The Postcard Project:

Future Directions in International and Comparative Administration

The Original Six Postcards

Introduction
Postcards from
... Paris
... Seoul
... Bamako
... New York City
... Rio de Janeiro
... Washington, DC
References

Further Contributions

... Derick Brinkerhoff
... Marc Lindenberg
... Fred Riggs
... Ted Thomas
... Tjip Walker

Contribute a Postcard
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Globalization of Governance

The year 2000 marks not only the start of a new century and millennium, but also a turning point in world history that has, in fact, already started. Its dominant forces are well captured by the word globalization which symbolizes a fundamental transformation in the role of the post-Westphalian state. Public Administration as the study of governance in America, and Comparative Administration with its complementary focus on the administrative problems of new states, have both been state-centered, taking for granted the salience and sovereign role of independent states in a world-system of states. Regardless of how the political institutions of these states were formed, we have assumed that they all required public bureaucracies able to attend to the most important needs of their citizens in an increasingly complicated age of industrialization and interdependence.
That assumption has informed our analysis of the American system as though it were a prototype that could serve as an exemplar for all the new states born out of the collapse of the modern empires that had first occupied the world and then shredded it by their great inter-imperial wars. 

The end of the "Cold War" actually brings this period in world history to a close. Although during the past half-century we learned to focus on the ideological aspects of the gigantic power struggles among the remaining super-powers, this focus blinded us to a more far-reaching transformation whose true character is only now beginning to become apparent. We have tended to assume that the collapse of the Soviet Union would launch a "new world order" in which democracy and capitalism would prevail and the United States would now, as the sole super power in the world, be enabled to play the role of peace maker and exemplar for the global development of a world system marked by continuously expanding prosperity, peace, and justice. 

Unfortunately for Americans, this rosy illusion is scarcely shared by anyone in other countries of the world, and many Americans are themselves becoming disillusioned by the rise of transnational crime, ethnic protest movements, vast environmental challenges, floods of refugees and apparently insoluble nationalist conflicts and local wars. This disillusionment manifests itself in a new kind of isolationism well reflected in the unwillingness of Congress to pay its share of the costs of the United Nations even though we have come increasingly to depend on its umbrella to implement costly peace-keeping and humanitarian projects throughout the world. The technological revolution best exemplified by the INTERNET, the World Wide Web and the universal availability of person-to-person linkages for every imaginable purpose by means of instantaneous e-mail access to individuals located anywhere in the world. Increasingly states are side-lined as useful but not essential players in the games of world politics. 

The INTERNET well symbolizes the trans-state networks that by-pass state authority and create new sodalities of interest and power most conspicuously manifested in the rise of gigantic multi-national corporations, often headquartered in tax havens and money laundering archipelagos of subvisible power, thereby undermining the capacity of responsible states to fund the necessary services that we have learned to count on as prerequisites of a civil society. The MNCs are augmented by powerful ethnic nations whose diasporas create global structures of power that challenge the fragile authority of new authoritarian regimes whose inability to maintain order and provide basic public services merely intensifies the anarchy, crime, and protest movements that make many of the new "quasi-states" essentially non-viable. The patent inability of contemporary states to cope effectively with a host of gigantic problems created by the interdependence of a global industrializing world system heightens momentous trends that students and practitioners of public administration alike need to think about, analyze and try to deal with. To think that we can continue to rely on stale and outmoded ways of understanding our situation in the world is, indeed, to blind ourselves to the emerging realities of globalization as an overwhelming reality. 

To be more concrete, can we not visualize the new problems and possibilities that will confront us in the coming years, decades, century and millennium? Let me offer a few suggestions. 

1. The Decline of States. The state as we have known it will scarcely wither away, but many of its functions and resources will be transformed and replaced. Increasingly, its powers will move to trans-state organizations created by governments and by non-governmental groups (both commercial and not-for profit in character). This makes the comparative study and administration of international organizations of all kinds increasingly fundamental to the survival of our global world system. Ferrel Heady in the recent SICA issue of PAR stressed the great importance for comparativists of paying serious attention to the organization design and functions of international organizations. I can only applaud and support his appeal: globalization now makes it even more urgent than it has been in the past. These trans-state organizations face huge problems that hinge on the activities of non-state actors of many kinds that states by themselves can no longer manage. Useful as administrative reform may be, it no longer offers solutions for many of the most urgent problems confronting our world today. 

