Essay

THE GLOBAL FORUM

The Last Two Centuries of Global Governance

� Craig N. Murphy

IN RECENT ESSAYS, THOMAS WEISS AND RORDEN WILKINSON ARGUE THAT analysis of systems of global governance going back to the beginnings of the earliest state systems could provide fundamental insight into the prob- lems that trouble the scholarly field of international relations today.1 While no social scientist or historian is yet able to give a credible account of global governance over those many millennia, it is possible to begin to recount the history of global governance far back beyond the events with which scholars of international relations begin, 1945, the end of World War II and the founding of the postwar UN system—as Thomas Weiss and Dan Plesch do in their essay in this issue of Global Governance—to provide valuable insights for contemporary global governance.

An even more reasonable date for the beginning of the contemporary system of global governance would be 1815. The associated events were the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna and the beginning of a system of governance of Europe and its empires that eventually led to the global system that we now have. The conservative governments that held the congress created many of the institutions that still characterize global governance and gave new life to older institutions and practices whose sources and consequences were central to the nineteenth-century interimpe- rial organizations out of which the United Nations grew. Many of the goals of the interimperial system—the economic goals as well as the goal of uni- versalizing and perfecting the state system—also are still with us. Moreover, the constitutional dynamics of the nineteenth-century system—the forces that led to change within international governance—remain the same. Atten- tion to those dynamics can, as Weiss and Wilkinson would suggest, help us understand the prospects for ameliorating current global problems, including problems that could not have been anticipated two centuries ago.

New Institutions The Congress of Vienna imposed a peace on France and Napoleon’s allies by doing much more than reestablishing something like the eighteenth-

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century European balance of power. The victors sought to create a system that would assure continent-wide and interimperial rule by conservative social forces far into the future. The congress itself was the first of a series of nineteenth-century multilateral conferences of the great powers called to deal with European and interimperial conflicts. The Hague international peace conferences of 1899 and 1907 (and a third, planned for 1915, aborted after the outbreak of war) also built on the earlier conferences by attempt- ing to institutionalize general processes for resolving conflicts among all national governments. The goal remained the same with the 1919 Paris Peace Conference that established the League of Nations and the 1945 San Francisco conference that agreed on the UN Charter.

The congress or conference system not only made multilateral treaty making a common practice, it quickly led to the simultaneous or sometimes separate meetings of periodic congresses or conferences of representatives of ministries involved with transportation, communication, commerce, health, currency, finance, and almost every other aspect of government. This was the beginning of the “legislative branch” of today’s global gover- nance, the system of global multilateral conferences.

At the same time, and often in the same cities where nineteenth-century public officials met, private associations of transnationally oriented com- munities of professionals and social activists also met to agree on voluntary international standards affecting almost every aspect of economic and social life throughout Europe and its empires. Moreover, long before the congresses of the great powers became truly global, the private interna- tional governance system welcomed professionals and activists from every part of the world.

By the mid-nineteenth century, many of the periodic conferences, both public and private, had created permanent administrations (secretariats) to carry out tasks between the meetings of national representatives. The secre- tariats prepared conferences; helped set agendas; proposed new agreements; helped monitor compliance with previous agreements; and, in some cases, provided specific services to governments, national associations, or even to citizens in many parts of the world. The nineteenth-century secretariats became the “executive branch” of contemporary global governance; the administrative history of the UN system and other global international organ- izations begins there, as a visit to the archives of almost any agency of the UN system readily confirms. Some were originally part of the nineteenth- century system of “public international unions” (e.g., the International Telecommunications Union [ITU] and the Universal Postal Union). Others grew out of or incorporated nineteenth-century predecessors (e.g., the Inter- national Labour Organization and the Food and Agricultural Organization). And the rest were modeled on nineteenth-century antecedents in different older fields (e.g., the International Civil Aviation Organization on the early ITU and railway unions).

