Towards a Global Polity

Future Trends and Prospects

Richard Higgott, Morten Ougaard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134472048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

While 'one world government' is not on the cards, the globalization of political life has progressed significantly over the last decades. Rather than adding to existing theoretical frameworks such as the realist picture of international anarchy or the English School'sinternational society this volume starts out from the idea of the world as one

Part I
Theorising the global polity

1 Global polity research Characteristics and challenges

Morten Ougaard

Introduction

There is no clearly distinct group or school of research that identifies itself as ‘global polity research’. Yet a number of scholarly contributions in international relations share some common characteristics that allow us to group them under this label. Most importantly, they share a focus on global politics as a much more interconnected and institutionalized whole than is recognized by more traditional state-centred perspectives. Most agree that even an embryonic world government or global state is still only a distant and uncertain, if not impossible and undesirable prospect, including those who introduce terminology to that effect (e.g. Luard 1990; Albrow 1996; Shaw 2000). Nevertheless, a seemingly growing number of researchers recognize that decisions are made and policies carried out with consequences for all or many countries through international and transnational structures and processes, and increasingly so. Consequently, researchers have begun to develop perspectives, concepts and theories that transcend the traditional distinction between domestic and international politics and direct attention to international and transnational political structures and processes in new ways. In this sense I would argue that a new research agenda has emerged. ‘Global polity research’ is used here to label these research efforts, whether or not the scholars in question would accept being pigeonholed as such.

This new agenda can and has been tackled in a variety of ways. Indeed, it is argued below that the global polity can be approached from a range of different paradigmatic positions and theoretical perspectives. Yet at a meta-theoretical level there is an agenda that poses common challenges, and in consequence all such perspectives have shared characteristics that set them apart from other approaches to international relations and world politics. This chapter will elaborate these points. First, two characteristics of the research topic that have important consequences for research strategy are pointed out, namely, that the global polity is both an emerging and singular phenomenon. It is argued that this has invited the application of concepts from comparative political analysis, and indeed general social inquiry to world politics, not simply concepts specific to the tradition of international politics alone. This reflects a significant reversal of research strategy which has further consequence. Differences of paradigm and theoretical approach derived from these fields are necessarily reflected in approaches to the global polity.

An emerging phenomenon

The global polity is an emerging phenomenon in two senses. First, it is a fairly recent phenomenon. While it can be shown that its roots are old (Murphy 1994; Boli and Thomas 1999) and indeed traceable back to early modern developments in international law (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000), there is much evidence to support the claim that it was not until the 1970s that the movement towards much denser political integration at the global level accelerated (Braithwaite and Zürn 1998; Held et al. 1999; Drahos 2000). Second, the global polity is also emerging in the sense that the transformative trends with which it is associated are likely to continue in the future. This was argued in the Introduction to this volume, but what deserves attention here is the sense of attempting to ‘capture something new’, of identifying new institutional forms, new political practices, new modes of interaction between well-known types of institutions and actors. It is this research orientation that is shared by many global polity researchers.

In this kind of research there is, in other words, a heightened sensitivity to new forms of politics, an urge to try to capture central features of a development that is still unfolding. It tries to identify transformations that are under way, to specify theoretical and empirical reasons why they should be expected to continue, and to theorize their possible and likely consequences for the entire international system. In the words of Michael Zürn and Gregor Walter (1999), there is an element of ‘transformation consequences research’ involved in much work on the global polity.

For example, Keck and Sikkink (1998) argued that the transnational advocacy networks they studied are important not only because they had a demonstrable impact on the specific issues they targeted (human rights in Argentina and Mexico, rainforests in Brazil and Malaysia, violence against women), but also because they exemplify a phenomenon whose significance is expected (for specified reasons) to grow in the future. In consequence, Keck and Sikkink argue that ‘scholars of international relations should pay more attention to network forms of organization’, and ‘we expect the role of networks in international politics to grow’ (ibid.: 200). This leads them to consider a ‘vision of the global potential and limitations of a cosmopolitan community of individuals’ (ibid.: 213) and to the claim that understanding transnational advocacy networks is ‘an important element in conceptualizing the changing nature of the international polity’ (ibid.: 216). This type of argumentation is often encountered in global polity research, precisely because of the emerging nature of the topic. Its central elements are the identification of new or hitherto neglected forms and practices, the claim that they are important and for specified reasons likely to become more prevalent in the future, and an attempt to theorize the possible future consequences of these developments, in this case ‘a cosmopolitan community of individuals’.