Consider that today's news includes a report of U.S. efforts to help Iran, despite our antipathy for this Islamic regime, to cope with drug trafficking across its frontiers with Afghanistan. Neither Iran nor the U.S. nor any established IGO is able to stop the growing flood of dangerous drugs reaching the world markets that are well organized globally by illegal syndicates whose power has become a growing threat to the health and good order of many states, including our own. Of course, this is not a new problem -- we have simply become aware that it not only involves our familiar frontiers in the Western hemisphere but it is, indeed, a global problem. 

2. The Rise of Sub-State Entities. The authority of independent states will also, increasingly, devolve to sub-state authorities. This is already apparent in the United States in the insistent demands, both locally and in Congress, to devolve more functions to state, city, and local governments each of which, incidentally, has become increasingly active on its own authority in world affairs. The rising demand by indigenous peoples and other non-state nations for autonomy or independence as "nations within a nation" is encouraged by the United Nations and by many of our own citizens who have come to recognize the gross injustices that were historically imposed on the peoples we conquered and abused. 

The new knowledge of how to organize, to use the INTERNET, to acquire weapons, and to coordinate global struggles in a rapidly evolving network of ethno-national movements will make their demands increasingly irresistible. Public administration needs, therefore, to take into account an increasingly complex network of cross-cutting jurisdictions that go far beyond traditional notions of federalism to create what I have begun to think of as a "syntropic" world system. 

3. Syntropy. This is not the notion of a "world federation of states" which some of our idealists have long pressed for as an antidote to the anarchy of increasingly violent world wars. Indeed, any such federation would probably collapse from its own internal contradictions, or generate some kind of global authoritarianism. By contrast, a syntropic system involves a host of autonomous and self-powered organizational structures that are able to take form, manage their own affairs, negotiate with each other, sometimes engage in violent confrontations but often evolve workable compromises and mutual adaptations. In a way, this is just the kind of world system (order? disorder?) that we already have. We will not, I think, have any more world wars, and major clashes between "civilizations" is a fantasy based on the illusion that a new basis for gigantic power struggles is bound to emerge. We tend to remain preoccupied with conditions in a world that is already dead, but we are too close to the emergent new world system to discern its real shape. 

I do not see any likelihood that any states in the world today will aggregate enough power and ambition to create new empires, no super states or mega-polities are likely to emerge. Instead, we are already living in a syntropic world (a world that links synthesis with entropy). Many of our colleagues have already started to recognize and talk about this phenomenon under the heading of "globalization." 

My personal vision of the challenge facing comparative and international administration is to face up to the implications of such a system. How can the officers (military and civil) who are working in a host of trans-state, sub-state, and state organizations understand and master the tasks they need to perform? In the past, each of them has accepted a set of prescribed duties based on the policies of whatever organization, at each of these levels, provides the context for their employment. Rarely, however, will it be possible during the coming years for these "glocal" bureaucrats (the office holders of a wide range of global and local organizations -- including states, as residual if battered strongholds of power) to focus on the tasks prescribed for them by formal political authorities. Instead, we need to recognize that office holders (bureaucrats) are themselves the bearers of a kind of personal sovereignty that compels them to take stock of their own actions in terms of a higher morality anchored in global accountability, and at the same time to become increasingly aware of the competing sensitivities and obligations of the officers of other organizations with which they must interact. 

In such a context, office holders are also power holders -- their interests and capabilities interface with a wide range of overlapping and competing organizations and agencies, at all levels. Whether or not our syntropic world will survive and satisfy the basic needs of a rapidly growing world population, providing for the survival of a global environment that has become increasingly threatened by the mining of resources and pervasive pollution, is a question specialists on Public Administration, both in academia and government, now need to think about most seriously. 

The SICA-sponsored mini-symposium in Seattle has been organized in response to a manifesto that points to "Sweeping global trends [that] are forcing public administrators here in the US to confront such new issues as transnational organizations and cultural differences." I applaud this initiative but urge participants to think even more broadly and fundamentally about the far-reaching transformations of states and the system of states that globalization is producing. We are, indeed, on the hinge of a major transition in world history. We need to think more profoundly about the fundamental changes this transition will necessitate in the way organizations at all levels, throughout the world, will have to manage their activities. Among these changes will be far-reaching transformations in the design and structure of the American system of government. This means that we can no longer take our own forms of governance for granted as a kind of safe haven for orthodoxy or a model for others to follow -- instead, we need to examine ourselves as well as the rest of the world in a global framework that is rapidly replacing the fading world of Westphalia. We are, indeed, on the threshold of a new era that compels us to think and act with far more imaginative creativity than ever before.