Why Global Governance Governs

On the legitimation of the illegitimate, and existential risk

But the state is only an episode in government, and it is not government that is an instrument of the state.

-Michel Foucault

We live in an age that is gesturing towards global government. This is not a conspiracy theory; it is something which perfectly respectable politicians, academics, policymakers and UN officials routinely talk about. What is crystallising is not exactly a single world government, but rather a complicated mixture of aligned institutions, organisations, networks, systems and fora which has sometimes been given the fancy name of a ‘bricolage’ by international relations theorists. There is no centre, but rather a vast and nebulous conglomeration.

This does not mean, though, that global government (or ‘global governance’, as it is more commonly known) is emerging organically. It is being purposively directed. Again, this is no conspiracy theory; it is something that the people involved openly discuss - they hide their plans in perfectly plain sight. And this has been going on for a long time. In the early 1990s, when the Cold War had drawn to a close, the UN convened something called the Commission on Global Governance, which released a final report - called Our Global Neighbourhood - in 1995. It makes for fascinating reading as a kind of ‘playbook’ for what has followed in the field in the 30 years since - establishing as it does a clear rhetorical and argumentative pattern in favour of the global governance project that is repeated to this day.

The basic idea is as follows. In the olden days, when ‘faith in the ability of governments to protect citizens and improve their lives was strong’, it was fine for the nation-state to be ‘dominant’. But now the world economy is integrated, the global capital market has vastly expanded, there has been extraordinary industrial and agricultural growth, and there has been a huge population explosion. Ours is therefore a ‘more crowded, interdependent world with finite resources’. And this means we need ‘a new vision for humanity’ which will ‘galvanise people everywhere to achieve higher levels of cooperation in areas of common concern and shared destiny’ (these ‘areas of common concern’ being ‘human rights, equity, democracy, meeting basic material needs, environmental protection, and demilitarisation’). We need, in short, ‘an agreed global framework for actions and policies to be carried out at appropriate levels’ and a ‘multifaceted strategy for global governance’.

This is not difficult reasoning to parse. The central argument can be summarised as follows: global governance is necessary because the world is globalising, and that brings with it global problems that need solving collectively. And the logic must be impeccable in the minds of those who are engaged in the global governance project, because what they say has remained essentially the same ever since. Hence, if we fast forward from 1995 to 2024, we find world leaders finalising a revised draft of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s proposed ‘Pact for the Future’, a memorandum of guiding principles for global governance which will be the culmination of his Our Common Agenda project, launched in 2021. While there is a bit more meat on the bone in this document than there may have been in Our Global Neighbourhood in terms of policy, we see a more-or-less identical argument playing out.

So, once again, we are reminded in this document that we live in ‘a time of profound global transformation’ in which we face challenges that are ‘deeply interconnected’ and ‘far exceed the capacity of any single State alone’. Since our problems can ‘only be addressed collectively’ we therefore need ‘strong and sustained international cooperation guided by trust and solidarity’ - stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. Even the substantive concerns at the heart of the Pact for the Future are largely unchanged from those cited in Our Global Neighbourhood: human rights, equity, poverty and sustainable development, the environment, peace and security - the familiar litany. The only thing that has really changed is that in 2024 there has been layered on top a tone of alarmism: ‘we are confronted by a growing range of catastrophic and existential risks’, the reader is told, ‘and if we do not change course, we risk tipping irreversibly into a future of persistent crisis and breakdown’. Better get the washing in, then.

To return to my summary from earlier on, the picture being painted by Our Common Agenda and the ‘Pact for the Future’ is then just a slightly more elaborate copy of what was sketched out in Our Global Neighbourhood: globalisation causes certain problems to emerge that have to be governed globally, and therefore we need, so to speak, to be globally governed. And this is presented as a fait accompli; it is indeed ‘common sense’, as the Secretary-General calls it in Our Common Agenda. Governing globally is necessary because there are global problems, and that is that - how could one imagine things could be otherwise?

This all brings to mind Michel Foucault’s account of the emergence of the State in early modernity. Foucault describes that emergence as being, in essence, an epistemological or metaphysical rather than a political or social phenomenon. For the medieval mind, the world’s significance was spiritual - it was a staging post before Rapture, and what mattered was salvation. The world was therefore not so much an empirical phenomenon as a theological one - it was governed not by physics but by ‘signs, prodigies, marvels, and monstrosities that were so many threats of chastisement, promises of salvation, or marks of election’. It was not something to be altered, but was rather a ‘system of obedience’ to God’s will.

