Governmentalizing the post-cold war international regime: The un debate on democratization and good governance

Alternatives

Volumn 30, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 461-487

  Zanotti, Laura ^a,b  

^a EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE   (Italy)

^b UNITED NATIONS   (United States)

Author keywords

Democratization; Global governmentality; Good governance; Post Cold War international regime; United Nations

Indexed keywords

EID: 32244448570     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540503000404     Document Type: Article

References (91)

1. For a comparison and discussion of different versions of democratic peace theories, see Miriam Fendius Elman, ed., Paths to Peace: Is Democracy the Answer? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
2. For an overview of the role of the United Nations in democracy assistance, see Nigel D. White, "The United Nations and Democracy Assistance: Developing Practice Within a Constitutional Framework," in Peter Burnell, ed., Democracy Assistance: International Co-operation for Democratization (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 67-89.
3. For legal and normative approaches, see Daniele Archibugi, "Cosmopolitan Democracy and Its Critics: A Review," European Journal of International Relations 10, no. 3 (2004): 437-473;
4. Daniele Archibugi, "The Reform of the United Nations and Cosmopolitan Democracy" Journal of Peace Research 30, no. 3 (1993): 301-315;
5. David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 1995);
6. Richard Falk, "Appraising the UN at Fifty: The Looming Challenge. "Journal of International Affairs 48, no. 2 (1965);
7. Keith Griffin, "Economic Globalization and Institutions of Global Governance," Development and Change 34, no. 5 (2003): 789-807.
8. For realist approaches, see David Chandler, "International Justice," New Left Review, 2d ser., no. 6 (2001): 55-66;
9. Peter Gower, "The New Liberal Cosmopolitanism," New Left Review, 2d ser., no. 11 (2001): 1-14;
10. Danilo Zolo, Invoking Humanity: War, Law, and Global Order (London: Continuum, 2001).
11. For Marxist approaches, see Christophe Gorg and Ioachim Hirsch, "Is International Democracy Possible?" Review of International Political Economy 5, no. 4 (1998): 585-615.
12. For Foucaultian analyses of government, see Michel Foucault's works in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, pp. 87-104 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991);
13. Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: SAGE, 1999);
14. Nicholas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
15. For a reflection on the value of applying governmentality to the study of the international arena and for applications of Foucaultian governmental analyses to the study of a number of issue areas, see Wendy Larner and William Walters, eds., Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge, 2004);
16. Wendy Larner and William Walters, "Globalization as Governmentalization," Alternatives 29, no. 5 (2004).
17. Foucault, "Governmentality," in Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, note 4, p. 97. Foucault developed his analyses of government through a plurality of texts, lessons, and interviews that are not always entirely consistent. A hermeneutics of Foucault's texts is beyond the scope of this work.
18. Citation Foucault, "Governmentality," ibid., p. 93. While an analysis of the origins of functionalism and its connections with governmentality is beyond the scope of this article, it is worth noting that Foucault implicitly dates the origins of functionalism to anti-Machiavellian literature and links it to the genealogy of government. Functional division of space and tasks is also for Foucault one of the key features of disciplinarity;
19. see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2d ed. (New York: Vintage, 1995).
20. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2d ed. Ibid., p. 96. (1995)
21. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2d ed. Ibid., (1995)., p. 97.
22. Pasquale Pasquino, "Theatrum Politicum: The Genealogy of Capital-Police and the State of Prosperity," in Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, note 4.
23. In Pasquino's words, "this literature, or rather body of knowledge, of police [is] known in the eighteenth century as both 'the science of happiness' and 'the science of government,' which constitutes society as the object of a knowledge and at the same time as the target of political intervention": Pasquino, note 9, pp. 107-108; emphasis in the original. The positive view of policing persists into the nineteenth century. Hegel used the term in just this sense in Philosophy of Right.
24. Pasquino, note 9, p. 109.
25. "What police regulations regulate . . . is everything which in the life of . . . society . . . goes unregulated. . . . This is what the science of police is about: a great effort of formation of the social body, or more precisely an undertaking whose principal results will be something which we today call society, or the social body, and which the eighteenth century called 'the good order of a population'": ibid., p. 111.
