What do you think?
Rate this book
Governing the World: The History of an Idea
The story of global cooperation between nations and peoples is a tale of dreamers goading us to find common cause in remedying humanity’s worst problems. But international institutions have also provided a tool for the powers that be to advance their own interests and stamp their imprint on the world. Mark Mazower’s Governing the World tells the epic story of that inevitable and irresolvable tension—the unstable and often surprising alchemy between ideas and power.
From the beginning, the willingness of national leaders to cooperate has been spurred by the book opens in 1815, amid the rubble of the Napoleonic Empire, as the Concert of Europe was assembled with an avowed mission to prevent any single power from dominating the continent and to stamp out revolutionary agitation before it could lead to war. But if the Concert was a response to Napoleon, internationalism was a response to the Concert, and as courts and monarchs disintegrated they were replaced by revolutionaries and bureaucrats.
19th century internationalists included bomb-throwing anarchists and the secret policemen who fought them, Marxist revolutionaries and respectable free marketeers. But they all embraced nationalism, the age’s most powerful transformative political creed, and assumed that nationalism and internationalism would go hand in hand. The wars of the twentieth century saw the birth of institutions that enshrined many of those ideals in durable structures of authority, most notably the League of Nations in World War I and the United Nations after World War II.
Throughout this history, we see that international institutions are only as strong as the great powers of the moment allow them to be. The League was intended to prop up the British empire. With Washington taking over world leadership from Whitehall, the United Nations became a useful extension of American power. But as Mazower shows us, from the late 1960s on, America lost control over the dialogue and the rise of the independent Third World saw a marked shift away from the United Nations and toward more pliable tools such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. From the 1990s to 2007, Governing the World centers on a new regime of global coordination built upon economic rule-making by central bankers and finance ministers, a regime in which the interests of citizens and workers are trumped by the iron logic of markets.
Now, the era of Western dominance of international life is fast coming to an end and a new multi-centered global balance of forces is emerging. We are living in a time of extreme confusion about the purpose and durability of our international institutions. History is not prophecy, but Mark Mazower shows us why the current dialectic between ideals and power politics in the international arena is just another stage in an epic two-hundred-year story.
From the beginning, the willingness of national leaders to cooperate has been spurred by the book opens in 1815, amid the rubble of the Napoleonic Empire, as the Concert of Europe was assembled with an avowed mission to prevent any single power from dominating the continent and to stamp out revolutionary agitation before it could lead to war. But if the Concert was a response to Napoleon, internationalism was a response to the Concert, and as courts and monarchs disintegrated they were replaced by revolutionaries and bureaucrats.
19th century internationalists included bomb-throwing anarchists and the secret policemen who fought them, Marxist revolutionaries and respectable free marketeers. But they all embraced nationalism, the age’s most powerful transformative political creed, and assumed that nationalism and internationalism would go hand in hand. The wars of the twentieth century saw the birth of institutions that enshrined many of those ideals in durable structures of authority, most notably the League of Nations in World War I and the United Nations after World War II.
Throughout this history, we see that international institutions are only as strong as the great powers of the moment allow them to be. The League was intended to prop up the British empire. With Washington taking over world leadership from Whitehall, the United Nations became a useful extension of American power. But as Mazower shows us, from the late 1960s on, America lost control over the dialogue and the rise of the independent Third World saw a marked shift away from the United Nations and toward more pliable tools such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. From the 1990s to 2007, Governing the World centers on a new regime of global coordination built upon economic rule-making by central bankers and finance ministers, a regime in which the interests of citizens and workers are trumped by the iron logic of markets.
Now, the era of Western dominance of international life is fast coming to an end and a new multi-centered global balance of forces is emerging. We are living in a time of extreme confusion about the purpose and durability of our international institutions. History is not prophecy, but Mark Mazower shows us why the current dialectic between ideals and power politics in the international arena is just another stage in an epic two-hundred-year story.
475 pages, Hardcover
First published September 13, 2012
About the author
Mark Mazower
22 books366 followersMark Mazower is a historian and writer, specializing in modern Greece, twentieth-century Europe, and international history. His books include Salonica City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950, winner of the Duff Cooper Prize; Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, winner of the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History; and Governing the World: The History of an Idea. He is currently the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University, and his articles and reviews on history and current affairs appear regularly in the Financial Times, the Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation, and New Republic.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews
August 4, 2017
This is a wonderfully written book by historian Mark Mazower about the idea of an international organization orchestrating international relations - since the time of the Concert of Europe in post Napoleonic wars Europe, until 2012, when the book was written.
Mr. Mazower concludes that the idea has essentially floundered although some good has come out of attempts of nations to work together collectively to head off war, such as international philanthropy, the growth of NGOs, and the implementation of the principle that the UN has the right to protect minorities if they are being persecuted (i.e. can interfere in the internal affairs of a member).
The Concert of Europe eventually broke down over the issue of nationality in SE Europe (the Bosnian wish to break free of Austria-Hungary) and the League of Nations failed about 20 years after it was founded, once WW2 broke out.
Since the founding of the United Nations in 1945, although there hasn't been a world war, there have been many smaller wars - however, since the events of the past couple of years (Brexit, the rise of Donald Trump, Putin's interference with politics in the Western countries) hadn't yet occurred by the time the book was written, it would be interesting to see how Mazower would have explained them in the context of the tension between internationalism/giving up a bit of sovereignty vs. nationalism/jealously holding onto sovereignty. Is the centrifugal force of nationalism once again on the ascendant, compared with the consolidating force of internationalism? It would seem so, at least in some countries, including the USA.
This is a book that is sweeping in its scope, and that manages to convey the origins of the idea of nations coming together to deal with issues internationally, since the time of the post Napoleonic war era. The Concert of Europe was the response of various European powers (bourgeoisie) to the French revolution Napoleon tried to spread in Europe, freedom, and the idea of national self-determination. The Concert preserved and extended empires, by means of non-transparent meetings of politicians who worked to maintain a balance of power, as theories were later advanced to justify European domination of parts of Africa and Asia (the Western Hemisphere being mostly off-limits since the US promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine) such as colonialism having a benign/edifying side.
After SE European nationalities struggled to to achieve independence from the Ottoman Empire in the Balkan Wars, WWI broke out, which represented in some ways the end of the idea of Europe, at least as it had existed up until then - more or less lost to the gruesome extremes of warfare in an age of advancing technology. It represented the end of the Concert of Europe just as the League of Nations was in turn a failure, although it had been founded on nobler principles. World war 2 broke out to supposedly protect the German residents of Western Poland, once again nationalism drove peoples, this time, Germans, into an expansionist frenzy.
