Understanding global security - Peter Hough

TOWARDS GLOBAL SECURITY
simply cannot satisfactorily be carried out at even the regional inter-state level. The
new medievalism problem, which has occurred as a result of the natural ‘drift’ towards
multi-level governance, would also be resolved by a clear demarcation of responsibilities,
in place of the ad hoc development of patchy international and global
governance. The application of subsidiarity to global governance would not merely
be about the sanctioning of ever-greater authority to remote institutions, of the
form which has provoked a prominent ‘anti-globalization’ social movement. The
decentralization of certain international political institutions and policies would also
be a consequence, where it is clear that policies may be better formulated and
implemented at regional level. Howse and Nicolaidis, for example, argue that the
principal target of anti-globalization activist anger, the World Trade Organization,
would gain greater legitimacy if subsidiarity were applied to its operations. Through
reform, more of its decisions could be taken at state or regional level and a clear
process found for resolving clashes between its rules and international environmental
law, thus disarming the most significant criticisms of its workings (Howse and
Nicolaidis 2003). In military politics the difficulties in getting global solidarity for
collective security could be offset by the unambiguous delegation of such responsibilities
to regional bodies like NATO or ECOWAS, as is already happening in an
ad hoc and controversial manner.
The partial nature of global governance has served to inhibit functional spillover
from occurring naturally. Clear injustice in a political system holds back its progress
towards a better system by reducing the inclination of the disadvantaged to participate
in the global discourse necessary for engineering improvement (Habermas
2001). Apel, like Habermas a firm believer in the existence of universalist ethics, has
rationalized this setback in the progression of cosmopolitanist moral governance.
Apel contends that the natural equilibrium between human actions and ethics, which
had seen human rights policy develop alongside the proliferation of greater
transnational interactions, has eroded due to the dark side of globalization becoming
more apparent in poverty and environmental degradation. The dominance of economic
liberalism in the global political discourse has hindered the development
of the natural human ethic of social responsibilty. Apel considers that for a more
rounded ‘planetary macro ethics’ to emerge from the shadow cast by economic
liberalism a global ‘communications community’ needs to develop, in which the
private sphere of human values is able to take its place alongside the public sphere
of profit-based rationality inherent in trading rules (Apel 1991). Hence the dark side
of globalization necessitates permitting the full emergence of the light side, rather
than a retreat from globalism.
Global ethics exist, and have gradually become more established, but they are
undermined by the lop-sided nature of recent global political developments driven
by economic gain (which, of course, has a light side as well as a dark side). The
development of human rights law is testimony to this and plenty of evidence shows
that social responsibility is not absent in the political world so much as stifled by
the focus on the freeing-up of trade at the highest levels of governance. A survey of
international organizations by Social Policy specialists led by Deacon in the late 1990s
concluded that: ‘[t]he old world of unreconstructed fundamentalist liberalism
associated with the IMF is on the wane within the global discourse’ (Deacon et al.
1997: 200). The reform of the World Bank, from being an advocate of ‘unreconstructed
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