While Anarchy has served for decades as a central category for the analysis of world politics, other concepts have recently become increasingly important. In the course of the end of the Cold War, questions have been raised as to whether the international system could be described as unipolar, hegemonic, or imperialFootnote 1; how power differences in the international system translate into vertical differentiationFootnote 2; how formal and informal hierarchies emergeFootnote 3; and how international institutions gain authority to bring states, but also non-state actors, to abide by their rules.Footnote 4 In short, the fundamental question of rule has superseded the question of anarchy in International Relations: Who can and who may command the conduct of actors in international politics?
Michael Zürn's A Theory of Global Governance (Reference Zürn2018) is the most straightforward attempt to tackle these questions. It highlights global politics as a political system constituted by authority patterns that go beyond (state based) forms of hegemony. Such patterns are located in trans- and international institutions that increasingly exercise authority over actors, states and non-state alike, a trend that has been documented in particular for the European Union,Footnote 5 but that can also be observed at the global level.Footnote 6 Zürn's theory of global governance stipulates that the increase in authority of international institutions is likely to produce politicization and contestation because the institutions lack the necessary legitimation to ground their increased authority in. Depending on how institutions react to such challenges, global governance and along with it authority patterns deepen or falter.
Surprisingly, however, despite the compelling description of the growing authority of institutions, their intrusiveness and the increase of majority decision-making within them, of institutionalized inequalities between states and the rise of contestation toward institutions, A Theory of Global Governance stops short of calling the political system of global governance what it plainly is, a system of political rule, in which structures of super- and subordination have formed through which basic goods and opportunities to exercise influence are distributed and expectations concerning compliance are stabilized.Footnote 7 By limiting himself to the nation-state blue print of political rule, that is, by reducing political rule to systems that have the capability to solve collisions and conflicts between spheres of authority (provide for meta-institutions) and that generally can rely on force as an ultimate means to solve them, Zürn misses significant aspects of super- and subordination existing in the international system.
In fact, as we aim to highlight, A Theory of Global Governance is so deeply embedded in liberal institutionalism that it limits international rule to the authority of trans- and international institutions and their recognition by their addressees thereby losing track of more structural forms of rule (first section). Deference is important in stabilizing rule over time, but it is not its foundation, which rather is its ability to enforce commands against resistance when needed (second section). Finally, we sketch an alternative understanding of political rule in the third section that bases it on the resistance it provokes. In such an understanding, authority is but one subcategory of rule, co-existing with domination as its counterpart. With such a broader view, we conclude, the perspective on global governance changes. It makes visible the more hidden forms of rule that oscillate between authority and domination.
Rule and authority in a theory of global governance
As most liberal theories of political rule, A Theory of Global Governance is shaped by Weber's sociology of rule as institutionalized power. For Weber, rule [Herrschaft] in the ‘narrower sense’ is ‘identical with authoritarian power of command’.Footnote 8 In this context, ‘authoritarian’ does not mean that it is imposed by force but instead that it is recognized in the sense of being ‘authoritative’ insofar as ‘the ruled had made the substance of the command into the maxim of their conduct for its own sake’.Footnote 9 The effect of this ‘narrower’ definition is that it tends to exclude institutionalized power structures that come about, for example, through markets or similar systemic constellations of interests. It also disregards structures of super- and subordination that are based primarily on coercion. According to Weber, the exercise of power transforms into rule (in the ‘narrower sense’) only if it succeeds in generating legitimacy. Thus, rule and authority become indistinguishable and it is no wonder that Weber's original term ‘Herrschaft’ is often translated into the English ‘authority’ as shortcut for ‘legitimate rule’. The problem is, as Steven Lukes has pointed out, that Weber's concept of rule ‘aims at structures of command in which the legitimacy claims of the rulers are accepted in general by their subordinates’.Footnote 10 This is why liberal approaches to the present day are mainly concerned with the legitimacy of governance structures at the global level and the question of what happens when institutions lose legitimacy.Footnote 11 By neglecting Weber's broader understanding of rule as comprising both, authority and domination, they miss more contentious forms of super- and subordination.
