Abstract
Climate change, digitalization, and urbanization are key global challenges that can only be dealt with glocally, namely by finding individual and community-based solutions and apply internationally and globally agreed norms, for example agreed reduction of emission to lower global heating. The user, citizen, and consumer are the main stakeholder and problem solver in respect to glocal challenges. The challenges is how we transform the state-based International Human Rights Regime, Democracy and Rule of Law into a glocal one, beyond national and territorial and administrative powers and the classical concept of statehood. Principles of good governance, universal jurisdiction, and customary international human rights law are principle and practices that help to glocalize governance in all aspects of life.
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There are a vast number of indicators to measure the interlinkage between global and local, including local habits, customs, and preferences such as music, pop culture, the food, or faith-based rituals. A prominent example of glocal diffusion is the blinking colorful Christmas Tree found in every shopping mall between Shanghai and Santiago de Chile.
To identify glocal challenges, that emerge from the dramatic diffusion between the local and the global, we can start by looking at societal dynamics locally, including the vastly growing number of angry young people and the rising number of local violent and armed conflicts, that are prominent symptoms if not outcome of bad governance. Half of the world’s population is under the age of 30 and today live far from fair opportunities and social mobility, and that can be the cause for dramatic and not always peaceful changes in society. Today, we find a 50:50 split globally, with one side leaning toward democratic regimes, the other half toward authoritarianism. As it seems, the ‘end of history and victory of democracy’ is currently on parole or taking a break (Fukuyama, 1992).
In response to this, in 2021 US President Biden proposed a New Global Deal to bring the democratic welfare state back in and summon a ‘coalition of democracies’ worldwide, marking a turning point in the debate on democracies in crisis through ‘backsliding,’ norm-breaking, and otherwise dysfunctional democratic practices.Footnote 1 And the EU responded to the backslide of democracy by launching the Global Gateway Initiative (GGI) that will allocate billions of Euros in investments, including for education and democracy.
Whenever there is a push for change, there is resistance. At the same time the EU was opening its borders to migrants and calling for more diversity and democratic reforms, elsewhere in the world, Russian President Vladimir Putin was resuming his life-long leadership as Father of the Nation in 2012, and Xi Jinping was installing himself as the ‘Eternal President’ of China in 2013. Around that time, Islamists were taking power across the Middle East, Afghanistan, and the Sahel and in Turkey and Hungary democratic standards were dramatically in decline. In 2015, de facto King Mohammed bin Salam ibn Abe al-Aziz of Saudi Arabia tightened his power to become an absolute leader; and Recep Tayyip Erdogan pushed himself to the presidency in Turkey, after staging a coup in 2016. India’s absolute Prime Minister Modi staged a military coup in Kashmir, manifesting his Hindu-nationalistic policies against Muslims and the West in 2019. What they all have in common is that they counter the desires of their youth and social mobility. Back in 2014, during a state visit to Europe, Chinese President Xi highlighted that all that matters is the outcome of governance, not the mode of governance: ‘The fruit may look the same, but the taste is quite different.’Footnote 2 Glocal governance is the complete opposite of that, it changes the mode and way decision are taken and implemented. It is mode of governance that looks into the medium and long term outcome, not short term. For short term authoritarian forms of governance it is important that people are quiet, seemingly happy, and kept busy, in order to keep stability in a country. Xi emphasized this mode of governance in the CPC’s White Paper from 2021 with the title: ‘Democracy That Works.’ There he highlighted that China is not refusing the Western way of life in general, but its mode of governance of achieving it, namely through general elections, changing leaderships, and free media. Hence, China’s ability to adapt to Western lifestyles in all aspects of architecture and day-to-day life is breathtaking; but to achieve Western standards or long term sustainable prosperity which China so much aspires to, cannot be achieved by autocratic means of governance.
China is taking the ‘New Cold War’ seriously, more than Western representatives who in majority have for long ignored it, believing in global connectivity, conviction, the power of persuasion. The Chinese government, in contrary has declared various measures to fight back Western lifestyle through pop culture, the myth of ‘development for all’ and cyber surveillance, led by a propaganda of the Han-Supremacy. All what we know from similar regime types and propaganda of the past, above all by Nazi Germany and Soviet Stalinism, this mode of governance is not going to end well, because fear, suppression, and closing up entire countries from the outside world is not sustainable. The governance model that Xi introduced is like those of past totalitarian regimes. He repetitively emphasizes his nation’s urge to overcome the indignation and humiliation by the West in the late nineteenth century (Fenby, 2017). The more state propaganda fuels this—one sided—perception of the past the more people will be alienated from the West and others, let alone after the closure of China during the Covid-19 pandemic.
But even though history seems to repeat itself in the case of China, it also tells us that these measures will not blindfold the people for too long and a massive brain drain from China to the rest to the world will soon follow. Hence the concern that China will soon increase its internal surveillance as well as military presence in Asia and start its first external war in the region, potentially vis-à-vis Taiwan and in the South China Sea, to demonstrate its strength and to distract the public from domestic problems is not far-fetched.Footnote 3
By the example of China one can illustrate that it is less the denial of modernity, not even that of globally shared values, capitalistic enterprises, or ICTs that stops autocratic regimes from embracing democracy. Rather, it is what Fukuyama described in 2018, namely the perceived distortion of a nation’s dignity. Dignity is, in simple terms, the freedom to determine one’s future and faith, free from coercion or want by others. To constantly fuel people’s mind with past heroism, supremacism, nationalism, and populism against the ‘others,’ counteracts everyone’s personal dignity and freedom.
Nothing of that is new Greek mythological figures Hermes and Prometheus were blinding society with their lies and populism, plotting, censoring, and using trick to successfully get public support. They were successful for a long time. But in times of crisis, eventually, they were unveiled because they had failed to prepare for these periods in such a ways that it would safe lives. As a consequence both were expelled from the community and into exile. They could not deliver their promises when their leadership was most needed. Blinding and plotting are used by modern autocratic leaders in the same way as in the past mythologies, employing propaganda and national sentiments. Stalin’s chief propagandist Trotsky, for example, saw the importance of keeping the spirit of the Russian Revolution from 1917 alive, as long as possible, to make people feel victorious and happy. Trotsky coined the notion of ‘keeping the revolutionary moment permanently alive’ through propaganda and lies to blind society with false heroism and to govern as one pleases. According to change theory, the revolutionary moment is when 2/3 of the population supports the regime change by whatever it takes. Strategic propaganda of a narrative paired with fueling an enemy image can maintain an autocratic regime for quite long. Schumpeter highlighted the success of the ‘permanent revolutionary ideal,’ that even modern democracies need to constantly claim and fight for their human rights values and norms to keep the consolidated majority attuned.
To win the Cold War on one side takes more than just doom on the other side. For many Western liberal democracies, they must succeed with democratic reform at home to be credible in emphasizing democracy abroad. On many fronts, the authority to propel democratic progress resides within institutions and how they respond to crisis (Brown & Carothers, 2021, 23 July).
There is a new trend in adopting Western lifestyles while avoiding to introduce any democratic reforms, namely a form of ‘piracy of Western lifestyle.’ This piracy happens when elected populist leaders, like Sadyr Japarov in Kyrgyzstan, or non-elected warlords such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, violently and with no respect to treaties, expropriate and take over infrastructural investments by Western donors or companies, such as mining, hospitals, and put their comrades and family members in charge. Warlords have no problem asking international donors and organizations from Japan, the US and the EU, to keep providing basic facilities in their countries while they themselves deny any democratic procedures and disregard agreements and treaties. If Western donors give in and continue with aid packages they become accomplices of dictators and human rights abusers. Many of these donor dependent states have turned into ‘addicts to donations’ from third parties or otherwise cannot survive, may it be IGOs or NGOs. They are by no means a sovereign independent state, because they fail to deliver on their own the most basic goods to their citizens.
The West and Western donors must reconsider their aid policies and humanitarian actions and should no longer allow for the tax money of democratic citizens to nurture warlords and organized criminals who defy any human rights standards possible and disregard treaties. Like ‘hunters and gathers,’ these warlords ‘hunt and gather’ the goods and infrastructure that Western NGOs and IGOs have imported to their territory. Often these investments are seen as imposed Western lifestyles, but the fact that many of them are kept intact after the takeover by warlords and autocrats, means that they are not as alien after all. It is a solid image to picture the current situation of warlords and organized criminals taking over 30 years of economic and administrative infrastructure. Western donors hoped to resolve local problems in conflict-torn societies such as Afghanistan by these means. What remains is the desire of the people living there to have the same living standards as the West, but at the same time are steered by the incapability or the unwillingness to change any traditional mode of governing the commons. Glocal ways of life through brotherhoods and patriarchy, seems to be irreconcilable.
The story of the wealthy West ‘feeding the poor in autocratic states,’ while their leaders care nothing about democratic and human rights norms, has reached a turning point for many, notably the EU with its GGI policy. If there is no adherence to a minimum of fundamental rights and at least electoral democracy, there should be no investments and no money given to patriarchal regimes. Instead, prosperity for all will be measured by how inclusiveness and Rule of Law-abiding governments respond to their citizens’ needs. The term New Cold War captures in many aspects the new cleavages, even more so when we look back at the height of the old Cold War until 1990, when the term ‘Absurdistan’ was used to describe autocratic (Soviet) type leadership, namely leaders that say one thing and do the opposite in a slowly eroding and declining political system (Politische Studien, 1971).
Today, one could say that Absurdistan is everywhere wherever there is a dysfunctional regime or community and even city government. We still use it when describing inefficient, corrupt, and suppressive governments and regime. Even though ‘stan’ literally translates into ‘place,’ it has become a stigma, almost a symbol for bad governance, not only of the autocratic and highly corrupt regimes in Central Asia, whose country’s names mostly end in ‘stan.’
Vicious circles of lousy governance practices often go hand in hand with ‘toxic masculinity’ and brotherhoods, as mentioned earlier. We find the call for fraternité in the slogans of the French Revolutions, calling upon brotherhoods to stand against the monarchy. Patriarchy, as outlined earlier, and toxic masculinity is the glocal challenge that is about to be overcome if we take our goal of inclusive governance seriously. Smiler describes these masculine circle-bounds as a ‘dominant ethnic homogeneous male group, relatively well-educated, heterosexual and from the upper class’ (Smiler, 2019). Any incentive to change can be perceived as a threat to it and if these brotherhoods see no benefit in changing their habits without losing what is key to their identity and power, they will fight back. Anything can be a threat: youth groups protesting climate change, especially if female leaders lead them, women wanting to go to university or homosexuals forming same-sex partnerships. Anything that stands in the way of masculine identity vis-a-vis female reproductivity must go.
In India, for example, the ruling BJP Hindu Party runs its own right-wing ‘male-only circle,’ the Rāṣṭrīya Svayamsevaka Saṅgha, founded as early as in 1925 and composed of businessmen that form a deep state and de facto govern the country. Similar developments we see in the movements of the Muslim Brotherhood (
, Jamāʿat al-Ikhwān al-Muslimīn), founded back in 1928, as a wealthy male-only group, or sect, following Sharia Law that eventually sought power in Egypt after the Arab Spring in 2012. They successfully do charity in public sectors such as health and education, and they recruit young men and promote them to become wealthy influential stakeholders. Other brotherhoods work similarly everywhere, such as the earlier mentioned ‘Proud Boys’ in the US that flourished after Trump became president in 2016, and Les Identitaires, founded in France in 2003. Similar groups are vital in Hungary and the Balkans. They pop up when and wherever pluralistic and elected and representative governments and parliaments show signs of dysfunctionality and are too weak to respond to glocal challenges. The German Bundestag with over 700 parliamentarians is the second-largest congress after China’s National People’s Congress with 3,000 members, and its size slows down the inclusive and effective decision-making process in Germany. In Poland and Hungary, parliamentarians are de facto disempowered by veto powers of the prime minister who is part of the brotherhood-like ruling party. Radical male movements often fill the power gap that seems to appear when governments become dysfunctional. They are strictly hierarchically organized, representing order and discipline in an unorganized and presumably chaotic pluralistic and diverse world. Similar movements are organized by clerics: the Saloon movement in Iraq, the radical Christian Lebanese Forces (al-Quwwāt al-lubnāniyya), the Juntos por el Cambio in Argentina, ‘Liberty Korea’ in South Korea, and the Thai Palang Pracharat (
) in Thailand, founded by former male military men who fear the decline of their influence. They follow an ethnic-nationalistic males-only agenda based on clientelism and faith and paired with the conviction that men are superior to others. They stand for law and order, conduct volunteer charity work for the youth, run public soup kitchens, award scholarships, and free education, and provide health care. Their charities often replace public services of the state, which in return is a sign of dysfunctionality of the same. By this they form ‘deep-states,’ often run by brotherhoods that follow religious rules and laws, such as Sharia Law or secret Codes of Conducts, and traditional ‘Father–Son’ dynasties. Not seldom, they occupy a branch of radical ‘warriors’ and fuel the rise of organized crime, and Mafia States. Organized movements and terrorist groups, such as ISIS, Boko Haram, or the Lord’s Resistance Army follow similar governance patterns. Team sports, religious rituals, in most Abrahamic, Hindu, and Buddhist congregations, and their cloisters and schools for males only, aim at creating a brotherhood-led governance regime. It is for that reason, that a Hindu pujari, a Muslim Imam, and a Catholic bishop can only be men. Active memberships in these sports clubs and religious congregations require masculinity and obedience to traditional rules beyond any doubt, expressed in codes of honor and conduct written down in holy books which are followed blindly.
