By FnWG Team
Working Paper for the International Workshop
_ Biocivilization for the
_ Sustainability of Life
_ and the Planet
in the run-up to the Rio+20 Conference
_ Rio de Janeiro, 9 to 12 August 2011
Which architecture of power is needed,
_ from the local to global level?
How should we organize? How can we organize in a fair and sustainable manner? How
can we govern effectively? These deceptively simple questions have been troubling
philosophers, jurists and theologians since the dawn of time. These are the questions the
people and their political leaders seek to answer, though it is true that the latter often come
up with different solutions to the former.
Here are some proposals outlined by the authors:
- Organize multi-actor forums by sector.
_ - Form geopolitical groups at the regional level
_ - Create a world governance index
_ - Set up an International Court for the Environment
_ - Put together a volunteer world army, independent from states and governed by international law
I – Introduction
• Processes active in the development and emergence of a new world governance
_ • The contemporary form of an age-old question
_ • Globalization requires an architecture that both incorporates and transcends the
nation-state
_ • The urgent and complex nature of problems is out of step with our governance
mechanisms
_ • Factors promoting and hindering the emergence of a new world governance
_ • A first and vital step: what sort of world society do we want?
II – Proposals for a New World
Governance
• Organize multi-actor forums by sector, the keystone of effective world governance
_ • Form geopolitical groups at the regional level
_ • Create a world governance index
_ • Set up an International Court for the Environment
_ • Put together a volunteer world army, independent from states and governed by international law
_ • Promote local industrial and service networks, connected to the regional and
transnational levels via a system of regional currencies
This document draws on the work carried out by the world governance group of the French Rio+20 collective.
How should we organize? How can we organize in a fair and sustainable manner? How
can we govern effectively? These deceptively simple questions have been troubling
philosophers, jurists and theologians since the dawn of time. These are the questions the
people and their political leaders seek to answer, though it is true that the latter often come
up with different solutions to the former. From ancient Greece to Greater Persia, India to
the unified China and the Aztec and Inca empires, to name but a few, the quest to find the
best possible political organization formed, and continues to form, the basis of all
deliberations on governance, particularly on good governance.
Nonetheless, the huge body of work seeking to find the answer to a problem that defines
the very essence of humanity has focused primarily on the organization of closed, mostly
homogeneous societies. Closed off by their borders and the limits of their state apparatus,
and homogeneous since societies tend to have a dominant culture, including multicultural
societies such as the Ottoman and Inca empires. In modern democratic societies, this
dominant culture, for many years the culture of the Prince, is now the culture of the
majority. Long considered, wrongly or rightly, a factor of conflict, cultural and religious
heterogeneity was the main target for the architects of history's first transnational order,
Westphalia, whose first rule was that the people had to take the same religion as the
Prince.
Political philosophy has almost always set out a spatial limit: the city, kingdom, republic or,
more recently, the nation. The only exceptions to the rule, such as Dante's universal
monarchy and Hobbes' omnipotent republic, were in fact super-states, a city architecture
that these thinkers merely transposed to the global level. The period from the mid-17th to
the late 20th centuries marked the end of empires and the emergence then arrival of the
nation-state. This period only strengthened the feeling that governance was fundamentally
the preserve of the nation-state.
In 1648, a vast cohort of diplomats and jurists brought one of the most atrocious conflicts in
history to an end and established a new governance for Europe. Since then, nations have
adopted a code of conduct that more or less adheres to the Westphalian system. This
system is now dead. We need to mourn it and invent a new political order. But to do so,
we need to develop a proper understanding of the Westphalian system, which can still
serve as a guiding spirit today.
