When in the aftermath of WWII, Fromm et al. wrote that the ‘(…) biggest problem of future governance will be to organize the societal and economic forces in a way, so that each human being would be master of his powers and leave slavery under these forces behind’ (1990, p. 196). He could have been no more prescient at that time. Three generations, one Cold War and one failed post-soviet transition process later, and at the dawn of a New Cold War, we see the shifts that Fromm predicted in the form of glocal governance.

To no surprise, according to the WVS (2021), globally, approx. 55% of people prefer being governed by experts and technocrats, not governments, because technocrats take decisions according to what they think is best in any circumstances without political visions or the need for propaganda.Footnote 1 If half the world’s population prefers technocracy over Nation-State government, and—as shown earlier—20% of the world’s population cannot participate in a formal political process due to their non-citizenry status; and, if 60% of the world economy is informal and therefore non-taxable; and, furthermore, if 40% of the remaining public and economic sectors are for most parts de facto under control of NSA and OC, then the territorial Nation-State has turned into an ‘empty shell’ that neither enjoys legitimacy nor sovereignty any longer—at least in some parts of the world.

As illustrated, glocal governance initiatives have filled power and the governance vacuum of dysfunctional or failing states. Today, most of the world’s population work, live, and migrate below the state’s radar, even in stable democracies. More than half of the worlds population organize their day-to-day lives in family-bound or clientelist structures and prefer to avoid too much contact with political elites and government.

The ‘good and safe life’ is part of the desired or idealist Western lifestyle, but far from their reality. Electoral turnouts in these countries are often below 40%, meaning that most do not care or believe in the current regime. Thus, glocal governance is, for most parts, virtual, local, and personal, as can be best seen in how public sectors, such as education, are run today. Weber investigated ‘glocal schooling’ in South Africa and concluded that it is in the best interest of students to apply generally agreed global didactics and curricula when it is adapted and amended to local needs and the interests of students, such as climate change, mobility, or health (2007). As he calls it, Glocal schooling turns teachers and principals into glocal policymakers and interpreters between the global and the local. Glocality is today an intriguing concept and form of governance for many—may it be complementary to, or replacing of statehood. Ewelina Niemczyk found that adopting global best practices amends and improves local classroom teaching much faster, for example, when responding to contemporary ecological and social issues in ways that consider the integrated nature of local and global processes, and is easier accepted by students (Niemczyk, 2019).

However, glocal governance of the public sector in communities requires a steady team of ‘managers’ or facilitators to organize, schedule, and supervise the decisions taken. More so if these decisions are taken according to international norms and laws. These managers can work remotely or locally and often occupy managerial tasks only, like the chancellor and council of state's role in the Swiss system. Apart from that, multi-stakeholder and multi-level glocal governance systems are democratic by nature because they require transparent actions and reporting, voting, and equal access to justice, and the ability to hold stakeholders accountable. Lastly, but most importantly, glocal governance allows for more inclusive participation across the whole spectrum of citizens. Head managers and council members are elected or selected according to representatives’ systems (parliamentarian) and rotating systems. Much of it is already practiced locally in Town Hall citizen dialogues procedures worldwide, often using lotteries to select participants. Members at large in these decision-making bodies rotate in and out of the office and serve limited—not renewable—terms—at least until the job is done. The decision is based on consensus and implemented according to technocratic and scientific best practices.

These governance shifts beyond Nation-States are not utopian thinking, which was once proven by the democratic forerunner in Europe, namely France. The 2017 French presidential and parliamentarian elections to the ‘Assemblée Nationale’ were an experiment promoting glocal governance. Presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s party-like movement, only founded a year before the elections, ‘La République En Marche!’ (LREM), combined several different societal stakeholders and attempts of glocal governance. Most of the members of this hybrid party regime had no experience in politics before. The LREM built a coalition with the other non-party group, the ‘Movement Democratique’ (MoDem). Together they won and occupied a substantive majority (350:577) of seats in parliament. 75% of the Assemblee members were newcomers in politics from CSOs and businesses. A record number of women were elected, and the average age of all members decreased by six years to 48; hence, the parliament became more gender-balanced, younger, diverse, and more inclusive. But strikingly, many of its newcomers left the parliament and instead initiated protest campaigns against parliament. It was much easier to protest than taking responsibility, and it seemed that the combination of bottom-up grassroots politics and traditional top-down politics did not suit the newcomers. Another reason for the failure of the glocal movement in France was that it lacked loyalty and discipline by its supporters—there was no ideology, no vision, no ‘right cause’ that would hold them together. Eventually, in 2018, when the President wanted to reform the Assemblee and decrease its seats by 30% to introduce speedier, more glocal procedures, the remaining members rejected it. It would have meant more power to the president on the one side and local inexperienced, community movement, on the other side. Parliamentarians were fearing a ‘triumph of technocracy over democracy.’Footnote 2 This glocal experiment has failed so far, but most parliamentarians agree on the urgency of reforms toward glocal governance in essence, but on another way.

