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LSE: Public lectures and events
Gridlock: why global cooperation is failing when we need it most
01:31:51
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- [00:01]
A
Good evening, everybody. My name is Stuart Corbridge. I'm one of the pro directors here at lse, and it's a very great pleasure to welcome you all to the launch tonight of a new book, Gridlock, by Thomas Hale, who's immediately to my right. David Held, who many of you will recognize is at the end of the podium. And Kevin Young, now is the time, please, if you would, to take turn your phones to silent if you want to tweet. The hashtag is LSE Gridlock. And we are hoping to have a podcast of this event in due course if there's no technical failure. Now, we're going to do something a little bit different this evening partly at David's behest, which is that for about the first 45 minutes, I'm going to lob a series of questions at Tom, Kevin and David around the book that will give a sense of what the book is about, what its main theses are. And when we've done that, there will be about eight questions that I'll be leading off with, and we'll open it up to the audience more generally. So let me just say a word or two about each of our guests tonight. Thomas Hale, here to my right, is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Blevechnik School of Government at Oxford University. Tom has his PhD from Princeton, but we're pleased to welcome him back tonight. He did get his Masters in Global Policy here at lse. Kevin Young, to Thomas, right, is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Kevin's well known for his work in the field of international political economy, particularly, I think, on financial regulation. And before Kevin moved across the Atlantic, he was previously in the Department of government here at LSE, which I think is where he received his PhD. David held now is very grandly the Master of University College and Professor of Politics and International Relations at Durham University. It's a great pleasure to have all of you back here tonight, but David, of course, has been a longtime member of lse. Many of you will know him as the person that held the Graham Wallace Chair at the school. David, of course, is very well known for a wide range of works, I think, particularly in the fields of political theory, globalization and cosmopolitanism, as many of us also know, and I've been a beneficiary of this. David is also a very distinguished businessman, having set up with Tony Giddens and John Thompson Polity Press, which I think is one of the major academic publishers in the uk. So we're delighted that you're all back here at the school tonight. I'm going to invite you first just to talk a little bit about the book and its title. As everybody can see in the room, the proper title of the book, Gridlock. The subtitle is why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most. So why do you think it's a particular issue now? And why do we need cooperation more than ever?
- [03:26]
B
Well, thank you. Thank you, Stuart. Before I start, let me just say what a pleasure it is to be back at the lse, an institution I love very much and is probably the greatest social science university in the world. I'm also delighted to see a former director of the LSE here and the current director of the lse, Tony Giddens, who's sitting over there, is a long standing friend of mine. We worked together and of course we co founded Party Press and has been a great inspiration to my work over many, many years. And Craig Calhoun is someone whose work often takes a different tack to my own. But I've always somehow been in debate with the positions that he's held. So. So it's a great honor and privilege that they're both here this evening. Thank you for organizing the event for us. We're very grateful. Thank you, lse. Thank you, LSE staff. Before I come on to answer your question directly, I would just like to say something about how the book came about, and it came about very much at the lse. After the pretty much breakdown of the climate negotiations at Copenhagen, I went to several lectures, as did my colleagues here, on why Copenhagen didn't deliver the goods, why the climate negotiations that Copenhagen didn't deliver the goods. And the more these lectures I went to, the more I began to think, and the more we began to think and the more we began to discuss that it may be the wrong question. Everyone was treating the difficulties at Copenhagen as sui generis. That is something that happened in and of itself to be explained by reference to processes as it were internal to it. But it became very clear you could ask the same question about many breakdowns in many international negotiations. The Doha Trade Round being one among several others. So the question emerged to us anyway, why are international negotiations at this time so unproductive? And that's really stimulated the book now to the question, so why do we need more global cooperation than ever before? Here, I think, is the dilemma in a nutshell. Globalization has created a world of very complex interdependence. This has led to new global challenges, and we don't know as yet how to address or resolve many of these global challenges. There's been a breakdown, as I've already alluded to, in many international negotiations, from the Doha Trade Round to Copenhagen. There were eight successful rounds of trade negotiations before Doha. But Doha has been negotiated for over 20 years and there's still no resolution in sight. Just one example. The global financial crisis nearly plunged contemporary capitalism over the edge of the abyss. It was very, very close indeed. Climate change seems to be running away with itself, and we're certainly not in sight, as we'll discuss in more detail soon, soon, for a way of addressing and mitigating and resolving climate change. And Syria as a fourth example. How many need to die before we can find a coherent way to act? Nearly 100,000 dead and gridlock over that security challenge and that nightmare for the people in the country and the region. This then is a breakdown or failure of cooperation reproduced in one area after another. Why? What is different about the global order today? I want to just say a few things about that. In the first instance, I want to suggest to you that what we call globalization, which is really the stretching of human activity across space and time, has created a world of growing interconnectedness among states and societies, central aspects of which need governing. Now we can measure globalization by measuring its extent, intensity and velocity of patterns of interconnectedness. We're not going to do that now, but just give you an example for that. Take trade. We can show the ways in which more and more countries over time have traded with more and more countries. That's extensity. How more and more countries that trade with more and more countries trade greater and greater proportions of their gdp. That's intensity. And how, of course, because of contemporary communication infrastructures and transportation infrastructures, they can shift those goods and services much more rapidly than before across many different domains of human activity. It can be argued there's been a confluence of change, particularly marked in the second half of the 20th century, producing deep enmeshment of countries with each other. Elsewhere in some of my work that Stuart kindly mentioned, I've talked about a shift in the modern period from largely national communities of fate, where countries could largely determine their own fate, the exceptions of course, being war, to increasingly a world, what I call overlapping communities of fate, where the fate and fortunes of countries are increasingly intertwined. Another way to put this is that up to a few hundred years ago, civilizations developed in relative isolation from each other, in relative discreteness from each other, as it were. Today, of course, this is no longer the case. Now gridlock come back to the book, available at a very modest price outside afterwards, argues that globalization has generated complex patterns of interdependence which require effective governance, which is in short, chronically short supply. Post war institutions I'm talking about now the Second World War and the creation of the UN system and the Bretton Woods. Institutions above all created a unique set of circumstances which allowed a multitude of actors slowly over time to benefit from forming companies that could trade with each other across borders, multinational companies that could invest abroad, the development of global production chains, and that allowed these actors to engage in a very diverse array of social and economic processes which transcended borders. Now, these circumstances, combined with expansionary logic of capitalism and fundamental changes of technology, changed a great deal. That institutional structure allowed a great deal of change. It changed the nature of the world economy. It radically increased dependence on people and countries from every corner of the world. This complex interdependence created demand for further institutions which which states seeking the benefits of cooperation provided. So the argument in a nutshell is that the post war institutions which sought to stabilize conflict after World War II created the circumstances which allowed the world economy and general prosperity to develop. And this complex interdependence required management that created more institutions. And you began a virtuous circle of what we call self reinforcing interdependence. I'll come on to this image in just a moment. Now, we're not saying in this book that the post war institutions were the only causes of a dynamic form of globalization experienced over the last few decades. Changes in the nature of global capitalism, including breakthroughs in transportation and information technology, of course are obviously hugely important as well. However, what we are arguing is that none of these changes are could have thrived or developed unless they took place in a relatively open, peaceful, liberal, institutionalized world order. That was the crux, that was the condition. By Preventing World War 3 and another great Depression. The multilateral order we suggest did arguably as much for global interdependence as microprocessors or email have achieved. So hence this figure. The post war institutional order, alongside of course technology and capitalist development, created a world of greater interdependence that needed greater management, that created more institutions, and you began to get a virtuous circle that marked basically the prosperous years of the post war period. End of stage war.
- [11:44]
A
Thank you, David. As it happens, I have been reading this book, so I partly know the answer to my next question. Many people have been working on this issue of global governance. Failure is gridlock, mainly a descriptor That's a catchy title for the book. Or are you developing something new theoretically here?