The Peace of Westphalia was first and foremost one of the most successful conflict
resolutions in history, since it put an end to the religious wars that had been poisoning
Europe for over a century. But the Peace of Westphalia accomplished far more: it put a
stop to the church's interference in affairs of state; it introduced a code of conduct for
states by establishing an international law that has continued to expand ever since; it set
out the limits to organized violence by defining the legitimacy of the use of force and
regulating the practice of war; it placed the issue of human rights at the centre of interstate
relations by establishing the principle of national sovereignty and non-interference in
countries' internal affairs; it protected as far as possible the integrity of small states against
the rapacity of larger nations, and proposed a system of counterbalancing forces designed
to prevent the more ambitious states from attempting to seize power.
The Westphalian system began to fall apart in the late 18th century and was in its death
throes in the 20th and 21st. Mainly because it was conceived for Europe and not the entire
world, for monarchies and not republics, for a heterogeneous geopolitical and cultural
system. Nevertheless, the spirit of the Westphalian system continues to guide us in our
quest for a new world governance: the development of international law, defence of human
rights, limitation of violence and regulation of the use of force, search for lasting peace and
establishment of opposition forces still underpin governance in the 21st century. But just as
the 17th century’s break from the past called for a political revolution, the 21st century’s
world of globalization, environmental threats and the problem of inequalities and
sustainability needs fast and real change. Today's governance is planetary, the world
system heterogeneous and diverse. The nation-state, once capable of regulating just about
everything unaided, now needs to call on other actors with other skills. New opposition
forces need to be established, including those that prevent the abuse of new sources of
power. The defense of human rights needs to be rethought, particularly in terms of the
problem of interference and respect of national sovereignty. In short, the death of the
Westphalian system should spark a process of reflection: the process of establishing a
new world governance can only benefit by drawing on the Westphalian approach while
shaking off the sometimes oppressive legacy of the past that, still today, prevents us from
moving forwards.
Paradoxically, the fall of the final empire, the Soviet Union, coincided with the emergence of
the idea, if not the necessity, of formulating a transnational governance: “world
governance”. The issue of war and peace has of course always triggered deliberations on
relations between political entities, commonly termed international relations, but such
thinking has tended to stay centered on the state. Furthermore, the first attempt to go
beyond traditional methods for managing international relations was state-based: the
League of Nations and its offspring, the United Nations. These bodies comprised—and
continue to comprise in the case of the UN—an association of states, which explains the
limits inherent to their basic structure. The G8 and G20, whose original architecture dates
back to the 1970s, are also organized on a state basis. They have a simpler architecture
than the League or UN and, although more recent, a more archaic philosophy, since they
have turned from the UN's semi-democracy to adopt an aristocratic political model.
Today's major revolution, and it truly is one, is rooted in two simultaneous and partially
interconnected events. The first is globalization. Globalization is not a new phenomenon,
but by the end of the 20th century reached a critical threshold where the various
phenomena that define and spring from the globalization process went far beyond states'
powers to control them, particularly since these states continue to function according to
the national interest principle, including within the European Union.
The second phenomenon initially emerged in the 1950s with the threat of nuclear
catastrophe, then was given fresh impetus in the 1980s by the first indicators of rapid and
troubling environmental damage. The phenomenon is a growing awareness that the
industrialization of the last two centuries, and all the accompanying excesses, have led to a
critical stage in history when humans are not only likely to self-destruct as a species, but
also to destroy the planet.
Globalization and this growing awareness point to a harsh reality: on the one hand, we are
facing entirely new, extremely complex and urgent problems, including migrations, financial
crises and ecological imbalances; on the other hand, we do not have the governance
mechanisms we need to solve these problems. The 1992 Rio Summit and the summits that
followed did, to an extent, respond to the first aspect by setting out the nature of the
problem and alerting humanity to the urgency of these issues, whilst identifying them
systematically and with precision.
However, progress in terms of governance has been extremely disappointing until now The Copenhagen Summit provides a striking example of how much ground we still have to
cover in this area and the urgent need to draw up plans for an effective and efficient world
governance.
