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The most important development that accelerated contemporary globalization was the universalization of capitalism when the Cold War ended. Capitalism advanced into the separate economic system led by the Soviet Union, which collapsed by 1991. In the name of “free trade,” states soon relinquished much of their power to control markets, thus allowing global market forces to restrain economies within states.

The globalized economy, with goods and investments flowing freely from one part of the world to another, is the heyday of capitalism. Transnational corporations (TNCs) have the opportunity to relocate manufacturing plants from affluent developed countries to inexpensive developing countries, leaving workers unemployed in the former and exploited in sweatshops in the latter. Meanwhile, corporate executives can decapitalize their profits to tax havens, leaving all countries with insufficient tax revenues to ease the human tragedies created thereby. Although Karl Marx predicted that such a day was inevitable, his expectation that the world proletariat would revolt has not come about. Instead, global mass society prevails today: Corporations operate unchecked, while the people have little or no say in how the world is governed because intermediate institutions are either tied to corporate objectives or lack the resources to represent the needs and views of the masses.

Just as ordinary persons are often disconnected from national governments, the only hope for their views to impact global problems is through the intervention of organizations within global civil society. Accordingly, the aim of the present chapter is to identify wherein the entities of global civil society seek to democratize how decisions are made, especially within major global institutions.

The reason for the need for global democracy is that global harm occurs daily. Nonelite masses and the planetary ecosystem remain largely unprotected. Some entities within global civil society protest against existing and future dangers, demanding action. But no single world government now establishes policies and takes remedial action. And major problems of the global economy, environment, and violence are not being satisfactorily addressed due to what Thomas Hale, David Held, and Kevin Young have identified in their book Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most (2013): Even though many problems are almost too complex to be tackled, the authors blame entrenched global interests that will not relinquish their dominant roles to work cooperatively on behalf of the global masses. For example, the UN Security Council is deadlocked on most matters of global security, trade negotiations stopped with the Doha Round, and global warming imperils the planet almost unchecked.

Nevertheless, what has emerged from the shadows is something known as “global governance”1 in which various public and private entities are cooperating to regularize interaction though voluntary consensus standard-setting (Murphy 2014: 217), with the prospect that low-level collaboration may rise to higher levels. They provide government-like services and regulations for planetary problems, some of which respond to the needs of the global masses (Weiss 2009: 257; cf. Lederer and Müller 2005; Cabrera 2011). Global governance operates by gaining transnational acceptance of norms and rules (Rosenau 1992: 4). Lacking a confederation or hierarchical federation of nation-states, the civil society within global governance may be the only hope to achieve global democracy (Archibugi, Archibugi, Marchetti 2012).

Clearly, the concept of “global governance” is an alternative to the “end of history” narrative that envisaged the United States pursuing hegemonic leadership in establishing a world of democracies (Fukuyama 1992). European scholars have been the most fervent students of global governance, while some American scholars still imagine that the world leadership of the United States is “indispensable” (e.g., Nye 1990).

The term “global governance” arose in 1992, when UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali supported Ingvar Carlsson and Shridath Ramphal in forming the Commission on Global Governance.2 Three years later, the commission issued Our Global Neighborhood, a report that urged increased formal and informal cooperative arrangements rather than giving more power to the UN or promoting world federalism. That same year the journal Global Governance began publication.

Global governance operates within various issue-areas in the form of “regimes.” For example, there are environmental, human rights, and many other global regimes wherein efforts to forge agreement on common norms now takes place. Thus, global governance has gained increasing recognition to describe multiple regimes of global cooperation throughout the world (Avant, Finnemore, Sell 2010: 6; Johnson and Tallberg 2010). James Rosenau and Ernest Czempiel launched the academic concept of global governance in their Governance Without Government (1992).3

One comprehensive definition of “global governance” is as follows:

the complex of formal and informal institutions, mechanisms, relationships, and processes between and among states, markets, citizens and organizations, both inter- and non-governmental, through which collective interests on the global plane are articulated. Duties, obligations, and privileges are established, and differences are mediated through educated professionals. (Weiss and Thakur 2010)

Although intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) tend to be the lead members of many regimes of global governance, international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) constitute the global civil society that has been vital in global rule-making.

To analyze the problem of global mass society within global governance, the same categories used in the two previous chapters will be applied to identify efforts that may enable the needs and will of ordinary people to prevail. The place to start is to identify members of the global order.

Members of Global Society

The masses throughout the world have long been members of global society. They have been controlled and occasionally assisted by several types of global institutions. Global society today consists of “multilayered networks of variously aligned transnational forces” (Falk 1999: 102).

Empires

One unit of global society has been the empire, a regional body. There have been regional mass societies across the planet for millennia, with decisions made by regional elites far from the masses. Formerly, the elites were rulers of such empires as Persia and Rome, which sought regional domains of the world that their armies could control and occupy (Bozeman 1994). City-states tried to avoid being incorporated into empires but ultimately were drawn into imperial domains. After Spain sought gold in far-off lands, financing the voyages of Christopher Columbus from 1492 to 1502, his Viceroy of the Indies title signaled the beginning the Spanish empire. England, France, Holland, and Portugal soon sought to pepper the world with imperial conquests. In 1494, Lisbon increased the volume of global trade astronomically as slaves began to be extracted from Africa and sold to imperial powers to provide labor in the New World.

As the successor to the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire was initially a useful entity for the Catholic Church to aggregate prototypic European states, but it was not an empire—nor, for that matter, was it holy or Roman. One of the imperatives of the United Nations after World War II was decolonization, and success came during the next three decades. A few remnants of empires remain wherever peoples are governed from abroad—undemocratically, in many cases.

Nation-States

The Peace of Westphalia, with 140 imperial states and 27 interest groups negotiating from 1643 to 1648, established the nation-state as the basic unit of global society. The result was to divide the globe into state members in Europe and nonstates outside Europe awaiting recognition from Europe. The most prominent states involved in negotiations were the Dutch Republic, France, Holy Roman Empire, Holy See, Sweden, Switzerland, and Venice. Most of those outside Europe that were not recognized became colonies, subject to the “right of conquest” (cf. Brenner 2016). Within the nation-state system, major powers tend to dominate, and only democracies have the interests of the people in mind.

Nonstate Entities

Some members of the global system have never been allowed membership in the nation-state system—notably, indigenous and nomadic peoples. Terrorist groups, sometimes considered as pirates, also qualify as nonstate members of global society, lacking recognition by the nation-state system. Viking pirates roamed about, settling in cities such as Dublin, and in due course constituted such states as Iceland and Ireland (Denemark 2017).

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) once operated as if it were a state, occupying territories for a time after seizing them militarily. Western propaganda identified such groups as “terrorists” rather than conducting negotiations with the groups regarding their grievances; they were never recognized as members of the nation-state system (Beyer 2010).

Some Somali groups have been policing the 200-mile exclusive economic zone of their country against intruders from elsewhere (Grell-Brisk 2017). But those charged with piracy seize people and property on board vessels inside or outside of that zone.

Several groups with stable territories are also not accepted as nation-states today. For example, the Palestinian Authority operates as a state but is not recognized sufficiently to be treated as a normal member of the nation-state system. Other de facto states vying for acceptance include Abkhazia, Adzharskaya, Artsakh, Kosovo, Republic of China (Taiwan), Sahrawi, Somaliland, South Ossetia, Transnistria, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and several others (Florea 2017). Paradoxically, Cambodia was represented in the UN by the Khmer Rouge, which occupied a portion of the Thai border from 1979 to 1991, because Western countries refused to recognize the government in Phnom Penh on the pretext that Vietnam exercised sovereignty over the country (Haas 1991). The masses in nonstate entities are at the mercy of the major powers.

Transnational Corporations

In 1602, the first transnational business was formed—the Dutch East India Company. TNCs, sometimes called multinational corporations, today number in the tens of thousands (Detomasi 2006: 226). Several have economic resources exceeding those of small or even medium-sized nation-states. Insofar as TNCs are in charge of the world economy (Mikler 2017), they have “dramatically altered the balance of bargaining power between states and firms” (Detomasi 2006: 227). Because such giant corporations are more interested in marketing goods produced within a variety of nation-states, they are often inattentive to labor conditions, especially the dangers of sweatshops (Stolle and Micheletti 2013: 17, ch. 6).

Today, many countries have privatized functions that were formerly performed by government, so people-oriented regulations have been relaxed, thereby empowering businesses. The process began in the Reagan–Thatcher era but accelerated after the end of the Cold War (Avant, Finnemore, Sell 2010: 5–6). TNCs, thus, operate with little democratic accountability. Some establish private transnational regimes that merely standardize industry practices, as discussed below, but others form cartels that limit competition. Someday, the out-of-control TNCs might be controlled by democratic global governance. But not today.

International Conferences

Regardless of sponsorship, an international conference is a global event that may have wide ramifications. From 1850 to 1913, more than one hundred international congresses were held (Keane 2009: 771). Among multilateral summits with developments in important issue-areas were the Geneva conferences of 1863 and 1864, and the Hague peace conferences of 1899, 1907, and 1929, all of which dealt with war crimes. The initial Hague conferences have been identified as providing the first verbal evidence of the concept of international society (Roshchin 2017: 190). Peace activists were actively engaged at the Geneva and Hague conferences.

Those attending the second Hague conference agreed that the same body should continue to meet at eight-year intervals. When World War I broke out, however, governments failed to organize such a body for 1915. Instead, Dutch suffragette Aletta Jacobs convened a meeting of nongovernmental organization (NGO) representatives and peace activists that year. Known as the International Congress of Women, the meeting was attended by 1,200 persons from twelve countries. The goal was to end the war and formulate principles for the future international political world. Many of their principles were later incorporated into Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points.

Conferences also set up new intergovernmental organizations, including the International Telegraph Union (1865), the Universal Postal Union (1874), the International Sanitary Bureau (1902), and the International Office of Public Health (1907). The latter two were merged into the League of Nations Health Organization.

Other international bodies during the nineteenth century met to discuss such issues as fishing zones, the opium trade, and submarine cables. Then came the Versailles Conference of 1919, which redrew some national boundaries and adopted provisions for the League of Nations, an organization discussed below.

The nine-power Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922 was an arms control conference. The most important contemporary conference, held in San Francisco during 1945, drew up the United Nations Charter. Although governments have been officially represented in international conferences, once again the major powers are dominant in many such bodies.

The number of international conferences has mushroomed, thanks to jet travel beginning in the 1960s. Many have been sponsored by the United Nations, which in turn has spawned new intergovernmental organizations.

Intergovernmental Organizations

Today, the nation-state system seems increasingly passé, as global decisions are made by entities that transcend states. Although there were some precursors, such as the Hanseatic League, the first IGO with multicountry membership was the International Telegraph Union, which was established with the objective of standardizing elements of the newly invented telegraph.

The League of Nations and the United Nations are the most famous IGOs with universal membership, though the United States did not join the League. There are many other IGOs, including the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Regional organizations are also global actors, including the African Union, the Association of South-East Asian Nations, the League of Arab States, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Organization of American States, and the Pacific Forum.

Most IGO decisions require agreement among nation-state member countries, some of which may block action. A few IGOs, however, are supranational—that is, they have the power to make decisions that nation-states cannot veto. The European Union, the International Criminal Court, and the World Trade Organization have supranational power.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) often makes demands on states when their lack of capital to pay back loans leaves them no alternative but to accept IMF direction as under a supranational authority. Governments may have to comply, but their people suffer the most.

Nongovernmental Organizations

In contrast with thousands of IGOs, there are 10 million NGOs (Kaeding 2016; cf. Rieman 2006). Among NGOs, some operate entirely within countries, whereas those of more global interest are international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), which have transnational membership. Both allow for input directly from ordinary people.

Anti-Slavery International, formed in 1839, was the first INGO to arise since the formation of the Catholic Church. In 1864, the Swiss government-sponsored conference at Geneva formed the INGO known as the Red Cross.

Many INGOs have been formed for purely cultural/religious or economic purposes. An example of the latter is the International Grains Council, which seeks to lower costs within the global economy (Kindleberger 1983; Spruyt 2001) and thereby to increase predictability in regard to the quality and quantity of goods exchanged (Prakash and Potoski 2006; Busch 2011; Büthe and Mattli 2011).

Epistemic Communities

Nonelite experts within professional associations constitute what are called “epistemic communities,” which can forge unity of opinion on such technical matters as global warming (cf. P. Haas 1990; Toke 1999; Meijerink 2005; Pak 2013). Such communities have the following unifying characteristics: ideological consensus, shared causal beliefs derived from empirical analysis, shared notions of how to validate research findings, and agreement on practices that will advance human welfare. In other words, they consist of experts.

One type of epistemic community is the transnational advocacy network (TAN), which is an increasingly vital aspect of the quest for democratic global governance (De Mars 2005; Tarrow 2005). TANs identify problems needing attention and carry out campaigns demanding that the issues raised become a part of INGO agendas (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Carpenter 2007). For example, Henri Dunant first formed a TAN and then convened the Geneva Conference of 1864 on war crimes. All three Hague conferences were attended by government representatives as well as TAN epistemic communities, which had the expertise to formulate the texts of the resulting conference agreements. Transformational decisions are more likely when an epistemic community of experts also engages in advocacy.

