Meritocracy Is a Good Thing

At the turn of the 20th Century when Western power was at its height, Sun Yat‐Sen sought to blend the Confucian tradition of meritocratic governance and Western‐style democracy in his vision for modern China. With the “rise of the rest” in the 21st Century—led by China—perhaps the political imagination is open once again, this time not only to Western ideas flowing East, but Eastern ideas flowing West as well. The political imagination has been pried open anew not only because of the sustained success of non‐Western modernity in places like Singapore and China, but because democracy itself has become so dysfunctional across the West, from its ancient birthplace in Greece to its most advanced outpost in California. That liberal democracy is the best form of governance ever achieved in the long arc of history is no longer self‐evident. Today, democracy, which has been captured by a short‐term, special‐interest political culture, has to prove and improve itself by incorporating elements of meritocracy and the long‐term perspective. If not, political decay beckons. In this section, we evaluate the tradeoeffs and ponder the possibilities of combining a more knowledegable democracy with a more accountable meritocracy.     

Political Meritocracy and Direct Democracy: A Hybrid Experiment

At the turn of the 20th Century when Western power was at its height, Sun Yat‐Sen sought to blend the Confucian tradition of meritocratic governance and Western‐style democracy in his vision for modern China. With the “rise of the rest” in the 21st Century—led by China—perhaps the political imagination is open once again, this time not only to Western ideas flowing East, but Eastern ideas flowing West as well. The political imagination has been pried open anew not only because of the sustained success of non‐Western modernity in places like Singapore and China, but because democracy itself has become so dysfunctional across the West, from its ancient birthplace in Greece to its most advanced outpost in California. That liberal democracy is the best form of governance ever achieved in the long arc of history is no longer self‐evident. Today, democracy, which has been captured by a short‐term, special‐interest political culture, has to prove and improve itself by incorporating elements of meritocracy and the long‐term perspective. If not, political decay beckons. In this section, we evaluate the tradeoeffs and ponder the possibilities of combining a more knowledegable democracy with a more accountable meritocracy.     

China's New Political Discourse

At the turn of the 20th Century when Western power was at its height, Sun Yat‐Sen sought to blend the Confucian tradition of meritocratic governance and Western‐style democracy in his vision for modern China. With the “rise of the rest” in the 21st Century—led by China—perhaps the political imagination is open once again, this time not only to Western ideas flowing East, but Eastern ideas flowing West as well. The political imagination has been pried open anew not only because of the sustained success of non‐Western modernity in places like Singapore and China, but because democracy itself has become so dysfunctional across the West, from its ancient birthplace in Greece to its most advanced outpost in California. That liberal democracy is the best form of governance ever achieved in the long arc of history is no longer self‐evident. Today, democracy, which has been captured by a short‐term, special‐interest political culture, has to prove and improve itself by incorporating elements of meritocracy and the long‐term perspective. If not, political decay beckons. In this section, we evaluate the tradeoeffs and ponder the possibilities of combining a more knowledegable democracy with a more accountable meritocracy.     

SELF‐REGULATION WITHIN THE REGULATORY STATE: TOWARDS A NEW REGULATORY PARADIGM?

An emerging feature of the modern regulatory state in Britain and elsewhere is the promotion of self‐regulation. This paper examines the relationship between the state and self‐regulation in the context of the challenge of meeting public interest objectives. It draws on research on the policy and practice of self‐regulation in recent years in Britain. The paper argues that the institutions, processes and mechanisms of the modern regulatory state and the ‘better regulation’ agenda in Britain, notably those that aim to foster transparency and accountability, can assist in the achievement of public interest objectives in self‐regulatory schemes. We conclude that a ‘new regulatory paradigm’ can be put forward which involves a form of regulatory ‘subsidiarity’, whereby the achievement of regulatory outcomes can be delegated downwards to the regulated organizations and self‐regulatory bodies while being offset by increasing public regulatory oversight based on systems of accountability and transparency.     