26. Foucault, "Governmentality," in Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, note 4, p. 100.
27. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). An in-depth discussion of the analyses of Foucault on epistemology and the connections between positivism and the rise of the governmentalized state are beyond the scope of this inquiry. In some of his writings on the history of culture, more than elsewhere Foucault emphasizes that positivism constituted a rupture with regard to previous systems of knowledge;
28. see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994).
29. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences Ibid., The History, p. 136
30. Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, "Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security, and War," Millennium 30, no. 1 (2001): 41-46, at 46.
31. Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, "Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security, and War," Millennium 30, no. 1 (2001): Ibid., p. 146. This productive character of biopower, strictly connected to its regulatory and disciplinary elements, is central for the discussion of governmentality in the international arena. On the one hand, it delinks the discussion of power from the opposition oppression/freedom. On the other hand, the productive character of biopower establishes connections between regulations, disciplines, and contemporary notions of freedom and democracy. Freedom and resistance are not to be regarded as ideal types but as specific forms of behavior constituted within historically determined power formations.
32. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
33. Foucault, "Governmentality," in Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, note 4.
34. Foucault, "Governmentality," Ibid.
35. M. Moheau, Recherches, 1778;
36. quoted in Pasquino, note 9, p. 115.
37. Rose, note 4, p. 231. For Rose, numbers are linked to democracies in four ways: first, numbers, through electoral mechanisms, determine whose power is justified and confer legitimacy to political leaders; second, numbers operate as a diagnostic instrument for political life through opinion polls; third, numbers make government both possible (as they map the characteristics of population, economy, and society) and judgeable (as numerical comparisons are essential for the scrutiny of authority in our modern societies); finally, numbers are essential to the complex technologies through which governance is exercised and to the formulation of government programs, for example in form of population counts, tax collections, social indexes, economic indicators, and health indicators. In summary, numbers are indispensable tools for linking up the exercise of democratic government with the entities upon which it depends.
38. Dean, note 4, p. 179.
39. Ibid., p. 211.
40. "Reflexive government means that the central target and objective of national government becomes the reform of the performance of the existing governmental institutions and techniques. . . . The distinguishing feature of reflexive government is that the point of the reform of the institutions and mechanisms of government is to secure them in the face of processes that are deemed beyond governmental control": ibid., p. 179.
41. Michael Moran, The British Regulatory State: High Modernism and Hyper-Innovation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
42. Foucault, note 4, p. 103.
43. The use I make of political rationale is similar but not identical to Dean's use of political rationality; see Dean, note 4, p. 211. Dean defined "political rationality" as "[a]ny form of calculation about political activity, i.e. about any activity which has as its objective the influence, appropriation, redistribution, allocation or maintenance of powers of the government of the state or other organizations. Political rationality is a species of governmental rationality in so far as it entails thinking about directing the conduct of others or ourselves. To the extent that its objective is to influence the way governmental organizations exercise their powers, its concerns are quite distinct." The use I make of political rationale has less to do with specific calculations and is closer to the elaboration of frameworks for thinking about political issues and their solutions.
44. Starting in 1988, an increasing number of UN member states showed interest in public discussions of democratization. In the 1990s, UN involvement in prodemocracy activities drastically increased. While interventions in democratization had been carried out before, the number of requests for electoral assistance submitted to the United Nations climbed from seven between 1989 and 1992 to a total of eighty-nine by June 1995. By the year 2000, 50 percent of United Nations Development Program resources were allocated to governance programs, including public-sector reforms, institutional strengthening, leadership development, and empowering the poor by strengthening civil-society organizations (United Nations General Assembly A/55/489 [2001]). The number of peacekeeping operations mandated to the United Nations also increased after the end of the Cold War: two-thirds of the total of peacekeeping operations set up since 1948 were established after 1991 (United Nations General Assembly, A/55/326 [2001]). Peacekeeping mandates reflected the general interest in democracy as a mean for making and maintaining peace. They broadened to include democratization, rebuilding of state administrations, reestablishment of public services, and performing state functions in the tasks of UN "complex" peacekeeping operations and "transitional administrations." In these "complex" peacekeeping operations, military forces are just one component of diverse international personnel mandated with creating new institutions.
