World-Regional Social Policy and Global Governance
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World-Regional Social Policy and Global Governance

Bob Deacon, Maria Cristina Macovei, Luk Van Langenhove, Nicola Yeates, Bob Deacon, Maria Cristina Macovei, Luk Van Langenhove, Nicola Yeates

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World-Regional Social Policy and Global Governance

Bob Deacon, Maria Cristina Macovei, Luk Van Langenhove, Nicola Yeates, Bob Deacon, Maria Cristina Macovei, Luk Van Langenhove, Nicola Yeates

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About This Book

This volume explores the case for and the prospects of the development of world-regional social policies as integral elements of a pluralistic, equitable and effective system of global governance.

Focusing on transnational regionalism, this book examines the trajectory and crossing over of the three strands of scholarly analysis within the past decade which have given rise to this volume: the perceived negative impact of neo-liberal globalisation upon national social policy; the need for but the difficulty of securing reforms in the institutions of global social governance; and the increasing salience of the world-regional level of governance in handling cross-border issues.

The authors develop an intellectual and research agenda that will also inform the political development of an international programme concerned with the social policy dimensions of regional governance. Combining the perspectives and collective expertise of a team of international scholars and activists, the book features:

  • Theoretical and policy cases for a focus on regionalism and social policy
  • A mapping and analysis of social policy dimensions of regional integration processes and formations in four continents
  • An assessment of the regional dimensions of global agencies, in particular of the UN (ILO, WHO, UNESCO, UNDP) including the approach to regional social policy of the UN Regional Economic Commissions and Development Banks
  • An articulation of a multi-levelled conceptualisation of global social governance within which regional associations of countries plays a significant part.

The book will be of interest to students and scholars of social policy, development studies, international relations and political science, especially those focused on the public policy dimensions of globalisation, regionalisation and international development.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2009
ISBN
9781135236618

Part I
The case for regionalism with a strong social dimension

1 Regional formations and global governance

Luk Van Langenhove and Maria Cristina Macovei

This chapter aims to provide a framework for understanding the growth and changing character of regional governance. This lays the basis for considering in Chapter 2 how social policy might be affected by the world-wide rise of regional governance. The first section explores how governance has evolved from an essentially state-led preoccupation into a complex phenomenon that involves many other actors and that is characterized by interlinkages between different (geographical) levels of policy-making. It will be argued that we are witnessing the transition from a single world of states towards a multiple world of states and regions. Important actors in this new world order are the world regional organizations and regional arrangements between states that have resulted from regional integration processes. The second section discusses three main varieties of regional integration that currently exist. First, there is regional integration by removing economic obstacles, a process that has resulted in a multitude of regional trade arrangements all over the world. Second, there is regional integration by building institutions and regulations that often go beyond economic and trade policies and that can be described as a ‘pooling’ of sovereignty at a transnational level. Third, there is regional integration by building a geopolitical identity and actorness. Here the ‘world region’1 behaves as an actor on the global scene, both through its own ‘foreign’ policy and through its presence in global institutions. The third and final section will then begin the exploration of the consequences of these varieties of regionalism for social policy. It will be argued that regionalism aimed only at creating free trade areas can put severe pressures on the existing national social policies of the countries involved. On the other hand, the development of a broader and deeper form of regionalism (often referred to as ‘new regionalism’) can act as a driver towards regional social policies. Moreover, in those – rare – cases where regionalism involves global actorness the regional external policy can contribute to the development of global social policies as well. By way of conclusion, it will be argued that in theory regional integration can act both as a building block and as a stumbling block on the way towards a global social policy that makes globalization ‘fairer’.