A new continuity with colonial administration: Participation in development management

Development management owes an unacknowledged debt to colonial administration, specifically to indirect rule. Development management, as opposed to development administration, has newly adopted a specific set of managerialist participatory methods, to achieve 'ownership' of development interventions. These methods are particularly evident in World Bank/ imf implementation of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers ( prsp s) and Comprehensive Development Frameworks ( cdf s). They have their conceptual foundation in action research, invented, it can justly be argued, by John Collier, Commissioner of the US Bureau of Indian (ie Native American) Affairs 1933-1945. Collier was a self-proclaimed colonial administrator, and remained an advocate of indirect rule as late as 1963. Evidence is presented to show his development of action research was a tool of indirect rule. Achieving 'empowerment' through participation was at its very beginning, therefore, subject to the colonialist's asserted sovereign power; and the limited autonomy it granted was a means of maintaining that power.     

Health and human security: a wrinkle in time or a new paradigm?

Since it was first advanced in the 1994 Human development report of the United Nations Development Programme [United Nations Development Project. (1994). Human development report. New York: UN], the concept of ‘human security’ has evolved as a holistic development-oriented acuity [Nef, J. (1999). Human security and mutual vulnerability: The global political economy of development and underdevelopment (2nd ed.). Ottawa: International Development Research Centre]. The human security concept reinforces the right to health, drawing on both the role of states and the global community's commitment to human rights. Yet, health and human security, long the purview of state power and responsibility, increasingly include alliances of state and non-state actors. This paper proceeds in three parts. The first looks at health and human security linkages, charting the trajectory of the health and human security relationship. The second deals with policy and operational implications. It explores the health–human security link, paying particular attention to the allocation of responsibility and accountability, including through private–public partnerships and rising powers such as China. The third provides a theoretical and technical analysis of the status of health and human security since 1994, taking into account its evolution vis-à-vis human rights’ development and development more broadly, also asking whether it represents but a wrinkle in time or a new sustainable development paradigm.     

Community security: human security at 21

The concept of human security has come a long way since its introduction in the UNDP Human Development Report in 1994. There are now a number of global and regional initiatives aimed at promoting human security issues. However, the achievements over the last two decades may be less impressive when one starts to explicate the progress of each of the key elements subsumed under the broad concept of human security. This paper will examine the extent to which community security, as one of the elements of human security, has been advanced through the security discourses and practices in the international arena. Using ASEAN as a case study, the paper argues that the massive gaps in human development, security and democracy hinder progress in promoting community security. The paper further argues that in developing states, community security is still very much the domain of the state.     

Demystifying democratisation: the global constitution of (neo)liberal polities in Africa

The contest to define ‘democracy’ has become a fundamental concern of global politics. As Noam Chomsky has argued, the guardians of world order have sought to establish democracy in one sense of the term, while blocking it in others. The article interrogates the theoretical and material underpinnings of the great-power-defined agenda of democratisation. It argues that the democratisation project seeks to constitute (neo)liberal polities with a procedural notion of democracy, through coveted transformations in three domains: the minimal ‘neutral’ state, the liberal public sphere or ‘civil society’, and the liberal ‘self’. The impetus to constitute African social relations in its own particular image may be attributable to liberalism's universalist pretensions. But ideas have materiality. Liberal democracy qua liberalism maintains a strong historical association with the birth and evolution of the modern capitalist world. The article contends that the democratisation project endeavours to reproduce within Africa (and elsewhere) the patterns of transformation that characterised the transition to capitalist modernity in north-west Europe.     

Chinese Soft Power,Insecurity Studies,Myopia and Fantasy

This article is critical of a series of works on Chinese soft power which have garnered much attention in recent years. These works typically portray Chinese soft power, characterised by its disregard for Western models of development that propagate ‘democratic governance’, as a latent threat to global order. The article argues that such claims are premature, and to date there is little evidence of a systematic attempt by the Chinese to propagate a ‘Beijing model’ of autocratic development. These claims are substantiated by analysing China's participation in United Nations peacekeeping operations in Africa, which are characterised by mandates aimed at transforming war-torn states into liberal democracies. I suggest that China's participation in these operations is a crucial component of its ‘charm offensive’ aimed at the West, and designed to allay fears of a ‘China Threat’. The article argues that Chinese understandings of soft power are diverse and directed at multiple audiences. The tendency to ‘look for potential threats’ in many Western policy-informed works, however, ignores the multifaceted nature and diverse views on Chinese soft power, and clouds our ability to understand this new phenomenon in Chinese foreign policy.     

