Abstract
Current debates in International Relations (IR) entail two different claims regarding the global structures evolving in the post-Cold War world. Some suggest that the scope of the US power amounts to lasting American hegemony or even to a US empire; others speak of global governance in light of waning capacities of single states to tackle international problems or the growing salience of non-state actors. In this article, we discuss these two bodies of literature in conjunction. We argue that the global governance literature and the empire literature use different lenses to observe the same object, that is, world politics after 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 world politics 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 and thus a move from anarchy to hierarchy. We discuss different attempts to redress this seeming contradiction and show that there is much ground to believe that world politics is in 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 moves towards heterarchy and hierarchy at the same time.
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Notes
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.
This is neither to claim that the anarchy assumption was never called into question before nor that all earlier proponents of the anarchy assumption have become sceptics. IR scholars working in the Marxist tradition have always pointed to patterns of rule in world politics, and the feminists’ critique of mainstream IR’s neglect of the structuring and ruling effects of gender can also be seen as in disagreement with the anarchy assumption. In addition, the anarchy assumption was occasionally criticised even from within the mainstream (Milner 1993). On the other hand, theorists like Kenneth Waltz (1999) continue to hold that world politics can be described and understood adequately on the basis of the anarchy assumption.
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 representative sketch of those contributions that share James Rosenau’s assumption that world politics is characterised by a proliferation of ‘spheres of authority’. In contrast, we exclude perspectives that conceptualise global governance as ‘a way of organising international politics in a more inclusive and consensual manner’ (Barnett and Duvall 2005: 5) or that ‘routinely [view] international organisations as the epicentre of global governance’ (ibid., 28).
Lipschutz (2002) may be one of the few exceptions here.
A different view is offered by the English School proponent Ian Clark, who opines that the US hegemony rests on the acceptance of the leading role of the US by others (Clark 2011: 24). While Clark does not use the concept of authority, his understanding of hegemony is in line with the global governance literature’s insistence on authority rather than power as the central concept.
Lake stresses that international relations can be disaggregated in various ways, but that the distinction of the issue areas of security and economics is most common (Lake 2008: 283).
The reverse proposition (‘first global governance, then empire’) would be a logical corollary; yet, we did not find any evidence in support of this position in any of the literatures discussed in this contribution.
See http://humanterrainsystem.army.mil/Default.aspx (last access 25 May, 2014); the HTS is also covered in the award-winning documentary Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic by James Der Derian, David Udris and Michael Udris; see http://humanterrainmovie.com/ (last access 20 November, 2010).
See, for instance, the critique from Charles Tilly (2002: 224), who holds that the authors ‘orbit so far from the concrete realities of contemporary change that their readers see little but clouds, hazy seas and nothingness beyond’.
That Zürn has a different conception of global governance in mind is also exemplified in his statement that 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).
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Kilian Beutel, Margot Eichinger, Annegret Kunde and Klaas Schüller for their research assistance. For comments on earlier versions, we are grateful to Jörg Friedrichs, Rodney Bruce Hall, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Jan Rolenc, the editors of the Journal of International Relations and Development, as well as two anonymous reviewers. Some of the work that went into this article was also undertaken as a part of the research project ‘Changing Norms of Global Governance’ for which funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; grant no. DI1417/2–1) is gratefully acknowledged.
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Baumann, R., Dingwerth, K. Global governance vs empire: Why world order moves towards heterarchy and hierarchy. J Int Relat Dev 18, 104–128 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2014.6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2014.6