GE 319 – The Contemporary World Lesson 3: Global Interstate System and Global Governance PDF

GE 319 – THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD Lesson 3 The Global Interstate System and Global Governance Learning Outcomes  Understand the structure and dynamics of the Interstate System;  Explain the challenges of global governance in the 21st century;  Identify possible solutions to the problems i...

GE 319 – THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD Lesson 3 The Global Interstate System and Global Governance Learning Outcomes  Understand the structure and dynamics of the Interstate System;  Explain the challenges of global governance in the 21st century;  Identify possible solutions to the problems in the United Nations structure and dynamics, and;  Equip students with 21" century learning and develop higher order thinking skills that will lead towards a deeper understanding of Global Interstate System and Global Governance as well as articulate a stance on these concepts while demonstrating effectively how these ideas impact the Philippines. Time Frame: 1 Week Overview In a world where there is anarchy, where no overpowering state-like entity imposes rules and order, it is imperative that the nation state impose its sovereign power within it domain. The state is the legitimate user of physical violence (Weber, 1964), through its military and police apparatus, together with its territorial, fiscal, and ideological monopolies (Wallensteen, 2012). The global system is anarchic, and this necessitates global governance to maintain international peace and security. How do we govern in the absence of a cosmopolitan state? This chapter aims to answer this question by focusing on the United Nations as the primary venue and formal arrangement for global governance involving states and non-state actors, In sum, global governance is defined as "the formal and informal arrangements that produce a degree of order and collective action above the state in the absence of a global government," that involve coordination among state and non-state actors (Young, 1999: 2). However, governance in an anarchic setting has been challenged by the self-interest of major states and has exposed the limitations which this lesson intends to discuss. Activity – Experiential Learning (Let’s Get Started!) 1. On a piece of paper, write at least 3 concepts that you remembered the most from modules 1 and 2. Write one sentence description of the concept you chose for each of the three. 2. Grab Bag – after writing the description of the concept you chose for each the three, draw an object from your bag, and explain or illustrate how the object is related to what you have learned. 68 | P a g e  GE 319 – THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD Example: The object grabbed was a mobile phone. The student can then explain that the mobile phone represent either the presence of necessary communication or a breakdown in communications that may result in international conflicts. Analysis (Let’s Think About it!) Now think about the questions below:  How can we explore the interconnectedness of global systems through a closer look at some of the world’s most pressing global issues and their impact on children?  What is the role of the United Nations (UN), and what it has achieved so far in addressing global conflict? Abstraction (Let’s Explore!) Global governance brings together diverse actors to coordinate collective action at the level of the planet. The goal of global governance, roughly defined, is to provide global public goods, particularly peace and security, justice and mediation systems for conflict, functioning markets and unified standards for trade and industry. One crucial global public good is catastrophic risk management – putting appropriate mechanisms in place to maximally reduce the likelihood and impact of any event that could cause the death of 1 billion people across the planet, or damage of equivalent magnitude. The leading institution in charge of global governance today is the United Nations. It was founded in 1945, in the wake of the Second World War, as a way to prevent future conflicts on that scale. The United Nations does not directly bring together the people of the world, but sovereign nation states, and currently c ounts 193 members who make recommendations through the UN General Assembly. The UN’s main mandate is to preserve global security, which it does particularly through the Security Council. In addition the UN can settle international legal issues through the International Court of Justice, and implements its key decisions through the Secretariat, led by the Secretary General. The United Nations has added a range of areas to its core mandate since 1945. It works through a range of agencies and associated institutions particularly to ensure greater shared prosperity, as a desirable goal in itself, and as an indirect way to increase global stability. As a key initiative in that regard, in 2015, the UN articulated the Sustainable Development Goals, creating common goals for the collective future of the planet. Beyond the UN, other institutions with a global mandate play an important role in global governance. Of primary importance are the so-called Bretton Woods institutions: the World Bank and the IMF, whose function is to regulate the global economy and credit markets. Those institutions are not without their critics for this very reason, being often blamed for maintaining economic inequality. 