Private Transnational Networks

In a recent compendium, fifty-one types of private global governance were classified into five categories (Hale and Held 2011): (1) Twelve global networks were identified, including the International Accounting Standards Board, which seeks uniformity among an association of accountants around the world (Nölke 2011). (2) The Fair Trade System (MacDonald 2011), noted in more detail below, is one of twenty-three cooperative groups that issue voluntary regulations. (3) The World Commission on Dams, which existed from 1997 to 2001 to develop a set of standards for scientifically engineered dam construction in order to pass environmental and sociopolitical impact tests (Dobesh 2011), is one of several multistakeholder initiatives by expert groups from seventy organizations; although half of the directors were from Latin America, neither China nor, India cooperated (Dingwerth 2008: 612, 621). (4) The most famous private commercial arbitration body, the International Chamber of Commerce, has been operating since the 1920s (Lehmkuhl 2011). (5) Among four financing mechanisms in the volume, Unitaid is a drug purchasing organization funded by an agreement between Chile, France, and several African countries to impose a tax on air travel that is funneled to assist victims of HIV/AIDS (Holzcheiter 2011). Unitaid is one project of the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens (ATTAC) (Evans 2005). Many private global networks listen to the demands of TNCs, if run by experts, but some voluntary regulations only exist because ordinary citizens follow them.

More examples are found in other compendia (e.g., Hall and Bierksteker 2002; Dingwerth 2008: 628–30). Most private global networks have set up private global governance regimes.

Transnational Regimes

IGOs and INGOs cooperate in what are known as “regimes” within specific issue-areas, usually as partnerships. When IGOs encounter conflict between nation-states, INGO-led regimes might take their place.

The first attempt to establish a regime was in 1603, when Britain tried to stop trade in tobacco, considered a dangerous substance, but the effort was a failure. Also failures were the anti-alcohol regime, founded by the Brussels General Act of 1889–1890, and the anti-opium trade sponsored by the United States in 1908. The latter folded into operations of the League of Nations and later the UN’s focus on the drug trade. A separate War on Drugs by the United States began in 1969 as a regime involving Colombia and México. In most cases, governments have tried to stop the operations of nongovernmental drug organizations run by mafias.

The first successful global regime, which sought to abolish slavery, was formed by NGOs, starting with the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded in 1787 by Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp. Because of interference in world trade, London in 1856 also sought to establish a global regime to combat piracy (but not privateering, a government contract to attack merchant ships during wartime).

Also in 1856, Édouard Ducpétiaux organized the first international conference on conditions of labor at Brussels; thanks to Karl Marx, the movement bloomed as the First International in 1866. Two “internationals” followed in 1889 and 1919. All three sought to establish a global labor regime but were limited by opposition to their ideological convictions. More successful has been the International Labor Organization, an IGO that was formed to establish a regime for humane conditions for workers composed of representatives from businesses, governments, and labor organizations.

Starting with the Universal Telegraph Union (UTU) in 1865, what were called “public international unions” established regimes consisting of nation-states seeking to regularize interaction for mutual benefit. UTU was initially an IGO as well as a regime.

Several more extensive regimes exist in specific issue-areas. After the journal International Organization launched the discovery of international regimes in 1974 (cf. Keohane and Nye 1974), special issues followed, with several essays on oceans (Spring 1977) and food (Summer 1978). Later, individual essays appeared on regimes relating to security (Henderson 1982; Jervis 1982), the environment (Young 1989), and human rights (Moravcsik 2000).

In some cases, the form of regime cooperation is organizational, whether regional or international, but regime analysis also involves searching for informal methods of cooperation within global governance (Young 1989). Principled norm convergence relevant to an issue-area has been identified as the key; the mere articulation of principles has been insufficient (Coleman and Gabler 2002; Conca, Wu, Mei 2006). Regimes built from INGO and TAN origins are more likely to carry out the wishes of the global masses.

Implications

In short, there are many types of entities that act legitimately or otherwise as members of global society, but there is no central place to make decisions with global impact on behalf of the global masses (cf. Carver 2011; Carver and Bartelson 2011). Amid such complexity and confusion, the question remains whether the desires and needs of the peoples around the world are being addressed or ignored, so efforts involving INGOs and TANs are more likely to increase the level of global democracy. But such efforts must confront those who are really in charge—the global elites.

Global Power Structure

Who are the global elites? During the imperial era, the elites were regional, not global. Before the early nation-state era, leaders of cities and provinces met together in the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire from 777. The first regional governance for Europe came in 1643 to 1648, when governments adopted the two treaties known as the Peace of Westphalia. The next major multistate conclave was the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815, when leaders of the four countries successfully defeating Napoléon Bonaparte (Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia) met with the post-Napoleonic French leader to agree to suppress nationalist efforts to break away from empires within Europe. Calling themselves the Concert of Europe, they also redrew the map of Europe by shifting territories around, declared that unilateral violation of a treaty was the equivalent of a war crime, opposed slavery, and recognized the rights of Polish minorities in Austria, Prussia, and Russia (rather than an independent Poland within those territories). But democratic developments in Britain and France ultimately ended that era of elite global governance by 1823 (Mitzen 2013).

Following the Crimean War, the Paris Conference of 1865 was attended by the same countries as at Vienna with the addition of the Ottoman Empire and independent Sardinia. The aim was to restore prewar boundaries, recognize the integrity of the Ottoman state and autonomy of other states that later became Romania and Serbia, protect Christians in the Ottoman Empire, and demilitarize the Black Sea. Another European summit, held in Berlin in 1878 and 1884–1885, decided which countries in Europe would colonize the remaining parts of Africa—of course without consulting Africans.

Perhaps the most famous elite summit of the twentieth century was the Munich Conference of 1938, attended by government heads of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. Neville Chamberlain, whose country was not prepared for a war with Germany, thought he could mitigate conflict by allowing Adolf Hitler’s Germany to occupy a German-speaking part of democratic Czechoslovakia on the basis of the Versailles principle of self-determination of peoples. But five months later, the Wehrmacht swallowed up the entire country.

During World War II, elite summits regarding the conduct of the war and the postwar world were held, the most famous at Potsdam, Tehran, and Yalta. The aim, hardly democratic, was for Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States to design plans for the postwar world.

Since the dawn of the jet age, bilateral and multilateral summit conferences have flourished. During the Cold War, leaders of the two superpowers often trampled on the needs of the world masses. Although the Kennedy–Khrushchëv summit of 1961 was unproductive, the Reagan–Gorbachev summit of 1986 reached an important agreement on limiting nuclear weapons.

Today, the United States government has been accused of being the covert and overt “ruler of the world” (Chomsky 2016) while alternatively praised as making sacrifices to provide global leadership but reluctant to be too hegemonic (Nye 1990; Ikenberry 2007, 2017; Kroenig 2017; Miscik 2017). As the lone superpower, Washington wanted to prevail in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and elsewhere, but has learned the limits to such an ambition while still dominating the IMF and the World Bank. Today, with the abdication of global leadership under the presidency of Donald Trump, Germany has emerged as a key player among nation-states.

Recently, leaders of China and Russia have been throwing their weight around, preventing the establishment of a global security regime (cf. K. Roth 2016; Z. Roth 2016). They have sought to form an alternative elite summit, known as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). BRICS countries formed the Shanghai-based New Development Bank in 2014 as a rival to the World Bank. China’s launching of the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIF) in 2016 was a significant effort to establish a rival to the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank. Britain and forty other countries joined the AIIF as founding members, and the IMF is cooperating (BBC 2015), but Washington has refused to join. The Chinese yuan has become a rival to the dollar as the primary international currency (Holmes 2015).

There is also a global elite consisting of certain powerful persons, who are described as follows: “They set agendas, they establish boundaries and limits for action, they certify, they offer salvation, they guarantee contracts, and they provide order and security” (Hall and Biersteker 2002: 4–5).

One enumeration of “they” consists of executives in TNCs, INGOs, transnational religious movements, mafias, and mercenary armies (ibid.: 4). Within major corporations there is a distinct “transnational managerial class,” which hops from one TNC to another (Cox and Sinclair 1996: 111). For Leslie Sklair (2001), global power is held by four types of persons: TNC executives, pro-globalization national bureaucrats and politicians, pro-globalization experts, and executives of media and merchants who sell their products globally. Andreas Paulus (2005) also identifies international lawyers as among the global elites. Yet another formulation is that transnational elites consist of TNC executives, top international civil servants, international judges, transnational media executives, and high-priced international lawyers (Kauppi and Madsen 2014; Sending 2014).

The Club of Rome, established in 1968, is an example of a group of elites who met together to decide the fate of the world. Consisting of economists, educators, industrialists, and national and international civil servants, they produced the famous book The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972). The main impact was the decision to form the UN Environmental Program.

According to Didier Bigo (2016), national civil servants who attend international conferences form transnational networks that constitute “guilds,” a term that may be applied to transnational elites as well. As such, they constitute “double agents,” loyal to their own countries but also loyal to transnational professional standards that they share in common (Dezalay and Garth 2002, 2011).

Today, those with the most power to control the global system—the elite “superclass”—often operate in the shadows with a level of unaccountability because of their invisibility (Tsingou 2014: 341). Attendees at Bilderberg and Davos conferences, for example, include development economists and investors who mingle with government leaders and others, presumably to establish priorities (Sklair 2001; Huntington 2005; Rothkopf 2008; Kauppi and Madsen 2014; Tsingou 2014; Easterly 2015).

The ultrarich are largely unaccountable, as they accumulate capital, gaining a higher rate of return on investments than the rise in the standard of living of the masses (Piketty 2014). As Mancur Olson (1982) once argued, a few hundred super-rich individuals can get what they want more effectively than millions of masses scattered around the world.

Some billionaires have used their wealth to finance humanitarian projects but not to undo the power structure. George Soros’s Open Society Foundations have provided funds for attorneys to aid the Roma people and sex workers, to support gay marriage, and for other efforts to empower civil society in more than one hundred countries (Koppell 2010: 245; Open Society Foundations 2017). However, other billionaires have plowed money into the economies of dictators, enabling them to exploit their people (Easterly 2015).

Global economic health has been the province of a select group of countries without INGO input: In 1975, the G-6 (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States) assumed that role, though the forum expanded to the G-7 (adding Canada) in 1976. Although the group became the G-8 in 1999 when Russia joined, the group reverted to the G-7 in 2014 after Moscow was suspended for annexing Crimea. (Russia formally withdrew in 2016.) The European Union has been represented but has not been counted as a “G.”

In response to the economic crisis in several Asian countries during 1997/98, a group of about ten countries and several INGOs met to design safeguards (Jönsson 2011). In 1999, central bank governors founded the G-20, adding middle powers to the G-8 countries. The G-20 has also included government heads since 2008.

In 2008, when the world financial crisis began, the invisible corporate globalizers were unmasked for their unaccountability. A network analysis of the “new global rules” of the superclass was begun but stopped short of full disclosure (Büthe and Mattli 2011; cf. Slaughter 2006; Maoz 2011).

Such visible globalizers as the IMF and the World Bank, with power over nation-states, also qualify for elite status (Woods 2006). Major Western powers making decisions about exchange rates, pollution, tariffs, and other matters usually ignore the will of the people, a classic case of mass society politics. They do so to maintain their economic dominance over developing countries that are major economic competitors, producing manufactured goods at lower prices with government subsidies and other deviations from the norms of Western capitalism (Halabi 2004: 34).

Global elites today are mostly unchecked, accounting for inequality, both within countries and by dividing the industrial North from the developing South (cf. Hurrell and Wood 1999; Michael 2005; Nooruddin and Simmons 2009). Daniel Cohen (2006), however, has argued that the poor around the world have failed to experience the prosperity enjoyed by the supercapitalists because of neglect more than exploitation (cf. Choi, Murphy, Caro 2004; Dowlah 2004). Poorer countries are not being accommodated by richer governments (Held and Rogers 2013: 6).

Superelites may be difficult to identify, but global nonelites are not. Larger countries treat atoll-based island republics in the South Pacific as inconsequential while polluting the air, causing the sea level to rise, almost inundating the low-lying countries (Davenport 2015). Indigenous peoples are trapped inside larger countries and often treated as if they lost all rights when they were conquered (Keal 2003). Ethnic minorities and women also suffer dependent status in many parts of the world. Consumers and small businesses are at the mercy of TNCs and governmental rent-seeking regulations.

Terrorists are reacting to global political inequality. Within Arabic-speaking countries, the gap between authoritarian rulers and the ruled without effective intermediate institutions accounts not only for the Arab Spring of 2010–2012 but also for the rise of some international terrorist organizations whose leaders have correctly reasoned that despised authoritarian regimes in the Middle East are financed by Western powers (Lipschutz 2008; Brenner 2016). Terrorists then seek to assert their power by inviting nonelites to express frustration over unmet demands to governmental elites, even though their aims and methods are illegitimate under international law.

In Western European countries, inequality has not brought the masses together but instead has fed the terrorist narrative within poor urban Muslim communities (Roy 2015) and the populist narrative in industrial countries (Bicha 1976; Gates 2000; Tomasky 2014; Müller 2016). Democracies have not been able to provide employment for the poor and declining middle class, fueling xenophobic policies. Discriminatory policies have in turn stimulated jihadism (Kepel 2017). When arrested for economic crimes, prisoners are introduced to jihadist and xenophobic networks in prison.

In other words, there is a global crisis of legitimacy. Helmut Breitmeier (2008: 204) suggests that legitimacy will be withheld until global governance actually works for ordinary persons, but that depends on cooperation between institutional structures, nation-states, and participation by global civil society. Legitimacy within global governance is fundamentally a matter of meeting the expectations of the global masses, which are identified next.

Global Public Opinion

Despite divergent cultural trends, public opinion throughout the world demonstrates several trends, as measured by the Pew Global Research Attitudes Project. The greatest dangers perceived around the globe are environmental problems and the spread of nuclear weapons. Environmental catastrophe is the danger most cited by Latin Americans. Africans are most concerned about AIDS and other infectious diseases. Inequality is on top among Europeans. Middle Easterners most fear ethno-religious hatred (Pew 2014b; Carle 2015).

