Power in Concert

The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance

Jennifer Mitzen

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780226060118
  9780226060088
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226060255
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How states cooperate in the absence of a sovereign power is a perennial question in international relations. With Power in Concert, Jennifer Mitzen argues that global governance is more than just the cooperation of states under anarchy: it is the formation and maintenance of collective intentions, or joint commitments among states to address problems together. The key mechanism through which these intentions are sustained is face-to-face diplomacy, which keeps states' obligations to one another salient and helps them solve problems on a day-to-day basis.

Mitzen argues that the origins of this practice lie in the Concert of Europe, an informal agreement among five European states in the wake of the Napoleonic wars to reduce the possibility of recurrence, which first institutionalized the practice of jointly managing the balance of power. Through the Concert's many successes, she shows that the words and actions of state leaders in public forums contributed to collective self-restraint and a commitment to problem solving—and at a time when communication was considerably more difficult than it is today. Despite the Concert's eventual breakdown, the practice it introduced—of face to face diplomacy as a mode of joint problem solving—survived and is the basis of global governance today.

CHAPTER ONE

Public Power and Purpose in Global Governance

In antitrust law there is a distinction between rational adaptation and concerted action.¹ It is reasonable to expect that firms in market economies will take one another into account and adjust their behavior in anticipation of what others may do. In doing so, each firm is acting alone, for its own self-interested purposes. Concerted action is different. When firms concert they are doing something together, not alone but with a common purpose. From a legal standpoint their concerting is considered problematic. Rather than allowing the invisible hand of the market to operate, firms are manipulating it for private ends. Since an economy guided by the invisible hand is considered desirable, concerting undermines society’s interest. If firms are found to be concerting they can be held responsible. In short, there are meaningful differences, both explanatory and normative, between these two ways of acting, rationally adapting and concerting.

Antitrust law is about firms in a market and this book is about states in anarchy, but the distinction is instructive. In this book I argue that states govern world politics by concerting their power. In doing so, they make the hand steering the international social order more visible. But because states are public powers with the responsibility to provide for society’s basic needs, the hand they bring into view by concerting is one that for the most part we should be happy to see. It could be called the hand of international public power.

I make the argument by developing a conceptual framework for understanding concerting as a particular type of joint action and then applying that framework to states in anarchy. The framework relies on the concept of collective intentionality.² Collective intentions to do something together are constituted by joint commitments, which give rise to obligations that can shape behavior when they are fully out in the open. I propose that among states, commitments can shape behavior when they are accompanied by forums. Forums enable states in anarchy to do what concerting firms do in a market: they can manipulate the balance of power toward shared ends. International relations (IR) scholarship already takes note of states making commitments and talking together in forums, but such a thin layer of institutionalization generally is not seen as capable of affecting outcomes separate from state interests and relative power. This book discerns those effects theoretically and links them to a system-level argument about how states inject social purpose to the international political order. I illustrate the framework in the “hard case” of security politics.

This argument intervenes in a debate on global governance. Scholars coined the term global governance in the early 1990s to point to a phenomenon in world politics that seemed distinct from international co-operation as IR had been studying it. At any level, to govern is to steer or self-consciously aim a society toward the pursuit of some specified ends or social purpose. In the early post–Cold War period, many saw new political potential of this kind on a global scale. In James Rosenau’s seminal formulation, global governance was defined as “order plus intentionality.”³ But while the language of global governance caught on, Rosenau’s analytic insight about intentionality was largely overlooked. Instead, the discourse of global governance linked up with a discourse on globalization, especially economic globalization, which had emerged in the 1980s with the rise of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is a market-centered liberalism in which concepts central to classical liberal thought, such as freedom and liberty, are understood narrowly and in economic terms, as market freedom and market liberty.⁴ As a result of this linkage, what has come to be known as global governance in IR has been, largely, neoliberal global governance, that is, the institutional preconditions for the invisible hand of the market to operate beyond the state.

