Rainer Baumann/Klaus Dingwerth 2015: Global Governance vs Empire: Why World Order Moves towards...

A

UTHOR COPY

Global governance vs empire: Why world ordermoves towards heterarchy and hierarchyRainer Baumanna and Klaus DingwerthbaUniversity of Duisburg-Essen, Centre for Global Cooperation Research/Käte Hamburger-Kolleg,Schifferstr. 196, D-47059, Schifferstr, 47059 Duisburg.bUniversität St. Gallen, School of Economics and Political Science (SEPS), Department of PoliticalScience, Rosenbergstr. 51, CH-9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland.

Current debates in International Relations (IR) entail two different claims regarding theglobal structures evolving in the post-Cold War world. Some suggest that the scope of theUS power amounts to lasting American hegemony or even to a US empire; others speakof global governance in light of waning capacities of single states to tackle internationalproblems or the growing salience of non-state actors. In this article, we discuss these twobodies of literature in conjunction. We argue that the global governance literature and theempire literature use different lenses to observe the same object, that is, world politicsafter the Cold War, and that they both address the question of power and authority in IR.The global governance literature identifies a diffusion of power and authority in worldpolitics and thus a move from anarchy to heterarchy. The empire literature, in contrast,identifies a concentration of power and authority in the hands of the United States andthus a move from anarchy to hierarchy. We discuss different attempts to redress thisseeming contradiction and show that there is much ground to believe that world politics isin fact characterised by both a concentration and a dispersion of power and authority.What we may see is neither global governance nor empire alone, but rather movestowards heterarchy and hierarchy at the same time.Journal of International Relations and Development (2015) 18, 104–128.doi:10.1057/jird.2014.6; published online 11 July 2014

Keywords: empire; global governance; heterarchy; hierarchy; world order

Introduction

The most influential strands of thinking in International Relations (IR)1 rest on theidea that international politics is anarchic. Void of a world government or any otherkind of central authority, states act in an environment with little functionaldifferentiation. Different schools of thought in IR come to different conclusionsregarding the consequences of anarchy for world politics. Structural realists seelimited possibilities for lasting cooperation in an anarchic world, where thedistribution of power and the self-help imperative shape the interactions betweenstates (Waltz 1979). For them, there is hardly any pattern of authority in international

Journal of International Relations and Development, 2015, 18, (104–128)© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1408-6980/15

www.palgrave-journals.com/jird/

http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/jird.2014.6

http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jird

A

UTHOR COPY

politics but mainly raw power. Institutionalism posits that, in a world marked byboth anarchy and interdependence, states can overcome many of the obstacles tocooperation in areas of common interest (Keohane 1984). The English Schooldistinguishes system and society and maintains that, even in an anarchic system,patterns of rule among the formally equal states and thus an international society canemerge (Bull 1977). Finally, most constructivists agree on the international systembeing anarchic, although they stress that anarchy is indeterminate, so we have toanalyse what processes of interaction and, as a consequence, what cultures havedeveloped that shape IR (Wendt 1999). Despite these differences, all these schools ofthought agree that the assumption of anarchy as a central structural feature of theinternational system provides a good starting point to think about IR.

Since the end of the Cold War, a growing number of scholars in IR have begun toquestion the assumption that international politics can still be understood adequatelyby assuming it is marked by anarchy.2 There are several strands of literature thatchallenge the anarchy assumption. In this article, we will have a closer look at two ofthem: the literature on evolving patterns of global governance on the one hand andthe literature claiming that the United States have to some extent assumed an imperialposition in world politics on the other hand. Both strands of literature advance claimsabout patterns of power and authority that call the assumption of anarchy intoquestion. Sometimes, these claims are made explicitly, but sometimes they are onlyimplicit in the arguments. In the following, we will work out the key claims presentedby each side in detail. The argument is two-fold.

First, we argue that the global governance literature and the empire literature usedifferent lenses to observe the same object, that is, world politics after the ColdWar, and they both address the question of power and authority in IR. The globalgovernance literature identifies a diffusion of power and authority in world politicsand thus a move from anarchy to heterarchy. The empire literature, in contrast,identifies a concentration of power and authority in the hands of the United States.It may not make a compelling point concerning the establishment of imperialstructures in the global system, but it does stress that we are witnessing a move fromanarchy to hierarchy.

Second, we argue that there is much ground to believe that world politics is in factcharacterised by both a concentration and a dispersion of power and authority. Whilemilitary power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a single actor, authority ina broader sense is increasingly dispersed among a plethora of actors that populate theworld of world politics. In short, it is neither global governance nor empire alone thatwe are witnessing, but rather heterarchy and hierarchy at the same time. If such adescription is roughly correct, understanding the structures of world politics and theevolving global order in the 21st century is only possible if we take this dual movefrom anarchy to heterarchy and hierarchy into account.

In the following sections, we will first take a look at the notion of globalgovernance and sketch out in what way it entails the idea of moving from an

Rainer Baumann and Klaus DingwerthGlobal governance vs empire

105

A

UTHOR COPY

anarchic to a heterarchical structure of IR. Then, we will present the debate on theAmerican empire, making the point that, while there is little ground to support thenotion of an imperial role of the US, the debate still conveys good arguments for thecontrasting notion of moving from an anarchic to a hierarchical structure of IR. Inboth sections, we examine the key concepts used in the two literatures, followed by adiscussion of the central claims about global order that are associated with theseconcepts. In the third step, we assess interactions between the two strands of literatureand develop the argument that global order is indeed marked by simultaneous turnstowards hierarchy and heterarchy.

Global governance: Approaching heterarchy in world politics?

The literature on global governance is broad and includes analytical as well asprogrammatic writings (cf. Dingwerth and Pattberg 2006). For the purpose of thisarticle, only the analytical strand of the global governance literature is of interest. Inexploring this strand, our primary focus is on the writings of post-internationalistscholars such as Yale Ferguson, Richard Mansbach, James Rosenau and, to someextent, also Susan Strange. What unites these theorists is that they all see a movetowards heterarchy in world politics. Stated differently, they either observe or assumethe presence of multiple, and partially overlapping, rule systems that transcend nationalborders and that are not reducible to the interests and power of a single dominant actor.The first assumption sets these scholars apart from those who base their analysis on astrong assumption of anarchy defined as the absence of international rule systems; thesecond distinguishes them from those who assume a hierarchal world order. Since theview that world politics is moving towards heterarchy also features prominently insome more recent contributions to the literature on legal pluralism (Krisch 2010),feminism (Rai 2008), liberal institutionalism (Young 1997; Avant et al. 2010) andprivate authority (Cutler et al. 1999; Leander 2010; Büthe and Mattli 2011), our reviewalso takes these into account.3

Authority as the central analytical concept

In the preface to his Limits of Global Governance, Jim Whitman (2005: ix; see alsoYoung 1997 and Avant et al. 2010) observes that ‘the starting point for nearly allglobal governance perspectives is a recognition that power, authority, and thecapacity to affect significant outcomes is no longer the exclusive preserve of states’.Since authority is one of the central concepts in global governance scholarship, itshould be useful to first clarify how it is used in this literature. Broadly, twoconceptions of authority can be distinguished — one that focuses on the actors’capacity to mobilise, and a second that is more interested in the ways in whichstructures enable or constrain particular sets of activities. However, both conceptions

Journal of International Relations and DevelopmentVolume 18, Number 1, 2015

106

A

UTHOR COPY

are compatible in the sense that they relate authority to a ‘right to prescribe’ (Cutleret al. 1999: 335).

James Rosenau, arguably the author most closely associated with the concept ofglobal governance, has organised his own account of world politics in the 21st

century around the notion of spheres of authority. Contemporary world politics, hemaintains, is characterised by the proliferation of spheres of authority in whichcollective social life is organised and political order is generated and maintained.While spheres of authority are structures, Rosenau defines authority itself as anactor’s capacity to induce voluntary compliance with its norms, rules and procedures(cf. Rosenau 2003: 273–314). Authority thus understood can be founded onhierarchical arrangements (command authority), on the delegated capacity to enforcecompliance (bureaucratic authority), on expertise (epistemic authority) or on moralstanding (moral authority) (Rosenau 2006a: 117; for similar taxonomies see alsoBarnett and Finnemore 2004: chapter 2; Avant et al. 2010).

