Abstract
The religious dimension of human experience has been generally excluded from the serious study and practice of governance for several centuries, especially in the West. The exclusion is definitely a consequence of the European Enlightenment and its endorsement of autonomous reason as the only reliable guide for human affairs, as well as its general tendency to ground politics upon a secular ethos, a principal feature of which is the separation of church and state. Of course, as with many questionable moves in history, this development had positive aspects and was rooted in a particular set of historical circumstances in Europe at the time of the formation of the modern state system, a process whose origin is difficult to locate with precision but is often, although somewhat arbitrarily, dated to coincide with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
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Notes
Hugo Grotius, “Prolegomena,” in On the Law of War and Peace (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1925), p. 20.
Hedley Bull, The Anarchic Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
See Myres McDougal and associates, Studies in World Public Order (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960);
McDougal and Harold D. Lasswell, Jurisprudence for a Free Society, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: New Haven Publishers, 1992); see esp. vol. 2.
Grenville Clark and Louis B. Sohn, World Peace through World Law, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966).
For representative works from WOMP over the period of its existence see Saul H. Mendlovitz, ed., On the Creation of a Just World Order (New York: Free Press, 1975);
R. B. J. Walker, One World/Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1988);
Richard Falk, On Humane Governance: Toward a New Global Politics (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995);
and Ali Mazrui, A World Federation of Cultures (New York: Free Press, 1976).
But see articulate argument in favor of world government in David Ray Griffin, “Global Government: Objections Considered,” in Toward Genuine Global Governance: Critical Reactions to Our Global Neighborhood, edited by Errol E. Harris and James A. Yunker (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), pp. 57–68.
For negative assessments of globalization see John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (New York: New Press, 1998);
and Richard Falk, Predatory Globalization: A Critique (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1999).
Whether this constraint is objective or “constructed” is beside the point. For helpful discussion see Grahame Thompson and Paul Hirst, The Myth of Globalization (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1996).
Also George de Martino, Global Economy, Global Justice: Theoretical Objections and Polity Alternatives to Neoliberalism (New York: Routledge, 2000).
The regulative mechanisms are subtle and elusive: the logic of competitiveness that exerts pressure on production costs, especially labor; the neoliberal orientation of elites; and the veto power exercised by financial and business sectors due to the mobility of capital. For further discussion see Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Expectations (New York: Norton, 1994).
For helpful study of variable state adaptations to the challenges of globalization, see David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformation: Politics, Economics and Culture (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1999).
For helpful discussions, see contributions to “The Globalization of Liberalism?”, a special issue of Millennium 24 (1995): 377–576. Also Yoshikazu Sakamoto, ed., Global Transformation: Challenges to the State System (Tokyo: UNU Press, 1994).
See Barry R. Posen and Andrew L. Ross, “Competing Visions for U.S. Grand Strategy,” International Security 21 (1996/1997): 5–53.
See Immanuel Wallerstein, After Liberalism (New York: New Press, 1995).
For documentation see United Nations Development Program, Human Development Reports (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990–1999).
See Vito Tanzi and Ludger Schuknecht, Public Spending in the 20th Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000); see also interpretation of findings in Martin Wolfe, “The Golden Age of Government,” Financial Times, 12 July 2000, p. 17.
Stephan Schmidheiny and the Business Council for Sustainable Development, Changing Course: A Global Business Perspective on Development and the Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992);
also Richard Falk, “Environmental Protection in an Era of Globalization,” Yearbook of International Environmental Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 3–25.
See Daniel Archibugi and David Held, eds., Cosmopolitan Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1995);
David Held, Democracy and Global Governance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
For eye-opening discussions see P. Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Viking, 1999);
see an essay by a founder of Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” WIRED 8, no. 4 (April 2000): pp. 238–47.
Robert Jay Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyō, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999);
Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).
See Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990);
R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
Hendrick Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3 vols. (New York: Academic Press, 1974–1989);
Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review, 1989);
Samir Amin, Rereading the Postwar Period: An Intellectual Itinerary (New York: Monthly Review, 1994).
For example, see Bruce Russett, Controlling the Sword: the Democratic Governance of National Security (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 119–145;
Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993);
for critical view see Joanne S. Gowa, Ballots and Bullets: The Elusive Democratic Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
This argument is developed in Richard Falk, “Siege of State: Will Globalization Win Out?” International Affairs 73, no. 1 (January 1997): 123–136.
For further clarification see Paul Wapner, Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996);
Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Global Civil Society and Global Environmental Governance (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996);
Richard Falk, Explorations at the Edge of Time: The Prospects for World Order (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992).
The work of Hans Küng has moved in this direction in recent years. See Hans Küng, Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic (New York: Crossroads, 1991), and chapter 6 of this book.
For a closely comparable revisioning of religious consciousness, see the important book by Charlene Spretnak, The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World (Reading, PA: Addison-Wesley, 1997).
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© 2001 Richard Falk
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Falk, R. (2001). The Religious Foundations of Humane Global Governance. In: Religion and Humane Global Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62975-6_2
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