Tag Archive for: governance

The populist backlash against global institutions may be good for them

Multilateralism is not necessarily under threat from populist anti-globalism.

The rise of populism in democracies does not inevitably threaten the rules-based international order (that tired but vital staple of Australian policy-speak). On the contrary, this populist moment creates opportunities to make international institutions more legitimate and effective by pushing for long-overdue reforms.

In theory, and where they are capable and neutral, global governance bodies from the well-known (such as World Health Organization) to the less high-profile (such as the UN International Telecommunications Union) can coordinate action and set standards on shared global challenges. They are also vital to advancing Australia’s own interests as a relatively vulnerable and trade-dependent power. Yet the purpose and value of multilateral bodies is probably not evident to the average voter. The ‘rules-based international order’ has become an easy but lazy phrase routinely rolled out in our policymaking.

If nothing else, popular scepticism about global governance is an opportunity—even within Canberra policy circles—to work smarter at always making a compelling, practical and positive case for why multilateral engagement matters.

‘Populism’ can signify many things. In foreign policy terms, it refers to domestic political portrayal of global governance bodies as illegitimate technocratic elites, foreign anti-sovereign impositions frustrating the will of the people. Scholars write of a populist ‘backlash’ against the international order, beginning in the mid-2010s, one that is strongest in the very Western powers that have long championed and benefited from that order.

Think of how pro-Brexit advocates scapegoated the European Court of Human Rights—which Britain helped establish and which has no connection to the EU—as a bunch of patronising ‘foreign’ judges out of touch with ordinary Britons’ reasonable concerns about deporting murder-preaching radical clerics.

In his first term as president, Donald Trump pulled the US out of the UN Human Rights Council and the World Health Organisation for domestic political gain. Arch-populist Rodrigo Duterte withdrew the Philippines from the International Criminal Court during his presidency. From Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Viktor Orban in Hungary, the prevailing view is that the past decade’s notable rise in populist rhetoric creates something of an existential crisis for multilateralism.

Yet this prevailing view is questionable. Research from the Australian National University shows that populist political rhetoric at the national level does not necessarily result in actual disengagement at the supra-national level. Even when it does, withdrawal or de-funding (or threats of both) may have unexpected positives. It may catalyse much-needed reform, or stimulate previously complacent partners to revitalise their institutional engagement. For instance, when the US left the Human Rights Council in 2018, northern European countries realised that if they were to draw the US back in, they needed finally to take long-standing (pre-Trump) US claims about imbalance and hypocrisy in the council’s agenda seriously.

Beyond their questionable validity, many commonly held criticisms of populism are also problematic. They caricature populists as bad and international institutions as good, passive victims of some irrational reactionary external pathology. Ironically, intellectual and bureaucratic elites who hold these views fulfil the stereotype (powerfully deployed by populists) of being patronising and unempathetic. Such people dismiss the populist backlash as nonsensical, inexplicable and backward.

This is unhelpful, because policymakers should be asking a very different set of questions. How did such institutions become so vulnerable to populist critiques? How have processes of global law-making, decision-making and governance come to be perceived as remote, as having lost touch with the concerns of ordinary people, their supposedly universal values taken as self-evidently superior? How did the operation and messaging of global governance itself lead to populism? How have international institutions overreached their mandates, underperformed them, or rendered them hostage to powerful undemocratic states?

Finally, the prevailing view is also misleading and distracting. Yes, populism in the West sometimes calls into question or even directly attacks the legitimacy of multilateral bodies. But while populism is a hot topic, it simply isn’t the greatest objective threat to the future of principled, effective and cooperative problem-solving, standard-setting and dialogue-enabling institutions grounded in UN Charter values. In fact, the greater risk, from an Australian and Pacific perspective, is being passive and naive in multilateral arenas while autocratic powers capture and re-shape the institutions and agendas of the post-1945 order.

If populist attacks help to break this Western sleepwalk and to catalyse much-needed engagement, reform and revitalisation of parts of that order, they might unintentionally offset some of the damage their own rhetoric may do the legitimacy of those bodies. At very least, the backlash will force Canberra policymakers to unpack assumptions, orthodoxies and value-propositions currently lazily wrapped in the familiar ‘rules-based international order’ mantra.