Other examples of global polity research drawing attention to new international political phenomena are not hard to come by. The emergence of transnational classes or a transnational ruling class (e.g. Van der Pijl 1998; Sklair 2001), the internationalization of law (e.g. Held et al. 1999), the rise of private authority in international relations (e.g. Cutler et al. 1999), and the legalization of world politics (Goldstein et al. 2000) are but a few.

The obvious danger inherent in the orientation towards all things new is the risk of overstating the case and exaggerating the extent and significance of new phenomena. Claims about the existence of a transnational ruling class, to be discussed below, or a world state, are strong candidates for the list of victims to fall into this particular trap, as indeed is much of the ‘hyperglobalist’ literature. The challenge facing all scholars, of course, is to get the balance right, neither overstating nor ignoring or underestimating new phenomena and their significance. In the final analysis, however, getting the balance right is a matter of judgement, and what perhaps distinguishes global polity researchers in this regard is that they would rather risk erring on the side of overstating than underrating transformations. The bias is forward-looking, not conservative and there is a reason for this. To quote Andrew Linklater, ‘identifying the seeds of future change in existing social orders is a key feature of sociological inquiry’ (1998: 3), and therefore it is often worthwhile identifying and analysing new phenomena where they are most developed, ascertaining their characteristics and potential for further development, even if they are not yet widespread or significant in their consequences. Having analysed industrial capitalism in England, where it was most developed, Marx told his readers in Germany, where this mode of production was still in its infancy, that he was showing them an image of their future ([1867]1996: 9). An example of a cautious application of this principle is found in Chapter 9 in this volume in Jørgensen and Rosamond’s discussion of European integration as a laboratory for the global polity. In a similar vein, political integration in the entire OECD area, and in particular the Atlantic relationship, arguably the most developed case of trans-regional integration, can be examined for indicators of institutional forms and modes of interaction that increasingly will characterize the entire global polity.

Finally, the emergence of phenomena studied by global polity research has consequences for the balance between inductive and deductive research. All theory-building depends on both types of research, and their inherent complementarity is well known: existing concepts and theories guide the search for empirical data, and the facts in turn provoke refinement and development of new theories and concepts. Thus, theories cannot be developed without a foundation in factual knowledge (and the broader and better the knowledge, the better the theories), but when dealing with emerging phenomena attempts to theorize depend on information on matters to which existing theories only randomly or unsystematically draw attention. David Easton has suggested that there may be a cyclical movement between facts and theory:

It could be demonstrated that in the short history of social science there is a tendency for the pendulum of research to swing from commitment to empirical research – discovery of the ‘facts’ – to theoretical attempts to make sense of them. Each new theoretical commitment raises the need for new kinds of ‘facts’, given the problems that the theories raise, which in due course leads to the return to theory as a way of trying to understand the new facts, and so on in an endless cycle.

(1990: 320, n 23)

Concerning global polity research, this pendulum image is too schematic, but clearly in recent research there has been a concern to ascertain ‘facts’, to compile empirical descriptions and indicators of aspects of political globalization as a basis for attempts to theorize more adequately contemporary international politics (e.g. Zürn 1998; Held et al. 1999; Braithwaite and Drahos 2000; Balanyá et al. 2000; Sklair 2001). The study of global business regulation by Braithwaite and Drahos in particular illustrates this. Although initial theoretical concepts and concerns guided their study, the main effort was to inductively arrive at empirical generalizations (resulting in forty-four empirical conclusions) based on a vast amount of collected facts, not to test hypotheses derived from existing theoretical models. Braithwaite and Drahos actually develop many promising theoretical insights although there are reasons to be critical of several of their conclusions. More importantly, by bringing together so much information about the global regulation of economic activity across so many issue areas, they have vastly improved the factual basis for future discussions. What this illustrates is the value of this kind of empirically rich research that leans more towards the inductive end of the spectrum when discussing emerging phenomena.

A singular phenomenon

The global polity is also a singular phenomenon – there is only one.
Diachronic comparisons with earlier ‘world polities’ are possible, of course, and can be illuminating (Murphy 1994). But such historical ‘global polities’ can also be seen as earlier stages in the evolution of a single global political entity, and from a methodological point of view the salient fact is that there can be only one contemporary global polity. Thus the nomothetic research strategy that has dominated much research on international institutions and regimes, while providing indispensable insights, has limits when analysing the global polity. It is necessary to supplement such efforts with historical, idiographic strategies that take a holistic perspective (Ougaard 1999b). This point has important implications and requires some elaboration.

