Thirty-years on, the high expectations that accompanied the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet communism have been largely confounded by the emergence of the autocratic Putin regime and the rekindling of Great Power rivalry between Russia and the United States. In this chapter, we argue that these outcomes were not inevitable, but rather were significantly the result of failures in Western, and particularly American, statecraft during the 1990s. First, the democratic transition was undermined by the type of economic transition, which Western policy networks promoted in post-Soviet Russia. Had Western influencers promoted a New Deal or social democratic model of economic transition, the distributional effects which undermined the legitimacy of the Yeltsin regime would have been far less severe. Second, the American failure to devise and pursue a strategy to effectively integrate Russia into a post-NATO European security architecture made it almost certain that “left out” Russia would react negatively to NATO expansion to the East. Had the United States followed up on Gorbachev’s vision of security architecture for a “Common European Home,” the ongoing clash between Russia and the West might well have been averted.

Introduction

Efforts to think about, and bring about, world political arrangements that significantly reform, subsume or replace the Westphalian state-centric world order in order to deal with problems that are ‘global’ in character have been salient and growing features of both the world political scene and theorizing about world politics for at least the last century. Unfortunately, despite the growing number and significance of problems that appear to be in some significant way ‘global’ in character, political efforts to move beyond, or significantly alter, the state-centric world order to address these problems appear to be largely stymied, even in retreat, and many efforts for international cooperation, institutions and organizations are declining and weakening. There is a widespread sense that problems are growing faster than solutions, producing a ‘governance gap.’

As this sense of a critical shortfall has grown over the last several decades, it has become increasingly common to refer to the overall enterprise of ‘global problem solving’ as ‘global governance.’ This turn to ‘global governance’ is in part a reflection of the difficulties of global problem solving through other means, and in part related to a growing sense that new ways of ‘governance’ may be better suited to solving global problems than ‘government.’ Anything approaching a full assessment of ‘global governance’ in practice and theory is a vast and difficult undertaking, due to the sheer extent and diversity of contemporary activities that appear to be parts of ‘global governance,’ as well as the large policy and social science literatures on this topic. This chapter attempts to look at global governance with very wide lenses, looking for some larger patterns and trends across time, space and issue area.

The first main claim of this chapter is that ‘global governance’ is the culmination of two successive broad secular ‘descents’ regarding the locus or ‘level’ of authority, away from configurations which are vertical, hierarchical and ‘from above,’ and toward those which are horizontal, ‘republican’ and ‘from below.’ The first ‘descent’ has occurred over the last five hundred years, as empires came to be replaced with a state-system, and as internally hierarchical states have been progressively ‘republicanized.’ The second ‘descent’ has occurred across the last century, in thinking about various forms of ‘international government’ capable of effectively dealing with new sets of the problems of ‘global’ scope that are fundamentally related to technological change.

Hegemony, nuclear weapons, and the American liberal order

The topic of hegemony has been of central concern to theorists of world politics at least since Thucydides, many of the leading figures of international theory have written about it, contemporary international theorists are still keenly thinking about it, and, with the relative decline in American power, it seems more relevant than ever. One of the leading works on the topic of hegemony, Robert Gilpin’s magisterial War and Change in World Politics was published at the end of the tumultuous decade of the 1970s in which it appeared that American power and the American liberal hegemonic order was waning fairly rapidly.

Often overlooked, however, is Gilpin’s larger project to understand large-scale and important change in human political life. Gilpin’s work on the logic of hegemonic systems, for which he is perhaps best known among IR scholars, was but one part of his larger body of work in which he addressed the range of theories about nuclear weapons, the implications of scientific-technological change for state power, and the ways in which state power and markets were changing in the era of American liberal hegemony and rapid economic “globalization.” What unites these works is Gilpin’s general quest to understand the interplay between changing material circumstances, particularly ones propelled by technological change, and various forms of political orders, internally and externally, particularly hierarchies and their interplay with more horizontal arrangements, particularly markets. And as an American writing in the American century, Gilpin has been keenly interested in exploring the prospects for the American liberal hegemony and the ways in which this order is like and unlike previous orders which have arisen and declined across history.

The nuclear–unipolarity puzzle

What are the implications of nuclear weapons for unipolarity? Both unipolarity and nuclear weapons have been subject to extensive analysis. Virtually every treatment of contemporary unipolarity makes reference to nuclear weapons, but virtually no analysis of nuclear weapons considers unipolarity. Exploring the impact of nuclear weapons on unipolarity would seem straightforward enough, but in reality is very complicated because theorists disagree about so many important aspects of both nuclear weapons and unipolarity.

Theorizing about nuclear weapons has been a central part of international theory for more than six decades. While there are still some outliers, theorists of the effects of nuclear weapons on international politics have a near consensus on the central importance of nuclear deterrence. Dispute remains about what is necessary to achieve deterrence, and how prone it is to failure. But the proposition that nuclear weapons deter conflicts by vastly raising the cost of war is both theoretically robust and widely held. According to this view nuclear deterrence has made international politics much more peaceful than in pre-nuclear times. The topic of nuclear weapons and unipolarity therefore can be simplified into a consideration of the relationship between nuclear deterrence and unipolarity.

What is the relationship between environment and security? Will environmental change produce violent conflict and thus insecurity? What is the relationship between ‘national security’ and the environment? Over the last thirty years, and particularly the last fifteen years, there has been a lively interest in these and related questions, under the rubric of ‘environmental security’.

Beginning in the 1970s, environmental advocates began proposing redefined ‘security’ to encompass a wide array of threats, ranging from earthquakes to environmental degradation. Others pointed to the destruction of the environment caused by war, and hypothesised that interstate war and other forms of violence would result from resource scarcity and environmental degradation. Yet others proposed to ‘reconceptualise sovereignty’ in order to focus on ‘ecological security’. Most of the pioneering conceptual work on environmental security was done by advocates of greater environmental awareness. Such concepts were advanced in the context of the renewed Cold War tensions in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and were extrapolations from the fears of resource wars in the wake of the oil crises of 1973 and 1979.

By the late 1980s, and early 1990s, ‘environmental security’ was a broad movement, had generated an empirical research agenda and had begun to shape policy. As the Cold War waned, such ideas began to attract the interest and support of military organisations who saw possibilities for new ‘missions’.

The Westphalian and the Philadelphian systems

The relationship between forms of legitimate political authority and the capacities of coercive power has been at the center of the Western study of politics since the ancient Greeks began systematically investigating politics. At least since the Middle Ages, these debates have been about “sovereignty.”

Because the modern European system has expanded globally over the last half millennium, students of international politics have focused on the Westphalian system of sovereign states as a paradigm so much that it seems inevitable and universal.

The essentials of the Westphalian system, codified as the core of realist international relations theory, are widely accepted. Westphalian realists presume a dyadic conception of political order: hierarchy inside and anarchy outside. Thus sovereign authority has two faces, an inside and an outside. Inside the territorial units, the sovereign state monopolizes the violent power that creates a hierarchy of higher and lower authorities. To avoid ambiguity, a hierarchically structured unit should be called a “hier-state.”

Outside and between states, authoritative governance is absent or fleeting. But interstate order exists, primarily because of two institutions and practices: mutual recognition of sovereignty and the balance of power. State sovereigns extend to one another the system of mutual recognition that creates a society of states, reflecting and embodying state supremacy, while moderating state power and anarchy. As Martin Wight, Hedley Bull, and others have noted, this European society of states existed in addition to the anarchical and balance-of-power system of states.