A Theory of Global Governance follows the liberal script neatly. Its basic conjectures focus on the link between authority and legitimation (in Zürn's terms the ‘authority-legitimacy-link’). In this understanding, the increase of authority nested in trans- and international institutions requires them to acquire a form of legitimation that is often not available to them because suitable political structures and processes are absent for instance.Footnote 12 As a consequence, the rise of authority is likely to produce politicization by civil society and contestation by states. Both challenge these institutions, their decisions or decision-making structures and can either lead to a further deepening of global governance or to its fragmentation and decline. A deepening is to be expected when the targeted institution responds to criticism by engaging in substantial reform, enlarging its legitimation basis. A decline is likely to result if an institution proves unable to reform or does not reform substantially enough so that the addressees of authority turn their back to them and either, as non-state actors, radicalize their protests or, as state-actors, leave institutions and create alternative fora. While Zürn goes a long way explaining contestation and politicization, his account still follows the liberal idea of progress.Footnote 13 No matter whether institutions will flourish or falter in face of politicization and contestation, in the end only those institutions will survive that are able to accommodate the need for legitimation and, thus, will make the whole system more legitimate.
These propositions are based on an understanding of authority that strongly relies on the reflexive ability of actors to recognize their limited intellectual and political capabilities and cede parts of their autonomy to those institutions or actors who know better.Footnote 14 ‘Deference’ is thus the dominant form of submission in global governance, a form of obedience that recognizes its own inferiority. This is also the reason why, according to Zürn, international institutions do not have to issue ‘commands’, but can rely on ‘requests’, since it is assumed that actors have an interest in following their instructions: ‘Indeed, states usually follow IO prescriptions because they feel that the authority is doing a good service, not because they feel a strong duty to oblige’.Footnote 15 This, again, can be traced back to Max Weber, who in his reflections on rule as authority speaks of a ‘minimum of willingness to obey’ that must be present in every form of rule. It is true that without the willingness to obey on the side of subordinates and without their cooperation rulers cannot stabilize their rule over time. Consequently, any concept of rule must contain a certain interest in obedience and will to comply and thus a certain degree of factual legitimacy.
The same applies to the will to resist, however. Without a minimum of opposition and objection to orders, a recourse to rule would not be necessary. Even legitimate rule, which Weber calls authority, is legitimate only to a certain degree. Although one can assume a general willingness to obey, it only makes sense to speak of rule or authority if there is also the chance of dissent and the possibility of resistance, because even legitimate rule as authority is the assertion of interests against the will of others. As a consequence, not only obedience and the will to comply, but also dissent and the will to resist have to be part of every conception of rule.Footnote 16
Although Zürn admits that global governance institutions can also issue more stringent demands than requests,Footnote 17 he focuses on the softer forms of global governance and the pleasant sides of international institutions. By putting the emphasis on deference, Zürn narrows his understanding of rule severely and neglects the extent of (and maybe the need for) coercion in global governance.Footnote 18 While Zürn points to important dynamics in the system of global governance, they hardly tell the whole story about structures of super- and subordination. The rise of contestation of international authorities that emerges in the current system is not simply a linear function of the increase in authority of specific institutions (and the presence of political opportunities), but can also be understood as the effect of two byproducts of institutionalization, an increase of channels to voice resistance on the one hand and a shrinking of spaces to avoid rule on the other. Structures of rule have always been present in the international system,Footnote 19 but the more formal institutions populate international relations, the harder it becomes for international actors to escape their grip.
This becomes apparent, for instance, when civil society protesters are asked why they protest against specific institutions. Often, their response is that their protest is directed at a more general phenomenon, but that they take the institution as a symbol for the politics they wish to contest. Recent studies show that at times protesters focus on grievances the respective institution is not responsible for or they overestimate an institution's power by far. Equally often, protesters misread their targets (they don't know in which institution specific issues are dealt with) or they have a general grievance (e.g. they want to contest the system of neoliberal capitalism and its implications), but miss a central institution to address them. Felix Anderl refers to the recent blockupy-protests in Frankfurt as an example.Footnote 20 Although protestors blocked the European Central Bank, they were keen to highlight that their focus was not on the bank but on austerity politics and global capitalism more generally.
