How Global Institutions Rule the World

Josep M Colomer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349501731, 9781137475077
• eBook ISBN: 9781137475084
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book reviews bureau-type organizations delivering network goods, documenting how most global institutions greatly improved their effectiveness during the last few decades. In the current globalized world, the design and choice of appropriate institutional rules and procedures can result in effective and democratic global government.

PART I

WHO RULES

CHAPTER 2

NETWORK GOODS ARE SERVED BY SIMPLE BUREAUS

If all world problems were like the setting of a calendar, the adoption of measurement standards, or the coordination of the post, air travel, or the Internet, global government would be simple and effective Successful global providers of this type of services have included such disparate fellows as the Roman papacy, the French revolutionaries, the powerful United States, the neutral and broadly respected Switzerland, as well as a high number of anonymous scientists, technicians, and public servants who keep working in discreet offices at different locations across the planet.

What all the above-mentioned and comparable affairs have in common is that they deal with the so-called network goods. In contrast to issues that will be analyzed in later chapters, such as currencies or trade, or even more so with anything related to armed conflicts or justice, “network” goods involve little conflict of interest. Almost everybody can be interested in coordinating standards for time, weights and measures, or in facilitating communication exchanges—well, “almost” because a few people still may prefer to live in isolation and self-contentment.

Network goods bestow higher benefits to each user the higher the number of users. For example, the higher the number of people using the same calendar or the metric system, the easier the coordination among them; the more widely accepted the criteria and decisions to use air space, the safer and more numerous travels can be; the higher the number of websites, blogs, and links, the larger the amount of information and potential communicators every web user may enjoy. There is no rivalry of direct conflict between users for using the same good. For any person or group, the option to stay outside this kind of network and try to build its own services by itself may not produce the same benefits as those that can be expected from broad cooperation. This is not certainly the case for economic or security issues, in which competition and conflict may prevail.

Very simple organizational structures at the global level can be efficient in attaining coordination and agreements for “network” goods and services. In the current world, there are not only gigantic and complex international organizations dealing with conflictive matters, but also a high number of lesser-known “bureaus,” “secretariats,” and “offices” that make the universal use of such extremely useful agreements possible. Their typical institutional formula, which may be backed by near-universal membership or adherence, focuses on a technical and administrative secretariat formed by experts in the field, which usually performs rather efficiently.

Due to its effectiveness and ease, this type of international organization is little intriguing and therefore has not attracted much attention from scholars or news-makers. But, it is precisely their effectiveness and ease that can make bureau-type organizations a helpful reference to realize that other types of organizations need to overcome different problems and difficulties to attain a satisfying provision of global public goods.

Networks goods can be provided by very different actors, organizations, and groups, as we will illustrate in the following few pages. Their success is not due to any special circumstance in world affairs or to the good skills of the initial institutional designer, as we will see with a few outstanding examples. It mainly depends on the intrinsic nature of network goods, which, as they can provide universal benefits, can generate relatively easy coordination and cooperation among potential partners acting in their own self-interest. The same simplicity in organizational structure does not work well for other type of collective goods involving higher levels of conflict of interests.

Yet, in spite of its simplicity and efficiency, building these global institutions has not always been an easy endeavor. Two things seem to be necessary to effectively organize the global provision of a network good: formula and authority.

First, there must be a formula that can act as a “focal point” able to attract the agreement of all powers of the world. The focal point can be a technical or scientific proposal, even if mistaken, as we will see for the measurements of time and space, but with the aura of prestige and reliability, on which everybody can converge.

Second, the proposal for coordination of rules and standards must be presented by somebody with sufficiently accepted authority to be heeded. In principle, and given the potential benefits that everybody can obtain from cooperating on these issues, any actor’s unilateral initiative to start cooperating can attain broad following. But the actor in question must have high visibility, spiritual, economic, or military strength, a neutral, privileged position to build bridges with many different countries, or some other universally recognized ascendancy. That is how some of the aforementioned disparate providers attained their accomplishments. In the following pages, I present a few of these cases related to time, measures, and communications, as well as a general survey of simple yet not-so-easy-to-build organizations that supply global network goods.

The Universal Catholic Calendar

In the late sixteenth century, the Catholic pope was already much weaker than a century before, as the Protestant Reformation had hugely eroded his authority. Yet, the papacy was still the only great power able to provide a global public good by making an enforceable decision that everybody could accept in their own interest. Doubtless, the most celebrated decision made by Pope Gregory XIII was the issuing of a new worldwide calendar.

All civilizations have had calendars to measure and apportion such a vital dimension for human beings as time. The length of a day and night did not present major trouble, while its arbitrary division in 24 hours of 60 minutes and in minutes of 60 seconds had existed since the Babylonians. The measure and the apportionment of the year, though, required more sophisticated calculations. For the Egyptians, a year had 365 ¼ days, while for the ancient Chinese, Greeks, and Hebrews, the basic year had 354 days to which a variable number of days were added at intervals in order to keep the calendar aligned with the seasons. The early Romans used an official 335-day year, which was increasingly misaligned with the solar year. None of these calendars was universal, of course.

