The West sees global governance. The emerging powers see anarchy. Discuss.

Posted By David Bosco Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - 1:00 PM Share

I wrote yesterday about a striking speech by a senior Indian security official on the state of current global governance efforts. The speech raises the question of how the major emerging powers perceive the existing global governance system. Menon, a former foreign minister, appears to view the current system as almost entirely ineffective, at least in terms of its core purpose of restraining violence. I don't think many Western foreign-policy thinkers or senior government officials would share that grim view, although they would undoubtedly concede all sorts of problems and shortcomings.

If there is indeed a marked difference between Western powers and the emerging powers (including India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and China) in perceptions of global governance, what accounts for this? At the risk of generalizing wildly, I'd offer up two related explanations:

Hypothesis 1: Western leaders are still much more institutionally focused and legalistic than their emerging-power counterparts. They spend an awful lot of time thinking about structures and institutions. They use the Security Council actively and seek to advance resolutions there in a way that most emerging powers still do not. They believe in instruments like the International Criminal Court and care about its work. Because of this institutional mindset, Western leaders tend to inflate the importance of these institutions in actually providing order. For their part, the emerging powers see through the web of resolutions, statements, acronyms and structures and perceive the world in its essence, and they still see a world where the powerful pretty much do what they want.

Hypothesis 2: For a variety of reasons, including ideology and capabilities, major Western countries are much more likely to deploy forces beyond their borders than are the emerging powers. In places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, and Libya, the West sees its missions abroad as serving a broad global governance purpose. Even when these operations lack formal legal backing (as in Kosovo or Iraq) or stretch the limits of what authorization they do enjoy (as in Libya), many in the West believe that they are acting in the spirit of the law and broadly serving the interests of global governance. And at a legal level, they have some reason to believe that. Even those missions that did not enjoy support from the UN at the outset do now. (The occupying forces in Iraq and Kosovo were blessed by UN Security Council resolutions after the fact.)

The non-Western emerging powers, by contrast, see most of these deployments as exercises of naked force that serve narrow Western political and commercial interests. For political reasons, Russia, China and other Council members acquiesced to post-hoc blessings of these missions, but only because it was expedient to do so and not because they believe the missions were necessarily justified or constructive. A great deal of military activity that the West sees as helpful in building up world order, the emerging powers see as little more than the rule of the powerful.

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PASHLEY1411

4:45 PM ET

October 17, 2011

maybe

Hypothesis 1: "Western leaders are still much more institutionally focused and legalistic than their emerging-power counterparts. They spend an awful lot of time thinking about structures and institutions."

having a hard time conflating the bureaucratic structures of DC and Brussels as the "the West". To give an example the other way, the US conducts wars these past 20 years without the benefit of a permanent organization; come-as-you-are. And, as it turns out, comes-as-you-are seems to be more coterminous with the Anglosphere than it is with Europe, or with NATO..

Hypothesis 2: For a variety of reasons, including ideology and capabilities, major Western countries are much more likely to deploy forces beyond their borders than are the emerging powers.

This assertion looks like a stalking horse for colonialism, and Isn't it a few decades out?

Here are some better reasons, imho. Western countries have a tradition of common culture. Latin, then Christian. Even in the worse conflicts allowed for agreements to limit the extent of conflicts; Treaty of Westphalia, no use of gas warfare in WWII. As opposed to, within living memory, the Nanking massacre, partition of India, and slavery of Korea.

Similarly, but different, western countries have a tradition of rule of law, international law being used to limit conflict. UN charter, Congress of Vienna, Treaty of Versailles, etc...