Requests and commands in global governance
This observation highlights that the problem of authority and legitimacy in the system of global governance cannot be confined to the exercise of authority by specific institutions or the interface conflicts between them. The political system of global governance lacks a central locus of decision-making and a unified hierarchical structure, but rather consists of overlapping and partly competing institutions and, along with those, structures of super- and subordination. In such a ‘heterarchical’ system, rule often escapes formal mandates and rules, but has to be carefully reconstructed in discourse, in the presence and absence of bodies of rules and in the analysis of possibilities and limits of action.Footnote 21 Of course, the more structures of super- and subordination exist outside the context of formal legal control and the less they depend on direct coercion, the harder it becomes to grasp rule empirically. Heterarchical systems of rule can rarely be analyzed as manifestly coercive arrangements (such as in the case of colonial power) or as asymmetrical institutions (such as in the case of unequal treaties). The mandates of international institutions are one facet of political rule but they do not exhaust the phenomenon. The more opaque forms of rule escape the focus of A Theory of Global Governance not least because of its conceptualization of authority as deference, that is, the voluntary submission of actors to international institutions. When the decisive criterion of authority is the deference it provokes, then it not only becomes harder to empirically detect more subtle forms of rule but it rules out certain forms of rule conceptually.
If rule is the institutionalization of super- and subordination, it can make use of various means to constitute and stabilize asymmetric power relations: informal discursive power of persuasion, structural power in the classical sense (that is, the power to set the agenda) or the unequal distribution of resources, deference based on a belief in the legitimacy of rule but, of course, also physical force as the most direct form of coercion.Footnote 22 None of these means is privileged theoretically, they only represent different manifestations of the exercise of rule. However, all systems of rule attempt to attain legitimacy because deference is the more economical way of stabilizing rule. While direct forms of coercion as well as persuasion are relatively cost-intensive and susceptible to opposition in the long run, indirect forms of rule and the internalization of norms have proven to be more enduring.Footnote 23 Understood this way, deference is not a criterion for the identification of rule as such, but rather indicative of a particular form of rule, namely authority. By describing its quality, that is, the legitimacy it can draw on, it is distinguishable from other forms of institutionalized power relations.
Such conceptualization sits uneasy with an approach to rule in which physical compulsion is rarely available or utilized. In fact, A Theory basically rules out the notion of rule for global governance because, first, there is widespread lack of physical compulsion within international institutions and, second, no meta-authority has evolved that is competent to decide upon conflicts between lower-level authorities.Footnote 24 This is why A Theory also refers to requests instead of commands to highlight the specific form that rule as authority takes in global governance. Since international institutions can only rarely coerce, they rather make requests, and state and non-state actors accept these requests because they deem them appropriate given their cognitive limits and their belief in the utility of institutions.Footnote 25
Again, this does explain quite a lot of empirical behavior we can observe in Global Governance. For a number of actors, however, institutional requests are factual commands because they neither have the resources to refuse nor the alternative fora they could turn to. While the European Union might have been capable of paying the fines in return for its non-compliance with WTO rulings regarding genetically modified organisms, as Zürn argues in his book, this strategy was not available to several other states.Footnote 26 For those actors, authority is not kept ‘liquid’, but is hard as steel.Footnote 27 To put it differently, our understanding of rule in global governance remains severely restricted if we pretend that coercion exists only in the form of physical compulsion. Coercion as the attempt to eliminate the freedom of other actors can rely on many means. Physical force might be the most direct form of coercion but unequal resources or structural means can have a similar effect. A good example is the ban on commercial whaling and its treatment in the International Whaling Commission. The ban on commercial whaling was initially established as a temporary ban to give whale stocks a chance to recover from industrial fishing. However, when pro-whaling states wanted to lift the ban in the 1990s given new data on whale stocks, the anti-whaling states prevented that drawing on institutional prerequisites of the IWC, requiring a ¾ majority to change the IWC's agenda.Footnote 28 While for many actors in the international system, states and non-state alike, the multiple forms of attempting to limit their freedom of action is their everyday reality, A Theory of Global Governance does not really capture this phenomenon.
