21st Century Cooperation

Regional Public Goods, Global Governance, and Sustainable Development

Antoni Estevadeordal, Louis Goodman, Antoni Estevadeordal, Louis Goodman, Antoni Estevadeordal, Louis W. Goodman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351735551
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume explains the importance of regional public goods (RPGs) for sustainable development and shows why they are particularly important in the context of 21st-century international relations. By presenting a new and original data set and by presenting original essays by renowned scholars, this book lays the foundation for what will become an increasingly important focus for both economic development and international relations as well as for their intersection.

The volume contains four parts. The first introduces the core issues and concepts that are explored throughout the book as well as a new and original data set on RPGs. The second part further develops specific concepts important for understanding 21st-century RPGs: regional leadership, alliances, networks, and outcomes. The third examines how cooperation takes place worldwide for a range of important RPGs. Finally, the fourth part discusses how public goods are produced in specific regions, stressing that each region has a distinct context and that these contexts overlap in a decentered "multiplex" manner.

Global economic cooperation will be different in the 21st century, and this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of global governance, economic development, international political economy, sustainable development, and comparative regionalism.

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Part I

Introduction

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1 21st-century cooperation, regional public goods, and sustainable development

Antoni Estevadeordal and Louis W. Goodman

Introduction

Global economic cooperation will be different in the 21st century. There may be a “new normal” of slower economic growth worldwide with resultant adjustment difficulties for citizens and policy makers (El-Erian 2010). There may be changing international cooperation configurations as nations try to find new partners and/or undermine existing relationships.

Spurts and shocks have increasingly shaped worldwide economic growth with the expansion of global trade. By the 1870s, the triumph of liberalism opened the doors to five great growth-propelling innovations: electricity, urban sanitation, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine, and modern communication, which the economist Robert J. Gordon (2000) has described as the “Great Inventions.” Over the past 150 years, the impact of these inventions and subsequent discoveries in other fields has been shaped by shocks that include the rise and fall of colonialism, two world wars, the Cold War, and its aftermath. A modern way of life has been created by the application of these innovations and their spread beyond the North Atlantic nations in which they were initially commercialized.

With the unfolding of the 21st century, there has been increasing concern that the growth in the impact of the Great Inventions is slowing and that new innovations in fields like information technology and biology, while important, will not match the depth of the impact of those of the late 19th century (Gordon 2016). It has been predicted that annual global economic growth may fall to long-term levels that could be half of that experienced since the 1870s. Further, in the 21st century demand has grown for the fruits of those inventions as the world’s population has swelled. An increasing share of this population has adopted a modern lifestyle and more state and nonstate actors are able to impact the capacity to sustain those lifestyles, for good or for bad.

In North Atlantic and other nations that reaped the benefits of these innovations early on, there is concern that the foreseeable future may be a time of slow growth or stagnation (Gordon 2016). In nations whose citizens have only recently adopted modern lifestyles on a broad scale, the question of how to sustain this growth is referred to as “avoiding the middle-income trap.” The desired outcome is sustaining economic growth so that standards of living can improve continuously. Best-case examples of this are the recent experiences of nations such as Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea.¹

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Sustaining this economic growth in the 21st century will require new forms of innovation beyond the natural science-based changes initiated in the 1870s. Some of the most important innovations will occur in the fields of economics and global politics, which will facilitate new ways of organizing the benefits of the Great Inventions. The foremost of these will be the way in which “public goods”² are generated. With the end of the two world wars of the 20th century, continuing economic growth has been dependent on the global availability of goods such as a clean environment, widespread peace, global economic stability and predictable trade arrangements, stable financial and monetary systems, effective enforcement of the rule of law, and adequate numbers of healthy workers and consumers. A large but shrinking proportion of the capacity to produce these public goods has been provided by the world’s great powers, including the United States. As these nations’ capacities to produce all of the necessary public goods has contracted, new actors have stepped up to supplement them. These include nations other than the great powers, as well as states, cities, municipalities, nonstate actors and—the subject of this book—groups of often-contiguous nations, or regions.

Questions have been raised about precisely how these public goods can be provided in the future by these many entities. Rapid changes in the 21st-century world economy mean that answering them is a complex matter. Assumptions that were once unassailable can no longer be sustained. For example, the 21st-century world does not have a simple global North-South wealth hierarchy with the North constituting the “rich few” and the South the “poor many.” The gross domestic product of the South, which represented about 20% of the global total in the late 20th century, had doubled to about 40% by 2012. Furthermore, as of 2010, 72% of the world’s population lived in what are now known as “middle-income countries.”³ Therefore, avoiding the middle-income trap and sustaining economic progress is a core issue for policy makers and citizens in nations throughout the world, be they rich or poor, and located in the North or in the South.