The changing face of governance

In our globalized world, societies are affected more and more extensively and deeply by events in other societies. Debates on globalization raise questions regarding the appropriate political response to deal with both its negative and its positive effects. One of the fundamental questions is at what level action should be situated. Action can be taken by national and local authorities but it is often the case that these authorities are limited in their ability to tackle global and thus trans-national problems. On the other hand, there are the global world-wide institutions such as the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions. And in between these levels are the regional institutions (such as the EU, MERCOSUR, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the African Union (AU), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), etc.), and perhaps at precisely that level there is increasing interest in and focus on dealing with the effects of globalization.
This may seem surprising as at first sight it could only be the UN which as a global institution offers a political answer to globalization. After all, the UN was founded in 1945 in an attempt to create a multilateral world forum where sovereign states could resolve differing opinions and where common actions about peace and development can be stimulated. Today, however, the world is dramatically different from that of the post-Second World War period in which the UN was founded. First of all, the geopolitical stability of that system disappeared with the end of the Cold War. Second, a lot more countries are now members of the UN than used to be the case (from the original fifty-one, the number has now risen to 192 member states), which means that the functioning of the General Assembly is not getting easier. Third, states now have to share their hegemony and their capacity to regulate economic transformation more and more with local governments, supra-national groupings and non-governmental actors.
One can observe that nowadays there are emerging problems that are beyond national or regional borders. Therefore, the problĂ©matique is how to deal with the rapid emergence of collective problems with cross-border dimensions, in particular those that are global in scope or potentially so. Global governance can be an answer to this problĂ©matique, as it refers to ‘cooperative problem solving arrangements on a global plane’ (Thakur and Van Langenhove 2006: 233). Global governance is characterized by a complex matrix of institutions, both formal and informal, of mechanisms, of processes between and among states, markets and citizens, and of organizations, both intergovernmental and nongovernmental. In the global governance system collective interests are wrought, rights and obligations are set up, and differences are mediated (Thakur and Van Langenhove 2006). The need for global governance is very present in today’s world; however, the idea of a centralized world government is not embraced by many people. In this respect, as underlined by Thakur and Van Langenhove (2008: 22), the goal of global governance ‘is not the creation of world government, but an additional layer of consultation and decision-making’ in governments and intergovernmental organizations. The organizing principle of global governance is multilateralism, and the UN represents the hub of the multilateral system of global governance. The world needs global governance in order to deal with non-passport issues, like human rights, chronic poverty, migration and other social problems. Global governance can be seen as a ‘chameleon-like’ concept that can be adapted to different meanings. The goals of global economic governance, for instance, are to manage the economic activity of the world without undermining state sovereignty, to preserve international financial stability, and to promote cooperative solutions to global problems, among others. Global security governance aims to minimize conflicts and violence across the planet, again respecting the sovereignty of the nation state (Thakur and Van Langenhove 2006). By the same token, global social governance, without harming the sovereignty of nations, seeks to protect the well-being of all people, including issues like social protection, education and health, and to try to solve the inequality and poverty dilemmas via intergovernmental modalities. Indeed, the world is ‘stumbling towards the articulation of global social policy of global redistribution, global social regulation, and global social rights’ (Deacon 2007). Global redistribution can be achieved via tax and income transfers, regional funds and overseas development assistance (ODA). Global social regulation is encompassing the core labour standards advanced by the ILO in 1998 and by UN Conventions. Global social rights are about citizenship empowerment, which refers to UN Conventions on the Rights of the Child and the UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Deacon 2007, 2008).
The current debate (WCSDG 2004, Farrell et al. 2005, Thakur and Van Langenhove 2006, 2008, UNU-CRIS 2008) is advocating a global governance built on regional integration. This approach is of particular interest for the debate on advancing (regional) social policy (Deacon 2007, Yeates 2005, 2008, Yeates and Deacon 2006, Deacon et al. 2007). The regional level is becoming a level of governance actively involved in policy implementation and elaboration. Multilevel governance or ‘the dispersion of authoritative decision-making across multiple territorial levels’ (Hooghe and Marks 2001: xi) is the new paradigm to explain this phenomenon. From this perspective, European integration, for example, is a ‘polity-creating process in which authority and policy-making influence are shared across multiple levels of government – sub-national, national, and supranational’ (Hooghe and Marks 2001: 2). The weakening of the state and the shift of competences to the new sub-national and supra-national levels of government result from a dual process:
European integration has shifted authority in several key areas of policymaking from national states up to European-level institutions. Regionalization in several countries, including the most populous ones, has shifted political authority from the national level down to the sub-national level of government.
(Hooghe and Marks 2001: xi)
One of the main characteristics of the sovereign state is that it has long had a quasi-monopoly on the provision of public goods within its territory. The beneficiaries of public goods are not limited to a single consumer or a specific group or consumers; they are available to all. The benefits of different public goods, like legal systems and institutions, defence systems and nationwide highways, extend to the entire population of a specific state (Musgrave and Musgrave 2003: xi). Some of these public goods also deal with social policy. National poverty eradication programmes, national education programmes, national social security systems, etc. are examples in this sense.
A main debate has always been on how far a state should go in developing instruments of social policy. The two extreme positions in that debate have been: (i) states need to be strong to tame the negative consequences of market forces; and (ii) states need to refrain from interfering where markets can do a better job. States versus markets has been a dominating political theme and has long been the main point of difference between left and right. But recently, two major (interrelated) events have shaken that old paradigm of state/market balance. On the one hand, markets have increasingly become globalized. As a result, many aspects of industrial production and of trade have escaped the control of national states. On the other hand, states have increasingly become stripped of some of their powers and competences as a result of a double movement. In many cases, there has been devolution of power from the (central) state level to federalized entities. In a country such as Belgium, the majority of governmental policy domains are now situated at the level of regions. Next to that, there have been strong tendencies to somehow ‘pool’ sovereignty across states into larger regional entities. The EU is the most developed example of this trend, though other examples of how this pooling/cooperation is taking place across world-regions are provided in each of the chapters in Part II of this book. As a result, a complex web of interrelated levels and spheres of governance with many actors has emerged. For a person living in Belgium, for example, this means that policies are situated at the local level of the commune, the level of the provinces, the regional level, the level of the language community, the national (federal) level, the level of the Benelux group of countries, the European level and the global level.2
Notwithstanding the above, in the foreseeable future states will remain important centres of governance. Nevertheless, in an attempt to face the challenges of globalization, states can turn to sub-national and world regions to complement and even strengthen their power. The world of states would thus gradually become a world of states and regions. A world of states and regions could be an innovative approach that holds the promise of a renewed and better system of global and local governance. Within this development, regional integration has taken an important place since the mid-1980s. There has been not only a proliferation of various forms of regional integration processes on a global scale but also an unprecedented deepening of the process of European integration. The EU is the world’s most advanced form of supranational regionalism. It has managed to develop a model that incorporates political elements in a system of deep economic integration, and as such challenges existing assumptions about governance.
This has important consequences for social policy. On the one hand, there is the issue of migration of some elements of social policy from the state level to either the supranational or the sub-national level. On the other hand, there is the problĂ©matique of the interaction between these different governance levels. Progressively, the idea that the EU should strengthen its competences in the social area over the national member states has indeed gained ground. In this sense, the first steps made have been the introduction of the legally enforceable ‘acquis communautaire’, the softer ‘acquis’ and the Open Method of Coordination (OMC)3 (see also Chapter 5) to promote coordinated social policy-making. But all in all, the European integration process is not as advanced in social policy as in other policy domains.
Although not the model for the rest of the world, the EU can be seen as an example of regional integration with cooperation spanning culture, politics, security, economics, social policies and diplomacy. It is often taken as a model for political and economic efforts in other regions to achieve stability and prosperity. Not surprisingly then, those interested in the social dimension of regional integration turn to the EU to see how social policy has been handled in the European integration process (see Chapter 5).