Some 78 percent of respondents in a global survey from 2014 agreed with the statement “In the future, renewable energy sources will be able to fully replace fossil fuels.” Regarding economic inequality, all agree that the wealth gap has increased (Simmons 2013), and most agree that the economic system favors the wealthy (Pew 2013). Those in developing countries express the highest levels of economic anxiety.

In addition, Pew found that the strongest supporters of foreign investment and trade are people in emerging markets (Pew 2014a). Less than half of the people in developed countries favor globalization; developing countries are also skeptical (Hu and Spence 2017: 55–56). Whereas people around the world are very unhappy about their own country’s economies, most global publics say that their personal finances are in better shape than their government’s (Pew 2013).

In short, the people seek solutions to problems about security (economic, environmental, ethnic, religious). Yet the masses believe they are at the mercy of the rich, who in turn employ the well-known divide-and-conquer strategy by focusing the attention of the masses on noneconomic matters, such as divisive identity politics (Kuran 2017; Scheidel 2017).

Lone voices of prominent advocacy scholars often speak on behalf of world public opinion. For example, political scientist Richard Falk (1999: 2) took the lead in decrying the neoliberal Washington Consensus that unleashed what he called “predatory globalization” and which he equated with “liberalization, privatization, minimizing economic regulation, rolling back welfare, reducing expenditures on public goods, tightening fiscal discipline, favoring freer flows of capital, strict control of organized labor, tax reductions, and unrestricted currency repatriation.” Falk has therefore called upon nation-states and transnational social movements to fight the forces of TNCs in the global marketplace.

The idea that the world might have democratic global governance—or even democratic decision-making in IGOs—is something that was unfathomable to Robert Dahl (1999) because of the powerlessness of global masses in relation to the global or IGO power structure. For the problems identified by the global masses to be satisfactory addressed, what is needed is a new way of thinking about global issues—development of a democratic global culture.

Global Cultures

Instead of a culture of global democracy, much of world history has involved attempts to impose a dominant culture: The Mongol, Persian, and Roman imperial cultures tried to gain widespread acceptance but ultimately failed (Brenner 2016). Today, efforts to make American culture the standard for the world are bitterly resented in many quarters. Nevertheless, global society needs a common language (Howard 2004), which clearly is English. But the content of a global culture is in dispute.

Two nonimperial cultural strains professing universalistic applicability began nearly two millennia ago. One is the quest to establish a caliphate that would unite all Muslims under the culture embodied within sharia law, though the vague term “sharia” is mentioned only once in the Quran (Wills 2017). The Abbasid dynasty centered in Baghdad was one effort, lasting from 750 to 1258. The Fatimid dynasty in Cairo ruled from 969 to 1171, making important contributions in the arts, philosophy, and science; eighteen caliphs were allowed to provide religious education in Cairo from 1260 to 1517, when the last caliph was taken to Istanbul, where the sultan claimed to be the heir to the Abbasids (Kennedy 2016). Nevertheless, the split between Shiite, Sunni, and other versions of Islam frustrates those seeking consensus to form a new caliphate.

Christianity, as interpreted by the Catholic Church in Rome, has been more successful in establishing a global culture. Although the pope today primarily has religious authority over the conduct of parishioners around the world, the church also has had secular influence, legitimating the Crusades and establishing the Augustinian concept of “just war.” In 697, several Irish priests proclaimed the Cáin Adomnáin, authorizing the death penalty for anyone killing a woman in wartime as well as other penalties for slaying clerics, clerical students, and peasants on clerical land. In 989, six French bishops at the Synod of Charroux declared the Peace of God (Pax Dei), advancing the law of warfare to prescribe immunity for children, clergy, merchants, peasants, and women. In 1026, the Truce of God (Truenga Dei) banned war on Sundays; the doctrine was later expanded to cover all religious holidays, including periods of Lent and Fridays. The Second Lateran Council in 1129 issued Canon 29, banning the crossbow in war. The concept of just war was further developed by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. But Protestantism contested the content of Catholic Christianity.

When Portugal and Spain made rival claims over South American territory, popes issued papal decrees (bulls). The first, in 1494, gave more territory to Spain, whereupon Portugal renegotiated with the Vatican, and a papal line gave Brazil to Portugal while most of the rest of South America went to Spain. The pope, a global elite, played a legitimating role for the two empires while totally neglecting the interests of the indigenous peoples, many of whom were subsequently slaughtered.

The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 tried to replace imperial cultures with a set of norms embodied in what became the culture of international law, as especially promoted by Hugo Grotius (1609, 1625). Initially, nation-states were to respect the sovereignty of every other country, including the principle of noninterference in internal affairs: Countries were expected to exercise power only inside their borders unless their citizens were mistreated abroad. International law then grew as international custom was incorporated along with new provisions in international treaties.4

Nevertheless, governments violated the norm of noninterference by going to war. A new culture arose, known as the balance of power—that no single country should be allowed to dominate Europe or the globe. Enforcement responsibility was left to major powers. The new global culture, thus, consisted of both international law and the obligation of major powers to avoid imperialistic takeovers by practicing balance-of-power realpolitik, otherwise known as “realism.”

During the nineteenth century, new principles emerged and were encoded into the culture of international law: Slavery was gradually abolished. The excesses of warfare were banned by international treaties adopted in Geneva and The Hague. The twentieth century brought more norms—those embodied in the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Geneva Conventions, and the United Nations Charter. Principles of civil, political, economic, and human rights were recognized in treaties during the late 1960s.

Although often attributed to Immanuel Kant (1795), a culture of cosmopolitanism was encouraged after World War II as a way to suppress nationalism (E.Haas 1958), the culprit in many wars. Decolonization after World War II finally allowed the nation-state international organizations of the planet to triumph over the global imperialist vision. Nevertheless, economic neocolonialization then began in the newly independent countries, which had been shaped to follow the same type of top–down rule and to be economically dependent on the former “mother” country (Hardt and Negri 2000).

But there was also a Cold War, in which three cultural strains emerged—a First World preferring capitalism, a Second World advocating socialism, and neutralism within the Third World countries seeking to develop their own economies and polities without outside interference and, for a time, hoping unsuccessfully to gain approval for a New International Economic Order.

The end of the Cold War suddenly produced a single global society with a lone superpower. The United States then flirted with establishing a “New World Order” based on a self-congratulatory “bound to lead” imperative (Nye 1990) that was premised on military hegemony—a Cold War goal, not a new governing philosophy. The exceptionalism of the United States even resulted in more than 200 types of war crimes being committed in Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and Iraq (Haas 2009), so Washington lost considerable moral authority.

Meanwhile, the dominance of TNCs in the world economy has definitely established a culture of consumerism on three levels (Hardt and Negri 2000): (1) World communications are the province of the global media and the Internet. (2) Neoliberalism is now the economic dogma. (3) And films, sports, and even clothing offer a consumerist perspective that enables the corporate power structure to dominate the globe. For example, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was founded in 1994 as a supranational organization to install and police a “neoliberal order” that would provide an arena for settling trade disputes and a forum for the gradual reduction of barriers to trade.

But another cultural perspective has emerged among opponents of globalization, who rely on two basic theses—anti-Westernization and subalternism (cf. Day 2005; Cohen 2006). Anti-Westernization inspired the “clash of civilizations” thesis (Huntington 1996). Subalternism is the view that the global masses need to rebel against the deleterious effects of the global class struggle to shift the power structure toward more equality; they count on activist forms of global civil society (Kenny 2003: 120–29). For example, the Zapatista movement in 1994 opposed México’s entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement; similar movements have arisen in Brazil and Ecuador (McMichael 2005: 600–02). Other subalternistic examples are Globalise Resistance, Peoples’ Global Action, and World Social Forum (Eschle 2005). The latter, founded in 2001, opposes financial hegemony, cultural destruction, monopolization of knowledge and mass media, degradation of nature, destruction of the quality of life, and anti-democratic policies (McMichael 2005; Smith 2011).

But there may be a middle ground among those who want to tame globalization. Whereas the focus of international politics during the Cold War was almost exclusively military, what instead arose after the Soviet Union collapsed were advocates of the global norms of democracy, environmental conservation, human rights, peaceful international relations, and prosperity through interdependent transnational capitalism—a communitarian culture of cosmopolitan democracy based on global civil society, with a rule of law at the global level based on cooperation instead of military coercion (Haas 2014b: 172–73, 2014c: ch. 12; cf. Krasner 1982, 1983; Fukuyama 1992; Ikenberry 2017). Europe had been gradually developing cosmopolitan democratic standards for a common market that extended into social matters, governed by the supranational institutions of the European Union.

Advocates of various cultures, however, cannot succeed until they achieve people-oriented legitimacy and the power to enforce norms. Marie-Claude Smouts (2003: 213) has pointed out that new norms take time to be established, yet the concept of “global good,” especially the idea that the planetary environment is the “world heritage of mankind,” has gained traction because INGOs have appealed over the heads of states to the global masses. Cosmopolitan democratic humanistic appeals in the areas of the environment and human rights appear to be creating a new global cosmopolitan culture that has swept across the globe, challenging self-interested TNCs and governments to live up to higher ideals.

However, the world power structure has been changing in centrifugal ways. The arrival of thousands of Iraqi refugees into Europe has dampened cosmopolitan thinking, and the European Union has lost Britain (Krastev 2014). Russian revanchism, including efforts to support extreme right-wing European leaders, has succeeded in producing inward-looking ultranationalism (Shekhovtsov 2017). President Donald Trump has abdicated the global leadership of the United States by denigrating IGOs and renouncing international agreements. The Islamic world is undergoing conflict between competing sectarian views that have been elevated to matters of national power. Internal conflicts plague Africa, some involving jihadist groups. Within Asia, conflict over North Korea has intensified, almost the point of a third world war. Only Latin America seems relatively free of international conflicts, though some domestic problems are associated with globalization. In short, the idea of global democracy seems far fetched nowadays. Nevertheless, incredible developments have been occurring under the radar of power politics.

As the current global cultural dissensus continues, global democracy will only exist when institutions of civil society intervene on behalf of the people to solve problems of globalization. In democratic countries, a crucial element is the ability of the media to inform the public so that intelligent decisions are made by government. The global media, therefore, are examined next.

Global Civil Society: Global Media

Many of the same observations about the media in the previous chapter apply globally. The media in any country play a crucial role in providing information to the public, though they also disseminate culture, usually subliminally. Whereas mass publics throughout most of history have relied on local and national news sources, globalization has given rise to a universal availability of information. But the major media outlets today have been accused of being “missionaries of global capitalism” (Herman and McChesney 1997), giving priority to corporate perspectives because media ownership is by transnational holding companies that operate more productive nonmedia businesses (Dencik 2012).

Among print media, the International Herald Tribune, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal are available worldwide, especially in major hotel chains. Most newspapers, however, are now a shadow of their former selves, while the public relies more on the Internet, and local news sources are more respected than print media emanating from the United States (Bird 2010).

Television commands more worldwide attention than newspapers, providing “mediated worldliness” (Thompson 1995). World travelers often rely on CNN, which began in 1980 as a relatively unbiased news channel, though some hotels only provide Fox News because their owners want to expose guests to a conservative perspective. News sources from China and Japan are also available worldwide. Regional television is also available in Arabic and Russian. With a large satellite dish, television stations from almost any source can be received.

Commercial global television networks rarely try to expose problems of global mass society, since they are owned by global elites. Nevertheless, television does an excellent job of covering environmental disasters, which can serve to encourage elites and nonelites to contribute funds desperately needed for relief.

Global television gives a slanted view of reality. Although some scholars believe that the modern media serves to disseminate cosmopolitan democracy, there is little evidence that the world public has bought that slant (Norris and Inglehart 2009). The media seldom report on the work of the United Nations until natural disasters, refugee surges, and scandals occur. Media advertisements on TV are effective in enticing consumers to buy whatever is displayed before them (Comor 2001: 402).

American films and fictional television programming spread a hedonistic and individualistic culture, to the dismay of many peoples. The effect is to whet the appetite for affluence.

In most countries, free access to the commercialized Internet offers a wealth of information, though omnipresent ads help to condition consumerism (ibid.: 401), and fake news can slip by the inattentive user. News provided by Internet service providers (America Online, Google, Yahoo, etc.) reaches a global audience, as does Facebook. Blogs and not-for-profit websites tend to be biased toward the views of their authors.

Social media, based on the Internet, plays an important role in transnational communication. The use of social media has facilitated mobilization of the masses, as in the Arab Spring.

The Internet provides unparalleled opportunities for states to spy on their own citizens as well as on foreign friends and enemies. Domestic laws provide limits in some Western countries, but China has the capacity to block its citizens’ access to Internet sites. Russia plants fake news abroad to sway public opinion in the direction that the Kremlin prefers. Today is the age of the cyberwar, yet cyberwar crimes on the Internet have not been targeted for international prosecution.

The International Telecommunications Union, with nation-states as members, has capitulated to the global media. In 2003 and 2005, the United Nations organized the World Summit on the Information Society to identify and cope with problems of the global media. Unfortunately, little progress was achieved (Hintz 2009: 276). Efforts to establish a global Independent Media service (Coyer 2005) did not progress past 2013.

Perhaps the richest source of helpful news for the global masses is INGO websites (such as Global Justice Now and Oxfam), which process information sources and then disseminate what they find important to their committed members and to anyone else in the public (Kavada 2005). INGOs also seek publicity for their causes in the print and electronic media, not only to gain new members but to prompt action from global elites, governments, and IGOs. They sometimes organize “stunts,” most notably the Seattle protest of the World Bank in 1999 (Coyer 2005). Those who use the Internet for humanitarian and political purposes tend to be highly educated and wealthy (Comor 2001: 401). Since TNCs have a stranglehold on the global media, INGOs and the Internet serve as the intermediate institutions for the global masses to counterbalance the consumerist narrative that maintains corporate global dominance.