Another question is precisely which configurations of nations will cooperate to produce public goods, be they global or regional. Through its “One Belt One Road” initiative, China is seeking to regain cooperative relations with states with which it once had mutually beneficial relations, some for nearly 2,000 years (Rowe 2009). Many nations that cooperated in the 20th century under the aegis of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union have now joined the European Union or look to it for significant economic cooperation, much to the dismay of the Russian Confederation. Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, increasing economic inequality among European countries, along with pressures brought to reinstate border controls in the Schengen Area by migration from some countries including Syria and Iraq, suggest that the nature of European cooperation is in flux. Political and economic change in Mercosur and the evolution of the Pacific Alliance trade bloc, all suggest that new patterns of cooperation for the production of public goods may develop in Latin America.

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In the United States, a cottage industry has developed that examines what we consider to be the flipside of this coin—the consequences of the relative decline of the power of the United States in an increasingly multipolar world. Underpinning this discussion is the observation that, while retaining its place as the world’s most powerful nation, the United States likely will not be able to continue to provide its current share of the world’s global public goods (GPGs). The provision of GPGs by the United States has been particularly important for maintaining world order and sustained economic development since the mid-20th century.⁴

Our advice to those who share this concern is the following:

• Take this matter very seriously. The GPGs produced by the United States and other powerful nations will continue to be critical for worldwide cooperation for the foreseeable future.

• Focus, too, on other sources of public goods—specifically city-based public goods, national public goods, and regional public goods (RPGs). It is our contention that, as the 21st century proceeds, global cooperation will depend increasingly on the coordinated production of public goods at all levels, including the global, regional, national, and municipal.

The shrinking salience of global public goods

Theorists from Kant (1795) to Kissinger (2014) have postulated that, beyond the power of hegemons, alliances are held together by common interests. In the contemporary world, an important source of common interest is creating and benefitting from public goods. While it would be ideal to promote international cooperation through public goods that are equally available to all nations and citizens—that is, GPGs—this has become increasingly infeasible. This is the case for a number of reasons:

• The number and types of public goods that are expected to be available have increased and are increasing year by year.

• Different types of public goods are required for specific regional, national, and municipal contexts. Thus it is unreasonable to expect that all public goods can come from a single source.

• It is beyond the capacity of even the world’s wealthiest nations to produce all desired GPGs while responding to their own national needs.

One solution to the problem of instability caused by shortfalls in the production of public goods has been derived from the economist Charles P. Kindleberger (1973) in his book The World in Depression: 1929–1939. Kindleberger contended that the economic chaos that afflicted the world during the early mid-20th century could be blamed in part on the fact that no nation had a globally dominant economy. He argued that the condition of a single nation having a globally dominant economy could only occur under very special (and unlikely) circumstances, an option he thus presented merely as a heuristic rather than as a condition that one should expect in empirical reality. Applying this heuristic to the field of international relations has resulted in what has been called “hegemonic stability theory”—the idea that the stability of the global system, in terms of politics and international law, relies on a hegemon to develop and enforce the rules of the system.

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The case for the literal form of this theory was the foundation for Michael Mandelbaum’s The Case for Goliath (2006). Mandelbaum argued that there is no feasible alternative to the United States as the provider of public goods for the global system. He stated that no other nation has the political will, the military and economic capacity, and the ability to generate sufficient international acceptance. He worried that self-destructive US domestic politics might critically weaken the United States’ capacity to provide GPGs.

The limitations of hegemonic stability based on a single hegemon have been widely noted. In a much-cited article, Duncan Snidal (1985) argued, as did Kindleberger (1973), that “the range of the theory (hegemonic stability theory) is limited to very special conditions . . . [the case of ] . . . one large actor and many small ones.” In fact, Snidal posited that hegemonic stability theory should be “viewed as a beginning rather than a reliable conclusion to international politics,” and that the central question raised by hegemonic stability theory should be “how the distribution of interests and capability affects possibilities for collective action” (1985, p.613). The contemporary world is now far from being one in which there is a single dominant economy as imagined by Kindleberger in his heuristic, or the special case of one large actor and many small ones described by Snidal. Rather, with the rise of China, India, Germany and a host of lesser powers, the world is becoming increasingly multipolar, a process described by Peter J. Katzenstein in A World of Regions (2005).

The growth of regional, national, and municipal public goods

Thus it is logical that, if an increasing proportion of the means for responding to the needs of the ever wealthier and more multipolar world is to be found at the regional, national, and municipal levels, how this capacity might come into being should be a serious and detailed subject of study. A particularly important factor is understanding the circumstances under which public goods are provided by regional and local ini...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• 21st Century Cooperation
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Regional Leadership, Alliances, Networks, and Outcomes
• PART III New Frontiers in Functional Cooperation
• PART IV Old and New Regions in a Multiplex World
• Index