It was the Roman emperor Julius Caesar who established, for the first time, a calendar that would surpass the borders of his great empire. Going back to the measurements of the Egyptians, Julius decreed that a year lasted 365 ¼ days. Therefore, a year of 365 days plus a leap year, adding one extra day every four years, was established from January 1, of 46 BC, after adding 90 missing days to the previous counting during the year 45. Julius Caesar also replaced the previous division of the year into 10 months into one with 12, while keeping the seven-day week. The names of July and August still recognize the foundational role of the emperor and his successor. The Julian calendar was adopted by the Christian Church, which gave it its aim of universality (and it is still used for religious festivities by the Greek Orthodox Church).

However, the Julian measure of the solar year was a little too long, so that the seasons were running earlier and earlier, up to the point that in the sixteenth century the real spring equinox arrived as early as March 12th instead of the 21st. The Catholic pope’s main concern was the calculation of Easter, the Christian holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which had been established for the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, and it was going away. There were also concerns about the measurement of the universal time as a consequence of recently completed expeditions to travel around the globe.

By 1575, Gregory XIII appointed an expert commission chaired by mathematician Jesuit Christopher Clavius and formed by astronomers and physicists, which established that the most appropriate length of the year, as measured by the mean duration of a few tropical years, should be 365.2425 days. The commissioners, thus, proposed to keep the year of 365 days, as well as a leap year every four years, but to skip the additional day on leap years, coinciding with the end of a century in three of every four hundred years. The solution was simple and elegant and was enthusiastically endorsed by the pope, who issued his bull Inter gravissimas on the matter on February 24, 1582. The immediate implementation of the new, adjusted calendar required the omission of ten days, which was scheduled for October that year.

Pope Gregory XIII had been very active in the Catholic Counter-reform. His calendar proposal was immediately adopted by Catholic rulers in Italian cities and principalities, in the kingdoms of Spain, Portugal, and their overseas colonies, in Austria, Hungary, Poland, as well as in Catholic German and Dutch territories and Swiss cantons. It found strong resistance in Protestant lands, where astronomers, priests, and kings released a number of counterproposals, but none of them was able to create a unified, sufficiently attractive alternative focal point. Different countries with various traditions in different parts of the world may have had varying levels of rejection of a proposal coming from the Roman pope. But the embracing of the Gregorian calendar by a succession of territories eventually provoked a chain reaction in favor of it. For some, a “sufficient” number of adherents was enough to forecast positive benefits of joining, while for others the fear of being left in isolation may have been the major concern.

All of Western Europe, including England, had adopted the calendar by 1700. Japan, China, Russia, and Eastern Europe followed by the early twentieth century—which caused, for instance, the anniversary of Glorious October Revolution in Russia, which kept being commemorated for decades every October 26, to actually occur on November 8, according to the new calendar. The further development of navigation, commerce and the increasing frequency of long-distance travel and communications transformed the Gregorian calendar into an unavoidable common reference for all humankind.

The most striking alternative emerged during the French Revolution. The Jacobin rulers instituted a new rationalized calendar formed of 12 months of 30 days each, plus five or six extra days at the end of the year, with weeks of 10 days, days of 10 hours, hours of 100 minutes, and minutes of 100 seconds each, in 1793. The names of the months were also shifted into references to natural events. The symmetry and systematic quality of the new decimal structure was difficult to surpass. The new revolutionary calendar did not stick, however, and it was abandoned after 12 years.

The Gregorian calendar is nowadays almost universally used. What is most remarkable is that the success in the provision of such an important global standard was attained despite numerous drawbacks. The pope’s main motivation, as noted, was related to the calculation of Christian festivities, which was not a main concern for most people in the world. The measurement of the year’s length had previously been calculated on the moment when the center of the sun appears to cross the equator, on the assumption that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun orbited over an immobile sphere above, which was still the most common belief among educated people at the time. The new measure of the year, although closer to the real solar year than the Julian one, was still a few seconds too long, so that the Gregorian calendar will be one entire day ahead of the solar year by about 5000. In addition, notorious flaws can result from the facts that the divisions in months and quarters are of unequal length, the days of the week drift each year, and both the months and the week days keep arbitrary names originally derived from planets or from ordinal references depending on the region of the world. In spite of all this, however, the Catholic pope’s proposal eventually became the sole calendar in the world.

During the twentieth century, several initiatives were launched to improve the design of the global calendar. The League of Nations appointed a special reform committee, with the intention of finding a more rational way of arranging the months and their lengths that would be of great benefit to public life, the economy, and international relations, which went to be called “Universal Calendar.” Later on, the United Nations developed several consults about it, especially through its Economic and Social Council. The Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church declared that it would not oppose the change, as long as a Sunday every seven days was retained. Yet, none of these and other initiatives succeeded in replacing the existing calendar. The formula decreed by a lackluster Renaissance pope had certainly become a focal point on which everybody converged, and nobody has any incentive to take the risk of moving away from it.