However, we must not give up quite the opposite. The fact that a — major meeting is being
held twenty years after the first earth summit should be an ideal opportunity for a frank and
in-depth exploration of the issues of world governance, since it is truly at the heart of the future of both the human race and the planet. If there is any lesson to be learned from the
last twenty years, it is that, as things stand, we do not have the structures needed to
tackle and solve all these currently converging problems, problems that leave us seemingly
powerless. States are the natural key stakeholders in formulating new plans, starting with
the major powers, the emerging powers and the United Nations. But they also represent, to
some extent, a force of inertia that we urgently need to offset and transcend.
How can we approach this issue of world governance? It essentially asks the same two
questions as all political philosophies: how to maintain that which needs maintaining? And
how to change that which needs changing in our governance mechanisms? The
overarching goal being to usher in an era of enhanced political action that tracks,
anticipates even, historical changes.
The way the world has changed over recent decades has rendered obsolete the approach
to international relations founded on national interests and the balance of power, an
approach the UN system has attenuated without, however, having managed to change the
foundations.
Overall, the practice of international relations is amoral: it looks to the interests of the most
powerful countries, sometimes to the detriment of the general interest or of the interests of
the weaker countries that get in the way. Although everyone's interests do sometimes
coincide, this tends to be accidental rather than the result of a concerted desire to act for
the good of the greatest possible number. The reorganization of the geopolitical world with
the arrival of emerging powers is modifying the status quo, but is not changing the way
states behave.
In the wake of the Second World War and with the creation of the UN, the Westphalian
concept of the state in internal terms as a unique entity with a legitimate — monopoly of
power, and in external terms as a self-contained, rational and sovereign actor—was
strongly challenged. The two main arguments were the demand for increased
representation of non-state actors in the international system, and the gradual awareness
of the impossibility of dividing up the environmental issue between internal and external
political spheres.
This undeniable interdependence between states in several areas—such as the economy,
the environment and health issues—and supremacy of the principle of collective general
interest require not only greater cooperation within the international system but also
recognition of the key role played by international solidarity and its actors during decision-making
processes.
Despite the capacity to adopt agreements and enhance cooperation produced by the
creation of international organizations, the huge shortfall between these organizations and
the challenges facing humanity is clear for all to see.
As far as civil society is concerned, years of commitment and mobilization in the fight
against social inequalities, climate change and the erosion of biological diversity as well as
demands for a fairer distribution of wealth have led to real progress in terms of
development. However, the situation facing our planet and most of the world's population
remains highly unstable, as illustrated by phenomena such as famines, lack of access to
essential services, human rights violations and ecosystem devastation.
This shameful situation was only exacerbated by the financial crisis that broke out in 2008.
A vast operation using public funds to save financial institutions and, to a lesser degree,
investments and thereby trigger global economic recovery was set up without any
preliminary analysis of the real causes behind the crisis: the design of the system itself.
Furthermore, competition law governing economic activities has become the benchmark
for settling international disputes. The World Trade Organization is currently the only
international organization with a binding system for settling differences. This leads it to take
decisions in areas other than trade. The lack or incapacity of arbitration authorities means
that the WTO establishes jurisprudence that defines international relations without
preliminary negotiations and gives trade a dominant position in international law.
Greater recognition of the key role played by non-state actors has again, and more
insistently, raised the question of transparency and the democratization of international
organizations. Civil society actors, often also operational actors in international cooperation
actions, contribute to these organizations' decision-making proceedings from the sidelines.
In addition to a lack of attachment to national interests that offers it greater legitimacy
when tackling cross-border questions, civil society also brings grassroots expertise to the
table.
Although development issues remain crucial, there is currently no arena for international
negotiation on this subject. The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) does not manage
to play its role as coordinator of UN development activities. Similarly, the Commission on
Sustainable Development failed to establish a link between the various economic, social
and political aspects of sustainable development.