Rosenau’s account resonates with other approaches in the post-internationalistcamp. Ferguson and Mansbach (2007: 535) summarise post-international theory as atheory that ‘sees the world as inhabited by countless actors of many different typesthat reflect different identities, are differentially engaged in countless issues, and (…)exercise effective authority in particular domains and contexts’. While they speak ofpolities instead of spheres of authority, authority remains a central element of theirinterpretive scheme. It refers to ‘the capacity to mobilise persons and groups forpolitical purposes’ (Ferguson and Mansbach 2007: 536) — and it is this capacity,they argue, that has become more dispersed in world politics.

Susan Strange (1996: 91), whose writings can, in many respects, be read as an earlycontribution to the global governance literature, provides a slightly different notion ofauthority that resonates more closely with her own focus on mapping the different sites ofstructural power in the global political economy. Arguing that ‘non-state authority […]can only be determined on the basis of outcomes’, she holds that ‘authority over social oreconomic relations is exercised whenever the choices open to others are changed’. WhileStrange’s discussion of non-state authority in different issue areas — for example theinsurance or accounting sectors (Strange 1996: 122–34 and 135–46) — might lookfamiliar to post-internationalist scholars, her conception of authority is thus focused lesson the actors’ capacity to mobilise other actors, but rather on structures that constrain orenable particular actors in defining or pursuing their own interests.

In a similar vein, feminist and postmodern scholars have long emphasised thatauthority is by no means ‘the exclusive preserve of states’ and that, in making senseof world politics, informal and transnational power structures are as relevant asformal and international power structures (for instance, Enloe 1989 and Leander2010). A particular focus of both literatures has been on epistemic authority— thatis, on ‘definitions and recognized processes of knowledge production’ (Rai 2008: 35)that prescribe what counts as relevant knowledge in a particular social or politicalcontext.


107

A

UTHOR COPY

Central claims

Many of the writings that use a global governance lens note that world politics hasundergone a profound transformation and that, as a consequence, authority isnowadays widely dispersed in world politics. While the era before World War II issaid to be characterised by a balance of power induced by superpower rivalry,today’s world politics is less easily pigeonholed by reference to a single orderingprinciple. Since James Rosenau’s account is the cornerstone for many discussions ofglobal governance, we use his interpretation of how world politics has changed post-1990 as a starting point for our own discussion, and complement or contrast it withthe perspectives taken by other adherents of the global governance discourse. As weshall see, major differences relate to the details of individual arguments rather than tothe central claims on which the global governance literature rests.

For the purpose of this essay, Rosenau’s core argument consists of three broadclaims. First, there has been a bifurcation of world politics into a ‘state-centric world’and a ‘multi-centric world’. Second, given the nature of the ‘multi-centric world’,powerful states such as the US may be able to dominate the ‘state-centric world’, butnot the ‘multi-centric world’. And finally, bifurcation results in a multiplication ofspheres of authority. We will briefly elaborate on each of these claims.

The bifurcation of world politicsThe first claim refers to Rosenau’s distinction between the state-centric and ‘anequally powerful, though more decentralized’ multi-centric world that operateslargely independently of the former (Rosenau 1990: 11; see also Rosenau 2006b:41–43). While the old, fully state-centric world was hierarchical in terms of theundisputed primacy of states over non-state actors, the bifurcation of world politicsleads to a world where authority is dispersed more equally. States are just one(albeit still important) type of actors among others. Yale Ferguson, for instance,attributes the exercise of authority to polities. States are just one type of polities,next to ‘families, tribes, cities, firms, religious organisations, international govern-mental organisations (IGOs), non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and so on’(Ferguson 2003: 32); and Tim Büthe and Walter Mattli (2011) point to privatetransnational regulators as the ‘new global rulers’. Together with InternationalPolitical Economy (IPE) scholars in the tradition of Susan Strange and institutionalistsin the tradition of Oran Young (1997), they are, however, keen to stress the multiplelinkages between the multi-centric and the state-centric worlds of world politics.

In itself, the demand to take both non-state and informal structures more seriouslyis, of course, not new to IR. It has been expressed very thoughtfully in criticalInternational Political Economy (Strange 1988, 1996) and in feminist scholarship(Enloe 1989), which have both shed light on how structural power operates acrossborders in a variety of often very mundane ways that we tend to overlook in ourdiscussions of ‘world politics’. More recently, poststructuralist approaches, partially


108

A

UTHOR COPY

based on Foucauldian notions of governmentality, have joined the plea and criticisedthe ‘reduction of global governance to its formal processes’ (formalism) in conven-tional IR and global governance studies (Leander 2010: 58–61). While all perspec-tives mentioned here stress the importance of informal and non-state aspects ofglobal governance, a major dividing line is the question of whether a state-centricview is misleading in relation to international politics per se or whether it is onlymisleading in relation to contemporary world politics as a result of fundamentaltransformations that have occurred more recently. While Rosenau seems moreinclined to the latter position, critical IPE scholars, feminists and poststructuralistshave expressed sympathy for the former. For them, world politics was never trulyanarchical, but heterarchical in the sense that a variety of powerful social actors andstructures have always succeeded in establishing rule systems that effectively shapepolitical identities, interests and outcomes.

The structure of the multi-centric worldThe second claim distinguishes the structure of the multi-centric world from thestructure of the state-centric world (cf. Rosenau 1990: 243–96). In relation to the latter,Rosenau refers to Kenneth Waltz’s well-known conceptualisation of structure as thecomposite of an ordering principle (i.e. anarchy), of the functional differentiation of theunits that compose the international system (i.e. states as like units), and of thedistribution of capabilities among the units (i.e. unipolarity, bipolarity or multipolarity).The multi-centric world, he argues, differs in relation to all three dimensions. First,actors in the multi-centric world are facing an autonomy dilemma rather than a securitydilemma; second, ‘the functions of the units vary as widely as the interests of people’(Rosenau 1990: 265); and third, the distribution of capabilities can only be analysed inrelation to specific spheres of activity, issue areas or types of resources that actorsexchange in pursuit of their goals. In conclusion, to the extent that the multi-centricworld is or has become an equally relevant part of world politics as the state-centricworld, concepts like hierarchy and hegemony are misleading. Why? Because at leastthe multi-centric world is radically multi-polar, and effective domination by a singlepowerful actor is virtually precluded.

Again, the largest part of this argument is shared by other global governancescholars. Yet, some conceive of the ‘multi-centric’ word as a more structured arena.For instance, Claire Cutler and colleagues have shown how transnational businessrelations are structured through cartels or other forms of private regimes that are oftenfunctionally equivalent to public international regimes (Cutler et al. 1999); and SusanStrange’s work, while clearly based on the understanding that the transnationalpolitical economy is characterised by a plethora of authority structures, providesevidence that these authority structures are themselves grounded in different forms ofpower structures, including a security structure, a production structure, a financialstructure and a knowledge structure (Strange 1988: chapters 3–6). In each of these


109

A

UTHOR COPY

dimensions, some actors are more involved in the making of social structures, whilemany others get to know them mostly as constraints in relation to their own activitiesand interests.

Diffusion of authorityThe diffusion of authority in world politics results largely from the proliferation of‘spheres of authority’ in one particular world of world politics, namely the multi-centric world. Where this world becomes more relevant — that is, where ‘the state-centric world is no longer predominant’ (Rosenau 1997: 64) — powerful states whomay control the state-centric, but not the multi-centric world, lose some of theirpreviously held powers. While Rosenau never argues that states are becomingirrelevant, he does point to the erosion of state authority that results from theproliferation of such spheres of authority (Rosenau 1997: 44; see also Rosenau 2005).Consequently, world politics can no longer be described as anarchic— this term wouldbe correct only in as much as it points to the absence of central authority or hierarchy.Yet, beyond anarchy and hierarchy, there is a third option, namely heterarchy.According to global governance scholars this third term provides a more adequatefoundation for our attempts to describe and analyse the decentralised authority struc-tures that characterise contemporary world politics (Young 1997).

