"Global Civil Society" and the Political Depoliticization of Global Governance

Activists, officials, and academics alike have often linked observations about an emerging global civil society to an incipient democratization of world politics. Global civil society is assumed to bring public scrutiny and "bottom-up" politics to international decision making "from outside" formal political institutions. Based on an analysis of uses of the concept of global civil society in 1990s global governance discourse (especially related to the major UN world conferences), this paper argues that the presumed democratization of world politics is better understood in terms of a double movement: on the one hand, "global civil society" depoliticizes global governance through the promotion of "human security" and "social development"; on the other hand, the emerging international public sphere (in the UN context) operates as a subsystem of world politics rather than opposing the system from outside. Practices of depoliticization are thus part of the political logic of (neo-)liberal global governance. The argument draws on Luhmann's systems theory and Foucault's analysis of governmentality.     

Rebalancing the Global Economy

The United States accuses China of subsidizing its entire export economy through artificially undervaluing its currency. China accuses the United States of fiscal profligacy while flooding the world with easy credit to keep its economy afloat. This dispute reflects the reality that the world's two largest economies are built on opposite dynamics of production and savings vs. consumerism and debt. In Europe, the wages of unsustainable debt that financed the welfare state have also come due. Rebalancing the global economy in this context is not only a matter of fixing exchange or interest rates and extending the retirement age. It must also involve a recalibration of democracy in both East and West. Two Nobel economists, the Greek prime minister, a ranking Chinese economist and the former chief economist of the IMF address these issues.     

全球性问题与国家

21世纪是全球性问题的世纪。新世纪伊始,重大全球性问题接连爆发,它既酿成与国家的结构性冲突,也给国家创造了新的机遇。在这一情势下,国家必然会扮演一个充满争议的新角色,会有不同的视野,会促成国家议程的全球化,也会使得国际谈判出现新变化。其中,新兴国家与全球性问题及其治理的关系尤其值得关注。     

Assessing Aid and Global Governance

This analysis argues for a system of global economic, social and political governance in which development aid is part of wider global redistributive mechanisms to foster social progress and development in the twenty-first century. The study provides two arguments in favour of setting up a new system of global governance, and the role of aid in such a new system. First, since in the current international economic system aid cannot cope with adverse external shocks, a new system of global governance is necessary in order to protect LDCs from the volatility of the international economic system. Second, it is argued that a new system of global governance is needed to improve redistribution at the global level to foster social progress and development.     

Global poverty and orthodox security

This article examines the way in which the discourses of security and development have merged in the past decade as an important strand of global governance. It shows why this merging of discourses has occurred and assesses whether the newly embedded security-development discourse provides adequate conceptual tools for understanding the causes of global poverty. It concludes by setting out three paths that emerge from this security-development discourse and suggests that the ontological and epistemological claims at the heart of this understanding of International Relations and global poverty serve to reinforce global hierarchies of social power and privilege.     

The Danger of Global Austerity

The United States accuses China of subsidizing its entire export economy through artificially undervaluing its currency. China accuses the United States of fiscal profligacy while flooding the world with easy credit to keep its economy afloat. This dispute reflects the reality that the world's two largest economies are built on opposite dynamics of production and savings vs. consumerism and debt. In Europe, the wages of unsustainable debt that financed the welfare state have also come due. Rebalancing the global economy in this context is not only a matter of fixing exchange or interest rates and extending the retirement age. It must also involve a recalibration of democracy in both East and West. Two Nobel economists, the Greek prime minister, a ranking Chinese economist and the former chief economist of the IMF address these issues.     

A Global Rescue for Europe

Because they have failed to address the fundamental economic imbalances within Europe obscured by the single currency, each effort by European leaders so far to resolve the euro crisis has only deepened it. Without a decisive move toward fiscal and political union, accompanied by policies that push productivity and competitiveness toward convergence while closing the democratic deficit, the Eurozone will disintegrate. To discuss the way forward, the Nicolas Berggruen Institute's Council on the Future of Europe met in Rome on May 28 with Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti. In this section we publish the contributions from that meeting by the former European leaders, scholars and Nobel laureates who are members of the Council.     

Global Inequality in Well-being Dimensions

This paper contributes to the literature on global inequality in multidimensional well-being by examining inter-country disparities in the longevity, knowledge and standard of material living components of the well-known and widely-used Human Development Index for the years 1992–2004. It differs from previous studies by examining global inequality in each of the components of this index alongside that of the index as a whole, thus side-stepping ambiguities over weighting that are inherent to multidimensional well-being indices. The Gini coefficient, both population and non-population weighted, is used to measure the extent of inequality. Results indicate that the different components often provide very different information to the index as a whole, especially with respect to changes in global inequality over time. Most component variables show declines in global inequality, whereas the longevity component exhibits increased inequality since 1992.