Can Global Governance Structures Adapt to the 21st Century?

20th century structures are increasingly under duress

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Global governance structures have always been the creature of powerful states. Even theorists who believed in the prominence of non-state actors rarely thought about international governmental organizations as truly independent actors in world politics.

Still, it was possible to survey the post-Cold War governance landscape and see significance in the growth of international institutions that encompassed old rivals and newly independent countries. These structures suffered from all the pathologies associated with bureaucracy and the fragility of cooperation in an an anarchic world. Nonetheless, structures like the U.N. Security Council, World Trade Organization, and International Atomic Energy Agency mattered. Their actions and reports framed how issues were dealt with in world politics.

At the current moment, however, global governance structures remain arenas of contestation but their overall utility has declined. This is for multiple reasons. The first is the rise of informal groupings like the Quad or the BRICS plus. While these groupings can complement more formal structures — as the G20 did after 2008 — they can also undermine them.

The second is the evolving U.S. approach to international organizations. Simply put, the days of U.S. treaty ratification have pretty much come to an end. Instead, the U.S. seems bound and determined to exit them or stymie their operations. Never forget that over the last ten years, the United States has been almost as much of a revisionist actor as China. These U.S. moves threaten the integrity of these organizations as well.

Third, countries are weaponizing existing global governance structures at a disconcerting rate. A lot of these structures were strengthened or enlarged during a moment in which which great power tensions were at an all-time low. As great power competition has become a real competition, it opens up space for a whole host of states to exploit these institutions in a manner at odds with their original intent.

Which brings us to the New York Times’ Jane Bradley, who had a front-pager on Wednesday detailing the ways in which autocratic states have used Interpol to harass domestic regime dissidents:

For years, strongmen and autocrats had a novel weapon in their hunt for political enemies. They used Interpol, the world’s largest police organization, to reach across borders and grab them — even in democracies.

An award-winning Venezuelan journalist was detained in Peru. An Egyptian asylum seeker was stopped in Australia. And Russia has tried repeatedly to secure the arrest of William F. Browder, a London-based human rights campaigner.

In response, Interpol has toughened oversight of its arrest alerts, known as red notices, making it harder than ever to misuse them. But as Interpol adapted, so did strongmen. They have turned to the agency’s lesser-known systems to pursue dissidents, a New York Times investigation has found.

Belarus and Turkey, for example, have turned Interpol’s database of lost and stolen passports into a weapon to harass dissidents or strand them abroad. Abuse of this important antiterrorism tool got so bad that Interpol temporarily blocked Turkey from using it. Belarus is now subject to special monitoring after Interpol spotted a wave of politically motivated entries, officials said….

While Interpol now reviews every red notice before it is issued, it does not scrutinize blue notices until they have circulated. Those after-the-fact checks have identified 700 alerts since 2018 that violated Interpol’s rules, according to figures released for the first time to The Times.

“It’s concerning in the same way that the abuse of red notices was concerning 10 years ago and led to the reforms that we now have,” said Stephen Bailey, a lawyer and an author of the book “The Legal Foundations of Interpol.”

This seems pretty bad! In the United States, it threatens to create a doom loop of governance skepticism. Stories like this one can feed a sense of these institutions as hopelessly corrupt and broken. Of course, if the U.S. responds by reducing its participation in such institutions, that just cedes the playing field to the Russias and Chinas of the world. That, in turn, encourages even more great power attempts at coercion. And then the whole cycle repeats itself.

This is a problem that is not going to go away anytime soon. How states that value these global governance structures respond will determine whether these organizations die a slow death, become “zombie” organizations suited to more pernicious ends, or maintain their relevancy going forward.

Developing…