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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter brought to you by Brill. I am Emily Tanken, and this week we will be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. I'm speaking today with Professor Stephen Gill. He's at York University in Toronto, Canada, and today we will be discussing his article Global Governance, as it was and ought to be a critical reflection in the journal Global Governance.
Stephen, thank you so much for being with me today. It's a pleasure to talk to you, Emily. So to start out, before we really dive into the discussion and the piece, how do you define global governance? Well, I can only speak for myself because there are many definitions of global governance, but my, I would give it two dimensions of definition.
They're an abstract definition. The abstract definition would include those ideas that justify or legitimate political power and influence, as well as the institutions to which influence that influence and power is stabilized and reproduced. And a set of patterns and incentives and sanctions which ensure compliance with the rules, regulations, standards and procedures which are written into the idea of governing. And it entails both, it's not just a public thing, it's not just states and multilateral institutions.
It also involves private forms of power, private institutions, the influence of private corporations, for example, or media institutions. Broadly speaking, it involves both institutions of what might be called political and civil society and how they operate either within particular localities such as the City of Toronto, across national boundaries of Canadian boundaries or American boundaries or regional, such as the North American frameworks or in the global frameworks which are more associated with global multilateral institutions and initiatives. So it's a very complex set of fields but they are connected to particular political purposes and attempts to be able to govern jurisdictions in a global sense across space and increasingly over time. And that's the abstract definition.
But a historical definition would really pose a question, well, what are those patterns, ideas, et cetera, as they currently exist today? And what I argued in that piece which is something that I would put forward as an argument or hypothesis is that it's principally to do with the currently dominant projects and frameworks of rule and governance that have come into being and begun to crystallize since the end of the Cold War. And that involves, as I noted before, juridical, regulatory and political mechanisms as well as a whole set of actors. And global governance is always influenced predominantly by prevailing patterns of power, or emerging patterns of power.
And the purpose is usually to legitimate and destabilize and indeed to extend those patterns of power and institutions across different jurisdictions and territories. And today it's connected to reinforcing an increasingly global capitalist system and what it bestrides upon which is an incredibly productive but energy-intensive international order, which includes both inclusion and exclusions, hierarchies, inequalities and so on. But its principle elements are dominated by a combination of American geopolitical power and the major economic and social forces which are connected to global capitalism. So it's the most recent as it were historical iteration of the historical patterns that I was sketching out at some length in the article.
Right. And I want to ask you about global capitalism in a bit. But first, speaking of the current iteration, you write in the piece that what we're seeing now is an organic crisis that has risen from structural crises. And I was wondering what that means?
Like why is the moment that we're in organic instead of yet another structural crisis or structural problem? And why is it important to you to distinguish between the structural and the organic? Well, it's a very important question because organic crisis is not a term that's normally used in the literature. And let me first of all tell you what I think in a kind of formal sense it is.
It's a crisis which involves a kind of historical moment or ampass or interregnum between a declining set of patterns or rule in world order and the governance practices associated with it, which are beginning to show contradictions and problems. And new patterns are beginning to be discernible, but are struggling to emerge and they have not yet crystallized in creating the controls or the possibilities of a new form of order. That sounds very kind of abstract. So let me just give you the roots of the idea.
I took the idea from Antonio Granci who wrote about the crisis of the 1930s, the interwar crisis following the First World War and prior to the Second World War. As a crisis principally, of course, he was focusing principally upon Europe, but basically a crisis of European civilization where the old order had really begun to collapse during the First World War. And there were attempts to reestablish that order after the Second World War. And it's downfall was triggered by a number of forces, including a historical turning point, which was the Wall Street crash of 1929.
Surrounding that crash and the contestation about what it meant in terms of the collapse of the world economy were new challenges and new patterns of politics. So on the left, you had the emergence of Bolshevism, the creation of the Soviet Union, but also on the right. In Europe and Asia, you had Nazism and fascism and the Axis powers. And they were beginning to deal with and approach that order as it were a struggle between the older and the new.