- [12:02]
C
We want to make a very specific argument about gridlock in this book. Cooperation between countries has always been hard. States don't like to give up sovereignty, even if it helps them solve some problems that they face. Interdependence. We've had successful cooperation in the modern sense of the word, since at least 19th century. So what's different about the difficulty of cooperation now? Why is the difficulty we face today different in nature from the difficulty we faced in previous periods of managing interdependence? And our argument really relates exactly to this dynamic of self reinforcing interdependence that David's laid out. And to see how, think about your last trip in a car. So in the middle of the 20th century, when these institutions that we've been talking about were first being set up, countries around the world invested in modern road infrastructure and highways and motorways, other networks of transportation. This trend was most strongly adopted in the United States under the leadership of President Eisenhower. President Eisenhower had seen the advantage of modern road technology when he was the supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II. When he was invading Germany. He saw how efficient the German road transportation system was and knew he needed to do the same thing in the United States. When he was just a corporal, a young corporal in the US army, he had led a convoy from Washington D.C. to San Francisco to test the United States road technology. Guess how long that trip from across the continent took? It took 62 days. Today that trip takes 45 hours, in large part thanks to the infrastructure that Dwight Eisenhower spearheaded when he was president. So this was an enormously successful example of road building. It was widely seen as one of the key institutional and infrastructural ingredients of the broad prosperity the United States enjoyed after World War II. But it also changed the nature of American society. As people had cars, they were able to move out of cities, establish things called suburbs, which radically transformed the way people lived, settled suddenly. They needed cars to survive. They bought more and more cars. People needed more roads to drive on the cars. And the result eventually was something much more like this, where. Like that, like this, where the problem that they set out to solve and had successfully solved actually then overwhelmed the capacity of that very same technology, road building, to solve it. In a later time period. It also led to new kinds of problems. We have a sedentary lifestyle, we have environmental difficulties, we have health difficulties that all stem from over reliance on automobiles. But that doesn't mean it was wrong to build the infrastructure in the middle of the 20th century. It was definitely the right thing to do at the time. The problem is managing the consequences. Same dynamic applies, we argue, to the different kind of interstate system. The international order, the very institutions that we used to create a more integrated world economy, to build a security infrastructure that would Prevent World War 3, have unleashed conditions of interdependence, a profound deepening of interdependence that they can no longer manage. And that's really what makes gridlock different from other explanations. It's historically contingent. It's a broad systemic pathology that affects the entire international system. And it relates to four specific drivers, four things about interdependence that make cooperation difficulties. And these are the arguments we trace in the book. First, we have a rapid shift in power from the established countries, the established powers, to new powers. As we have more people at the table negotiating with more influence, agreement is often harder to reach. We also have a system of institutional inertia where the decision making procedures that were set up in the 1950s, 1940s have lost touch with the reality of power relations today. We also have a lot harder problems. The issues we confront penetrate more deeply into societies. Making them more required greater adjustments on the part of countries to achieve cooperation around. And last, we have dysfunctional fragmentation in many areas where the proliferation of institutions we've set up are now butting up against each other with competing mandates and leading to making problems, ironically, harder to solve. So it's a complex phenomenon.
- [16:13]
D
If I can try to answer your question as well, it's both a nice descriptive device and an explanation that we providing for the fact that the kind of institutional supply of global governance solutions hasn't met the demand that previous supply has created, essentially. Is it okay if I just sort of hash out each of these mechanisms sort of one by one, a little bit. So in terms of emerging multipolarity, we identified this and the other three gridlock pathways as among a variety of different causes for gridlock today. And we label these all what we call second order cooperation problems, right? They're cooperation problems at the international level or the global level that exist because of previous success in international cooperation. So they're unique. These are not cooperation problems that exist sort of in an extract, excuse me, in an abstract space that we can theorize. And so they're therefore true problems that have emerged historically. So take for example, emerging multipolarity. Since the financial crisis, and in particular over the last decade, we have more and more international Negotiations that are being stalled and they're coming to deadlock positions because of the rise of the BRICs and a greater diversity of states that are powerful enough to not be pushed around anymore. And this is arguably inhibiting a lot of international cooperation, for good or ill. Institutional inertia. You know, the prime kind of example, this kind of dynamic at work would be, you know, the UN Security Council. It's created by the victors. It's a post war institution created by the victors to give the winners of World War II a veto. That was essential historically. It embedded the privileges of these, of these victors. And today, arguably that causes all kinds of problems when we try to confront the kind of conditions of cooperation that we need today in the current security environment in terms of harder, complex problems. You know, 50 years ago, when international trade negotiations set to resolve issues, they were dealing with at the border problems, right? They were dealing with things like tariffs and anti dumping, things that existed at the border. And now we've moved into a terrain, global cooperation has been so successful, global integration has been so intense that we're now moving into issues like intellectual property rights and a host of other issues that are essentially more complex and harder. And finally, fragmentation. This is one of my favorite second order cooperation problems because in many areas of global governance, right, in the environment, in finance, for example, we have tons of international institutions that have emerged to micromanage particular problems that have emerged historically. But now we have, you know, collections of institutions that exist sort of in a network structure among each other. But often the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. These institutions don't relate to each other in any kind of logical way. There's an overlap in terms of the kind of jurisdiction they have. There's issues of communication between international institutions within the international system. So all of these, all these examples are the kind of main mechanisms or pathways we conceive of in the book that lead to gridlock. So it's both a sort of clever, pithy title, I suppose, and an explanation where we're trying to add value to existing explanations of breakdown.
- [19:46]
A
Thanks, Kevin. As you move into the heart of the book, there's some fairly empirical discussions of things like the politics of climate change. You already mentioned the environment and you showed the slide of the motorways. It reminded me of my hometown, Birmingham, but I don't think it was Birmingham. And then you talked about financial regulation. So I mean, maybe the way to make this discussion a little bit more concrete is to take these in turn. So maybe one of you could talk about the difficulties of the politics of.
- [20:10]
C
Climate change, I'd be very happy to. So climate change is the case par excellence of a more difficult problem. The technical term that some social scientists use to describe it is a super wicked problem, which means it has all sorts of characteristics that make it incredibly difficult to solve. So environmental problems in general used to be local issues. Is my water clean? Is the air I breathe clean? Is there a nice park behind my house? But the diffusion of industrial production around the world has made environmental problems global. In nature, the most important environmental problems we face now are inherently global. Ecologists refer to the present period as the Anthropocene, meaning that the actions of man are the single most important factor influencing the Earth's natural systems. That's a really powerful form of interdependence. It means that every action that every one of us in this room takes every day affects everyone else on the planet through our carbon emissions and other kinds of pollution. It doesn't just affect other people on the planet now, it affects people on the planet in the future. And our children are children's children. So that kind of global interdependence has never really existed before. They might have had a local situation, Easter island scenario where people over consume the resources. But this is a new kind of problem. It also has the, you know, climate change embodies the difficulty of the power shift we observe in international relations, the emerging powers issue. It has what Nicholas Stern has called a brutal arithmetic. That's the nature of the problem. The people who are responsible for getting climate to the tipping point that we're at today are largely the rich countries, the people who have, since the industrial revolution pumped carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. However, the people who will take us past the brink and into the realm of complete danger are the poor countries, countries who are just now beginning to enjoy the benefits of a middle class lifestyle. And so we have this inherent. The problem has this inherent conflict between rich and poor built into it. And of course, I should add, the people who will suffer the most are the countries in sub Saharan Africa and small island states who have really least to do with causing the problem. So, so this is a really difficult thing to solve. Finally, we've tried to solve it using the technology, the institutional technology, institutional processes that we've always gone to international negotiations that would have a global deal where we lay out the targets. You have to do this. You have to do this. We'll have some sort of verification system and we'll make them legally binding. So you really really, really have to do it. We've done that for 20 years now. And we've negotiated exactly one treaty, this Kyoto Protocol, which was meant to be a stepping stone to more ambitious measures. It hasn't been. It's been a treaty that never really tried to do very much and failed to do the little that it tried to achieve. Probably the way to solve it is not going to be this institutional technology. But we remain stuck in these negotiations where thousands of delegates get together year after year to try to get there again. So I think the climate change problem is really the case par excellence of gridlock and exactly embodies the problems we need to solve today.
