Emerging Global Governance Mechanisms

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Discussion

Anne-Marie Slaughter (interviewed by Bergruen Institute):

* Gilman: You published “A New World Order” 17 years ago, arguing that we already have a far-reaching global governance system, just not the one that people typically think we have. This system is made up of global networks of government officials coordinating and cooperating to tackle all sorts of shared problems, from transnational crime to constitutional jurisprudence to regulating financial markets. What’s your assessment of how these networks have fared in the years since the book came out? Do we need new ones to tackle the challenges of today and tomorrow?

Slaughter: There are definitely new ones. In the financial arena, for example, the Financial Stability Board — which emerged out of the global networks of insurance supervisors, securities regulators, finance ministers and central bankers — was essential during the 2008 financial crisis. We would not have gotten through the crisis without it.

What I left out of the book were cities. I knew they were there and I gestured at them. But since then, cities have become far more important. On terrorism, health, climate, equity and inequality, we can’t only work at the national level. City governments have a huge role to play.


* Blake: Yet nation-states remain institutionally oriented toward other nation-states and towards the formal intergovernmental fora, like the U.N. How much of a barrier is this to achieving a fully networked world?

Slaughter: Much of this is due to the formation of officials’ professional identities: what they studied, what they’ve done in their careers. The pathway for diplomats is to go into government or maybe into an international organization. This shapes how people see the world: as a world of states, which is definitely how the State Department sees it.

There’s also a divide in the issues that people learn about. Diplomats study war and peace and global commons issues, like freedom of the seas. But you have no training to help you think about vaccines, and certainly not treatments and isolation and all the things that we need to do during a pandemic. Similarly, when you get into the nitty-gritty of climate change — and the behavioral change we have to accomplish in almost every aspect of the way we live, produce and consume — we have to work far below the level of national governments and foreign policy practitioners. Something like the Paris Agreement is important, but only a beginning at best.

By contrast, folks working in city governments often do have the necessary knowledge and experience. I tell my students if I could choose between Nina Hachigian’s job — Los Angeles deputy mayor of international affairs — versus being a midlevel official in the State Department, I’d take Nina’s in a heartbeat, because she’s really at the cutting edge.

This also means that we need to rethink security outside the state-centric framework that we are used to. Governments with nuclear weapons still have the capacity to destroy the planet, but that threat is not what affects most people in their everyday lives. Health and climate are the paradigms for security in this century, in the same way that world wars were the paradigms for the 20th century.

What’s key is to get people away from thinking strictly in terms of “international,” which connotes government-to-government interaction and state versus non-state, and instead to think in terms of the interconnected global. Our kids are much more keyed into thinking that way. Psychologically, my generation (I’m 62) started out with separation, and then figured out connection; by contrast, recent generations start connected. The idea of an interconnected ecosystem comes naturally to them because they were connected from the beginning. Not all connections are good, of course, so they also have to figure out separation and boundaries."

(https://www.noemamag.com/networked-planetary-governance/)