Beyond IR, this notion of a heterarchical global order has also gained currency inlegal discourse, where authors influenced by the systems theory and administrativelaw have stressed the emergence of transnational legal structures based on contractsbetween transnational actors, on the coordination efforts of transgovernmentalnetworks, or on the legal activities of international bureaucracies (Teubner 1997a, b;Krisch and Kingsbury 2006; Krisch 2010). Gunther Teubner’s notions of a globallaw without a state and global legal pluralism (Teubner 1997a, b) exemplify thisconception of a heterarchical order in which (powerful) transnational actors create awhole range of law-like structures that effectively order their relations with otheractors. To the extent that the number of such ‘partial orders’ increases, thisproliferation implies a proliferation and diffusion of authority in world politics. Froma legal perspective, however, this proliferation is itself ordered (and thus alsoconstrained) by the more fundamental norms associated with legal structures.

Empire: Elements of hierarchy in IR

While much of the literature on empire appears to be research on US foreign policy,a closer look reveals that many authors who claim that the United States havebecome an imperial power speak as much about global structures as they speak aboutthe behaviour of one specific state. Since the end of the Cold War, the debate on theposition of the US in world politics has also been a debate about governancestructures on a global scale. The literature reasoning about the extent to which the US


110

A

UTHOR COPY

have turned into an empire, which we refer to as the ‘empire literature’, is comparableto the global governance literature in that it asks, inter alia, the same questions aboutglobal power structures and governance patterns after the end of the Cold War. Theanswers it offers to these questions, however, are fundamentally different.

In light of the erosion of Soviet or Russian power after 1989/1990, many observerssaw the United States as the sole remaining superpower — a situation that created atleast a ‘unipolar moment’ (Krauthammer 1991) and was reflected in the expectationof a lasting US primacy in the 21st century (Nye 1990). To be sure, structural realistsdisagreed with the identification of the global structure as unipolar, or at least theyexpected that new powers would soon rise to balance the US (Layne 1993; Waltz1993). In the meantime, the continued military primacy of the United States in the1990s lent little empirical support to the latter position.

It was not before the United States responded to the terrorist attacks of 11September, 2001, by launching a ‘war on terror’ that the notion of ‘empire’ began tofigure prominently in the literature on the United States and global structures. Thepertinent literature is rather diverse, ranging from historical comparisons of theUnited States with the Roman Empire to policy papers advocating or criticisingcertain US foreign policy decisions. In the meantime, in light of the continued rise ofChina and other non-Western states, the establishment of the G20 and the economicdifficulties the US (as well as its European partners) have had to sustain since thebeginning of the global financial crisis in 2008, the claim that the US constitute anempire appears to be moot and outdated. It is still worthwhile to review the literatureas it entails claims about elements of hierarchy in world politics that contrast with theheterarchy thesis of the global governance literature — elements that may beunderestimated in that literature.

Power as the central analytical concept

The proponents of the empire thesis usually speak of ‘power’ rather than of‘authority’. Power is mostly understood in Max Weber’s or Robert Dahl’s sense, asthe ability of an actor to make other actors do what they would not have doneotherwise. This ability rests primarily on military and economic capabilities, whichare always to be viewed in relation to the capabilities of other actors. Just like inRosenau’s understanding of spheres of authority, resource dependency is a keyelement in the structuring of IR (cf. Cox 2004: 602).

Power in this sense does not have to be coercive. To some extent, it rests onasymmetric economic interdependence that enables the US to make other statescomply with the US demands without having to threaten or even force these countriesto do so. Lipschutz (2002) even employs the Foucauldian concept of governmentality,which alludes to a discursively based understanding of rule. Here, rule may bemaintained mostly by defining what is to be seen as normal, accompanied bysurveillance and the occasional display of coercive power, whereas its actual exercise


111

A

UTHOR COPY

can remain an exception. An explicit link between authority and power (and empire)is made by David Lake. He defines authority as rightful rule and views it as a special,yet, important form of power that is sometimes overlooked by IR scholars (Lake2008: 282).

‘Authority’ thus puts a greater emphasis on the voluntary compliance of those whoare exposed to it than the notion of ‘power’. Rosenau’s ‘authority’ is non-coercive,whereas ‘power’ as used by the proponents of the empire thesis includes bothcoercive and non-coercive relations, and even authority may comprise a notion ofcoercion in this understanding. For most of the empire literature, more rooted inmainstream IR than the global governance literature,4 there is no bifurcation in worldpolitics and, thus, there is only a state-centric and no multi-centric world. From thisperspective, it makes more sense to speak of power rather than of authority.Nevertheless, both concepts overlap substantially, so we can juxtapose and comparethe claims these two strands of literature make on authority and power in worldpolitics since the end of the Cold War.

Central claims

The starting point for the empire literature is the observation of a shift in thedistribution of power after the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the SovietUnion and the sudden economic problems of Japan greatly weakened both thebiggest military and ideological opponent and the strongest economic competitor ofthe United States. These developments made another American century possible(Cox 2005: 17). In contrast to the expectation of the US decline, which dominatedmuch of the debates in the late 1980s (Kennedy 1987), many authors agree that,after the end of the Cold War, the United States have attained a position ofunrivalled primacy rooted in both military and economic strength (Lipschutz 2002:226; Cox 2004: 602; Walt 2005: 17).5

Also, apparently, this literature views states as still the primary loci of power inworld politics. It pays little attention to non-state actors. Admittedly, Lipschutzstresses that, in the 1990s, order in a globalising world was mainly maintained byself-regulation, in which private actors as well as international institutions played animportant role (Lipschutz 2002: 220–21). He also points out, however, that the Bushadministration, opting for more direct control, was able to change such a system ofgovernance and introduce a form of rule that relied more on the display and use ofmilitary force. Implicit in his argument is the position that the most powerful stateshapes global governance structures more than it is constrained by them. Theexceptionally strong power position of the United States made an imperial turnpossible, but it took the terrorist attacks of September 11 to actually bring about sucha turn (Lipschutz 2002: 223; Cox 2004: 589).

But what constitutes an empire? The terms ‘empire’ and ‘imperial’ are defined andused differently in the literature (cf. Ferguson 2008; Ferguson and Mansbach 2008).


112

A

UTHOR COPY

The main question is whether imperial orders are more extreme forms of unipolar orhegemonic orders or whether they are categorically different from such orders.Alexander Motyl defines empires as ‘structurally centralized political systems withinwhich core states and elites dominate peripheral societies’ (Motyl 1999: 126). Anempire is thus established and it operates according to a structural logic that isdifferent from both the logic of a territorial state and that of a group of formally equalstates. Similarly, Herfried Münkler distinguishes empires from hegemonic structures:hegemony is the dominance of one state within a group of formally equal states,whereas empire dissolves such equality and reduces the weaker states to satellites(Münkler 2005: 16–21). Daniel Nexon and Thomas Wright (2007) develop this ideafurther by distinguishing four ideal types of political organisation, two of which arehegemonic order and imperial order (and the other two are unipolar anarchy andconstitutional order). From their point of view, empires are not characterised onlyby a strong asymmetry between the core power and the peripheral minor powers,but also by a lack of exchange between the different minor powers. The empiregoverns according to the principle of ‘divide and rule’, and there is no opposition tothe asymmetric exchanges between the core and the peripheral units. Due to thelack of political and economic relations between the different peripheral units,balancing against the core power is nearly impossible. The central argument is thusthat an imperial order not only rests on an extremely unequal distribution ofcapabilities in an otherwise anarchic system, but also that the structuring principleof anarchy has largely been replaced by hierarchy. Empire in this understanding is arelational concept with a structural element that goes beyond the mere distribution ofcapabilities.

If we apply this understanding of empire to the case of the United States since theend of the Cold War, we will not find much of an empire. It makes no sense to arguethat, in a globalising world, weaker states and regions would have little exchangebetween each other and would mostly communicate and trade with the United States.It comes as no surprise that those participants in the empire debate who share thismore demanding and more structural understanding of ‘empire’ have usuallydismissed the thesis that the US had adopted an imperial role (Nexon and Wright2007; Ferguson 2008; Nexon 2008).

