Global Governance and Japan

The Institutional Architecture

Glenn D. Hook, Hugo Dobson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415424004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134097197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Leading specialists from Europe and Japan examine the institutional mechanisms of governance at the global level and provide concrete evidence of the role Japan plays in these institutions. An excellent introduction to the concept of global governance, the volume analyzes how global governance actually works through the global institutional mechanisms of governance. It provides an up-to-date and contemporary analysis of the six most important global institutions, namely:

• the Group of 7/8
• the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
• the World Bank
• the International Monetary Fund
• the World Trade Organization
• the United Nations.

Written clearly and concisely, the book provides a thorough and accessible discussion on Japan's role within these institutions and uses supporting case studies to ask whether Japan is reactively or proactively involved in trying to shape these institutions in order to promote its own interests. As such, it will be a valuable resource for undergraduates and scholars with an interest in global governance, Japanese politics and political economy.

1 Global governance and the Group of Seven/Eight

Hugo Dobson

Introduction

It has been estimated that almost one conference a week is held on the subject of governance and yet it remains a contested term, especially when the qualifying adjective ‘global’ is added (Valaskakis 2004: 3). In spite of this confusion, Rorden Wilkinson provides a road map for making sense of global governance:

Global governance, then, is not defined simply by the emergence of new actors or nodes of authority; instead, it compromises a growing complexity in the way in which its actors interact and interrelate. Most certainly, some of the agents of global governance are newly emerged; others, however, are much longer established. Nevertheless, the key to understanding contemporary global governance is the capacity to identify the range of actors involved in the act of management, as well as to uncover the variety of ways in which they are connected to one another.

(Wilkinson 2002: 2)

Although several studies of global governance have identified the range of actors involved in such a nexus and explored their interconnectivity, most of these studies more often than not omit the Group of Eight (G8). Instead, the UN, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) are the ‘usual suspects’ when locating the relevant providers of global governance. The reason for this might lie in the openly declared and clearly articulated aims and evolution of these organizations, in contrast to the flexible goals and amorphous development of the G8. It is undeniable that a high degree of functional uncertainty surrounds the G8 to the degree that it is unclear what it is: international organization or institution, effective centre of global governance or meaningless junket? The objectives of this chapter are to establish what kind of entity the G8 is, adumbrate how it works and then explore how it is connected to other mechanisms involved in the provision of global governance. It does this by employing the metaphor of a concert and by fast-forwarding and rewinding between almost 200 years of international history to tease out a number of similarities between the G8 and its closest predecessor, the Concert of Europe.

The origins of the G8

The G8 represents a constantly evolving process that has redefined itself on a number of occasions. It first met as the Group of Six (France, Italy, Japan, UK, US and West Germany) from 15 to 17 November 1975 at the château of Rambouillet in France. This first meeting found its origins in an informal meeting of the Group of Four (G4) French, West German, UK and US finance ministers in the White House library in March 1973, later joined by Japan to form the Group of Five (G5), to discuss the state of the international monetary system. The perceived success of this style of meeting provided the impetus behind the Rambouillet meeting ‘to recreate at the highest level the same sort of direct and informal exchange’ (Hunt and Owen 1984: 658). Or, in the words of renowned summitwatcher, Sir Nicholas Bayne, the summit:

was conceived as a personal encounter of the leaders of the world’s most powerful economies. The founders believed that bringing the heads of government together would lead them to understand better both the domestic problems of their peers and the international responsibilities they all shared. This would enable them to solve, through personal interaction and original ideas, problems that had baffled their bureaucrats. The bureaucrats themselves ought to be kept out of the process entirely.

(Bayne 2005: 174)

Unlike the more traditional international organizations explored in other chapters (even the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the G8’s closest relative), which are the result of an international agreement or formal treaty and display a high degree of institutionalization, the G8 has no legal basis and was originally intended as an impromptu, never-to-be-repeated, informal meeting in reaction to a series of ‘tightly-spaced, partially-interrelated’ crises of the early 1970s including conflict in the Middle East, the 1973 oil crisis and the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates (Kirton 1989). The utility of this forum as a unique meeting place for the world’s leaders (in addition to President Gerald Ford’s desire to use the summit as an electoral fillip at home) led to a second conference being held in San Juan, Puerto Rico in June 1976 at which Canada was added to form the Group of Seven (G7). Since then, other members with varying levels of status have joined the summit and their participation has contributed to the process of redefining the summit’s nature and agenda. The European Community/European Union Commissioner participated from the 1977 London Summit. The meetings of the original G5 finance ministers, who had met irregularly in secret since the early 1970s, were brought into the open and expanded to include all seven members from the 1986 Tokyo Summit onwards. The 1990s witnessed the evolution of Russia’s position from guest in 1991 through a range of statuses to a fully enfranchized member of the G8 by 2003. More recently, the G8 has engaged in a policy of ‘outreach’ to include non-G8 nations in individual summits and the further expansion of its membership – potential members currently include China and India – is regularly touted.

