Cosmopolitan Government in Europe: Citizens and Entrepreneurs in Postnational Politics by Owen Parker

Author:Owen Parker [Parker, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, International Relations, General, Political Process, Political Parties
ISBN: 9780415519281
Google: FPYDywAACAAJ
Goodreads: 13711678
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-01-15T07:48:02+00:00

Legitimacy via/of governance: a brief genealogy

Governance as description

At the heart of many scholarly and practical responses to a perceived deficit in transnational and global democracy lies a discourse of ‘governance’. This well used term can mean all things to all people in the study and practice of government and any attempt to define its meanings and comprehend its usages across all relevant domains of scholarship and practice is bound to fall short.4 Indeed, the term has become a relatively unquestioned mainstay in the lexicon of government in modern times, used in relation to a variety of different scalar contexts and frequently invoked as that which overcomes an unproblematic political association with any such context. Related to this, the concept has transcended disciplinary boundaries; it has, for example, had the effect in both theory and practice of dissolving distinctions between International Relations and Comparative Politics in political science. It is perhaps for this reason, that the notion of governance has been so popular in the study of the EU, which is so frequently conceived as a sui generis entity; a political system which is neither an international organisation nor a state.5

In terms of its dictionary definition, the term governance is synonymous with the idea of government and etymologically there is some logic in this; its roots can be traced to the same Greek origins. However, in social studies since the 1980s, governance has frequently been defined as something distinct from the concept of government as usually understood in political science – in contrast to Foucault’s broader understanding (see above and Introduction) – as a hierarchical form of top-down rule by state institutions.6 Historically, governance seems to have become a common term of usage for a range of practitioners, public and private, as a consequence of a perceived shift of authority from centralised public state institutions of government towards a host of other sites, both domestically and internationally. Hence, in the 1980s, public policy and comparative politics scholars used the term to encapsulate processes such as privatisation and the delegation of authority away from the central state in many western states; what Rhodes describes as a shift from ‘rowing’ towards more ‘steering’ in public policy.7

The study of global governance in the disciplines of IR and IPE which emerged around the end of the Cold War, similarly rests on a broader notion of authority than one associated exclusively with the state. As Rosenau has it, ‘[g]lobal governance is conceived to include systems of rule at all levels of human activity – from the family to the international organization – in which the pursuit of goals through the exercise of control has transnational repercussions’.8 Similarly, in EU studies, Marks and Hooghe’s conception of ‘multi-level’ governance has proved influential.9 The concept of multi-level governance – and, indeed, the EU as multi-level governance reality – poses a challenge to realist and neo-realist analyses in the field of International Relations, where the unitary ‘state-as-billiard-ball’ is conceived as the primary unit of analysis. An interest in global governance,

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