The neoliberal backdrop has had two effects on the way global governance is studied in IR. First, it has crowded out the intentional or agentic aspect of governing. If governing is mostly about setting the rules to facilitate the smooth operation of the globalizing market, it is easy to see how once that is accomplished, academics and practitioners would come to treat global governance as a set of ongoing, functional responses to imperatives of economic globalization, as if problems present themselves to a system that anonymously generates solution mechanisms.⁵ As Deborah Avant, Martha Finnemore, and Susan Sell put it in their critique, we tend to see “global governance [as] something that happens; no one, apparently, actually does it.”⁶

Second, the wariness of public power that characterizes neoliberalism carries over, and it is difficult to advance a positive role for the state and state-like power in global governance.⁷ In neoliberalism, political freedom is the freedom to be left alone; we are the best guarantors of our own freedom. This translates to an implicit assumption in much global governance scholarship that the power to manage economic globalization and to realize new values does not reside with states. Indeed, states often are treated as sources of disorder and violence, not order and integration. To the extent there is positive agency in global governance, it is not the agency of the state’s public power but that of private, particularistic interests.⁸

Pushing back against the dominance of neoliberal thinking is a key aim of this book. But neoliberalism is not the only reason why intentionality and especially the state’s intentionality have been relatively neglected in global governance scholarship. The neglect also has to do with the way we think about group agency⁹ and the difficulty of applying that model in anarchy. Quite naturally, the starting point for thinking about agency is human or anthropomorphic agency. Because humans speak and act with one locus of final authority, we tend to think of all things that have agency as being structured to act with a single locus of final authority. Groups with agency are those that are organized hierarchically or centralized to act in a unitary fashion. This move of analogizing all agents to humans is not always explicitly justified in the work that relies on it, and it certainly has critics.¹⁰ But the assumption nonetheless dominates the way we think about agency in world politics, with the paradigmatic example being state agency. Intentional action without a unitary agent engaging in it is difficult to picture.

An anthropomorphic model of group agency is not itself problematic. Indeed, like many IR scholars, in this book I treat the state as a unitary actor. But the anthropomorphic model becomes problematic in thinking about global governance because the context for group agency in world politics is fundamentally decentralized. If purposive action requires centralization and unitary actorhood, the possibilities for agency beyond the state are limited. States either can merge their sovereignty or they can create new bodies with supranational authority. Only if group agency is possible without centralization and through concerting does it become possible to envision collective, purposive action, and its corollary of collective responsibility, among states in anarchy.

To illustrate this intentionalist, public power approach to global governance, I reach back to its origins and tell the story of the first international public power, the Concert of Europe, which came about after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 when the five most powerful European states committed to maintain continental stability together. Their idea was that when European stability was affected, European power must respond. Before 1815, international order had been produced essentially behind the backs of states by the invisible hand of the balance of power. What marks the post-Napoleonic period as the first case of states concerting their power for public interests is the combination of their commitment to keep the peace together and their institutional innovation of states meeting in forums to manage crises. Because of these, the great powers were able to keep Europe at peace until the Crimean War in 1854. In the international context, among states that had maintained a long, hot rivalry, this was quite an accomplishment.

To say that nineteenth-century European great powers constituted a new and greater power by acting together can seem at once obvious and hardly worth celebrating. After all, these were “great powers,” which means they already dominated the continent. But I want to separate out their individual or even their aggregate capacity to dominate from the capacity to act in concert. To be sure, action in concert can be used for domination, but that does not mean it is the same thing.¹¹ In its time, from a European perspective at least, great powers working together to keep the peace was a normative improvement over how they had acted in the centuries before.

International Public Power

This book argues that by acting in concert states can create international public power, a locus of authoritative decision on matters in their common, public interest. To lay the theoretical groundwork for the framework I will develop in chapter two, it is helpful to begin by looking more closely at two central concepts: collective intentionality and public.

Collective Intentionality

Because international governing is something states do together, it is a case of collective intentionality. The idea behind collective intentionality is that some group actions are neither reducible to the intentions of individual members nor necessarily collected into a unitary corporate agent. Actions are not reducible in that, in John Searle’s words, “the crucial element in collective intentionality is a sense of doing . . . something together, and the individual intentionality that each person has is derived from the collective intentionality that they share.”¹² At the same time, this top-down agency does not subsume the agency of individual participants. It is a larger, “macro” purposiveness that does not necessarily coalesce into unitary actorhood.