Here are some interesting quotes from the book:
"The League of Nations
Much like the men of 1848, [President Woodrow] Wilson was drawn to the language of religious passion. The extraordinary Protestant theologian George Davis Herron, who shared Wilson's overheated blending of Protestant eschatology and Mazzinian nationalism, hailed the war as "between a white and a black governing principle, each striving for possession of the world." Having fled the United States (following a scandalous second marriage) for Genoa and then Geneva in order to be close to the spirits of his heroes Mazzini and Calvin, Herron, who was perhaps the most colorful in a long line of unconventional presidential confidants, described the European war as a struggle between the Christian ethic of love and satanic self-interest and competitiveness. Wilson, he wrote admiringly, sees "the law of love... as the only practicable social basis, the only national security, the only foundation for international peace.... He cunningly hopes, he divinely schemes, to bring it about that America, awake at last to her national self-hood and calling, shall become a colossal Christian apostle, shepherding the world in the kingdom of God." It was a portrayal that resonated with Wilson himself, and presented him as the culmination in a long line of American peace activists eager to spread the good word into a fallen Europe.
Yet in the president himself theology was combined with a deep commitment to political pragmatism. There were good tactical domestic reasons for this, but there was also philosophical inclination: Wilson's ideal of politics as inherently deliberative underpinned his commitment -- a deeply elitist commitment -- to democracy and public opinion as the bedrock of any living political order. From the time the United Stats entered the war, Wilson preferred to avoid the war aims debate entirely. But that became harder when in late 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, stepped up their antiwar propaganda, and called for a "democratic peace." Like Woodrow Wilson, they blamed secret diplomacy and the old elites for the war, but they went further than him in breaking with diplomatic protocol, denouncing past treaties, publishing secret documents, and giving accounts of Trotsky's negotiations with the Germans to reporters as they happened. The Soviets called for a general peace, and believing that all governments were under pressure to stop fighting, they addressed themselves to "all belligerent peoples" and only secondarily to their governments.
Where the Bolsheviks led, the Americans and British followed. News that the new leaders of Russia were parleying with the Germans -- Lenin and Trotsky's peace negotiations with the Central Powers went on through the winter of 1917-18 -- made it seem imperative to do whatever was possible to keep their country in the war. Wilson warned that "the voices of humanity that insist that the war shall not end in vindictive action of any kind" had been exploited by "the masters of German intrigue to lead the people of Russia astray." He was quickly followed by British prime minister Lloyd George, who spoke out against annexations and emphatically in favor of national self-determination.
This term, which was to become so associated with Wilson, had in fact been highlighted far more emphatically by Lenin, heir to a long tradition of rich Marxist debate on nationality that went back to the Hapsburg debate of the early twentieth century and before. In his October 1917 "Decree on Peace," the Bolshevik leader had gone into some detail about the plight of small nations forced against their will inside the borders of larger and powerful sates, and insisted they should have the right to determine their own fate. This as a clear reference to the nationalities of the Hapsburg monarchy and an effort to destabilize the Central Powers. Neither Wilson nor Lloyd George, by contrast, were committed at this stage to breaking up the Austro-Hungarian Empire (read carefully, not even Lenin was actually saying that small nations *had* to be independent -- an important proviso for later communist policy), but they did see themselves competing with the Bolsheviks for European public opinion."
"The Battle of Ideologies
The Nazis took from an older German school of thought the view -- common to nineteenth-century conservatives elsewhere too -- that instead of trying to subordinate national states to international control, it was individual states whose will and autonomy was sacrosanct; at extreme moments, this led some German lawyers to deny the very possibility of international law, a denial that gathered force with the rise from the mid-1930s of an avowedly racist reading of law. If politics was a struggle between races, each unified in its own state, then there could in reality be nothing they shared, or should. Each state must on this reading develop its own conception of law. It followed that treaties were only to be observed insofar as it suited the signatories to observe them: they were "scraps of paper," as one German lawyer admitted in print, which could not be allowed to hold the well-being of the race hostage. Or in the words of another, "Generally recognized international legal principles and international customs are recognized by Germany only when they coincide with the legal concepts of the German *Volk.*" If blood was the basis of political belonging, then boundaries counted for little and ethnic Germans in Poland or Czechoslovakia owed a primary allegiance not to those states but to the Reich. Nazi lawyers worked hard to peddle this view not only because it allowed them leverage over the political organizations representing the ethnic Germans across eastern Europe, but also because they hoped to use it to pressure neighboring governments to cede rights over these minorities and thus allow the Reich to start interfering in their domestic affairs."
"The League is Dead. Long Live the United Nations
Another of the key differences between the wartime discussions in 1914-18 and 1940-45 was the shift in register. As planning moved from London to Washington, a generation accustomed to thinking on classic Oxbridge common-room style about the eternal wisdom of ancient Athens was superseded by a new cohort of policymakers more comfortable with discussions of comparative legal systems, farm economics, or business cycles. Still populated by historians and classicists rather than American-style social scientists, Whitehall had been thinking mostly in terms of a revival of the old Concert [of Europe] diplomacy. ... The goals of the New Deal, as Roosevelt had anticipated in his Four Freedoms speech, also provided a potential program for global action, and the war itself had made the broader struggle against hunger and poverty seem more acute. But as civil servants and technical experts began planning for the serious humanitarian and refugee crisis that would undoubtedly greet the victors after Nazism's defeat, some British diplomats mocked the American "new Dealers ... and their 'Tennessee Valley Authority' nostrums for the organization of international society which they tend to urge with missionary fervor."
"In the 1920s he [Stalin] had sharply attacked the League of Nations as an organization of imperialists masquerading as peace-lovers. But head never had much time for the Comintern, and after 1933 he had made sure that the USSR entered the League. Marxist ideology allowed considerable latitude for maneuver. Stalin's anti-colonialism was predictable, as was his desire to make sure the Red Army had a free hand in eastern Europe. On he other hand, his overriding goal was to preserve good relations with the British and the Americans as long as possible after the war to give the USSR the time it would obviously need to recover from Nazi occupation: so long as membership of the UN helped Soviet security and did not jeopardize it, therefore there was no reason not to go along with this latest expression of Anglo-American internationalism. What we do know is that in late 1943, he was desperate to get a second front opened the following year; one of the reasons why he had wound up the Comintern was to send a reassuring signal to his partners. Perhaps he was reassured in turn by Roosevelt telling him that American troops were not expected to play a police role in postwar Europe and that the decisions of the proposed new UN Executive Council would not be binding. In these circumstances, there was every reason to support the UN idea and few evident drawbacks."