However, beginning in the early modern period, there began a great epistemological rupture: it became possible to understand the world as having an existence independent of God, and being organised therefore by what we would nowadays call science. Now, all of a sudden (though obviously the story played out over many generations) the world became something that had temporal rather than spiritual significance, and the people in it began to be seen as not merely souls awaiting the Second Coming, but populations whose material and moral conditions could be improved by action in the world itself. And this meant that people began to imagine that a ruler’s duty was not just to be a sovereign but to ‘govern’ in the sense of making things better in this life rather than the next.

The State as we understand it today, according to Foucault, emerged within these reflections - the apparatus of armies, taxation, courts and so on all existed before this period, but it was only once government was imagined as having the role of governing that it became possible to think about and speak of the State as such; it was only then that it became a ‘reflective practice’. It thus became:

[A]n object of knowledge (connaissance) and analysis, […] part of a reflected and concerted strategy, and […] began to be called for, desired, coveted, feared, rejected, loved, and hated.

The point that Foucault was keen to emphasis, though, was that while States undoubtedly existed, and governed, the State was just an ‘episode’ in government and would - the implication obviously follows - some day be superseded. To repeat: the epistemic break ushered in by early modernity, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and so on transformed the world into an empirical phenomenon, not just particular chunks of territory, and it therefore contained within it the seed of a concept of global or world government: a future in which all of ‘creation’, so to speak, could be brought under the same shared project of material and moral improvement.

Government, then, is not something which the State does per se, but rather something which at a particular period of time simply happened to utilise the State as its instrument. Government is in essence an epistemic phenomenon - it is that activity which conceives of the world as its field of action, as something to be known, understood, studied, manipulated and improved, in the absence or irrelevance of God. At one stage its ambition was limited territorially, chiefly because of technological constraint, but there is no inherent reason for that limit, and as technology has improved such that the globe can now be relatively easily traversed physically and communicatively, so that limitation has disappeared and government is free to imagine its project as genuinely global.

That goes a long way to explaining the first part of the conceptual dynamic that plays out in respect of the global governance project: government can now imagine the world, in a very literal sense, to be something that human reason can know, and act upon, and thereby improve. As the preamble to the Pact for the Future has it, ‘advances in knowledge, science, technology, and innovation, if properly and equitably managed, could deliver a breakthrough to a better and more sustainable future for all…a world that is safe, sustainable, peaceful, inclusive, just, equal, orderly and resilient’. To repeat: governing is that activity which conceives of the world as its field of action, as something to be known, understood, studied, manipulated and improved, in the absence or irrelevance of God.

To understand the second part of the conceptual dynamic underlying global governance - the fact that that there are global problems that make it absolutely necessary for global governance to exist, and act - we only need to carefully read Machiavelli. Foucault puts Machiavelli at the centre of the story he tells in regard to government and the State, because Machiavelli brings the medieval or pre-modern way of thinking to a resounding end; he asks no theological questions but treats ruling as something that is done only in the name of temporal concerns. He is not interested in the next life; he is interested in this one.

And in particular he is interested in providing advice to a ruler who is taking charge of something new, or afresh - not a ruler who is established but one who has founded, usurped or conquered his throne. Hence, at the very beginning of The Prince, Machiavelli tells us - these are more or less the first words out of his mouth, as it were:

I say, then, that in hereditary states accustomed to the rule of their prince’s family, there are far fewer difficulties in maintaining them than in new states, for it is sufficient simply not to break ancient customs, and then to suit one’s actions to unexpected events. In this way, if such a prince is of ordinary ability he will always maintain his state… It is [only] in the new principality that difficulties arise.

So Machiavelli was not interested in providing advice to rulers who were simply maintaining the status quo; his advice was going to be provided to those who set out to rule a new principality. And here the advice is absolutely clear - the new ruler, one who does not inherit his position but somehow comes to occupy it, needs to justify his position somehow; he needs a reason why he should be in charge in the first place, and why he should remain in place. Hence, very simply and straightforwardly:

[A] wise ruler [in such a position] must think of a method by which his citizens will need the state and himself at all times and in every circumstance. Then they will always be loyal to him.

Governing in modernity, then - in which ‘princes’ will no longer be able to simply point to hereditary or religious justifications for their existence, and are therefore always new in the Machiavellian sense - requires what I once called a ‘discourse of vulnerability’. It is imperative that it presents its own existence as indeed imperative, so that can maintain its status. It always needs to be making the citizens loyal, through having an account of itself as necessary. And this means discursively constructing the vulnerable population as always in need of government for succour.

