1  GOLD MERCURY INTERNATIONAL Global Governance: Towards a New Ethic
Global Governance: Towards a New Ethic GLOBAL GOVERNANCE POLICY SERIES
Keywords: Global governance> globalisation> sustainability> global values> global ethics> dialogue> Anticipatory Governance> global solutions> global complexity> nation state> sovereignty> global public goods> global citizenship.
26 MINUTES
2 GOLD MERCURY INTERNATIONAL Global Governance: Towards a New Ethic
“For the last thirty years […] when asking ourselves whether we support a proposal or initiative, we have not asked, is it good or bad? Instead we inquire: Is it efficient? Is it productive? Would it benefit gross domestic product? Will it contribute to growth? This propensity to avoid moral considerations, to restrict ourselves to issues of profit and loss—economic questions in the narrowest sense—is not an instinctive human condition. It is an acquired taste.” Tony Judt, What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?
3  GOLD MERCURY INTERNATIONAL Global Governance: Towards a New Ethic
Introduction We are entering into new global realities. Our 21st century society has been shaped by the multidimensional impacts of globalisation: the speed of technological advancement, economic, political and social liberalisation. We face a profound crisis in global governance as the existing international institutions seem incapable of making decisions to lead nation states, corporations and citizens into a sustainable future. It is now crucial to reconsider our conception of governance and leadership, as we search for consensus on the ethical basis of human coexistence and cooperation.
4 GOLD MERCURY INTERNATIONAL Global Governance: Towards a New Ethic
Global Governance The ongoing process of globalisation is rapidly reducing the significance of borders and people are becoming more and more interconnected. As a result, many problems cannot be dealt with by individual states anymore because they are affecting people regardless of their nationality. Decision making on a global level - global governance - is needed and issues have to be addressed through cooperation between different actors. Global governance should not be confused with global government. In fact, as there is no global government and no universal global enforcement power, global governance relies on a variety of actors. A few decades ago, global governance referred primarily to intergovernmental and/ or bilateral relationships. Today the international system increasingly incorporates the voice of NGOs, citizens’ movements, multinational corporations and the common realities we share through a democratic global media. The current multilayered and polycentric system of global governance is not only a reaction to globalisation itself; it is actually shaping globalisation through the vehicles of regional and global organisations. This includes the UN, the G8, G20, the IMF etc, national and international law, international treaties, international policy making and multiple non-state actors. The way in which the ‘global governance’ system is structured thus impacts everyone, from the individual citizen to the boardroom CEO. We need a way to understand sustainable global governance without taking recourse to several qualifications in international relations. The global governance ‘complex’, or system, is a matter of concern for everybody in helping to facilitate a ‘good global community’ and manoeuvring prospective conflict over global public goods such as scarce resources, human rights, the environment, through democratic platforms. This article aims to reduce the current and future complexity of global governance to something remarkably simple: a global ethic. Globalisation has undeniably created complex ethical dilemmas at the micro and macro level. Yet it is not a “new way of thinking” that we so desperately need; it is an assiduous application of what we have always known—that we need a code of discipline, integrity and respect for our global neighbours. The UN Declaration of Human Rights marked a significant stage in our 20th century global morality—it showed that human suffering was a global concern
5 GOLD MERCURY INTERNATIONAL Global Governance: Towards a New Ethic
and helped lay the preliminary basis for a global moral community. A strengthened global values framework in action should bolster global governance institutions which should, in turn, reinforce the accountability and legitimacy of the state to its citizens. The nation state is today the most relevant political unit for citizens. What is not so clear is how the concept and management of state and national sovereignty will evolve in a more regionalised and globalised world. We have seen clearly how individual and sovereign nation states failed to predict and avoid a global financial crisis in 2009 and how a group of nations acting as a group (the EU) are moving to rescue member states on the verge of collapse.
The late-2000s financial crisis (often called the Credit Crunch, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), and sometimes referred to as the Great Recession is considered by many economists to be the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
This paper argues that sustainable global governance must be seen through the lens of an engaged and normative discussion of global values that form a global ethic. Once sustainability is understood as a key moral concern of global governance, the principle could exert great influence on the shape of the future governance system. Values, principles and ethics are often seen as the ‘soft’ side of global governance, but sustainability cannot be achieved without considering them, and without questioning whether and to what extent sustainability is a moral problem that transcends old boundaries—be they political, cultural or economic. As well as considering the global governance system today, with examples of it in action, we will lay out a roadmap for a new global set of values that can shape tomorrow’s governance system when promoted by the right kind of leadership. Ultimately, the global community strives for a new set of norms to underpin a set of constitutional guarantees in all nations, leading towards a global ethic that supports a robust international governance complex.