- [23:18]
A
Okay, well, I mean, I know we're going to move on now to the financial crisis then. Kevin, some of us might think the financial crisis has something to do with avaricious bankers, the failure of regulators, the fact that governments have been content to bribe us with their own money. I mean, how are you going to explain it differently? Why does a theory of gridlock help us?
- [23:38]
D
So we're not trying to sort of directly compete with those existing explanations. We're to trying, trying to sort of add value at the level of the international system. I guess, and I guess I would disagree with Tom a little bit that climate change is sort of a gridlock issue par excellence because I think in the financial regulatory realm it's much more, even more apparent, as it were. So on the one hand it's a clear case where of institutional supply that's insufficient to meet the demand. So we haven't been able to generate strong enough, robust enough global, global institutions to manage the very kind of interdependencies that as David mentioned, the wave of globalization after the war itself created, as it were, in the crisis, global institutions were adequate, they were just adequate to manage the crisis. And so instead of getting a completely unmitigated crisis, as it were, an unmitigated disaster, we got a mitigated disaster. This is a good thing in some ways.
- [24:37]
C
Right?
- [24:37]
D
So not everything failed. We did avoid the worst outcomes. You know, the reaction, the sort of follow up from the crisis management of the crisis looked very much like it was helped in many ways by existing international institutions. The world looks very different in 2008, for example, than it does in 1929 when the last Great Depression started. But I would argue that the gridlock mechanisms that we identify that Tom just went over and we had up on the screen a little while ago, they can actually help us to explain the kind of post crisis regulatory response that has taken place and some of the failures of global economic governance since the financial crisis. And so a large part of that story arguably is that a lot of governance has moved from, from the G1, the United States pushing its way around, or even the G8 and the G10 being able to control the global economic agenda to the G20. And arguably that has made global cooperation more difficult to achieve simply. So if you have more veto players at the table, it's more difficult to hash out a complex global agreement when there's different preferences at different stages of development and different historical traditions. But a big part of the story we also tell another gridlock mechanism that plays into the financial crisis story is these fragmentation problems that I mentioned earlier. So existing institutions have been created over the last few decades to tackle particular problems, and they've emerged as effective micromanagers since the 70s even to tackle particular problems. But what we're left with is a very, very loose patchwork, a kind of network of institutions where there's relatively unclear lines of accountability. There's an overlap jurisdictionally and these kind of problems. So take, for example, there's been initiatives at the global level, various different levels of governance since the crisis to tackle a better management of derivative financial instruments, kind of complex financial instrument. It's very important for the global economy. We've had initiatives from about five different international institutions, plus different separate initiatives within the us, different initiatives at the EU level, and yet different ones here in the uk, for example. A lot of this is uncoordinated. And that kind of uncertainty isn't actually good for markets, arguably, and it isn't good for citizens that want a kind of robust regulatory reform. So we have here a sort of creation of a patchwork of institutions that doesn't always serve the public purpose globally perceived. Another example would be one of these institutions since the crisis, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. There they had this kind of reaction since the crisis to institute a new set of global standards, the Basel III Accord. And there's actually a lot in there. There's a lot in there that's very interesting and we just discuss it a little bit in the book. But one of the consequences, for example, is that one of the unintended consequences of this new regulatory initiative by this Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, just this one node in this network, was that it messed up trade financing, the financing of exporting and importing of goods and services around the globe. And it took many months and it took the World Trade Organization and the World bank completely by surprise that had no involvement in the creation of these global rules to eventually try to correct this problem. The point here is that the left hand doesn't often know what the right hand is doing. So there's an institutional inertia story here arguably as well. Right. So if you have a system like this, sometimes it can work like a resilient network, and other times it can work like chaos. And when it works like chaos, you want some sort of more centralized governing authority to kind of oversee the network.
- [28:37]
B
Right.
- [28:38]
D
But we have institutional inertia problems among many of these big institutions. A lot of countries, a lot of whole regions of the world are arguably reluctant to cede authority to institutions like the Financial Stability Board or even the IMF that arguably some regions and countries of the world have Apache history with. So arguably it's a good example, I think, of all these different gridlock mechanisms kind of coming together to ensure that the kind of supply, the global governance solution, the supply to a lot of new global dilemmas, is chronically insufficient. It's one example among many we tell in the book.
- [29:16]
A
Thanks, Kevin. And it's very nice to see reference to a third LSE director there on the slide. One of the things I think that people might want to explore later, which I thought was a at the heart of the book, is the way that you think about the sort of global cartography of power, if I can put it that way. A lot of the argument is about institutional inertia. So it's a very nuanced account of the fact that the EU and the United States have not gone away. But you're also talking about the rise of multipolarity and this what you call a massive shift in the distribution of power, Perhaps you could sort of talk us through that. And could you also, as a coder, say how you would deal with a slight skeptic like myself who tends to think still that the US is fairly hegemonic, that their ability to close European airspace recently is just one instance of that, as well as the ability to listen in on the conversations of people in the uk, France and Germany. I mean, how do you square your account of multipolarity with these recent events?
- [30:18]
B
Good.
- [30:18]
A
Take the general argument first.
- [30:19]
B
Right. I think the basic argument we want to make is not that US power and European might, as it were, such that it is, have simply ebbed away, but rather there's been a rebalancing of world power for most of the modern period, I'm thinking really from the 17th century onwards, but for about 200 years or so, 250 years or more, the west has basically written the rules of the international order through empire, colonization, and basically through the control of territory. After the massive World War I and World War II, the undermining of these global empires, the weakening of colonization, it was possible for Western interests to still remain dominant through, as it were, the entrenchment of their interest in international institutions. After the Second World War. You see that in the P5 membership. You see that in the way in which voting rights are skewed in the IMF and the World Bank. What we've had essentially since 1945 is a continuation, as it were, not of empire through control of territory, but as it were, control through rules of the game, managing the rules of the game. And this is you like as the club model of governance at the international level. The G1, as I call the United States, the G5, the G6, the G, G7 and so on, have by and large managed most of the complex institutions because they've had leverage on them, which was way in excess of the leverage of other countries from different regions of the world. What has changed is that particularly in the last 25 years, but increasingly with great acceleration, the world economy has been rebalanced. The US contribution to global GDP has declined. The European contribution to global GDP has also declined, with a huge rise in China's contribution to world GDP from about 4% to about 18, rising rapidly to about 8%. They're all converging on about 18%. This is a truly significant change. In the context of this change, I think what has happened is not so much the US of course, and the UK and Europe do not have significant trumping power in certain sectors anymore, but rather they meet now the veto power. The capacities of emerging countries to say no, if this is the only deal on the table, we don't want it. This is what's happened in trade negotiations. Eight successful trade negotiations since 1945. Then Doha, no. The Americans arrived with 500 trade delegates in Doha for the beginnings of the next round of trade negotiations. The European with the simple similar numbers. Some African countries shared them, shared one. But the emerging countries could say, if this is the deal on the table, if this is your agenda, it's not going to work for us. For the first time, there was a sufficient economic clout behind that refusal to create a veto. Not necessarily an alternative democratic project, hegemonic project, but a veto. And that we now see in international negotiations after international negotiations, again, of course, at Copenhagen, when there was no agreement and when the basic countries, the BRIC Countries, the basic countries, could say again, we're not going to accept these negotiating positions. I think the power shift as we refer to it, and I'll come on to it again in just a moment, is a sustained trend with far reaching consequences. And these consequences are positive as well as negative. Let's just dwell for example on the positive. The colossal reduction in the number of world poor, the hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty in a way that is unprecedented in terms of speed and time. It's an absolutely extraordinary achievement. We've never seen anything like it. And of course China is an obvious example, but not the only one. The transformations in China are extraordinary, but so too are they in other countries. Parts of India, not all of India, but parts of India, South Korea, Vietnam. I can remember going to China for the first time some 25 years or so and arriving in Beijing and wanting to do some shopping. There was one retail store in Beijing and to get to the luxury goods sections of the fourth and fifth floor such that they were. You had to be a member of the Communist party or show your foreign passport. I was there just recently, 18 months ago, on a Friday, tonight at about 6 o' clock and you couldn't cross the roads for Mercedes, BMWs and other luxury cars. You could go into shopping mall after shopping. Male I watched agog as young Chinese were in the luxury shopping malls buying Prada handbags and so on and so forth. This is a transformation of extraordinary kind with profound implications for the life chances of hundreds of millions of people. The post war rivalry between the great powers, to the extent that it was kept in check, I think incentivized this economic development and it allowed new entrants into the world economy. And boy did they pour in. Few liberal economists I think would have predicted this extraordinary increase in entrance into the world economy. And many of them in their economic policies departing from the standard liberal model or the so called Washington Consensus model. Few would have predicted 25 years ago that these countries would have accelerated their economic development to the extent that they have. And of course LSE's Danny Kwa, who I believe is speaking at this very time is probably talking about this again. And he plots in a very subtle way what he calls the shifting center of economic gravity in the world in the 19th century Mid Atlantic slowly now moving eastwards somewhere now I think in northern Turkey. But if trends continue between India and China within 30 years, this is an extraordinary set of changes. The emerging economic powers I think developed, have of course at the same time have developed their own agendas. And it's hardly surprising. They have voice, they have interests. They're not always those, as we see in the international negotiations of over finance and climate. They aren't necessarily the same as those in the West. And that difference of voice and interest is expressed in fora after fora. And the consequences have been striking. The power shifts bring huge benefits, as I said, but they also bring new challenges. And the question is, how are the new voices and interests of the emerging countries going to be represented in international and transnational governance, in institutions, in order to both enhance their representativeness and effectiveness? I think the old clubs of Western models, the Western models, clubs of interest, they have lost their dominance. They've not lost all their authority or their influence, but certainly they can now be trumped or blocked. And this, I think, is a positive thing. This, we think in gridlock and we trace its implications is a positive thing for the world overall and certainly for these countries. But the other side of it is that new levels of dissenters emerge, new levels of conflict over ends and objectives emerge, and this blocks agreement on crucial issues.
