I’ve just had the good fortune to return from Oxford University where I spent several very pleasant days examining with experts and others the health and direction of global governance.  This almost annual Princeton University Workshop is a highly satisfactory partnership of the Council on Foreign Relations and Stewart Patrick, Princeton University and John Ikenberry, The Stanley Foundation, President Keith Porter and Program Director Jennifer Smyser, and ‘moi’ of the Global Summitry Project at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.

This year with John Ikenberry ensconced as the George Eastman Visiting Professor we made the rather logical choice to take the Princeton Conference on global governance on the road to Oxford.  In fact we plunked it down at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, courtesy of Andrew Hurrell the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations and Balliol Fellow.

With this change in venue to Oxford we were very fortunate to include a serious number of colleagues from Oxford but also Cambridge and the University of London. In  addition we were fortunate enough to have a number of media types (a term that was not particularly well received by our colleagues – sorry if it fits …) from the FT, namely Philip Stephens and Gideon Rachman.

It was an interesting temperature taking by the group.  What do I carry away from the encounter with the group?Well the short hand is this:

• The Informals, G20, NSS, EAS, etc., barely register with my colleagues.  The global governance focus, as they see it, remains on the formal institutions of the UN and Bretton Woods;
• When they do focus on the Informals – the G20 Leaders Summit in particular – they see an exhausted fading institution;
• For my colleagues attention to something like the leader’s meeting is on that exactly, with little regard paid to the policy machinery established by leaders and the output established by this machinery;
• My colleagues are unsure of what do make of the identified caucus groupings such as the BRICS; and
•  the return of geopolitical rivalry, especially from Russia, but also China, poses a serious challenge to contemporary concert diplomacy.

So let’s look briefly at these conclusions.  First, there is little acknowledgement by this group, and I suspect more generally, with what I have called the ‘Rise of the Informals’. When my colleagues and others think of the institutions of global governance they remain fixed largely on the UN and Bretton Woods system.  My colleagues appear to set aside the fact that the G20, for instance, tasks the the formal institutions such as the IMF and the OECD.

To the extent they pay attention to the Informals it is largely, though not exclusively the focus on the G20 Leaders Summit.  And this focus is largely to acknowledge, at least to some degree, their efforts to avoid the abyss of the Great Recession in 2008.  But from say 2010, as the worst of the economic crisis appeared to abate, they conclude that the “juice”  has escaped.  As David Rothkopf, the CEO of FP wrote recently at the FP:

International institutions are weaker than ever.  The G-20, which was to be the new vehicle for international economic coordination, has faded in importance over time …

Now, Fletcher’s Dan Drezner who just released his book, The System Worked.  How the World Shaped Another Great Depression, seemed something like a Martian in this gathering – he did attend. The positive global governance reaction to the challenge of the 2008 financial crisis, as described by Drezner, appeared to be in marked contrast to the rather downbeat narrative and analysis by other of current global governance efforts.

Next there was little or no attention paid to what I call the ‘Iceberg Theory‘ of Global Governance’.  Certainly the G20, but others such as the Nuclear Security Summit, have built machinery to deliver policy and standards that are required for building coordination among the powers. Financial policy prescriptions are not something leaders do.  The machinery of the G20, the ministers, the working groups, the transgovernmental networks and the IFIs – the traditional institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF and the OECD prepare the means to ‘move the yardsticks’ on policy in finance, anti-corruption, and even in macroeconomics.  These are just some of the genuine policy issue areas that are being explored by this machinery and then placed in front of Leaders.

In another area of the Informals – the various caucus groups most notably the BRICS but also IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa) there appears to be no consensus of the influence and import of these caucuses.  There certainly appeared to be no conclusion that these caucuses represented oppositional groupings say the G7 versus the BRICS.  The efficacy of the BRICS, in particular, was raised.  I suspect that the discourse would have been distinctly different if the BRICS Bank announcement we’ve been waiting for had occurred prior to our meeting.  I guess we just will have to wait.

On one dimension most suggested that significant change structural change had occurred.  The return of geopolitics had pitched global governance into a new transitional era.  Russian rivalry for sure but also Chinese ascent in East Asia and the greater competitiveness with Japan and then also in the South China Sea marked a new more difficult period for global summitry.

Finally, there was a curious absence of examination of US leadership.  A number of us referenced President Obama’s commencement address at West Point, delivered just shortly before the Oxford Conference and there seemed to be agreement that the speech had not been received well by those focused on US foreign policy. Though there was recognition that the US was indeed drawing to a close the wars in the Middle East, “ending a long season of war,”  there appeared to be no appetite to engage in what US leadership should be – how it should be conducted – in a growing multilateral world where geopolitical rivalries had reappeared.  And other than the raising the spectre of the G-zero world – a world without US hegemonic leadership – there was little discussion over how to make concert diplomacy of the 21st century work, or more pertinently how US policy should make concert diplomacy work.

To underscore this view, our colleague  Stephen Walt – not with us – presented a rather sober view of US foreign policy.  Walt argued at FP that there was little fresh thought in the ‘beltway’ on US leadership.  In the piece Walt largely ‘dissed’ a series of Washington conferences that have reviewed, or are about to review, “the state of the world and America’s role within it.”  The problem, at least according to Walt, is that the same old voices are the one’s featured at this venues.  As Walt argued:

If American foreign policy were going swimmingly, it would be easy to shrug off my proposal and say “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” But that’s hardly the case: we’ve had twenty-plus years of foreign policy fiascoes, yet we continue to turn to the architects and supporters of these failures for advice on what to do next. This makes no sense; we need to rethink how we do business.

Well it is arguable whether these voices have nothing to say about US leadership, but there is a curious reticence, in my opinion, for colleagues to grapple with how America leads when it is not a hegemon.  As I said before – well multilateralism is – well complicated.  But in the world of global summitry, it cannot be avoided.

Image Credit:  Alan Alexandroff