"Humanity's Law
What is so striking about the emergence of a permanent International Criminal Court is that it took place in the teeth of powerful American opposition. The Bush administration in particular threatened to veto UN peacekeeping operations unless the Security Council gave any Americans involved immunity from prosecution, and it went further -- to the fury of many of its own partners -- by concluding numerous bilateral agreements with other countries not to surrender each other's nationals to the court."
"The idea for the [International Criminal] court was not driven by Washington -- and indeed Washington's toleration of it was always highly conditional, dependent on its functioning as a servitor of the Security Council and premised on a complete exemption for serving U.S. military personnel. Yet its role in American foreign policy since its creation has emerged in a fashion characteristic of the longer history of the American deployment of international institutions, its "exceptional" sponsor extending the power of international law while remaining above and beyond its reach itself."
"In his [Elihu Root's] time, international law had been proclaimed as a creed of universal applicability, and he could hardly have imagined the enviable situation that would be enjoyed by his heirs in Washington, who routinely preach the virtues of law while exempting themselves from many of its constraints. ...the idea of a law binding upon all states and those governing them seems as far away as ever."
"What Remains: The Crisis in Europe and After
From the perspective of Ventotene [Manifesto written by a small group of Italian political prisoners held on the islet of Ventotene in 1941], federation was an instrument hat would allow the struggle against inequality and poverty to be won. A form of managed capitalism would place limits on the market and property ownership without doing away with them completely; there would be nationalization of key industries, land reform, and worker cooperatives. The result would be not communism but the realization of a simpler, more manageable, and perhaps nobler dream: a world in which economic forces would be guided and controlled by man rather than dominating him.
In the war years on Ventotene, finance capital was seen as a force to be controlled and checked, and the speculators themselves were seen as at least partially responsible for the slump of the 1930s. By contrast, integration through financial liberalization and monetary union has produced wealth that European democracies cannot afford and problems they cannot answer limiting their power and undermining the credibility of their institutions. No longer the fount either of political liberty (as nineteenth-century liberals once hoped), or of social welfare, European internationalism has moved a long way from its origins.
...
Tony Judt's 2005 history *Postwar* ended describing a continental nirvana in which people opted to pay higher taxes in return for "free or nearly free medical services, early retirement and a prodigious range of social and public services." Writing in 2009, on the very eve of the sovereign debt crisis, the political commentator Steven Hill went even further, describing the continent as "the new City on a Hill."
...
In its various nineteenth-century incarnations, after all, internationalism was preeminently a movement to restore sovereign power to the peoples of the world, and those who governed in their name. Its approach to the nation-state and its institutions was almost entirely positive.
...
Now we are on the verge of a new era, and as Western predominance approaches an end, the prognosticators speculate on what will come next.
...
In the current crisis, politicians have essentially acted as underwriters, essential but subordinate to the dictates of communities of financial market makers they hesitate to contradict. More generally, the politicians have become policymakers, who listen in the first place to private interests and their lobbyists and try to adjudicate among them. Time will show whether they are any longer capable of governing. If that fails to happen, the responsibility will not be theirs alone. One of the reasons for the mid-century popularity of the state and sovereignty was that both had proved themselves in extreme circumstances. Twentieth-century total wars were fought by states that mobilized entire societies around shared perils and experiences. By creating models of equity, solidarity, and sacrifice, they transformed public attitudes in ways that endured into peacetime. Without a comparable transformation in our own views about the nature of government, the public good and the role of the state, without our developing a new kind of faith in our own collective capacity to shape the future, there is no real incentive for our politicians to change. They may not be trusted by their electorates -- polls show levels of trust plumbing new lows -- but they have no reason to care so long as this lack of trust does not translate into mobilization, resistance, and sustained pressure for reform.
...
Today, when the primacy of the fact is challenged by the Web -- a recent article hails the fact's death -- the future, more important than ever, has been privatized, monetized,and turned into a source of profit. An entire corporate sector is dedicated to commodifying and modeling it; our financial markets in general take the future as the determinant of present values in a way that simply was not true a century ago. No one now feels the burden of an essential but unknowable future more acutely than the stockbroker and trader. But this money-driven individualistic future has crowded out an older vision of what he public good might look like.
...
In the ongoing atomization of society, citizens and classes have both vanished as forces for change and given way to a world of individuals, who come together as consumers of goods or information, and who trust the Internet more than they do their political representatives or the experts they watch on television. Governing institution today have lost sight of the principle of politics rooted in the collective values of a res publica, even as they continue to defend the "civilization of capital." As for the rituals of international life, these are now well established. The world's heads of state flock annually to the United Nations General Assembly. There are discussions of reform and grandiose declarations of global targets, which mostly go unmet. Politicians, journalists, bankers, and businessmen make their pilgrimage to the heavily guarded Alpine precinct of Davos, seeking to confirm through this triumph of corporate sponsorship that a global ruling elite exists and that they belong to it. Our representatives continue to hand over power to experts and self-interested self-regulators in the name of efficient global governance while a skeptical and alienated public looks on. The idea of governing the world is becoming yesterday's dream."
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the strands of thought that went into the founding of the League of Nations and the UN, and how the activities and effects of international bodies on world affairs have played out in the past 100 years. Although it's extremely well-written, it's not an easy read per se - given the multitude of ideas and recounting of historical situations and controversies dating back to the 19th Century. It's extremely fascinating, however, and for me at least, exciting even as it opened doors to ideas and periods of history I hadn't thought about, but which nonetheless can provide context to today's world problems, such as, how can the US deal with North Korea, and why is the UN rather quiet on the topic, etc. Why was the UN regarded as a rather ineffectual body for a couple of decades, until the arrival of Kofi Annan as Secretary General? All of these topics are covered and explained in the book - which I suggest to the reader to stick with it, since it is a 400 page plus book - given the sweep of history and ideas recounted. It's a worthwhile trip through time !
Mr. Mazower concludes that the idea has essentially floundered although some good has come out of attempts of nations to work together collectively to head off war, such as international philanthropy, the growth of NGOs, and the implementation of the principle that the UN has the right to protect minorities if they are being persecuted (i.e. can interfere in the internal affairs of a member).
The Concert of Europe eventually broke down over the issue of nationality in SE Europe (the Bosnian wish to break free of Austria-Hungary) and the League of Nations failed about 20 years after it was founded, once WW2 broke out.