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A final new, and continuing, institution initiated at the end of the Napoleonic Wars is the practice of giving systemwide sanction to some, but not all, successful nationalist movements. For example, the victors over Napoleon approved the freedom that the Norwegians won from Napoleon’s ally, Denmark (albeit, allowing only a limited freedom under a personal union of Norway and Sweden under the Swedish king), but the revolution- aries who had defeated Napoleon in Haiti did not gain similar recognition. As the nineteenth century went on, the creole-ruled American states, Greece, Belgium, Romania, and others gained interimperial recognition, but not Liberia, Ethiopia, or other nonwhite-ruled states that were distant from Europe.

Incorporating Older Institutions The differential practice of nineteenth-century multilateral recognition reflected a European institution that only slightly predated the Congress of Vienna, the idea that legitimate sovereignty depended on governments adhering to “the standard of civilization,” or, perhaps it is better to call that standard “white hegemony.” As W. E. B. Du Bois describes it in “The Souls of White Folk,”

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing, a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. . . . [E]ven up into the eighteenth century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great, Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more than birth. Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sud- den, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful!2

The discovery of whiteness and of the standard of civilization were reac- tions to the resistance to European colonization of much of the world, worldwide colonization that was made possible by the fortuitous European discovery of America and its exclusive exploitation by Europeans through- out the three centuries before the Congress of Vienna.

Access to the wealth of the Americas and the exploitation of African labor gave Europe and the United States their head start into the Industrial Revolution. It also gave the world what Ian Morris describes as the West’s (temporary) global “rule,” something that only began in the 1770s, when Napoleon was a boy.3 Looked at through the historical lenses of Morris or Du Bois, contemporary global governance started as a set of institutions designed to help secure the global dominance of white folks by managing some of the conflicts among Europe’s imperial powers. The early system seems to have done the job of helping secure European dominance quite well; after all, when Du Bois was writing the “The Soul of White Folks” in 1910, the number of nonwhite-ruled states whose sovereignty remained

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uncompromised by any of the European empires could have been counted on one hand. Nevertheless, contradictions within the nineteenth-century system of global governance assured that it would eventually help under- mine the white hegemony that it originally served.

Despite the focus of the nineteenth-century great-power conferences on the high politics of potential armed conflict, most of the staff and the resources of the public international unions were dedicated to supporting what we would now call “economic globalization.” The unions eased trade and international communication among industrial firms while mollifying powerful business and labor groups that might be harmed by ever greater economic integration; the League and the UN systems continued to do the same. Ultimately, though, economic globalization undermined white privi- lege and power, acting as an often unexpected ally of the forces of nation- alist resistance to European imperialism that gave rise to the defensive ide- ology of the standard of civilization.

Similarly, the secretariats of the public international unions, the League, and the UN attracted idealistic internationalists who often believed, in the words of John A. Hobson, that

nationalism is a plain highway to internationalism, and if it manifests diver- gence we may well suspect a perversion of its nature and its purpose. Such a perversion is Imperialism, in which nations trespassing beyond the limits of facile assimilation transform the wholesome stimulative rivalry of varied na- tional types into the cut-throat struggle of competing empires.4

Moreover, from the beginning, Hobson and other activists who supported the emerging system of global governance considered the training of native administrators and eventual decolonization something that anyone who believed in good government and internationalism should support. For that reason, international institutions designed to improve the state and the state system should, as a matter of course, be anti-imperialist.

The Dynamics: Why and How the System Changed In 2015, global governance may still promote economic globalization, but it is hardly still the champion of formal imperialism. This is, in large part, due to the forces that have influenced the global governance system over the past two centuries: the system has responded to the will of the govern- ments of the great powers, particularly that of the hegemonic powers, changing in response to changes in the ideology of the hegemon and with the change of the hegemon. The system has also responded to civil society and political forces from below, forces that have been strong enough to maintain global agendas even after they have been dropped by the hege-

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mon. And perhaps most significantly, global governance has both responded to—and helped shape—the phases in the increasingly global industrial economy, the periodic creative destruction that took the world from the early Industrial Revolution to the Information Age.