Confucius (500 BC) was in favor of brotherhoods and the father–son relationship as the most reliable form of governance because it guarantees obedience of the law. But if the father does not fulfill his duties to protect the family’s safety, the son has the right to oppose and even kill him because non-obedience would be disruptive to the collective security of the family and society—a concept that justified millions of killings over the past millenia, even within Royal families, and more generally, during the cultural revolution in China from 1966 to 1976. Following this concept father–son relationship, there is no emancipation foreseen through enlightenment, self-determination, and teaching, let alone female emancipation, because collective security can only be guaranteed through obedience to rules, no matter how discriminatory and exclusive they may be.
Except for Buddha (5000 BC) and Socrates (400 BC), none of the philosophical thinkers of Antiquity highlighted individual empowerment and enlightening of an individual person, independently of any brotherhood or government. Buddha was one of the first of his kind who established monasteries for women and men, but those for women only survived for short period. Fanatic religious followers later abolished them. Until today brotherhood structure ultra-orthodox religious communities such as the protestant Amish in the US, the Hasidic Jews in Israel, and Lamaist Buddhists are following millenia old rules with the sole aim to protect urban settlements and family households and procreation. They consider women only as a means for procreation and children as their property, denying any concept of individual self-determination, human equality, and consequently share a sense of resentment against multicultural, diverse, and inclusive societies.
Female leaders and role models remain the exception in these power games. If they take the lead in authoritarian systems, they are often either the daughters or the widows of former male leaders, such as the case of Marine Le Pen, who led the Front National in France after her father declined, or Aung San Suu Kyi, former State Counselor in the government in Myanmar who is the daughter of Aung San the father of the nation. Hence, glocal challenges are not new, but they illustrate that the current paradigm shift is not only about how to respond to climate change and digitalization, but also how we govern our societies differently in the future. So far, as illustrated, all our modes of governance have been male-dominated and hierarchical for reasons found in the past.
Another example of contextualizing contemporary glocal governance is to take a snapshot of how popular culture and the billion-dollar film industry respond to the global and the local. Most intriguing of all, are fantasy, science fiction, and children’s movies because they often portray an illusion and reality we wish for. One of the recent blockbusters that called attention, was the phantasy animation film ‘Trollhunters,’ from 2021, which shows how a diverse group of teenagers and seniors calling themselves Trollhunters are fighting evil Titans, resembling the Ice and the Heat that stand for climate change, to save the Earth from destruction. Nuri, a good female Titan and a mix between Greta Thunberg and Mother Earth, joins the group to fight the upcoming Ice Age and drought. After long fight against the evils she finally exclaims, ‘My friends (the humans) set me free to fight you!’ Eventually, and not surprisingly, together they defeat Ice and Heat, and mankind survives. Not less elusive, but quite the opposite approach when saving planet earth is taken up by the 2019 Chinese science fiction blockbuster titled ‘The Wandering Earth.’ The action film illustrates how a male-only (except for one schoolgirl who is the adopted daughter of the film-hero) and army-like Chinese troop of scientists and astronauts take the lead in world government on behalf of the UN. All other nations in the world gave up their sovereignty in favor to China, who seems to have the best regime to resolve the threat to planet Earth. Eventually, the main character, a Chinese astronaut, dramatically sacrifices himself by throwing himself into the burning Sun while exclaiming, ‘The Earth will survive.’ Striking is how different these two films visualize and illustrate the same fundamental matter, namely the extinction of planet Earth, and how different they respond to it in terms of inclusive or exclusive governance.
A different but engaging example of how governments and societies respond to glocal phenomena is how we deal with minorities, such as the LGBTIQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, inter-gender, and queer) community. One of the reasons why defending the rights of LGBTIQ causes many emotions across the world could be that it contradicts one of the most fundamental matters of male brotherhood and patriarchy, as well as male sexual reproduction and masculine identity. To replace millennia-old categories of male and female that kept systems in place, is a radical threat for many who prefer the male-dominant status quo. The LGBTIQ community, by its sheer existence, question the core identity of masculinity and brotherhoods, and for some this poses a threat worth fighting against (Smiler, 2019). So it is not surprising that despite all scientific evidence about the biological and natural causes of LGBTIQ, this topic stands today, like no other, for the divide between male supremacy and autocratic leadership on the one side and diverse democratic mode of governance on the other side.
People who defend LGBTIQ or belong to that community have been prosecuted, tortured, beaten, excluded, systematically discriminated against, killed, and massacred, and are de facto prisoners of consciousness in many regimes. Why on Earth would people torture someone who does not even show any signs of political violence, let alone is not threatening others? And why is it mostly men to hit and torture gay men, and not lesbian women? One answer is that some men feel threatened by gay men in their masculine identity. According to Smiler (2019), the sheer existence of the organized LGBTIQ community and their supporters in society, and their often-outstanding success as change-makers in art, business, and politics, infringes patriarchal rulership.
It also explains why the LGBTIQ community’s symbol, the rainbow, is today a symbol for a diverse and more democratic and human rights abiding lifestyle. The rainbow first appeared in the 1960s, standing for diversity and peaceful coexistence of different shapes and colors of society, and has transferred to a symbol for the glocalist. Moreover, it has become the symbol of Western norms and ideas, and overall, what modern Europe and the EU stand for. Burning rainbow flags and colors in public is almost identical to burning national flags to express ones’ disagreement with diversity, plurality, and change in society. On Poland’s Independence Day in Warsaw in 2013, some 15,000 right-wing protesters marched through the streets and burned the rainbow installation Tęcza, by a Polish artist, on the central Savior Square, that had been placed there in 2012. He had installed it, celebrating diversity, freedom, hope, universality, and independence and as a pro-European political statement, because it was first featured in front of the European Parliament in Brussels in 2011. Even though the rainbow was reinstalled after the 2013 events in 2014, it was burned down again in the same year and not reinstalled again.
![figure a](http://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image/chp%3A10.1007%2F978-3-031-02108-4_3/MediaObjects/525189_1_En_3_Figc_HTML.jpg)
Warsaw Poland, November 2013 (Photocopy right: Alamy)
The burning rainbow illustrates not only the cleavage between patriarchal brotherhood governance and glocal governance but could easily be the symbol of pro-democratic supporters in the New Cold War era, and has become a political statement today. One of the male domains in which the rainbow sign causes rebellion is soccer. It causes even more a stir when world-class male soccer teams wear the symbol. It can trigger diplomatic upheavals, as happened during the 2020/2021 European championship before and during a match between the German and Hungarian teams. The German soccer team wore the rainbow color band to protest the Union of European Football Association (UEFA) decision that prohibited the Munich soccer stadium from shining the rainbow colors as an expression of tolerance and to protest Hungary’s recently passed homophobic laws that violate human rights in 2021. UEFA claimed that soccer games were neutral and forbade illuminating the soccer stadium in rainbow colors. In response to the German soccer team’s decision to wear the rainbow colors despite UEFA’s decision, Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban canceled his visit to Munich to watch the game. Since UEFA could only stop the colors inside the stadium but not outside, the whole city of Munich was shining that evening in rainbow colors during the match. German world-class soccer player, Manuel Neuer, who wore the rainbow armband during the game, was charged by the UEFA for violating its decision not to do so.Footnote 4 The charge was later dropped without further consequence, but illustrated how far patriarchy has mainstreamed our modes of governance.
3.1 Human Rights
Human rights are the normative backbone of glocal governance. They set our normative frameworks and shape our attitudes toward others and for our day-to-day behavior. The assumption is that the more we know about the rights of others, the lower the level of interpersonal violence in our local communities. For example, in a case study on the impact of information, education, and human rights awareness campaigns in Mozambique, researchers found that the level of violence and corruption decreased, correlating to a higher level of human rights awareness. They conclude that the information and education campaigns in a local community generated a large increase in awareness of 25% points when information was distributed to citizens. The community treatment increased citizens’ awareness and their depth of knowledge. The researchers also found that no effects of lowering political violence occur when only the leaders of that community are trained, suggesting that leaders did not introduce any apparent within-community effort to disseminate information about what they had been trained on, in order to avoid change and lose privileges (Armand et al., 2020). Instead, they found that a high level of transparency to pass on the information and direct engagement and empowerment of the population lowered the level of corruption and nepotism. It increased the level of wellbeing of the community and motivated citizens to take more beneficial actions for all. Therefore, empowering only the elites will not positively affect the local community, as Courbage and Todd concluded.
Over the past century, the increase of literacy has shaken the dominance of religious believers and value systems and thus led to a more self-determined society that controls economic growth and wealth through family planning (Courbage & Todd, 2007). The exciting correlation between literacy and thus the eligible access to information—also employing ICT—led to and empowered civil society across the planet, the most prominent example being the Arab Spring in 2011. One can conclude that building schools and allowing for media to act is one thing, but educating, informing, and empowering people, for example, through human rights and political education, is yet another. It goes much further beyond schooling and has a higher effect.
Human rights are a set of norms and standards of fundamental freedoms that can empower people. Today, ten core human rights documents called the International Bill of Human Rights encompass the critical standards on which glocal governance is grounded. These standards stretch from the rights of migrant workers to freedom of assembly, freedom of and from religion to the right to housing, and to be free from discrimination of any sort. At its core, the Bill is a normative framework that sets standards to distinguish between the violations and abuse of our natural entitlements, and the enhancement of these entitlements. Nevertheless, this normative framework has undergone a remarkable development in content and progress, starting with the UDHR in 1948, the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights (ICSECR), both from 1966 and thus far ending with the 2010 Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance (DPRED) as the most recent addition to the Bill.Footnote 5
The treaties cover all key areas of human life and those causing suffering, injustice, and discrimination. The UN is currently considering one more global norm setter, a convention on the rights of elderly people. These treaties, nevertheless, are state-driven agreements between governments, which makes them the main duty-bearer to respect, protect, and fulfill, as well as violate them, vis-à-vis their right-holders, the citizens.
Regional human rights organizations and regimes, above all in Europe and Latin America are standard setters.Footnote 6 There are no legally binding human rights treaties or courts for the Asia Pacific region or the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. But there are some political and morally binding human rights agreements in place in Asia and the MENA region. For example, the ASEAN Bangkok Declaration from 1993 and the Asian Human Rights Charter from 1998 and the Arab Human Rights Charter from 2004 (Mihr, 2008). They stress cultural practices and development and that fundamental freedom rights must be respected, such as freedom of religion or freedom of assembly. The Bangkok Declaration also advocates for ‘true democracy,’ demanding ‘good governance, freedom from corruption, and accountability of State and other authorities to the people.’Footnote 7 The Arab Charter was reformed in 2008 but never emphasized democracy and instead is highlighting the superiority of Sharia and domestic law over human rights law. It was, for that reason, excluded by the UN from being an inclusive human rights document.
Most international and regional human rights treaties and agreements have turned into customary laws and hence globally applicable human rights standards, both politically and legally, no matter whether governments have ratified them or not. Customary human rights law is an essential guidance tool for CSOs and businesses when demanding the implementation and respect for global human rights norms locally. What customary international human rights law can do for glocal governance is to guide and incentivize individuals to take actions that lead to a more inclusive community. These rules and regulations also guide what people can do, beyond any national state legislation, because human rights law is—in theory—above, and at least in compliance with, national law. Hence, human rights norms and standards often undermine state power, notably authoritarian regimes. The challenges current glocal governance regimes thus face is not a lack of norms but rather how these human rights can be organized for the common good so people in local communities can benefit from it equally.
For overcoming global disparities in the 1990s, the UN initiated its Millennium Development Goals in 2000 to set human rights-based benchmarks for more equality. Its successor agenda, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) from 2015, take one step further and serve today as normative and practical benchmarks for glocality. To both, all 193 UN member states have pledged to fulfill them by 2030 through their National Action Plans (Agenda 2030). The MSA is explicit in the SDGs. In addition, some UN member states have agreed on Global Compacts on business and human rights or migrants and refugees to materialize the SDGs. These Compacts give guidance to local and private actors on implementing global norms. The fast development to link global norms to local actions since the 1990s is dramatic, and since the global financial crisis in 2009, multilateralism and glocalization have sped up once again, as it did, too, during the global pandemic after 2020. National governments realize that they can only solve domestic and local problems if they collaborate transnationally and globally. For example, the EU and WTO effort to protect artists, developers, designers, and scientists’ intellectual property rights shows how bilateral and plurilateral arrangements globally create stricter standards for protection and enforcement penalties.
Notwithstanding, intellectual property treaties are some of the oldest human rights treaties globally, starting in 1986 with the Bern Convention on Copyright Law and through the updated international agreements on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) within the World Trade Organization (WTO). The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) from 2018 has thus marked the peak of protecting individual rights in cyberspace and physical pace, not only in the EU, to protect our texts, photos, bank accounts, and other personal and intellectual matters. The International Monetary Funds (IMF) has likewise, over the past decade, fostered a decentralization process to secure the human rights of access to work and a decent income for individuals across the planet no matter the country (Acharya & Plesch, 2020). The principle of non-interference in domestic affairs has become redundant.