The global media spreads information and therefore may serve to identity problems and report on solutions. But problem solving requires cooperative measures, including the mobilization of institutions. Accordingly, the next part of the chapter identifies the formal (IGOs), informal (INGOs), and semi-formal (public–private cooperation) components of global civil society that contribute to global governance.

Informal Global Civil Society: INGOs

Aside from the media, the agents of global civil society include transnational social movements and networks, INGOs, organized indigenous peoples and cultural groups, and prominent citizens (Pasha and Blaney 1998: 418; Kenny 2003: 121). The web of INGOs could ideally mediate between the people and the diffuse global power structure (Lipschutz and Mayer 1996). But do they?

The creation of global civil society has been difficult, resisted by elites (Colás 2002; Tsutsui and Wotipka 2004). Globalization of information, especially through social media, has equipped civil society organizations with the resources to be more influential. Thus, there is now an antinomy between “global concentration” by TNCs and “global pluralism” involving mass-based global civil society (cf. Koppell 2010).

INGOs, known as the “sovereignty-free actors” of global governance (Rosenau 1990: 33–37), have become the principal components of global civil society while nation-states remain focused on internal problems. With budgets amounting to $7 billion annually (Reiman 2006), INGOs have been judged more effective than IGOs on many global issues (Meyer, Whittier, Robnett 2002; Doh and Teegan 2003; Kaldor 2003; Lipson 2004: 2–3; Franklin 2008).

For INGOs to be effective, they have relied on issue entrepreneurs or vanguards (Milner 2005: 207). Prime movers, such as anti-slavery advocate Granville Sharp, first define problems and then seek to attract the attention of prominent members to devote resources for campaigns to establish new norms and principles.

Three types of INGOs have been identified (Teegan and Doh 2003): (1) Stakeholder INGOs exercise a certain amount of power. Nature Conservancy, for example, buys land to prevent development. (2) Staketakers carry out campaigns to delegitimize the “enemy.” Accordingly, Global Witness has exposed corporate abuse since being formed in 1993; Amnesty International is more famous in the human rights regime. (3) Some INGOs are stakegivers, which confer either people-oriented or procedural legitimacy, such as the Nobel Peace Prize (cf. Breitmeier 2008: 204).

The key triumph of the INGO approach to global democratization was the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990 and the abandonment of apartheid in South Africa during 1994 after at least a decade of pressure from many sources, including university students demanding disinvestment by their boards of regents. Organized opposition to apartheid has become a model for future efforts.

INGOs can definitely change conditions at the micro level. According to Richard Falk (1999: 134), globalization-from-below started with the Rio Conference on the Environment and Development in 1992, involving technical experts from nation-states along with considerable input from INGOs. Similar conferences have been sponsored by the UN’s Economic and Social Council on several subjects. A new democratic consensus appears to be emerging at world summits, thanks to the participation of INGOs.

During the twenty-first century, bottom–up global civil society has emerged on a scale previously unknown, including a critical mass of more than ten million NGOs and nearly ten thousand INGOs that are prepared to effect fundamental change in global governance (Walker and Thompson 2008; Tallberg et al. 2013: Fig. 1.1; Kaeding 2016). INGOs and NGOs now speak truth to economic as well as political power. Global civil society now bypasses, opposes, and supports governments in raising global issues directly within IGOs and transnational regimes (Colás 2002).

Environmental, labor, and women’s movements, thanks to their INGOs, have been described by several scholars as constituting major sectors of global civil society, having successfully promoted environmental and human rights (Keck and Sikkink 1998; O’Brien et al. 2000; Clark 2001; Eschle and Maiguashca 2005; Evans 2005: 661; Richards and Gelleny 2007; Steger and Wilson 2012; Poloni-Staudinger and Orbals 2014; Hughes, Krook, Paxton 2015).

Ronnie Lipschutz and Cathleen Fogel (2002) have identified twenty-eight specific campaigns by civil society groups with varying success. Among successful campaigns are those involving anti-personnel land mines (Price 1998; Bower 2016) and child soldiers (Carpenter 2007: 106). An unsuccessful example is the International Action Network on Small Arms, while the Climate Action Network has been picking up some steam since the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 despite opposition by President Trump (Dimitrov et al. 2007: 242–46, 249–50; Bob 2010; Grillot, Stapley, Hanna 2011).

Several successful methods have been used by INGO campaigns on behalf of nonelites around the world. They include verbal activities, publicity, boycotts, buycotts, protests, direct action, and even direct enforcement.

Verbal campaigns have been launched to influence corporations, governments, and IGOs. The anti-slavery movement primarily utilized petitions and speeches (Jennings 1997) and even a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852). More recently, verbal campaigns have evidently encouraged developing countries to block further rule-making by the WTO, which has not advanced beyond the Doha negotiations (Koppell 2010). Advocacy scientists, similarly, have been prominent in the campaign against global warming (Grundmann 2011).

Publicity can shame corporations and other members of the global superclass. Transparency International, which was set up a decade before the UN Convention Against Corruption of 2003, shames elites by exposing corruption (Kauppi and Madsen 2014), though some observers claim that the most effective anti-corruption campaigns involve investigative journalists, watchful users of social media, and mobilized local NGOs (Casas-Zamora and Carter 2017). In the issue-area of human rights, several IGOs operate along with such INGOs as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to shame violators (Lebovic and Voeten 2006).

INGOs are more likely to attract funds if their work is widely publicized. The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Doctors Without Borders provided that publicity, boosting contributions. INGOs, thus, are partially dependent on global media to attract attention.

Boycotts are another effective method. During the 1980s, in addition to the withdrawal of investments in order to dismantle apartheid in South Africa, a boycott of Nestlé was launched over improper marketing of infant formulas (Doh 2003). In fact, some boycotts have changed industry practices (Locke 2013; Stolle and Micheletti 2013). Whereas chemical companies have developed genetically modified organisms (GMOs), they have been strictly regulated by European countries and are no longer sold by several supermarket chains in the United States due to the influence of such INGOs as Greenpeace (Soule 2003). Only Kenya has an outright ban on GMO produce.

Buycotts increase the effectiveness of boycotts. While consumers boycott some products, they purchase those that meet minimum standards, such as products labeled “non-GMO.” Buycotts under the Fair Trade Movement are discussed below.

Protest demonstrations are a fifth method. A demonstration in Paris during 1848 spread throughout Europe. The International Workingmen’s Association, which began in 1864, mobilized strikes by workers. The International Alliance of Women, formed in 1902, not only brought together national movements engaged in public demonstrations but also various forms of civil disobedience; the result was that women’s suffrage became a reality. In each case, the protest was for positive change. Negative demonstrations tend to be short-term expressions of opinion unless part of a concerted strategy.

Direct action can be taken on behalf of the forgotten and neglected. Save the Children International Union, founded in 1920, uses donations to provide food and shelter for poor children around the world.

Direct enforcement is a final method used by some INGOs (Doh and Teegan 2003; Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Bondaroff 2014). The most prominent example is the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Although the Olympic Games of ancient Athens drew athletes and spectators from all over Greece, rules were established to ensure that competition was fair. In 1894, the IOC was founded to bring the competition back for a gradually urbanizing world of leisure, with men (and later women) decreasingly tied down on farms. The IOC’s founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, selected members of the committee with the power to determine the host city, which games would be played, which countries could send athletes, and to set the standards that athletes had to meet. The first games were held in 1896.

But after Olympics host Montréal suffered a $1 million deficit in 1976, the IOC changed from a nonprofit INGO into a money-making corporation of endorsement and sponsorship deals, including sales of broadcasting rights. A bribery scandal was exposed in 2002, resulting in lawsuits and resignations. Big changes to the Charter came soon afterward: An ethics commission is now in place, officers with limited terms are now elected by representatives from Olympic Committees in each country (not governments), sessions are open to the public, and finances are published. Democracy, thus, arrived in at least one arena of international sports (Keane 2009: 703–05). Currently, the IOC recognizes more than seventy sport INGOs, some of which have their own events outside the IOC. In 2009, the UN General Assembly allowed the IOC to attend and speak during regular sessions.

INGOs may claim to speak for the masses, but their voices are not necessarily heard by the masses (Kenny 2003: 127). The “iron law of oligarchy” is inevitable in INGOs, which must raise funds to survive. Although INGOs with a mass base, such as Human Rights Watch, operate autonomously (Berkovitch and Gordon 2008: 884 n.2), other INGOs are dependent on rich donors, who may contribute only on a project-by-project basis, following priorities encouraged by the governments in which the donors are located. In some cases, governments subcontract to domestic NGOs to perform tasks authorized by domestic legislation. Because NGOs and INGOs have to compete for contracts, the result is decreased solidarity (Powell and Friedkin 1987; Cooley and Ron 2002). INGOs, thus, have not yet fully tamed global elites, but they have made enormous strides in articulating the needs of the masses to the global elites.

Formal Agents of Global Governance: IGOs

Insofar as global civil society operates as the democratizing force of globalization, a major test is whether IGOs primarily listen to their members, nation-states, or are influenced by the input from INGOs or the global masses. Increasingly, the latter is the case.

Historically, most IGOs have been established by the major industrial powers, who have fashioned structures for their benefit, rarely consulting developing countries or minor powers (Gruber 2005), and even excluding them from membership (Donno, Metzger, Russett 2015). Because IGOs have member governments which seek to advance their own interests, they should not be expected to work for the benefit of the global masses. Indeed, some IGOs have perfected the ability to manipulate less developed countries into compliance with rules of global governance set by developed countries (Halabi 2004: 33–35). When the opinions of the international public are articulated by minor powers within universal IGOs, most major powers do not listen (cf. Comor 2001). Nevertheless, some do.

Many prominent IGOs today act in response to pressures from INGOs, intervening on behalf of minor powers in matters of the environment and human rights (Jaeger 2007; Heins 2008; Omelicheva 2009). Epistemic communities and INGOs were indispensible in the formation of the public international unions during the nineteenth century, including the Universal Postal Union. IGOs composed of many democracies are particularly open to INGO involvement (Tallberg et al. 2013: 241).

IGOs perform two main functions—providing a forum for discussion and providing services for members. The following sections focus on the most prominent IGOs to determine whether they listen to the voices of the global masses, as transmitted by INGOs.

League of Nations

Set up primarily as a forum to discuss the peaceful resolution of international conflicts, the Assembly and the Council of the League clearly failed to prevent World War II. The requirement that resolutions must be unanimously adopted was a source of gridlock. The Disarmament Commission held two conferences (in 1922 and 1932) but failed to provide a security regime.

Although defeated countries customarily found their territories carved up by victorious countries after war with little regard to the wishes of the people, the League adopted two major innovations based on the principle of self-determination: One was the plebiscite, in which some peoples in Europe were able to vote to determine which of two countries they wanted to be governed by. Second, former German colonies in Africa and the Pacific islands were reassigned through the Mandates Commission to Australia, Belgium, Britain, France, Japan, New Zealand, and South Africa as “sacred trusts” (Louis 1967: 7), though little effort was subsequently undertaken to prepare the people for eventual independence.

The League was most successful in providing services, which later rolled over to the United Nations. The Health Organization became the World Health Organization in 1948. The League’s International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation joined an INGO, the International Bureau of Education, to form the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1946 with a goal of promoting “education for all” (Mundy 2010). The work of the League’s Commission for Refugees is now carried out by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The treaty-based Permanent Central Opium Board was folded into the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) and was a precursor to the International Narcotics Control Board, which supervises several UN treaties that have tried to set up a global anti-drug regime. The League’s Slavery Commission was continued by the UN Working Group on Slavery as a body under the UN Economic and Social Council.

In 1919, the League also oversaw creation of the independent International Labor Organization (ILO), which continues as a UN Specialized Agency. Codes of conduct have been drawn up over the years to create a labor–management regime, and many countries have adopted laws to conform to ILO’s codes.

League service-oriented bodies, often placing experts in control of the agenda, involved INGOs in their work. As a result, INGOs were given official recognition in the UN Charter.

United Nations

Founded in 1945, the UN has been more useful in providing services for the global masses rather than forums. More than a dozen UN agencies have “contact points” with INGOs.

Conference of Nongovernmental Organizations (CONGO)

Formed in 1948 by the General Assembly, CONGO encourages intervention by INGOs, some of which have Consultative Status. As a forum, CONGO’s aim is to encourage INGOs to take prominent roles throughout the UN structure (Bloem et al. 2008). The UN Economic and Social Council currently accredits about 4,500 INGOs, though not all that apply receive accreditation (Kaeding 2016).

United Nations Nongovernmental Liaison Service (UN-NGLS)

Approximately 400 INGOs have been accorded recognition by UN-NGLS, though sometimes there are barriers to their participation (Zettler 2009). Formed in 1982, the General Assembly authorized UN-NGLS in 2006 to hold forums (conferences) on specific topics. A proposal was made in 2013 to merge two related bodies—the Executive Committee of Non-Governmental Organizations Associated with the United Nations Department of Public Information and the Conference of NGOs with Consultative Relations with the United Nations. But few such omnibus bodies have direct impacts on UN policy-making.

UN Security Council (UNSC)

The UNSC, consisting of five permanent members (Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States), which have veto power, and ten members elected from major world regions, on paper offers the promise of serving as the major locus of the global security regime. Instead, the UNSC has been divided between rivals, such that decisions mirror world anarchy unless consensus develops regarding how to treat smaller countries. The body has authorized military force to stop aggression—in the case of North Korea’s attack on South Korea (1950), which occurred while the Soviet Union was boycotting UNSC, and Iraq’s attack on Kuwait (1990); in both cases, coalitions of countries were organized by the United States. More limited UNSC-authorized sanctions have included naval restrictions to enforce sanctions (in Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Haïti, North Korea, and Sierra Leone). The use of “all necessary means” or “all necessary measures” by multinational forces has been authorized in several cases—Albania, Bosnia, Congo, East Timor, Haïti, Iraq, Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia, Zaïre, and the self-proclaimed ISIS. The early impetus for action came from member countries, even though global civil society increasingly pressured the five UNSC permanent members.