Great Britain led the victors over Napoleon and it remained the Euro- pean hegemon. Therefore, when the balance of social forces within Britain shifted in the mid-nineteenth century and all of its governments began to give active support to a liberal international order, Britain became a leader in the campaign to create the governance that made the first era of eco- nomic globalization possible. Britain’s nineteenth-century humanitarian sympathies also received special attention in nineteenth-century global gov- ernance; for example, the Congress of Vienna took the time to condemn the slave trade even though most of the conservative governments in atten- dance thought the issue a bit off-topic or even outré. Of course, not all of the nineteenth-century hegemons’ hobbyhorses appeared this progressive. In the quarter-century before World War I, an official British skepticism about the “germ theory of disease” led to its implacable (and effective) opposition to an international regime to require quarantine of ships infected with cholera, influenza, and the like (a regime opposed by British shipping interests). After World War I, the end of British hegemony, and the 1918 flu pandemic, such a global regime became possible. Arguably, the end of British hegemony also meant the beginning of the real possibility of a global governance system indifferent to, or even opposed to the chummy global condominium of the world by the European empires.

The relative dominance of the United States after World War II assured that global governance would learn to ride American hobbyhorses, one of which (although it is now often forgotten) was economic development. From 1946 through Richard Nixon’s first administration, the United States provided more than half of the finance of the UN development system of technical assistance (coordinated by the UN Development Programme [UNDP] and its predecessors and initially carried out by the specialized agencies), development finance (primarily the task of the World Bank), and humanitarian relief. Americans were at the helm of all of the main devel- opment agencies and Americans designed and helped establish most of the lasting institutional innovations within the development system.

All that changed in the mid-1970s. A good marker and explanation of the change is “The United States in Opposition” written by Gerald Ford’s UN ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which laments the waning influ- ence of the great powers in favor of the states newly liberated from colo- nialism.5 Despite this rebalancing of power, the UN development system continues to dominate the entire UN system forty years later in terms of staffing and expenditure, demonstrating that the identity and will of the hegemon is only one part of the dynamics of global governance. Certainly

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hegemons remain important; after all, when US governments began to push economic deregulation, with Jimmy Carter, and neoliberalism, with Ronald Reagan, most of the UN agencies began acting as transmission belts of the same policies to the developing world. Nevertheless, the UN system also remained a well-endowed site of alternatives to the economic vision pre- ferred by the hegemon and this was not just a consequence of the feckless third world majority that Moynihan blamed. It had to do with the policy preferences of many UN members in all parts of the world, the advocacy of groups within international civil society, and with the independent judg- ment of professionals on the UN staff. Many, like the founder of the UN Development Office, Mahbub ul Haq, were actually brought into the system due to their expertise by Americans with close connections to its new neoliberal leaders (in this case, to Reagan who nominated UNDP’s admin- istrator, Bill Draper, a venture capitalist who recruited Haq simply because he had the widest reputation as the wisest and most creative person in the development business).

A final aspect of the dynamics of global governance—and one often overlooked by scholars who focus on the formal intergovernmental organi- zations (the public international unions, the League, and the UN system)— is the role of changes in the global industrial economy. Global governance not only encourages and shapes globalization, it is affected by it, particu- larly by the new sectors that emerge in the processes of creative destruction that have marked industrial capitalism from its beginning. If that creative destruction is the stuff of industrial entrepreneurs—of the Thomas Edisons, Henry Fords, and Bill Gateses who create whole new lead industries—there is equally a lesser known pantheon of institutional entrepreneurs who have created the new forms of global governance necessary to sustain each suc- cessive industrial age.

In the most recent era the name of one of them, Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee, the “inventor of the World Wide Web,” is widely known. He is not widely known as the inventor of one of the most powerful institutions of contemporary global governance, the voluntary consensus standard-set- ting organization called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), formed in 1994. Often much to the irritation of the world’s most powerful govern- ments, W3C along with other relatively new groups (the Internet Society, Internet Engineering Task Force [IETF], and Internet Architecture Board [IAB]) and much older organizations such as the IEEE Standards Associa- tion (originally the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, founded in 1884) govern the Internet, the essential infrastructure of the Information Age global economy, through a set of committees that include representa- tives of major infrastructure producers and consumers (and many others) that operate on the basis of consensus rules, meet continuously, and have lit- tle or no relationship to national governments or the UN system.

