Governing Beyond the Nation-State
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t t American Institute for Contemporary German Studies The Johns Hopkins University AICGS Research Report No. 11 GOVERNING BEYOND THE NATION-STATE Global Public Policy, Regionalism Research Repor Research Repor or Going Local? Edited by Carl Lankowski American Institute for Contemporary German Studies The Johns Hopkins University AICGS Research Report No. 11 GOVERNING BEYOND THE NATION-STATE Global Public Policy, Regionalism or Going Local? Edited by Carl Lankowski i The American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS) is a center for advanced research, study, and discussion on the politics, culture, and society of the Federal Republic of Germany. Established in 1983 and affiliated with The Johns Hopkins University but governed by its own Board of Trustees, AICGS is a privately incorporated institute dedicated to independent, critical, and comprehensive analysis and assessment of current German issues. Its goals are to help develop a new generation of American scholars with a thorough understanding of contemporary Germany, deepen American knowledge and understanding of current German developments, contribute to American policy analysis of problems relating to Germany, and promote interdisciplinary and comparative research on Germany. Executive Director: Jackson Janes Research Director: Carl Lankowski Development Director: Laura Rheintgen Board of Trustees, Cochair: Steven Muller Board of Trustees, Cochair: Harry J. Gray The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) alone. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. ©1999 by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies ISBN 0-941441-48-2 This AICGS Research Report is made possible through a generous grant from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. Additional copies are available at $5.00 each to cover postage and processing from the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, Suite 420, 1400 16th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036-2217. Telephone 202/332-9312, Fax 202/265-9531, E-mail: [email protected], Web: http://www.aicgs.org ii C O N T E N T S FOREWORD............................................................................................v ABOUT THE AUTHORS.......................................................................ix AICGS GLOBALIZATION PROJECT TEAM.........................................xi GLOBALIZATION AND DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE: GLOBAL PUBLIC POLICY AND TRISECTORAL NETWORKS Wolfgang H. Reinicke and Jan Martin Witte.............................................1 GLOBALIZATION WITHOUT CITIZENS: A CRITIQUE OF REINICKE’S GLOBAL PUBLIC POLICY WITH A COMPARATIVE LOOK AT GERMANY AND THE EUROPEAN UNION Thomas O. Hueglin.................................................................................41 PROTECTING THE LOCAL GLOBALLY Michael H. Shuman................................................................................65 MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE: GERMAN FEDERALISM AND THE EUROPEAN UNION Renate Mayntz.....................................................................................101 SOCIAL DEMOCRACY, GLOBALIZATION AND GOVERNANCE: WHY IS THERE NO EUROPEAN LEFT PROGRAM IN THE EU? Christopher S. Allen...............................................................................115 iii iv F O R E W O R D This volume is the companion to AICGS Research Report No. 10, Responses to Globalization in Germany and the United States: Seven Sectors Compared, which includes chapters on labor markets, immigration, welfare institutions, taxation, innovation, education and infrastructure. Though governance was conceived as an eighth, integral sector of this project, these five papers were first presented and discussed individually and as a group at a special workshop in March 1999, and for that reason are published separately. As these lines are being written, thousands of citizens from many member states of the World Trade Organization have assembled on the streets of Seattle, Washington, in a largely peaceful protest, dramatizing the challenges of governance beyond the nation-state in the era of globalization. For the present, Germany, represented by the European Union, and the United States are key players and coarchitects of the WTO regime. Each supports access by elements of civil society to WTO consultative bodies, though neither the policies nor the procedures of inclusion satisfy the trade union, environment and other NGO organizers of the protest action. The gap between those networks giving rise to a global “society” and the organization of a world “community” continue to be wide enough to make “world community” seem like an oxymoron. Accordingly, a vital question for the policy community is how to organize governance in the long transition during which erosion of national sovereignty is more likely to be perceived as a threat than as a promise. This is the question that animates the papers included in this volume. Three quite different approaches to the governance problem are represented here. They range from “agnostic” to positive with respect to the benefits of globalization. For Wolfgang Reinicke and Jan Martin Witte, globalization means that in some critical policy areas, state sovereignty has become essentially devoid of meaning. To secure the benefits of globalization, public policy should be reconceptualized in a non-territorial frame and the growing gap between public expectations and the actual span of state control must be addressed if a legitimation crisis is to be avoided. Ruling out any recapturing of effective sovereignty, the authors instead advance the notion of diffusing mechanisms for monitoring implementation of policy through the network of actors comprising the action system in question, for example in the area of financial institutions. Such a strategy of “global public policy”—going with rather than against the grain of globalization—requires explicit acknowledgement of loss of (operational) sovereignty. v In his contribution on federalism, Thomas Hueglin offers critical commentary on the Reinicke/Witte position, pointing to unresolved questions about technical capacities for coordination as well as problems of moral hazard within specific action systems. Moreover, as a strategy geared pragmatically to the functioning of specific sectors, the problem of inter-jurisdictional competition for tax bases does not fit easily into the global public policy paradigm, nor does the connected problem of systemic marginalization of society’s already weak groups dependent on state social policy. The thrust of Hueglin’s argument is that there can be no acceptable substitute for a well-ordered system of intergovernmental relations. Regional associations such as the EU and NAFTA comprise an intermediate path to transnational governance, without offering a solution for action systems that extend beyond the regions. I will return to the regional approach momentarily. Policies aimed at transforming the character of globalization may provide another partial answer to the conundrum of global governance. Following up his earlier studies on the worldwide connections of local governments, Michael Shuman’s “bottom up” approach in this volume suggests the potential for a strategy of community self-reliance. In a statement for presentation at a special seminar convened by the Portuguese government in the run-up to its assumption of the EU Council Presidency in December 1999, Shuman succinctly makes his case: “Rooting capital in community—banks and businesses alike—is perhaps the only way to expand global capitalism while also addressing the concerns expressed by tens of thousands of skeptics of globalization marching this week in the streets of Seattle.” There may be no choice to “going global” on the basis of “going local,” but the condition of globality already exists and the option of becoming self-reliant first is not open to communities. In any discussion of a regional approach to transnational governance, there is no way to exclude discussion of the EU. In her contribution, Renate Mayntz discusses the special position Germany occupies in EU constitutional development with respect to articulating Länder interests in Brussels, thereby providing a practical example of linking the sub-national territorial units and supranational governance. One question that arises out of this experience is the long-term viability of a supranational regime that accommodates sub-national units as different in status and function as the German Länder and the French or Italian regions. More broadly, Mayntz delineates the peculiarities of European governance, which “is characterized by a pronounced horizontal dispersion of functions that creates special coordination needs and blurs clear distinctions between contrasting logics.” Notably, one value associated with the lack of a government at the EU level is the resulting relative ease with which member states with quite different socioeconomic and constitutional structures can participate in the policy process. vi In addition to being a laboratory of transnational governance, the existence of the EU also raises the question of transatlantic relations, which must be regarded as a special case of cooperation in agenda-setting for global governance issues (most especially with respect to the WTO) and bilateral arrangements under the New Transatlantic Agenda. This is a theme AICGS is developing in parallel with this globalization project in another publication containing entries whose subject matter ranges from competition policy to