Governing a post-Western world

When NATO leaders descend on Vilnius for next week’s annual summit, they will demonstrate that the organisation, newly united behind support for Ukraine, is far from ‘brain dead’, as French President Emmanuel Macron infamously described it in 2019. But beneath NATO’s new vitality lies a problem: the West’s failure to convince the rest of the world that it also has a stake in Ukraine’s defence is emblematic of a broader shift.

In a world of rapidly evolving power dynamics, a silent revolution is reshaping multilateralism and increasingly leaving the West and its institutions behind. To paraphrase India’s foreign minister, the West’s problems are no longer the world’s problems.

This development may come as a surprise to those who, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, had bet on the transformative power of the post-1945 global governance institutions. The West’s instinct was to emphasise the universalist nature of these institutions and expand their scope. The hope was that bringing even recalcitrant countries into the tent would make them less likely to want to burn it down. With enough time, the argument went, they would become what then–US deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick called ‘responsible stakeholders’.

But that forecast failed, not least because China, the main target of the responsible-stakeholder approach, was never forced to choose between integration and revisionism. After being given a seat at the table, it pursued a three-pronged strategy of extracting as much value as it could from global institutions while also preserving its own sovereignty and building parallel institutions. Among these are the BRICS grouping (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which are meant to be alternatives to the G7, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, respectively.

Not until the 2008 global financial crisis did the West wake up to this reality. Since then, it has mirrored China’s own practices, attempting to advance its interests and values with a similar three-pronged strategy. The United States, for example, has re-engaged with the United Nations to push back on Chinese influence while also building its own parallel institutions—from the EU–US Trade and Technology Council to the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (with Australia, India and Japan) and AUKUS (with Australia and the United Kingdom).

Western governments are also taking pains to create more connective tissue between Euro-Atlantic and Asia–Pacific institutions, such as by inviting Asian partners to NATO summits. But most striking is the new focus on exclusive climate clubs, carbon border taxes and friend-shoring. By pursuing these ideas, the West has further undermined the post-1945 institutions, making them—and thus itself—even less credible in the eyes of the rest of the world.

The problem with this zero-sum approach, of course, is that it could make solving pressing global challenges even more difficult. When it comes to climate change, the war in Ukraine and the threat of future pandemics, the legacy global-governance institutions have proven to be incapable of delivering cooperative solutions, partly because of their loss of credibility.

Many of us would wish that the 1990s model of global governance had worked, but it’s hard to deny that the old ‘responsible stakeholder’ ethic now needs to give way to a new ethic that is better suited to a multipolar world.

Unfortunately, Westerners will need to reduce their ambitions for universalist institutions, treating them less as sources of solutions and more as sites for sharing information and facilitating conflict management and resolution. The UN can’t avert competition between major powers, but it can help establish guardrails. The world desperately needs a greater effort to make war—and not just over Taiwan—less likely, and it still needs diplomacy to end conflicts like the one in Ukraine. The goal should be what US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan calls competition without catastrophe.

Global governance needs to be reconceived for an age of non-cooperation. On climate change and Covid-19, multilateralism has achieved only modest successes, whereas the biggest advances have been driven by rivalry and competition. It would be better to have cooperation, but where it is not possible, perhaps the same kind of incentive structures could work in other areas.

We must also recognise that much of the action is now happening outside Western-led institutions. In the domain of peacemaking and security, the West has already started to come to terms with the realities of a more fragmented world. In Syria, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, non-Western powers are playing a greater role as intermediaries. The West has generally yielded to this new logic, engaging where necessary, but usually on terms guided by local realities instead of its own wishful thinking.

Rather than dwelling on whom to invite into Western-led processes, Western countries should be looking outward. Which of the new non-Western institutions and initiatives does it make sense to engage with, and in what domains (regulatory, standard-setting, and so forth) can Western powers help to achieve favourable outcomes?

Coming to terms with the new multipolar world doesn’t mean cutting ourselves off from everyone else. Even as the West builds new institutions with like-minded countries, it must continue to engage constructively with non-Western players. Cooperation on global issues can be compatible with competition. By being clear-eyed about its interests and capabilities, the West can leverage its still-considerable heft to much greater effect. That will bring better results than a retreat into solipsism ever could.

The double threat to liberal democracy

The crisis of liberal democracy is roundly decried today. Donald Trump’s presidency, the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the electoral rise of other populists in Europe have underscored the threat posed by ‘illiberal democracy’—a kind of authoritarian politics featuring popular elections but little respect for the rule of law or the rights of minorities.