And the new wasn't necessarily progressive. It was reactionary in the sense of Marxism and fascism. You could say that Bolshevism was progressive, but some people would also say that's very regressive as well. But nevertheless, it was an increasingly conflictual world order that ultimately led to the violence of the destruction of the Second World War.
So when Granshee wrote about that, he looked at the particular characteristics that had given rise to the organic crisis and these alternatives that began to emerge. And he saw that as basically a crisis of representation and a crisis of the dominant forms of ideology and understanding of the self-evidance of the times and the patterns of the rules and rules. And it led to the most lethal war in history. After that war, attempts were made both by the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, to reconstitute world order, to create a new order, although it was bifurcated along Cold War lines.
And Granshee summarized that concept of organic crisis, because it involved things which was embedded in the structures and the contradictions of society. In other words, structural crises, which were intersecting in different ways, as a moment where the old was dying and the new was struggling to be born, and as he put it very poetically, and in the interregnum, many morbid symptoms arise. And in that particular case, there were more of these symptoms were globally lethal. So the question is, what is that concept useful today?
Well, I think it is because although the characteristics and conditions are different, we have different sets of structural contradictions, but we also have crises of representation and authority. And many of the elements of the self-evidance of the governance of an increasingly global capitalism are beginning to be challenged. And some of them are being challenged on the left, or what might be called a progressive side of the political spectrum. And some from the right, and in fact, the right seems to be becoming more and more powerful.
And it's reflected in new patterns of authoritarian leadership, leaderships where extremely wealthy individuals not only try to foster political coalitions and backclassies that they favor, but actually to govern directly. And at the same time, we have a situation in which the present patterns of development, production, consumption, carbon-based energy systems, and so on, are proving to be in contradiction with many of the life forms of the planet. And they're not sustainable. And there seems to be a new kind of interregnant where that post-war order, which actually brought prosperity and relative peace to much of the world, but not all of it, of course, is now being challenged.
And new questions are being asked in a kind of Ampass and Deadlock, which concerns the making of the future of World War, and with that the potential patterns of global governance. So in that answer, you mentioned as a previous turning point, the crash of 29, for the moment that we're in now, when you look at it and take this longest historical view, do you see that there was one moment that was a turning point that brought us to where we are now? Were there many turning points? Was there no turning point?
How do you see it not for the 20-30s, but for right now? Well, it's always hard to identify turning points in the time that you actually live in. Of course. But I tend to take a slightly different perspective in terms of the way that one conceptualizes shifts, as it were, in historical time and the world orders that would be connected to them.
And I take inspiration from a French historian called Féne-Baudel, and Bordeaux basically had a three-fold conception of time, which you called it the long-lasting time, or lingerie in French, the conjuncture or event's time. So what would be the long-duration? Well, where we are now to understand all of its logic, we'd have to go way back in terms of the historical development of capitalism, and in particular, for example, its development and its links to massive increases in consumption and production, and particularly dependence upon fossil fuels for its development. So we'd have to take that into consideration to understand many of the moments that we might want to discuss.
But secondly, the conjuncture. And the conjuncture that I think we need to place everything into is what many thinkers, scientists, as well as political economists, ecologists, and so on, have called the Great Accelerations since 1945, which basically involves two broad dimensions. One would be the the dimension that's been triggered by the use of nuclear weapons and their spread. In other words, a new existential global condition of what we might call exterminism, though it was a potential moment that we face, which militates against taking a longer term view of the future.
And now that has morphed with a new kind of exterminism, associative species, extinction, climate change, and so on. And then the other dimension is the accelerations and production and distribution in what I've called a market civilization model, which is increasingly premised upon the idea of consuming today and forgetting about tomorrow. It's very energy-intensive, it's ecological. It's got a kind of myopia of consuming the future.
It threatens the ecological structure in terms of the acceleration in these economic patterns. And again, it tends to make people less, take less of a long-term view to become a little bit a-historical. Now, of course, that's being challenged by many young people, such as Graser, when she talks about climate change and so on. But nevertheless, there are these elements of consciousness that are connected to these real material and military elements in our world that everybody is more or less aware of and is affected by.