David Lake proposes to understand empire as an authority relationship ofdominance and subordination that is accepted by both the dominant state and thesubordinate polity. The relationship is very unequal, so that it is better characterisedby hierarchy than by anarchy. Hierarchical relationships among states in theinternational system may exist both in the economic as well as in the security realm.6

Lake suggests that only if both security and economic relations between two politiesdisplay a sufficient level of hierarchy should we speak of an empire (Lake 2008: 282–84). It follows from this position that it makes limited sense to only ask if the UnitedStates are an empire. Some of their relations may be so hierarchical that the use of theterm ‘empire’ is warranted, whereas others may be less hierarchical. Still, Lake finds


113

A

UTHOR COPY

the reach and breadth of both security and economic hierarchies controlled by theUnited States to be the ‘most striking fact about the pattern of authority in the modernworld system’ (Lake 2009: 82).

In sum, for David Lake, the difference between anarchy and hierarchy is adifference in degree, not in kind. Without openly contradicting authors who viewempire as categorically different from non-imperial orders, Lake nevertheless showshow the concept can be understood fruitfully as a more extreme form of an unequalrelationship. At the same time, he concurs with scholars like Daniel Nexon thatempire is a relational concept. It is authority relationships that constitute empire andnot the simple (unequal) distribution of capabilities.

Since empire is a relational and to some extent structural concept, it is important todistinguish imperial orders (or the degree to which global order has imperial features)from imperial policies a single state like the United States may pursue. None of theauthors reviewed here embraces structural determinism. The US quest for empire wasnot inevitable from this perspective. It has been made possible by the concentrationof power in the hands of the United States after the end of the Cold War. At first,though, in the Clinton era, the United States continued their grand strategy thatincluded the building and maintenance of international institutions and sought toadvance economic globalisation without too much overt use of coercion. While therewas a growing tendency towards unilateralism already in the 1990s, the imperial turnonly materialised fully after the terrorist attacks of September 11, and may havewaned during the second Bush administration or with the change from Bush toObama. Thus, imperial foreign policy should not be conflated with empire as arelational and structural feature of world politics.

Nevertheless, if the United States have in fact made use of their unrivalled powerto organise more of its relationships in a more imperial fashion, this would obviouslyhave repercussions on a structural level, too. The literature reviewed here is not in fullaccordance as to how structural the US imperial turn has become and how sustainableit is likely to be. Two lines of thought can be distinguished. The first group consists ofmoderate realists who have identified (and criticised) the US imperial ambitions.These authors are rather sceptical that such policies could be sustained in the longrun, since structural impediments and counter-balancing efforts by other states wouldprevent a lasting change of global structures towards hierarchy (Ikenberry 2002; seealso Walt 2005). John Ikenberry urges the US to accommodate rather than antagoniseChina, so that China will join rather than seek to overthrow the Western liberal order(Ikenberry 2008). From this perspective, it is not likely that there will be atransformation of world politics. The challenge to the US empire will come fromthe inter-state system with China as the most likely challenger.

The second group agrees that viewing the present-day United States as an empireis an unwarranted oversimplification, but they see elements of hierarchical rulepenetrating international politics. David Lake, for instance, has long since called forpaying greater attention to hierarchical relationships. Even if the US today are neither


114

A

UTHOR COPY

‘an empire’ in general nor an informal empire in some of their relations with otherstates, they still shape world politics in a way towards more hierarchy at least in somerespects (Lake 2009). Lake considers hierarchy not only to be a feature of state-to-state relations, such as the relationship between the US and the Caribbean states, butalso to pertain to supranational organisations like the World Trade Organisation(WTO) vis-à-vis states and even to private actors such as the rating agencies’hierarchical relationship with states and other borrowers (Lake 2010). Daniel Nexonquestions openly the usefulness of the states-under-anarchy proposition. He speaksof the ‘micropolitics of international hierarchy’ (Nexon 2008: 305–07), not only withregard to the United States, but also with regard to some of the relationshipsinvolving states like Russia and China.

In consequence, from the perspective of the literature reviewed here, world politicshas become more complex, and the anarchy assumption has become less useful toexplain and understand it. In this respect, the literature is in accordance with theglobal governance literature. The important difference, however, is that thesescholars identify, at least in some respects, a concentration and not a diffusion ofauthority. Consequently, world politics is marked by a move from anarchy tohierarchy rather than by a move from anarchy to heterarchy.

The interplay of hierarchy and heterarchy

Defying both the idea of a simple test of two competing hypotheses and the notion ofa fundamental incommensurability of both research programmes informing the twoclaims, we distinguish, in this section, between four possibilities to relate the twointerpretations of the global governance and empire debates to one another. The firstone is the claim that anarchy was initially replaced by hierarchy, but has now givenway to heterarchy (‘first empire, then global governance’).7 Second, we discuss theview that different logics are at work in different issue areas (‘empire in some areas,global governance in others’). Third, we evaluate the claim that global governanceand empire can exist simultaneously since they relate to different dimensions orelements of world politics (‘empire in relation to some elements of world order,global governance in relation to others’). And finally, we discuss a fourth view,which holds that, whereas authority has become more dispersed in world politics,power has been concentrated in the hands of the United States as the single mostpowerful actor in world politics (‘diffusion of authority, concentration of power’).For each of these possibilities, we discuss, though at a fairly generic level, what kindsof empirical observations tend to support or challenge a given interpretation of theinterplay between hierarchy and heterarchy after the Cold War. Since our empiricalarguments remain selective and since examples may be found for or against manythings, such an approach can hardly settle the issue. Nevertheless, it illustrates thatsome attempts to engage with insights from both bodies of literature may be more


115

A

UTHOR COPY

promising than others. Finally, while discussing the different interpretations, we alsosketch out avenues that would help us come to more thorough empirical assessments.

Sequential order: first empire, then global governance

The idea that anarchy had initially given way to hierarchy, which was then replaced bya more heterarchical order, draws only little support in the literature. However, JosephNye’s discussion of the ‘hub-and-spokes’ argument, presented in his depiction of theUS as a dependent colossus, comes close to it. In short, Nye argues that the US powerstems from the fact that the United States constitute a centre in many networks of worldpolitics. At the same time, he sees a range of factors that would make it ‘a mistake toenvisage contemporary networks of globalism simply as the hub and spokes of anAmerican empire that creates dependency for smaller countries’ (Nye 2002: 74). First,the US dominance may be a more accurate descriptor for some dimensions ofglobalisation, but not for others. For instance, a hub-and-spokes metaphor is mislead-ing for trade relations in which Japan and Europe constitute ‘significant alternativenodes in the network’ (Nye 2002: 75). In addition, the metaphor fails to take account ofthe ‘two-way vulnerability’ — in other words, of the fact that the US cannot merelymake decisions for others, but are also affected by the decisions of other actors. Andfinally, the hub-and-spokes image seems inaccurate in light of the interaction betweenthe alleged spokes, which interact directly with each other, thereby reducing the powerof the central state (Nye 2002: 75).

The latter aspect, in particular, makes it plausible to conclude that the prospects ofimperial governance have changed as a result of the emergence of powerfuleconomies in previously semi-peripheral areas (e.g. the BRIC countries) and thespread of technological innovations associated with the internet. In short, centralcontrol may have been viable in the years directly following the end of the Cold War,but has since then been rendered ever more difficult as patterns of transnationaleconomic and social interaction have changed. ‘Over the longer term’, Nye thusmaintains, ‘we can expect globalization itself to spread technological and economiccapabilities and thus reduce the extent of US dominance’ (Nye 2002: 76).

