Reconstructing the Balkans: A Global Governance Construct?

Abstract

Several of the essays in this book examine global governance at a very abstract level—as a discourse or a rhetorical move that influences thinking on legitimate social organization in its broadest terms (Späth, Friedrichs, Johns, and Patomäki). Analyses span the theoretical and empirical spectrum so that an examination of sixteenth-century Venice immediately precedes this selection, blending fluidly with the development of a future vision for political life. Perhaps it is their disconnection from the world as it exists today that gives these articles their critical distance and analytical power. This essay adopts a different approach. It scrutinizes the specific in an effort to gain leverage over the general. Its distance is psychological rather than temporal or spatial. The power of the critique launched here derives from the unease that is created when one is confronted with the reality that something is broken, that it cannot be fixed, and that although broken, it is still better than its counterparts in good repair.