June, 2007

The “Thickening” of Global Government

I agree with Kal that the combination of a shift to multipolarity, combined with the “thickening” of global governance structures, leads us to a very uncertain future. Simply put, an increase in the number of great powers will increase the likelihood of forum creation and forum shopping. The normative effects of this […]

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The Consequences of Institutional Proliferation

Let me respond to two points made in recent posts. First, Ann’s argument that no one knows what China will become, and that China is undergoing dramatic political and social as well economic change, is surely correct. I have no great knowledge of China and am the first to admit it. My only point was […]

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Notes on China

With regard to China — having spent the past year in Singapore, where people spend a LOT of time thinking about China’s future roles, I think Kal has laid out just a few of the many possible futures. No one, including the Chinese, really has any idea what kind of great power China will […]

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Is the EU Special? Are NGOs Agenda-Setters?

I have progressed in my career by adhering to a few basic maxims: be as parsimonious as possible in developing a theory, be as detailed as possible in the presentation of evidence, and don’t get into a debate on Internet governance with Milton Mueller.
I will largely adhere to the third rule here, […]

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Best of the Blogs: Milton Mueller on Internet Governance

Syracuse University information studies professor Milton L. Mueller, author of Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace takes issue with Daniel Drezner’s views on Internet governance in a detailed post on the Internet Governance Project blog.

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What China Portends

One of the interesting points raised in this forum concerns the rise of new great powers, in particular China. Everyone recognizes that China is increasingly significant in global political terms; the harder task is predicting what kind of power China will be and what kind of world China will seek to create as it resumes […]

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Why Should We Care?

There are two threads running through these essays. The first is about who is actually running the world, which probably is of concern mostly to scholars and pundits. The second is, who should be running the world, and toward what ends.
On the first, Dan, I think you don’t really mean your original assertion […]

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Transnational Activists, Democracy Deficits, and the Tragedy of the Institutional Commons

Ann Florini, Jeremy Rabkin, and Kal Raustiala have all provided interesting and challenging counterpoints to the arguments I’ve made in All Politics Is Global. One of the problems with distilling a book into a 2,500 word essay is that a few things get left out — which is why, of course, everyone reading these words […]

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Globalization and Global Governance

“In the main {Drezner’s] argument is persuasive,” writes Kal Raustiala, director of UCLA’s Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations. However, the continued preeminence of states on the world stage “is a bit more ambiguous and complex than Drezner suggests.” Raustiala argues that critics of globalization increasingly “expect more openness, more transparency, more accountability; in other words, a process more like domestic governance.” Raustiala contends that can learn something important by looking to domestic politics: powerful lobbyists and special interests did not emerge because the state was getting weaker. “The rise of interdependence and NGOs in American society didn’t signal the end of the state; it signaled the growth of the state.”

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While “Great States” Sleep

Jeremy A. Rabkin, professor of law at George Mason, writes, “one can accept almost everything [Drezner] says in his essay and still think the challenges we face now are different, in important ways, from the patterns we had become accustomed to in the past.” The collapse of communism and the discrediting of socialism has led to a world in which “states now are so entangled in international regimes — because so entangled in international exchange — that the accepted rules of international economic conduct are now recognized to be very important.” Though the U.S. can in principle block international rules contrary to its overall interests, domestic interests jump at the chance to push their narrow agendas, it is often easier to go along than to fight, and some marginal changes occur simply through neglect. But “marginal changes can add up to sizable effects in the aggregate.”

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Globalization Is Transformative

Ann Florini, director of the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the National University of Singapore and senior fellow at the Brookings Institutions disagrees with Daniel Drezner’s claim that global governance remains dominated by a few great state powers. “We’re heading for a multi-polar system where very different kinds of states, at very different levels of development, will matter,” Florini argues. And, she maintains, “‘regulation’ is no longer done only by governments.” For example, corporations, not states, put international protection of intellectual property rights on the table, but it was small states and pressure from civil society groups that eventually determined effective policy. Florini suggests Drezner’s analysis is confused by an over-simple idea of the interests of great states. “How states define what their interests are is one of the most important ways globalization is affecting outcomes in global rule-making.”

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The Persistent Power of the State in the Global Economy

Drawing from his recent book, All Politics is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes, Tufts University’s Daniel Drezner explains that “for many issues that comprise the daily substance of our lives … the politics have gone global.” However, he argues, the intellectual response to this development has been out of proportion to its real extent. When great powers coordinate on regulatory standards, that may be enough to shift the rest of the globe. But, as Drezner illustrates from example ranging from the Internet to genetically modified foods, when the costs of adjustment are too high for states with economic heft, global regulatory coordination tends not to be forthcoming. In the end, we get neither a “race to the bottom,” nor liberation from the state through jurisdictional competition. “Globalization is not irrelevant to global governance,” Drezner concludes, “but it is not transformative either.”

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