Abstract
What connects the various parts of humanity are several types of flow—flows of capital, of goods and commodities; transfer of information and knowledge; and the movement of people across international borders. While the objective of public policymaking should be to factor in global change it can be done with two very different approaches. Policymakers can choose to optimize national interest or they can search for ways to maximize public welfare. National interest and public welfare are not always overlapping objectives. The pursuit of one can do tremendous damage to the other. This is the main lesson to be drawn from the history of the exceptionally bloody contests witnessed in the first half of the twentieth century. We are seeing this again in the beginning decades of the present century as the rise of religious extremism continues to take a heavy human and economic toll in many parts of the world. Promoting human welfare over national interest, therefore, must be the most important objective for policymakers to pursue.
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Burki, S.J. (2017). The Final Word: Broken Countries and Breaking Systems. In: Rising Powers and Global Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59815-8_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59815-8_14
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