The key driving factor for glocalizing human rights is the intriguing possibility for individual accountability for anyone who violates these principles. Universal jurisdiction in the context of gross human rights violations at any domestic court is a milestone achievement. At its foundation in 2006, the UN Council on Human Rights Policy confirmed that many human rights and sound governance principles overlap. These principles and standards have transformed the relationship between governments and individual persons and citizens and at the same time turned every local court, into a potential ‘international court’ that can decide based on universal human rights principles and laws. It has made both sides, governments, and citizens, more responsible and accountable for their actions. The UN Council admitted that more research and assessment were needed to understand which forms of governance—other than governments—are affected by universal jurisdiction to leverage the achievement of these standards or vice versa (ICHRP, 2006, p. 14). North et al. (2009) underlined the need for this human rights-based governmental reforms and multi-stakeholder approach to it—otherwise, democracies will not survive in their present forms.
Bacl in 1997 and 2005 the UNDP reports on Good Governance in the World already alluded that the human rights-based approach (HRBA) through MSA is the best way to turn basic governance principles into good governance. The World Bank’s Governance Indicators in 2002, 2006, 2011, followed these recommendations and, in the following years, the Council of Europe’s first World Forum on Democracy in 2012, and the European Union’s ongoing Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) incorporated the HRBA and the MSA as key for realizing effective governance. Later, Landman and Larizza (2010) measured the correlation between good governance, human rights, and effective governance in their case studies on governmental performance of different regimes.
One can argue that over the past decades, this massive global diffusion and dissemination has led to what Scholte called ‘transscalarity,’ which in return led to a norm-driven less hierarchal and egalitarian mode of governance. Today, people’s expectations concerning effective governance depend more on achieving human rights and good governance than in the past. Additionally, the number of people who know, understand, and claim ownership of these principles has surpassed a critical mass of 33% within societies, having increased since digitalization and ICT fostered HRE (Childs & Mona, 2008; Thompson & Walker, 2008). The 2021 WVS report illustrates that human rights are globally supported. In over 160 countries, an average of 60% felt that human rights were somewhat respected and essential, and by this reached a stable majority appreciating human rights as a means for change.Footnote 8
In that same line, Beth Simmons (2009) and Henkin et al. (2009) assessed that human rights had reached global acceptance some years ago and that the problem for human rights fulfillment is not the concept of human rights, nor the lack of knowledge, but corrupt and dysfunctional political systems. However, this has impacted citizens’ demands, needs, and overall expectations toward effective governance, even in anocratic-led societies.
Human rights standards have become part of our daily lives, reaching a consolidated threshold of societal consciousness and attitudes, and are entering people’s belief systems and political regimes. No other international document is disseminated in all the world’s languages, as is the UDHR. Most social movements or networks refer to international human rights standards, independent of their political agenda. Parallel to this, international human rights law, conventions, and declarations have skyrocketed since the 1990s. Governments, companies, CEOs, and CSOs competitively emphasize that they aim to comply with human rights standards and good governance principles (Stadelmann-Steffen, 2008). The debates surrounding public–private partnership (PPP), the SDGs, the ICC, and the plea for a World Court of Human Rights are just a few examples of these developments. One can assume that governance regimes respond to societal or international pressure to comply with human rights and good governance principles but that, in fact, they also acknowledge that they will increase their legitimacy and might leverage their governance outcomes if they adhere to them. Therefore, many of these actors are today more responsive to citizens’ demands for fundamental freedoms and equity, which they are more likely to be held accountable to than in previous decades.
In 2020, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the heads of State of France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and the EU launched a joint article in the newspapers with the title ‘Only global Answers will work’Footnote 9 to combat the pandemic asking for all stakeholders of society to share efforts to deal with the crisis. Accordingly, Syrian Nobel Prize Nominee Raed Saleh highlighted in his interview that peace and wellbeing in Syria could be established through a combination of civic and state actors under global standardized norms: ‘No one should have too much influence in that matter and dominate another, (…) and by these resources should be distributed equally,’ he hopefully expressed.Footnote 10
3.1.1 Competing Norms
Human rights are constantly competing with other primarily traditional norms, cultural perceptions, religious rules, and ideological ideals. The main difference between traditions and human rights is that human rights are guiding principles and norms of global best practice. They have no symbols or icons, as faith-based groups or brotherhoods have. Human rights have no habits, music, dances, or other insignia to highlight their practice. The rainbow, however, may have become a symbol for human rights.
Because of their ‘invisibility,’ human rights have many other value-based habits and rituals that compete with them—although sometimes they complement each other. Above all in this regard are religious and traditional practices. The eleventh-century Ulema State that developed in the Middle East, for example, rooted itself in seventh-century Islamic rules. Today’s ‘Islamic States’ result from a political interpretation of that same belief system. One could say that the Islamic Republics of Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan follow the Ulema, and opposed to that, today’s modern liberal democracies follow the concept of universal human rights. Nevertheless, whereas the universality of human rights depends on our responsibility and actions to construct a societal order, supporters of the Ulema State, organized in brotherhood style regimes, follow a centuries-old order regime.
Family and local communities are in the core of these regimes, and hence local actions combines both the normative and the order systems. In its 2021 reports, the WVS team asked people whom they trust most among various groups of people? An average of 96% of all interviewees, irrespective of whether they live in Tajikistan, Mexico, or Germany, responded that they overall trust family over friends and acquaintances.Footnote 11 Regardless of religion and tradition, family stands for solidarity, based on kinship and marriage, and builds a socio-economic safety net. This safety net allows for members of the family to find work, go to universities, and support each others in case of expensive hospital costs when needed. But it also controls and prohibits any deviation from the norm for its members.
The expression ‘family values’ is not to be confused with emotional or tenderly love for family members or spouses, as many understand it in the West. One aspect that glocal governance can take away from this survey is that whatever normative framework families follow and whoever rules them sets the standard for the political regime.
Human rights-based governance is the opposite of ‘family values’-based obedience toward the elderly; instead, it is individual empowerment to fix problems and determine one’s own life. The person is in the center and builds capacity and solves her and his problems and collaboration with other individuals in society, under the do no harm principle.Footnote 12 Nonetheless, human rights do not exclude religious practices or family values. Quite the opposite, Article 18 of the UDHR paraphrases that ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion’; This article includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance. Moreover, in Article 16 (3) it states that ‘The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State,’ and hence an integral part of the exercise and living of one’s human rights, if they do not infringe upon or breach others. The fact that the right to family and freedom of religion is prominent in various UN and regional treaties highlights the importance of its mutual complementarity and, hence, guidelines for governance regimes. However, the difference is that no one should impose on others a religious practice by force.
HRBA and MSA are a mix that can enhance glocality, and it can be a set of different private and public actors or governmental representatives and experts. The MSA has the advantage that all relevant actors can participate and be heard equally. They not only vote or decide on subject matters together, but they also commit themselves to the successful implementation of the agreed subject matters. Ideally, they set their standards and rules, defining possible repercussions or penalties for non-compliance by the involved stakeholders. Enforcement still relies heavily on cooperation with state actors, such as national security agencies. Private actors can conduct it through means of public pressure by, for example, utilizing naming and shaming tactics that may threaten the legitimacy of the respective company, state agency, or otherwise. MSA will not fully replace state agencies, but its process leads to more local, individual, and corporate responsibility.Footnote 13
Human rights are often the sole guidance to govern during dissolving statehood and bad governance, as we see currently. They are the essence of constitutional states, but not of Nation-States. More so, when nothing else is left other than reputed family values, national pride, and traditions that cannot fix the problems that the Anthropocene is posting to local communities. The intriguing and comforting promises to progress without breaking habits, traditions, and religious practices, give little room for facing the challenges ahead. Hiding behind belief systems and turning them into guidance for governance, such as Buddhism in Myanmar, Hinduism in India, Islam in Afghanistan, and a plethora of Free Churches in Latin America promises an intriguing alternative, but far too often worsens the problems of social inequality, exclusion and lack of social mobility, instead of solving them. But faith-based governance modes enjoy much legitimacy from the people, as Zelditch notes, no matter whether they deliver according to universal norms (Zelditch, 2001). There are only three trustworthy entities for many members of these communities, namely the cleric leaders, the family, and the Internet, more than any state institution can ever enjoy. They draw a direct link between the individual and the community, whether virtual, spiritual, or personal. According to Brown and Marsden, the Internet has become an additional fundamental element of governance today (Brown & Marsden, 2013).
A plethora of competing normative orders enter all aspects of glocal life and challenge our comfort zones as we seek a governance system that we can trust. There does not seem to be a clear ‘cultural lead,’ rather a particular lifestyle that promises opportunities and the freedom of choice and that—it seems—can be found locally and in cyberspace. Regimes that provide liberty and social mobility are the ones that succeed. Much has been written about these overarching cultural values and norms by Almond and Verba’s ‘Civic Culture’ (1963) to understand the role and impact of normative values on democratic governance, in line with Fukuyama’s works on ‘Identity’ (2019), highlighting our eternal search for a self-determined and dignified life which, after all the searching, we find it best in free and self-determined societal setups. We see that whatever identity we may own or share, it is composed of faith, values, personal experience, habits, language, family, and education and hence is what we call culture. Though identity is never collective nor exclusive, it is individual and personal, and so are the human rights that are the toolbox and guidance to live our identities to the fullest. One problem with identity is what Fukuyama calls ‘weaponizing identity’ (2019), namely when we hide exclusively behind our identity and no longer see the identity of others as equal. In short, it is good to be sure of one’s own identity, but it becomes dangerous if we do not adhere to universal human rights principles to respect and protect the identity of others. The lamentably divide and ‘echo chambers’ in modern societies is the result of this development.
German chancellor Angela Merkel’s ‘We can do that’ (Wir schaffen das!) in 2015 was an effort to counteract this divide, at the height of the refugee and migrant flow from the Middle East into Europe. But the effort seems to have led to the opposite. It polarized Europe between those who say, ‘we cannot’ and those who say, ‘we can.’ One could also argue that like any other global crisis, it only sheds light on what already was below the surface, namely the societal divide among those who want to face glocal challenges and those who want to return into territorial, national comfort zones, in which the planet seemed to be a never running dry well of resources and growth. There is a difference between using ‘we against the others,’ which is classic for polarizing populist rhetoric or using ‘we’ as a unifying element against a global migration challenge. The ‘we’ against the ‘others’ seems easier to instrumentalize when people have only a few layers of identity. Nationalism, Islamophobia, and racism work along these thin lines of weak and collective identities. A glocal identity is different from collective identities, as it does not adhere to one specific religion or state borders and carries the risk of constantly questioning states’ sovereignty.
Quoting Socrates (400 BC) again, when he was asked by his disciples what the best way would be to govern a state; Socrates figured the best governance practice was through universal value (morals)-driven personal empowerment. A century before, Confucius allegedly has answered the same, when asked. But Socrates’ advice to the youth in Athens went further, calling for an uprising against the elders and a corrupt elite. This cost him his life in 399 BC. The council of elders accused him of spoiling the youth of Athens by making them think for themselves—which sounds very modern in today’s autocratic societies and wars. As a result, many young men no longer wanted to serve in the military and go to war with Sparta, a city-state with which Athens was at war. The verdict was clear: Socrates had manipulated and empowered the youth to think for themselves, ask for individual justification, not for a collective one, and thus had become a threat to the city’s stability.
The ‘next generation’ metaphor has always served as a threat to traditions because it stands for change and often revolution. A hundred years before Socrates took his life, during the Chinese Chu dynasty (500 BC), when Confucius concluded that the main challenge for governance is to overcome the cleavage between the old and the young, his disciples asked him ‘Is there any one word that could guide a person throughout life?’ He replied that it is reciprocity, and mutual respect, and ‘that one should never impose on others what one would not choose for oneself’ (論語, Analects). Over two thousand years later, Immanuel Kant’s 1785 categorical imperative took up the sentence recommending, to ‘act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law’ and which today is the lead idea in the preamble of the UDHR.
Metaphorically, followers and disciples, throughout history, are usually illustrated by mystical numbers of young men of 7, 10, 12, or 77, resembling those who challenge traditions and governance systems often led by rebellious figures, prophets, and heroes from Antiquity to present times. From Confucius to Kant, the point is that no matter whether seniority allows it or not, if reasons stand against traditions, reasoning wins.
Nevertheless, many prophets who called upon the youth found the same deadly destiny as Socrates. Jesus Christ (30 AD) is one of them, and because of his rebellion, he was crucified, and as his disciples had spread the words of their masters against traditional leaders, they had to pay with their lives. Even Confucius and Buddha (550 BC) were condemned for treason and had to leave their homes, often followed by male disciples who passed on similar narratives and epics on how to govern best while wandering the earth spreading the ideas of reform and revolution. The seventh-century prophet Mohammed, quoted in the Kitab al-Kafi Dialogues (
), responded to the question of guidance by one of his disciples, with, ‘as you would have people do to you, do to them; and what you dislike to be done to you, do not do to them. This maxim is enough to go and act in accordance with it!’ Like many before him, Mohammed had fled his home of Mecca to spread the message and hence shared this destiny with many before and after him.