In terms of empirical evidence, the ‘new interventionism’ of the 1990s or theestablishment of the WTO in the mid-1990s might be read as indications of imperialpolitics. Since the US-led interventions have met with stronger opposition in morerecent years and since negotiations on further trade liberalisation are effectively onhalt in the current Doha Round, this could— at least in relation to a formalist accountof world politics — point to a set-back for imperial politics. At the same time, it isplausible to assume that political stalemate in previously imperial forums — forinstance, trade negotiations within the WTO — leads those with an interest inregulation, among them most notably a range of private actors, to create their ownformal or informal regulatory schemes. In that sense, the proliferation of multiplespheres of authority may be read, at least in part, as a consequence of the end of


116

A

UTHOR COPY

empire. In the short period after the end of the Cold War, transnational actors saw noneed to regulate because the US organised regulation for them; since the end ofempire, they have to adopt the burden of ‘regulating for the rest of us’ (Lipschutz andFogel 2002).

At the same time, it is difficult to see what exactly has led hierarchy to give way toheterarchy. Is it the emergence and growth of large new economies such as India orChina— and would we not then simply be going back to multipolarity as we used toknow it (rather than to global governance as the diffusion of authority)? Or is‘globalisation’ the driving force — and if so, which aspect of globalisation preciselymade the US dominance so much less usable? Or is it the revolution in communica-tion technologies that has put an end to empire — and if so, how exactly has itlessened the capacity of powerful states to exercise effectively their poweradvantages over other states and non-state actors? In addition to verifying the generalpattern suggested by the model of a sequential order — which, in this case, wouldrequire a more systematic measurement of power and authority relations in at leastone issue area over time — these are crucial questions for those who propose asequential order; as long as convincing answers are missing, the proposition does notseem entirely persuasive.

Sectoral order: empire in some areas, global governance in others

That some issue areas — most notably those related to military relations — may bedescribed in terms of imperial interaction is partially conceded by the adherents of theglobal governance discourse (for instance, Rosenau 1997: 65); and it also resonateswith Joseph Nye’s arguments discussed above. The basic argument holds that there isno unified area of social activity that could be summarised under the heading of‘world politics’. Instead, there are different transnational issue areas that aregoverned according to different logics. Empire rules where the US can effectivelyexercise their (military) power; global governance is a more appropriate descriptor inthose areas in which the US have to share regulatory space with other states andwhere, moreover, the totality of states share regulatory space with a plethora oftransnational actors.

In practice, this would amount to saying that, for example, the politics ofinternational security is governed hierarchically while the internet is governedheterarchically. This proposition bears some intuitive plausibility, and it certainlyalso draws support in the literature, where internet regulation (or lex informatica) isfrequently invoked as one of the primary areas of private transnational governance(cf. Holitscher 1999; Baird 2002; Leib 2002; Bendrath et al. 2008). As a whole,however, the proposition seems to downplay both the heterarchical dimension ofsecurity governance and the hierarchical aspects of internet governance.

In relation to security, the threat of Islamic terrorism evidently emanates not fromthe state-centric world but from the multi-centric world (Crenshaw and Cusimano


117

A

UTHOR COPY

Love 2007). Therefore, the underlying conflict cannot be grasped from a state-centricview. Moreover, the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan show that the US have apreponderance of coercive power, but only limited authority. Looking at the invasionof Iraq, we see a strong anti-war movement, which challenged severely the legalityand legitimacy of the invasion and hence the authority of the US. According to theestimates, between 3 January and 12 April, 2003, about 36 million people took partin worldwide protests against the Iraq war (Callinicos 2005), leading some to speakof ‘two superpowers: the United States and the world public opinion’ (Tyler 2003).

In relation to Afghanistan, the US Army’s decision to set-up a so-called HumanTerrain System (HTS) seems to acknowledge the need to enhance its understandingof and authority over local communities. The mission of the HTS is to ‘recruit, train,deploy, and support an embedded operationally focused socio-cultural capability(…) in order to enable operational decision-making, enhance operational effective-ness, and preserve and share socio-cultural institutional knowledge’.8 While the HTSis a US Army-led initiative and might thus be read as an effort to adapt imperialpolicies to a new political context, its focus on the cultural dimension of war points tothe intricacies— some would argue to the virtual impossibility — of such a task. Asthe right to prescribe or rule, authority is, in many ways, a cognitive concept, and theextent to which a foreign army becomes accepted by local communities — anelement that some authors associate with the notion of empire — can be controlledonly partially by a single state, let alone its army. Beyond this particular example,some have observed that ‘states progressively collaborate with other state andnonstate actors in providing national and international security’ (Krahmann 2005:538) and that security-relevant non-state actors— among them a growing ‘peace andstability industry’ — are themselves adopting an active role in defining securitythreats as well as reasonable strategies to answer such threats (Leander 2010). In thatsense, both the deep structures and the actual practices of security governance appearmuch more heterarchical than an empire perspective would make us believe.

While it is thus plausible to assume that security governance has an importantheterarchical dimension, it is equally evident that the regulation of the internetincludes meaningful hierarchical elements. This can, first of all, be noticed inrelation to the historical role of the US in developing the internet and its governance,and to the continued US control over the technical infrastructure of the internet(Goldsmith and Wu 2006). A narrative that sees internet regulation as a primaryexample of a move towards global governance thus overlooks the fact that the USgovernment was not only pivotal in developing the internet, but that it has alsosecured, through a number of legal contracts, effective control over the ‘private’organisations in charge of its administration. The result is, as empire scholars mightargue, an essentially US-driven regime for worldwide internet governance that somehave poignantly termed ‘global self-regulation in the context of American adminis-trative law’ (Leib 2002: 262, our translation). Moreover, the US have successfullyobstructed all moves towards a more intergovernmental regulation of the internet,


118

A

UTHOR COPY

thereby indicating that the current world information order is preferable in terms ofUS interests.

In short, both security as the poster-child example of the empire literature andinternet regulation as a favourite example used in the global governance literature,therefore, seem to include elements of hierarchy and heterarchy. To some extent, thismay seem like stating the obvious, namely that if one looks close enough, one willalways find that a given set of social relations is neither purely anarchical, nor purelyhierarchical nor purely heterarchical. Yet, the patterns of power and authorityrelations in both areas do not seem to lend themselves very well to the role ofopposing poles of a continuum reaching from empire to global governance. What wewould need, to be able to substantiate the claim regarding sectoral order, is theobservation that dominance of a single powerful actor has been established in relationto power and authority in some areas, while other issue areas are characterised by agrowing dispersion of power and authority. If the examples discussed above aredescribed correctly as the most likely candidates for the empire and globalgovernance perspectives, our discussion gives us some reason to believe that, at thevery least, the sectoral claim alone will be insufficient to account for the pattern ofworld political change after 1990.

Global governance as empire

Next, some contributions identify major difference not so much in terms of issueareas, but rather in relation to the various elements that compose global political orderin a given issue area. Depending on how they weigh these different elements, theyeither conclude that global governance is empire, that global governance and empireis a false dichotomy, or that hierarchy and heterarchy exist in parallel. We deal withthe first two views in this section and the last in the following section.

The first view is exemplified in the writings of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri(2000). With their book simply called Empire, it would appear to be simply anothercontribution to the literature on global hierarchy. Yet, in fact, Hardt and Negri do notascribe imperial power to a single state like the United States. While they are moreexplicit in their writings on what ‘empire’ is not rather than on what it is, it isprobably fair to say that their understanding is that global governance by some sort ofnetwork of state and non-state actors from the Global North constitutes ‘empire’. Theauthors claim that ‘sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series ofnational and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule’ and refer to‘this new global form of sovereignty’ as empire (Hardt and Negri 2000: xii).Accordingly, Frank Ninkovich (2000: 488) observes that ‘the theme of Empire isnot imperialism, but an “imperial postmodernity” (globalization)’. This understand-ing of global governance, then, is also completely different from that of authors likeRosenau in that global governance does not make empire illusionary; rather, in somesense, global governance is empire. On their account, the sites of authority may have


119

A

UTHOR COPY

become more dispersed, but at the same time the different sites have come to followa common underlying logic. As a result, world order(s) may look more heterarchical,but has in fact become organised more hierarchically, at least in the sense of aclear hierarchy of values or norms that underpin most, if not all, efforts to govern theglobe.

