Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

part, agricultural, local and small scale. However, with the coming of
manufacturing and the factory system, and recognition that efficiency gains –
economies of scale – could be achieved via production for a wider market,
the range and scope of economic activity expanded, and with it the possi-
bilities for social policy. The first consequence here was a step up in the opti-
mum size of states; Britain and France created ‘single markets’ by removing
local obstacles to trade, while Germany moved from a Customs Union to a
single state. However, the needs of the new societies went beyond these
steps and gradually, from the 1860s onwards, regulatory international bod-
ies were established: the International Telegraphic Union of 1865; the estab-
lishment of an International Bureau of Weights and Measures in 1875; and
the International Labour Office in 1901 (Murphy 1994). In the twentieth
century, the League and UN systems 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. Each
of these new institutions grew out of the exercise of sovereign powers, but
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each constituted a diminution of sovereignty, in the sense that here we have
powers which can only be exercised effectively by a degree of pooling of
sovereignty.
Moreover, this process of institutionalized regulation does not simply
involve the new social and economic forces of the last two centuries. It is
also the case that the most basic external capacity of the state – the capacity
to make war – is now regulated, albeit somewhat ineffectively, in a way that
would have been difficult to believe 150 years ago. The various Hague and
Geneva Conventions, the legal restraints of the UN Charter, and the
emergence of customary restraints on the employment of force do place
some inhibitions on the use of military power. In short, what these reflec-
tions suggest is that, although the world lacks government (because states
have been unwilling to surrender their juridical status as sovereign) their
attempts to rule effectively and exercise their political sovereignty have
created extensive networks of global ‘governance’ – a somewhat archaic
word which originally was synonymous with government, but which has
been pressed into service as a convenient term for the collective impact of
the various disparate quasi-governmental institutions which have prolifer-
ated (internally and externally) over the last century or more (Rosenau and
Czempiel 1992). In this chapter the basic institutional framework of global
governance will be examined, along with some theories of international
cooperation – functionalism, neo-functionalism, federalism, regime theory
and collective security.
One final caveat; the relevance of ‘global governance’ varies quite dra-
matically from issue to issue and from one part of the world to another. It
would be a mistake to see the growth of global governance as a steady
process encroaching on all areas of international life and all regions of
the world. There are many parts of the world where a savage Hobbesian
realism is the most accurate way of theorizing politics, domestic and inter-
national, and there are some aspects of international politics where no
states have proved willing to give up their sovereign prerogatives. In short,
and to reiterate an earlier point, 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 exaggerated.