- [37:43]
D
They interact with the other kind of gridlock mechanisms.
- [37:45]
B
So, you know, can you give an example? Like trade?
- [37:48]
D
So, okay, so, you know, international trade negotiations, you know, in the early 90s when the Uruguay Round of international trade trade negotiations was trying to come to a close, the EU and the us, let's not forget the role of the EU here, were very effective at extracting information from developing countries with respect to what they wanted through existing international institutions that got at the time that they wanted and were able to essentially engage in a kind of power play where they got a lot of what they wanted. At least the Europe and North America got a lot of what they wanted through pushing other countries around at the time. Doha has been completely different, right, because there, there's been not only different kinds of international institutions. So we have the wto, which has different rules that we created in the past, where the role of consensus is much more important, as it was in the past. And we have all kinds of coalitions emerging within the developing world and within reemergent powers, if I can call them that, that are having kind of coalitional effects which block the US and the EU getting exactly what it wants. And indeed, we see this in Doha and we try to document this in the book a little bit sort of round after round, a little institutional innovation after innovation. We kept on seeing failure and failure and failure come to a collective agreement to the extent that sometimes they were coming up with all kinds of Creative ways of trying to forge agreement between small numbers of parties, et cetera. And nothing seemed to really do the trick. And so a lot of that is this multipolarity story. It doesn't mean the US doesn't get a lot of what it wants, but it certainly constrains a very different picture than it was in the past.
- [39:40]
A
It's interesting, this language of veto and blockage kind of reminds me of gramsci in the 1920s when he was talking of the old order has decayed, but the new order has not yet been born.
- [39:49]
D
That was going to be the title of the book.
- [39:51]
B
It's not quite the title.
- [39:52]
D
Daniel Gramsci is a sort of title.
- [39:53]
A
I didn't know that. I mean, is that the gist of the story then? That you're waiting for a new hegemon to come on the scene? And if so, what's it going to be? China?
- [40:02]
C
Well, I think that our argument is that the new order not just hasn't arrived yet, but might not arrive in fact, and that we might have to. The challenge we face is indeed to live in an era where order is harder to create. You know, we could look for leadership in lots of places. Maybe it's China. I'm quite doubtful. China people. China is often called upon by Western people or people in Japan to be a more responsible stakeholder in the global system. And they see this shift of power as necessitating commensurate rise in China's investment in global public goods and other pro social behavior in the international system. I think the more interesting story is how phenomenally drastic China's embrace of the global order has been in the very short time since the end of the Mao period. China's economic reform has not followed the neoliberal prescription necessarily, but it's certainly taken place and benefited enormously from the open trading system and the open system of financial integration that the world enjoys. It's hard to see how this export, that model of development would succeed without that kind of global order. And so China is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the post war order and it knows it. And that's why we see, you know, I would argue that China's embrace of the global system has been extraordinary. However, that doesn't mean that China is able or willing to pay the additional cost needed to move us beyond gridlock. China's chief difficulty over the next few decades is to reorient its economy from this one of export led investment led growth to a more domestic consumption led economy. That's a humongous challenge that's going to occupy the Chinese leadership for the foreseeable future. There's not much space there to care also about global public goods.
- [42:00]
B
Well, let's take the EU then, as an alternative candidate for potential leadership, as it were, to break the pathways to gridlock. And there, of course, the situation is worse. We can think of at least two EUs. There's the EU of the 1990s. If you look at the euro barometer polls in the mid-1990s, Europe is riding high with its population. Europe EU is enjoying widespread legitimacy. The model of European soft governance, the pooling of sovereignty to deal with critical issues, is widely admired around the world. Famous American commentator compares and contrasts European Kant with America's Hobbes. And increasing numbers of people look to Europe for a new model of governance, a new strengthened form of internationalism towards the end of the 20th century. Not anymore. The global financial crisis, which is really the coming together of gridlock in the global scene with the gridlock in the European one, has stymied Europe, as you all know. Fundamentally. The increasing, not surprising obsession is managing the European economy, trying to preserve the euro. So the EU is now EU leadership, now is essentially focused on Europe, looks internally at, and actually is no longer often a vital player in international negotiations as it once was 10 years ago. You had a good example of that, Tom, didn't you? The recent international climate negotiations, or one of them.
- [43:29]
C
So last summer around this time was a very important environmental meeting called the Rio Plus 20 conference, where there are great ambitions about how to reconstitute global environmental governance. Europe has of course, been the historical leader of these efforts, but it happened to coincide with a pretty tight moment in the euro crisis and lots of European leaders didn't show up. Only a few of heads of state from Europe actually came, whereas the previous meeting in Johannesburg, almost all of the European heads of state were there. And that leadership, that lack of leadership, that internal distraction put Europe in a very. Made it rather impossible to achieve global cooperation without the strongest advocate of such cooperation being even at the table.
- [44:15]
D
I would just add that even between the United States and the EU in recent months on a range of different economic issues. Sorry, there's all of you out there. Even across a range of different economic issues over the last few months, even the US and the EU have proven often unable to cooperate on issues that one would think in the past they would be able to cooperate on. In fact, in financial governance, now there's a real worry about financial protectionism.
- [44:43]
B
Right?
- [44:43]
D
So this is like the most Globalized sector of the economy. Every time you open up a book about globalization, you know, financial flows move all around the world with incredible speed, and they're buttressed through all these international institutions. Now, even between the US and the eu, there's all kinds of concerns and all kinds of volleys between the European Commission and, and the Federal Reserve, where they can't agree on a number of critical issues. And there's concern about interbank lending within this zone, declining and continuing the global slump that we've been in for some time. So even within the core, this kind of breakdown arguably is happening. So not that much sort of room for hopeful leadership there. Problems of nature.
- [45:31]
A
Let's take that up as the last question from me then, and then bring in the audience. The last part of the book, the last chapter is called Beyond Gridlock. How do you think we are going to get beyond gridlock? And how do you deal with the. What seems to be almost like an observable fact that very often it's war that precipitates a real change in the distribution of power and the rebuilding of institutions? War is both distributed, constructive and productive. Is that what you foresee or are you thinking of different ways out of this?
