Global Governance: Lest We Forget!

Abstract

Business Power in Global Governance. By Fuchs Doris. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007. 233 pp., $55.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-1588264923). The Enclave Economy: Foreign Investment and Sustainable Development in Mexico's Silicon Valley. By P. Gallagher Kevin, Zarsky Lyuba. MA: The MIT Press, 2007. 232 pp., $21.00 paper (ISBN-13: 978-0262572422). Textures of Struggle: the Emergence of Resistance among Garment Workers in Thailand. By Pangsapa Piya. Ithaca, NY: IRL/Cornell University Press, 2007. 217 pp., $18.95 paper (ISBN-13: 978-0801473760). Globalization and Labor: Democratizing Global Governance. By Dimitris Stevis, Terry Boswell. UK: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2008. $27.95 (ISBN: 0-7425-3785-4 978-0-7425-3785-9). These books explicitly underline the necessity to revive and continue the “global governance” debate that has dominated both academic and policy relevant circles since the Commission on Global Governance in the 1990s. Technological developments, increase of foreign direct investment into and in some instances the subsequent abandonment of particular industries, increasing tensions of global and national union politics, and the questionable fate of workers, are issues that inform and fuel a number of debates whilst globalizing capitalism continues its omniscient advance. The four texts I review in this piece ask crucial questions about the impact of the expansion of neoliberal capitalism on societies and on people and fundamentally question the utility of the idea of “global governance” that does not take into account corporate power and workers' struggle. Each book gives useful and well informed answers in the context of increasing social antagonism against globalizing strategies still operating at the level of intergovernmental and corporate organization, as well as the domestic arena. Each text challenges mainstream assumptions regarding the impact of globalisation at the popular level, and also challenges widely accepted ideas coming out of business and academic discourses for the advantages of a global free market economy. Each volume also revokes the idea that globalization has reduced the role of the state, and outlines clear state activities in the management of global capitalism, rendering unfounded the allusions made by ideas of global governance for its potential to reduce national governments' involvement. “Governance” is a post-Cold War concept and was discussed in the early 1990s at a meeting in Konigswinter at which time the Commission on Global Governance was born. Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson and Guiana statesman Shridath Ramphal co-chaired this meeting and created perhaps the first definition of global governance: Governance is the sum of the many ways …