The unfinished business of global governance

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Yesterday I finished Mark Mazower’s [amazon_link id=”0141011939″ target=”_blank” ]Governing the World: The History of an Idea[/amazon_link]. It’s an excellent overview of global governance, ideal for students new to the subject as well as readers with a general interest. The book starts with the Concert of Europe and ends with the implications of the financial crisis for the EU. It has a western perspective, but then, as it argues, global governance has been a western and specifically American construct.

[amazon_image id=”0141011939″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Governing the World: The History of an Idea[/amazon_image]

Given its scope, the sections covering the parts I know best, namely the post-1990 globalisation debate and role of the IMF, World Bank, WTO etc, feels quite concise. Reassuringly, though, it also gets to the essence of the issues.There are also some interesting perspectives – for instance, on the problematic status of NGOs, many of which started specifically as instruments of the Cold War. “The broad term ‘NGO’ hids as much as it reveals'” writes Mazower. He introduced me to the acronym GONGO, government-organised non-governmental organisation.

Another very interesting section covers the momentousness of the UK requesting IMF assistance to deal with its balance of payments crisis in 1976. The book focuses on the internal Labour Party debate between the Atlanticists, among them Prime Minister Jim Callaghan and Chancellor Denis Healey, and the left-wingers who favoured a radical turn towards nationalisation, capital controls etc. When the former prevailed, Mazower writes, “It was much more than a defeat for the British Left, the unions and the working class. It was the first step in the capitalist reconstruction of the West.” He argues that the moment marked the turn away from post-war social corporatism and enabled the construction of the financialized ‘free market’ economy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The book goes on to finger the role of economists in this process, and specifically its turn away from history and institutions into the realms of abstraction. “Most of the economists in the IMF had little interest in history, nor in the other social sciences. Its staffers were mostly male, and almost entirely economists trained in American and English universities. Entering the IMF and the World Bank in the 1980s, they were rational-expectations revolutionaries who based their prescriptions on in-house templates couched in the language of highly formalized mathematical models…. they existed in a state of more or less total ignorance of the cultures, languages, or institutions of the countries they had been told to cure, having been trained, as many economists still are, to believe that this ignorance did not matter.” Anybody who quibbles about this should read Kevin O’Rourke’s marvellous post on why history matters in economics.

Mazower’s book ends with some thoughts or questions about where a  system of global governance shaped fundamentally by America goes next, in a world of European crisis and Chinese power. There seems little doubt it will be different – think only of the contrasting Western and Chinese attitudes to conditionality for loans to Africa these days. (Deborah Brautigam’s book [amazon_link id=”0199606293″ target=”_blank” ]The Dragon’s Gift[/amazon_link] is fascinating on the Chinese perspective.)

Mazower is a skeptic about the current emphasis on human rights as a justification for intervention in internal conflicts: “A world in which violations of human rights trump the sanctity of borders may turn out to produce more wars, more massacres and more instability.” Reading a history of the past two centuries of debate makes it clear that the dilemmas are constant, however. There are always powerful and less powerful countries. Governance is built around rights and responsibilities, but whose rights – the nation, the minority group or the individual? The balance changes as events move on. Technology progresses and social complexity increases, so there is a constant dilemma between technocracy and participation or politics. It is impossible to embed the good judgement these dilemmas require into a perpetual institutional framework; global governance will always be unfinished business.

 

Technocracy vs democracy

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Ever since I read Daniel Bell’s [amazon_link id=”0465097138″ target=”_blank” ]The Coming of Post-Industrial Society[/amazon_link], I’ve been struck by how prescient it was about the tension between technocracy and democracy. Bell argued that as societies become more complex and require technical expertise in areas ranging from healthcare and engineering to economics, there will be increasing conflict with the populism engendered by democracy. What would he make of Twitter-based political dynamics?! The technocratic government in Italy, post-crisis, was a vivid illustration of Bell’s dilemma in action.I spoke recently about the trade-off again in my recent Pro Bono Economics lecture, the likely conflicts between the “what works” agenda in public policy and political populism. Crises or slow growth make the trade-off worse because they encourage populism and because there is no additional output to compensate losers – it’s zero sum.

[amazon_image id=”0465097138″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Coming Of Post-industrial Society (Harper Colophon Books)[/amazon_image]

In the fascinating Mark Mazower book I’ve now almost finished, [amazon_link id=”0141011939″ target=”_blank” ]Governing the World: The History of an Idea[/amazon_link], he cites Hans Morgenthau’s 1946 [amazon_link id=”B0007DKTKQ” target=”_blank” ]Scientific Man versus Power Politics[/amazon_link], which from the title touches on the same theme. Mazower says the book attacks the naivety of technocrats and the Saint Simonian tradition of belief in rational universalism. So it seems like this is a constant theme, played out in every era.