Another figure behind modern times’ normative order and governance regime is sixteenth-century German reformer, Martin Luther. He posted his ‘95 Theses’ against the corrupt elderly Catholic Church, and unintentionally founding a new branch of religion, Protestantism. He, too, was calling upon the youth (disciples), to stand up against corrupt (male) clerics and noble elites. Protestantism was later seen as the cultural foundation of liberal democracy and finds its roots in Luther’s concept of self-determination and critical thinking. What was different about Luther is that he not only challenged the father–son relationship and traditions and hence patriarchy led brotherhoods, but he also called for an inclusive revolution by men and women against the establishment. This however, resulted in a century of war between the confessions and ended with the Westphalian Peace Agreement in 1648 which has been so far the blueprint of modern statehood and International Relations. Only prophets like Jesus, Mohamed, and Martin Luther are reported to have had female disciples, which marked a qualitative shift in how people could identify themselves with the new religious doctrine. Father–son relationships, patriarchal governance regimes, often found in religious congregations, brotherhoods, knights, and forms of ‘kurultais’ (councils of elderly men), and other forms of fraternities all pretend to carry a specific exclusive knowledge, wisdom, and ‘truth’ that women in particular are forbidden to have access to. Like the Freemasons, they have hierarchical structures, strict norms, and often practice secret rituals, seeking control over the world.
Not surprisingly, the importance of youth in spiritual and political movements remained influential throughout the centuries. Every major political party and faith-based congregation has their youth branches, often the loudest when calling party slogans with sometimes radical views. The largest in the world is the Communist Youth League of China (CYLC), with over 80 million members, an influential party propaganda voice on social media channels. Youth is an important target group because they are easier to influence, and they stand for change and reforms and hence can challenge traditional norms.
How far this radicalization between glocalists and traditionalists had divided even some of the most robust democracies was seen in 2011 when a Norwegian right-wing Neo-Nazi and supporter of the US Proud Boys, killed 80 students of the Norwegian Labor Party Youth group during a summer camp in the island of Utøya in Norway. In court, he claimed that ‘his actions were justified to save the country from multicultural forces’ (Magnay, 2012). In his eyes, he fulfilled a ‘sacrosanct duty,’ arguing that these teenagers threaten traditional conservative values in Western society. Inspired by these murderous attacks, a white supremacist terrorist shot and killed 51 members of a Muslim congregation in New Zealand in 2019. Shortly beforehand, he posted a manifesto on social media, expressing hate against ‘Muslim invaders’ and justifying his atrocious acts against ‘internationalists and globalists.’ He, too, claimed to defend white people against non-white ‘invaders,’ the establishment against the outside threat (Toohey, 2019).
Radicalization of ideas and faith can trigger violence—this is far from new. However, what is novel is the individualization of terrorism around the world, often in the Dark Web and under the radar of public scrutiny. Mansour, the Palestinian-German psychologist who studied the phenomena of radical fundamentalist terrorism, explained that it is the consequences of insult and inferiority of the individual that leads them to become a terrorist—no matter where. In his example, Islamic faith practice is often incompatible with the open and diverse way of life of liberal-pluralistic democracies. The fact that people in liberal democracies can, through good grace or ill, accept and even respect the opinions of others without infringing on their freedoms makes these terrorists feel inferior. Even more so, when they hide behind this identity of inferiority and victimhood, as Fukuyama (2019) explains, and use this as a justification and weapon against others. For many radicals, the contact with a Western lifestyle is the moment of radicalization because, in their opinion, the tolerance, fundamental freedom rights, and the consensus-building nature of democracy demonstrate vulnerability and weakness. Mansour argues, that it is the openness and inclusiveness shown to others that irritate these traditionalists (Mansour, 2020). Hence liquid borders, diversity, LGBTIQ, climate change sensitivity, and One World-One People ideas, as portrayed in Western-style pop culture, suggest fair opportunities, equality, friendship, and a merit-based working system that is intriguing to some and a threat to others (Smith, 2018).
Here again, it is the pop culture that illustrates the worlds current societal divide, and it aligns with the success of the contemporary beauty and fitness industry, creating a globally shared youth and beauty hype that sometimes has bizarre forms. Beauty images of the young and fit are the largest globally shared culture and identity ever and have reached the level of a spiritual character and cult across language, religious, and territorial borders (Greenwood, 2019). Bearing in mind that according to UNESCO data, approximately over 50% of the world’s population is under the age of 30, and in Africa, up to 70% (40% are below the age of 15), the divide between young and old will only increase. This hype divides society into those who claim to be forever young and caring about the future of the planet and others who are not. By its sheer figures, the youth dominate the world, at least in the Global South. In the North, it is the reverse. Willing or not, this ‘post-1990’ youth generation threatens patriarchal authoritarian forms of leadership rooted in century-old ideologies or religious rules, and causes millions of young people across the planet to leave their home countries, seeking a place in which they find opportunities and equality. Out of these generations comes protest against ruling elites. One of these groups are cyber-partisans that are (mostly) young Internet hackers and whistleblowers, sometimes organized in NGOs like WikiLeaks, but generally working individually and moving between darknet and Internet, who hack and publish data on leaders, clans, and anyone they do not like, and put this news on social media. Those who are following these cults see themselves as human rights defenders (HRD) in many respects, for example, calling for the right to information and access to neutral Internet, to physical and social mobility, to be free to live their sexual orientation and to be free to choose what to study, and where to work, where to live, and what religion to follow.
3.2 Democracy
Democrats steer, dictators control. Therefore, democratic principles are fundamental for glocal governance. Democratic institutions and actors are dynamically interacting based on personal convictions and a level of institutional responsiveness by policymakers and compliance with norms manifested in national constitutions. Their actions are—ideally—in compliance with universal human rights norms. That is one reason why China does not oppose democracy as such; quite the opposite, it defines it anew based on Chinese norms in its White Paper on ‘How Democracy Works’ from December 2021. The CCP even claims to realize the so-called ‘American Dream’ and Western lifestyle, that gives everyone opportunities and prosperity, and by its own standards the Chinese government aims to surpass the Western model. Whether it will succeed in its endeavor to turn the core concept of democracy, namely inclusiveness, pluralism, and free choice, into one with ‘Chinese characteristics’ and what that exactly means, remains to be seen. So far the Chinese model of democracy has not been seen successful to deal with crisis and challenges of modern times, it rather lags behind when responding to migration, climate change, wars, and pandemics. Its model lags of a culture of reflection, constructive criticism, trial-and-error, and overall is not willing to accept different views on public matters and instead remains in copying Western lifestyle without developing it further.
What we do know is that countries that democratized successfully followed the same patterns. Linz and Stepan’s highlight that democratization is successful and, that ‘a democratic transition is complete when sufficient agreement has been reached about political procedures to produce an elected government, when a government comes to power that is the direct result of a free and popular vote, when this government de facto has the authority to generate new policies, and when the executive, legislative and judicial power generated by the new democracy does not have to share power with other bodies de jure’ (Linz & Stepan, 1996, p. 3). Hence a constant bottom-up and reflective struggle between different stakeholders is needed in order to complete democratic institution building.
Most of today’s 190 listed constitutional democracies worldwide are multi-party systems in which elections are the norm. Many of them have already adapted to direct democracy methods and introduced MSA. Others turned into de facto anocracies or electoral democracies, and left the path of liberal democracies. Countries with one- or no-party regimes remain the exception, most prominently China, North Korea, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Libya (Regel & Döring, 2019). These regimes are far from consensus-building modes of governance among different parties and positions, let alone in the key areas of public matters, which are the sectors (1) security/health, (2) economy/work, and (3) education/social mobility, and which they often either privatize or outsource to CSOs or international organizations. Anocratic or authoritarian regimes are less capable of dealing with the rough consequences of global crisis such as climate change, pandemics, cyber security, and migration.
Dankwart Rustow, the pioneer of Transitology and transition from autocracies to democracy, highlighted that ‘(…) People who were not in conflict about some rather fundamental matters would have little need to devise democracy’s elaborate rules for conflict resolution. The acceptance for those rules is logically a pact of the transition process rather than its prerequisite’ (Rustow, 1970, p. 362). Rustow understood that any society that fights and opts for a democratic system has to comply with four fundamental stages of transition: First, a sense of national and collective unity of different stakeholders making a clear commitment to democratic change (background conditions); Secondly, the readiness and willingness for political struggle by different stakeholders to overcome cleavages, disputes, and obstacles that have caused the wish for change of fundamental matters in the first place (preparatory phase). Thirdly, the collective will to agree on democratic rules that must be applied de jure and de facto and eventually the acceptance of shifts in power after fair and free elections (decision phase). Lastly, the most difficult of all is to turn a pro democratic attitude into daily habits and move from the acceptance of (democratic) rules to believing in them (habituation phase) (Rustow, 1970). Latter phase is hardly achieved even among the strongest and consolidated countries, today.
The biggest threat to backsliding democracies today are phases three and four when political leaders and civil society breach their own rules and norms that brought them into power in the first place. Rustow’s concept of transition to democracy has inspired researchers worldwide to find out what is key to democratic consolidation. We find much of the same in Samuel Huntington’s ‘Waves of Democratization’ from 1991 and later Wolfgang Merkel’s concept of system transformation and democratic regime consolidation from 1999. Whereas Huntington overall describes the tricky avenue to complete the process of democratization, which can take between one and ten years, or two legislative periods, he also explains why so many countries never successfully democratize. They usually fail to comply with norms and rules during the first legislative period, when they start corrupting and undermining the normative orders, such as fair and free elections, freedom of media, inclusive voting rights, competitive party system, etc. Merkel sequences consolidation of a political system in four stages, and together they can take decades to complete. The first stage is to set widely agreed norms that are inclusive and acceptable by an absolute majority in the constitutions. The second stage is the representative and institutional role of all political, private, and business actors who abuse the norms. The functionality of an independent judiciary (the rule of law), free media, and civil society can be ways to measure this stage. The third stage, and much more challenging to reach, is the attitudinal and behavioral shift in society when all political, private, and civil actors not only believe but also adhere to constitutional norms and play a fair game—like Rustow’s ‘habituation.’ This is almost impossible to achieve without continuous political and human rights education. The last stage of consolidation is what Almond and Verba named ‘civic culture’ when a free civil society interacts with politics through active and free participation and hence shows a high level of trust and free interaction in public institutions (Wolfgang, 1994). To illustrate consolidated democracy, we must look at one of the oldest democracies in the world, namely Switzerland since 1848 (some even date it back to the first democratic claims, the Rütli Schwur in 1291). It is a land-locked country that had passed several stages of improvement and backsliding over the past centuries, and whose national President is rotating on an annual basis. Chancellor Thurnherr, who, after serving two terms since 2016, said about his role, ‘I do not see myself as the Chairman or Chancellor of the eighth Federal Council more as a top civil servant. My power is limited. But I have some influence. I can mediate or control, coordinate, and make suggestions; however, decision and consensus are driven by all stakeholders together.’Footnote 14 Such a public statement by the lead governor of a country is unimaginable in authoritarian countries. Switzerland’s multi-level and bottom-up governance regime, with its unique rotating governance regime and principles of direct democracy, serves today as a blueprint for modes of glocal governance. Local communities decide issues of collective relevance through direct voting and consensus-building.
A failed democratization process can be seen in the once promission example of transition toward democracy in Tunisia since 2011. In 2021 the Tunisian parliament was dissolved and turned back into a centralistic Presidential system, because it failed to undertake major political and societal reforms in the first two legislative periods. Huntington, in (1991) ‘Waves of Democratization,’ describes this erosion and backsliding as the ‘spillover effects’ of non-democratic states to the once in the process of democratization. An isolated and new fragile state, like Tunisia after the Arab Spring that remained as the ‘only democracy in the region,’ cannot survive among autocratic regimes by which it is surrounded in the region. It cannot, for long, counterbalance and resist anti-democratic infiltration from outside. In 2021 when the President finally dissolved and disempowered the parliament, Tunisia’s first democratic experiment failed to consolidate. The Arab uprisings in 2011 and the following years were labeled ‘revolutions’ in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen and gave—at first—hope for entering stage one and two of Rustow’s and Merkel’s stages from transition to transformation. Rather than overthrowing authoritarian regimes, civil society and the angry youth protesters prompted some concessions. And in return, the Moroccan and Jordanian governments made massive concessions toward the youth and amended their constitutions to keep the regime alive and the protesters quiet. In fear of losing power, the highly dysfunctional Algerian government ended an almost two-decade-old state of emergency, and part of the government of Kuwait resigned in response to protests. These were signs of concessions, even though the patriarchal stronghold of older men remained at the end, and pro democratic regime change did not take place. There was not a fundamental will and enough threshold in society for a renovation of the regime that would have satisfied the needs of all its citizens. It is only a matter of a short time until the vicious cycle of unrest, protest, concessions, and suppression emerges again, and the Arab Spring will turn into the next Arab Autum.