- [46:00]
B
Well, can I just start on that? I mean, it is the case that in the catastrophic wars of the first half of the 20th century, I always remind my students, it wasn't Islam or China that brought the world to the edge of the abyss in the 20th century. It was in a sense, Europe, not just once, but twice. And after each of these great wars, of course, there were huge efforts at international reorganization and attempt to avert war again. After the First World War, of course, the foundation of the League of Nations, which proved very short lived. But after the Second World, of course, the UN system, which we argue has been hugely successful, the UN system is of course, often knocked and criticized. But we argue that institutional cluster, as we've been arguing all along, was sufficiently successful in order to prevent a threat. Third World War helped to prevent a Third World War. There are other factors as well, of course, which allowed this long, sustained, remarkable period of global economic development and growth, which brings us to where we are, as it were. We are faced now with a set of global challenges, climate being, of course, the most obvious one where we have a good idea what's going to happen if we do nothing. Climate change has a capacity to uproot human activities as we know it, human association as we know it, and to change fundamentally many of the parameters of human life. We know all this yet do we have the wisdom now to be able to act decisively around these issues without, as it were, calamity? We have a unique moment, as it were, to galvanize our energies to break gridlock in one area or another and. And to learn from that process. But the challenge now is to do it as it were, anticipating calamity rather than actually being in a calamitous circumstance, as we have been in the first half of the 20th century. And the evidence at this moment is not good that we will be able to break out of gridlock through the coming together of great leadership and social movements of one kind or another. Let's look at social movements as a source. Well, we've already discussed national leaderships as a were, or the leadership of the great blocs. China, focused on its own internal legitimacy through economic growth. Europe, dogged by the crisis of the euro and seeking stabilization of the economic situation in Europe. The US of course, often gridlocked in Congress. And no matter what Obama says about his climate program, getting a lot of that through Congress will be extremely difficult. So what are the alternative social movements? Social movements have a fantastic capacity to put issues on the agenda, but unless they connect to institutional politics, they often disappear. Remember Occupy? Occupy two years ago was formidably successful in raising fundamental questions about the nature of global finance, about the restructuring necessity to restructure global financial institutions, to bring markets, financial markets, to heal. In many important respects, this agenda is not unimportant. But two years later, Occupy is hard to hear. That, it seems to me, is the fate of certain kinds of social movements, unless they can articulate their projects in institutional politics, unless there's a coalition between movement and leaderships within institutions. When that happens, change occurs. For instance, you think of the extraordinary impact. To me, I think it's one of the most extraordinary changes of contemporary period. Not at the global level, however, but it's a great example of how, as it were, the 60s and the wave of that particular wave of feminists in the 60s and 70s led to the raising of girls expectations over their futures. And their schooling led to changes in educational policy that integrated young girls into schools more and so on. 25 years ago, the problem was the dominance of boys at every level of education. Today, it's almost reversed. In just 25 years, girls outperforming boys at high school in almost every category of subject, and now at universities too. Social movements, when they interlock with institutions at the global level, can produce similar significant results. Think of the land mine treaty. Think of the foundation of the icf, which was driven partly by social protest and civil society movements. However, unless that bridge is made, the institutional solutions will always be partial. And where we sit today, it is very hard indeed to see how social movements, without reconnecting to institutions, will resolve gridlock. Do you want to add to this, guys?
- [50:41]
C
Yeah. I think one of the beacons of hope that I see in my work on climate change is, comes not from the gridlocked multilateral negotiations, but from the actions that other kinds of actors are taking on climate change. And I don't mean nation states, but I mean parts of nation states like cities or regions or provinces or states or non state actors like corporations or non governmental organizations who are taking the gridlock in the global setting as an opportunity to make their own kind of progress on these issues. And we see a really vast range of action here, be it the state of California introducing its own regulations, or individual corporations signing up to disclose their carbon footprints, individuals taking action. This is really exciting stuff and it kind of bellies the traditional pessimism that we have that collective action requires a collective solution. Collective action problem requires a collective solution. People actually are willing to be the first mover to go ahead and try to make progress, even if they can't be sure that other people are going to join them. The problem though is that these things haven't reached yet a level of scale and a level of ambition to actually solve the problem. So there's some seeds of hope, but the key task before us is really to think about how to make this proliferation of bottom up stuff enough of a substitute or catalyst for the top down institutionalized reforms that are actually going to bring us the rest of the way there. David mentioned.
- [52:07]
A
David, do you want the last one?
- [52:10]
D
I would only add very briefly that a lot of scholars of international relations and global economic governance generally are increasingly sort of satisfied with the notion that maybe we don't need global agreement on every single issue that has been raised. And so there's this rise of the term cooperative decentralization. You know, it's okay if we, if we don't have global agreement on trade and financial rules, we don't have an international standard informing all of public policy, et cetera. And I think one of the dangers with that is that publics may become a little bit complacent and the kind of institutional capacity we've been creating for many years, since World War to ended, will simply cease and that capacity will end. But I'm actually more interested in hearing what all these people.
- [53:06]
A
Yeah, now's the time. I'd like to thank Tom, Kevin and Debbie. I think they've given a very good account of the book as a whole, so that will allow people to engage with it. I'm going to come and stand over here so that I can see people on that side. I will call you first, sir. Could you please sort of try and keep your questions fairly short and just say who you are when I call you. I'll start with that gentleman.
- [53:33]
D
Occupy.
- [53:34]
A
I am part of the economic working group. Gridlocks, of course, are also in not just the international realms, but if you look at the various health systems in all kinds of territories, nations in especially the educational complex, also in the academic complex, you know, just look at British academia, economics departments or now we feel that their identification of problems, that is in the old club tradition, whilst the definition work, which includes quite intensely semiological and anthropological and other aspects, technological aspects, is very often not considered sufficiently. However, for instance, when it comes to Wall Street Occupy, they do fantastic definitions in the moment. They have offered a card index of explanations. I mean, the British Occupy, we have offered with the help of LSE people, a little learning booklet about key issues. But the American Wall street occupier is fantastic and they are connecting with global philosophers much better than anybody else. I think even with the gridlock research. Now they include the semiological aspects. Could you now phrase a question a question? Okay, so how do you relate to.
- [55:33]
B
The.
- [55:36]
A
Micro level of economics and finance? Thank you. Do you want to take them one at a time or we'll take three? Lady in the front row and then young man behind.
- [55:52]
C
The name is Jessie Harrington. You looked at the institutional side and governance levels. I would like to ask you a question from the point of view of the public, as a member of the public, to create a secure, equitable world with sustainable growth. At what level should we be living? That is, do you have any figures.
- [56:21]
D
For that.
- [56:23]
C
And do we have the technology for that or do we need.
- [56:28]
D
More technological revolutions and evolutions.
- [56:33]
C
To be able to get the growth bigger? And so, and you said also we're lacking governance. So to be able to create the governance, what should we be doing?
- [56:52]
D
Young man, Eric from Eckerd College in.
- [56:56]
C
The United States, you referenced earlier on.
- [56:59]
D
Climate change about the countries that were a tipping point and that the countries that are going to push us over.
- [57:06]
B
The tipping point has finally gotten to.
- [57:08]
D
That kind of area where they can enjoy the benefits with them now having.
- [57:17]
B
A seat at the table where they can say no, how are you going.
- [57:20]
C
To convince those countries to Kind of.
- [57:23]
B
Cut back and to not enjoy the.
- [57:26]
D
Benefits that they've now finally reached.
- [57:31]
B
We'll take these questions. But before I do, since some of you are leaving now, just to say, apart from the fact that the book's outside for sale, and secondly, we're very happy to sign it and that's free, but more importantly, we have drinks for some of you who would like to attend in the old building, in the atrium of the old building immediately afterwards. And you're all very welcome to join us for a drink. And I wanted to say that before you all start drifting out and before we start answering questions, and I hope to see some of you there. So who's going to handle what?
