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Global Governance as a Multilayered Process
By Andrew F. Cooper
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In my book, Tests of Global Governance: Canadian Diplomacy and United Nations World Conferences (United Nations University (UNU) Press, Tokyo, 2004), I provide a detailed examination of the interface between diplomatic method and new forms of global governance at world conferences sponsored by the United Nations. Cast as a series of tests highlighting key concepts and issues central to the operation of international relations, this work demonstrates that global governance has become a multilayered process within which States and non-State actors play vital, if often conflicting, roles. Canada’s and Canadians’ role in these conferences is explored as a unique and representative sample of how statecraft and new society-crafts have taken shape over the past decade. The picture that emerges suggests a deepening network of institutions, actors and organizations that are animating the complex regimes which govern the major arenas of world politics.
As a test of transition with regard to diplomatic machinery, UN world conferences provide an impressive and intriguing canvas. Chronologically, a massive leap can be traced from the important, although still quite restricted, presence of non-governmental organizations in the 1960s and 1970s to the high watermark of participation featured at the 1992 Rio UN Conference on Environment and Development and beyond. Substantively, this trend opened up the possibility of a fuller and deeper integration of the “two worlds” between State and societal forces.
A second test is wrapped up with the tensions between fragmentation and consolidation in diplomatic practice. The commonplace way of looking at UN world conferences is as the exemplar of the model of multiplicity of activity. Still, if one face of this test came via bureaucratic adaptation, another is through the ongoing hold of leadership at the apex of power. Diplomatic practice has been thoroughly penetrated by highly personalized political considerations.
A third test relates to what purpose diplomacy serves. UN conferences can be interpreted as part of a compensatory strategy to deflect and offset the momentum towards neo-liberal/market tendencies. To detractors, however, this mode of multilateralism has become a tool of coercive discipline in the international system. The book cuts more concretely into these questions by examining two specific case studies: the Global Forestry Convention and the 1995 Copenhagen World Summit for Social Development.
The fourth test straddles the intersection between purpose and means as framed by the debate over sovereignty. These conferences reinforced the image (and self-image) of Canada as an actor, ready and able to bargain creatively on questions of sovereignty. A more territorially-based face of its statecraft nonetheless emerged in the narrative over indigenous or aboriginal rights at the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights. Rather than living up to the expectations of advocates of a new and inclusive diplomacy, the style adopted by the Canadian delegation reinforced the notion of diplomacy still being trapped by its older and most problematic character.
The fifth test expands on the notion of diplomacy as a means of dialogue between and across boundaries of identity in global politics. The 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development is examined via Samuel Huntington’s concept of “Clash of Civilizations”. The argument is made that the weight he attributed to particularistic and rigid identities is diminished through the embedded hold of a common diplomatic culture. Any putative clash along these lines is superseded by a more creative process by which there is a willingness to think and act beyond the “civilizational” box.
A sixth test hinges on whether or not diplomacy is conducive to a fundamental alteration in the rules of the game concerning international affairs. Women’s role and rights illuminate such a test. For if such claims are accurate, the space for women’s participation in the conference process and the boundaries of a women-centred agenda must be reordered in a decisive fashion. This test is explored by asking the central question, “How different was the 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women from the other UN conferences under review?”
The 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa, is used to illustrate the ongoing value of UN world conferences. Their fundamental value has been the ability to stay on the front lines of global governance. Procedurally, the deep if still uneven and awkward penetration of these events by multiple societal actors has become one of the defining characteristics of diplomatic engagement. Substantially, UN world conferences have continued to position themselves at the head of the intellectual and agenda-setting effort to tackle the disparate problems associated with the acceleration of globalization through the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. |
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Andrew F. Cooper is Associate Director of the Centre for International Governance Innovation and a professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada). He has co-edited with John English and Ramesh Thakur “Enhancing Global Governance: Towards a New Diplomacy?” (UNU Press, 2002). |
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