This is why it is vital that formulation of a brand new system of world governance goes
further and asks the question of how to build a fair and responsible world society. But how
can ‘good’ be defined? How can we define a good (world) society? This ethical and cultural
aspect is crucial. We will only learn to manage our differences by exploring our capacities
and our limits. And it is only by establishing the ethical basis of a world governance that we
will be able to answer the fundamental question: is the other separate from us or part of
us? In practical terms, the great ethical and cultural question we need to answer before
endeavoring to build true world governance is the following: how can we rebuild the
universal using civilizations as our building blocks? If we tackle these difficult but fascinating
questions without any preconceptions, we will really be able to take a step forwards.
Rio+20 provides us with the opportunity to do so.
In a world where the effects of globalization and environmental threats transcend the
framework of national policies, it is vital to redefine the rules of conduct for states. To do
so, we need to lay down the ethical foundations of the practice of international relations
that defends general and collective interests, for all and with the participation of all, rather
than national interests.
The application of moral standards to international relations takes the form of a model that
advocates multilateralism over unilateralism, cooperation over coercion, defense of human
rights and reduction of inequalities over quest for profit and draining the poorest countries'
natural resources.
A transformation of this kind requires that the principles of world governance be revised.
To take one example, the system we have inherited is rooted in the principle of respect for
national sovereignty and non-interference in a country's internal affairs. But is this principle
still valid or desirable? Two recent examples, Japan and Libya, have raised this question
but without resulting in any real desire to redefine the rules of the game. More generally,
we now need to establish new principles based on notions that, until now, have been
almost totally absent from international relations: collective responsibility, equity and
solidarity.
In short, these new principles of governance needs to transcend national borders by
encouraging states to take responsibility for their individual and collective obligations
towards the general interest and the interests of the planet and its inhabitants. These
principles raise new difficulties in terms of the legitimacy of collective action, authority, the
exercise of citizenship that respects human rights, and the resolution of tensions between
the local, national and global levels.
The challenge is to formulate an architecture for governance suited to the current situation
and based on the principle of finding solutions to the problems currently facing us. We need
to set out the framework for a new world governance using these problems as a
springboard, with dedicated mechanisms and institutions for solving them. We have seen
the capacity to identify these problems over the least twenty years. And we have seen
that the existing institutions and mechanisms are not only unsuitable but also, more
importantly, incapable of adapting, or at least, adapting far enough and fast enough.
So, how to move forwards from this basis? A first element concerns the actors. It is clear
that non-state actors are stakeholders in the formulation of a new architecture that takes
into account the globalized economy. These actors, particularly those operating in civil
society, as well as businesses that respect the environment and workers' rights now have
a key role to play. The quicker they contribute to developing a world governance, the
quicker it will emerge.
? Proposal: Organize multi-actor forums by sector, the
keystone of effective world governance
Multi-Stakeholder Forums, comprising all actors in a given sector or domain, are a
promising innovation. The advantage of this type of structure is that it can reach beyond
the purely territorial framework. It strengthens the local roots of actors, workers, business
leaders and local authority leaders, but by positioning itself in the global framework of the
sector, it extends across territories since it promotes actors in their environment, from
local context to global network. This two-tiered territorial/multi-stakeholder forum structure
could be the keystone of a new architecture for effective world governance.
Second is the question of geopolitical world governance groups. It would seem logical for
major regional or multi-continental groups to play a key role in the new construct that is
world governance.
? Proposal: Form geopolitical groups at the regional
level
One of the key features that already marks the new architecture for world governance is
the reconfiguration of territories at the regional, sub-continental level. It questions borders,
although the context is not yet ripe to ask for borders to be removed. However, we can
already clearly see the circulation of human, economic, trade and technological flows that
ignore borders. It is difficult to talk of the specific features of these processes in general
terms, since they are highly diverse. The European Union, UNASUR in South American,
ASEAN in Asia and the African Union are groups with varying economic and political
dimensions, but we now know that the new regional groups are more flexible, doing more
to adapt to the market configuration and political or diplomatic alliances. The transnational
reconfiguration of territories also corresponds more closely to the new renewable energy
formats, centered on linking several sources that require an integrated system for supplying
wind, photo-voltaic, solar thermal, tidal and biomass energy, and with an ‘energy territory’
extending far beyond borders. The key to strengthening these new economic, political,
cultural and ecological territories will be to find other mechanisms, looking beyond states
alone, but without overlooking them.
