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Global governance, essentially a product of liberal thinking, concerns so called global values, norms, standards and rules. The majority of values that are considered global are Western and so global governance basically facilitates and reflects Western hegemony. Western hegemony here refers to the dominance of Western institutions, interests, standards and NGOs.
The ‘global civil society’ is based on Western mores. In global governance, non-Western states and NGOs have had to redefine their interests and identities in relation to Western norms and power. Severe socio-economic problems have delivered the Third World political leaders and NGOs into the hands of the West, thereby making Western hegemony appear like an ’empire by invitation’.
The dominance of Western institutions is partly due to the function of an ‘interpretive community’ that constantly explains, promotes, advocates and justifies global governance. The ‘interpretative community’ has been extremely successful in portraying Western ideas, values and preferences as global. The term ‘interpretive community’ refers to any group of people who are committed to providing justification and legitimating principles for particular institutions, values or practices.
Members of an ‘interpretive community’ may come from different professional backgrounds, such as scholars, journalists, international civil servants and NGO workers. They may also be recruited from different countries and might not even be aware that they operate as a part of a global ‘interpretive community’. What they have in common is a conviction that they are interpreting reality, when, in fact, they may be only expressing aspirations. Sometimes the ideas of an ‘interpretive community’ may influence practice.
In the post-Cold War era, members of the global ‘interpretive community’ have converged on several themes, including a new world order, globalisation and new forms of sovereignty and security. For example, in December 1988, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev used the phrase ‘new world order’ in his address to the UN to underline the new strategic thinking and the global restructuring which he envisaged, but the ‘world’ simply ignored it.
However, when the US President George Bush used the same phrase two years later, the ‘world’ took notice. In condemning Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, Bush talked of a new world order ‘where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle, a world in which nations recognise the shared responsibility for freedom and justice’. This liberal aspiration contrasted sharply with the realist logic of power politics, in which war between states is always considered a possibility.
It was no more than a wish for a different type of international system in the post-Cold War era, but other world leaders, scholars and journalists subsequently started talking of a new world order, as if it was a reality. Bush’s aspiration did not spell an end to power politics; instead it gave impetus to a re-thinking of norms in world politics, and this, in turn, energized efforts to portray Western values, standards and institutions as global norms.
It was in this intellectual climate that the Commission on Global Governance issued a report which defined sovereignty as an institution that is ultimately derived from the people: ‘It is a power to be exercised by, for, and on behalf of the people of a state’. This report implies that sovereignty should be respected, only if the people of a state have had an opportunity to exercise their political, economic and cultural rights.
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The report also argues that ‘the principle of sovereignty and the norms that derive from it must be further adapted to recognise changing realities’. Furthermore, ‘global security extends beyond the protection of borders, ruling elites and exclusive state interests to include the protection of people’.
The Commission was simply expressing aspirations that may become practice one day. At about the same time, a former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans argued that the concept of security, ‘as it appears in the [UN] Charter, is as much about the protection of individuals as it is about the defence of the territorial integrity of states’.
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Earlier in April 1991, a former UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar had argued that state sovereignty needed to be reassessed in response to ‘the shift in public attitudes towards the belief that the defence of the oppressed in the name of morality should prevail over frontiers and legal documents’. Similarly, his successor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, argued that the time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty had passed.
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The former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, went further in redefining sovereignty, when he told the General Assembly in September 1999 that his interpretation of the UN charter was that it aims ‘to protect individual human beings, not to protect those who abuse them’. Annan argued, in his speech to the General Assembly in 1999, that sovereignty had been ‘redefined by the forces of globalisation and international cooperation’, and that the state was the ‘servant of its people, and not vice versa’.
The conclusions of the Commission on Global Governance and those of the UN secretaries-general and other analysts in recent years suggest that the re-thinking of norms has given rise to an interpretive community which is ready to argue for changes in the practices of sovereignty. By arguing for liberal interpretations of the UN charter, they have promoted a particular view of global governance. However, the views of an ‘interpretive community’, without changes in the practices of the majority of international actors, cannot constitute a shift in the meaning of sovereignty.
According to some analysts, it was not possible in the 1990s to see a clear-cut turn in state practices. As Adam Roberts has observed, while idealists have hoped that ‘the sovereignty of states would take second place to human rights’, humanitarian action in the 1990s ‘owed much to political considerations that were often tinged with an element of realpolitik’. It is such interpretations that set the stage on which ‘NGOs and IGOs grope, sometimes cooperatively, sometimes competitively, sometimes in parallel towards a modicum of global governance’.
What these interpretations do not say is that global governance links together ‘global civil society’, individuals, the state and market forces. It is also about the generation of, and the response to, ‘shared’ values and institutions, which give rise to a process to identify issues, form an agenda, and arrive at outcomes and make arrangements to implement them. In this way, global governance has definite implications for interpretations of sovereignty.