- [58:04]
C
Let's go down the line. So there are a few questions about sustainability and how we can ensure a sustainable future in a world where people also get the lifestyle that they want or that they are arguably entitled to. So I think that's the big question we face. Certainly the project will not succeed if it means that it involves denying people the opportunity to have access to electricity, to a basic standard of living that most of the people in this room who have enjoyed those standards of living would consider a bare necessity for human dignity. Billions of people in the world don't enjoy that standard. Yet there'll be billions more people in the world the next few decades who will need to be brought into that standard of living. So it's not just a question of limiting. If it's phrased as a problem of limiting the ability of people to enjoy a dignified life, then it won't succeed. So we need to have this magical conflation of sustainability and development. The old formulation what can governance institutions do to help us get there? I think that we shouldn't think about it as we in the west telling the emerging powers how they should behave. That's not going to work as we've outlined. What will work is trying to tackle us as a common problem. So you've maybe read about recently an agreement just yesterday and today between the United States and China to try to tackle some climate change issues. And these are very small measures to change the way heavy trucks operate, to cooperate on something called hydrofluorocarbons, which are potent greenhouse gas, other kinds of incremental steps. But the great thing about this is that it helps the pro climate actors in both countries make progress in the domestic debates. The key problem for both the G2 is not the international level really, but getting around the blockages they find in Congress, in the United States or in State owned enterprises and parts of the Chinese bureaucracy. So these nice kinds of cooperative measures are able to reinforce the leverage that those pro climate actors have domestically against their opponents domestically. And that's how international cooperation, I think, can help to inch forward toward progress.
- [60:24]
D
I'm happy to.
- [60:26]
C
Kevin has an answer.
- [60:29]
D
So we don't to give you a very direct answer in the book, we don't really have much direct to say about the appropriate scale at which economic activity should take place in order to facilitate some sort of sustainability goal. All I would add to that short and pithy answer to your question is that arguably many would agree that some modicum of global cooperation on a range of different pressing issues is important, whether or not we are localists at heart and whether or not we approve of a kind of robust sustainability agenda or not. I think one of the problems conceptually, and this is really what we're trying to sort of bring out in the.
- [61:16]
C
Book.
- [61:18]
B
Is well.
- [61:23]
D
It'S difficult to conceive of even many local problems that are emergent in many different localities as fundamentally non global in the sense that there's often an underlying sort of international dynamic behind many, many local problems. And arguably we need global solutions to those problems. I would only add to that that there's I think, a tendency within many communities that want more sustainable economic development and that kind of thing to think about the international system in terms of international institutions existing to buttress a kind of neoliberal project exclusively. And I think that's sort of, that's arguably a misunderstanding that has pervaded and prevented a lot more global cooperation and prevented a kind of progressive economic economic project that maybe more people would actually.
- [62:16]
C
Support.
- [62:17]
D
That's the only direct answer I can give to you as I can possibly. So there's micro gridlock. What do we have to say about that? Well, obviously the focus of the book is on the level.
- [62:35]
B
Right?
- [62:37]
D
Right. Well, I mean, arguably there are different forms of gridlock within national scales or even there's a study here at the LSE by Simon Hickson's colleague on gridlock within the European Parliament, within European institutions. Indeed, I believe there's whole books written about gridlock in the US Congress. These are arguably different kind of dynamics. Often, for example, in the United States States there's a famous argument that party polarization intensifies as the level of inequality intensifies. And that's simply a different kind of mechanism than the kind of mechanisms we're trying to address and develop and explicate in the book which exist at the level of the international system because of previous success in generating international cooperation.
- [63:31]
A
Can we let David.
- [63:32]
B
No, I'm not going to add anything.
- [63:33]
A
You're not going to add anything. I'd like to go to some hands that I saw up before. Yes, we'll take you first and then gentlemen, there you in the next round.
- [63:43]
D
My name is Emily Henderson.
- [63:44]
B
I'm from College of Charleston in the.
- [63:46]
D
US So you said that global organizations have not done enough for the increasing.
- [63:50]
C
Globalization and interconnectedness, such as like imf, World bank, those kind of things.
- [63:56]
D
So are you suggesting a world government.
- [63:57]
B
Or can I get your opinion on a world government?
- [63:59]
C
And do you see that in our future?
- [64:01]
D
Thank you, sir.
- [64:03]
B
My name is David Wood from London Futurists. I wanted to ask of your awareness of the work by another Oxford professor, Ian Golding, who in this same room four months ago gave a talk which is pretty similar on divided nations and why world governance is failing, but why we need it. And so as much as I remember, his argument was there's a lot of people who've been in institutions and they now retired from institutions and they really realize they didn't have the time before to make the changes work. And he's trying to coordinate a whole bunch of them through the Oxford Martin School. Ex politicians, ex institutional leaders. Do you have any hope that that could be part of the sol.
- [64:46]
A
Gentleman there?
- [64:50]
B
Thank you very much everybody.
- [64:52]
C
My name is Peter Hanley.
- [64:53]
B
I work in the ports and logistics industry from the uk. So we have a global connection. But I do do private research in systems. So this has been very interesting for me.
- [65:06]
A
So my question is, I think these.
- [65:08]
B
Are fantastic observations that you are working on that you put in the book.
- [65:13]
A
But it's about going beyond gridlock.
- [65:16]
D
So my question is what do we.
- [65:18]
B
Need to do using your diagram, Kevin, of your network, what do we need to do to the network?
- [65:26]
D
Copyright Howard Davies. But go ahead. Yeah, what do we need to do.
- [65:29]
A
To the network or feed it to.
- [65:31]
B
Help it stay in network mode more often than chaos mode? Okay, thank you. I'll have a go at some of these and we'll offer slightly different responses to these three questions. Let's take them in reverse order on my understanding, first of all, beyond gridlock. We have another volume coming out called Beyond Gridlock, but that's about two years time down the road. Secondly, because it does seem to us beholden to work out pathways out of gridlock, I think the most important thing to say about this book is the project was not to map that path, but by focusing on what's going on across a number of inter areas. Concentrate minds on the problem and if you can state the problem clearly as one of a kind of pervasive gridlock and concentrate minds of leaders on these issues, then there's a greater opportunity of moving outside it. But unless you define the problem first, you're hardly going to be able to meet that challenge. So the primary purpose of this book is explanatory analytical. On Ian golden, of course, there's often very little new under the sun and books come in waves of things. Ian Goldin's book overlaps with ours in some extent, but I think our explanatory framework is rather different to his. There are points of contact, there are points of similarity, but overall our arguments about pathways to gridlock I think takes a relatively different has a relatively emphasis to his. Are we suggesting a world government? I think no. To come back to my first response, I think we're suggesting a set of problems. Do I think world government is the solution? Well, I have written at great length about cosmopolitanism, as some of you might know in cosmopolitan democracy. But you have to distinguish different kinds of questions. As a political theorist, I write at three different levels. I write books about where we might like to go, books about where we are, and books about how you might get from where we would like to be to where we from where we are to where we might like to be. And I have a lot to say about your question, but that's not what this book is about, is what I'm trying to say. And we wouldn't agree on it, I have to say, say but I think what we would agree on is this is without greater coordination across many of these problem areas, without policy makers seeing the repeated circles of failure that occur across these areas, without picking out the pathways, the path dependencies that lead to fragmentation and so on, we're going to go around in a vicious circle. What was once a virtuous cycle becomes a natural negative set of circles and that you have to break. How you break it and on what particular agenda is another question. And certainly in my own work I've been a passionate advocate of internationalism, of cosmopolitanism, and of building on the achievements of 20th century international law and institution building, which I call stepping stones to a cosmopolitan order. But that is I have to suggest and emphasize not what this book tries to do. Do you want to pass things.
- [68:42]
A
That's not quite an answer to the question, David. Do you believe in world government?
- [68:45]
B
Is the question.
- [68:47]
C
Can I just comment on this point?
- [68:48]
B
I'll come back to that. Fair enough.