As a footnote, the Mazower book has given me another technocratic hero, the Australian Robert Jackson who ran the logistics for the Allies in the Middle East during World War II, having first helped organise the defence of Malta while in his 20s, then helped run UNRRA after the war. There is a biography by James Gibson, [amazon_link id=”0955396808″ target=”_blank” ]Jacko, Where Are You Now?[/amazon_link]

Weightlessness

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Reading a review of Mark Miodownik‘s new book, [amazon_link id=”0670920541″ target=”_blank” ]Stuff Matters[/amazon_link], brought to mind my own first (1996) book [amazon_link id=”1900961113″ target=”_blank” ]The Weightless World[/amazon_link] (or as a free pdf). It looked at the way technology was changing the structure of the economy and society, and used the idea of dematerialisation as a link – the economy becoming increasingly intangible, manufactures becoming smaller and lighter, value inhering in the design and service etc, rather than the stuff.

[amazon_image id=”1900961113″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Weightless World: Thriving in the Age of Insecurity[/amazon_image]

So I was very struck by the aerogels, graphene and other innovations highlighted in the book. Is even stuff becoming weightless now?

[amazon_image id=”0670920541″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World[/amazon_image]

Giant lizards and geeks

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The former TV presenter David Icke, when he left the small screen to set up as a new age guru, developed a theory that the world is run by an elite group of giant alien lizards. The theory features in Jon Ronson’s very funny book [amazon_link id=”0330375458″ target=”_blank” ]Them: Adventures with Extremists[/amazon_link]. Since we read Them in my household, my husband has teased me about being a giant lizard every time I’ve been appointed to a public body or attended a fancy conference (he doesn’t mention it when I get an application rejected, nor every year when I don’t go to Davos).

[amazon_image id=”0330375458″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Them: Adventures with Extremists[/amazon_image]

The giant lizard theory came to mind after reading the chapters in Mark Mazower’s book [amazon_link id=”0141011939″ target=”_blank” ]Governing the World: The History of An Idea[/amazon_link] about the role of technocrats in shaping international governance in the early and mid-20th century.

The story has given me a new hero, the Belgian Paul Otlet, “the founder of modern information science and bibliographer extraordinary.” Otlet invented metadata, and created a Central Office of International Institutions to co-ordinate and share information among the growing number of new bodies, then congregating in Brussels. His aim was a ‘Universal Book’ in which all knowledge about knowledge would be recorded. I can’t believe I’ve never before heard of M. Otlet!

Of course his vision was one of the lesser casualties of World War I. The League of Nations subsequently also proved short-lived. But that era saw the creation of many of the technical agencies of international governance that survived the Depression and World War II and survive still. Mazower’s account of how this technical global elite came into being and the role it played in rebuilding trade and then globalisation is fascinating. Discussions of international governance tend to overlook the unglamorous end such as the ITU and the FAO and so on, but they turn out to be more resilient than the more political bodies.

So it isn’t the giant lizards but rather the statisticians and epidemiologists and engineers – all the geeks, in short –  who run the world. I don’t mind being called an internationalist geek.

[amazon_image id=”0141011939″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Governing the World: The History of an Idea[/amazon_image]

Brave and humble economists

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Someone on Twitter (@kestontnt) sent me a link to an article on The Economics of Courage by INET’s Robert Johnson in a recent issue of the OECD Observer. The courage it calls for is that required to stand out against the conventional wisdom, which is what INET is all about of course. I’m optimistic that the conventional wisdom in economics is shifting significantly, although maybe that’s because last week was such an encouraging one, with a workshop led by Wendy Carlin on INET’s new CORE curriculum programme, and a fabulous session at the Rethinking Economics conference.

Robert Johnson’s article cites HL Mencken’s well-known essay on ‘The Dismal Science’ (in [amazon_link id=”1440083754″ target=”_blank” ]Prejudices, 3rd series[/amazon_link]) on a brave Professor Nearing who was kicked out of the University of Pennsylvania for daring to challenge the status quo; and also a book I don’t know, by Norbert Häring and Niall Douglas, [amazon_link id=”0857284592″ target=”_blank” ]Economists and the Powerful: Convenient Theories, Distorted Facts, Ample Rewards[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”0857284592″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Economists and the Powerful: Convenient Theories, Distorted Facts, Ample Rewards (Anthem Other Canon Economics)[/amazon_image]

The sociology of any academic discipline involves insiders, successful in a discipline in its current form, who are resistant to outsiders suggesting that they’ve got it all wrong. There are also incentives against change in any existing system – promotion and success depend on publishing in the top journals, which want small advances on the existing body of knowledge; there is little reward for changing course materials and teaching methods whereas the time cost is large; for any individual caution is a better bet than radicalism; and so on. Against that, there is the intrinsic reward of intellectual discovery, the humility that really ought to arise from both the recent track record of economic forecasts and an appreciation of the consequences of simplistic ‘market knows best’ thinking – and a bit of courage. But refusniks opposed to the status quo have more company now than at any time in the past 50 years.