How the United States justified its war on terrorism: prime morality and the construction of a ‘just war’

Just war theory has a long established reputation in the social sciences for evaluating the morality of the military actions of states. However, this analysis has rested upon assumptions of territorial sovereignty and the equal rights of states. The actions of hegemonic powers violate these twin assumptions through their expression of extra‐territorial reach. To avoid charges of immoral behaviour hegemonic powers must use the just war rhetoric of territoriality to justify their extra‐territorial acts. A world‐systems theory conceptualisation of hegemony allows for an interpretation of hegemonic military actions as the defence of a universal prime modernity. Prime modernity refers to an ideal organization of society projected by the hegemonic power as a form of integrative power. For the hegemonic power, threat is perceived as a rejection of the prime modernity anywhere rather than the language of border violations that dominates the foundations of just war theory. Using the language embedded in government and non‐government documents justifying the War on Terrorism, the manner in which a hegemonic power constructed military extra‐territoriality in a system of sovereign states as just is examined. The development of a ‘prime morality’ allowed the hegemonic power to claim that it was operating at the scales of the individual and ‘humankind’ rather than inter‐state power politics. The analysis challenges the implicit geographic assumptions of just war theory and extends our understanding of the imperatives underlying the hegemonic power's construction of its military actions as morally right.     

Politics of responsibility: governing distant populations through civil society in Mozambique,Rwanda and South Africa

This article presents and analyses the findings of a research project on power relations in the context of development partnerships with civil society on HIV/AIDS in Mozambique, Rwanda and South Africa, and engages in a critical dialogue with governmentality analysis. It argues that contemporary neoliberal government needs to be understood as context-specific articulations of three forms of power discussed by Foucault – sovereignty, discipline and biopower – and, in the global domain, a fourth form of power – (new) imperialism. Further, the analysis demonstrates how the introduction of a ‘package of (de-)responsibilisation’ shapes CSOs’ activities so that they become competitive service providers, use evidence-based methods and produce measurable results. Addressing the issue of resistance, it shows how the transfer of responsibilities may involve tension and struggle – a politics of responsibility.     

Misrecognitions and missed opportunities: post‐structuralism and the practice of development

Over the past 20 years post‐structuralist scholars have produced critiques of the field of development. In some circles it is now quite broadly accepted that this approach is futile and that we ought to move into a ‘post‐discourse’ era. By way of counterpoint, this paper argues that such exchanges are based on misrecognitions whose acceptance forecloses possibilities that both critics and their detractors would welcome. The paper is broken into two sections. The first engages problems ascribed to post‐structuralist critiques that seem to have been particularly successful in discouraging further engagement. The second explores three aspects of a single moment of post‐structuralist thought that have been obscured by current debate. Engaging these aspects, while bringing difficulties of its own, may secure conditions necessary for the emergence of the sorts of partnerships often claimed as necessary both by developers and by their post‐structuralist critics.     

Culture Governance: Governing Self‐Reflexive Modernity

Political and administrative analysis is today said to be taking a narrative turn: to learning by telling and listening to the different stories that constitute political life. However, this new approach to studying the decentring of politics and policy as multiple discursive practices carries a new grand narrative too. A new connection between political authority and political community is taking shape outside the spheres of modern government and representative democracy. Political authority is becoming increasingly both communicative and interactive in order for it to be able to meet complexity with complexity. It is employed for reforming institutions by opening them towards the culture and by tying them to the political attributes and capacities of self‐reflexive individuals and to the transformation and self‐transformation of their conduct. I call this development culture governance. Culture governance is about how political authority must increasingly operate through capacities for self‐and co‐governance and therefore needs to act upon, reform, and utilize individual and collective conduct so that it might be amenable to its rule (Bang 2003; Dean 2003). Culture governance represents a new kind of top‐down steering; it is neither hierarchical nor bureaucratic but empowering and self‐disciplining. It manifests itself as various forms of joined‐up government and network governance and proclaims itself to be genuinely democratic and dialogical. This I shall show by a study of local Danish politics and policy in Copenhagen. Culture governance, I shall argue, constitutes a formidable challenge and threat to democracy, in attempting to colonize the whole field of public reason, everyday political engagement, democratic deliberation, and so on, by its own systems logic of success, effectiveness or influence. It seeks to take charge of the working of the more spontaneous, less programmed and more lowly organized politics of the ordinary in political communities, thus undermining the very idea of a non‐strategic public reasoning as founding the practices of freedoms.     