69 | P a g e  GE 319 – THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD Global governance is more generally effected through a range of organizations acting as intermediary bodies. Those include bodies in charge of regional coordination, such as the EU or ASEAN, which coordinate the policies of their members in a certain geographical zone. Those also include strategic or economic initiatives under the leadership of one country – NATO for the US or China’s Belt and Road Initiative for instance – or more generally coordinating defense or economic integration, such as APEC or ANZUS. Finally, global governance relies on looser norm-setting forums, such as the G20, the G7, and the World Economic Forum: those do not set up treaties, but offer spaces for gathering, discussing ideas, aligning policy and setting norms. This last category could be extended to multi-stakeholder institutions that aim to align global standards, for instance the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In summary, global governance is essential but fragmented, complex and little understood. In this context, the key questions raised by the Global Challenges Foundation are, how to reform institutions, how to develop alternative institutions, and how to use the new possibilities of technology to improve governance. The United Nations The United Nations (UN) serves as the primary organization for international cooperation, peace, and security. It is the only international organization that can authorize the use of force against an aggressor. Its primary concern is collective military security (Chapter VII of the UN Charter) through the facilitation of peaceful settlement of disputes among member states (Chapter VI) or by [commanding allegiance of the entire UN membership; sanctions). While its primary objective is to ensure peace and order, the UN as an organization can be a conflict actor in itself or an instrument for action driven by the interests of particular states. With that, it must be emphasized that "UN is a membership- directed organization and the members are all states. This strongly affects what it can do" (Wallensteen, 2012: 241). The United Nations Charter established six principal organs in 1945. These organs are Economic and Social Council, Trusteeship Council, and the International Court of Justice, General Assembly, Security Council, and the Secretariat (Article 7, Chapter III) The Economic and Social Council's (ECOSOC) primary objective is to advance the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. It serves as a gateway of the UN's partnership with the rest of the world for the coordination, policy review, dialogue, recommendations, and implementation of international development goals. The organ is composed of 54 elected members by the General Assembly for overlapping three-year terms (Chapter X). The IMF and WB are specialized agencies and independent organizations that are affiliated with the UN. These two institutions issue yearly reports to the ECOSOC but the WTO, since it is a related agency and not a specialized one, is not required to do the same. UN has little authority over these institutions, and a significant reason to this is that they do not seek for UN funds (Cohn, 2011). Developed countries channel funding to these institutions because of the weighted voting system of the IMF and WB, contrary to the one- nation, one-vote system found in the UN (Cohn, 2011). The Trusteeship Council was established as a main organ of the UN (Chapter XIII) to provide international supervision of Trust Territories that are under the administration of seven member states, to ensure that adequate steps are being made to prepare the peoples of Trust Territories for self-governance. All 11 Trust Territories achieved independence in 1994. The council's operation was suspended and will meet whenever an occasion necessitates it. 70 | P a g e  GE 319 – THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD The International Court of Justice is the United Nation's principal judicial organ (Chapter XIV). Its role is to settle legal disputes between states (contentious cases) and to provide advisory opinions on legal questions referred by the UN organs and specialized agencies, in accordance to international law (adviso proceedings) (International Court of Justice, 2018). The S ecurity Council (SC) is the most potent organ with the power to make legally binding resolutions. It is comprised of the strongest military states and is a concrete manifestation of the reality of power dynamics. The council is composed of 15 members, among them would be the five states which are granted permanent seats by the UN Charter (Chapter V). The five permanent members (PM), also known as the Permanent Five or P-5, are China, France, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States - all of which are allies in the Second World War and are nuclear states. The remaining seats are for the ten elected non-permanent members (NPM) elected by the General Assembly (GA) for overlapping two-year terms. The ten non-permanent seats are divided among regions: five states from African and Asian states, one seat from the Eastern European States, two states from Latin American states and last two from Western European and other States (UNGA Resolution 1991 (XVIII) of 17 December 1963). Article 24 of the UN Charter states that the SC is mandated to act on behalf of the entire UN body to fulfill its primary responsibility for maintaining international or threat; impose economic sanctions and other measures; determine the existence of a peace and security. Functions may include investigating any situation that has the breach of peace and actions to be pursued. The council has the authority to determine breach in international as stipulated in Article 39 under Chapter VII. Crisis situations can be categorized as a threat to the peace,' a 'breach of the peace' or an act of aggression. The UN agenda expanded during the World Summit of 2005 in crises urging international responsibility to protect exposed populations against mass violation of human rights, ethnic cleansing or genocide. State sovereignty is viewed as conditional based on the state's fulfillment of its responsibility to protect its people. If the state is incapable of unwilling to fulfill such responsibility, the intervention of the international community is called upon to address the violations of human rights. The doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle was first was first executed in 2011 in Libya under Muammar Gaddafi with the implementation of a no-fly zone and authorization of air strikes. The military intervention's legal status remains contested and is considered to be "a failed case of international law and R2P since the international community saved Benghazi but lost Libya" (Teimouri & Subedi, 2018: 31) Such measures, however, can challenge the independence of sovereign states. The structural feature of the SC - the power to veto of the PMs to vote against a substantive resolution - serves as a measure to protect states from possible threats to independence 71 | P a g e  GE 319 – THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD and to ensure that the UN will not be used to serve the interest of particular states. Apart from this, there is also a 'sixth veto' or 'hidden veto' of at least seven non-permanent members of the council to prevent the nine needed votes from reaching a decision (Wallensteen, 2012).The voting system ideally aims to foster and emphasize the importance of unity, consensus, and compromise, which were not present in the League of Nations where it was used as an instrument by major powers to target Germany, Italy and Japan, and why countries such as the United States opted out from the membership. However, the UN Charter was never intended to espouse sovereign equality; the structural feature of the UN Charter-veto-is a result of an international compromise allied powers of Second World War (Carswell, 2013). These safeguards to sovereignty - the veto - also serve as a severe problem. When major powers are directly or indirectly involved in a conflict, it renders the body unable to take action in addressing conflict as seen in the inaction of the UN in the Syrian armed conflict. Frequent vetoes would often come from the United States and Russia on issues concerning the Middle East; for China issues related to countries expressing recognition of Taiwan. The P-5 also act outside the UN charter and undermine the interest of the larger UN body as in the case of the US-led military intervention in Iraq in 2003 or the intervention of Russia in Georgia in 2008. The bypassing of the UN renders it as a mere rubberstamp on interventions led by the major powers. This overrepresentation and power concentration has resulted in demands to reform the structures of the SC, which dramatically serves and benefits the interests of the P-5 (Permanent Five). To maintain peace and order, the SC adopts a set of instruments such as sanctions, peacekeeping, and peace enforcement. Sanctions can take in forms of non-military measures of economic, trade or diplomatic sanctions, and targeted measures on groups or particular individuals such as travel bans, financial and diplomatic restrictions. These are enforcement tools applied when diplomatic relations have been fruitless, and the threat to international security persists, and if deemed inadequate, military sanctions may be taken (Articles 41 and 42). Aside from sanctions, peacekeeping is also a useful tool employed by the UN to assist host countries struggling from armed conflict. UN peacekeepers are deployed to provide security to populations and political and peace building support to countries transition from conflict to peace. Ramsbotham et al. (2016) outline the transformation of peacekeeping operations across three phases. The first generation of classical peacekeeping from the 1950s to 1980s and the multidimensional