This purposiveness is found not only when firms concert in a market, it also is common in everyday life and something we all know how to do. As a more prosaic example of team play,¹³ consider the purposiveness of a basketball team. Here the players share the goal of winning the game, but accomplishing that goal requires many individual choices, often made in the spur of the moment. Each choice—passing the ball, going for a three point shot, substituting one player for another—is certainly comprehensible in individualistic terms as a discrete choice by a single person aiming for a particular goal. But the choices are perhaps better understood in the context of the game and of the overall collective goal of winning the game, which is something they all desire and intend but none can accomplish alone. Scholars of collective intentionality argue that the fact that there is a single commitment to act creates a single locus of agency. But because more than one agent is necessary to produce the actions that achieve the goal, they must act together, hand in hand so to speak.

Forming a collective intention creates what Margaret Gilbert calls a “plural subject.”¹⁴ The term subject conveys that a collective intention creates an agency separate from the agency of the actors participating in it; the term plural suggests that the intentionality of those actors is not thereby erased or subsumed. A useful way to think about plural subject-hood is as an emergent phenomenon, one that arises from interaction among a set of actors but is not reducible to them.¹⁵ Plural subjecthood implies a normative relationship among the participants, which Gilbert calls a “relationship of owing.”¹⁶ Because the agency of each (for a particular goal) depends on the others following through, they owe one another explanations if they deviate from actions implied by their commitment. To be part of a plural subject is to take a first person plural, or “we,” perspective for the purpose of pursuing some specific goal or project. “We” is an identity term, and there is a sense in which plural subjects share a collective identity. However, the “we” ness of collective intentions is circumscribed by the explicit intention toward which action is directed, and as such it can be relatively thin and potentially quite transient.

In short, from a collective intentionality standpoint, when actors jointly commit to do something together, they are not merely signaling cooperative intentions and the result is not merely cooperation as IR scholarship has understood it. They also are creating a new agency in which authority and responsibility over action is shared. From here, if, for example, a basketball player chooses to take a risky shot rather than pass to an open teammate in an effort to boost his individual statistics, his teammates have the standing to criticize him for undermining their agency, and he owes them an explanation. Intentions can be shared purely behaviorally or in silence. But in many cases collective intentions are produced and maintained by talking together. The crucial role of talking together generally is recognized in antitrust law as noted above, where face-to-face meetings are considered evidence of concerting.¹⁷ Needless to say, talking together is crucial for governing together.

Public Power

Collective intentions to do something together come in many forms. Part of what makes the case of states acting together distinctive is that states have a special status as public powers. But while that term is widely used, the meaning of public that stands behind it is not well theorized. For example, public can simply mean intersubjective or visible.¹⁸ But it often is used more narrowly, as a synonym for political. Even where public means political however, usage of the term varies widely, from the thin economistic notion in public choice theory and the theory of public goods¹⁹ to the thicker more republican-inflected notion that informs conceptualizations of the public sphere.²⁰ This book relies especially on two political meanings.

First, the term public is used to convey a type of social solidarity. When we refer to the public we tend to be talking about the people who reside in a given state but who are not in government. The public is not a random collection of people, but a group with a particular bond. Members of a public are interdependent and see themselves as sharing some common interests and as subject to the same set of rules and institutions. Generally speaking, members of a public prefer coordination to going it alone, and they expect their coordinatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Public Power and Purpose in Global Governance
• 2. Governing in the Shadow of Violence
• 3. From International Society to Public Power
• 4. More Than Mere Words: Publicly Managing the Vienna Settlement, 1815–22
• 5. Governing Together: The Greek Revolt and the Eastern Question, 1823–32
• 6. Things Fall Apart: From a Russo-Turkish Dispute to the Crimean War, 1853–56
• 7. Conclusion
• References
• Notes
• Index