PERFORMING GOVERNANCE: A PARTNERSHIP BOARD DRAMATURGY

This paper explores the governance of complex public sector partnerships through a detailed case study of a Joint Commissioning Partnership Board (JCPB) in the South East of England. It argues that a theoretical and empirical focus on the instrumental roles of boards has resulted in an under‐appreciation of their symbolic purposes, especially in the context of the governance of inter‐organizational relationships. The paper considers the performative dimension of partnership governance, highlighting the role of the symbolic in institutional enactment. Following a brief overview of governance in public sector partnerships, the case study site for the empirical research is introduced. The instrumental and symbolic roles of management boards are considered from a new institutionalist perspective and a dramaturgical analysis of institutional enactment undertaken to explore interplays of the symbolic and instrumental in strategy formation. Some implications for our understanding of the symbolic in partnership governance are discussed.     

Order and commerce in turbulent areas: 19th century lessons, 21st century practice

The recent collapse of some states, the proliferation of internal wars and of localized political authorities, so‐called ‘warlords’, challenges the homogeneity of the international system of states at its margins. These new fragmented authorities often rely upon commercial deals with outsiders to consolidate their power. This threatens officials in strong states who depend upon organized states everywhere to control their realms and control their citizens' transactions, including with terrorists and criminals. Widespread direct rule by western powers, as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Bosnia, is too expensive and politically risky to apply to all disorderly parts of the globe. Instead, officials in powerful states use techniques of indirect control that utilize commercial networks to pacify disorderly areas. This strategy resembles techniques developed in 19th century European relations with stateless areas. Similar problems develop as well. This led in the 19th century to direct rule, while contemporary officials are forced to experiment with more intensive use of commercial relations to pacify unruly areas.     

National determinants of international preferences in post-communist Europe: The case of Slovakia in the European Union

This paper shows that the dominant theory of European integration, the liberal inter-governmentalism, contains several assumptions about the process and character of national preference formation that may not be fully met in the post-communist EU member states. It argues that the primacy of economic and societal interests in influencing positions of national governments should not be taken for granted. Using Slovakia as an example, it demonstrates the autonomy of political and bureaucratic actors and importance of their preferences. It is also argued that ideational and exogenous factors should not be left out in constructing a realistic framework of national preference formation.     

The "End Of History" 20 Years Later

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumphant celebrations of the West, a new chapter of history has opened featuring the rising powers of Asia, led by China. Though embracing free markets, China has looked to its Confucian traditions instead of liberal democracy as the best route to good governance. Will China manage to achieve high growth and a harmonious society through a strong state and long‐range planning that puts messy Western democracy and its short‐term mindset to shame? Or, in the end, will the weak rule of law and absence of political accountability in a one‐party state undermine its promise? Francis Fukuyama and Kishore Mahbubani, the Singaporean thinker who has become the apostle of non‐Western modernity, debate these issues. In this section we also republish a collective memoir by George H.W. Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand, recalling their fears and hopes two decades ago as they brought the Cold War to an end.     

Obama in Asia: West Looks East After the "End of History"

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumphant celebrations of the West, a new chapter of history has opened featuring the rising powers of Asia, led by China. Though embracing free markets, China has looked to its Confucian traditions instead of liberal democracy as the best route to good governance. Will China manage to achieve high growth and a harmonious society through a strong state and long‐range planning that puts messy Western democracy and its short‐term mindset to shame? Or, in the end, will the weak rule of law and absence of political accountability in a one‐party state undermine its promise? Francis Fukuyama and Kishore Mahbubani, the Singaporean thinker who has become the apostle of non‐Western modernity, debate these issues. In this section we also republish a collective memoir by George H.W. Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand, recalling their fears and hopes two decades ago as they brought the Cold War to an end.     

Recalling the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumphant celebrations of the West, a new chapter of history has opened featuring the rising powers of Asia, led by China. Though embracing free markets, China has looked to its Confucian traditions instead of liberal democracy as the best route to good governance. Will China manage to achieve high growth and a harmonious society through a strong state and long‐range planning that puts messy Western democracy and its short‐term mindset to shame? Or, in the end, will the weak rule of law and absence of political accountability in a one‐party state undermine its promise? Francis Fukuyama and Kishore Mahbubani, the Singaporean thinker who has become the apostle of non‐Western modernity, debate these issues. In this section we also republish a collective memoir by George H.W. Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand, recalling their fears and hopes two decades ago as they brought the Cold War to an end.