- [68:50]
C
So I think I'm less a political theorist and more of a sort of what explains the world we see today. And I think if we take that perspective, world government is not really in the realm of likely outcomes. And so we can pretty much leave it to the political theorists, which is why we probably wouldn't agree on writing a book about it. But I think Ian's book does a great job of pointing out the need for global cooperation and the lack of it. What we try to do is to explain why we have a lack of it. Ian makes a very, I think, morally strong call for more effective global governance. But our book shows that effective global governance is unlikely to emerge. Not just because we don't have good ideas about how to do it, but because there's these deep seated historical trends that are in fact the products of our previous success that make it hard to do politically. I think the Commission on the Future, I think it's called the 21st Century Commission, I'm not quite sure which is the name he has for it. They bring together the good and the great to think very hard about how we might make progress. And that's a worthwhile exercise. And I wish we'll look forward to seeing what good suggestions they come up with. There are other similar commissions that put their mind to this. But I think the value of seeing gridlock as we describe it is to say this is more than just about having smart institutional design. This is a long term, historically contingent trend and we're going to need to think about long term historically contingent trends of solutions. So not to discredit it, not to cast aspersion on that very worthwhile project, but I think we would be cautionary about expecting silver bullets to emerge anytime soon.
- [70:29]
B
I'll answer your question. Oh, Kevin, you want to come in?
- [70:31]
A
No, I want to hear David's answer.
- [70:33]
B
To your question as well. The short answer would be no. I don't think world government is either desirable or feasible. However, there are many intermediate steps which are both desirable, desirable and feasible. The post war order created a set of institutional circumstances at the global level which have been hugely successful, as we've argued. That's because global governance can work and can galvanize a rule system across the world. A shared rule system that allows the world economy and a range of other significant goods to develop. The problem is that the rule system that created that progressive growth trajectory and so on is no longer the rule system we would want if we were starting from scratch. Now we know, for example, what some of the colossal public goods crises are as a result of that system sustainability, climate change and a whole host of other things. We'd want the rules to not just be growth oriented, we'd want the rules to be sustainability oriented. We'd want the rules to embed the costs of environmental damage into the price of goods and services itself, and would want many other things as well. So we need then a different institutional design which embeds the modus operandi of companies, firms, civil society organizations in the set of shared but alternative reframing of rules. We can imagine that, but it's difficult to achieve. I don't think we start from nowhere. We start from a system of global governance at its best, which has huge credits. We start with the beginnings of a universal constitutional order that seeks to move down that road. The laws of war and human rights regime are two sides of a complementary structure which has sought to re articulate sovereignty and embedded in a new system of rules which qualifies in fundamental ways. These stepping stones to what I call the universal constitutional order are hugely significant. They're things that international order has got right, often as a result of catastrophes in the past. These are the stepping stones I think we build on. These are the stepping stones I defend in other of my books. These are the stepping stones we need to extend by enriching our governance institutions at the global level. But we're in a framework of rules that are not just market driven, but are sustainable, friendly to gender diversity and so on and so forth. In my other work, I try to fill that out at some length, but I won't go on now.
- [73:13]
A
Very interesting answer, David. I just want to make sure we're not missing. Yeah, well, there's a gentleman here. Perhaps we start with you, sir. Yeah. Is there anybody. Yeah, at the back. Two rounds. So we'll pick you at the back as well. Michael Gavrilovic, My question is a case of responsibility. Of all these bodies, who are they responsible to? Ultimately, they have to be responsible to people, to ourselves. And my question hence is one on national versus international and sovereign versus international. It appears to me that we've sort of lost our orientation here. A very good example has been given, in fact, by Professor Held telling us about the position of the EU in the mid-90s. A relatively high rating now, a very low rating. The fact is that people quite simply do not identify with the European Parliament. They still want to identify with their own nation states. And I don't know how long we can ignore that. I have been for a united Europe if you like, so long as it was a national Europe. I support ukip, by the way, and I would support similar groups in Germany, France and elsewhere, because that is what Europe is. What we now have is basically a kind of soup with no responsibility. And unless we know where the buck ends, then it can be easily passed about. And. And then you get what you've got here, the gridlock. But you may want to comment on that. If you want to ask a question, sir, there's a microphone.
- [74:55]
B
Thank you. Thank you. Yes, very interesting.
- [75:00]
A
The crisis that we are undergoing these days. It has laid bare the need for more, closer international cooperation.
- [75:12]
B
Can we use this, the crisis, to.
- [75:16]
A
Enhance, to promote international cooperation? Thank you. We'll take the person right down the front and we'll take the back for the next round.
- [75:30]
B
Hi, I'm Susan Wolf and I know you've said that your book is not about solutions, but I can't help thinking about a European tour guide I was speaking to a few years ago who said. Who led groups of Midwestern Americans around Europe, and she said, tell me, she said, how do you get someone from the American Midwest to try a different kind of salad dressing? And in a world where people don't want to try a different kind of salad dressing and things have changed so much, how do you get people locally to see the larger picture?
- [76:12]
A
Thank you.
- [76:16]
C
Several questions about national identities and the conflict between local and particular identities and global challenges. I think that's really at the heart of the issues we're talking about today. Interdependence means that my ability to get what I want means that you have to do something for me, and your ability to get what you want means that I have to do something for you. And the globalization has made that condition prevalent across the entire world. No issue that matters to people today on the headlines, be it economic management, environmental quality, basic security can be solved really at a local level, and exclusively or very few problems are characterized by that. Things like the quality of your school, maybe. But the issues we have are global in nature, and that has big implications for democracy. If you want, democracies have developed as national institutions where we have some say over governance. But if decisions are affecting us that are made in Beijing or in other parts of the world, then no level of national democracy, no level of sovereign defense for a national democracy is going to be effective for solving that. Instead, it might be worthwhile for us to give up some of that autonomy we have from sovereignty in order to get cooperation from Beijing or other places, because those are the decisions and the forces that are really affecting us. So this is, this reality is when we face is at disjuncture with our national identities, with our political identities, with our individual identities. Often I don't think that's going to go away. I think that's going to remain a very prevalent part of the world order. But the. So that's, you know, why we think gridlock is such a difficult problem, because we have this fundamental disconnect between our institutions and identities. And the problems we need to solve.
- [78:06]
B
Address the Europe question.
- [78:08]
C
So that's my take on Europe, is that we will continue to see national identities far into the future in Europe and elsewhere, but we need to have a way of managing those particular identities in an interdependent setting where you can't just go into your own cave and say, I'm this lord of my castle. No one can come through the moats. Because we live in a world that's fundamentally a world of, I don't know, it's a rabbit war and it's not a castle, it's an interconnected world.
- [78:37]
D
So the question of the crisis. Sorry, I didn't get your name. So arguably the shock effect has started to wear off in many quarters. I mean, there were initiatives immediately after the crisis to revitalize the international trade system through enhanced multilateral cooperation that again started to break down under some of the forces that we identified even within the financial system. The slide we had up earlier, there was a recognition that, look, wow, we have a tangled web here. It was referred to as a tangled web at one point by Bhattacharya and.
- [79:16]
B
The attempt to create an international financial tax transaction tax.
- [79:19]
D
There is initiatives like that that were more, arguably robust and called for more global governance at that level, but Those within the G20 failed as well. So I'm actually skeptical that we can utilize a lot of this sort of immediate post crisis social shock to move us forward. That and the fact that a lot of the problems that we describe in the book that exist within the economic domain also exist within the security domain, which we barely touched on here in a sense, and an environment. So there's common sort of pathways across these areas. So our hope is that by highlighting these, we'll have some intellectual traction there. But I think the post crisis sort of shock effect has really started to wear off.