and multilateral second generation were guided by the principles of consent, impartiality, and the non-use of force except for self-defense. However, due to the incapacity of the UN peacekeeping forces in preventing mass killings in cases of the civil war in Yugoslavia and the genocides in Somalia and Rwanda, the UN was forced to rethink its principles. These failures would lead to the development of the third generation of peacekeeping, which departed from the traditional principles of the traditional practice. It viewed the use of force as necessary to fulfill the mandate, the consent of exposed populations as enough consent needed to intervene, and the digress from neutrality when a party refuses to the adhere to the UN mandate. The more robust and more encompassing mandate of the third generation peacekeeping has often been interchanged with the peace enforcement (Ibidem), which involves for direct military intervention as seen in the military intervention Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in the 1990s and Libya in 2011. The blurring of lines between peacekeeping and peace enforcement and the boundary between UN and non-UN peacekeeping has amalgamated UN intervention with war-fighting (Ramsbotham et al., 2016). The current state of UN peacekeeping is marred with concerns over the legitimacy of the military interventions. 72 | P a g e  GE 319 – THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD The General Assembly (GA) is the only UN organ with universal representation, with all 193 member states represented in the body. The GA decides on essential questions with a simple majority, while concerns related to peace and security, budgetary matters, and new membership admissions require a two-thirds majority Yearly, the GA meets for the annual General Assembly Session and general debate participated by several heads of state. Moreover, the body also elects a GA President and 21 Vice-President (elected according to equitable geographical representation) every session for a one-year term. While the assembly may discuss questions relating to international peace and security, it can only make recommendations when a dispute is already being discussed by the SC. In reality, the SC remains to be the primary decision-maker of the UN in all matters of international peace and security However, the "Uniting for Peace Resolution of 1950 ensures that divisive issues in the SC are blocking the members to take action may be assumed by the assembly, to bypass the vetoes of the council and recommend measures including the use of force. This resolution, however, has been criticized for being unconstitutional, as it allowed the assembly to usurp the SC's primary role in maintaining international peace and security (Carswell, 2013). Collective action in times of crises may be coursed through the Security Council and the General Assembly, as well as the Office of the Secretary-General. The Secretary-General is the chief administrative officer of the United Nations Secretariat. As stipulated in Article 97, the SC sends a recommendation to the GA which will appoint the Secretary-General for two five-year terms at most. Article 99 mandates the Secretary-General to call for the attention of the members of the SC on threats to international peace and security, or when the inability of SC members to be responsive or to take responsibility is present. Wallensteen (2012) states that "the three organs of the UN are interrelated in ways which support the viability of the United Nations” (p. 247). The shifting responsibilities of the three organs ensure that the organization will not collapse. However, since the Cold War, the SC has been paramount when it comes to decision making, leaving the other organs with little involvement and influence in international issues (Ramsbotham et al., 2016; Wallensteen, 2012). Reforming the United Nations Reform has only been met once in 1963 when the UNGA voted for the expansion of the UNSC from 11 to 15 member-states (UNGA Resolution of 1963). In 1994, the Open-ended Working Group on the Question of Equitable Representation and Increase in the Membership of the Security Council was created where members were invited to submit comments on the reformation and review of the Security Council. Since then, the negotiations have been fruitless, and it has been dubbed as a "Never-ending Working Group” for the endless years of consecutive deliberations (Gould and Rablen, 2017). Gould and Rablen (2017) state two distinct sets of criticisms relating to the efficiency of the council and the degree of equity regarding power allocation. For the inequity in the country level, the problem lies in overrepresentation of the PM countries, in the regional level, there is lack of representation for Asia and Africa while Eastern and Western Europe are overrepresented - an overt manifestation of the North and South divide (Gould and Rablen, 2016). Several demands have been presented by established of India, Brazil, Germany, and Japan in the G-4 proposal calling for permanent seats in the council, while smaller states demand equitable representation for the South (Hosli & Dorfler, 