Hakan Altinay
Nonresident Senior Fellow - GlobalEconomy and Development
Management of transnational issues throughvoluntary international cooperation has come to be referred as GlobalGovernance. The term sounds like global government, but it is really theopposite, as it refers to management of the transnational challenges in theabsence of a world government. Neither transnational challenges, nor attemptsto manage them are new. We have had things like the Rhodian Law of the Sea,which provided a framework to govern maritime losses. The Hawala system hasworked over a thousand years through the proactive participation of countlessactors across South Asia, Middle East and the Mediterranean. The HanseaticLeague provided an early glimpse of true multilateralism. Nevertheless, thedepth and breath of current international cooperation around transnationalissues is unprecedented.
Let’s review some of the manifestations ofour existing international cooperation: It took several decades to develop asystem to have telegrams across national borders. And yet, today owners of fourbillion mobile phones have a reasonable expectation that their phones will workseamlessly when they travel to another country. World GSM operators have agreedto sensible standard practices such as every operator dedicating 112 toemergency services.
At a mundane level, money can be wiredacross countries with tremendous speed and little inconvenience. SWIFT, theSociety for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, and IBAN,International Bank Account Number, are two systems which expanded to many atask which would not have been routine even for Rothschild.
We cooperate around the internet activelyand every day. Tremendous amount of data, information and knowledge is open toall 6.7 billion of us. Encylopédistes of the 18th century would beawe-struck by what is available through Wikipedia, JSTOR, Google Scholar andthe like. Popular VOIP facilities such as Skype have rendered internationaltelephony, a facility not available to Napoleon or Cengiz Khan, practicallycost free for billions. CreaticeCommons is becoming a popular alternative toconventional trademarks practices. And, we all have access to trans-borderbroadcasting through satellite TVs, which makes diverse ideas, lives andsufferings accessible to great many, and nurturing awareness and a feeling ofcommon humanity along the way.
We have assumed that traditional sovereigncompetencies of national states have been more resistant to internationalcooperation schemes. However, countries have the facility to ask othercountries to apprehend criminal suspects through Interpol, which reports tohave enabled 5,600 arrests in 2008. This is not a minor achievement.
We have rules governing safety at sea,pollution, and even a system for a global maritime distress, search and rescuesystem. There exists an audit scheme, albeit a voluntary one, to monitorcompliance. Furthermore, we have a way to allocate satellite orbits, and thesystem is working with relatively little discontent.
We have mechanisms for global healthchallenges and even some vital successes. Small pox has been eradicated thoughinternational cooperation; And polio may be next. The world has had thewherewithal to come up with ad hoc responses when traditional mechanisms didnot suffice; The Global Fund to Fight TB, AIDS and Malaria is one such ad hocresponse with encouraging results. We have also managed to cooperate to protectthe genetic diversity of our main crops, and have established the Global CropDiversity Trust.
The world has demonstrated crucial capacityto identify ozone depletion as a potential problem with global consequences,and was capable of hammering out a set-up where the ozone depleting gases havebeen phased out. The basic grammar of the ozone problem is not very differentfrom the climate change predicament, and the Vienna Convention and the Montrealprotocol are no small accomplishments.
The first example of an internationalnormative campaign for global rules was the anti-slavery movements of 19thcentury, and their efforts took more than 50 years to produce the firstinternational treaty on the issue. Another seemingly gargantuan task was aroundthe land mines, one of the most popular ammunition of armed forces around theworld. In the latter case, it took a mere seven years for a global consensus tobe achieved, and for this once-popular weapon to be outlawed. There is now anew movement to establish norms concerning the trade and transfer of smallweapons, which are responsible for many more deaths than nuclear weapons.
Another very significant development wasthe formation of the International Criminal Court. Not all the states are partyto the International Criminal Court, and yet the mere existence of ICC wouldsurpass even the most optimistic utopias of the multilateralists from the lastcentury.
Amartha Sen has recently warned us againstexcessive fascination with ideal justice at the expense of multiple andseemingly disjointed ways of decreasing injustice. The patterns of globalcooperation of the last decades seem to support Sen’s argument. Progress hasbeen uneven and less than ideal, but, on balance, we should be encouraged bythe advance of international cooperation and global governance on thesemultiple tracks. The more visible absence of progress is the exception, andshould not be the basis of a debilitating cynicism; We need to celebrate ouraccomplishments and in the process muster the energy to overcome remainingchallenges to a fuller global cooperation.
Two glaring gaps in the existing globalgovernance schemes are effective procedures for Responsibility-to-Protect, andof course a framework to thwart climate change. One of the earliest modernattempts to set transnational norms was around proper conduct during the timeof war. The first Geneva Convention dates back to 1864. Humanity has been awareof the ultimate crime of genocide, and has profusely sworn not to let it occuragain since 1940s. Yet, what has come to be known as the Responsibility toProtect, has been systematically abdicated. As long as humanity is organizedprimarily through national states, there is an inherent problem to sendnational armies to harm’s way without clear national interest. Yet, that is notthe only option we have. Humans have always taken up arms in other countriesfor their beliefs. The international brigade at the Spanish Civil war is themost celebrated example, but the practice is older. UN needs to have amechanism to accept volunteers; ensure adequate representation of all regionsso that no particular group ends up dominating the UN Army at any givenconflict; and, of course ensure their discipline during their mission as thereare too many examples of presumed rescuers harassing the very people they aremeant to rescue. One can even imagine a set up where not just UNSC butUNSG or the college of all former UNSGs can endorse a given mission, so thataction cannot be held hostage to veto by P5.
Climate change is clearly the most pressingissue facing us. Business as usual means that we will soon cross the point ofno return in triggering a chain reaction of catastrophic results for humanexistence and civilization on Planet Earth. The qualities of the underlyingdynamics make climate change an especially difficult challenge: There is some30 years between cause and effect; that is carbon emissions and the fullconsequences of those emissions. The fact that significant percentages ofadults continue to smoke demonstrates that humans find it difficult to give upimmediate gratification in anticipation of deferred costs in 30 years. As such,climate change is the collective action problem from hell. After years ofneglect, denial and foot dragging, humanity now seems to have harnessed thewherewithal to address climate change. No other challengewe face brings home our epic interdependence. Therefore, a solution to theclimate change challenges could serve as the paradigm for solving other globalpublic goods problems.
Ours have been a story of trial and error,and slippages as we found ways to cooperate across border, a process which webegan thousands of years ago. The audit of current state of internationalcooperation and global governance patterns show that perseverance, creativity,pragmatism and vision are the answer, not despair or cynicism.