The youth rebellion failed in the Arab Spring because it did not agree on fundamental matters, and it was too divided to speak with one voice. If they had called for fair and accessible opportunities, the governments would have been forced to make substantive changes in the education and economic sector and labor market. Since that was not the case, the revolutions failed. Protesters also failed to establish a joint coalition to negotiate the transition with the ruling elites. While mass mobilization in favor of political liberalization emerged across the region—and elsewhere in Central Europe, South America, and Asia—the hopes for more far-ranging political changes were often dashed, because protesters could not speak with one voice and organize themselves well enough to challenge the establishment. It would take another generation before it would rise again. Instead, civil wars emerged in Libya, Syria, and Yemen.Footnote 15 Another factor for the failed democratic revolutions in and around the year 2011, was lack of a pre-existing culture to compromise and build consensus, even on the local levels. Instead the patriarchal mentality and brotherhood like local governance regime, foster ‘strong male leaderships’ in which the winner of elections claims all the power instead of sharing it. Looking again back into ancient Greek writings, Plato’s 5th book in Politeia, he, too, observed that it takes several attempts and learning experiences of reformers and protesters until a regime can successfully transform itself democratically (Grassi and Walter, 1990, p. 240). A successful outcome could be, according to Plato’s disciple Aristotle (322 BC) the constitutional state as one with fixed norms and rules applicable to all. It is a state in which the middle class ought to govern and be responsive to the youth and next generation, and hence his visions reminds us today of a modern state that embraces the concept of sustainability. Aristotle connects the success of a constitutional state to the fact that its norms are transparent and applicable to everyone and at the same time universally—every member of society, can easily agree to these norms and they need to be perceived as a doable endeavor by all members of society. As he goes on, Aristotle argues that a constitutional state is legitimate based on the pursuit of happiness, and hence a fundamental matter for which people are ready to establish unifying norms and rules (Aristoteles, 1994, pp. 198–199). His slogan ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’ made it into the American Declaration of Independence from 1776, two thousand years later. Many of Aristotle’s claims not only sound modern but even utopian. Another contemporary author, Wallerstein, in his World-System Approach from 2004, follows up on Greek philosopher’s division of basic needs of people that must be satisfied and regulated before thinking about different kind or better statehood, and he adds that these needs and happiness need to be set out by explicit legally binding norms and standards accessible to everyone; otherwise, any new or old regime is doomed to fail. The three services the state must provide, according to Wallerstein, are (1) public education, (2) access to health, and (3) guarantee of lifelong possibility for solid income that allows each member of society to live a self-determined life (Wallerstein, 2019, p. 94). In short, the two-core task for governments is to provide for fair, free, and equal social mobility and a healthy environment for all. How this can be best achieved is the essence of the core divide between autocratic and democratic regime defenders.
Little doubt there is, that dysfunctional states are susceptible to corruption even in public schooling, hospitals, and the informal labor sector, but they are nevertheless successful for a period of time, and often enjoy a high level of prosperity. In a similar line, Carl Schmitt, a controversial German Constitutionalist, saw the German Weimar Republic of the 1920s in the same stage as many dysfunctional states are today, and a root cause for the rise of the Nazi regime and a destructive WWII. The Weimar leadership would not let go of traditional, hierarchical ways of governing by a militant elite. Schmitt drew upon Aristotle’s writings in The Politeia (335 BC), elaborating that the main pitfalls of a constitutional state is that citizens and policymakers neither understand the laws, nor adhere to them. This mistrust will sooner or later corrupt the law by policymakers and lawyers if the law is not adhered to through conviction by society at large. Carl Schmitt’s ‘Political Theory’ on Constitutionalism predicted the end of the first wave of democratization (Huntington, 1991) in the 1920s and the rise of nationalistic autocratic regimes in Europe and elsewhere—later leading the world into a devastating global war. He argued that if a state does not have a functioning normative framework and constitution, to which all stakeholders adhere to by conviction, the state and the political system will fail (Schmitt, 2015).
In the essays on Legitimacy and Legality, Schmitt highlights that every new democracy is doomed to fail, if people do not have the necessary culture and experience through a certain level of education and a free space to explore their own talents. The democratic state is one in which people get together, negotiate, and agree on shared norms and a law (the constitution) and then act accordingly. Hence, the transition to democracy is slow and might soon end up in reverse, even an authoritarian form of governance, if citizen do not carry and defend the constitutions (Schmitt, 2012). According to Aristotle the three core elements of bad governance, namely the rise and level of (1) mistrust, (2) helplessness and disempowerment of people, which leads to a shared sense of inferiority, and (3) the corrupt, submissive, and opportunistic behavior of public officers to a clientelist leadership; are contrary to what a constitutional state stands for (Aristotle, Politeia, p. 261).
We can see today, that tyrannical leaders will always aim toward a low level of education for citizens, claim obedience by public officers, and use propaganda to install fear and hostility toward ‘others.’ In reverse, autocratic leaders have portrayed themselves even as ‘knights’ and heroes and saviors of an intimidated and fearful population. Not much seems to have changed since Antiquity, if we look it at it? From the legendary figure of Herakles in Greece, Prince Ashok in India, to the mysterious King Arthur in England, and the evil-dragon fighting St. George across the Middle East and Europe, the good against the evil is always associated with a strong fighting man defeating the evil snake. There seems to be little room for MSA and a human rights-driven agenda? The mythical half-men-Jaguar Protectors of the Mesoamerican Mayas, the figure of El Cid during the Reconquista in Spain, the knight Parsifal in Germanic myths, as well as the Knight Manas in Central Asia, resemble nothing less than successful autocratic leadership. All fight for a unified, peaceful nation, independence, and self-determination. Their fan community remains unchallenged and their role models are found in a plethora of contemporary fantasy and graphic novels, movies, and games in which these figures are portrayed, until the twentieth-century reincarnation as Superman and Iron Man. The hero is predominantly a lonely male fighter gathering followers to save a nation from evil. Even mysterious and religious prophets of the past follow that pattern. Heroic female figures, such as Greek Nike and warrior women, are portrayed as guardian angels, mothers, widows, divine, virgins, and seldom emerge as a prototype of Superwomen. These visions from good versus evil leadership in times of paradigm shift are not to be underestimated.
The popularity of these characters over the past decades grew, whether mystical, fantasy, virtual-avatars, or for real, are severe competitors for the way we perceive democracy. They portray a patriarchal, hierarchical, and populist way of governance. Mystical heroes are unbeaten in their intriguing success and achievements in fighting evil and the enemies of Nationhood—be it in modern times, terrorists, or aliens. Even contemporary leaders portray themselves as ‘fathers of the nation’ and liberators. Statues of Simon Bolivar remain untouched in South America. He was a freedom fighter against colonialist powers in the nineteenth century and symbolized the struggle for self-determination and dignity—but by no means was he a human rights defender. Che Guevara fought against social inequality, endorsed the use of violence for a higher cause, and became a pop-art symbol; Napoleon stands for a genius strategist who slaughtered thousands of innocent people; Mao Tzetung is the father and liberator from old traditions while killing millions; and Stalin portrayed himself as a father figure who takes care of his nation’s children, while deporting and deliberately killing millions of citizens. These leaders all resemble top-down autocratic feudalistic leadership style modes of governance, liberators at the most, but not promoting human rights nor inclusiveness in governance. Mafia States and organized crime follow this concept until today and control large parts of statehood and the world economy. Russia’s/Soviet Union’s ‘Great Fatherland War Victory’ of 1945 is until present times commemorated every year on 9 May as in many of the former Soviet Republics with the sole purpose of keeping the fragile nations together and justifying centralized power in the hands of a benevolent father. Warlords and organized crime leaders successfully uphold similar images of liberators from a supreme and evil power or victims of the same, to legitimate their actions, as did Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the deceased founder of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq, who is today considered a hero among its supporters. Above all, they often stand for the despair of many, seeking a solid leader who offers solutions to problems.
Plato was looking for an answer what a ‘just state’ would be, despite the vicious cycle of hero-driven leadership? In Politeia, he cites Socrates search for a ‘healthy state.’ A sick state is one, in which bad manners govern and rules with tempers due to a lack of good education, inability to sideline and channel greedy and ill-minded people through a lack of control over the law, and the lack of public services. To set up a ‘just state,’ Plato suggests first to make sure there is a diversity of people in the state that can deliver what is needed to survive in terms of mercantile, food, and other goods of the daily allowance. Second, the state must provide an entertainment culture and good education for all. Third, the state leaders must provide services, such as trading and stock markets, schools, and hospitals; and fourth, a permanent defense system and security sector that can defend the state along its border (Platon, 1990, p. 110). Even so, some of the measures to sideline ill-mannered people sound radical to our ears today; but fundamentally, not much has changed since Antiquity when identifying what it takes, even democratically, to govern a community, society, or state. We also learn from Plato that any ‘just state’ sooner or later erodes and falls apart by inner forces if interests and stakeholders are not balanced and do not have the same access to resources or political participation. This happens, for example, when everyone enjoys all freedoms at once, without regulating or sharing them with others.Footnote 16
Anocracies, however, seem to be the most successful model of governance today, and for many that is already a success, because they are neither fully autocratic nor fully consolidated democracy. According to the former foreign minister Rajaratnam of Singapore, liberal democracy is an ideal that can not be achieved. Instead democracy is the governing of deeds, and prefers anocracy and electoral democracy over liberal democracy. He coined the term ‘democracy of deeds’ in 1971,Footnote 17 and ever since, the term describes a democratically set up regime that strongly controls the public sectors, in the same way as it controls CSOs and media and puts citizen duties before human rights. Some 50 years later, in 2019, Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat called on the city’s citizens to collaborate in what he called a Cohesive Society to ‘build a democracy of deeds, where everyone chips in with our various strengths and passions to build a society we can all be proud of.’Footnote 18 The government needs to keep its ears on the people and consult with them, instead of allowing them to raise their voice to hear them. Until now, the Singaporean model of ‘democracy of deeds’ has been a source of inspiration for many emerging and yet anocratic states in most of Asia, above all for China, and hence samples of Singapore’s model can be found in the White Paper on democracy in 2021. This ‘surveillance anocracy’ needs public-spirited action and heavy surveillance technology to spy on people’s problems and solve these problems top-down, claiming governmental solutions as a ‘devotion to the welfare of the people.’ Similar concepts and misuse of democracy are often found in authoritarian governmental rhetoric to calm people and give the image of people’s free will, empowerment, and participation.
Unlike Singapore’s model, deliberative and collaborative democracy has been claimed to be the highest and most solid level of democracy. They resemble pluralistic coexistence between government and civil society of the kind found in contemporary societies, mainly in Europe and North and South America (Morlino et al., 2020). Collaborative democracy equates Almond and Verba’s definition of ‘civic culture’ and Rustow’s approach to habituation and Merkel’s designed attitudinal and behavioral level of interaction of all stakeholders based on law. It is quite contrary to the ‘democracy by deeds’ that Singaporean leaders prefer. Instead, the normative claim of the deliberative model is that all decisions are subject to discourse and those who determine or dominate that discourse—as seen in the Swiss model (Schäfer & Merkel, 2020, pp. 3–27).
By this definition, deliberative democracy is complementary to majority voting and reaching consensus. Its decision-making process aims at including as many diverse people as possible to agree on one subject and build at least 66% consensus on the solution. As described by many, deliberative politics is not a mode of decision-making but a criterion and method of seeking consensus decisions (Habermas, 1990, p. 42). This deliberative mode of governance is often accused of not challenging existing political conditions or opinions, and only building consensus on a subject matter, by any means, even with unfair methods, blackmailing, and vote-buying. In order for a deliberative model to contribute to the creation of existing social power relations, especially in times of populist governments and Social Media echo chambers, deliberative discourse can preserve opinions and political attitudes, and hence preserve old power structures instead of changing or transforming attitudes and behavior.
In any mode of governance, powerful lobbyists and businesses can be key stakeholders and a curse or blessing for an inclusive democratic model (Crouch, 2004). Despite the many weaknesses that any democratic regime has, the only thing we know for sure is that states that are run by an autocratic elite or one-party regime will fail sooner or later to respond to citizen needs in times of crisis and global challenges. Democratic regimes, instead, need to adapt and reform themselves, if they want to succeed and those who already incorporate glocal governance methods, have managed both the financial crisis in 2009 and the Covid pandemic in 2020 and undertake most of all the global efforts to mitigate the consequence of climate change. One weakness (and strength) of democracies is their multi-party system that pushes governments to build coalitions and govern by consensus. In the height of new consolidated democracies in Europe in the late 1960s, Krippendorff spoke of the end of the party-state (1968). He saw multi-party regimes as the product of the early stages and phases of democratization processes that do not last more than a generation before they get corrupted because multi-party coalition leaves little room for opposition. Party-based governments cannot be voted out of the office quickly because they can renew themselves and have economic and ideological control instruments at their disposal. Candidates for office without a party or movement behind them have hardly any chances to win elections. According to Krippendorff, party regimes should only be an intermediate state, not a permanent one; once democracy is consolidated, direct voting should be the rule, not the exception. Another scenario describes a small government run by a freely elected elite of managers (party leaders) that take managerial functions to help local and international governance, but not overall power, like the concept of glocal governance proposes. Party leaders hence run most modern democracies, and the centralization and presidentialization of politics is turning weak democracies into autocracies. Samples can be witnessed anywhere, but most often in the post-soviet countries, such as in the Kyrgyz Republic. Within less than half a year, between October 2020 and February 2021, the semi-parliamentarian democratic system was turned into a full-fledged presidential one by a presidential candidate who was forcefully freed from prison with the help of organized crime groups. Similar but different is the case of France with President Emmanuel Macron, where his political movement En Marche allowed him to enter the Elysée Palace in 2017. Krippendorff was right; presidentialization of One-Party and minority governments are becoming the norm. Multi-party systems such as the Netherlands or Denmark have been governed by fragile minority governments for decades now. The consensus-building slows down, and decisions taken are weak rather than strong. It can be the beginning of the end of democracy, one way or the other.