However, it was not long after the first summit that its original goals were abandoned. On the one hand, the remit of summit discussion expanded from chiefly economic issues to encompass political and security issues; while, on the other hand, the composition of summit delegations developed from the original idea of solely the leaders, accompanied by foreign and finance ministers, to embrace regular ministerial-level meetings on education, employment, energy, the environment, justice and trade. As a result, the administration and preparation for the annual summit, directed by the leaders’ personal representatives, or sherpas, in turn supported by sous-sherpas, who meet regularly during the year preceding a summit, has led to an ever-increasing bureaucratic load that has become one of the main rods with which to beat the summit process over recent years.

Nevertheless, the G8 has ‘hung together’ and by 2004 the G8 was firmly entrenched into its fifth cycle of summitry, begun at the twenty-ninth summit in 2003 at Evian, and will meet again at the thirty-first summit to be held at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland from 6 to 8 July 2005. However, despite this degree of longevity, the G8 and its position within the global governance nexus is a mystery that has only recently begun to be explored as a result of the work of the G8 Research Group at Toronto University and the associated G8 and Global Governance series of books published by Ashgate. These summit-watchers believe the G8 to be ‘emerging as an effective center, and is prospectively the effective center, of global governance’ (Kirton 1999: 46). Although this claim may be more demonstrative of the enthusiasm of an academic defending his chosen subject of study, it would be difficult to deny that their work represents an overdue and welcome attempt to understand what kind of entity the G8 is and how it seeks to provide global governance. With the goal of shedding more light on these specific questions, the following sections highlight the way in which the G8 functions as an effective centre of global governance by comparing and contrasting it with a 200-year-old predecessor, the Concert of Europe. This exercise is all the more relevant as the embryonic summit process was originally credited as being the idea of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, author of one of the main studies of nineteenth-century diplomacy, A World Restored, who ‘consciously sought to construct the modern equivalent of the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe’ (Kirton 2001–2).

The Concert of Europe

Although its roots lie in the eighteenth century, the Concert of Europe existed in one form or another from its creation in the last years and immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars until its final demise during the outbreak of the First World War. It was Napoleon’s attempted domination of the European continent that

finally convinced the statesmen of Europe, hard persons to teach, that what was at risk was not merely certain goods in international politics (peace, security, territorial integrity) but the very life principle of European politics which made hese goods and others possible . . . [and thus, they] finally and suddenly succeeded in learning how to conduct international politics differently and better.

(Schroeder 1994: 395, vii)

The Concert of Europe was the manifestation of this learning process.

From 1815 to 1914, a ‘system of governance was created by a five-power coalition, defined by it, and operated in terms of its members’ interests’ (Holsti 1993: 34). To this end, the European great powers of the day, namely Austria (Austro- Hungary from 1867), Britain, France, Prussia and Russia, held over thirty congresses and conferences and numerous smaller conferences attended by fewer of their number. Not only did it create a blueprint of how to organize (or not, as the case may be) future international organizations, such as the League of Nations and the UN (Mowat 1930: 362–4; Medlicott 1956: 315), it has been touted as the closest thing to a ‘world government world federation, or even a worldwide pluralistic security community’ (Jervis 1985: 58). However, perhaps a more accurate description of the Concert is of ‘the great powers meeting together at times of international crisis to maintain peace and to develop European solutions to European problems’ (Elrod 1976: 162).

The novelty of the Concert, and its chief similarity with the G8 summit, was its exclusive nature:

Throughout the nineteenth century the European great powers claimed for themselves special rights and responsibilities which they were unwilling to accord to other states. They usually consulted each other, although not the small states, on major issues. They regarded themselves as the guardians of the peace of Europe, and they assumed responsibility for the maintenance of order within their neighbouring states. It was the strongest second-class states which resented the existence of this ‘exclusive club’ of great powers.

(Bridge and Bullen 1980: 2)

This self-elected directorate shouldered exclusive responsibility for the security of Europe and the maintenance of the status quo in a spirit of cooperation. Or, in other words,

the Concert would function as an informal consultative body of all the powers, handling each European question as it arose by ad hoc discussion, and finding a solution of differences between the great powers themselves in (presumably) the good fellowship and spirit of mutual concession which this friendly collaboration would foster.

(Medlicott 1956: 34)

It sought to govern and negotiate any peaceful revisions to the post-war status quo on the basis of agreement within the concert system.

The Concert of Europe never constituted anything as formal as an institution or a regime. ‘Regimes convert broad norms and principles into concrete rules and procedures . . . . While the Concert of Europe embodied principles and norms, however, it lacked rules and procedures for putting them into effect’ (Rendall 2000: 87). Rather, the Concert was a forum based on the ideological convergence of the leading statesmen of the day as regards anti-revolutionism and general contentment with the status quo. Thus, ‘concert’ means something very different from institution or organization:

In the language of diplomacy ‘concert’ originally meant either an ad hoc diplomatic arrangement involving some measure of cooperation between two or more powers or a temporary political situation implying some degree of agreement between the parties.