You will no doubt have joined the dots already. Since the State is a mere ‘episode’ of government, and since government will necessarily expand its ambition to the entire globe, the same logic underpinning Machiavelli’s discourse of vulnerability in the context of the modern State will also of course hold true in the global arena. It will in short be necessary for global governance to insist precisely on its own necessity at every turn: since we face all sorts of problems that are ‘deeply interconnected’ and ‘far exceed the capacity of any single State alone’, and since especially we ‘risk tipping irreversibly into a future of persistent crisis and breakdown’ if these problems are not solved, then a global governance framework simply has to come into existence and govern the globe on our behalf. And thus it retains our loyalty and legitimates itself. This is what it governs for: to present government as necessary - globally.

Now that we understand the nature of this discourse, then, we are in a position to subject it to critique. And we can do this across three axes.

First, we can ask: are the problems identified in global governance circles actually not in the capacity of any single State alone to manage on its own behalf? Or might it be the case that individual States, responsible to their electorates and engaged in the national interest, are better placed to deal with crises that arise than nebulous, unaccountable and opaque networks of global governance actors?

I have on my bookshelf here a collection titled Legitimacy in Global Governance: Sources, Processes and Consequences, edited by Jonas Tallberg and put out by the University of Lund in 2018; its opening paragraph - absolutely standard in academic work of this kind - lists ‘climate change, internet communications, disease epidemics, financial markets, cultural heritage, military security, trade flows, and human rights’ as sources of global problems, and includes ‘uncoordinated climate policies, a fragmented internet, perennial financial crises, transcultural misunderstanding, arms proliferation, trade protectionism, and human rights abuses’ as the likely results of failing to set up appropriate institutions of global governance accordingly. Well, we might very well ask - are ‘trade flows’ a ‘global challenge’ requiring global coordination through the WTO, or something that individual elected governments should determine for themselves, acting perhaps through bilateral agreements? Is ‘transcultural misunderstanding’ something that we really need global governance to manage on our behalf? Is ‘military security’ not quintessentially a task which sovereign nation-states pursue on behalf of their populations?

Second, we can ask: is it true that the problems which purportedly necessitate global governance would lead to ‘permanent crisis and breakdown’ without it? Or is it perhaps more plausible to say that an interconnected world (and it is doubtlessly true that the world is more interconnected than it has ever been in human history) is simply going to be characterised by insoluble problems that are best dealt with as contingencies by individual States? For example, is the likelihood of pandemic disease something that global governance needs to exist in order to control, or is it just a fact of life in the modern era which is best responded to through the plans of State governments based on their particular needs and resources, on an ad hoc basis?

And third - and most importantly - we can ask: is global governance in itself a risk, or a factor which exacerbates existing risks rather than ameliorates them? On the one hand, there is no doubt that global governance, which has a tendency to crystallise groupthink among a relatively thin sliver of globalised political, academic, third sector and business circles, can lead to the worldwide, or near-worldwide, imposition of very foolish public policy. The Covid lockdowns are of course the paradigmatic example of this. To this extent global governance is inherently fragilising: it puts all of the policy eggs in one basket, and thus massively amplifies the threat of breakage.

But on the other hand, the very project of global government brings with it particular, unique risks which global governance enthusiasts naturally tend to overlook. In a recent interview with the Triggernometry podcast, Peter Thiel makes something like this point, in his observation that the biggest risk of all which humanity faces is probably a totalitarian world government which, precisely because it covers the whole world, cannot be escaped. This is the real threat posed by government as such (remembering that it is the State which is the tool of government and not vice versa), and, in representing the extinction of human freedom, it would be far more damaging than any individual pathogen, trade war, environmental disaster, or financial crisis.

The question which we really need to ask, in other words, is not whether there are risks that come into existence as a result of the world becoming more interconnected, but rather what those risks really are. And sensible people would come to the conclusion that they are in fact political rather than genuinely ‘existential’ - they come not from the realm of the exogenous but rather emerge from the very project of managing existential risk through global governance itself. To put things very bluntly, a future of ‘permanent crisis and breakdown’ is much more likely to emerge from authoritarian attempts to stave off such a future than the emergence of particular events (pandemics, financial crises, environmental disaster, etc.) in themselves. Our problem, in other words, is government - understood, at the risk of repeating myself, as that activity which conceives of the world as its field of action, as something to be known, understood, studied, manipulated and improved, in the absence or irrelevance of God - and that is precisely a problem that global governance is uniquely incapable of solving.