So that's the context I would place the events or turning points, as they might be called. And key turning points recently would be in geopolitics, the collapse of the USSR and the decline of communism worldwide. Whilst at the same time, China, combining capitalism and communism has risen. So it's a contradictory pattern there.
And the other would be the recent, the 2008 global financial meltdown, which originated again on Wall Street, like the 29 crash, which has had enormous ramifications and has been, I think, very instrumental in provoking the so-called rise of populism, and in particular, the rise of authoritarian or reactionary forces that are seeking to find ways to make sense of and to challenge the self-evidence of the economic and political patterns associated with post-communist global capitalism. It's so clear listening to you, or it seems clear to me anyway, that you really can't disentangle questions of global governance from questions of global capitalism. And since you raised this in your piece, you sort of raised the question of whether capitalism is the problem or the solution. So I'm going to throw it back at you and pose that question to you now if you think capitalism is the problem or solution for global governance.
Yeah, well, you put me behind the eight ball there because I tried to pose it as a question that we should all debate and think about rather than ignore. It depends on how you look at it. Many of the things I've just been talking about from the long historical viewpoint that Brodell writes about, you can see how capitalism, which is spread throughout all its contradictions and crises, is nevertheless generated an enormous amount of productive and creative power, although that creative power is, you know, you might call it one of creative destruction, and you can criticize it in all kinds of ways, saying that it generates hierarchy and inequality and so on. But it does prevent present a set of alternatives, which are far more optimistic for the world than was the case, you know, during and following World War II, because there is so much more prosperity and more knowledge now in the world, more and more interconnected, more aware of the different dimensions of the world.
And a lot of that is to do with capitalism. It's not just to do with capitalism, of course, because capitalism would want to own all that. And of course, society and politics depends upon putting constraints on any form of power that would seek to monopolize. So in that sense, capitalism is both a solution and a problem at the same time.
But the other thing you have to remember is that there are many kinds of capitalism, right? And that's notism and fascism or capitalist states. China is a communist rule capitalist state. The Nordic countries are different to the United States and the United Kingdom.
I spend a year as a visiting professor at the University of Helsinki. I came to admire and to really, I was so impressed with Finland and the way that Finland organizes itself. It's a capitalist society, but it's very egalitarian. It's very progressive and it has a wonderful quality of life for its people.
So a lot depends on the type of capitalism. You can't wish capitalism away. So in a sense, what you have to do is to problematize what's worst about it. I mean, what's bad about capitalism today?
Again, if you go back to Baudel, where they'll say the merchant capitalists that dominated Europe and then the world, for example, from Amsterdam, the United Provinces in the 18th century, they were monopolists. The capitalists don't like competition. They like to monopolize. And the US used to rebel against monopoly capitalism very early on.
They attacked the robber barons who were monopolizing energy and transportation systems as well as financial systems in the United States. Nowadays, we have monopolies that are trying to control many significant parts of our lives. Big data, for example, big pharma that controls many of the medical systems of the world, energy corporations that are not producing sustainable energy provision for the world. They focus almost entirely on the consumption of non-renewable resources, particularly carbon-based energy.
So these things have to be brought under governance practices that can make them more consistent, increasingly consistent with sustainability. And I think if that were to happen, and we get away from the idea that we can just govern the world as business as usual, and we realize that the real issues about the future are our responsibilities of future generations, then the hybrid might have some element of capitalism in it. It might have a lot of capitalism in it. But we have a lot of other elements, too, which was socialized control over these forces, which are the moment, really diswilling the oceans, they're connected to species extinction, and they're rendering the future less plausible for the health of people and all the life forms of the planet.
That call for the future, inspired by knowledge of the past, was given to us by Professor Stephen Gill. His argument, sorry, his essay, Global Governance as it was, is an ought to be. A critical reflection is in the Journal of Global Governance. Stephen, thank you so much for so thoughtfully speaking with me today.
It's a pleasure. And I think that the more people can debate these questions and ask interesting follow-up questions of the type that you've just done, we're all going to benefit from that. So thank you so much. Thank you.