Governance in the Context of Globalisation and Regionalisation

• Author: Anthony Payne
• Pages: 147-163

Governance in the Context of Globalisation and Regionalisation 147

the central argument of this paper is that the governance of the international

political community at the beginning of the 21st century is more complex

than ever before. It has become so as a consequence of several, intersecting

developments within the structure of the inter-national, inter-state, inter-

economy order which grew out of Europe to spread across the world on the

basis of the widespread attractiveness of the national-statist model of human

destiny. For all the genuine turbulence of this order, generated by economic and

political conflict between states, it was structurally relatively stable. Analytically,

we knew how it was organised and governed and what were its core dynamics.

In the current era, we are no longer so sure where we stand. We can easily

enough define governance, as James Rosenau has done, as connoting “spheres

of authority. . .at all levels of human activity....that amount to systems of rule in

which goals are pursued through the exercise of control” (Rosenau, 1997: 145);

we can certainly recognise the greater complexity of contemporary governance

arrangements, as averred earlier; and we can seek to map these arrangements, as

will be attempted. But we also know that we are still in the middle of intensive

processes of economic and political change which are far from slowing down,

let alone coming to a finish.

These changes have generated equally intensive intellectual debates within

international political economy. Four such debates stand out, each focused

around a widely used, but inevitably contested, concept: namely, globalism,

globalisation, regionalism and regionalisation. These are all concepts which we

cannot avoid using, but which we must specify and clarify if they are not in the

end to obfuscate analysis and understanding. In particular, globalism and

globalisation as a pair and regionalism and regionalisation as a pair are

sometimes deployed interchangeably, which is to miss an important opportunity

to draw extra subtleties of analysis out of the available vocabulary. The approach

of this paper will therefore be to take up positions in respect of each of these

debates as a necessary, ground-clearing prelude to discussion of some of the key,

governance In the context of

globalIsatIon anD regIonalIsatIon

ANTHONY PAYNE

CHAPTER EIGHT

148 GOVERNANCE: THEORETICAL ASPECTS

emerging characteristics of the contemporary governance of the international

political community. A brief concluding section will then endeavour to draw

out some of the policy implications of the foregoing analysis.

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Globalism is best understood as a state-led political project designed to

organise the global order along defined economic and political lines (Gamble &

Payne, 1996). It aspires to, but does not necessarily have to achieve, global

hegemony, which in turn is best understood in the neo-Gramscian usage of that

term, as classically set out by Robert Cox. For Cox, hegemony means “more

than the dominance of a single world power”. Instead, it is understood as

dominance of a particular kind where the dominant state creates an order

based ideologically on a broad measure of consent, functioning according to

general principles that in fact ensure the continuing supremacy of the leading

state or states and leading social classes but at the same time offer some

measure or propsect of satisfaction to the less powerful (Cox, 1987: 7).

Thus “there can be dominance without hegemony; hegemony is one possible

form dominance may take” (Cox, 1981: 153).

Crucially, in this perspective hegemony is seen as bringing together both coercive

and consensual elements of power. Although the novelty of the neo-Gramscian

approach to international political economy compared to mainstream (neorealist

and neoliberal) analysis lies in the attention it gives to the role of ideology in

establishing and maintaining a hegemonic global order, it does also theorise the

objective, material elements of power which lead to the capacity for the exercise,

ultimately, of coercion. Power is conceived, in short, as a centaur, part man, part

beast, with different elements employed in different political situations.

This understanding of globalism as a putatively hegemonic project helps to

unlock many features of the current phase of the global order. It identifies two

hegemonies in modern history: (i) that of Pax Britannica, broadly the period

from 1789 to the 1870s when the British state transmitted the norms of liberal

economics and politics to much of the rest of the world; and (ii) that of Pax

Americana, broadly the period from 1945 to the early 1970s when the United

States presided over the “golden years” of post-war growth and peace. Each in

turn came to be undermined. US hegemony could not, in the end, survive the

combination of enormous expenditure on the war in Vietnam, the most

ambitious expression of its globalist ambition, and the unwillingness of its

politicians to tax their people sufficiently to cover the costs of the global operations

of the US state. President Nixon”s devaluation of the dollar in August 1971 and