The desire for strong and male leaders, even in democracies, is a legacy from century old narrative and illusion that only a single leader can be a good leader, and this is only slowly eroding. In Germany, for example, the notion of Wutbürger, ‘angry and disenchanted citizen,’ has entered political rhetoric over the past decades. They are the foundation of the radical-right, Q-Anon, and other movements, and Wutbürger is a citizen that is often satisfied with populist politics and easy answers to the overwhelming complex challenges of climate change and digitalization, for example. They have created their quasi-ideology, the ‘anti-pluralism’ and ‘anti-parliamentarianism,’ a kind of proxy religion against anything that is consensus-driven and respectful toward other identities. During the Covid pandemic, they were remarkably resistant to get vaccinated—despite all reasoning—, and during the global migration movement in 2015, they were the first turning against intruders that would violate their ‘European values,’ without ever defining these values. This crowd is growing and a severe threat to pluralistic and inclusive societies. Essentially, they fight against an order system based on pluralism and consensus-building while claiming that this is against their identity (Fukuyama, 2019). A multi-party system and parliamentarians is a way to show respect to different identities, and hence in times of using one’s own identity as a weapon against others, democratically elected parliaments are the natural target of these Wutbürger. The Wutbürger and the identitaires traditionalists are across all political spectrums, and they often represent followers of the ‘reverse-wave of democratization’ (Huntington, 1991) and tend to follow ‘Father figure’-led exclusive Nation-State.
3.2.1 Statehood
The nineteenth-century concept of a territorially and sovereign Nation-State, run by an elected but elitist party government, has lost its purpose in the twenty-first century. This form of statehood no longer provides solutions to the global challenges of digitalization, climate change, and migration. Not surprisingly, discussion papers and studies on dissolving statehood have multiplied and today determine the political discourse on governance. For example, the essays on governance beyond Nation-States by Lankowski (1999), and on global citizenship by Langran and Birk (2016), on global justice and liquid borders by Moraña (2021), and above all, Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity and democracy (2007), all aim to explain the significant paradigm shifts in societies, local communities, and overall statehood over the last century. Baumann, a pioneer of the concept of ‘liquidity,’ highlights that in a modern liquid democracy, states, borders, and national constitutions alone cannot provide for the three basic needs of people, namely health, education, and a decent income to live a dignified life, already outlined by Aristotle over two millennia ago. Liquid borders hence is a concept aiming to overcome dysfunctional state institutions that can only govern people’s needs within territorial state borders, bound by it through their national constitutions and rules. Liquidity is, at a minimum, a two-way road that allows for diffusion. It overall applies to virtual space and quasi-non-territorial proclaimed states, like the global Caliphate of the so-called Islamic State, which is in no need of a territorial state. It is based on and held together by a belief system and governed by local, albeit hierarchal leaders. Another dramatic transformation of statehood can be seen within the EU, based on European interests governed by a multi-level, relatively horizontal system. With its de facto constitutions, with the EU Lisbon Treaty in 2010, and its principles of subsidiarity which allows local communities to interact with EU institutions directly, the Union has slowly but steadily dissolved state sovereignty and transferred national powers to a supranational level, and in return shared them with to a local one.
Fragile post-Soviet states, for example, in the Caucasus and Central Asia, went through a strange mix of policies to become independent from the Soviet Union in 1991, and former republics of the Soviet Union, like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, were de facto expelled from the Union against their wish. In the 1991 autonomous referenda in almost all post-Soviet Union republics, people were asked whether they wanted to stay in the Russian Federation, the successor State of the Soviet Union, or leave. Over 80% wanted to stay. The former Soviet Republics became independent against their will after a regime change in Moscow, and neither in the Caucasus nor the Central Asian republics did any bottom-up approach by citizens toward democratic reforms ever happen. De facto it was a decolonization process against the will of the people colonized decades before by Russia. Because there was never a bottom-up approach to reform the political system and democratize, these states turned into hybrid anocracies. Today they are seen as the result of a failed Nation-State building process. One reason for its failure is that among society, there has never been cohesion and agreement on ‘fundamental matters’ such as, for example, striving for independence from the Soviet Union. The same happened in post-colonial countries in Africa and South America who, after the decolonization process in the nineteenth and twentieth century, continued with the type of leadership they knew, namely autocratic, male-dominated, and top-down. There was no bottom-up movement for independence and a consolidated majority of citizens that would agree on fundamental matters (Rustow, 1970). Their state leaders copied European-style constitutions with a vital portion of continued habits from lead nations, England, Spain, France, and the US, but citizens never backed up institutional changes.
The few post-colonial countries that established functioning, democratic structures such as Botswana, Uruguay, Ukraine, and the Baltic States shortly after becoming independent often went through troubled times before reaching the independence they claimed to have. For many then, as today, the Nation-State remains an artificial construction of people living in a territory that allows for governing bodies, institutions, and mechanisms to set rules and regulate these people’s lives. State leaders promise to provide security, economic security, public health, and education in exchange. If they do not respond to these requirements, state-building fails. Hence, to keep it alive, many leaders use coercion and violence to keep citizens attuned.Footnote 19 ‘Panem et circenses’ (bread and circus/games) was allegedly used as a method of autocratic leaders to keep the Roman Empire intact. If adapting that metaphor today, it would be ‘Panem et signification’ (bread and purpose and identity) that are constructed by this anocratic regime to keep people happy.
Nevertheless, statehood and Nation-States were meant as an answer to anarchy and to build a form of unity within constitutional limits. Two ways to exercise these limits are state borders and sovereignty. Today we define a Nation as a group of people with a common identity based on constitutional rights, religion, ethnicity, history, language, or other forms of cultural identity. We often find a combination of all these forms of identities in ourselves. But if there is no more Nation-State with borders as we know it, so does our identity change. It is not surprising that the sheer thought of losing one’s national identity scares many people across the globe.
The first significant crises of nation-building and statehood occurred between the two World Wars when many young democracies in Europe failed and became anocracies. In the aftermath of the war, the French philosopher Michel Foucault introduced the need for more ‘governmentality,’ meaning to have an inherent mind or mentality to govern and decide more strongly than just ‘belonging to a Nation’ (Foucault et al., 2011). He argued that a strong state is determined by governmentality and the way a society is governed, less on nationhood. Elected governments are mediators between those who hold power and the sovereign, namely the people, of a state or community. From his view, this power–sovereignty relation is formed by the law between citizens and their elected governors, not only by specific political parties or groups. In the essence of his thoughts is the idea of glocality, and in his eyes, political actors obey the law given to them by citizens. Foucault did not argue pro or against democracies or autocracies but raised the point ‘whoever gains the trust, and the legitimacy by the people will govern’ and build or maintain the state.
Just imagine no state with boundaries and many different nationalities, but rather local communities in which all people adhere to the same principles of human rights and the rule of law and contribute to it. It sounds utopian indeed, and Foucault answered that governmentality is, therefore, the relationship of power between various groups, individuals, institutions, or companies (Foucault, 2005). Territorial statehood is not a necessity for governmentality. Police or parliament is just one form of exercising local power empowered with the ‘right to do something versus someone else,’ but this relationship also exists in families, work, business, schools, and any fraction or section of society. In the same vein, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt proposed that while all people are aware of their inherent human rights, it will allow them to find the best modes of governance. For her, this can best be achieved in the context of a ‘res-publica,’ hence a republic where the public sets the rules enforced by elected leaders. Republican theory is about constructing a system of governance built on the free will of people, which must continuously be fought for and developed further. As Arendt claims ‘(…), this freedom is never realized if the right to participate actively in public affairs to Citizens is not guaranteed’ (Arendt, 1994, p. 281).
In ‘glocal’ times, it is—ideally, democratically elected—governments that set the rules and standards of implementing and enforcing human rights to which all other non-state actors and citizens involved comply and adhere to or not (Zürn, 2018). Global or regional political governance regimes are thus complementary to Foucault’s concept of governmentality and the concepts of a republican and a constitutional state, and they invariably operate with much less hierarchy. Citizen-driven regime change that led to the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1990 was based on claims for ‘freedom’ but not necessarily and participation, used in Southeast Asian waves of democratization at the same time. The millennials then started the Facebook Revolutions in the Arab World, and in China used the Sina-Weibo network to mobilize millions, and in Brazil, they used the Fórum Social Temático to ask for more social justice and fair opportunities, that is: social mobility. Only those successfully drove significant regime change, which turned their claims into fundamental matters and concerns and organized their movements locally successfully. However, democratization failed in many societies for many reasons, and one of them is that people seeked more freedom, but not necessarily wanted to participate in building up the new regime. They expected that governments and political elites deliver to them, like before, but in a different manner. Instead, the old political elite, simply changed colors, and remained the same and soon or later manifested the same authoritarian mechanism as before.
A fertile ground for organizing movements to fight for fundamental matters can be found today in urban dwellings. Over 60% live in urban settlements and megacities with 10 million people or more. ‘Urban governmentality’ and informal settlements illustrate how dramatic this shift and the struggle for effective governance is (Appadurai, 2001). These shifts in governance are fundamentally different from the democratization movements within a determined territorial state. In modern megacities, we find urban space no longer controlled by state authorities, but by CSO groups or organized crime. Schools and hospitals are built and run by humanitarian and often foreign organizations, such as UNICEF and foundations. Hence, cities have become a state within the state. Their local neighborhood councils, informally appointed or elected, are the managers of these urban spaces. They organize health care, schooling, policing, and regulate markets and business—and their most prominent opponents are organized crime groups, not the state. These informal governance councils organize and govern a diverse population of different languages, ethnicities, and religions in a surprisingly peaceful and fair manner. More formally, elected city mayors act and advocate transnationally on migration, and they are supported by a growing web of intercity networks spanning from knowledge sharing and lobbying to operational work. In parallel, cities’ agency is rising as they acquire access and influence in interstate deliberations and decision-making fora. Glocal policy instruments like the foundation of the Global Mayors Forum in 2005, founded their own Global Forum on Migration and Development, the Global Compact on Refugees in 2018, and city mayors across regions initiated the 2019 UN Global Compact for Migrants. State governments play a marginalized role in crucial public policy issues. Cities and urban dwellings face the challenges of integrating migrants, dealing with climate change-induced floods and water shortages, and cyber security (Lacroix, 2021).
Along with the shift from territorial state to local urban governance units comes the caveat of rising populism, notably locally. Populism is fueled by unresolved heterogeneity issues, which again become more potent by the number of migrants from diverse backgrounds flowing into the cities, where the integration and inclusion of migrants and other groups happen. Hence it is in urban spaces where future modes of governance are developing, and if not in a human right complying manner, populists and nationalists will take the lead. The search for a shared and common identity in a highly diverse and heterogeneous group of urban dwellers can quickly exhaust the most dedicated democrats and instead mobilize right-wing populists that deliver the easy answer: ‘we against the others.’ Populist led governments share common features, such as (1) joint, often heroic, narrative, and rhetoric ‘we against the others,’ (2) the need for drama, chaos, and action, (3) rhetoric to dismantle or humiliate the ‘others,’ (4) fuel general fears among the population, (5) spread fake news, and (5) nurture conspiracies. Not surprisingly, populism is strongest where the flow of liquid borders and migration has been objected to. Even within Europe, the idea of the Nation-State remains strong among supporters of populist leaders. David Runciman illustrates how democracy in Europe always grew out of fear against tyranny and populism. In Attica Greece, tyrants were often populist leaders who represented their own clientelist ‘privileged elites’ and who had no interest in guaranteeing the common people the rights and opportunities they deserved—always just enough so they would not notice that they are fouled (Runciman, 2018). This fear is deeply ingrained in the European narrative of the ‘demos,’ who ‘demonstrate’ and protest their will against a corrupt elite—or at least aims to control the elite. Contemporary attempts to discourage, intimidate, forbid, and dissolve political parties before elections, such as under Russian populist President Vladimir Putin’s ‘Unity’ Party (Eди́нcтвo) over the past decades, remind European leaders of the darkest time of European tyrannies. Populist former US President Donald Trump (2016–2021) also called his Republican Party ‘our America First Movement for the people,’ asking the masses to join his cause, but not the Republican party. And the French President Emmanuel Macron, who has strong populist tendencies, founded a hybrid party-movement-group La République En Marche! in 2016. Formal political parties have turned into hybrid forms, between civil society activism and political parties. Their gatekeepers are no longer party programs or parliaments but social media and messengers’ platforms such as Meta, Weibo, and Twitter.
Like twin brothers, populism and ethnonationalism mutually reinforce themselves. Nations and nationalism go hand in hand, like a pseudo-religion and cover identity aiming to replace the concept of dynastical and even divine monarchies. The nineteenth-century invention of a European Nation-State had but one goal: One nation under one rule! Nevertheless, only for those living within its state borders, the state was far from being inclusive. The concept of state sovereignty and non-interference in internal matters is a legacy of this nineteenth-century concept and slogan that haunts us today in International Relations. What may have appeared novel and revolutionary to replace a millennium old and ineffective mode of monarchial and dynastical governance in the nineteenth century, namely the Nation-State, largely failed to provide peace and prosperity in the twentieth century, let alone in the twenty-first. Nationalism needs the other, and enemy against which it can justify the uniqueness of its nation. Hence, a Nation-State needs to legitimate itself via language, history, traditions, or religion vis-à-vis other states. In Eric Hobsbwan’s terms, ‘Traditions’ are inventions, and more constructed than real, are key to this Nation-State, even when people claim to defend European or Muslim traditions. In eroding statehood, the nation based on constructed traditions and identities is often the only element left to justify the state. Hence, it shows its ugly side, turning identities into racism, xenophobia, and exclusions of others that kill and have heavy consequences for socio-economic development. The Nation-States are built for an egoistic reason and exclusive principles toward its constituency; therefore, hierarchical and top-down authoritarian leadership seems to be the most obvious form of governance. A pluralistic and inclusive governance model contradicts nationalism. In a representative study in 2000, Blank and Schmidt looked at people’s different identities, whether they tend to identify themselves as nationalist or patriot and what that meant for building an inclusive and democratic society when dealing, for example, with migration and minorities. Not surprisingly, those who follow a nationalist agenda prefer to expel, blame and exclude migrants and minorities; those who consider themselves patriots of the country prefer integration and more inclusion of minorities through participation (Blank & Schmidt, 2003). According to Hobsbawm, constructed identities need strong leaders, who are often the strongest agitators of a toxic mix of traditions and nationalism. He refers to the nineteenth-century Catholic Pope Pius IX in his example. In his fear of losing papal (divine) state control in Europe, Pius called upon conservative traditions and infallibility to justify his stand against the radical democratization and liberalization movements while fueling antisemitism and hate (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1992). Another political, nationalistic leader, Victor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary since 2010, uses constructed traditions to rule. In his words, liberalism and diversity are the ‘enemy of Christian Conservatism’ and the universal political order that liberals propagate, only has one goal, namely to ‘(…) steal ones’ Tradition that resume from the lives and experiences of our grand-grand, grand and parents.’Footnote 20 Although Orban argues that the liberal way of life is against Hungarian traditions, he does not explain why the ancestral experience of family heritage is opposed to global and universal values such as fundamental freedoms and human rights.