(Holbraad 1970: 3)

Another important characteristic of the Concert of Europe is that it brought about a change in the behaviour of states in response to a crisis. The Concert was a reaction to the widespread destruction and anti-establishment ambitions unleashed by Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (Gulick 1955: 134–5; Bridge and Bullen 1980: 20–47). Both suppressing this revolutionary zeal and ensuring France would not become the destructive force it had been during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries constituted a driving force and core principle of the Concert:

The quarter of a century of turmoil to which Europe had been subjected created a strong and authentic desire for peace and order. At Vienna the clock was ostensibly set back and the Europe of 1815 may have seemed to the restorers little different from that of pre-1789. Yet it was also felt more than ever desirable that the competition of interests should proceed in orderly fashion: order could best be maintained by the clear assertion of the right and the responsibility of those possessed of power, the Great Powers. The conception was hardly new or original, and it was not formally institutionalized beyond the loose provision for the holding of future meetings of the Powers. Here lies the essence of the Concert of Europe.

(Albrecht-Carrié 1968: 5)

So, ‘[t]he Concert of Europe was a loose concept rather than a formalized institution’ (Albrecht-Carrié 1968: 59) and stressed multilateral, as opposed to unilateral or bilateral, solutions to issues of international diplomacy based on the ‘conviction that the only satisfactory basis for intervention in the affairs of other states was in collaboration with other powers in the maintenance of the public life of Europe’ (Medlicott 1956: 21). This was seen to be the only way ‘which would permanently “neutralize and fetter and bind up” the selfish aims of each individual state’ (Medlicott 1956: 305). This norm applied to containing smaller states, middle power and the dominant superpowers of the system, Russia and Great Britain, and ‘[d]espite significant conflicts of interest among them, all the states shared the important interest of avoiding large wars and the need to maintain the new, more cooperative arrangements’ (Jervis 1992: 719).

Thus, the Concert was an informal grouping of wartime allies who agreed to continue their frequent meetings and extend their spirit of unity into peacetime: ‘[t]he Concert of Europe, which brought a peace that although often disturbed did not shatter for a century, was due not only to the rough equilibrium of power after the Napoleonic wars but to the ability of statesmen to sense, appreciate, and solidify it’ (Helprin 1996: 33). So, in order to realize the willingness to forego self-interest for the good of the group, the Concert worked for most of the time on the basis of individuals and personalities, and herein lies another important characteristic. In the case of the Concert, the inter-personal relationship between the British Foreign Minister from 1812 to 1822, Viscount Robert Castlereagh, the Austrian Foreign Minister from 1809 to 1848, Prince Klemens von Metternich, and the Russian Tsar from 1801 to 1825, Alexander I, has been credited as being integral to its successful functioning (Albrecht-Carrié 1968: 4). The fact that the statesmen of Europe, especially these three individuals, knew each other well having dealt with each other previously and respected each other’s abilities and status drove the Concert during its early years while memories of the Napoleonic Wars were fresh. Moreover, stability in the relationships was encouraged by the fact that several of these statesmen were in power for extended periods of time, often more easily measured in decades than years, and their foreign ministries were often very small in size and number (Bridge and Bullen 1980: 17–18).

In addition to maintaining its own coherence through the ability of the individuals involved, the Concert demonstrated an ability to negotiate with third parties (Jervis 1985: 72). For example, France as the chief security concern in the immediate post-war period was admitted to the Concert in 1818 despite having been initially excluded. The Ottoman Empire, the management of whose decline proved to be the major issue of nineteenth-century international relations, was admitted to the Concert in 1856.

The ‘intense diplomatic preparations’ for each meeting of the Concert represent another characteristic worth mentioning. It has been noted that in preparation for Concert meetings:

[s]ome delay was necessary . . . to give diplomats time to consult their colleagues and to work out their positions, and above all, to discover what would and what would not be palatable to the other powers in the conference. The requisite order included extensive pourparlers, perhaps a conference, and then a congress. This procedure insured that only those issues that were amenable to diplomatic treatment were introduced, and constituted a necessary precondition for successful summit diplomacy.

(Elr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Global Governance and Japan
• Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies/Routledge Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• A note on the text
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Thinking about global governance and Japan
• 1 Global governance and the Group of Seven/Eight
• 2 Global governance, Japan and the Group of Seven/Eight
• 3 Global governance and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
• 4 Global governance, Japan and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
• 5 Global governance and the World Bank
• 6 Global governance, Japan and the World Bank
• 7 Global governance and the International Monetary Fund
• 8 Global governance, Japan and the International Monetary Fund
• 9 Global governance and the World Trade Organization
• 10 Global governance, Japan and the World Trade Organization
• 11 Global governance and the United Nations
• 12 Global governance, Japan and the United Nations
• Conclusion: The meaning of global governance
• Glossary