Since the founding of the United Nations in 1945, although there hasn't been a world war, there have been many smaller wars - however, since the events of the past couple of years (Brexit, the rise of Donald Trump, Putin's interference with politics in the Western countries) hadn't yet occurred by the time the book was written, it would be interesting to see how Mazower would have explained them in the context of the tension between internationalism/giving up a bit of sovereignty vs. nationalism/jealously holding onto sovereignty. Is the centrifugal force of nationalism once again on the ascendant, compared with the consolidating force of internationalism? It would seem so, at least in some countries, including the USA.
This is a book that is sweeping in its scope, and that manages to convey the origins of the idea of nations coming together to deal with issues internationally, since the time of the post Napoleonic war era. The Concert of Europe was the response of various European powers (bourgeoisie) to the French revolution Napoleon tried to spread in Europe, freedom, and the idea of national self-determination. The Concert preserved and extended empires, by means of non-transparent meetings of politicians who worked to maintain a balance of power, as theories were later advanced to justify European domination of parts of Africa and Asia (the Western Hemisphere being mostly off-limits since the US promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine) such as colonialism having a benign/edifying side.
After SE European nationalities struggled to to achieve independence from the Ottoman Empire in the Balkan Wars, WWI broke out, which represented in some ways the end of the idea of Europe, at least as it had existed up until then - more or less lost to the gruesome extremes of warfare in an age of advancing technology. It represented the end of the Concert of Europe just as the League of Nations was in turn a failure, although it had been founded on nobler principles. World war 2 broke out to supposedly protect the German residents of Western Poland, once again nationalism drove peoples, this time, Germans, into an expansionist frenzy.
Here are some interesting quotes from the book:
"The League of Nations
Much like the men of 1848, [President Woodrow] Wilson was drawn to the language of religious passion. The extraordinary Protestant theologian George Davis Herron, who shared Wilson's overheated blending of Protestant eschatology and Mazzinian nationalism, hailed the war as "between a white and a black governing principle, each striving for possession of the world." Having fled the United States (following a scandalous second marriage) for Genoa and then Geneva in order to be close to the spirits of his heroes Mazzini and Calvin, Herron, who was perhaps the most colorful in a long line of unconventional presidential confidants, described the European war as a struggle between the Christian ethic of love and satanic self-interest and competitiveness. Wilson, he wrote admiringly, sees "the law of love... as the only practicable social basis, the only national security, the only foundation for international peace.... He cunningly hopes, he divinely schemes, to bring it about that America, awake at last to her national self-hood and calling, shall become a colossal Christian apostle, shepherding the world in the kingdom of God." It was a portrayal that resonated with Wilson himself, and presented him as the culmination in a long line of American peace activists eager to spread the good word into a fallen Europe.
Yet in the president himself theology was combined with a deep commitment to political pragmatism. There were good tactical domestic reasons for this, but there was also philosophical inclination: Wilson's ideal of politics as inherently deliberative underpinned his commitment -- a deeply elitist commitment -- to democracy and public opinion as the bedrock of any living political order. From the time the United Stats entered the war, Wilson preferred to avoid the war aims debate entirely. But that became harder when in late 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, stepped up their antiwar propaganda, and called for a "democratic peace." Like Woodrow Wilson, they blamed secret diplomacy and the old elites for the war, but they went further than him in breaking with diplomatic protocol, denouncing past treaties, publishing secret documents, and giving accounts of Trotsky's negotiations with the Germans to reporters as they happened. The Soviets called for a general peace, and believing that all governments were under pressure to stop fighting, they addressed themselves to "all belligerent peoples" and only secondarily to their governments.
Where the Bolsheviks led, the Americans and British followed. News that the new leaders of Russia were parleying with the Germans -- Lenin and Trotsky's peace negotiations with the Central Powers went on through the winter of 1917-18 -- made it seem imperative to do whatever was possible to keep their country in the war. Wilson warned that "the voices of humanity that insist that the war shall not end in vindictive action of any kind" had been exploited by "the masters of German intrigue to lead the people of Russia astray." He was quickly followed by British prime minister Lloyd George, who spoke out against annexations and emphatically in favor of national self-determination.
This term, which was to become so associated with Wilson, had in fact been highlighted far more emphatically by Lenin, heir to a long tradition of rich Marxist debate on nationality that went back to the Hapsburg debate of the early twentieth century and before. In his October 1917 "Decree on Peace," the Bolshevik leader had gone into some detail about the plight of small nations forced against their will inside the borders of larger and powerful sates, and insisted they should have the right to determine their own fate. This as a clear reference to the nationalities of the Hapsburg monarchy and an effort to destabilize the Central Powers. Neither Wilson nor Lloyd George, by contrast, were committed at this stage to breaking up the Austro-Hungarian Empire (read carefully, not even Lenin was actually saying that small nations *had* to be independent -- an important proviso for later communist policy), but they did see themselves competing with the Bolsheviks for European public opinion."
"The Battle of Ideologies
The Nazis took from an older German school of thought the view -- common to nineteenth-century conservatives elsewhere too -- that instead of trying to subordinate national states to international control, it was individual states whose will and autonomy was sacrosanct; at extreme moments, this led some German lawyers to deny the very possibility of international law, a denial that gathered force with the rise from the mid-1930s of an avowedly racist reading of law. If politics was a struggle between races, each unified in its own state, then there could in reality be nothing they shared, or should. Each state must on this reading develop its own conception of law. It followed that treaties were only to be observed insofar as it suited the signatories to observe them: they were "scraps of paper," as one German lawyer admitted in print, which could not be allowed to hold the well-being of the race hostage. Or in the words of another, "Generally recognized international legal principles and international customs are recognized by Germany only when they coincide with the legal concepts of the German *Volk.*" If blood was the basis of political belonging, then boundaries counted for little and ethnic Germans in Poland or Czechoslovakia owed a primary allegiance not to those states but to the Reich. Nazi lawyers worked hard to peddle this view not only because it allowed them leverage over the political organizations representing the ethnic Germans across eastern Europe, but also because they hoped to use it to pressure neighboring governments to cede rights over these minorities and thus allow the Reich to start interfering in their domestic affairs."
"The League is Dead. Long Live the United Nations
Another of the key differences between the wartime discussions in 1914-18 and 1940-45 was the shift in register. As planning moved from London to Washington, a generation accustomed to thinking on classic Oxbridge common-room style about the eternal wisdom of ancient Athens was superseded by a new cohort of policymakers more comfortable with discussions of comparative legal systems, farm economics, or business cycles. Still populated by historians and classicists rather than American-style social scientists, Whitehall had been thinking mostly in terms of a revival of the old Concert [of Europe] diplomacy. ... The goals of the New Deal, as Roosevelt had anticipated in his Four Freedoms speech, also provided a potential program for global action, and the war itself had made the broader struggle against hunger and poverty seem more acute. But as civil servants and technical experts began planning for the serious humanitarian and refugee crisis that would undoubtedly greet the victors after Nazism's defeat, some British diplomats mocked the American "new Dealers ... and their 'Tennessee Valley Authority' nostrums for the organization of international society which they tend to urge with missionary fervor."