Peacekeeping has been an alternative method for UNSC action to provide global security. Blue-helmeted UN troops recruited from various countries, sent to areas of conflict, have been successful in some cases, but UN peacekeeping often fails because the major powers provide neither sufficient funds nor troops to assure success (Guéhenno 2015). Otherwise, UNSC operates as an elite body, paying minimal attention to victims of aggression despite the power to do so.

UNSC also has the power through resolutions to be a creator of new international laws. But despite more than 600 resolutions over the years, the impact on international law has been negligible (Deplano 2015).

UN General Assembly (UNGA)

With 193 member countries, the UNGA provides a forum in which minor powers might articulate interests vis-à-vis major powers by passing resolutions by majority vote. A notable success was pressure to gain independence for African colonies. Regular condemnations of Israel for occupation of territories on the West Bank of the Jordan River led to recognition in 2012 of the State of Palestine as a nonmember Observer Country with a seat in the General Assembly. The annual debate in September is an opportunity for countries to state their priorities, though they are often stated in an obscure legalese (Johnstone 2005) and thus are overshadowed by policy exhortations by the major powers.

UN Secretary-General

The top official of the UN Secretariat, the Secretary-General, mainly attends to the bureaucratic problems of the agency. Nevertheless, Secretaries-General have often sought to be peacemakers on behalf of innocent people who are victims of war and other calamities.

Several service agencies located within the Secretariat coordinate operations in the field by holding meetings of IGOs, INGOs, and NGOs. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, for example, coordinated relief from the tsunami that hit twelve countries surrounding the Indian Ocean in 2004 (Weiss and Thakur 2010: 24).

The Economic and Social Affairs Department within the UN Secretariat has held world summits, starting with the World Summit for Children of 1990, to crystallize global opinion. Subsequently, nearly fifty summits have been organized on such matters as basic human needs, human rights, and sustainable development. The most famous is the Millennium Summit of 2000, which drew up goals to be achieved by all countries with special emphasis on the least developed. In addition to UN member countries, INGOs and sometimes TNCs corporations have attended the UN-sponsored summits.

UN Specialized Agencies

Extending the work begun under the League of Nations, many humanitarian organizations do extraordinary work on behalf of distressed individuals, such as providing food for those experiencing famine. However, most such agencies are starved for funds beyond UN dues and thus have their assignments written by major power paymasters. Most Specialized Agencies use INGO personnel as consultants (e.g., Liese 2010). In specific projects, they coordinate the work of all INGO and NGO civil society organizations involved in particular countries (Tussie and Riggirozzi 2001).

The UN International Children’s Fund (the current title of UNICEF) was originally set up to aid child victims of World War II and later was assigned the role of delivering UNESCO’s educational programs to children. UNICEF still focuses on the right of children to food, health, and shelter, including aiding vulnerable pregnant women.

TNCs dominate at least two UN agencies: The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) deals with airline companies that respond to market forces, though the International Passenger Association tries to monitor ICAO on behalf of consumers (Koppell 2010: 234). The International Maritime Organization allows about four dozen consultative organizations, of which only nine are civil society INGOs (ibid.: 243).

The World Health Organization (WHO) provides an excellent example of how a Specialized Agency can respond to global civil society demands. One success is the worldwide eradication of smallpox. However, if a new disease suddenly spreads in Africa (Ebola) or Asia (SARS), WHO often awaits requests for action from member governments, and then sets a priority on controlling the disease and takes whatever action is within the organization’s budget until more funds are raised for the emergency. But nation-states often hide the onset of an epidemic (Sparrow 2016: 27) until spillover is detected in the First World. For example, the Zika virus infected slightly more than one thousand persons in late 2015 but was noticed by WHO only after a few persons in the United States contracted the disease. Meanwhile, cholera continues to affect 3 million and kills about 100,000 annually. WHO’s emphasis in 2015 was on Zika, not cholera. Malaria affects and kills even more, but the organization continues to respond to elite member countries more than nonelite countries, frustrating the effort to build a global health regime (Waldman 2007).

Indigenous Peoples and the UN

Although representatives of indigenous peoples sought to address the League of Nations during the 1920s, their requests were denied. The UN’s earliest interest in indigenous peoples was to gain independence for colonies and former Mandates of the League of Nations. A working group on indigenous peoples, set up in 1982, was upgraded to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2000, though members consist of experts rather than members of indigenous groups. ILO, meanwhile, adopted the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention in 1989 (in force in 1991), which served as a basis for the Permanent Forum in drafting the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007 (Steinhilper 2015).

In 2011, the UN Indigenous Peoples Partnership (UNIPP) was established, recognizing about 5,000 peoples in at least seventy countries, constituting 5 percent of the world population. UNIPP works with several UN agencies to advise countries about rights in the Declaration, including the ILO’s convention.

The UN organized the World Conference on Indigenous Peoples in 2014, but UN member countries brought along indigenous peoples from their own countries rather than having native peoples alone in attendance, thereby keeping them subordinate during discussions (Morris 2014). Outside the UN, the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization has since 1991 has been more effective in articulating views of indigenous peoples, who are most likely to be harmed by efforts to clear land and cut down trees where they live.

Implications

Those who salute the UN in the areas of human rights, security, and socioeconomic development characterize developments as an “unfinished journey.” Aside from services to individuals in need around the world, the UN has hardly assisted the global masses in seeking justice from global elites (Falk 1999: 102; Weiss and Thakur 2010).

International Monetary Fund

Founded at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, the IMF was set up to provide capital for countries with cash-flow shortfalls to pay off loans, which was an expected consequence of the need for funds to assist Europe after the devastation of World War II. The IMF thereby eases debt payment, but subjects recipient countries to stringent conditions. Because there is no well-financed alternative in the world, IMF plays a coercive role, disrupting the domestic affairs of countries seeking bailouts.

Restrictions usually involve a cutback in local government spending, which creates unemployment and shortages in government services. Other forced reforms include devaluing exchange rates, privatization, loosening employment security and related laws, and lowering trade barriers (Griesgraber 2008). Although the United States protected infant industry in the late nineteenth century with tariffs on imports, the IMF does not allow developing countries falling into debt to follow that example—just the opposite.

Egypt, for example, was once pressured to produce cash crops in order to obtain international currency to pay back loans. But that meant a local shortage of food, which had to be imported from abroad (Halabi 2004: 44). As a result, a grassroots movement arose among peasants to demand food sovereignty, resulting in a ten-year dialog within the UN Human Rights Council until a draft declaration on the rights of peasants emerged in 2015 (Dunford 2015).

Another IMF requirement is for loan-defaulting countries to spend less on higher education and more on primary education. The basis for such a priority is a study finding that there is a 26 percent return on investment in the latter and only 13 percent from colleges and universities (Landell-Mills, Agarwala, Please 1989: 77), but that study is contradicted by another one (Caffentzis 2000: 5). In short, the IMF wields the power to destroy the intellectual capabilities of poor nations (Kamola 2013), leaving positive investment to the World Bank.

The most prominent backlash has been in the form of “IMF riots,” the consequence of imposed austerity that has affected more than fifty countries (ibid.: 43; Wood 2013). The IMF tries to propagandize countries with the neoliberal theory of economic growth and often uses developing countries that have bought the line to persuade those that are more reluctant (Halabi 2004: 39). The theory supports economies that coddle the rich, crush the poor, and cremate the middle class, ignoring the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (Gutner 2010).

Having imposed onerous repayment schemes on so many countries in debt, the IMF is now said to focus more on gaining external support. An International Monetary and Financial Committee has been set up to permit more debate among member countries (Jönsson 2011). The IMF also seeks validation from INGOs (O’Brien et al. 2000: ch. 5; Breen, Hodson, Moschella 2017; Hibben 2017). Oxfam, for example, has called for better terms for indebted countries, and the ILO has also played a role in lobbying for changes. Nevertheless, IMF reforms have thus far been minimal (Boorman 2007; Cook 2008; Griesgraber 2008: 154–62).

World Bank Group

Also formed at Bretton Woods, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) was set up to provide initial loans to countries short on capital but with a high probability of paying off loans due to their industrial workforce capability. However, the Marshall Plan in 1948 made the bank irrelevant for Europe, since the United States provided the capital for initial European reconstruction after World War II.

With the establishment of the International Development Association (IDA) in 1960, the two IGOs were called the World Bank. The addition of three later IGOs—the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), and the International Center for Investment Disputes (ICSID)—constituted the World Bank Group. IBRD provides government loans, IDA offers technical assistance, IFC provides loans to the private sector, and the functions of MIGA and ICID are obvious from their titles.

Since the 1960s, the World Bank has professed the goal of relieving world inequality. But funding for contracts to build infrastructure in developing countries inevitably goes to TNCs in developed countries, and recipient countries are notoriously selected for reasons of political favoritism (Woods 2006). Bids come from TNCs that will benefit from the new infrastructure by lowering transportation costs for their businesses abroad. Meanwhile, as a former World Bank executive has revealed, recipient governments often treat projects as “cash cows,” enabling corruption (Berkman 2008).

The World Bank’s Civil Society Policy Forum (formerly the Nongovernmental Organization Committee), which professes to strengthen ties with domestic civil societies (Tussie and Riggirozzi 2001), has adopted very few reforms. Women’s movements, however, have refocused projects on the role of women, who are regarded as more reliable recipients of aid (O’Brien et al. 2000: ch. 2).

The World Bank has encouraged private funding to universities. But the capital has been used primarily for postcolonial restructuring of universities in Africa to foster economic development, downplaying the humanities and social sciences as “unfriendly” to economic development (Jaycox 1991: 5; Olukoshi and Zeleza 2004: 2).

Structural adjustments required by the World Bank have not been favorable to human rights (Abouharb and Cingranelli 2006). Not notable for listening to the needs of the global masses, the bank nevertheless established and has funded two bodies to handle dispute settlement, as described below.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)

The Marshall Plan was an American commitment of funds for European recovery from the ruins of World War II premised on the formation of a European IGO, which was to design how the funds would be used. That body, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), was no longer needed after recovery was completed. Accordingly, OEEC cooperation gradually morphed into what later became the European Union. But in 1961, the United States wanted to join OEEC, so the organization was transformed into OECD, which is now a sixteen-member organization composed mostly of European governments and nine non-European industrial countries (Australia, Canada, Chile, Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Turkey, and the United States). But the scope of interest is global.

OECD is primarily interested in promoting economic growth throughout the world. A major focus is on the protection of shareholders through procedures of accountability and transparency to member and non-member countries through five Regional Corporate Governance Roundtables (Detomasi 2006: 241). Recommendations are provided in the form of technical assistance on how to run and supervise businesses. Another function is to assist in tax collection, including the identification of tax havens, where corporations hide their profits. Corporate INGOs play a role in the roundtables.

World Trade Organization

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), formed in 1947, was superseded by WTO in 2005 to end world economic warfare, once and for all. WTO aims to create a world of trade flowing freely—that is, without trade barriers erected by states. Accordingly, WTO treaty provisions permit states to file trade disputes against one another when such barriers are perceived to create an unfair advantage. During WTO negotiations, major powers favored the interests of businesses over those of consumers and workers; the latter were not present when rules were adopted (Colgan and Keohane 2017: 40). Lowering trade barriers hurts less developed countries the most, which have been relatively marginalized (Dowlah 2004).

Environmental and labor INGOs have complained about WTO’s overconcentration on commercial aspects of trade (O’Brien et al. 2000: chs. 3, 4). If, as proposed, WTO provisions were amended to focus on global environmental issues (Vifell 2010), the world polity would benefit, as bilateral dispute settlement would then accumulate jurisprudence beyond trade.

WTO operates a dispute resolution system, which is described below. If a country is successful in complaining against another country’s trade practices, the latter is directed to stop what is unacceptable. An order of compliance may be resented, but WTO has the power to authorize all member countries to boycott a noncompliant country. That threat, rarely exercised, has usually been effective.

International Judicial Institutions

Legal concepts, such as “just war,” have been articulated in concrete terms over the past 1,400 years but never enforced globally. What is brand new in human history are international tribunals that constitute a global legal regime. World tribunals tend to be approached by smaller countries to resolve conflicts peacefully with larger countries.

Most international tribunals use international law as a basis for resolving disputes between governments. Besides custom, international law emerges from four sources—principles adopted at conferences, intergovernmental negotiations resulting in treaties, institutional practices, and decisions of tribunals (cf. Woodward 2010). Most world courts are restricted to the application of treaty provisions but lack enforcement powers. All offer some possibility to obtain a modicum of justice, particularly when small countries are frustrated by larger countries, provided that the latter are compliant. What is important is that the decisions involve a deliberative process that results in reasoned decisions, building a coherent jurisprudence (Kuyper and Squatrito 2017). To build global democracy, courts must allow people to have access when decisions are being rendered.

International Court of Justice (ICJ)

The successor to the Permanent Court of International Justice, formed in 1920, ICJ began in 1946 as a major UN institution. Although most cases involve only two countries in dispute, ICJ seeks to cumulate international jurisprudence with comprehensive rulings. Political questions cannot be taken up by ICJ, so when India shot down a military aircraft inside Pakistan, the court ruled in 1999 that the case was not justiciable but instead should be resolved by the UN Security Council. The distinction between political and nonpolitical questions, however, can be thin, since New Zealand addressed the court in 1973 regarding the legality of French nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific Ocean, whereupon France announced a moratorium, and ICJ ruled the case moot. Nevertheless, ICJ can render an Advisory Opinion when a country seeks a ruling but chooses not to sue.

