Global governance refers to transnational networks, institution building, norm entrepreneurship, regime creation and the management of global change. It covers many issues, such as women’s rights, human rights, development, democratisation, the environment, security and investments. It has worked out some recent achievements include the treaty banning landmines, the Kyoto climate convention, the international criminal court, the World Trade Organisation, and the ‘new generation’ UN peacekeeping operations.
However, it is power that determines whose interests, rules and standards become ‘global’. Thus, while global governance requires tolerance and accommodation of conflicting interests across national, racial, class, gender and ethnic boundaries, it is often the preferences of the most powerful actors that are accommodated.
1. Threat to Nation-States:
Both Globalisation and Global Governance go together. They are proving a threat to the nation-states. It should be accepted that both of them have made some positive and fruitful contribution to the entire world. But there is also a great need to overcome and remove the evils caused by it. The world has to be made safe and livable. If Globalisation aims at dismantling nation-states and democracies, it has got to be opposed in every possible manner.
Success of a nation-state depended on correct mixing of:
(a) Identity,
(b) Legitimacy, and
(c) Security.
All of them began to erode during the era of globalisation. Both Soviet Union and the US exercised the right of intervention in many sovereign countries. Few members and fewer votes from the developing countries find a place on the boards of the IMF and the World Bank.
Subscribing to the triad of human rights, free markets and democracy has been put as a condition precedent to them. Owing to expansion the TNCs (Transnational Corporations) and NGOs (non-governmental organisations) legitimacy of nation-states has lost their former shine. Global business has neutralised national boundaries. A part of power and identity has shifted upwards from the nation-states to the global agencies. About 90 per cent of foreign news and information in the print media is controlled by four news agencies located in the North.
The ‘spectre of globalisation’ haunts the earth. It has raised doubts about the relevance, role and even the need for nation-states at the end of the twentieth century. If this trend continues, there would be neither ‘state’ nor ‘nation’ at least in developing countries.
2. Threat to Democracies:
Globalisation is undermining democracy. Global governance concentrates economic power in the hands of a few individuals and corporate bodies. GATT/WTO, IMF, OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), World Bank (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development), United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD) and other financial institutions manage global political economy.
The World Bank, IMF and WTO are expected to work in a coherent manner for it. Every member of the WTO has to accept in its entirety a common set of rules and disciplines covering goods, services and intellectual property. The WTO has legal and institutional foundation for enforcement of its decisions on disputes in the areas of goods, services and the protection of intellectual property rights. Its General Council makes appropriate arrangements for effective cooperation with other intergovernmental organisations that have responsibilities related to the WTO.
Other international organisations and agencies mentioned below also operate in regulating the global economy:
1. World Intellectual Property Organization;
2. International Organization for Standardization (lOS);
3. Coadex Alimentarious Commission;
4. International Office of Epizootics; and
5. International Plant Protection Office.
All political power and capacity to decide on behalf of global community is with the western world because of the ‘unequal’ nature of distribution of economic power among the nation-states, including making of important appointments on these bodies.
Global inequality has become quite acute. Structural inequality of power between the few developed centres of capitalism and a large majority of peripheral developing states has changed the whole agenda of contemporary discourse where the very relevance of nation-state as a centre of decision-making for national management has become questionable. According to the Pearson Commission this gap has been further widened because of the concentration of finance capital in a ‘few capitalist countries’.
Globalisation has set people to think about the political institutions, such as, state, democracy and civil society.
David Held, in search of a supra-national democracy at global level, visualises a new international order involving:
(i) The emergence of a global economic system which stretches beyond the control of a single state (even of dominant states);
(ii) The expansion of network of transnational linkages and communications;
(iii) The enormous growth in international organisation which can limit the scope for action of most powerful states; and
(iv) The development of a global military order can reduce the range of policies available to governments and their citizens.
One can witness a crisis of global civilisation. It involves a counter-revolution of the powerful against the weak. In much of the Third World the processes of urbanisation and economic decline have gone with social chaos, anomie and nihilism. Its leaders in theory are accountable to the governed, in practice, they are accountable to market forces, most notably debt structures and structural adjustment programmes. Their major problem is how to make economic revitalisation compatible with democratisation.
The international funding institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF and the ADB pressurise the recipient countries for removal of subsidies on even essential sectors like health, education, water, irrigation, agriculture, electricity and free use of public infrastructure such as roads. There is the question of quality versus quantity. The fundamental challenge of globalisation to the state and governance is to become accountable and responsible to the ruled and also to the global institutions.
However, to counterbalance these trends, Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State has suggested steps to make major progress in the emerging international order by involving all key nations to say to themselves that this is our system. This is not an American system or anybody’s system. This is something we participated in creating it and we have an interest in maintaining it.
3. Threat to Environment and Culture:
With weakening inter-state borders, threats to environment are increasing. With the resistance of the US and Australia and indifference of Russia and China towards Kyoto Protocol (to enforce emission norms for prevention Green House effect) and Copenhagen Protocol (to ensure ozone layer protection from chlorofluoro carbons), the ecosystem is under grave threat. Globalisation has led to a new world trade market in environmental waste. The state finds it difficult to balance the trade-off between economic growth and environment preservation.
Some other major consequences of globalisation have been:
(i) The dislocation of traditional religions and belief systems;
(ii) The beginning of the disintegration of the traditional social fabrics and shared norms by consumerism, cyber-culture, new-fangled religions and changing work ethics and work rhythms;
(iii) The fast spreading anomie forcing an ever incr
easing number of individuals to fall back upon the easily accessible pretentious religious banalities; and
(iv) Religion related creation and acceleration of extremist, fundamentalist and terrorist tendencies in the Third World countries.