Global Governance over the Long Haul

Abstract

Wilkinson and Weiss (W&W) suggest that questions surrounding global governance—“what makes the world hang together,” to follow Ruggie (1998)—should become a central problematique for social scientists and historians studying the relations among the largest human communities in any era and therefore a central matter of interest for International Relations (IR). W&W argue that we should pursue this interest by (i) investigating the different forms of world organization across historical epochs; (ii) identifying and explaining both the largest structures of authority in any epoch as well as their interaction with more local systems; (iii) focusing our attention on power, interests, and on ideas—both those through which actors of a particular epoch come to understand their interests and those that reinforce, perhaps legitimately, the systems of authority of the day; and (iv) searching for ways to account for change both within and between epochs. This argument makes a great deal of sense, however “anomalous” (W&W, p. 6) it once may have been to use “global governance” to describe the world before the 1990s. This response illustrates some of the implications of W&W's argument by proposing some hypotheses about global governance across different epochs. That exercise leads me to raise two cautions about W&W's proposed approach: One is about the possibility of accounting for changes within and between epochs with a focus on human powers, interests, and ideas alone. The other is a concern that, even while we investigate global governance across time, we recognize that global governance today is something quite different than ever before.

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