Global Governance as the Hegemonic Project of Transatlantic Civil Society

Abstract

There is an old tradition of politics claiming supremacy over the market and civil society. One may reasonably doubt whether politics was ever able to make good this claim. But whereas it was somewhat plausible to talk about the supremacy of politics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after the end of the Cold War this claim has come to be more and more questionable. More often than ever before, economic and societal actors bypass their governments and challenge the autonomy of political decision making. At the international level, it has become an accepted wisdom that globalization and global governance are making inroads into the sphere of politics among nations. This implies that the time-honored concepts provided by the academic discipline of International Relations (IR) are less and less adequate to capture the reality of world affairs. Accordingly, it is increasingly important to engage in the conceptualization of novel analytic instruments. The concepts of globalization and its offspring, global governance, both hold the promise to facilitate such a novel conceptualization. Without denying the importance of globalization, this essay focuses on global governance.