Essay On Global Governance

Global governance institutions, from the International Monetary Fund to the World Trade Organization, are little loved. They are often perceived as bastions of sclerotic mediocrity at best and outright corruption at worst. In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Daniel W. Drezner, like so many others, observed the smoking ruins of the global economy and wondered the extent to which global governance institutions have affected the post-recession, international system.

In The System Worked, Drezner contends that despite the massive scale and reverberations of this latest crisis (larger, as he argues, than those that precipitated the Great Depression), the global economy has bounced back remarkably well. Examining the major resuscitation efforts by the G-20, IMF, WTO and other institutions, Drezner asserts that, aside from averting a full-fledged depression, the international response appears to have sufficiently prevented the crisis from igniting internal repression, border disputes, and arms races. Yet his conclusions sidestep fundamental arrangements in today’s international system and in many ways misgauge existing conflicts and their underlying grievances. During the initial stages of the 2008 crisis, multiple analysts asserted that the financial crisis would lead states to increase their use of force as a tool for staying in power. They voiced genuine concern that the global economic downturn would lead to an increase in conflict—whether through greater military exercises, diversionary wars, or violent trade disputes.

Populist revolts in North Africa and the Middle East along with an emerging border dispute in East Asia fueled impressions of surging global public disorder on behalf of the financial crisis. In Egypt and Tunisi...

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... financial crisis (domestic and global), countries are known to secure tenuous national assets to reaffirm regional hegemony. Ultimately, lower global growth rates heighten the risk of conflict as they have in Argentina, and more recently, in East Asia.

Drenzer accurately contends the role of global institutions in preventing further financial calamity, but in preventing the agitation of existing grievances, Drenzer discredits the destabilizing potential of latent conflict, incorrectly assessing post-Crisis disruptions to the stability of North Africa and Northeast Asia. While Drezner overlooks the nature of existing non-violent conflict and underestimates the role of break-through transitions in shifting power distribution, The System Worked still remains an undoubtedly vital contribution to our understanding of an arena in which the stakes could not be any higher.