Globalization and Governance: an Overview

Abstract

Since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), global governance has been predicated on a territorial state system nested in an international capitalist order. In the twentieth century, the communist, fascist and Third World challenges to that order led to the breakdown of the European, American and Japanese empires. Ultimately, competing national capitalisms and territorial states gave shape to the contemporary institutions of global governance. At the same time, tensions have increased among global capital, territorial states and civil societies. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of bipolar rivalries between the American and Soviet camps, a global capitalist regime armed with a neo-liberal ideology has emerged. The neo-liberal project is attempting to integrate the international political economy around the rule of transnational capital. Frictions between global capitalism, the state system and an emerging international civil society are framing the conflicts of the twenty-first century.

One of the best ways to explore global governance, what world government we actually have had, is to consider the history of world organizations, those intergovernmental and quasi-governmental global agencies that have (nominally) been open to any independent state (even though all states may not have joined).

Craig Murphy (1994), p.1