Rule and resistance in global governance
To get a grasp on these phenomena, we propose a broader concept of rule based on the ability to force actors to submit to the will of others and the resistance this provokes. We return to Weber's original ideas in order to understand rule (Herrschaft), in the broader sense, as an expression of asymmetric power relations, which are of a certain duration and perpetuated by (formal or informal) institutions. Thus, rule means a structure of institutionalized super- and subordination through which basic goods and opportunities of influence are distributed, regardless of whether these structures are primarily socio-cultural, economic, or military in nature. Authority (Autorität) then is not synonymous to rule but constitutes one of two main subcategories of rule in which rule enjoys (relative) legitimacy. Domination (Beherrschung), the other main subcategory denotes a form of rule that depends on the application of (relatively) open coercion.
Coming from such a broader understanding of rule and taking into account the nature of global governance as a heterarchical system, we would suggest to utilize resistance as an angle from which to reconstruct rule empirically, theoretically, and normatively: empirically, because phenomena of rule in international politics are often not observable as such, but become visible when resistance arises and must be counteracted; theoretically, because we believe that rule can be conceptualized more precisely through the enforcement of power than through the voluntary observance of commands or request; and normatively, because rule is necessarily associated with resistance which requires a reinterpretation of its normative meaning.Footnote 29 Regardless of the form of resistance, that is, whether it pursues a transformative agenda or not, it helps to identify and question rule, thereby laying the foundation for the re-establishment of its legitimacy.Footnote 30 Non-domination, it seems, is not only the more fundamental normative ideal than freedom, equality and justice,Footnote 31 but also the better descriptive lens to account for rule and its discontents.
Although rule always entails resistance because it ultimately rests on coercive force (actual or potential), the nature and extent of resistance can vary. For example, resistance can be limited to individual decisions or policies, it can concentrate on decision-making structures and processes (politics), or it can reject the order in its entirety, that is, its fundamental norms and principles, rules, and institutions (polity). Not only can the object of resistance vary, but also the means to which it has recourse. Resistance can advocate changes within the system of rule by accepting the applicable rules of the game of political participation or it can make use of means of action that lie outside of these accepted rules. These ideal types of action can be conceptualized as oppositional conduct, on the one hand, and as dissident conduct, on the other. Common to both forms is that they voice resistance and formulate – albeit in varying degrees – political alternatives to the ruling order; but they differ quite fundamentally over whether they accept that order and the applicable rules of political participation and comply with them (opposition) or whether they reject or deliberately violate these rules (dissidence). This is evident, for example, if one considers signature campaigns by Greenpeace, on the one hand, and arson attacks by the Earth Liberation Front, on the other, as ways of articulating opposition to the logging of old growth forests. Resistance can also change its form, moving from opposition to dissidence, as in the case of the development of student protest into an urban guerrilla movement and then into terrorist attacks of the Red Army Faction, to cite an extreme example. Another would be the PLO which took the opposite direction. A key factor in explaining the transition from opposition to dissidence and from dissidence to opposition, as we have elaborated on elsewhere is the character of the system of rule and the changes it undergoes.Footnote 32
Summing up, A Theory of Global Governance paints a rather narrow picture of authority in global governance that tends to miss important empirical phenomena. By focusing on the deference of reflective actors and stressing the re-establishment of legitimacy by international institutions in the long run, Zürn takes the study of international relations and global governance an important step forward. His approach captures, however, only parts of the empirical reality of super- and subordination in the international system and the effects it has on different actors by confining it to institutional authority. It thereby misses other forms of rule, institutional, and non-institutional and is tempted to present international rule as a novel development although many studies have highlighted that rule, in its different shapes, has been present in international relations all along.Footnote 33 To be able to analyze these different shapes, we propose to go one step further, not only to focus on authority, but also, by way of analyzing resistance in international relations, on domination and thus on rule more broadly. To analyze the factors that drive the dynamics of rule and resistance is undoubtedly the central task for a research program that places the problem of rule rather than authority at the center of the analysis of international politics and global governance.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for helpful comments and suggestions from the reviewers, journal editors, and in particular the guest editors for this symposium, Orfeo Fioretos and Jonas Tallberg.