Others hold that global governance vs empire is a false dichotomy in as much asinternational norms and rules have indeed gained strength vis-à-vis domestic normsand rules, but they do not apply to all states in the same manner. In the end, theseauthors see an internationalisation of authority that leads to a ‘legally stratified multi-level system’ (Zürn 2007: 681). This conception evidently combines insights fromboth the global governance and the empire strands of literature. On the one hand, itacknowledges the institutionalisation and legalisation of world politics, and hence theemergence of new spheres of authority beyond the state, which would be broadly inline with the global governance perspective. On the other hand, it acknowledges thehighly unequal power of those who create and are governed by internationalisedauthority and the particular role of the US power as it is evident in the internationalnuclear order, in international negotiations to the International Criminal Court, or inthe decision-making rules of the UN Security Council, the World Bank or theInternational Monetary Fund (IMF) (Zürn 2007: 694; see also Lake 2010).

Both arguments have their merits in acknowledging the possibility to think about aparallel existence of hierarchy and heterarchy. In the first case, the ‘single logic ofrule’ constitutes the hierarchical element while sites of authority may be considered— although, maybe, only at first sight — as the heterarchical element. A keydifficulty, however, lies in the fuzziness of key concepts such as ‘empire’ and‘multitude’. Given the broad, but vague conceptualisation of empire, we are leftwondering how we might demonstrate empirically the existence of the ‘single logicof rule’ that unites the plethora of authority spheres and, in so doing, defines their‘empire’.9 In the end, the approach thus seems to fail in taking the real-worldstructures of transboundary governance seriously and, thereby, it greatly simplifies— although in a complex terminology — the power and authority relations in thecontemporary global order. In the second case, the argument is grounded moresolidly in empirical evidence. Yet, empire vs global governance can only be a falsedichotomy because the two terms do not relate to a common dimension. Thus, Zürndoes not foreground the relation between hierarchy and heterarchy but rather betweena hierarchy of norms and rules on the one hand and a hierarchy of actors on the other.In relation to the former, he maintains that international norms have moved up theladder in the hierarchy of norms, often superseding or heavily influencing theirdomestic counterparts. In relation to the latter, he claims that the US have climbed up,far beyond all other states, on the ladder that constitutes the hierarchy of rule-makers.Taken together, Zürn’s observations provide an ambivalent answer to the empirequestion, which might be captured in the notion of an institutionally constrainedempire. Yet, unless one takes the omission of the multi-centric world to be a


120

A

UTHOR COPY

statement about the latter’s empirical irrelevance, they do not resolve the tensionbetween the two perspectives at the heart of this article.10 In addition, both readingsconceive of power and authority as largely moving in parallel and, therefore, theyneglect a key difference in the ways the empire and global governance strands ofliterature frame their central claims. This distinguishes them from the fourth and finalreading of the interplay between empire and global governance.

Concentration of power, diffusion of authority

Given that the empire literature tends to talk about ‘power’ while the globalgovernance literature prefers to speak of ‘authority’, might it not be that the formerhas become concentrated in the hands of a single actor while the latter has become sodispersed that it now resides in ‘literally millions’ of spheres of authority? Thisreading seems to have some support in contributions to the literature that take bothperspectives seriously, most notably in Andrew Hurrell’s monograph On GlobalOrder. His chapter on ‘complex governance beyond the state’ (Hurrell 2007:95–117) provides a fairly standard narrative of global governance as the sum ofinter-state governance, civil society governance and market governance. When itcomes to discussing the role of power in ‘complex governance beyond the state’,Hurrell’s position is only thinly elaborated. Yet, his conception leaves some room forhierarchy when he clarifies that ‘the extent of the relevant expertise and resourcespossessed by the United States increases the likelihood that its norms, values,and preferences will win out’ (ibid, 112). In a subsequent chapter on empire (ibid,262–86), Hurrell elaborates that the position of the US is unprecedented in terms ofmilitary and economic power, but that it is often incapable of using its overwhelmingpower as a result of changes in the structures or foundations of the internationalsystem. In line with some of the empire literature, Hurrell (ibid., 269) thus acknowl-edges the role of the US power in contemporary world politics, but sees it asoperating within rather than outside the boundaries of international institutions.

Seeking a convincing interpretation of this observation, Hurrell (ibid.) distin-guishes between coercive power on the one hand and authority on the other. Incontrast to the US, other actors in world politics may thus not have the capacity tocoerce other actors to follow a particular course of action, but they may have theauthority to devise norms and rules that guide other actors’ behaviour, or they may beable to offer conditionally the resources required by other actors and, hence, to shapethe latters’ conduct. In turn, the coercive power of the US faces limitations where itsauthority is questioned and where the norms of international society demand a courseof action that differs from the US foreign policy preferences (ibid., 263). In short,world politics can be described as hierarchical in terms of power, but heterarchical interms of the authority that enables or constrains the use of power.

How plausible is this reading? If we understand authority as rightful or legitimaterule, it is evidently related, but not identical, to power — at the very least because


121

A

UTHOR COPY

power implies that obedience may also be generated in the absence of ‘rightful rule’,namely through coercion. Authority is thus often treated as a specific, but not as theunique source of power. Why then would authority have become more dispersed as(coercive) power has become concentrated in the hands of the US? We can imagineseveral dynamics here. Hegemony might simply spur resistance and, therefore, moreor less automatically undermine the authority of systems of rule based on thesuperiority of one particular actor; or the US may have used their economic andmilitary superiority excessively or unwisely, notably in their response to 9/11, andthus have lost much of their authority in the global order. Yet, even beyond unwiseuse — and much in line with the global governance literature — the skill revolutionand the revolution in communications technology may have made it easier forindividuals across the globe to organise in the effort to challenge the existingauthority and/or to build up new spheres of authority that regulate some shares oftheir transboundary interactions. Therefore, the more powerful and visible a specificsite of power is, the more difficult it might have become for it to uphold its authorityas the rightful regulator of global affairs. Examples would include the WTO or theIMF, which see their authority publicly challenged by coalitions of Southerngovernments, environmental and social activists and protectionist trade unions, butalso the US when they are perceived as an ‘imperial’ actor by many and whoseauthority becomes challenged on precisely this ground. The rise of democratic normsas the gold standard in justifying political rule can be thought of as contributingfurther to a development in which the concentration of power in the hands of a singleactor, who is seen to regulate ‘for the rest of us’, would lead almost automatically toits authority as a rightful ruler being undermined (see also Zürn et al. 2012).

Again, these short remarks only hint at the way in which an argument along thelines of this fourth reading would need to unfold, but they hardly amount to aplausibility probe for such an argument. To test the proposition of a paralleldevelopment of a concentration of power and a diffusion of authority morethoroughly, we would need to take a longer-term perspective. Have power andauthority of the leading state(s) in the state system normally been in conjunction,marking the current situation of the US as a new and unprecedented one? Or is thisgap between military might and social and political authority that we are witnessingat the moment quite normal in world politics? This, of course, would necessitate anempirical study that would go far beyond the scope of this article.

From anarchy to hierarchy and heterarchy: Conclusions

The strands of literature on global governance and empire seek to interpret the samephenomenon, namely changes in the world political order after the Cold War. Yet, indoing so, they come to fundamentally different conclusions. If we assume that bothbodies of literature have something interesting to say about the contemporary world


122

A

UTHOR COPY

order, how might we read their seemingly contradictory claims in conjunction? Is theidea of a sequential ordering, in which a post-1990 empire has gradually given way toglobal governance (or the other way around), plausible? Not entirely, since, at thevery least, this reading leaves us wondering what may have given rise to the shiftfrom empire to global governance. Does a sectoral ordering, in which some issueareas are governed hierarchically and others heterarchically, sound more persuasive?Hardly so, since even a quick glance at the most-likely cases for each categorysuggests that hierarchy and heterarchy exist in parallel. What remains is a thirdpossibility according to which some elements of world order are characterised by aconcentration of power and/or authority while others move in the opposite way —

and depending on how one’s conception of order weighs these elements, one will endup seeing more of an empire or more global governance-like structures.