About half of ICJ cases involve boundary disputes. In 1989, the court decided counterclaims involving Hungary and Slovakia regarding treaty obligations involving the Danube, a river considered as a “shared resource.” Hungary tried to withdraw from the treaty, something that the court ruled was not possible in view of the wider development of environmental international law.

The court acts on behalf of ordinary people in cases involving human rights, which constitute one-fourth of the cases, mostly dealing with the treatment of nationals of one country who live in another country. For example, in 2004 México sued the United States regarding fifty-one Mexican nationals on death row in ten states who were being denied legal representation guaranteed by the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations of 1963. ICJ ruled in favor of México, recommending a reconsideration of the sentences and payment of reparations to the Mexican government. In 2005, the United States withdrew from the Optional Protocol. In short, a smaller country only obtained verbal justice.

The court has also handled war crimes as a successor to the Nuremberg Trials after World War II. In 1984, after a case was filed by Nicaragua, ICJ ordered the United States to stop all military and paramilitary activities against Nicaragua. Two years later, Nicaragua sued Costa Rica and Honduras for serving as staging areas for American-backed rebels who sought to overthrow the regime in Managua. But in 1990 both cases were withdrawn in the context of a peace settlement.

The use of or threat to use nuclear weapons was ruled a war crime in 1996 as an Advisory Opinion, responding to requests from WHO and UNGA. Matters of war crimes, however, now can be handled by the International Criminal Court.

International Criminal Court (ICC)

Among international courts, only ICC has the power to enforce judicial rulings because individuals charged with violations of international criminal and humanitarian law can be arrested by the Interpol, incarcerated while on trial, and imprisoned in a member country if found guilty. Beginning in 2002, the court has tried fewer than twenty persons, lacking the resources for more activity. Only four persons have been convicted out of more than 1,500 complaints against those recommended for prosecution. Prosecutable offenses include genocide and war crimes.

International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS)

Created in 1982 to resolve disputes regarding the designation of 200-mile “exclusive economic zones” projecting from maritime borders, ITLOS was set up primarily to clarify borders, which can be difficult to determine with exactitude. Nevertheless, the Philippines filed a case against China for actions within its zone with the Permanent Court of Arbitration, not ITLOS.

World Trade Organization Appellate Body (WTO AB)

The WTO has a Dispute Resolution Body, which serves an arbitral function when one country is accused by another of violating provision of the WTO’s agreements. A panel is then constituted to review the case and make a nonbinding determination. In 1995, WTO AB was established to hear appeals, which apply a more rigorous legal analysis. More than 200 cases have been considered by the seven-member body. If a country is still found in violation but does not accept the ruling, sanctions can be authorized by WTO’s main decision-making organ, the General Council. Sanctions have been authorized in a few cases, but the targeted countries usually reverse policies they consider illegal.

Implications

International litigation is “slow, costly, inefficient, and inaccessible to the public” (Wai 2005: 252). Often the cases are about ambiguous matters within treaties, opening the opportunity for some norm contestation (ibid.; Berkovitch and Gordon 2008: 893–94, 898–99). The adversarial process may not assist in improving cooperation between the countries involved. With precedent written in the past primarily by Anglo-European legal scholars, the rulings are not always welcomed in other parts of the world. In any case, jurisprudence develops far more imperceptibly than acceptance of the basic principles set forth in the treaties themselves. The greatest success has been in developing a jurisprudence on global environmental law (Baber and Bartlett 2009).

Judicial settlements have considerable legitimacy and can help to mediate between smaller and larger countries, though the latter may ignore the rulings. When a country yields to another based on a ruling, compliance is more likely if the losing country uses a world court decision as justification for losing face. INGOs gain legitimacy and recognition when they aid victors of court decisions.

In addition to courts with universal jurisdiction, there are twenty regional courts (Kuyper and Squatrito 2017). The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), founded in 1959 as an organ of the Council of Europe (CoE), handles litigation involving violation of CoE treaties. ECHR has heard thousands of cases of individuals who were denied justice in their home countries, mostly regarding failure to provide speedy trials. Due to ECHR rulings, several state practices have changed (Haas 2014b: ch. 12).

The existence of regional courts offers an opportunity to build a global jurisprudence that is not Eurocentric. As cases are decided by courts from the Andean Tribunal of Justice to the Western African Economic and Monetary Union Court of Justice, legal principles can be articulated for specific situations but have worldwide relevance. In contrast with international courts, some regional courts allow litigants to be individuals.

Meanwhile, national court decisions can have international implications by generating new legal principles that are picked up by other countries. The first “climate change” lawsuit in which a court ruled that a government was responsible for reducing carbon emissions, Urgenda Foundation v The Netherlands (2015), relied on the commonly used “hazardous negligence” tort principle and evidently inspired similar rulings in domestic courts in Pakistan, Perú, and two states of the United States (Estrin 2016). Ordinary people, in other words, have enlisted their governments to take action on their behalf—and won. The right to live in a healthy environment has not yet been established under international law but may come if more such cases are decided.

International Arbitration Institutions

For millennia, international commercial agreements have presupposed honest arrangements between exporters, traders, and importers. Disputes have been inevitable and resolved through negotiation, sometimes involving third parties. Arbitration has a long history, as guild courts have existed since the time of the city-states of Genoa and Venice (Lehmkuhl 2011). Most industrial states have arbitration bodies, public and private.

Modern international arbitration was formally instituted in 1785, when Britain and the United States signed a treaty that provided a provision for arbitration of commercial disputes. The Jay Treaty served as a model for future trade agreements as the United States entered the global market.

Today, international tribunals for arbitration exist to resolve disputes by applying only specific legal principles to which the parties agree beforehand. Arbitration can involve corporations as well as governments. Arbitration begins adversarially but can rely on negotiated solutions. Arbitration does not build jurisprudence but can facilitate voluntary compliance in a way that judicial courts cannot.

Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA)

Established at The Hague in 1899, PCA was primarily designed for trade disputes. Most cases involve claims of contract violations, though treaty violations are also handled. PCA cases have increased in the twenty-first century because UN Security Council vetoes have resulted in decreased reliance on the UN for peacekeeping.

In a few recent cases, the small country of Timor-Leste (East Timor) has been able to resolve disputes with Australia. Russia, however, refused to allow PCA action proposed by the Netherlands in 2014 after Russians boarded a Dutch ship and detained crew members, claiming that the vessel was inside Russian territorial waters in the Arctic. China refused in 2016 to accept the opinion of the court regarding successful claims of the Philippines within the latter’s exclusive economic zone (200 miles from its territory), but subsequently Beijing offered conciliatory gestures toward all affected countries in the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Pubantz 2017).

PCA can accept nonstate litigants. In 2011, a representative of the Hawaiian Kingdom was accorded recognition in the quest to have the court rule that the United States had illegally annexed the Hawaiian Islands in 1898 (Haas 2016: 257). Hawai’i was then a sovereign state recognized around the world. However, until the United States government agrees to be a party to the case, no arbitration can move forward.

International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID)

The World Bank formed ICSID in 1965 as an independent IGO to provide arbitration of disputes over terms of investment agreements involving private businesses. Arbitration is handled on a case-by-case basis in accordance with rules in the ICSID treaty (Reed, Paulsson, Blackaby 2010). Parties must include at least one government and a citizen of another government. Most cases are suits brought by businesses in one country against governments of other countries.

World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement Body

Although dispute settlement was offered under GATT, the process was inadequate, so the WTO established a formal procedure for one government to object to the trade practices of another. Panels are created for each dispute. More than 500 disputes have been handled by WTO thus far, mostly involving the largest trading countries, often suing one another. Panel recommendations can be appealed to the WTO Appellate Body, as described above.

In 2001, President George W. Bush imposed tariffs on imported steel to fulfill a campaign promise to the American steel industry, though he doubtless knew that a complaint would be filed in response. The following year WTO ruled that the tariffs were illegal. The European Union then threatened retaliatory tariffs on a range of goods, whereupon Washington removed the tariffs in 2004. Foreign steel then entered the American market, resulting in steel factory shutdowns. President Trump has demonstrated interest in playing the same game.

There is a vaguely worded loophole: WTO member countries can take measures “necessary for the protection of … essential security interests … taken in time of war or other emergency in international relations” (Article XXX of the GATT Agreement of 1994, which is still considered operative). Trump’s declaration of an emergency for the steel industry will doubtless impress few.

Although WTO is often assumed to be part of the global power structure, weaker countries have used the body to achieve justice. Panamá, for example, has filed several complaints about the trade practices of nearby Colombia. Argentina initiated a complaint against the European Union in 2012. Several smaller countries have filed complaints against the United States (Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand—but most have been from México). Most disputes tend to be product-specific with little overall impact in transforming world trade to reverse world income inequality. The protocol to file complaints is so complicated that less developed countries have difficulty doing so, and technical assistance to improve their capabilities is inadequate (Kim 2008: 680).

States do not always comply with WTO dispute rulings, and organizing retaliatory boycotts is difficult. Because the rules are vague, most disputes involve bargaining (Shaffer 2005). As a result, trade jurisprudence has advanced only incrementally (Zangl 2008). WTO’s supranational power is in theory but not yet fully in practice.

Work Bank Group Inspection Panel

Characterized as a remarkable advancement in international law (Clark 2003), the Inspection Panel was created in 1993 to provide a way for ordinary people to protest specific environmental and human rights concerns related to IBRD and IDA projects. Although some researchers have found that the response has been insufficient (Birdsall 2007; Dingwerth 2008: 614; Hale 2011b; Wood 2013; Buntaine 2015; Breen, Hodson, Moschella 2017; Hibben 2017), in fact half of the disputes are resolved in favor of the people, especially if their complaint is presented by an NGO or INGO (Graham et al. 2017). Cases involving indigenous groups are usually ruled in their favor. However, in the case of Uganda’s Basoga tribe, which objected to construction of a dam because of the spiritual significance of the land involved, the tribe was paid off to quell their opposition (Ziai 2017).

The Inspection Panel carries out both compliance reviews, to determine whether a project might deviate from project design, as well as complaint processing. Most cases relate to infrastructure projects

World Bank Group Compliance Adviser/Ombudsman (CAO)

With the same mandate, processes, and effectiveness as the Inspection Panel, CAO was established in 1999 to handle complaints involving the IFC and MIGA components of the World Bank Group. Together the two World Bank Group bodies have processed some 250 cases in regard to sixty countries (Graham et al. 2017). Similar to the Inspection Panel, the people have prevailed in about half of the disputes, notably when an NGO or INGO presents the case on their behalf (ibid.).

Conclusion

There are regional counterparts to the international arbitral bodies. Some regional banks, such as the Asian Development Bank, have adopted the WTO Inspection Panel reform (Bradlow and Fourie 2011). A similar body, the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation, is based on a side agreement of the North American Free Trade Agreement (von Moltke and Mann 2001; Hale 2011a).

In 1976, the UNGA set up the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) to devise a set of standard rules for arbitration and conciliation. The Asian African Legal Consultative Organization, an intergovernmental organization with about forty member countries in Asia and Africa, agreed in 1977 to establish regional centers so that members would not have to endure the cost of flying to the arbitral bodies in Europe and could either use UNCITRAL rules or proceed ad hoc (Haas 1989a: 57–59). In 1978, Kuala Lumpur was the first to agree. Cairo followed in 1979, Lagos in 1989, and Tehran in 1997. The regional centers not only provide panels of arbitrators but also seek to enforce rulings.

Regional IGOs

IGOs with global membership have been designed, financed, staffed, and otherwise dominated by major powers of the North Atlantic. Minor powers outside that region have felt neglected and have established regional IGOs.

The most famous regional organizations are in Europe, notably the Council of Europe, the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The powers of the European Union became so extensive, with little input from ordinary Europeans, that the Brexit campaign drew upon mass society imaginary in 2016 and won.

Regional organizations began to emerge in Africa and Asia during the 1960s in order to focus on their own needs as well as to build consensus before going to IGO forums (Haas 1989a, b, 2013a, 2014b: ch. 13). The origins the current Organization of American States can be traced to a conference in 1826, when Simón Bolívar urged South American countries to unite against European colonial control. A similar goal, asking European countries to grant independence, was responsible for the formation of the League of Arab States in 1944. Most African countries were colonies until the 1960s, and they formed the Organization of African Union (now the African Union) not only to hasten independence for the continent but also to pressure South Africa to end apartheid. Although six European countries tried to coordinate their efforts with the Pacific islands by forming the South Pacific Commission in 1947, colonialism did not fade in the region until the 1970s. A rival body of five independent countries formed the South Pacific Forum in 1971 (now the Pacific Forum) along with Australia and New Zealand, not only to secure independence for the rest of the South Pacific but also to obtain the wherewithal to become economically independent.

Within Asia, Britain proposed the Colombo Plan in 1950 as a parallel of Europe’s Marshall Plan to provide aid to its former South Asian colonies of India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. When the organization officially began in 1951, five non-Asian members and three Indochinese colonies joined the three from South Asia (Haas 1989a). The Colombo Plan never obtained the necessary capital to flourish, however, and no pan-Asian organization has ever emerged. Instead, exasperation over American intervention in Vietnam united countries to form the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1965, not only to form a bloc in UN forums but also to gain resources for joint economic development. Eventually, ASEAN formed cooperative arrangements with East Asian and European countries while providing a model for the establishment of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation in 1985 (Dash 2008).