"In the 1920s he [Stalin] had sharply attacked the League of Nations as an organization of imperialists masquerading as peace-lovers. But head never had much time for the Comintern, and after 1933 he had made sure that the USSR entered the League. Marxist ideology allowed considerable latitude for maneuver. Stalin's anti-colonialism was predictable, as was his desire to make sure the Red Army had a free hand in eastern Europe. On he other hand, his overriding goal was to preserve good relations with the British and the Americans as long as possible after the war to give the USSR the time it would obviously need to recover from Nazi occupation: so long as membership of the UN helped Soviet security and did not jeopardize it, therefore there was no reason not to go along with this latest expression of Anglo-American internationalism. What we do know is that in late 1943, he was desperate to get a second front opened the following year; one of the reasons why he had wound up the Comintern was to send a reassuring signal to his partners. Perhaps he was reassured in turn by Roosevelt telling him that American troops were not expected to play a police role in postwar Europe and that the decisions of the proposed new UN Executive Council would not be binding. In these circumstances, there was every reason to support the UN idea and few evident drawbacks."
"Humanity's Law
What is so striking about the emergence of a permanent International Criminal Court is that it took place in the teeth of powerful American opposition. The Bush administration in particular threatened to veto UN peacekeeping operations unless the Security Council gave any Americans involved immunity from prosecution, and it went further -- to the fury of many of its own partners -- by concluding numerous bilateral agreements with other countries not to surrender each other's nationals to the court."
"The idea for the [International Criminal] court was not driven by Washington -- and indeed Washington's toleration of it was always highly conditional, dependent on its functioning as a servitor of the Security Council and premised on a complete exemption for serving U.S. military personnel. Yet its role in American foreign policy since its creation has emerged in a fashion characteristic of the longer history of the American deployment of international institutions, its "exceptional" sponsor extending the power of international law while remaining above and beyond its reach itself."
"In his [Elihu Root's] time, international law had been proclaimed as a creed of universal applicability, and he could hardly have imagined the enviable situation that would be enjoyed by his heirs in Washington, who routinely preach the virtues of law while exempting themselves from many of its constraints. ...the idea of a law binding upon all states and those governing them seems as far away as ever."
"What Remains: The Crisis in Europe and After
From the perspective of Ventotene [Manifesto written by a small group of Italian political prisoners held on the islet of Ventotene in 1941], federation was an instrument hat would allow the struggle against inequality and poverty to be won. A form of managed capitalism would place limits on the market and property ownership without doing away with them completely; there would be nationalization of key industries, land reform, and worker cooperatives. The result would be not communism but the realization of a simpler, more manageable, and perhaps nobler dream: a world in which economic forces would be guided and controlled by man rather than dominating him.
In the war years on Ventotene, finance capital was seen as a force to be controlled and checked, and the speculators themselves were seen as at least partially responsible for the slump of the 1930s. By contrast, integration through financial liberalization and monetary union has produced wealth that European democracies cannot afford and problems they cannot answer limiting their power and undermining the credibility of their institutions. No longer the fount either of political liberty (as nineteenth-century liberals once hoped), or of social welfare, European internationalism has moved a long way from its origins.
...
Tony Judt's 2005 history *Postwar* ended describing a continental nirvana in which people opted to pay higher taxes in return for "free or nearly free medical services, early retirement and a prodigious range of social and public services." Writing in 2009, on the very eve of the sovereign debt crisis, the political commentator Steven Hill went even further, describing the continent as "the new City on a Hill."
...
In its various nineteenth-century incarnations, after all, internationalism was preeminently a movement to restore sovereign power to the peoples of the world, and those who governed in their name. Its approach to the nation-state and its institutions was almost entirely positive.
...
Now we are on the verge of a new era, and as Western predominance approaches an end, the prognosticators speculate on what will come next.
...
In the current crisis, politicians have essentially acted as underwriters, essential but subordinate to the dictates of communities of financial market makers they hesitate to contradict. More generally, the politicians have become policymakers, who listen in the first place to private interests and their lobbyists and try to adjudicate among them. Time will show whether they are any longer capable of governing. If that fails to happen, the responsibility will not be theirs alone. One of the reasons for the mid-century popularity of the state and sovereignty was that both had proved themselves in extreme circumstances. Twentieth-century total wars were fought by states that mobilized entire societies around shared perils and experiences. By creating models of equity, solidarity, and sacrifice, they transformed public attitudes in ways that endured into peacetime. Without a comparable transformation in our own views about the nature of government, the public good and the role of the state, without our developing a new kind of faith in our own collective capacity to shape the future, there is no real incentive for our politicians to change. They may not be trusted by their electorates -- polls show levels of trust plumbing new lows -- but they have no reason to care so long as this lack of trust does not translate into mobilization, resistance, and sustained pressure for reform.
...
Today, when the primacy of the fact is challenged by the Web -- a recent article hails the fact's death -- the future, more important than ever, has been privatized, monetized,and turned into a source of profit. An entire corporate sector is dedicated to commodifying and modeling it; our financial markets in general take the future as the determinant of present values in a way that simply was not true a century ago. No one now feels the burden of an essential but unknowable future more acutely than the stockbroker and trader. But this money-driven individualistic future has crowded out an older vision of what he public good might look like.
...
In the ongoing atomization of society, citizens and classes have both vanished as forces for change and given way to a world of individuals, who come together as consumers of goods or information, and who trust the Internet more than they do their political representatives or the experts they watch on television. Governing institution today have lost sight of the principle of politics rooted in the collective values of a res publica, even as they continue to defend the "civilization of capital." As for the rituals of international life, these are now well established. The world's heads of state flock annually to the United Nations General Assembly. There are discussions of reform and grandiose declarations of global targets, which mostly go unmet. Politicians, journalists, bankers, and businessmen make their pilgrimage to the heavily guarded Alpine precinct of Davos, seeking to confirm through this triumph of corporate sponsorship that a global ruling elite exists and that they belong to it. Our representatives continue to hand over power to experts and self-interested self-regulators in the name of efficient global governance while a skeptical and alienated public looks on. The idea of governing the world is becoming yesterday's dream."