From our perspective, the idea that derives most directly from the conceptualfoundations of the two bodies of literature seems most persuasive in this regard. Inthis reading, it is (coercive) power that has become concentrated in the hands of asingle actor, namely the US. In contrast, authority— the central concept of the globalgovernance literature — has become so dispersed that some now see it as residing in‘literally millions’ of spheres of authority. Theoretically, we can think of severalways in which these seemingly opposing developments are linked to each other. Thedirect link between the concentration of economic and military power in the hands ofone actor and the public challenge of the authority of such power by those subjectedto it is a plausible candidate among them. In short, we therefore put forth twoarguments: first, that world politics is characterised by moves towards hierarchy andheterarchy at the same time; and second, that this is a contradiction only at first sight.

So what are we to make of all this? The acknowledgement that we are witnessingsimultaneous shifts from anarchy to both hierarchy and heterarchy has implicationsfor our disciplinary research agenda. First, it points to the need for better and moresystematic mapping of the relative weights of anarchy, heterarchy and hierarchy indifferent areas of world politics (see also Lake 2010: 608–09). Doing so will, first ofall, require a more precise terminology to clarify what we mean by hierarchy andheterarchy and how we can recognise both phenomena when we see them. Here, thefuzziness of ‘empire’ and ‘global governance’ often precludes a more thoroughanalysis. Second, the focus on simultaneous shifts from anarchy to hierarchy andheterarchy points to the need to account for the variation that we will most likely findas a result of this mapping exercise. What explains variation across time and issues?And to what extent is the distinction between power and authority useful in thisregard? Finally, acknowledging the co-existence of hierarchy and heterarchy as acore element of contemporary world politics has also practical and normativeimplications inasmuch as most of our disciplinary thinking and the policy advicethat is frequently based on such thinking are founded on the notion of an anarchicworld of world politics alone. Practically, US foreign policy would wish to maxi-mise power and authority rather than only one of them. Likewise, the opponents


123

A

UTHOR COPY

to the US hegemony would wish to minimise public perception of the US hegemonyas ‘rightful’ to limit the uses to which the US military and economic power may beput. Therefore, for both groups, gaining a better understanding of the dynamics ofpower — authority relations in global order is of imminent necessity. On a largerscale, understanding the normative and analytical implications of a more complexworld of world politics, in which anarchy, hierarchy and heterarchy intersect, istherefore not exclusively an intellectually rewarding task. It is also a necessary task ifwe wish to contribute to the development of adequate practical knowledge that isneeded to solve the existing policy problems.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Kilian Beutel, Margot Eichinger, Annegret Kunde and Klaas Schüller for theirresearch assistance. For comments on earlier versions, we are grateful to Jörg Friedrichs, RodneyBruce Hall, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Jan Rolenc, the editors of the Journal of International Relationsand Development, as well as two anonymous reviewers. Some of the work that went into this articlewas also undertaken as a part of the research project ‘Changing Norms of Global Governance’ forwhich funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; grant no. DI1417/2–1) is gratefullyacknowledged.

Notes

1 Following common usage, we will refer to the academic discipline of IR by using capitalised‘International Relations’, whereas ‘international relations’ refers to its object of study.

2 This is neither to claim that the anarchy assumption was never called into question before nor that allearlier proponents of the anarchy assumption have become sceptics. IR scholars working in theMarxist tradition have always pointed to patterns of rule in world politics, and the feminists’ critiqueof mainstream IR’s neglect of the structuring and ruling effects of gender can also be seen as indisagreement with the anarchy assumption. In addition, the anarchy assumption was occasionallycriticised even from within the mainstream (Milner 1993). On the other hand, theorists like KennethWaltz (1999) continue to hold that world politics can be described and understood adequately on thebasis of the anarchy assumption.

3 We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for pointing out some of these additional contributions.And while our list does not claim to be exhaustive, we do seek to provide a more or less representativesketch of those contributions that share James Rosenau’s assumption that world politics ischaracterised by a proliferation of ‘spheres of authority’. In contrast, we exclude perspectives thatconceptualise global governance as ‘a way of organising international politics in a more inclusive andconsensual manner’ (Barnett and Duvall 2005: 5) or that ‘routinely [view] international organisationsas the epicentre of global governance’ (ibid., 28).

4 Lipschutz (2002) may be one of the few exceptions here.5 A different view is offered by the English School proponent Ian Clark, who opines that the UShegemony rests on the acceptance of the leading role of the US by others (Clark 2011: 24). WhileClark does not use the concept of authority, his understanding of hegemony is in line with the globalgovernance literature’s insistence on authority rather than power as the central concept.

6 Lake stresses that international relations can be disaggregated in various ways, but that the distinctionof the issue areas of security and economics is most common (Lake 2008: 283).


124

A

UTHOR COPY

7 The reverse proposition (‘first global governance, then empire’) would be a logical corollary; yet, wedid not find any evidence in support of this position in any of the literatures discussed in thiscontribution.

8 See http://humanterrainsystem.army.mil/Default.aspx (last access 25 May, 2014); the HTS is alsocovered in the award-winning documentary Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic by James DerDerian, David Udris and Michael Udris; see http://humanterrainmovie.com/ (last access 20November, 2010).

9 See, for instance, the critique from Charles Tilly (2002: 224), who holds that the authors ‘orbit so farfrom the concrete realities of contemporary change that their readers see little but clouds, hazy seasand nothingness beyond’.

10 That Zürn has a different conception of global governance in mind is also exemplified in his statementthat both the empire literature and the global governance literature ‘consider the strengthening of non-state actors only at their margins’ (Zürn 2007: 682–83, our translation).

References

Avant, Deborah A., Martha Finnemore and Susan K. Sell, eds (2010) Who Governs the Globe?Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Baird, Zoe (2002) ‘Global Internet Governance: Engaging Government, Business and Nonprofits’, ForeignAffairs 81(6): 15–20.

Barnett, Michael and Martha Finnemore (2004) Rules for the World: International Organizations in WorldPolitics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Barnett, Michael and Raymond Duvall, eds (2005) ‘Power in Global Governance’, in Power and GlobalGovernance, 1–32, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bendrath, Ralf, Jeanette Hofmann, Volker Leib, Peter Mayer and Michael Zürn (2008) ‘Namensräume,Datenschutz und elektronischer Handel: Die Suche nach Regeln für das Internet’, in AchimHurrelmann, Stephan Leibfried, Kerstin Martens and Peter Mayer, eds, Zerfasert der Nationalstaat?Die Internationalisierung politischer Verantwortung, 209–39, Frankfurt and New York: Campus.

Bull, Hedley (1977) The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, New York: ColumbiaUniversity.

Büthe, Tim and Walter Mattli (2011) The New Global Rulers: The Privatization of Regulation in the WorldEconomy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Callinicos, Alex (2005) ‘Anti-war Protests Do Make a Difference’, Socialist Worker Online 1943:available at http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=6067 (last accessed 15 December,2008).

Clark, Ian (2011) Hegemony in International Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Cox, Michael (2004) ‘Empire, Imperialism and the Bush Doctrine’, Review of International Studies 30(4):

585–608.Cox, Michael (2005) ‘Empire by Denial: The Strange Case of the United States’, International Affairs

81(1): 15–30.Crenshaw, Martha and Maryann Cusimano Love (2007) ‘Networked Terror’, in Maryann Cusimano Love,

ed., Beyond Sovereignty: Issues for a Global Agenda, 3rd edn. 114–35, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.Cutler, Claire A., Virginia Haufler and Tony Porter, eds (1999) ‘The Contours and Significance of Private

Authority in International Affairs’, in Private Authority and International Affairs, 333–76, Albany, NY:SUNY Press.

Dingwerth, Klaus and Philipp Pattberg (2006) ‘Global Governance as a Perspective on World Politics’,Global Governance 12(2): 185–203.

Enloe, Cynthia (1989) Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics,London: Pandora Press.


