; the inability of the sovereignty system to cope with environ-
mental degradation because the absence of authoritative decision-making
and effective enforcement undermines collective action; and the humanitar-
ian failures generated both by global inequalities, which are widening and
increasingly unmanageable, and by the inability of the state to protect its
citizens from global economic forces. In short, she argues, the system has
failed to satisfy the long term conditions for sustainability: Westphalia is
‘Westfailure’.
This is a strong argument – and a rather pessimistic one, since Strange
offers no actual solution here. Humanitarian failings have been addressed
somewhat already and will be returned to later in the context of ‘humani-
tarian intervention’ in Chapter 11, and the issue of a global central bank –
a particular interest of Strange’s – would require an excessively technical
discussion, so the focus here will be on environmental degradation, which is
both deeply serious as an issue, and highly revealing in terms of what it tells
us about contemporary IR. One of the first principles of traditional inter-
national law is that state sovereignty involves control over natural resources
and local economic activity. Some such principle is implied by the very
nature of the modern state – unlike, for example, some medieval institutions,
contemporary political forms have been territorial since at least the
seventeenth century, and territoriality involves a claim of ownership over
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natural resources. Moreover, the nature of capitalist economies as they have
developed over the same time period has been such that it was inevitable
that in the advanced industrial countries ‘ownership’ would not be inter-
preted as ‘stewardship’ but as ‘dominion’. Natural resources were there to be
exploited for gain by landowners, the state, and perhaps, at least in modern
welfare capitalist societies, the people. However, even in the latter case, ‘the
people’ means ‘citizens of the state in question’ and not people generally:
until comparatively recently, the idea that a state might be held globally
accountable for economic activities conducted on its territory would have
seemed incompatible with the first principles of the system.
This attitude began to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the
first place it became clear that certain kinds of economic activity could
have quite dramatic effects beyond the borders of the state in question: the
phenomenon of ‘acid rain’ is paradigmatic here, with deforestation in, for
example, Scandinavia or Canada caused by industrial pollution originating
in Britain, Germany or the United States. However, although these are serious
issues, they pose no particularly interesting theoretical problems. In principle,
cross-border pollution is much the same as intra-border pollution; cleaning
up the Rhine (which flows through several states) is more complicated than
cleaning up the Thames, but poses the same sort of problems – in particular,
how to cost what economists call ‘externalities’, whether to regard pollu-
tion control as a general charge on taxation or something that can be han-
dled on the basis that the polluter pays, and so on. Once the problem is
recognized, capitalist economies have fewer problems dealing with this sort
of question than one might expect. Private ownership cuts both ways – it
can hinder collective action, but it also means that it is, in principle, possible
to identify and hold accountable the agents of environmental degradation.
An interesting contrast here is with the far greater difficulties in controlling
direct pollution experienced by communist industrial powers, where ‘public
ownership’ provided a reason for not tackling similar problems, as the post-
communist states which have inherited dead rivers and urban industrial
nightmares have reason to be aware.
Of greater long-term significance was the second reason for the increased
salience of environmental issues in the early 1970s, namely a growing
consciousness that there might be ‘limits to growth’ (Meadows et al. 1974).
It was argued that industrial civilization depended on the ever-faster
consumption of materials the supply of which was, by definition, finite.
Hydrocarbon-based fuels that had been created over millions of years were
being consumed in decades. Demand for resources that were, in principle,
renewable – such as wood or agricultural products – was growing faster
than matching supplies, creating other potential shortages a little way down
the line. The point about these rather doom-laden predictions was that,
unlike phenomena such as acid rain, they challenged the prospects of