But fewer analysts have noted that illiberal democracy—or populism—is not the only political threat. Liberal democracy is also being undermined by a tendency to emphasise ‘liberal’ at the expense of ‘democracy’. In this kind of politics, rulers are insulated from democratic accountability by a panoply of restraints that limit the range of policies they can deliver. Bureaucratic bodies, autonomous regulators and independent courts set policies, or they are imposed from outside by the rules of the global economy.

In his new and important book The people vs. democracy, the political theorist Yascha Mounk calls this type of regime—in apt symmetry with illiberal democracy—‘undemocratic liberalism’. He notes that our political regimes have long stopped functioning like liberal democracies and increasingly look like undemocratic liberalism.

The European Union perhaps represents the apogee of this tendency. The establishment of a single market and monetary unification in the absence of political integration has required delegation of policy to technocratic bodies such as the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the European Court of Justice. Decision-making increasingly takes place at considerable distance from the public. Even though Britain is not a member of the eurozone, the Brexiteers’ call to ‘take back control’ captured the frustration many European voters feel.

The United States has experienced nothing quite like this, but similar trends have made many people feel disenfranchised. As Mounk notes, policymaking is the province of an alphabet soup of regulatory bodies—from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Food and Drug Administration. Independent courts’ use of their prerogative of judicial review to promote civil rights, expand reproductive freedom and introduce many other social reforms have encountered hostility among considerable segments of the population. And the rules of the global economy, administered through international arrangements such as the World Trade Organization or the North American Free Trade Agreement, are widely perceived as being rigged against ordinary workers.

The value of Mounk’s book is to highlight the importance of both of liberal democracy’s constitutive terms. We need restraints on the exercise of political power to prevent majorities (or those in power) from riding roughshod over the rights of minorities (or those not in power). But we also need public policy to be responsive and accountable to the preferences of the electorate.

Liberal democracy is inherently fragile because reconciling its terms does not produce a natural political equilibrium. When elites have sufficient power, they have little interest in reflecting the preferences of the public at large. When the masses mobilise and demand power, the resulting compromise with the elites rarely produces sustainable safeguards to protect the rights of those not represented at the bargaining table. Thus, liberal democracy has a tendency to deteriorate into one or the other of its perversions—illiberal democracy or undemocratic liberalism.

In our paper ‘The political economy of liberal democracy’, Sharun Mukand and I discuss the underpinnings of liberal democracy in terms similar to those Mounk uses. We emphasise that societies are divided by two potential cleavages: an identity split that separates a minority from the ethnic, religious, or ideological majority, and a wealth gap that pits the rich against the rest of society.

The depth and alignment of these divisions determine the likelihood of various political regimes. The possibility of liberal democracy is always undercut by illiberal democracy at one end and what we call ‘liberal autocracy’ at the other, depending on whether the majority or the elite retain the upper hand.

Our framework helps to highlight the fortuitous circumstances under which liberal democracy emerges. In the West, liberalism preceded democracy: separation of powers, freedom of expression and the rule of law were already in place before elites agreed to expand the franchise and submit to popular rule. The ‘tyranny of the majority’ remained a major concern for elites, and was countered in the US, for example, with an elaborate system of checks and balances, effectively paralyzing the executive for a long time.

Elsewhere, in the developing world, popular mobilisation occurred in the absence of a liberal tradition or liberal practices. Liberal democracy was rarely a sustainable outcome. The only exceptions seem to be relatively egalitarian and highly homogeneous nation-states such as South Korea, where there are no obvious social, ideological, ethnic or linguistic divisions for autocrats of either kind—illiberal or undemocratic—to exploit.

Today’s developments in Europe and the US suggest the vexing possibility that liberal democracy may have been a passing phase there as well. As we rue liberal’s democracy’s crisis, let us not forget that illiberalism is not the only threat that confronts it. We must find a way around the pitfalls of insufficient democracy as well.

Securing the digital transition

Every year, the World Economic Forum publishes a Global Risks Report, which distills the views of experts and policymakers from around the world. This year, cybersecurity is high on the list of global concerns, as well it should be. In 2017, the world witnessed a continued escalation in cyberattacks and security breaches that affected all parts of society. There is no reason to believe 2018 will be different.

The implications are far-reaching. Most immediately, we must grapple with governance of the internet as well as on the internet. Otherwise, the opportunities afforded by digital technologies could be squandered in a regulatory and legal arms race, complete with new borders and new global tensions.