125

http://humanterrainsystem.army.mil/Default.aspx

http://humanterrainmovie.com/

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=6067

A

UTHOR COPY

Ferguson, Yale H. (2003) ‘Illusions of Superpower’, Asian Journal of Political Science 11(2): 21–36.Ferguson, Yale H. (2008) ‘Approaches to Defining “Empire” and Characterizing United States Influence in

the Contemporary World’, International Studies Perspectives 9(3): 272–80.Ferguson, Yale H. and Richard Mansbach, eds (2008) ‘Superpower, Hegemony, Empire’, in A World of

Polities: Essays on Global Politics, 200–15, London: Routledge.Ferguson, Yale H. and Richard W. Mansbach (2007) ‘Postinternationalism and IR Theory’,Millennium—

Journal of International Studies 35(3): 529–49.Goldsmith, Jack and Tim Wu (2006)Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World, Oxford:

Oxford University Press.Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Holitscher, Marc (1999) ‘Global Internet Governance and the Rise of the Private Sector’, Swiss Political

Science Review 5(2): 134–42.Hurrell, Andrew (2007) On Global Order: Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society,

Oxford: Oxford University Press.Ikenberry, G. John (2002) ‘America’s Imperial Ambition’, Foreign Affairs 82(5): 44–60.Ikenberry, G. John (2008) ‘The Rise of China and the Future of the West. Can the Liberal System

Survive?’ Foreign Affairs 87(1): 23–37.Kennedy, Paul (1987) The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from

1500 to 2000, New York: Random House.Keohane, Robert O. (1984) After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy,

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Krahmann, Elke (2005) ‘American Hegemony or Global Governance? Competing Visions of International

Security’, International Studies Review 7(4): 531–45.Krauthammer, Charles (1991) ‘The Unipolar Moment’, Foreign Affairs 70(1): 23–33.Krisch, Nico (2010) Beyond Constitutionalism: The Pluralist Structure of Postnational Law, Oxford:

Oxford University Press.Krisch, Nico and Benedict Kingsbury (2006) ‘Introduction: Global Governance and Global Administrative

Law in the International Legal Order’, European Journal of International Law 17(1): 1–13.Lake, David (2008) ‘The New American Empire?’ International Studies Perspectives 9(3): 281–89.Lake, David (2009) Hierarchy in International Relations, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University

Press.Lake, David (2010) ‘Rightful Rules: Authority, Order, and the Foundations of Global Governance’,

International Studies Quarterly 54(3): 587–613.Layne, Christopher (1993) ‘The Unipolar Illusion: Why New Great Powers Will Rise’, International

Security 17(4): 5–51.Leander, Anna (2010) ‘Practices (Re)producing Orders: Understanding the Role of Business in Global

Security Governance’, in Morten Ougaard and Anna Leander, eds, Business and Global Governance,57–77, London and New York: Routledge.

Leib, Volker (2002) ICANN und der Konflikt um die Internet-Ressourcen: Institutionenbildung imProblemfeld Internet Governance zwischen multinationaler Staatstätigkeit und globaler Selbstregulier-ung, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Konstanz, Germany.

Lipschutz, Ronnie D. (2002) ‘The Clash of Governmentalities: The Fall of the UN Republic and America’sReach for Imperium’, Contemporary Security Policy 23(3): 214–31.

Lipschutz, Ronnie D. and Cathleen Fogel (2002) ‘“Regulation for the Rest of Us?” Global Civil Societyand the Privatization of Transnational Regulation’, in Rodney Bruce Hall and Thomas J. Biersteker,eds, The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance, 115–50, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Milner, Helen (1993) ‘The Assumption of Anarchy in International Relations Theory: A Critique’, inDavid Baldwin, ed., Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate, 143–69, New York:Columbia University Press.


126

A

UTHOR COPY

Motyl, Alexander J. (1999) Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and TheoreticalPossibilities, New York: Columbia University Press.

Münkler, Herfried (2005) Imperien: Die Logik der Weltherrschaft — vom Alten Rom bis zu denVereinigten Staaten, Berlin: Rowohlt.

Nexon, Daniel H. (2008) ‘What’s This, Then? ‘Romanes Eunt Domus’?’ International StudiesPerspectives 9(3): 300–08.

Nexon, Daniel H. and Thomas Wright (2007) ‘What’s at Stake in the American Empire Debate’, AmericanPolitical Science Review 101(2): 253–71.

Ninkovich, Frank (2000) ‘Review of Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’, Political ScienceQuarterly 115(3): 488–89.

Nye, Joseph S. (1990) Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, New York: Basic Books.Nye, Joseph S. (2002) ‘The Dependent Colossus’, Foreign Policy 129: 74–76.Rai, Shirin M. (2008) ‘Analysing Global Governance’, in Shirin M. Rai and Georgina Waylen, eds,

Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives, 19–42, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Rosenau, James N. (1990) Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity, Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press.Rosenau, James N. (1997) Along the Domestic— Foreign Frontier: Exploring Governance in a Turbulent

World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Rosenau, James N. (2003) Distant Proximities: Dynamics Beyond Globalization, Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press.Rosenau, James N. (2005) ‘Illusions of Power and Empire’, History and Theory 44(1): 73–87.Rosenau, James N., ed. (2006a) ‘Toward an Ontology of Global Governance’, in The Study of World

Politics, Vol. 2: Globalization and Governance, 111–20, London: Routledge.Rosenau, James N., ed. (2006b) ‘Global Affairs in an Epochal Transformation’, in The Study of World

Politics, Vol. 2: Globalization and Governance, 31–45, London: Routledge.Strange, Susan (1988) States and Markets, London: Pinter.Strange, Susan (1996) The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Teubner, Gunther, ed. (1997a) ‘Global Bukowina: Legal Pluralism in World Society’, in Global Law

without a State, 3–28, Dartmouth: Aldershot.Teubner, Gunther, ed. (1997b) Global Law without a State, Dartmouth: Aldershot.Tilly, Charles (2002) ‘Review of ‘Empire’ by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’, Canadian Journal of

Political Science 35(1): 224–25.Tyler, Patrick E. (2003) ‘Threats and Responses: News Analysis — A New Power in the Streets’, New

York Times (17 February, 2008): available at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9902E0DC1E3AF934A25751C0A9659C8B63 (last accessed 20 November, 2010).

Walt, Stephen M. (2005) Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy, New York andLondon: Norton.

Waltz, Kenneth N. (1979) Theory of International Politics, Boston, MA: McGraw Hill.Waltz, Kenneth N. (1993) ‘The Emerging Structure of International Politics’, International Security 18(2):

44–79.Waltz, Kenneth N. (1999) ‘Globalization and Governance’, Political Science and Politics 32(4): 693–700.Wendt, Alexander (1999) Social Theory of International Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Whitman, Jim (2005) The Limits of Global Governance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Young, Oran R., ed. (1997) ‘Global Governance: Toward a Theory of Decentralized World Order’, in

Global Governance, 273–99, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Zürn, Michael (2007) ‘Institutionalisierte Ungleichheit in der Weltpolitik: Jenseits der Alternative “Global

Governance” versus ‘American Empire’’, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 48(4): 680–704.Zürn, Michael, Martin Binder and Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt (2012) ‘International Authority and Its

Politicization’, International Theory 4(1): 69–106.


127

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9902E0DC1E3AF934A25751C0A9659C8B63

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9902E0DC1E3AF934A25751C0A9659C8B63

A

UTHOR COPY

About the authors

Rainer Baumann is Head of the research unit Global Governance Revisited at theCentre for Global Cooperation Research, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.His current research focuses on the role of non-state actors in internationalgovernance. He is co-editor (with Peter Mayer and Bernhard Zangl) of the three-volume anthology International Relations: The Great Debates (Edward Elgar, 2011)and has published in journals such as JIRD, German Politics and Society, andZeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen.

Klaus Dingwerth is Assistant Professor in Political Theory of Global Governance atthe University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. His current research focuses on thelegitimation and de-legitimation of international organisations. His publicationsinclude The New Transnationalism: Transnational Governance and its DemocraticLegitimacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) as well as articles in the European Journal ofInternational Relations, Global Environmental Politics, Global Governance, andInternational Studies Quarterly.


128

Rainer Baumann/Klaus Dingwerth 2015: Global Governance vs Empire: Why World Order Moves towards...

Documents

Transcript of Rainer Baumann/Klaus Dingwerth 2015: Global Governance vs Empire: Why World Order Moves towards...