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the strands of thought that went into the founding of the League of Nations and the UN, and how the activities and effects of international bodies on world affairs have played out in the past 100 years. Although it's extremely well-written, it's not an easy read per se - given the multitude of ideas and recounting of historical situations and controversies dating back to the 19th Century. It's extremely fascinating, however, and for me at least, exciting even as it opened doors to ideas and periods of history I hadn't thought about, but which nonetheless can provide context to today's world problems, such as, how can the US deal with North Korea, and why is the UN rather quiet on the topic, etc. Why was the UN regarded as a rather ineffectual body for a couple of decades, until the arrival of Kofi Annan as Secretary General? All of these topics are covered and explained in the book - which I suggest to the reader to stick with it, since it is a 400 page plus book - given the sweep of history and ideas recounted. It's a worthwhile trip through time !
July 10, 2018
A challenging but rewarding book about the evolution of the idea of global governance. Mazower approaches this question since 1815, spending a little time with the Concert of Europe before jumping into a variety of approaches to this problem. He looks at internationalism from the perspectives of communism, nationalism, liberalism, and technocratic elites. I actually found the last strain the most interesting, as you can see this idea playing out in new forms throughout modern history. This is the idea of taking global gov't out of the hands of mendacious, myopic politicians and handing it over to the new epistemic communities of lawyers, doctors, economists, and other scholars. This concept had major purchase before WWI, after WWII in the guise of modernization theory, in the EU, and in various aspects of global gov't today.
Probably the most insightful point in the book (also the thesis) is the idea that effective international governance historically depends on effective national government. The root of this idea for Mazower is the liberal internationalism of people like Mill and Mazzini, who wanted liberal, democratic nations that could interact on the basis of equality and mutual respect. Today we think of the nation-state and the ideology of nationalism as the main impediment to internationalism and global gov't, but it is important to remember that Mazzini and other liberal nationalists struggled largely against the Concert of Europe, a conservative, even regressive version of global gov't that sought to stifle reform and revolution at the national level. Thus, Mazzini envisioned a symbiosis between national reform and an international gov't that would facilitate domestic change rather than block it. Following this point, Mazower claims that Roosevelt's New Deal state (and the broader model of the center-left welfare state of the mid-20th century) did a similar thing regarding the UN and other global regimes. For example, the New Deal state sheltered the American people from the impact of unrestrained flows of goods and people from the world, providing them with economic security at home and sustaining a baseline of popular support for active US engagement in global institutions. The rise of neoliberalism stripped away much of that cushion, buffeting domestic populations with global competition and economic vulnerability to things like population movements and financial shocks, turning populations against global institutions and globalism more broadly. I thought this was a fascinating concept, and it was one of the few non-hysterical critiques of neoliberalism I've encountered.
This is an enlightening but tough book. I'm surprised Penguin published it; the language is difficult and there's minimal effort to fill the reader in on important contextual material. It would be appropriate for advanced undergrads or grad students, and anyone interested (and already fairly informed) on global governance will probably find it useful. I will definitely come back to it for the teaching of int'l politics and possibly for research as well.
Probably the most insightful point in the book (also the thesis) is the idea that effective international governance historically depends on effective national government. The root of this idea for Mazower is the liberal internationalism of people like Mill and Mazzini, who wanted liberal, democratic nations that could interact on the basis of equality and mutual respect. Today we think of the nation-state and the ideology of nationalism as the main impediment to internationalism and global gov't, but it is important to remember that Mazzini and other liberal nationalists struggled largely against the Concert of Europe, a conservative, even regressive version of global gov't that sought to stifle reform and revolution at the national level. Thus, Mazzini envisioned a symbiosis between national reform and an international gov't that would facilitate domestic change rather than block it. Following this point, Mazower claims that Roosevelt's New Deal state (and the broader model of the center-left welfare state of the mid-20th century) did a similar thing regarding the UN and other global regimes. For example, the New Deal state sheltered the American people from the impact of unrestrained flows of goods and people from the world, providing them with economic security at home and sustaining a baseline of popular support for active US engagement in global institutions. The rise of neoliberalism stripped away much of that cushion, buffeting domestic populations with global competition and economic vulnerability to things like population movements and financial shocks, turning populations against global institutions and globalism more broadly. I thought this was a fascinating concept, and it was one of the few non-hysterical critiques of neoliberalism I've encountered.
This is an enlightening but tough book. I'm surprised Penguin published it; the language is difficult and there's minimal effort to fill the reader in on important contextual material. It would be appropriate for advanced undergrads or grad students, and anyone interested (and already fairly informed) on global governance will probably find it useful. I will definitely come back to it for the teaching of int'l politics and possibly for research as well.
October 27, 2015
Not governing the world?
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2014 posted revenues for $90 billion and a $271 million loss. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].
Mazower is here more of the 'Anna Karenina' type of historian than the subject permits: more interested in the destiny of his (mostly) obscure hero-bureaucrats than in the nature and implications of the 'ideas' he promises to unpick.
The superficial round-up of fads concerning the administration of world affairs mixes Mazzini, eugenics and Wilson, Saint-Simon and William Simon (treasury secretary under Nixon), the European Union and ISO.
Bear with him, you think (having read the awesome No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations), everything will come together at the end. But after all the mixing, Mazower astonishingly concludes that "the idea of governing the world has become yesterday's dream" (at Penguin, they possibly read this last sentence only and thought, good, let's publish it). As never has the world been better governed than today, to almost 'end of history' perfection (no room left for other ambitions, other forces than the ones making up the clockwork mechanisms of accumulation).
Mazower's methodological mistake is to take at face value tactical and generally clumsy agenda setting attempts and to call them ideas, as if ideologies had to be published in "Foreign Affairs" to shape the world we live in (ideas tend to be few and far between: Marx had ideas, Mazzini had a political programme, Huxley and the eugenists had convictions, and Kissinger had an ego).
Mazower's narrative of the transience and vanity of all 'ideas' is ultimately the triumph of the ideology that sees the world inesorably divided between the haves the have-nost, and rightly so.
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2014 posted revenues for $90 billion and a $271 million loss. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].
Mazower is here more of the 'Anna Karenina' type of historian than the subject permits: more interested in the destiny of his (mostly) obscure hero-bureaucrats than in the nature and implications of the 'ideas' he promises to unpick.
The superficial round-up of fads concerning the administration of world affairs mixes Mazzini, eugenics and Wilson, Saint-Simon and William Simon (treasury secretary under Nixon), the European Union and ISO.