45. Philippe Schmitter has called governance a doctrine on the grounds that it does not constitute a structured philosophy; see Philippe C. Schmitter, with Nicholas Guilhot and Imco Brower, "Defining, Explaining, and Using the Concept of 'Governance,'" working paper, European University Institute and Stanford University, 1997.
46. R. A. W. Rhodes, "The New Governance: Governing Without Government," Political Studies 41 (1996): 652-667.
47. World Bank, Governance and Development (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1992).
48. Rhodes, note 30, p. 656.
49. These conferences saw a growing participation of states, international organizations, and representatives of "civil society." Their final declarations became official UN documents and provided backgrounds and themes for the reports of the secretary-general to the General Assembly. The first conference was held in Manila, Philippines, in June 1988; the second was in Managua, Nicaragua, July 4-6, 1994. The findings and recommendations were forwarded to the secretary-general by a letter from the permanent representative of Nicaragua to the United Nations (A/49/713, November 23, 1994). The recommendations of the third conference, held in Bucharest, Romania, September 2-4, 1997, went to the secretary-general as a note verbale from the representative of Romania (A/52/334, September 11, 1997). Outcomes of the fourth and fifth conferences, held in Cotonou, Benin, December 4-6, 2000, and Ulaanbatar, Mongolia, June 18-20, 2003, went to the secretary-general as letters, from the representative of Benin (A/55/889, April 5, 2001), and the representative of Mongolia (A/58/387, September, 18, 2003).
50. In 1994, following the Plan of Action of the Second International Conference on New and Restored Democracies, Managua, the General Assembly requested the secretary-general to discuss how the UN system could support democratization (A/51/761, December 20, 1996; letter, December 17, 1996, from secretary-general to the president of the General Assembly).
51. Secretary-General Kofi Annan presented the following reports to the General Assembly under the agenda item "Support by the United Nations System of the Efforts of Governments to Promote and Consolidate New or Restored Democracies": A/52/513, October 21, 1997.
52. A/53/554, October 29, 1998; A/54/492, October 22, 1999; A/55/489, October 13, 2000; A/56/499, October 23, 2001.
53. Former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali produced two reports and a letter to the General Assembly on "Support by the United Nations System of the Efforts of Governments to Promote and Consolidate New or Restored Democracies": A/50/332, August 7, 1995; A/51/512, October 18, 1996; and A/51/761, December 20, 1996, reprinted as Agenda for Democratization DPI1867 (97.1.3).
54. UN General Assembly A/52/513 (1997).
55. At the Bucharest conference, in which eighty governmental delegations participated, "good governance" was accepted as the "a major driving force of development" and as the organizing concept for international cooperation in peace building and democratization.
56. The year 1990 marked a milestone, with the presentation of the first UNDP annual report on the worldwide situation of human development in the world. . . . Since then, the relationships and dependencies between political systems and their capacities to establish consistent paths toward human development have become increasingly apparent. In this way, governance became one of the most important tools for facilitating human development: Governance and Democratic Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, UNDP, New York (nd).
57. UNDP, Governance for Sustainable Growth and Equity, report, international conference, New York, July 28-30, 1997 (New York: United Nations, 1997).
58. Ibid., p. 5. "Reviving growth entails downsizing the state and ensuring the independence of those institutions necessary to create the foundations for sustained economic growth. This includes institutions to ensure a sound monetary management and to secure property rights and contracts, as well as an effective judicial system."
59. UN General Assembly, A/53/554 (1998).
60. "The effort here is to help countries to redefine the role of the State, moving from a heavily interventionist paradigm to one in which the State's main function is to provide an enabling environment in which both the market economy and civil society can flourish . . . the challenge is to reform the core systems of government, such as budgeting and financial management, the civil service, procurement, records management and cabinet processes. A special thrust has been decentralization, helping countries to define the functions best carried out by subordinate tiers of government, and to create a clear framework of fiscal responsibilities and limits."