Global and non-nationalistic mass movements and protests such as We are the 99%, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Cancel Culture, and Post-Colonialism, started to deconstruct invented traditions that no longer match the reality of a global and diverse society. An urban civil society leads these movements, communicating in a few global world languages. Counter-movements, such as anti-feminist Men’s Rights associations and male brotherhoods are fighting back against women’s rights activists and gender equality politics and often find their constituency among rural or very elitist groups who fear the loss of privileges and customs.
To better illustrate this, it is again worth looking at what the popular film industry says about this. In the 2016 Netflix documentary ‘The Red Pill’—in alignment with the Red Pill question in the blockbuster Matrix from 1999—men confess why they hate women and why they think that Feminism is a global threat: because it questions the ‘natural supremacy’ of man, and hence challenges an ancestral brotherhood system in which men worldwide found confidence and comfort to handle their matters. What many of these Anti-Feminism, Anti-Westernism, Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Colonialism, and Anti-Semitism movements have in common is the struggle of the perceived inferior against the superior. Undoubtedly, colonialism was one of many ugly consequences of uncontrolled capitalism, to argue with Max Weber. Today, the global post-colonialism movements are more than only an Anti-Western movement. It is an anti-capitalism movement, too. Urban youth movements, such as cancel culture and a shared economy with a strong anti-capitalism urge, understand that a ‘good way of life’ is more than a materialistic life. The anti-‘isms’ are social movements against others’ alleged ‘superiority’ and allegedly powerful wealthy elite.
The first global UN Anti-Racism Conference in Durban, South Africa, in September 2001 marked the beginning of deconstructing the Nation-State. Nevertheless, primarily forgotten because the day after it ended, the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon in DC were attacked by terrorists, today known as 9/11. The conference was closed, concluding that the main obstacles to good governance were the lack of equal and mutual respect and self-determination. The press release on 8 September 2001 stated that the unequal treatment, humiliation, and discrimination of the ‘others,’ may they be members of ethnic, religious, or language minorities, women, or elders, cannot be fixed with money. One ‘(…) could not put a monetary value on the restoration of that dignity, was a concluding remark of the conference.’Footnote 21 Hence, what it takes is a change in attitude and behavior to build a peaceful world. The military response to the deadly attacks in the US caused precisely the opposite and led to a plethora of proxy wars and conflicts across the world since 2001.
Ever since, 2001 stands for a turning point, highlighting identity politics as a critical challenge for the twenty-first century on the global and local agenda, as had been predicted by Huntington and Fukuyama ten years earlier. Assimilation, genocide, stolen identities, and ‘cultural appropriation’ describe century-long humiliation against people’s identities and habits. Modern-day cancel culture and the return of stolen or betrayed cultural artifacts to Africa, Asia, or Latin America from the British Museum, the Louvre in Paris, or the Pergamon Museum in Berlin is a way to make up for it. The practice is highly disputed and controversial because the purpose of cleansing museums and memorials of unpleasant historical facts is unclear. Running away from an unpleasant past is the opposite of what Transitional justice claims to do when dealing with it (Mihr, 2018). Taking down statues of war heroes and enslavers or returning archeological and historical artifacts to the country of origin seems to be a good move. But this also carries the risks that people construct a past and identity according to their subjective understanding of it.
Along with cancel culture comes the destruction of the standard narrative of the one nation. National narratives were invented to cover the ‘weakness and deficits of human beings’ in the first place, according to some, in dire need of solidarity and reciprocity to survive.Footnote 22 Hannah Arendt contributed to the debate about the concept of solidarity and the needs of people living in urban communities and Nation-States. All religious and ideological streams offer their concept of solidarity and reciprocity to us and, hence, a form of governing that. What if people no longer need a religion, an ideology, or nationality and instead live their solidarity because there are human beings with different beliefs, identities, and ideas? Then the Nation-State is obsolete as an entity to govern.
A diverse, mobile, heterogeneous urban society has different needs than a rural homogeneous one. In his 1973 study at Stanford University, Granovetter investigated why heterogeneous societies, are more successful at maintaining peace and prosperity over a more extended period than homogeneous societies tied by kinship (Granovetter, 1973). In heterogeneous societies, they found out, is the need to form new bonds outside one’s comfort zone stronger than in homogeneous ones. A kin urge us to be open, adapt, and respectful toward others and build new ties and friendships to survive. Automatically we collaboratively exchange views and ideas, generating innovation and progress. Diverse societies and transdisciplinary research groups have more innovative outcomes than homogenous ones. People who leave their homes and countries, triggered through curiosity or force, need to build trustworthy bonds with people they have never met before. This group is often young and seeks merit-based collaboration ties that at the same time aim to get the best results for all and both. The opposite of this is tribalism and clientelism and kinship, based on property and blood relationships, and those who solve problems based on traditions and customs, but not on merits and scientific evidence.
So why then, do homogenous nationalistic and territorial societies flourish at all? China exercised the ethnonationalism of the Han, Nazi Germany was partly successful while propagating the superiority of the Germanic race, and even the Soviet Union claimed that the homos sovieticus was new ethnic humankind, rising above all others. What these societies have in common is that at the beginning of their ‘homogeneous empires,’ as we see in modern-day China, they have a disciplined top-down controlled economic regime, using the best-brains in the country to make the new ideology successful in the eyes of the population—at the beginning of regime change. Engineers, scientists, physicians, and even writers and lawyers enjoy a certain level of freedom and liberty in the first decade of establishing the new empire. However, these liberties shrink after a decade, and control, surveillance, betrayal, and mistrust creep into all aspects of life—as seen in current-day China. The system corrupts and collapses from the inside and turns into tyranny. Along this downward spiral, all empires and societies turning into ethno nationalists have failed to succeed.
Lets take China, for example, ten years after its successful launch of ‘global development for all,’ initiative, the BRI strategy cracks. China cannot keep up its promises, its ‘roads and highways’ get attacked by angry mobs in Asia and Africa, energy projects are put on hold, there is the rise of military expenditure instead of development, as lands get violently annexed in Kashmir, Tibet, and Hong Kong, installing a Han Chinese way of infrastructural development. The CPC spends more on control and security than on infrastructural matters, and Beijing’s leadership keeps its citizens happy at the cost of personal freedoms. Human rights abuses are increasingly being reported and sooner or later, this will trigger resistance in China and the BRI countries in Central and Southeast Asia and Africa.
Many leaders before tried to establish all sorts of autocratic governance regimes to reach societal prosperity without democracy, but often failed. Second-century Roman Emperor Diocletian, to keep the empire together, created a system called Tetrarchy, a multi-level decentralized governance regime led by four proxy emperors. This system was an early form of federalism to overcome high security risks and costs posed by ethnic conflicts and the fight against protesters in the colonized regions. Diocletian failed because he kept the last word and hierarchal autocratic structures and would not allow to share and decentralize powers. He would not allow for complete autonomy and liberalization of regional autonomies in Roman colonies because he did not trust their leaders; and hence the Tetrarchy failed and could not stop the empire’s fall. A century later the fifth-century theologist and writer Augustine, claimed to have found the solution to the governance dilemma, namely theocracy. He proposed a divine, cleric, and God-led cleric state, similar to what we see today in the Islamic Republics of Iran, Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia. It was the basis for the Catholic reign over Europe for centuries and today’s Vatican State. Theocracy eventually failed because it left little room for citizens to express different views and needs. The regime was responsive to a majority of people, but not to all. After all, the last word was always with the cleric elites and those who shared their belief. However, even when liberal democracy became a popular model of governance, Ludwig Hegel, a critical political thinker of the nineteenth century, had his concerns about it. He wanted a ‘moral state’ under the rulership of a strong, ideally, monarchial leader—like Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan. Hegel’s caveat was that these moral leaders hardly exist, let alone as monarchs, and hence the system he proposed is not sustainable. Threats to autocratic hierarchical and patriarchal regimes always came from inside. When people loose trust in the central government, the regime collapses sooner or later. What Augustin, Hegel and others often overlooked is that they looked at governance model that would work for a majority of society, but not for all, let along minorities.
3.3 Universal Jurisdiction
Universal jurisdiction is the rule of law on the global level. It provides for state authority anywhere in the world, namely domestic or regional courts, parliaments, and tribunals to exercise jurisdiction over crimes against international human rights law, even when the crimes did not occur on that state’s territory and regardless of the defendant’s nationality. A suspect subject to universal jurisdiction is someone who committed severe or gross human rights violations, such as massacres, genocide, and other crimes against humanity, and who is sought by an international warrant and hence can be put to justice anywhere in the world. This practice has eroded state sovereignty dramatically over the past two decades—and some would go as far that it replaced state sovereignty over jurisdiction. Universal jurisdiction, if exercised, highlights the incapability or unwillingness of countries’ authorities to bring to justice to their worst criminals. The extent to which universal jurisdiction expands is decided by an assembly of member states to the system such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) who defines the legal framework of the universal jurisdiction.
Thus far, the most prominent legal instrument of universal jurisdiction is the Rome Statute (1998) of international criminal law. Its subsequent legal body is the ICC in The Hague (2002), dealing with most the severe and gross human rights violations, such as genocide, crimes of aggression, and systematic rape as means of suppression—if the state on which territory it is happening cannot or will not deal with it. Nevertheless, universal jurisdiction equally allows other national courts in third countries to address international crimes occurring outside that territory, to hold perpetrators criminally liable. Genocidaires of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, for example, who escaped the country and were later tracked down in Germany and Belgium, had been trialed, sentenced, and imprisoned there for a lifetime—thanks to universal jurisdiction and the capability of courts elsewhere in the world to apply international law.
Globalization and mobility have increased the need for universal jurisdiction to be applied extraterritorially—which, too, has significantly eroded our understanding of statehood. Extraterritorial regulations and trials build intersections between different forms of jurisdiction, local, national, and global, and erode governmental authority and domestic jurisdiction (Allen et al., 2019). However, universal or extraterritorial jurisdiction only applies when domestic governments and courts are unwilling or incapable to exercise jurisdiction according to international law. Extraterritorial jurisdiction, for example, means that a court of one country can exercise legal authority beyond its normal state boundaries. Domestic courts of one country must have an agreement either with the legal authority in the other country or with a legal authority that covers both territories. It mainly applied to cases of transnational terrorism and piracy and organized crime groups, environmental crimes, human trafficking, and cybercrime. For example, the storage of data Cloud Computing against the will and consent of the Internet user, can compose a cybercrime. The company, or programmer, responsible for it can be charged anywhere in the world if one finds lawyers, courts, and state attorneys that are willing to deal with the case. Trans-border criminality is nevertheless one of the most complex, glocal, and yet underdeveloped areas in terms of universal and extraterritorial jurisdiction thus far (Allen, 2019).
International criminal, human rights, environmental, and cyber laws are, for most parts, customary international law. But no matter their global acceptance, to implement these laws it does require collaboration and agreements by national governments, after the ruling takes place in one country and needs to be enforced in another. One of the first criminal trials worldwide on systematic and gross violations of human rights by a third state, namely Syria, in front of a domestic court in another country, was a trial against a torturer in Germany in 2020. The defendant, a former official at the Syrian General Intelligence Directorate, was found guilty by a district court in Germany, sentencing him to four and half years in prison in 2021 (Buerger, 2021). And later, in 2022, the German district court of Koblenz sentenced a Syrian colonel to life in prison for crimes against humanity. The former Colonel of the Syrian Army was linked to the torture of over 4,000 people in Syria’s civil war. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, called the conviction a ‘landmark leap forward’ in pursuing truthFootnote 23 and one could add it was a stepping stone for ‘glocal justice.’
Under the same notion of universal jurisdiction, in 2021, the District Court of The Hague ruled against the Dutch government for not fulfilling its duty to combat climate change elsewhere in the world and protecting citizens in other countries from the consequences of environmental destruction.