2017). Contrary to these recurring demands, however, Gould and Rablen (2017) call for caution in pursuing structural reforms related to expand the UNSC membership. Their quantitative appraisal shows that UNSC membership enlargement is no panacea; it permits enhancement of equity in diminishing returns, at the expense of efficiency at increasing returns. They find that reform of requiring two PM votes to constitute a veto would be more promising, in improving both equity and efficiency and break the status quo (Gould & 73 | P a g e  GE 319 – THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD Rablen, 2017). Furthermore, they also see the difficulty in finding a reform that would break the 20-year impasse in the negotiations. The difficulty for the UNSC to include rising powers into the power-sharing arrangement in the UNSC is due to the absence of the prospect for change. According to Hosli and Dorfler (2017), this is brought by not only the diverging preferences of the permanent members but also of structural hurdles in the UN Charter locking in the current institutional arrangement and preventing any reforms from seeping in. These institutional hurdles are the P-5 inclusion requirement and the two-thirds majority requirement in UNGA substantive decisions. The likelihood of reform to succeed depends on the feasibility of acquiring the necessary support and votes. If reforms are unforeseeable in the near future, what can be done? The awakening of the latent potential of the General Assembly to counteract the powers of the Security Council through the "Uniting for Peace" resolution serves as a potential solution. This is imperative especially with two permanent members ensuring that no international intervention would occur in the Syrian armed conflict. As argued by Carswell (2013), "the General Assembly, representing the entire international community, has a moral authority that should not be downplayed, particularly where the issues at hand have a direct impact on state sovereignty" (p. 478). The resolution ought to be fully realized and maximized for it has bestowed the assembly the capacity to check the Security Council in its proper and rightful exercise of veto, in accordance to what is mandated by the UN Charter. NOTE: Please read the attached file in the UVE. re: The Globalization of Economic Relations.pdf Formation of an Asian Interstate System We can obtain matrices of interstate relationship in Asia by accumulating all of the bilateral diplomatic relationship, six cases of which were observed. The matrices render us some findings on the formation and deformation of an interstate system in East Asia. In the mid- 1960s the framework of the Cold War was dominant in the region, where the Communist and the ‘Liberal’ blocs were clearly demarcated. In the mid-1970s, especially after the unification of Vietnam (1976), some kind of an interstate system should have been formed on the initiative of ASEAN member states. However, it was the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam (at the end of 1978) that destroyed the new dynamism. As a result, in the 1980s, Vietnam and Cambodia under Hen Samrin’s and Hun Sen’s premiership respectively came to be isolated from the rest of the Asian countries. The emergent system in Asia became chaotic. However, since the end of the 1980s, Japan, China, Thailand and other ASEAN members practiced a kind of concerted diplomacy, persuading that Vietnam should withdraw its military forces from Cambodia and political factions in Cambodia should cooperate with each other to restore order in an appropriate way. Eventually, the Vietnamese forces withdrew back home in September 1989, and in Cambodia the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) was set up in March 1992 as an intermediary for the nation rebuilding. In September 1993 Kingdom of Cambodia started anew. In the 1990s, locally the détente in the Indo-Chinese Peninsula, and globally the end of the Cold War and the domestic as well as international collapse of the former Soviet bloc brought about the conditions that enabled East Asia to construct an interstate system based on equality. In the late-1990 the system appeared on the surface, provided that Taiwan enjoyed not formal (political) but informal (economic and cultural) relations with all nations in the region and that North Korea had diplomatic relations with Asian nations except South Korea, Japan and Myanmar. Thus in principle a network of diplomatic relations is well established, connecting almost all nations in East Asia. 74 | P a g e  GE 319 – THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD The basis of the Asian system is a modified version of the Western State System, deprived of the function of Western dominance. The Western State System was quintessentially Western-centric, where legitimate actors were limited to the sovereign states in the West. While it brought development, wealth, and state-building to Western nations, it destroyed non-Western nations in terms of politics, economics, society, and culture. The system embraced a practical code of inter-state behavior, comprising a double standard of