Beginning around 1970, the UN became concerned that regional IGOs might eclipse the New York-based organization. Scholars were assigned to go to each region to report on developments (Andemicael 1979). As a result, the UN became more favorable toward regional bodies, even supporting the formation of some intergovernmental IGOs that focused on bringing technological improvements to widely traded agricultural commodities (Haas 1989a: ch. 11). Global and regional IGOs have played complementary roles ever since, and the smaller countries of the world have benefited from building peaceful relations within regions and subregions.

In some cases, regional IGOs are limited to specific countries by geography. For example, an agreement for intergovernmental cooperation in matters of navigation on the Rhine River was adopted in 1815. About one hundred similar agreements now exist at the bilateral and regional levels (Rahner 1998; Conca, Wu, Mei 2006; Zawahiri, Dinar, Mitchell 2011). International law has developed principles to cover disputes between riparian countries (McIntyre 2016), thanks to the UN International Law Commission and the Watercourses Convention of 1997. Although the Convention lacks the ratifications required to go into effect, the regional bodies remain. Governments guard their sovereign land, river, and sea boundaries. Meanwhile, boundary disputes can be referred to global judicial bodies.

Conclusion

Superpowers and major powers attend to their own interests in IGOs, and middle powers often line up behind them. Although one scholar has found twenty-three partial environmental regimes (Breitmeier 2008), proposals for an intergovernmental World Environmental Organization, which would consolidate mini-regimes into a single IGO structure, have been proposed by the European Union and several INGOs but opposed by Britain and the United States (Esty 2007; Evans 2012). Meanwhile, China and Russia seek major changes in IGOs to overcome Western dominance in economic-oriented IGOs (Magnus 2013).

Although INGOs play positive roles in delivering services to the needy alongside IGOs, they have much less impact on behalf of the global masses within IGO forums. INGO influence is much greater in private–public regimes.

Private−Public Regimes of Global Governance

IGOs cannot serve as the home for all possible global regimes for two reasons: Some IGOs work at cross purposes with other IGOs, and the existing IGO structure leaves important gaps in coverage. Therefore, there is a need to identify regimes for all the issue-areas of global governance that involve both IGOs and INGOs—characterized herein as “semi-formal” regimes.

Oran Young (1994), the most persistent regime analyst, has identified three types of regimes based on how they are formed—imposed regimes, negotiated regimes, and self-generating or spontaneous regimes. The three types nearly fit the trichotomy of Andreas Hasenclever, Peter Mayer, and Volker Rittberger (1997)—realist (hegemonic), neoliberal (transaction cost negotiations), and knowledge-based (converging expectation) regimes (cf. Oye 1986; cf. Dimitrov et al. 2007; Zawahiri, Dinar, Mitchell 2011). Any particular regime may have two or all three origins, though the negotiated, neoliberal regimes are the focus of the present section.

Many regimes start within IGOs and remain there. Any regime seeking legitimacy today must include INGOs, so humanitarian IGOs and others regularly use the expertise of INGO representatives, finding them to be effective in policy formulation, implementation, and enforcement—especially within the human rights regime (Tallberg et al. 2013: 236–37).

Public–private regime cooperation is more likely to assist the problems of the global masses than IGOs alone because of the greater role of INGOs. IGOs need to learn that without the input of INGOs, especially those with expertise, they will lack effectiveness in dealing with urgent problems.

In several cases, negotiations for regimes have started but failed—cases of regime negotiation gridlock (Dimitrov et al. 2007). For example, the lack of scientific knowledge has been faulted for the failure to develop a regime regarding reef survival. Some problem areas are simply too difficult to tackle, and the outcome of cooperation might be so uncertain that efforts will backfire (Miles et al. 2002). In addition, domestic politics in developed countries has blocked regimes concerning the global economy in regard to corporate takeovers and Internet privacy. Efforts to establish regimes to stop the sale of small arms and the proliferation of tactical nuclear weapons have run into the stone wall of geopolitics. The role of INGOs has been overridden by major powers who resist global governance.

Nevertheless, public–private regimes exist in several issue-areas. A complete analysis would focus on dozens of regimes to derive generalizations in such areas as arms control, banking, energy, health, intellectual property, and travel. To give a flavor of how regimes operate, three are identified below—the counterterrorism, human rights, and financial–monetary regimes; all three are micro-regimes, restricted to a single issue-area. The UN Global Compact, in contrast, seeks to bring together several micro-regimes. The aim of the short discussion is to illustrate the struggle between global elites and INGOs that seek to represent the global masses.

Counterterrorism Regime

Since September 11, 2001, the United States has sought to create a counterterrorism regime, coordinating intelligence and military operations, with other countries. The effort was partly legitimated when the UN Security Council in 2009 authorized a Contact Group on Piracy of the Somali Coast as an umbrella to coordinate the actions of some eighty countries and six IGOs to combat piracy (Percy 2016). The Contact Group has five working groups to strengthen diplomatic, financial, legal, naval, and self-defense components. Cooperation in the Contact Group with labor groups and the maritime industry elevates the effort to a private–public regime. Although the UN Security Council authorized the use of violence against ISIS in 2015, implementation was left to individual governments without coordination. Efforts to restrict funding to terrorist groups have also been pursued as part of the regime. However, terrorists obtain funds from a variety of untraceable sources (Neumann 2017). In short, the counterterrorism regime is only a proposal, with little consensus to move forward.

Financial–Monetary Regime

Trade between two countries is complicated when they use their national currencies, so there has long been a desire for a standard form of payment in the world. Gold arose in Asia at least two millennia ago, but that gave countries with strong military forces an edge to win wars in order to capture gold. The Byzantine gold Solidus was the commonly accepted currency from 330 to 1453 in Europe and the Mediterranean (Lopez 1951). Afterward, Europe chose silver as the standard. In 1717, Britain chose the gold standard, which spread due to extensive trade but was not legally adopted in Germany and the United States until 1873 (Andrei 2011: 146–47). Two world wars and the Great Depression caused havoc over the gold standard.

The IMF was formed in part to construct a global financial–monetary regime. The agreement at Bretton Woods was that the dollar of the United States would be the reserve currency for the world. All countries were then to peg the exchange rate of their currencies to the dollar, which in turn was based on gold held by the United States government (Conway 2015; Buzdugan and Payne 2016). The IMF was charged with the responsibility to handle emergency indebtedness in the global currency.

Europe objected to making the dollar the international standard, however, because it gave undue advantage to the American economy. By 1971, France demanded gold when wine sales produced a large American trade deficit, though the subtext of the demand was protest over the American intervention in Vietnam.

Although the agreement at Bretton Woods to establish the IMF and the World Bank was supposed to form a firm global monetary regime, the system collapsed when

President Richard Nixon decided to take the United States off the gold standard in 1971, as gold was flowing from the United States to Europe (Eichengreen 2011). Exchange rates then “floated,” and the Bretton Woods monetary regime lacked a replacement. Nevertheless, the IMF continued as if unaffected, while increasingly relying on a “basket of currencies.”

A conference convened by Washington in 1973 tried to find an alternative to Bretton Woods. Then France hosted a summit conference in 1975, the first “G” summit, with the avowed aim of coordinating economic policies among Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States—thus known as the G-6. As noted above, Canada and Russia joined later, though Moscow was booted out in 2014 and withdrew in 2016.

Central bank governors and finance ministers consult together in the G summits. Global governance in matters of exchange rates, interest rates, and similar issues is supposed to occur, though statements released at the end of the summits reveal very little about joint decision-making.

Civil society protests around the meeting sites have sought to place various matters on the agenda. At the G-8 meeting in 1998, some 60,000 protesters campaigned on behalf of Jubilee 2000, which urged the First World to establish a clean slate for the twenty-first century by forgiving all debt to developing countries. The movement eventually gained supporters in forty countries as well as among some famous musicians. Britain and the United States expressed vague support, but the movement lost momentum after the year 2000 (Gready 2004).

After the financial crisis of 1997, when Asian governments were unable to pay their international debts, a separate forum, known as the G-20, was formed, as noted above. The aim was to have a wider group of countries with substantial economies to manage future financial crises, and the countries contributed about one trillion dollars to the IMF. With the establishment of twelve working groups on such sectors as agriculture, employment, and the environment, the door opened to INGO input in shaping decisions. Today, there is a B-20 of 706 corporate members from thirty-nine countries, a C-20 of 450 civil society groups from sixty countries, an L-20 of labor organizations, a T-20 composed of think tanks, and a Y-20 of youth organizations (Martens 2017). As a result, G-20 decisions are informed by INGO inputs.

Four disgruntled members of the G-20, not included in the G-7, met in 1999 to offer funds for the IMF on condition that they would be given additional voting power (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). When they were turned down, they revoked their offer and formed the BRIC community, which became BRICS when South Africa joined in 2000. BRICS now invites several other countries as observers in their annual forum. BRICS countries put previously pledged funds in the New Development Bank, which is an alternative to the IMF and the World Bank. BRICS meetings are attended primarily by political leaders, in contrast with the G summits.

Roger Loewenstein (2015: 69) claims that the regime is a façade because the world “will continue to have turmoil over trade and unstable currencies because that is what most nations want.” As David Detomasi (2006) has demonstrated, heads of major corporations collude in the financial realm, and the Great Recession was one result. Humanitarian-oriented INGOs might convey the needs of the masses to global financial institutions, but the financial–monetary regime has little interest in the people around the world. The current INGO strategy is to try to open the door just a little in order to have some input, hoping that the response will be positive and the door will open wider.

Human Rights Regime

Several IGOs and INGOs are focused on the goal of universal respect for human rights, challenging nation-states to live up to norms found in human rights treaties. Relevant IGOs range from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to the Human Rights Committee (one of eight treaty-based organizations sponsored by the UN) and the International Criminal Court (Haas 2014b: chs. 9–10). Human rights INGOs, such as Amnesty International, seek to promote compliance so that the global masses will benefit from protection of their rights. Both IGOs and particularly INGOs seek to shame violators with the aid of media coverage (cf. Murdie and Davis 2012; Peksen, Peterson, Drury 2014), resulting in a decline in investment and a lessening of repression within the countries that have been shamed (Franklin 2008; Barry, Clay, Flynn 2013).

After countries sign and ratify human rights treaties, they tend to comply with provisions and show improvements (Simmons 2009). Although INGOs often take credit for exerting effective pressure, the dynamics of domestic political party systems are that one political party will criticize another for human rights violations, win an election, ratify a human rights treaty, and compliance will increase. Among the areas of recent success are rights accorded to migrant workers (Soysal 1994), women (Ramirez, Soysal, Shanahan 1997; Berkovitch 1999), and gays and lesbians (Frank and McEneaney 1999).

One focus of the human rights regime is war crimes. Following the use of torture by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo, and more than 200 other war crimes committed with impunity (Haas 2009), there has been a backsliding in compliance as other countries and terrorist groups realize there is little accountability for war crimes (Haas 2010: ch. 6).

However, appearances may deceive. Most INGO activity focuses on civil and political rights; economic and social rights are downplayed. The reason is that donors to flourishing INGOs are likely to be corporate foundations, which are attracted to projects that advance the rule of law in developing countries by ensuring that investment and trade are secured without corruption.

Yet economic inequality springs from denials of civil and political rights. INGOs stressing economic and social rights have fewer economic resources, tend to engage in advocacy and documentation of violations rather than court cases, and engage in direct aid projects (Berkovitch and Gordon 2008: 894, 897). In short, the human rights regime has made an auspicious dent in the behavior of elites in the global economy.

UN Global Compact (UNGC)

Operating as a macro-regime with the aim of promoting environmentally and socially responsible business practices, the UN Global Compact began in 2000 as a forum for discussion and a network for communication between national and local governments, businesses, labor organizations, and civil society organizations. UNGC asks corporations to report on how they uphold various human rights—specifically, the right of collective bargaining, ending forced and child labor, nondiscrimination in employment, ending corruption, and environmental preservation. Participants today include about 10,000 members from more than 170 countries and 7,000 corporations, though 3123 corporations have been expelled for not submitting reports.

Critics accuse the forum of being a talkathon that permits corporate “bluewashing”—that is, corporations can water down the effectiveness of international agreements by submitting reports with no apparent substance. For example, Survival International objected that Ayoreo Indians in Paraguay were never contacted before the Brazilian ranching company Yaguarete Porá felled trees and cleared land, even after being fined by the Paraguay government for illegally clearing the Ayoreo’s forests while concealing evidence of the presence of Ayoreo residents in the forests (Cheeseman 2012).

Clearly, UNGC overlaps with the work of the International Labor Organization. Regimes are not entirely tidy constructions.

Implications

Private–public regimes promise to bring some stability to global problems because they establish mutual expectations based on common norms. When they involve both IGOs and INGOs, the interests of the global masses are more likely to be considered. Private–public regimes are more effective in relieving problems faced by ordinary people around the world when they articulate norms and enforce them (Young 1999; Coleman and Gabler 2002; Conca, Wu, Mei 2006). Violations of conduct codes can be deterred either through sanctions or the need to receive the rewards of cooperation (Keohane and Martin 1995; Dimitrov 2003; Ritter 2010).

Some scholars, known as cognitivists, stress that regimes thrive because there are real problems that need attention and because considerable learning takes place on how to improve the payoffs during the interactions of the regime negotiators (Wettestad and Andresen 1994; Hasenclever, Mayer, Rittberger 1997). If positive interaction takes place within regimes, the process of developing and implementing codes of conduct will be enhanced. Continual interaction ensures that critical information about the behavior of each participant in a regime will be transparently known to all others. Participants need to be problem solvers with experience in promoting cooperation between diverse interests (Miles et al. 2002).