Climate-related issues and cybercrime cases are the most frequent cases that call for global and local jurisdiction changes. Espionage of intellectual property and abuse of private or company data has reached approximately a damage volume of 450 billion dollars yearly. The number of international and hybrid trials against hackers, whistleblowers, and alleged cyberespionage has skyrocketed over the past years. The call for an International Cybercrime Court—in the style of the ICC—and global jurisdiction on cybercrime is louder than ever by CSOs and companies alike, highlighting the fact that domestic courts can no longer deal with what does not only fall under the category of transnational crimes in global cyberspace. Violation of rights in cyberspace forces governments of all states, local and national courts alike, to collaborate under existing international law (Mihr, 2017). The UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF), the European Court for Human Rights (ECtHR) endorsed and practice the European Convention against Cybercrime from 2001, turning it into global customary law and by this setting new legal benchmarks for global jurisdiction on these matters. Cases on cybercrime and data protection have skyrocketed over the past decade, mainly in Europe and North America. Yet, the main challenge is not the law or the lack thereof, but the law’s applicability when the crime happened in ‘non-territorial’ cyberspace. IP addresses are often not traceable to a specific country, let alone a person. Based on European Union Law and the EU Fundamental Rights Charter from 2000, the EU’s Court for Justice in Luxemburg ruled in 2020 against one of its member states, Romania, for failing to protect the privacy on the Internet of an abused woman, whose Facebook and emails were accessed by her ex-husband and who blackmailed her with harmful consequences. The court ruled that the Romanian government must pay compensation to the women because it failed to protect its citizen from human rights abuse (Barberá, 2020). States, let alone governments for that matter, are no longer the only duty-bearer of law; they can also be a service provider. The relationship between duty-bearer and rights holders has dramatically shifted over the past decade. The traditional concept that governments are the only duty bearers to be held accountable is no longer valid. Nowadays, all legal entities, i.e., companies, NGOs, and individuals alike, are duty bearers and therefore responsible for fulfilling human rights,Footnote 24 namely in the manner in which rights holders hold duty bearers accountable (EU White Paper, 2007; UN, 2007). Domestic jurisdiction alone can no longer solve recent global–local and private cases. The development of universal and extraterritorial (country-to-country), and supranational jurisdiction (EU), has taken speed. However, what is remarkable in the light of glocal governance is that the court’s decisions can be implemented by anyone who can implement them, whether it be the local authorities in Romania, Civil Society in Syria, and City Mayors in the Netherlands.
Another way to see the interlinkage between universal norms and politics in a glocalized world is to look at Outer and International Space Law and joint space shuttles. The first treaties and agreements in the UN Outer Space Treaty from 1967, setting norms and standards, agreed to by the Soviet Union and the US at that time, set out that the exploration and use of outer space shall not be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of one country alone. Instead, it shall be in the interest ‘of all countries and shall be the province of all humanity’ (1967). At the height of the Cold War, and apart from the other UN human rights treaties, this treaty paved the grounds for setting standards, governing a space and environment in a sustainable way, and for the benefit of all humankind. It is under no clear jurisdiction of a state government and territory and inspires many lawmakers today when facing governance issued in the context of climate justice or cybercrime.
Equally, this rapid change underlines the dramatic rise of domestic violence and sexual abuse during war and conflict or within one’s family. For centuries rape and sexual assault have been seen as ‘unavoidable collateral damage in times of war or pressure,’ let alone a private matter within families and husband and wife. This harmful norm led to a dreadful spiral of more violence and impunity and hence again the struggle of many for vengeance and homicide. The Rome Statute on Crimes against humanity of 1998 and the UN Resolution 1325 on Women’s Rights and Sexual Violence during conflicts and at home aim to challenge our norms and attitudes of sexual violence and domestic violence and rape in war times so that it is no longer seen as collateral damage. Turkey’s withdrawal and Hungary’s and Croatia’s blockade against the 2011 Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention against Violence against Women marked the tipping point of how serious of a threat women’s rights are seen by patriarchal systems. Gender equality fundamentally erodes a millennia-old patriarchal governance system across the planet.
3.3.1 Rule of Law
The rule of law is crucial for glocal governance to work. The most visible institutions that exercise the rule are administrative courts, hence local or district or city courts that deal with people’s day-to-day issues. During the period of Soviet dictatorship, none of the socialist countries having administrative courts was one way to prove that in an autocratic regime, the day-to-day problems were not dealt with by courts but by political elites. Hence, fair and open trials were not possible, and people depended on the will and arbitrary judgment of political or clerical elites or clan leaders. Nevertheless, even though today all modern societies have at least de jure, administrative justice, if judges are seen to be underpaid and corrupt, and police and courts are not equipped with necessary equipment, the rule of law is nil.
The rule of law is more than anything a concept according to which arbitrary exercise of power is restricted by subordinating jurisdiction to overall agreed and established laws by citizens. Ideally, international, domestic, and local law is exercised based on this concept that can both be applied by local judges to sentence people and to solve disputes. The more independent and impartial judges are, and the more unrestrained and fairer the trials are run, the more likely that rule of law is practiced and the higher the trust in the judiciary and the more robust this institution is perceived publicly. International, domestic, and local formal and informal councils, courts, tribunals, etc., can practice the rule of law because it is a concept of how to govern, but not a law in and of itself. Human rights norms are integral to the rule of law but not sufficient unless buttressed by a commitment to principles such as the supremacy of law, equality before the law, and accountability to the law. Judges should respond not only to laws but also to people. Therefore, successful compliance with the rule of law principles depends on the levels of popular trust and confidence in the courts and the judges, predicting the accountability and responsiveness in institutions. Key indicators of whether the stakeholder, namely clients, defendants, witnesses, and lawyers trust institutions and hence the rule of law is if they bring their cases in front of the court in the first place.
According to the World Justice Project data report on the practice of the rule of law in 128 countries in 2020, it is dramatically downscaling across the planet, meaning that law is no longer impartially applied but instead abused by powerful elites. Domestic legal institutions are more and more corrupted, the judges threatened by clients and governments alike, or they are bought or underpaid, witnesses are intimidated, and claims by citizens denied. Hence, an independent judiciary is at stake and can no longer deliver citizens’ needs. The questions asked by the Justice Project are whether domestic jurisdiction and courts can constrain governmental powers and hold up fundamental Rights, Order, and Security for their citizens. The average annual percentage drop in the rule of law is in states that have recently turned back to autocratic leadership or are governed anocratically, such as Egypt, Venezuela, Cambodia, the Philippines, Cameroon, Hungary, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Poland’s recent decline of rule of law performance up to 10% is the highest in less than five years among democratic states. Even here, the rule of law is jeopardized if control mechanisms such as civil society, population empowerment, and fee and impartial media are not in place or cannot work freely. What is also striking is that small countries in each region, with less than 10 million inhabitants, score the best among their regional peers in upholding the rule of law. Size seems to matter. Those smaller countries who preform best among its regional peers are Nepal in South Asia, Georgia in Eastern Europe and Central Asia; Namibia in Sub-Saharan Africa; Uruguay in Latin America; the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East; New Zealand in East Asia and Pacific; and Denmark in the Western hemisphere.Footnote 25 Smaller states seem to have more transparency, mutual control mechanism, and shorter communication distances between governmental institutions and civil society and media. Whether this equation ‘the smaller, the better’ aligns with glocal governance entities remains to be seen, but for sure, mutual control, checks and balance systems, and transparency are more intensive in smaller communities than in larger ones. According to the Justice Project, large, populated countries such as India ranking 69:128 and China, 88:128, and score relatively low unless they decentralize and share power with local courts on the one end and accept universal jurisdiction on the other.
According to the change theory, the rising awareness of human rights and individual entitlement will challenge any dysfunctional and corrupt regime, as it has already passed the threshold of 33%, and the number of people who are sensitive to abuse of power and corruption is growing daily (Childs & Mona, 2008). This critical mass can trigger sustainable change and transformation, no matter the regime type. Welzel and Alexander asses this effect and found out that the ‘(…) lack of the rule of law depreciates the scoring of many nominally democratic countries. Sometimes this depreciation goes so far that nominal democracy scores lower ineffective democracy than some autocracies. Under recognition of democracy’s purpose to empower people (…). Democracies that lack the rule of law fail to set popular rights into effect, and so they do as little to empower people effectively as do some milder versions of autocracy’ (Welzel & Alexander, 2008, p. 30). In the same vein, and according to the V-dem index report of 2021, the backsliding of democracies around the world is intertwined with the abuse of Rule of Law in all world regions. State authorities manipulate democratic institutions, such as supreme courts, as tools to exercise their power and to keep a democratic facade. In India, for example, the populist Hindu BJP government has used laws on sedition, defamation, and counterterrorism to silence critics without providing fair and open hearings to those who challenge these laws. Street revolts and imprisonment of people were the consequence, over 7,000 people were charged with sedition after the populist government assumed power, and the rule by law became stronger. It applies mainly to hybrid and weak democracies that lack strong media and civil control mechanisms, but it is also a global trend showing the rapid erosion of statehood (Alizada et al., 2021).
It is what Hume, Kant, and others meant when highlighting that the concept of the rule of law is the positive law, deriving from Natural Law and the ‘natural entitlement by all men’ not states. Glocal governance aims to put these individual entitlements in the center of if rule of law concept, independently from the any regime-driven state. In short, everywhere, and at any time without any exceptions or excuses international law and practice can and should be applied, based on the born entitlements and natural rights of free women and men (Beitz, 2011 and Donnelly, 2003). Our natural entitlements are the fundamental freedoms such as the capability of logical thinking and speaking, and the desire for security and safety, but it also includes envy and vengeance. The rule of law aims to balance these natural entitlements and desires for fundamental freedoms. It is our reasoning and action that turns human rights into laws, and hence measuring the applicability and impact of the rule of law can best occur in a glocal setup.
Notes
- 1.
Biden, Joseph, 2021, US President. Speech US Congress, Washington, 28 April 2021.
- 2.
Irish Times, 2 April 2014, Brussels, ‘Democracy not for China,’ says Xi Jinping, Political systems of other countries, would not suit Chinese.’ https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/democracy-not-for-china-says-xi-jinping-1.1747853 (August 2021).
- 3.
The New York Times, 2018, Adolf Hitler, Educational Publishing Books, New York Times, pp. 31–33.
- 4.
20 June 2021, UK News Today, Manuel Neuer, facing UEFA probe for supporting Pride Month with rainbow armband. https://todayuknews.com/shopping/manuel-neuer-facing-uefa-probe-for-supporting-pride-month-with-rainbow-armband/.
- 5.
All documents are accessible via UN Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights, Database. https://www.ohchr.org/en/publicationsresources/pages/databases.aspx. As for the chronological order: 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), followed by the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD); 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR); 1979, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW); 1984, Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT); 1989, Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC); 1990, International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (CPRMW), 2006 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).
- 6.
Regional legally binding human rights treaties: The European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the ECHR in 1951, the Inter-American Convention for Human Rights (1969), Pact of San Jose, and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1986), Banjul Charter, have created their courts that can take decisions or to pass judgments over those states that are a member of the treaties and courts and that violate human rights. The three main regional human proper courts are the European Court for Human Rights (1959) in Strasbourg, France; the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (1979) in San Jose, Costa Rica; and the African Court on Justice and Human Rights (2004) in Arusha, Tanzania.
- 7.
Bangkok Declaration on Human Rights, 1993 Paragraph 6. https://asean.org/.
- 8.
World Values Survey, 2021. Wave 7 (2017–2020) Results in % by country weighted by weight, Study # WVS-2017v2.0, Q253, p. 505.
- 9.
(FAZ 2. May 2020),
- 10.
Die ZEIT, 16 April 2020.
- 11.
WVS, 2021, Q58, 257.
- 12.
European Commission, 2014, Input on “Internet Governance Principles,” NETMundial, Sao Paulo 23–24 April 2014 (Source: http://content.netmundial.br/files/176.pdf).
- 13.
World Summit Information Society Tunis Agenda (2005) (Source https://www.itu.int/net/wsis/docs2/tunis/off/6rev1.html).
- 14.
Bundeskanzler Walter Thurnherr, Schweizerisch Eidgenossenheit, Bundeskanzlei. https://www.bk.admin.ch/bk/de/home/bk/bundeskanzler-walter-thurnherr.html (accessed August 2021).
- 15.
Source V-dem report 2021. https://www.v-dem.net/en/publications/democracy-reports/ (accessed September 15, 2021).
- 16.
Ibid., p. 261.
- 17.
August 14, 1971.
- 18.
June 21, 2019, TODAY news channel: Cohesive society calls for everyone to build a ‘democracy of deeds’: Heng Swee Keat; Read more at https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/cohesive-society-calls-everyone-build-democracy-deeds-heng-swee-keat.
- 19.
- 20.
Victor Orban, 2020, Prime Minister of Hungary, in his annual speech ‘Jointly we will achieve our goals’ on 29 September 2020. https://visegradpost.com/de/2020/09/29/gemeinsam-wird-es-erneut-gelingen-ein-essay-von-viktor-orban/.
- 21.
Press Briefing by President and Secretary General of World Conference on Racism, World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, UN DPI—News and Media Services Division, Durban, South Africa 31 August–7 September 2001, 8 September 2001.
- 22.
Gehlen, Arnold, on Hannah Arendt? https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/arnold-gehlen-on-arendts-the-human-condition-2013-05-07.
- 23.
BBS News (14 January 2022), German court finds Syrian Colonel guilty of crimes against humanity. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59949924.
- 24.
UN Report of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the Issue of Human Rights and Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises, John Ruggie: Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework 2008. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/705860.
- 25.
The World Justice Project, 2020, The Rule of Law Index, Washington, DC. https://worldjusticeproject.org/ (August 2021).
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Mihr, A. (2022). Glocal Challenges in the Present and the Future. In: Glocal Governance. SpringerBriefs in Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02108-4_3
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