behavioral code, one applied to Western nations, and the other to non-Western nations. While Western nations acted as equals to each other in principle, they treated polities outside the West in such discriminatory ways as they considered appropriate. The core of the inward code was threefold: national sovereignty, the balance of power, and international law. The ideal type of states was nation-states. Dependent on the outward code, the Westerner would never easily admit that the non-Western nations also have sovereignty. The West regarded non-Western nations as a target of Western mercantilism, colonialism, and imperialism. Moreover, they tried to destroy any indigenous industrialization in the rest of the world, particularly that in Asia which had been far more ahead of the West in this respect until the mid-eighteenth century. Globally speaking, the 1960s was epoch-making in the international system, as was expressed in such significant incidents as the emergence of ‘African years,’ the finding of ‘the North-South problem,’ the impasse of ‘the nuclear stalemate,’ or the assertion of ‘international interdependence.’ In the current international system, the outward code in the Western State System has ceased to function, and the equality principle applies to all the states. (Hatsuse 1993: 279- 288) Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) ASEAN was established on 8 August 1967 in Bangkok by the five original member countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Brunei Darussalam joined on 8 January 1984, Vietnam on 28 July 1995, Laos and Myanmar on 23 July 1997, and Cambodia on 30 April 1999. The ASEAN Declaration states that the aims and purposes of the Association are: 1. to accelerate the economic growth, social progress and cultural development in the region through joint endeavors in the spirit of equality and partnership in order to strengthen the foundation for a prosperous and peaceful community of Southeast Asian nations, and; 2. to promote regional peace and stability through abiding respect for justice and the rule of law in the relationship among countries in the region and adherence to the principles of the United Nations Charter. In 1995, the ASEAN Heads of State and Government re-affirmed that “Cooperative peace and shared prosperity shall be the fundamental goals of ASEAN.” 75 | P a g e  GE 319 – THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD Fundamental Principles The Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) in Southeast Asia, signed at the First ASEAN Summit on 24 February 1976, declared that in their relations with one another, the High Contracting Parties should be guided by the following fundamental principles:  Mutual respect for the independence, sovereignty, equality, territorial integrity, and national identity of all nations;  The right of every State to lead its national existence free from external interference, subversion, or coercion;  Non-interference in the internal affairs of one another;  Settlement of differences or disputes by peaceful manner;  Renunciation of the threat or use of force; and  Effective cooperation among themselves. Political Cooperation The TAC stated that ASEAN political and security dialogue and cooperation should aim to promote regional peace and stability by enhancing regional resilience. Regional resilience shall be achieved by cooperating in all fields based on the principles of self-confidence, self-reliance, mutual respect, cooperation, and solidarity, which shall constitute the foundation for a strong and viable community of nations in Southeast Asia. Some of the major political accords of ASEAN are as follows:  ASEAN Declaration, Bangkok, 8 August 1967  Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality Declaration, Kuala Lumpur, 27 November 1971  Declaration of ASEAN Concord, Bali, 24 February 1976  Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia, Bali, 24 February 1976  ASEAN Declaration on the South China Sea, Manila, 22 July 1992  Treaty on the Southeast Asia Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone, Bangkok, 15 December 1997  ASEAN Vision 2020, Kuala Lumpur, 15 December 1997  Declaration on Joint Action to Counter Terrorism, 5 November 2001  Declaration of ASEAN Concord II, Bali, 7 October 2003  ASEAN Convention on Counter Terrorism (ACCT), 11 January 2007  Cebu Declaration on the Acceleration of the Establishment of an ASEAN Community by 2015, 11 January 2007 ASEAN Declaration on Joint Action to Counter Terrorism, 5 November 2001; and Joint Declaration of the ASEAN Defense Ministers on Promoting Defense Cooperation for a Dynamic ASEAN Community, 25 May 2016. Although ASEAN States cooperate mainly on economic and social issues, the organization has a security function, with a long-discussed program for confidence-building measures and for establishing a nuclear-weapon-free zone in Southeast Asia, with the objective of implementing ASEAN’s 1971 Declaration on a Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality (ZOPFAN), and a Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone (SEANWFZ), which would be a component of ZOPFAN. 76 | P a g e