But regional integration is a world-wide phenomenon, and the regions should not be seen just as formal institutions but rather as (re)constructed organizations in the process of global transformation. The regions, therefore, should be seen as ‘dynamic in their development and open to change and adaptation’ (Farrell 2005: 8).
In Latin America, for instance, the idea of Latin American unity achieved by regional economic integration has been on the agenda since the end of the Second World War. Prominent organizations in the region are MERCOSUR and the Andean Community, next to other forms of regional integration. MERCOSUR can be considered as a ‘network regionalization’ scheme, where regional identity is a response to globalization, and relies primarily on non-institutionalized or intergovernmental working methods (Warleigh-Lack 2008). The Asunción Treaty establishing MERCOSUR in 1991 does not provide for a special cluster of integration-related social issues. In 2004, however, the issue of the institutionalization of the social dimension began to form part of the agenda, with proposals and actions in this connection. This resulted in the creation in 2000 of the Social MERCOSUR, which consists of ministers and authorities in charge of the social development of MERCOSUR. The social dimension of MERCOSUR underlines the importance of an integration process that has real implications for human and social development (SELA 2008). In contrast with MERCOSUR, the social dimension of integration was part of the Andean Community (CAN) from its conception in 1969. The whole Andean integration process involved social and labour issues, followed by health-related ones. CAN has also started to deal with border problems and education-related issues, and in 2003 and 2004 the Andean Community approved its first decisions regarding its social development plan (SELA 2008) (see Chapter 6).
In Asia and the Pacific, the most notable examples of regional integration are ASEAN and APEC. According to Warleigh-Lack (2008), ASEAN, like MERCOSUR, is a network regionalization process. With its ASEAN Vision 2020 (ASEAN Leaders 1997), ASEAN leaders vowed to establish a community of caring societies with a common regional identity. In October 2003, they returned to Bali to update the original Bali Concord that laid the foundation for their cooperation. The declaration ASEAN Concord II (Bali Concord II) provided for the establishment of an ASEAN community with three pillars, the ASEAN Security Community (ASC), the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) and the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC). APEC is basically a forum to facilitate trade and investment. Labour issues in APEC have been mostly limited to human resources, productivity, worker training and education issues. A Human Resources Development Working Group (HRDWG), established in 1990, aims at facilitating recognition of qualifications between the participating members. It also fosters links and strengthens collaborative initiatives between the members by organizing regular meetings of education ministers. One major outcome in the field of professional recognition so far has been the APEC Engineers Register (see Chapters 7 and 9).
In the African continent regional integration schemes are taking place at both continental and sub-continental levels. The main drivers of continental integration are the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and the Organization of African Unity (OAU), now known as the African Union (AU). The second wave of African regionalization started in the 1980s and led to the creation of a patchwork of overlapping sub-continental organizations, such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The ECOWAS Treaty provided for a Social and Cultural Affairs Commission designed to ‘provide a forum for consultation generally on social and cultural matters affecting the member states’ (Art. 49). The AU is the umbrella organization for all African regional arrangements.5 It was designed as an intergovernmental organization and was established in 2002 to promote the unity and solidarity of African states, to spur economic development, and to promote international cooperation (see Chapter 8).
On a world scale the picture of regionalization is thus complex. There exist many regional organizations, and quite a lot of them overlap with other regional integration schemes (i.e. the overlapping membership in the case of Regional Economic Communities (RECs) in Africa). Most of the existing schemes, however, are little more than ‘paper tigers’: they have weak structures and powers, and all too often there is a gap between the integration discourses and the actual practices. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify differences in the nature of the ongoing integration processes.

Varieties of regional integration

Regional integration is a complex process of interactions between a group of (mostly) neighbouring countries that can be driven by state interventions or by interactions between citizens. As a merely European endeavour after the Second World War, regional integration has its origins in a political preoccupation to bring peace and security to Europe, based upon a common economic policy. Since then the idea has not only spread around the globe but it has also developed...

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