The distinction between idiographic and nomothetic research was introduced by the German philosopher Wilhelm Windelband (1848– 1915) (Riedel 1973). The word idiographic is not to be confused with ideographic. The latter stems from the Greek ideo and refers to human concepts and, to be precise, ideas. Ideography thus normally means the representation of ideas by signs, hence Chinese characters are called ideograms. Idiographic derives from the Greek prefix idio, referring to that which belongs in particular to, or is a unique property of something, as in idiosyncratic. Nomothetic research seeks common properties and general laws covering a class of phenomena; it is a generalizing research strategy. Idiographic studies, in contrast, seek to develop concepts and theories that capture the uniqueness of a single phenomenon and the particular configuration of cause–effect relationships that has shaped it.

Studies of the global polity call for an idiographic research strategy for the simple reason that it is a unique phenomenon. It is incidentally not the only phenomenon of a singular nature that is of great interest to international relations research. As noted by Barry Eichengreen, ‘It is hard to imagine a field of international relations in which unique situations . . . were excluded because of the lack of an adequate, comparable group of situations’ (1998: 1012). Examples such as the Cold War spring easily to mind.

Idiographic research purposes have often been associated with hermeneutic methodologies and epistemologies, but this link is not axiomatic. Idiographic research is not bound to focus on ‘ideational factors’ as the only or primary source of explanation; nor does it exclude assumptions about rational behaviour. For instance, idiographic analysis could explain a unique agricultural system as the result of rational adaptation to a particular physical environment. The core of the distinction between idiographic and nomothetic research is one of research purposes, not necessarily one of epistemology or ontology (Ougaard 1995). It should be noted that the antinomy between idiographic and nomothetic employed here differs from the one between ideographic and nomothetic introduced by Katzenstein et al. (1998: 682).

The two types of research are complementary. Often the identification of what is unique requires as a matter of logic an understanding of what is common, and vice versa. Furthermore, idiographic analysis of a unique phenomenon will often require generalizations about its constituent parts. Thus, analysing the global polity is an idiographic venture, but it can draw heavily on input from nomothetic studies into its constituent parts – types of states, groups of institutions, classes of actors, etc. It can also use general insights into human behaviour and societal development generated by nomothetic research efforts and theories. However, when fitting the pieces together, overarching concepts that capture central features of the ‘whole’ are needed. For this reason the impressive body of institution-alist theory on international institutionalization is at the same time both indispensable and insufficient for the exploration of the global polity.

A note on nomothetic institutionalist theory

The impressive research effort that has been devoted to the analysis of international regimes and institutions has played a major role in the fields of international relations and international political economy (Krasner 1983a; Keohane 1989a; Efinger et al. 1993; Levy et al. 1995; Hasenclever et al. 1996; Martin and Simmons 1998). The theoretical debates and empirical studies generated by such research have clarified important issues, and in a sense an emerging consensus is identifiable. Institutionalist theory has made a convincing case that institutions do matter, and it has identified a set of key explanatory factors: shared interests, the power of states, knowledge and ideas, domestic politics, and learning (see Hasenclever et al. 1996 for a synthesis of regime theory). Thanks to this effort, we now know much about the conditions under which institutions are created and become effective.

This impressive body of research, however, also has limitations. One is that a wider perspective has been downplayed. After all, in Keohane and Nye’s seminal book from 1977 the analysis of regimes was only one component – albeit a major one – in a larger inquiry. The ‘first major question’ on their agenda was ‘what are the characteristics of world politics under conditions of extensive interdependence?’ (Keohane and Nye 1977: 19). The central focus was regimes, but the purpose was a wider one: to understand the nature of the changes in world politics resulting from increased interdependence, a research agenda that has clear parallels to the one addressed here. In ensuing years, however, the main body of regime theory has not systematically addressed questions about patterns in regime formation and the nature of the resulting overall ‘regime architecture’. One reason, probably, is the strong focus on proving that institutions matter, necessitated by the neo-realist challenge (Martin and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Beyond System and Society – Towards a Global Polity?
• Part I: Theorising the Global Polity
• Part II: Non-State Actors In the Global Polity
• Part III: Prospects and Agendas for the Global Polity In the Twenty-First Century
• Bibliography