The concept of indicators or indexes is highly controversial. It is a fact that indicators,
including the IMF and World Bank versions, are exploited for often dubious ends. Without
going into the way in which indexes are used, they need to be designed and executed with
great caution. Despite the many flaws that go hand in hand with the batteries of indicators
covering every field, they can nevertheless be put to good use.
? Proposal: Create a world governance index
Initiatives promoting new indicators for wealth, production and sustainable development
have already been launched. We need to develop world governance indicators using the
same approach. This task will require a great deal of work and thought, particularly in
developing transnational indicators that look beyond national data, practically the only
figures currently available. The World Governance Index (WGI) could eventually become
the key benchmark in this sphere.
We need to develop existing international regulations, or even establish supranational
regulations, both to provide a legitimate definition for a climate order and the norms to
ensure that it endures, and to regulate the various conflicts resulting from the disposal of
limited resources in terms of energy, water and fertile land.
? Proposal: Set up an International Court for the
Environment
The need to impose restrictions that are accepted and respected by the various parties
entails establishing legal norms that are perceived as legitimate and accepted as such.
Even if national states succeed in agreeing on new regulations that establish obligations to
be respected by all nations and companies on the planet, for example, in areas such as
greenhouse gas emissions, pollution or energy consumption, this global law will still need to
be obeyed. To do so, monitoring bodies need to be set up to observe who is and is not
enforcing the rules. Furthermore, supranational police and justice bodies need to have the
power to penalize states or companies, both national and transnational, that feel able to
flout rules laid down by global law.
The need for a world armed force, capable of putting a stop to wars currently being waged
and new wars that are brewing not just in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, but on every
continent, has become truly urgent. This need is particularly strong for populations who are
the victims of bloody conflicts, but it affects the whole world community, which needs such
a force to avoid wars and, quite possibly, prevent its own self-destruction (for example, if
nuclear power is fully unleashed).
? Proposal: Put together a volunteer world army,
independent from states and governed by international
law
The problem is that we have not (yet?) built a world community. As we have pointed out,
the UN does not fully represent this community. So how to proceed? Under whose
authority should the world army be placed? It is clear that placing it under NATO's
command would be inappropriate to say the least. The question of building the world
community thus ties into the reconfiguration of territories at the regional and continental
level. We need to achieve a new interlinking of territories, without making them too rigid or
dependent on states alone. But this world army must not be scattered across the different
territories. This gives a clear example of the distance that separates us from a sustainable
architecture for world governance. In any event, proposing a volunteer world armed force
independent from states and governed by international law (which does already exist)
takes us further in our deliberations, since it makes us think about the framework that
would hold and protect the new architecture for world governance in a safer and more
peaceful world.
The issues of ecology, the economy including the green — economy—and social
inequalities, particularly extreme poverty, are all elements that could be used individually or
collectively to draw up a roadmap laying down the first markers for a world governance
centered on protecting the environment and lessening inequalities.
? Proposal: Promote local industrial and service
networks, connected to the regional and transnational
levels via a system of regional currencies
corresponding to different types of goods
(goods) that are used up as they are consumed, those that exist in finite quantity, those
that can be divided and shared but exist in indeterminate quantity, and those that multiply
when shared). Putting all these goods in the same capitalist basket is the overwhelming
mistake made by neoliberal ideology. The newly emerging economy must therefore
develop not only a new production and consumption system, but also a trading system
based on values other than the quest for profit, values such as solidarity, responsibility,
dignity and well being.