But there’s a broader issue: For all the speed with which we are racing into the digital age, efforts to ensure global stability are lagging far behind. In many respects, our world is still organised within a Westphalian framework. States with (mostly) recognised borders are the building blocks of the international system. Their interactions, and their willingness to share sovereignty, define the existing world order.

But globalisation has gradually changed the realities on the ground. And while its force—waxing and waning since the decades preceding World War I—is nowadays being tempered by geopolitics, and by the impulse to slow the pace of technological change, the digital transformation will propel globalisation forward, albeit in a different form. After all, the internet’s key feature is its non-territorial architecture. By breaking down traditional borders, it poses a direct challenge to the very foundation of the Westphalian order.

This is a profoundly positive development, because it facilitates free expression and the cross-border exchange of goods and ideas. But, as with all human inventions, the internet can be abused, as evidenced by the rise in cybercrime, online harassment, hate speech, incitement to violence and online radicalisation.

Minimising such abuses in the years ahead will require close international cooperation to establish and enforce common rules. There can be no solution in isolation, because no single government can tackle the problem on its own.

Over time, an alphabet soup of organisations has emerged to bring together the technical community, businesses, governments and civil society. And bodies such as ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) now provide de facto governance of the internet’s architecture. But governance on the internet is far more complex. Here, the institutional landscape is both crowded and unsettled.

It is crowded because numerous actors are competing to shape the normative framework of cyberspace. Many countries have multiple relevant ministries regulating online activity. Websites and online services have vastly different community guidelines and terms of service. Public- and private-sector developers determine the design of the internet’s changing infrastructure. And numerous civil-society groups are proposing their own sets of cyber principles, while international organisations attempt to develop multilateral agreements.

The landscape remains unsettled because intergovernmental cooperation has largely stalled, owing to conflicting priorities among countries. Making matters worse, there are still too few dedicated spaces for different stakeholders to interact and devise operational solutions.

In the absence of mutually agreed frameworks, governments will tend to adopt short-term unilateral measures—mandatory data localisation, excessive content restrictions, intrusive surveillance—to address immediate concerns, or as a response to domestic political pressure. But by doing so, they could fuel a dynamic that heightens, rather than minimises, international tensions.

Digital governance touches on everything from cybersecurity to the economy to human rights, and uncertainty about which laws apply in different jurisdictions weakens enforcement in all of them, leaving everyone worse off. Moreover, measures to address one dimension can easily affect the others, which means that uncoordinated and rash policy decisions can have negative consequences across the board.

When I had the honour of chairing the Global Commission on Internet Governance, our 2016 report highlighted these risks, and called for ‘a new social compact’ to ensure that the internet of the future will be accessible, inclusive, secure and trustworthy.

Progress since then has been limited. Because efforts at the United Nations to establish global cyber rules have reached an impasse, alternative initiatives will have to drive the process forward.

Fortunately, the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace recently issued an important ‘Call to protect the public core of the internet’. And the upcoming Global Internet and Jurisdiction Conference in Ottawa will provide another valuable opportunity for policymakers to continue working towards solutions.

Such technical and legalistic proceedings are essential for shaping the global transition from the industrial to the digital era. To avoid a legal arms race, policymakers will need to develop a smart approach to a variety of tricky issues, from mutual assistance frameworks for investigations to the role of domain-name administrators and service providers in addressing abusive speech online.

Achieving policy coherence across jurisdictions should be a top priority. Doing so will require direct, sustained interactions among all stakeholders. Only then can we create a framework to preserve the cross-border nature of the internet, protect human rights, fight abuse and sustain a truly global digital economy.

As Kofi Annan said back in 2004, ‘In managing, promoting and protecting [the internet’s] presence in our lives, we need to be no less creative than those who invented it.’ Westphalia is behind us. What comes next is up to us.

Are we in caretaker mode already?

With all the ‘Days of Our Lives’ action in parliament a new Defence White Paper seems so far down the list of political priorities as to seem almost irrelevant.

Prime Minister Gillard announced the election date of September 14 at the end of January this year, making it the longest election campaign in the nation’s history. Thanks to the democratic system that Australia operates under, a caretaker period begins for all government agencies as the campaign enters its final throes.

It’s worth understanding what that means. Here’s the formal version: Read more