- [80:11]
B
The salad dressing question, I mean, of course, how do you get people to try different salad dressings? By tempting them to do so, by giving them the opportunity to do so. And by showing that the salad dressing they've always had is not the only salad dressing they could possibly have in the future. That, I think, is the fundamental value of education to take perspectives we all take for granted and to relativize them to show that only one set of views among many others. And I think education publications, the media, social media, all create a public sphere in and through which it's possible, of course, to change the horizons of what it is that you have as a salad dressing, as it were. To continue the metaphor, of course, change, fundamental change, only comes really when you get sick of a certain salad dressing and you want to move on to continue this metaphor. That is to say, when your interests begin to be affected fundamentally by the salad dressing and you begin to say, actually, I actually can't go on like this. You know, it's going to make me sick if I have another sad addressing like this. I should stop this metaphor when you begin to see your interests defined in a different way. So to leave this behind us a little bit now, I think change occurs when sufficient number of people from coalitions of groups, whether they're states and movements or collections of states and so on, come to a common view that their interests are being so damaged by a set of circumstances, then they need to redefine those circumstances and create new rules at the level of citizenship. At the level of citizenship, that moment comes when people experience, you know, growing awareness of a set of constellations of issues that begin to motivate them and so on. You see that in teenage kids all the time, waking up to the fact that some fundamental things about the world are changing and so on. So at different levels, you see people begin to engage with new issues and horizons begin to change. But at the level of states, corporations and so on, at the end of the day, no matter what their horizons and awareness of a diversity of possible salad dressings, they will not act unless their interest is to so do. And at that level, I remain a materialist.
- [82:31]
A
I think we've got time for three very quick questions, three very quick answers. I'm going to have to disappoint a lot of people, including friends.
- [82:38]
B
Don't forget the books outside and don't forget the drinks.
- [82:40]
A
I was going to say that David at the end. That's why she probably said that. I'm going to go from that side to one person at the back and you at the front. So if we could start with this, you can try and keep the question short, snappy.
- [82:53]
C
Sure.
- [82:53]
D
Okay. I'm Hannah Percival. I actually work for the Department of International Development here.
- [82:58]
B
In the uk. So my question is kind of about developing countries. It's just basically obviously you've talked about a kind of reform of world institutions, which is really interesting and obviously the.
- [83:07]
C
Kind of link between the top down.
- [83:10]
B
And the kind of bottom up movements, really.
- [83:11]
C
And I just kind of wondered what.
- [83:13]
B
Kind of do you see in terms of the future, the kind of participatory framework for kind of developing countries in particular to get more involved in global institutions?
- [83:22]
C
Yeah, I'll try and keep it at that.
- [83:25]
A
I think you were first, sir, with a sort of red shirt from here.
- [83:29]
D
Sorry to disappoint the others.
- [83:31]
A
Roundabouts.
- [83:33]
B
Toby Chambers, We Care Foundation. I would like to suggest, if I may, that maybe it's a failing of the capitalist system that maximizes profit over kind of social impact.
- [83:46]
D
Thank you.
- [83:47]
A
And you can have the last question. You could come down to the very front, please, on the. To my left in Chap's three equally short answers.
- [83:57]
B
I'm Elsina Jefferson and I have my own foundation. Why don't we just launch it?
- [84:02]
D
You have over 200 people in the room here.
- [84:04]
B
Let's launch it here. The Queen asked the LSE a question. Let's answer it.
- [84:11]
A
Queen asked the LSE a question she did when she came here to open the new academic building, which is why didn't. Why didn't anybody tell us about the financial crisis? In mind are economists.
- [84:21]
B
I'll let Kevin answer that one. I'd like to take the one about to begin with. About, if I may, about participation and the incentivisation of participation. What you tend to find is that the higher up the social hierarchy people have as a background, as it were, the higher their social standing and status, the more incentivized they are to participate. In other words, if people believe there are rewards to participation, they tend to participate. If they believe they're not rewards to participation, they tend to participate less. I fundamentally believe that suddenly there's a whole civil society structure and social movement structure in which participation is of great significance. But in order to articulate that participation with institutions, you need avenues to do that, you need to build public avenues that incentivise that participation. We don't have those within the institutions themselves. Whilst it is the case that there has been a considerable improvement in many of the international governmental organizations, openness, publicity, transparency, they use the web much more. They publish their minutes of key meetings much more than they did in the past. This doesn't amount to great participatory channels. So how do you do that? That gets back to the question you asked earlier, I think you can only really do that at the glass level by creating much more deliberative connections between peoples and institutions, by creating deliberative chambers which make it possible for people to articulate their views on a more sustained basis. Ultimately, of course, there are schemes, many schemes about, that would seek to complement a parliament of states at the global level, which is the current General assembly, where the parliament of peoples are more directly elected, such as perhaps in the European model. But whilst we're not going to get anything like that in the short term, I think it is possible to conceive of ways of reforming international institutions that creates much more access for social movements and social agents. And actually some already do that. One of the results of the great pressures of social movements and civil society movements in the 1990s was precisely to open up many of these international governments institutions. You remember the crisis of the WTO in Seattle, where this huge pressure of social movements in Seattle nearly brought the WTO to a stop. Since then some of these organizations, I say, have become more transparent, more open, and they do have participatory fora for social groups and social movements. These are significant, but not sufficient. Elsewhere I've tried to write about this in a number of different ways, but that would take us beyond this evening.
- [86:59]
C
Let me speak very quickly to the question about building social environmental values into business models and to try to integrate these in a more comprehensive way. And we've seen huge progress in this. In the last few decades the idea of corporate social responsibility has gone from a kind of fringe notion practiced by Ben and Jerry's to a kind of mainstream thing that every major corporation in the world world things it has to do. We've also seen models of social enterprises, businesses that have as one of their goals, not just profits, but of creating social and environmental goods. These are fantastic shifts. They don't amount yet to a redefinition of capitalism. And I'd suggest that they're likely to remain partial solutions without more effective state regulation. State regulation was the traditional way we internalized externalities. To put it in economist speak. I just think that ultimately the solution is going to have to involve some mix of shifts from within the way businesses conduct themselves and external pressure applied by publics via states and through regulation.
- [88:01]
D
Let me try to answer the Queen's question really briefly and maybe hit off the one that was back there. So there's many different explanations of the crisis and why it wasn't spotted. It's obviously not our direct target. And in this book But I will tell you some thoughts that we do deal with in the book. Of course, there's a shortsightedness and a narrowness of the economics profession which has been well documented elsewhere. We didn't feel the need to go into too much here. Of course there's. Before the crisis, there was obviously a lot of entrenched interests, not just within the financial sector, but within the wider financialization of modern societies that played a role in making that economics profession rather complicit. The story that we do tell is very much at the international level in the book. And we claim that on the one hand, existing institutions entrenched and reinforced the biases of the Anglo American system that arguably had the greatest interest in the existing order, continuing and not spotting these problems on the one hand. And on the other hand, many international institutions within that highly fragmented network that we had up there a moment ago did identify particular systemic problems, but couldn't do much about it. Often, you know, they make, they would make a call, they would write a policy paper, etc. But in a highly fragmented system with very little centralized coordination or authority at the legal level or otherwise, very, very little could be done and they became voices in the wilderness. So we would not by any means neglect the importance of national level or even civilizational or historical reasons for the crisis. We tried to identify some contributing factors that existed at the level of the international system that we tell in the book that are related to this general gridlock dynamic story we're trying to tell.
- [89:55]
B
A tiny little final note. If you want to have a tiny bit of homework, read the G8 communique after their last meeting. If you want to really know what gridlock means, read it carefully. For example, with respect to Syria, it calls for the urgency of finding a political solution that's very, very precise. But it reaches its reductio ad absurdum. And I want to read you this. When it calls on quote, this is the G8 communication. It calls on the Syrian authorities to commit to destroying and expelling from Syria all organizations and individuals affiliated to Al Qaeda and any other non state actors linked to terrorism. Assad would have been delighted. That is, as it were, the brutal banality of a gridlock politics that doesn't know how to move on. Thank you very much.
- [91:01]
A
Just before you go, let me just add a couple of points. David's twice done my job for me. They will now the authors be signing copies of the books outside and you are all very welcome to go to Houghton street, the main entrance of LSE go into old building if you want to join the authors later for a drink. It only remains for me to say thank you all for coming out tonight. We're especially pleased if we've got students here from the LSE summer schools, as I hope we have. Very grateful to LSE events. I think we have the best public events program by far in the world, never mind in the UK or Europe. But most of all, very grateful to have our three authors with us and three strong alumni of the LSE back at the school. Thank you very much indeed.