Bear with him, you think (having read the awesome No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations), everything will come together at the end. But after all the mixing, Mazower astonishingly concludes that "the idea of governing the world has become yesterday's dream" (at Penguin, they possibly read this last sentence only and thought, good, let's publish it). As never has the world been better governed than today, to almost 'end of history' perfection (no room left for other ambitions, other forces than the ones making up the clockwork mechanisms of accumulation).
Mazower's methodological mistake is to take at face value tactical and generally clumsy agenda setting attempts and to call them ideas, as if ideologies had to be published in "Foreign Affairs" to shape the world we live in (ideas tend to be few and far between: Marx had ideas, Mazzini had a political programme, Huxley and the eugenists had convictions, and Kissinger had an ego).
Mazower's narrative of the transience and vanity of all 'ideas' is ultimately the triumph of the ideology that sees the world inesorably divided between the haves the have-nost, and rightly so.
November 30, 2022
История на интернационализма или по-точно на идеята за "световно управление" в новата и най-новата история на човечеството - от Конгреса във Виена (1814-15) до почти наши дни. Мазауър отново подлага иначе добре познати събития, личности и идеи на критичен анализ. Факти и трактовката им, с които сме свикнали от учебниците, са преобърнати с главата надолу. Важно е следователно кой пише учебниците, или кой финансира съществуването на учените, за да имат спокойствието и времето да напишат тези учебници. В класическите истории на Обществото на народите или на ООН трудно ще открием нещо за заложения в същността им баланс на силите или латентен империализъм. В учебниците по международно право рядко се обръща внимание на историческите процеси, стоящи зад формирането на съвременните международноправни принципи, норми и институти. С две думи, Мазауър стимулира критичнния поглед върху историята на "интернационализма", препоръчвайки ни да гледаме на личности и идеологии, борещи се световното благо, с доза скептицизъм, пък били те марксисти, либерали или европеисти. Както подобава на един изследовател на "черния" 20-ти век и за разлика от проповедите на съвременните либерали, той завършва труда си песимистично - като отказва да повярва, че ще се поучим от опита на своите предци...nihil sub sole novum.
December 23, 2012
Global financial integration, poverty, failed states, climate change, and a host of other issues that transcend national borders call out for new forms of transnational cooperation and regulation. However, the formation of international institutions stands in tension with the norm of national self-determination that has governed international affairs since the Treaty of Westphalia, and that was strengthened by the dismantling of European empires in the wake of the two World Wars. Governing the World examines how (mostly European and North American) intellectuals and politicians have sought to resolve the tension between the need to pool resources and expertise in order to govern an increasingly globalized world, and the desire of countries to choose their own path to prosperity and define modernity in their own way over the last two centuries.
Drawing on the work of German legal theorist Carl Schmitt, Mazower argues that the ability to define and propagate international norms constitutes a vital source of national power. As a result, international law, which was originally intended as a means to take politics out of international relations by empowering disinterested jurists and technical experts, has repeatedly been used as a way for powerful countries to set standards of behavior for weaker states, even while carving out regimes of exception that maintain their own freedom of movement. In other words, international law and standards are things that the powerful impose on the weak, reflecting not only their own self-interest but also ideological preferences that they proclaim to be universal values. These regimes of exception are reflected in dichotomies between 'civilized' and 'uncivilized' peoples, 'developed' and 'developing' countries, and functioning versus 'failed' states - categories that define who sets the rules, and who those rules apply to.
Mazower's application of this argument to the postwar international political and economic orders organized by the United States and its Western European junior partners (particularly in the wake of the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1970s and 80s) has drawn criticism from some authors, who accuse him of impugning the good intentions of people like Samantha Powers (see, for example, Brendan Simms's review in The Independent (UK)). They argue that the West's promotion of democracy, human rights, and development are more than just some arbitrary rules that the developed countries seek to impose on the weaker states.
However, this criticism makes the mistake of not asking what the United States and its partners mean by 'democracy' or 'development'. All too often, what the West means by democracy promotion in the developing world is "you get to choose who will implement our agenda" (this applies to Democrats as much as Republicans in the US). Furthermore, while most people can agree that rising standards of living should be the target of development policies, many development experts would agree that there is no one formula for achieving higher levels of income and other development indicators. Yet, even as World Bank economists such as former chief economist Justin Yifu Linn have criticized the Washington Consensus, the Bank continues to evaluate the process of borrower countries by measuring how closely they have adhered to the same old script of 'liberalize, privatize, and deregulate.' Despite the ongoing debates about how to achieve long-run economic growth, which underlines the lack of development blueprints, the World Bank portrays itself as a 'knowledge bank' that dispenses technocratic advice to developing country clients, creating a politically useful illusion of certainty. Reviewers who criticize the part of the book that deals with more recent history (often historians of Europe) do so because they uncritically accept the norms that the Western/developed/civilized/white countries promote, perpetuating the hierarchy of truth that Mazower rightfully criticizes, while also sidestepping the questions about the ability of Western countries to transform foreign societies that he raises.
Looking to the future, Mazower strikes an understandable note of pessimism for the future of international cooperation because while American politicians and intellectuals continue to promote self-serving ideological preferences as universal truths, the institutions they have traditionally used to promote those norms abroad are declining in influence. The rise of regional powers like China, Russia, India, and Brazil means that new international norms are going to emerge that could contradict or undermine United States and European priorities. Furthermore, the Senate's unwillingness to ratify even the most mundane of international technical agreements like the Law of the Sea or the recent agreement regarding rights for people with disabilities on the grounds that they threaten United States sovereignty illustrates that the US is not at all ready to give up its "above the law" status in order to solve global problems. Countries like China and India, which have been on the wrong end of unbalanced international legal orders in the past, are no more willing to trade sovereignty for problem-solving either. Perhaps, as Dani Rodrik has argued and as Mazower implies at the end of the book, the resuscitation of democratic nation-states that can challenge the centralized power of global finance may be the only way to change the global agenda in a progressive direction.
Drawing on the work of German legal theorist Carl Schmitt, Mazower argues that the ability to define and propagate international norms constitutes a vital source of national power. As a result, international law, which was originally intended as a means to take politics out of international relations by empowering disinterested jurists and technical experts, has repeatedly been used as a way for powerful countries to set standards of behavior for weaker states, even while carving out regimes of exception that maintain their own freedom of movement. In other words, international law and standards are things that the powerful impose on the weak, reflecting not only their own self-interest but also ideological preferences that they proclaim to be universal values. These regimes of exception are reflected in dichotomies between 'civilized' and 'uncivilized' peoples, 'developed' and 'developing' countries, and functioning versus 'failed' states - categories that define who sets the rules, and who those rules apply to.
