How to govern humanely in a brave new world

On Humane Governance: Toward a New Global Politics,

By Richard Falk,

The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995

288 pages

JAKARTA (JP): This book focuses on governance and systems of governing, not governments. It invites reflections on the shortcomings of present governance systems in the world, prodding us to consider alternatives to remedy the failings.

This is a report on global governance developed from analyses and findings of The Global Civilization Initiative (GCP) program. It is part of the World Order Models Project (WOMP), a project initiated by the Center of International Studies of Princeton University. Professor Falk has been associated with the center and this project since its inception in 1975.

Falk and his associates are concerned with the probable emergence of "inhumane governance" in the early 21st century as the outcome of diminishing capacity of the sovereign territorial state to shape the history of humankind. They attribute this to the "double historical movement", denoting globalization beyond the reach of the territorial state, and fragmentation outside the grasp of these same states.

They fear a continuation of basic systems in the new era will foster inhumane conditions for those on the bottom of the state hierarchy.

Most frequently cited among these conditions are:

* no provision of adequate food, shelter, healthcare, clothing, education, and housing for the most disadvantaged 20 percent of the world population;

* denial of full protection of human rights to the most socially and culturally vulnerable groups;

* lack of tangible, cumulative progress toward the abolition of war as a social institution;

* insufficient effort in the protection and restoration of the environment;

* failure to achieve dramatic growth of transnational democracy, and little progress in the extension of the primary democratic practices of respect for others, of accountability by political leaders as well as market executives, and of popular participation in critical arenas of decision.

Humane governance is a vision of efforts needed to correct the social, political, economic, and cultural arrangements that cause these ills. Success in the search for humane governance must be built on similar efforts in the past while being fully rooted in the unfolding present, combined in "aspiring to achieve an imagined future". This desired future must be defined in terms of dignity and worth of the individual, as well as the group.

Is this naysaying on the future justified? Falk addresses this in the first two chapters, outlining commercial globalism that is capital-driven, market-validated and media disseminated. He warns the coalition between leading states in the West (possibly inclusive of East and Southeast Asia) and transnational capital deployed by corporate managers and banking operatives will wire the world for purposes of advertising, indoctrination and administration.

The negative fall-out is that the severity of environmental decay and challenges emanating from civil society is likely to make these combined state and market forces behave in a coercive and interventionary way towards peoples in many societies.

Also casting a pall on prospects for the present system of geogovernance is the prevalence of a political attitude defined as "political realism". This dismisses moral and legal criteria of policy as irrelevant and grounds speculation on an assessment of relative power as perceived by rational, even ultrarational actors, essentially states.

This bars consideration of passion, irrationality and altruistic motivation of political forces, or the impact of nonstate actors. The danger of political realism lies in its belief that the only appropriate morality is the pursuit of self- interest of statist scope in a societal space that lacks community sentiment and agencies of government.

Another important shade in this skeptical viewpoint is that our present way of administering our planet exhibits three dangerous tendencies. These encompass a tendency toward "global apartheid", or viewing and treating the entire world in terms of two separate entities of the developed North and the underdeveloped South; the leaning to avoidable harm", as shown by those in authority who pursue policies that cause harm to humanity; and a drift toward ecoimperialism, defined as the worsening of environmental conditions and the persistence of dominant growth-oriented priorities.

The pessimism thus seems justified. But more important is how we feel about our collective future and our resolutions to these prospect. Falk describes details of the quest towards humane governance in Chapters 3 - 7.

The Global Civilization Initiative was the product of exchange of ideas between scholars running the WOMP and Georgi Shakhanazarof, former president of the International Political Association and a special assistant to Mikhail Gorbachev (who visited WOMP in 1986). The overriding purpose of the Global Civilization Initiative is "to contest conventional notions of international relations --notions which stress the pre-eminence of the states system and inevitability of war as a means of resolving international disputes".

The view of humane governance is one that links the global and regional to the national and personal. What constitutes cumulative humane governance is the aggregation of these various sites of "decision making" power: from the personal level of decision making to the local and national levels, and on to the regional and global levels of bureaucratic power. Thus genuine humane governance cannot be achieved without real progress in participatory democracy. At each level there must be a sincere commitment to values sustaining the idea of world order, expressed in terms of peace, economic well-being, social and political justice and environmental sustainability.

On the basis of this view, humane governance is a condition comprising 10 dimensions -- curbing war, abolishing war, making individuals accountable, collective security, rule of law, nonviolent revolutionary politics, human rights, stewardship of nature, positive citizenship and cosmopolitan democracy.

I couldn't help asking myself as I read this book: Where are we at the moment in this regard? Have we started the journey towards humane governance yet?

Despite the grim picture that emerges, the book is still inspiring. Putting all the problems related to our efforts to create a rechtsstaat, a state based on law, in light of this unfolding picture of humane governance somehow makes me optimistic about our collective future. It gives me the luxury of feeling that we are swimming with the tide of history, not against it.

-- Mochtar Buchori