India under Modi’s leadership has been treated as an almost textbook case to highlight the dangers of illiberalism and democratic erosion associated with "civilizational states". This chapter focuses on the impact that an evolving civilizational narrative has had on Indian foreign policy. Investigating India’s record in global and regional governance, it argues that scholars may have overestimated the impact of Modi’s civilizational narrative: there are key continuities in India’s negotiation positions across different issue-areas. Critics may also have been somewhat hasty in proclaiming its effect as being necessarily detrimental for both India itself and also the world at large. The chapter demonstrates that despite important continuities in its foreign policy, India has, in recent years, begun to take on a role of greater responsibility in global governance. This role, interestingly, is more aligned with the liberal orientation of many western democracies, while also working in tandem with the country’s concerns and priorities.
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18. India and the world
Civilizational narratives in foreign policy
Amrita Narlikar
Chapter
24. Global health governance and COVID-19
Jeremy Youde
This chapter outlines how the international community tries to address cross-border health concerns through its system of global health governance. It looks at the historical evolution and contemporary context of the global health governance system. In order to delve more deeply into the strengths and weaknesses of the current system, the chapter looks at the COVID-19 pandemic to assess how various national and international actors responded and where they ran into problems fomenting cooperation in the face of a global microbial threat.
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14. Global governance
Richard Jolly and Thomas G. Weiss
This chapter discusses ‘global governance’, the term now used widely to analyse the international system. Global governance consists of collective efforts to identify, understand, and address worldwide problems and processes that go beyond the capacities of individual states. The question of how to improve global economic governance can be understood by addressing the main ‘gaps’ in the international system: knowledge, norms, policies, institutions, leadership, and compliance. The chapter then presents three illustrations of current issues in global governance—and the gaps therein—to help in understanding international responses (both weak and strong) to communicable diseases, economic instability, and child welfare. Ultimately, addressing global governance problems requires more robust intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
Chapter
Introduction
This introductory chapter presents global environmental politics as an important area of international and transnational cooperation and as a distinct field of study. First, as an area of cooperation, global environmental politics emerged out of the need to work together internationally and transnationally to address some pressing environmental problems, such as biodiversity loss, climate change, the depletion of the ozone layer, and the rapid reduction of global fish stocks. Independent state action at the local and national levels is not sufficient to address global environmental issues: these issues require cooperation through global governance. Second, as a field of study, global environmental politics investigates the various dimensions of emerging actions on global environmental issues. It is a diverse field of study from both theoretical and disciplinary perspectives.
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20. The Stability of EU Policy-Making in a Turbulent World
Mark A. Pollack, Christilla Roederer-Rynning, and Alasdair R. Young
This chapter examines trends in European Union policy-making during times of multiple, overlapping challenges. It first considers the main trends in EU policy-making that emerge from policy case studies, including experimentation with new modes of policy-making, often in conjunction with more established modes, leading to hybridization; renegotiation of the role of the member states (and their domestic institutions) in the EU policy process; and erosion of traditional boundaries between internal and external policies. The chapter proceeds by discussing the issue of national governance as well as the interaction between European and global governance. Finally, it explores how the EU has responded to the challenges of Brexit, the politicization of the Union, geopolitical upheaval, and the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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18. Global Europe: A Pivot to Asia?
Stephan Keukeleire and Hai Yang
This book has so far shown that the European Union (EU) has consistently sought to exercise structural power to influence the developments of third parties and the arrangements of regional and global governance to its preferences, and the (in)effectiveness of its foreign policy is inextricably associated with the internal character of the EU. This chapter showcases that the EU’s engagement in Asia—a region with several systemically important geopolitical and economic players and one of increasing relevance to European interests—is no different. As elsewhere, the EU’s search for strategic relevance in this region has been impeded by both internal and external factors. For now, its ‘pivot’ to Asia remains elusive.
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9. The European Union and the Global Political Economy
Amy Verdun
This chapter examines the position of the European Union (EU) in the global political economy (GPE). It also highlights key dimensions of change and development, and evaluates the EU’s impact on the operation of the contemporary GPE. It does this by examining key ideas in international political economy (IPE), by relating these to the growth of the EU, and by assessing the EU’s role in the GPE in three areas: European integration itself, the EU’s engagement in the GPE, and the EU’s claims to be a major economic power. The final part of the chapter brings these together with an analysis of global economic governance—in particular, the EU’s role in the financial, multilateral state system with its principles of global governance, and pays some attention to recent crises (such as the Covid-19 pandemic) and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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9. Financial Openness and the Challenge of Global Governance
Louis W. Pauly
This chapter studies the globalization of finance. The world economy today reflects a systemic experiment involving, on the one hand, the unleashing of cross-border capital movements and, on the other, the dispersion of the political authority necessary to oversee and, when necessary, stabilize the markets through which vast amounts of capital now flow. Resulting tensions become most obvious during financial crises, when those flows suddenly stop or reverse their direction. In the late twentieth century, most such crises began in emerging-market or developing countries and had limited systemic consequences. In 2008, however, the global experiment capital market openness, now far along in its evolution, almost failed catastrophically when policy mistakes in the United States combined with large national payments' imbalances and a broad economic downturn to spawn a worldwide emergency. Shortly thereafter, Europeans at the core of the system narrowly escaped a similar disaster at the regional level. The chapter then explores key implications for contemporary global governance. It calls particular attention to the increasingly difficult and variegated politics of systemic risk assessment, emergency management, and future crisis prevention as the experiment continues.
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4. International organizations, states, and global governance
This chapter evaluates global governance and how it relates to international law. It addresses the role of international organizations in processes of global governance, charting their rise from the nineteenth century onwards. Two international organizations exemplify semi-legalized governance beyond the state: the United Nations and the European Union. Sovereign states, of course, continue to play a central role in the institutions, processes, and mechanisms of global governance. The chapter then explores the extent to which a state’s power, influence, and legitimacy are affected by factors such as its domestic political arrangements and its adherence to the liberal, Western values that underpin the postwar order. It also assesses whether the proliferation of legalized and semi-legalized global governance regimes amounts to a constitutionalization of international relations.
Book
Edited by Nicola Phillips
Global Political Economy explores the breadth and diversity of this topic and looks at the big questions that matter today. It addresses essential topics and themes, such as poverty, labour, migration, and the environment. With a strong emphasis on ‘globalising’ the study of this subject, the text introduces the idea that it matters who is talking and writing. It explains that there are different ways of seeing the world, and that bringing together different theoretical and methodological perspectives adds to the depth and richness of understanding. In addition, chapters look at globalism and neoliberalism, finance, trade, production, health, climate change, inequality, crime, migration, and global governance.