61. "A vibrant civil society is the key to a successful democratization process. Without the participation and active contribution of the citizens to social life, a true democracy cannot grow and prosper. Promotion of public participation and the formulation of well-informed public opinion are essential in the process of consolidation of democracy and the maintenance of democratic values": A/52/513, October 21, 1997.
62. Ibid., para. 17.
63. Sentence attributed to Ruth Richardson, former minister of finance, New Zealand: UNDP, note 40, p. 5.
64. UN General Assembly, note 38, para. 57.
65. Proposals were also outlined in UN General Assembly, Renewing the United Nations: A Programme for Reform: Report of the Secretary General, A/51/950, July 14, 1997.
66. UN General Assembly, A/52/513 (1997) and A/53/554 (1998).
67. UN General Assembly, A/53/554 (1998), para. 7.
68. The World Bank has established an online interactive database that makes it possible to compare states' performance with regard to a series of "good governance" indicators; see info.worldbank.org/governance/kwz2002/maps- html#top.
69. UN General Assembly, United Nations Millennium Declaration: Resolution, A/RES/55/2, September 8, 2000.
70. UN General Assembly, A/56/499 (2001).
71. UN General Assembly, A/55/889 (2001).
72. UN General Assembly, note 53, para. 7.
73. Ibid., para. 27.
74. UN General Assembly, Road Map Towards the implementation of the United Nations Millennium Declaration: Report of the Secretary-General, A/56/326, September 6, 2001.
75. UN General Assembly and Economic and Social Council, The Role of Public Administration in the implementation of the United Nations Millennium Declaration: Report of the Secretary-General, A/57/762-E/2002/82, August 16, 2002.
76. The Role of Public Administration in the implementation of the United Nations Millennium Declaration: Report of the Secretary-General Ibid. 2002
77. The Role of Public Administration in the implementation of the United Nations Millennium Declaration: Report of the Secretary-General 2002 Ibid.
78. For instance, they were discussed in the secretary-general's report to the Economic and Social Council of June 1999 (UN Economic and Social Council, E/1999/79 [1999]), in secretary-general reports to the General Assembly in 1999, 2000, and 2001 (General Assembly, A/54/492 [1999], A/55/489 [2000], and A/56/499 [2001]), and they also constituted the topic of the Fourth International Conference of New and Restores Democracies on "Democracy, Peace, Security, and Development," Cotonou, Benin, December 2000.
79. UN General Assembly and Economic and Social Council, note 58, paras. 8-9.
80. Ibid., para. 10.
81. Ibid., para. 13.
82. Ibid., para. 12.
83. Ibid., para. 18.
84. Ibid., para. 20.
85. Issues of financial management for developing countries were discussed at the International Conference on Financing for Development, Monterrey, 2002; see Report of the International Conference on Financing for Development, Monterrey, Mexico, March 18-22, 2002 (UN Publications, sales no. E.02.II.a.7).
86. General Assembly and Economic and Social Council, note 59, para. 20.
87. Ibid., note 1.
88. The assumption by which a government is in control of most variables within its territorial state has been called by James Ferguson the principle of "governmentality." In his analysis of the "development discourse" in the 1970s, Ferguson argued that "governmentality" was one of the main tenets of development theories. By representing the economy of a country as self-contained and under the control of government planning, the principle of governmentality created representations that made it possible for international institutions to work toward the results they promised. For Ferguson, these approaches are blind to internal politics and have therefore the effect of depoliticizing the state. In Ferguson's words, "because government is the tool for planning and implementing economic and social policy, representations which ignore the political character of the state and the bureaucracy and downplay political conflicts within the nation-state are the most powerful": James Ferguson, The Anti Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 74. The use Ferguson makes of the term governmentality is different from the one I have proposed in this article.
89. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Twelve Lectures (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
90. See Schmitter, note 29. Scott has found a similar capaciousness in Taylorism, another early-twentieth-century technocratic discourse: "The vision of society in which social conflict was eliminated in favor of technological and scientific imperatives could embrace liberal, socialist, authoritarian, and even communist and fascist solutions": Scott, note 17.
91. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).