But the crucial question in terms of global mass society is which interests are dominant in shaping the new codes of conduct within private–public regimes. The answer seems to be that the codes of successful regimes—those with a high level of norm compliance—are shaped by major powers (Breitmeier, Young, Zürn 2007; Breitmeier, Underdal, Young 2011). The reason is that every regime requires resources that minor powers lack, and INGOs are beggars (Mearsheimer 1994/95; Dowlah 2004; Halabi 2004; Sharman 2011; cf. Strange 1983: 342).

However, various studies have found conflict among the institutions involved in private–public regimes, providing mixed messages that often undermine regime legitimacy. Effectiveness is a function of the differential “payoff structure,” which ultimately is assessed through political more than economic considerations (Oye 1986; Young 1999; Lipson 2004; cf. Berkovitch and Gordon 2008).

Nevertheless, private–public regimes are making important contributions to global governance. Compared with the struggles within private–public regimes, more attention to the global masses may be found within IGO-led regimes because the latter service the most vulnerable of the world’s citizens, for example those who suffer from health problems and refugees awaiting resettlement. For those who want to avoid the vagaries of politics, there is another way to build regimes—by the private sector alone.

Private Global Governance

Global regimes emerge entirely in the private sector because governments and IGOs are so preoccupied with issues of political legitimacy and survival that everyday problems of TNCs and the global masses seem less immediate (Hale and Roger 2014; Abbott et al. 2015). The public can have input into the rule-making by attending corporate functions to demand certain standards, but what is more likely is that they will join labor INGOs to seek better working conditions and environmental INGOs to press for environmental sustainability.

Claire Cutler (2002) identifies six types of private international regimes: (1) informal industry norms and practices, such as when European banks only sold Eurobonds to blue-chip companies; (2) coordination service firms, such as how stock exchanges impose requirements before a company can be traded; (3) production alliances, as when a company puts the same label on a product made by several companies; (4) cartels, particularly in the maritime transport industry; (5) business associations, such as the International Business Brokers Association; and (6) private regimes, most notably nongovernmental dispute settlement arbitration. A seventh type should be added—consumer-oriented private regimes of global governance. In the discussion below the first four will be identified as corporate global governance, followed by a section on the latter.

Corporate Global Governance

TNCs seek to lower transaction costs in the global economy, thereby increasing profits and lowering prices for everyone. Accordingly, transnational private organizations have been created from “clubs”—working groups consisting of industry representatives, which design practices and rules that have gained wide acceptance in the private sector (Koppell 2010: 241; Prakash and Potoski 2010). The process of developing standards within the “clubs” is identified as “a vast network of committees, subcommittees, and working groups that serve as focal points for the negotiation of individual standards” (Dimitrov et al. 2007: 427). The role of the global masses and even INGOs is nonexistent in most corporate global governance (Koppell 2010: 242).

For example, the International Organization for Standardization establishes rules for products and processes and even allocates a code number to every island on the planet. The International Accounting Standards Board seeks to standardize accounting practices around the world. The International Container Bureau standardizes shipment containers to simplify how shipments are loaded and unloaded from merchant vessels. However, the World Standards Cooperation, which is not limited by sector, is a club of corporations that have established standards for food safety and social responsibility (Prakash and Potoski 2010: 74 n.4).

Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, private firms in New York, estimate investment risk by applying a rating system, and thereby direct capital toward some countries and away from others while also affecting interest rates on loans (Sinclair 1994; Halabi 2004: 45). Both companies have power without accountability. Yet even though they were discredited by the financial crisis of 2008/09, they continue to operate without competition.

But something more sinister is going on—a hidden agenda. During the 1980s, the writings of André Gunder Frank (1967, 1969; cf. Easterly 2015) and others dwelled on how TNCs bought up local businesses in Third World countries and then shut them down to dominate the local market while neocolonially extracting resources and decapitalizing the economy. But now TNCs accomplish the same goal of driving out the competition by refusing to purchase products from developing countries if they fail to comply with “global standards,” which never take problems of developing country companies into account (Garcia-Johnson 2000; Arnould, Plastina, Ball 2009).

There are several reasons why aspiring businesses in developing countries are being treated so ruthlessly, in addition to the fact that they lack the capital—though not necessarily the will—for compliance (Dimitrov et al. 2007: 427). Democratic developing countries seeking greater prosperity are coerced into abiding by “global standards” because the First World has the investment capital they need (Li and Resnick 2003; Halabi 2004). Noncompliance with “global standards” in authoritarian developing countries has also been attributed to lack of a strong civil society to counter corrupt governments (Drezner and Lu 2009; Berliner and Prakash 2014; Prakash and Potoski 2014)—and the corruption comes from payoffs by TNCs. Susan Strange (1983: 342) long ago identified such efforts as a strategy of economic domination by the United States and its many TNCs (cf. Dowlah 2004; Halabi 2004; Friedrichs 2005). Even within developed countries, small businesses are destined to fail because they lack the resources to conform to “global standards.”

In the matter of corporate acquisitions and mergers, the International Competition Network has emerged from eighty-four national and transnational agencies. But efforts to forge a regime regarding international competition have been blocked by the United States (Dimitrov et al. 2007: 238–40; cf. Detomasi 2006).

Corporate global governance is a classic case of global mass society: TNCs and related INGOs ignore the adverse impact on the people of the world, instead relying on a top–down narrative. In short, the global market has a wide range of standardized rules that have been developed by corporations and associated business-oriented INGOs within particular industries without inputs from governments or the global masses. Although consumers sometimes benefit by paying less at cash registers and over the Internet due to standardization, another result is that workers are trapped in sweatshops, the environment is endangered, and TNCs aggregate profits and exacerbate global inequality.

Consumer Global Governance: Fair Trade Movement

TNCs trade in a market where some consumers insist on environmentally friendly standards and oppose exploitative labor conditions. Accordingly, market-based regimes have arisen to attract consumers and to circumvent corporate global governance. What have emerged are alternative trade organizations (ATOs), the most famous of which are associated with the Fair Trade Movement. A survey in 2000 found that about 30 percent of Western consumers avoid purchases if they believe that producers have harmed animals, used sweatshops, or contributed to pollution. Thanks to the movement, they can do so. The discussion below focuses on such cooperative efforts in agriculture, clothing, and forestry.

Agriculture

The origins of the Fair Trade Movement can be traced to Eduard Douwes Dekker’s pseudonymous novel Max Haavelar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (1860), which decried the conditions of workers on coffee plantations in European colonies. Before imperialism intruded, the workers had been communal farmers within agriculturally self-sufficient villages, but afterward they were paid at starvation-level wages. The novel not only inspired anti-colonialism but also spawned the idea of ATOs.

After World War II, churches in Europe and North America began to purchase handicrafts from refugees through such organizations as the Mennonite Central Committee. In 1965, Oxfam set up an ATO to negotiate purchases of goods from primary producers for department stores and similar consumer companies. Then in 1968, the World Earth Catalog featured handicraft items so that buyers could contact sellers directly. In 1969, the first WorldShop opened in the Netherlands, with the items purchased from the catalog on display for purchase. WorldShops then spread throughout Western Europe. As the price of coffee plummeted due to more plantations being set up in former colonies, the Havelaar Foundation was started in 1988 to issue “Fair Trade” labels for cans of coffee that met living wage standards.

In 1989, the International Federation of Alternative Trade was formed as an alliance of ATOs, with headquarters in England. Now known as the World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO), members include export marketing companies, importers, national and regional fair trade networks, producer cooperatives and associations, retailers, and support organizations. In 1994, American and Canadian ATOs joined WFTO, which then became the Fair Trade Federation.

For ATOs to be successful, there was a need to put visible labels on products. Accordingly, the Fairtrade Labeling Organization (FLO) was founded in 1997 at Bonn. Beginning in 2002, FLO then began to label cocoa, coffee, and tea, which became available at Starbucks from the year 2000. Other fair trade products today include fresh fruits, fruit juices, herbs, honey, rice, sports balls, sugar, vanilla, and even handicraft baskets from Rwanda.

To gain a “fair trade” label, a product must meet several standards. Farmers must receive a living wage, with women paid the same as men. Workers must operate in safe working conditions and have the right to join unions. ATO trade is direct, not involving “middlemen.” Producers must be free to invest profits, some of which go to product improvement and scholarships. And production must be ecofriendly, made without harmful chemicals or genetically modified organisms.

FLO split into two entities in 2009. FLO International is a nonprofit that develops standards and licenses ATOs, encouraging producers to process their products before shipment, such as by roasting and packaging products so that they can undersell products processed in developed countries. The profit-making FLO-CERT certifies and monitors producer organizations in more than fifty developed and developing countries. As a result, 1.5 million primary producers around the world receive at least $1 billion of additional income each year.

Clean Clothes Campaign

Founded in 1989 by the garment industry, the aim of the Clean Clothes Campaign is to ensure decent labor conditions and to avoid child labor (Pruett 2005). Businesses and unions in fifteen European countries have developed more than forty framework agreements between international union federations and TNCs. The campaign has outreach to more than 250 INGOs and NGOs throughout the world.

Forestry

The global environmental regime has many components. Focusing just on the forestry aspects, the International Tropical Timber Organization serves the interests of exporters and importers and refuses to allow input from INGOs (Smouts 2003: 215), thereby allowing ferocious logging practices to continue with impunity.

Then in 1993, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) established a certification program that determines which trees can be cut without jeopardizing forest sustainability (Cashore, Auld, Newsom 2004; Gupta and Mason 2014). An Alternative Trading Organization, FSC was set up through negotiations between logging companies and INGOs at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 (cf. IIED 1999). FSC’s principal decision-making body is a general assembly of some 600 individual and organizational members, though there are three “chambers” dealing with economic, environmental, and social interests and two subchambers in each for input from developing and developed countries, albeit weighted toward the latter, which are more numerous (Dingwerth 2007, 2008: 620, 624).

Although South Africa now subcontracts forest surveillance to FSC (Pattberg 2006: 590), few FSC-certified forests are located in developing countries (Dingwerth 2008: 619). Today, Home Depot, Ikea, Lowe’s, and more than 300 others businesses sell only FSC-certified products (Domask 2003; Biermann and Pattberg 2010). The movement has even encouraged the World Bank to uphold FSC standards and inspired an agreement to maintain sustainable global forests between the International Federation of Building and Wood Workers and Ikea (Dingwerth 2008: 611, 618). FSC also agreed to a partnership with World Wildlife Fund, now the World Wide Fund for Nature (Smouts 2003: 216).

Implications

Perspicacious consumers are now in a position to undermine reprehensible practices that take place in the global economy. But not all consumers have the knowledge or can pay the extra amounts that are charged by Fair Trade products. Such efforts to divert consumers may merely reinforce the dominance of the transnational corporate structure, according to Ronnie Lipschutz (2005).

In addition, less developed countries have been largely outside private global governance regimes (Ronit and Schneider 1999: 246), mostly because they are economically outclassed by developed countries and lack the expertise in technical areas necessary to comply with strict standards. Nevertheless, they are increasingly trying to play a role in ATOs and the Fair Trade Movement (Dingwerth 2008).

Conclusion

Global mass society continues, with no clear solution to such global problems as economic inequality, environmental fragility, and massive human rights violations. The main problem is not gridlock but instead the failure of global civil society to penetrate the global economic power structure and to discredit the culture of consumerism. Exponents of democratic global governance are nevertheless encouraged by some developments leading toward stakeholder democracy (Tallberg et al. 2013: 257), but progress has been limited.

Many problems were anticipated four decades ago. On May 1, 1974, a proposal for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) was presented to the UN General Assembly. A New International Information and Communications Order was also proposed as a prerequisite to NIEO (MacBride 1980). The NIEO proposal would have given greater voice to developing countries in the construction of an economic regime among capitalist countries (Bhagwati 1977; Murphy 1984). Before the end of 1974, the General Assembly adopted a Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, which called for the redistribution of wealth and political power as well as the promotion of global justice, assigning “duties” to developed countries and “rights” to developing countries. But all three initiatives, which recognized the existence of a global mass society, were stillborn, strongly opposed during the Cold War by the United States.

Today, despite the end of the Cold War, TNCs still block global reforms (Mearsheimer 1994/95), resulting in the marginalization of the developing world (Dowlah 2004; Halabi 2004). Even smaller developed countries are among those trapped by the consequences of out-of-control dominance by TNCs in the global economy.

Barriers to global democracy include the failure of cosmopolitanism to outweigh consumerism, media that cover rather than question global dysfunction, the weakness of people-oriented pressure groups, intergovernmental organizations that await funding before action, and TNC global governance regimes that ignore the consequences of their rules on small businesses, minor and developing countries, and of course the people ultimately affected.

Many scholars hold out the hope that democratic global governance is the answer (Goodhart and Taninchev 2011), but anti-globalization is now evidenced by the rise of nationalist movements led by radical leaders who promise to fix the problems even though they cannot, and instead seek to hold onto power while paying more attention to scapegoating than to global democratization, environmental sustainability, and human rights (Marchetti 2008a, b; Kirchick 2017; Mishra 2017; Peer 2017).

Many supporters of global governance are aware that they are celebrating how Western power has shaped a world that has long neglected countries in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, where most of the world’s population lives. China, the world’s largest economy, will ultimately play a larger role (Rachman 2017), though it seems doubtful that either Beijing or the BRICS will serve as an intermediary between the West and smaller countries. The global mass society that the West has created through economic and military domination is not receding.

Nevertheless, heroic inroads are now being made, as nongovernmental organizations are increasingly allowed a voice in the deliberations of intergovernmental bodies. Some but not all regimes consisting of partnerships between private and public entities are providing more global democracy, especially in regard to the environment. Alternative trade organizations compete with TNC dominance in world trade.

Although world federalism is a utopian plan to end global mass society, practical alternatives are not gaining support. Those challenges are addressed in the final chapter.