Even though the concept of Nation-State vis-à-vis glocal and liquid borders can be resolved technically, mostly through ICT and AI—as the EU’s supranationality and subsidiarity has shown; the issue of legitimacy and the lack of a uniting political or social vision, cannot. The legitimacy of governance bodies declines as one moves away from the core purpose of the governing regime and can no longer fully engage and identify with it. Scholte et al. argue that glocality and its ‘transscalar’ diffusion of global norms and local actions create new forms of relationship between normative and sociological understandings, and eventually of legitimacy. Therefore we have to rethink legitimacy, and the extent to which prevailing social norms impact legitimacy beliefs. This can be stronger than the de facto leadership role of an agent, chairperson, or other types of leader.Footnote 3 Against this backdrop, universally agreed human rights and good governance principles, designed to strive for ‘equal opportunities for all,’ might become a new pseudo-ideology which is worth compromising for glocally.

A key element of glocal governance connectivity as sworn in the triangle (Fig. 1.1) is deliberation, as highlighted by Merkel, Schäfer, Habermas, Huntington, Morlino, et al., earlier in this book. For example, procedural (democratic) moderation and glocal governance facilitate the participants’ curiosity toward reasonable disagreement, and encouraging contentious debate (Morlino et al., 2020, pp. 8–9). For glocal and partially deliberative governance, no dominant and absolute narratives or argumentation can dominate, and neither is the absolute dominance by technocrats and scientists. The key to its success is balancing and moderating a facilitator's different views, experiences, skills, and attitudes. Hence it is not the outcome or the final decision that represents the success of glocal governance but rather the process toward it.

Nation-State-based governance and oversized parliaments such as the German one, or Presidential ones, are no longer the reference point for the young and angry today. Social movements across the globe of all shapes and sizes refer to international norms, transnational agreements, and local practice, even in the most autocratic and warlord-run states—at least they do so rhetorically and on their Social Media accounts. Whether they succeed largely depends on how they can accept diversity and the bridging of individual ‘identity bubbles,’ which have been the key obstacle to political reforms since the beginning of the Anthropocene, according to Fukuyama (2019). Diversity contributes to growth as governance institutions seek higher innovativeness, effectiveness, and productivity as diversity increases—and not only in developing countries (Khan, 2005; Meisel & Aoudia, 2008).

For a while now, we have seen Citizen Dialogues and MSA practicing direct democracy and glocal governance, mainly in small and medium-sized towns and (federal) states. The question is whether these elements of glocal governance will also work in strongly centralized megacities of 10 million people and more? As seen by the example of the megacity of Moscow, citizen-driven projects and startups instead are marginalized and use their identities as ‘weapons,’ the young against the old, the conservatives against the progressives. Last, they separate and move to peripheries instead of being included in the whole process of city governance. And an evaluation of Citizen Dialogues in Ireland in 2017, has shown that if the current political elite is absent in a deliberative process, the outcome of these dialogues lack any clear and prescriptive direction and outcome (Costello, 2021). Glocal governance can only work in an inclusive manner, and by this be an addition and improvement to dysfunctional regimes.

Almost all conflicts within the EU, for example, since its formal existence in 1992 (EU Maastricht Treaty), are related to inflexible national identity and territorial autonomy, i.e., the separatist self-determination claims in Scotland, Corsica, Catalonia, Northern Ireland, Greek Islands, and Northern–Southern Cyprus. If governments do not allow the people to move and decide independently about regional and local matters as they happen, it loses de facto power. Second, local conflicts today are closely connected to non-voting rights for migrants and foreigners, no matter how long they have lived and paid taxes in the respective country—which is fatal in times of glocal mobility. It excludes this rising number of people in any community and subsequent conflicts. Thirdly, due to an imposed top-down value-focused debate, citizen dialogues were, at the beginning, not neutral dialogue. Lessons learned from the mistakes; the EU today is the most prominent donor for citizen dialogues worldwide.

The biggest competitors to glocal governance remain the patriarchal and hierarchal governance mode. These regimes can be successful for some time because, to cite Confucius, they based on the father–son relationship, and hence seniority principles, which are seen as fundamental to the family as a social security system. But sooner or later, they always end up facing inequalities that lead to conflicts, even wars, and destruction.

5.1 Human Security and Opportunities

The youth rebellion asking for equal opportunities beyond its state borders, globally, is already in motion and cannot be stopped on both sides of the New Cold War curtain. In essence, they demand Human Security and Equal Opportunities for all, no matter where in the world. They represent an angry and disillusioned crowd upset about the incompetence and unwillingness of political leadership to respond to global challenges causing them major lack of social mobility. Human security is first and foremost individual security and the responsibility of governing elites to (1) protect people from severe, pervasive, and widespread threats by autocratic regimes, and (2) empower them enough to be free from fear, from want, and to live their life in dignity. Everyone can quickly agree on these human security principles (Franck, 1995). It they get systematically violated, as Rustow predicted, they will trigger fundamental change of the way societies want to be governed.

The right to human security appeals to these rebellious youth, and not surprisingly, in 2005, in a forecasting attempt, the heads of states met at a UN World Summit for Human Security and highlighted what is essential in the twenty-first century if planet Earth wants to remain peaceful; namely the ‘right of people to live in freedom and dignity, free from poverty and despair (…) and are entitled to freedom from fear and freedom from want, with an equal opportunity to enjoy all their rights and fully develop their human potential.’Footnote 4

The summit marked, willingly or not, a break with the Westphalian Peace concept (1648) and the concept of Nation-State of the nineteenth century; namely that the state alone guarantees personal safety and freedoms, territorial integrity, political stability, military defense, and economic, environment as well as currency stability.

Instead, today governors’ main purpose is to create an environment in which everyone, independently of his/her/its background can enjoy the human security principles. These governance regimes will be less ideological and religious but relatively pragmatic.