Only the measurement of the variable length of the year, always imperfect, has changed. By 1955, it was found that more regular than the sun crossings of the equator or the earth rotation orbits would be the oscillations of an atom of cesium, a rare metal. A year is now equated to 290,091,200,500,000,000 (more than 290 quadrillion) oscillations of such an atom. This may sound impressive, yet adjustments to the actual, somewhat irregular earth rotation are necessary, so that a few leap seconds are added almost every year to establish the Coordinated Universal Time. A Master Clock making such a measurement and adjustments, in synchrony with the Gregorian calendar, is located inside the US Naval Observatory, in Northwest Washington, DC, a greenly compound that also encloses one of the oldest telescopes of the world still in use and the official residence of the vice president of the United States. The Master Clock takes the average time of an ensemble of about 120 cesium bean clocks. Twenty-five officers suffice to keep the clocks working. As for many other global standards, getting a benefit from the collective advantages provided by the universal calendar and the universal time attached to it does not require large administrative apparatuses or any explicit affiliation. Just using them for free can benefit everyone in the world.

The Revolutionary Decimal Metric System

The establishment of a system of standard measures that could be valid across the world was a revolutionary step. In truth, it was the initiative of the newly elected National Assembly of France at the beginning of the process of the Revolution, in 1790. The assembly mandated the Academy of Sciences to design a system of uniform measures that should “encompass nothing that was arbitrary, nor to the particular advantage of any people on the planet.” The academics thus declined to declare the units of measure that were used in Paris national or global units, and sought, in contrast, a firmer foundation by looking at something embedded in nature: the size of the earth itself. The newly designed “meter” was conceived to become all the world’s common standard of measure.

Everybody in the world had, of course, used weights and measures for agriculture, commerce, communication and administration for centuries. Although there was a great diversity of names and measures in different towns, counties, and regions (up to about 800 only in France), most systems included standards referenced as for a trace (or ligne), the width of a finger (digitus, inch, puce), the lengths of the hand or the foot (also virtula, palm), of the arm or a footstep (like yard, vara), and so on. A comparable set was intended to be designed by the French enlightened academics by establishing decimal multiples and submultiples of a central reference.

The French Academy appointed a Commission of Weights and Measures, which would be chaired successively by mathematicians Jean-Charles de Borda and Joseph-Louis Lagrange. The commission discarded a previous proposal, which had been supported, among others, by the secretary of the Academy and Borda’s intellectual rival, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, which would have been based on the length of a pendulum beating one second, that is, for reference to another standard—of time—which had been established in a different context. They chose instead “the meter” that would equal one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. They were thus bending on the natural facts of the planet earth and on the aesthetics of multiples-of-ten divisors—as the Revolution would also try to do with the measurement of time, as discussed earlier. But actually, the academics knew that by choosing a decimal fraction of a quarter and not of the entire meridian, the meter would be close to the length of the aune, which was the common measure used in Paris.

All the other dimensions would be established with reference to the meter, such as area (the squared meter); capacity (the cubic decimeter or liter); or weight (one liter of rainwater weighted in a vacuum at the melting point of ice or kilogram). With such firm natural and scientific foundations, the secretary of the academy, Condorcet, was confident enough to solemnly proclaim that the decimal metric system would be “for all people, for all times.”

Although the meridian had already been measured on several occasions, a new expedition was organized to do it again with new techniques and equipments, including the traditional triangulation used by land surveyors and a repeated circle invented by Borda. The commissioners chose to measure the piece of the meridian arc that runs from Dunkirk through Paris to Barcelona. They started from the two more distant seaports in order to ground on presumably stable sea level and converged on the intermediate fortress town of Carcassonne. Apparently, the expeditionary topographer sent to Barcelona made a measurement error at triangulating from the “Fontana d’Or,” a Romanesque building with a fortified tower accommodating a famous restaurant, to the castle over the hill of Montjuic. As a consequence, we know now that the standard meter fell roughly 0.2 millimeters short of the length of its official definition.

A provisional estimate of the length of the meter was presented in 1793 to the French National Assembly, which ruled the metric system as obligatory. Yet the system was not really accepted until the holding of what possibly was the first international scientific conference ever, which took place in Paris on February 8, 1799 (the word “international” had been coined and first published by the English thinker Jeremy Bentham only ten years before). A bar of platinum adopted at the Paris conference became the basis for officially declaring the metric system as the sole meas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   Who Rules
• Part II   How They Rule
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Size of Global Institutions
• Appendix 2: Rules and Procedures of Global Institutions
• Appendix 3: What a World Assembly Could Look Like
• Sources and Further Reading
• References
• Name Index