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The Internet governance structure is not the only system critical to the current global economy that operates this way. Containerized shipping, an infrastructure essential to global manufacturing (and, in that way, to the economic rise of China) both began with and is largely governed through technical committees of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) an ostensibly private network set up after World War II but growing out of the wartime “United Nations” (the official name of the anti-fascist alliance) standard-setting organization. Global financial transactions are facilitated by a similarly organized voluntary consensus body, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), and even many of the environmental and social externalities associated with contem- porary global industrial capitalism are dealt with (to the extent that they are dealt with at all) through a similar set of standards-creating and -monitoring organizations that are part of the ISEAL Alliance, “the global membership association for sustainability standards,” whose members most of us know only through various fair trade, organic, or other seals on the packages of some the products we buy.

Many, perhaps most, of the hundreds of thousands of people involved in these global standard-setting and -monitoring organizations who have reflected on their history think of them as something fundamentally new, something required by the rapid rate of technological innovation that has taken place since the early 1980s and by the lack of interest—and often the incompetence—of governments to establish the regulatory frameworks nec- essary to gain the greatest public benefit from the new technologies, and to avoid the greatest risks of harm from their exploitation. In fact, as the date of the founding of IEEE might suggest, this belief is fundamentally incor- rect. At least since the second half of the nineteenth century—that is, since that first era of economic globalization before World War I—governments have been reluctant (and often unable) to regulate new globalizing tech- nologies in the public interest and private transnational associations of engineering professionals and social activists have stepped in to fill some of the gaps.

The Next Half-century of Global Governance It is probably more difficult for us to imagine the world of 2215 than it was for the people of 1815 to image the world today, but fifty years forward, 2065, is much less difficult. If the dynamics operating since the Congress of Vienna remain the same—and, barring the revolutionary transformation of capitalism or disasters triggered by unregulated climate change—global governance in 2065 will still involve a thin layer of global institutions sup- porting the global economy and helping to mitigate its harms. The eco- nomic rise of China and of other large industrializing countries will mean

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that the agenda of the global institutions will be shaped as much by their governments as it is now by the preferences of the United States and of the first countries to industrialize. Those governmental preferences will be shaped by the domestic and transnational social conflicts that emerge throughout the century. And even though many of the social scientists of 2065 may be oblivious to it, institutional entrepreneurs, among the engi- neers who have created the newest industries of the day, will be doing much of the work of world government alongside, and sometimes competing with, transnational activists and socially responsible companies. �

Notes Craig N. Murphy teaches at Wellesley College and the University of Massachusetts Boston’s McCormack Graduate School for Global and Policy Studies. He received the 2013 International Studies Association (ISA) Distinguished Senior Scholar Award in International Political Economy for his work on global governance and economic development. He is past president of the ISA, past chair of the Academic Council on the UN System, and a founding editor of Global Governance. His recent publications include a Japanese translation of his history of the UN Development Programme, UNDP: A Better Way? (2014), and a Portuguese translation of his study of global governance, International Organization and Industrial Change: Global Governance Since 1850 (2014).

1. Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, “Global Governance to the Res- cue: Saving International Relations?” Global Governance 20, no. 1 (2014): 19–36; Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, “Rethinking Global Governance? Com- plexity, Authority, Power, Change,” International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2014): 207–215.

2. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” The Independent 69, no. 3220 (18 August 1910): 339.

3. Ian Morris writes that, if he were forced to specify a year for the beginning of the West’s lead, it would be 1773. See Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (New York: Random House, 2011), p. 167.

4. John A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (New York: James Pott, 1902), p. 9. 5. Daniel P. Moynihan, “The United States in Opposition,” Commentary 59,

no. 3 (March 1975): 31–44.

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