Mazower's application of this argument to the postwar international political and economic orders organized by the United States and its Western European junior partners (particularly in the wake of the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1970s and 80s) has drawn criticism from some authors, who accuse him of impugning the good intentions of people like Samantha Powers (see, for example, Brendan Simms's review in The Independent (UK)). They argue that the West's promotion of democracy, human rights, and development are more than just some arbitrary rules that the developed countries seek to impose on the weaker states.
However, this criticism makes the mistake of not asking what the United States and its partners mean by 'democracy' or 'development'. All too often, what the West means by democracy promotion in the developing world is "you get to choose who will implement our agenda" (this applies to Democrats as much as Republicans in the US). Furthermore, while most people can agree that rising standards of living should be the target of development policies, many development experts would agree that there is no one formula for achieving higher levels of income and other development indicators. Yet, even as World Bank economists such as former chief economist Justin Yifu Linn have criticized the Washington Consensus, the Bank continues to evaluate the process of borrower countries by measuring how closely they have adhered to the same old script of 'liberalize, privatize, and deregulate.' Despite the ongoing debates about how to achieve long-run economic growth, which underlines the lack of development blueprints, the World Bank portrays itself as a 'knowledge bank' that dispenses technocratic advice to developing country clients, creating a politically useful illusion of certainty. Reviewers who criticize the part of the book that deals with more recent history (often historians of Europe) do so because they uncritically accept the norms that the Western/developed/civilized/white countries promote, perpetuating the hierarchy of truth that Mazower rightfully criticizes, while also sidestepping the questions about the ability of Western countries to transform foreign societies that he raises.
Looking to the future, Mazower strikes an understandable note of pessimism for the future of international cooperation because while American politicians and intellectuals continue to promote self-serving ideological preferences as universal truths, the institutions they have traditionally used to promote those norms abroad are declining in influence. The rise of regional powers like China, Russia, India, and Brazil means that new international norms are going to emerge that could contradict or undermine United States and European priorities. Furthermore, the Senate's unwillingness to ratify even the most mundane of international technical agreements like the Law of the Sea or the recent agreement regarding rights for people with disabilities on the grounds that they threaten United States sovereignty illustrates that the US is not at all ready to give up its "above the law" status in order to solve global problems. Countries like China and India, which have been on the wrong end of unbalanced international legal orders in the past, are no more willing to trade sovereignty for problem-solving either. Perhaps, as Dani Rodrik has argued and as Mazower implies at the end of the book, the resuscitation of democratic nation-states that can challenge the centralized power of global finance may be the only way to change the global agenda in a progressive direction.
September 4, 2021
LA HISTORIA DE UNA PREGUNTA: ¿CÓMO GOBERNAR EL MUNDO?
RESEÑA A Mazower, Mark. Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present.
Nueva York: Penguin Press, 2012.
Para el estudiante de Relaciones Internacionales promedio estudiar los asuntos globales es una perspectiva atemorizante. Lleno de teorías, hipótesis, reglas (explícitas y no dichas), instituciones, Estados, organizaciones, individuos e ideas, el sistema internacional es una construcción heterogénea formada por piezas irregulares, que hacen su ensamblaje difícilmente armonioso. Su edificación, entre azarosa y premeditada, es aún más difícil de comprender. Sin embargo, para el humano —ser inquieto por concebir el mundo donde habita— y, en específico, para el científico social, la odisea parece valer la pena. Mark Mazower, autor de Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present, es uno de los valerosos dentro de la disciplina: mediante un repaso de su conformación histórica, muestra cómo algunas ideas (elemento generalmente subestimado) tuvieron y tienen la capacidad de construir y transformar nuestra realidad.
Mazower, historiador y escritor, nace en Londres (Reino Unido) en 1958 y —no sería exagerado señalar— crece en una época convulsa que le proporciona al autor más de una razón para enfocar sus estudios en cuestiones globales: se enfoca en la Grecia moderna y la Europa del siglo XX, y se especializa en historia internacional. La curiosidad y maestría del autor en dichos temas producen textos como No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (2009) y Greece and the Inter-War Economic Crisis (1991) (Mark Mazower, s.f.).
Ahora bien, sin llegar a ser un liberal empedernido como Kant ni un realista incorregible como Maquiavelo, Mazower destaca por mantener una perspectiva liberal equilibrada y objetiva: comprende la lucha de poder entre los Estados soberanos, pero confía en la capacidad del derecho e instituciones internacionales para establecer límites a su convivencia irrestricta en el sistema internacional; conoce la naturaleza egoísta y el interés propio de los gobiernos, pero se fía del ideal universalista que busca un reconocimiento pleno de los derechos humanos y una gobernanza mundial de todos para con todos (Anderson, 2013). No obstante, a pesar de propugnar instituciones que promueven dichos ideales, como la Organización de las Naciones Unidas (ONU), el mismo Mazower confiesa que “no podría explicar tan fácilmente la razón por la cual está a favor de [ella].” (Columbia University, 2011). De ahí que, lo que más salta a la vista de Governing The World es la resolución del autor por identificar a la organización internacional por excelencia como un medio para hacer cumplir los fines de las grandes potencias, en general, y de los Estados Unidos (EE. UU.), en particular.
Así pues, el inicio de la peripecia de Mazower de escribir Governing The World data del último decenio del siglo pasado. La disolución de Yugoslavia y la invasión a Irak fueron sucesos que pusieron bajo los reflectores a la ONU y que dejaron mucho que desear después de presenciar su intervención. Lo anterior llevó al autor a preguntarse ¿Para qué sirve la ONU? Mazower argumenta que rastrear el origen y el fin de la organización internacional nos lleva, invariablemente, a descubrir que esta es solo una pieza más de un rompecabezas mucho más complejo: el ideal de un gobierno intergubernamental y la clara hegemonía estadounidense en los asuntos globales (Columbia University, 2011).
En cuanto a su estructura, Governing The World se divide en dos secciones: “The Era of Internationalism” y “Governing the World the American Way”. En esta última, se presenta la evolución de la idea del internacionalismo desde la perspectiva estadounidense. El escritor reconstruye la visión romántica de la ONU, haciendo evidente que —en realidad— fue creada como seguro (para afianzar la estabilidad en Europa), como alianza (en tiempos de guerra) y como medio de difusión (para un régimen político-económico ad hoc para los países capitalistas). Posteriormente, Mazower relata cómo, con el inicio de la Guerra Fría y la creciente rivalidad entre EE. UU. y la Unión Soviética (URSS), el campo de batalla se trasladó de Europa a Asia. En este contexto queda claro que la ONU fue utilizada para contener el avance del comunismo y con ella aparece un nuevo actor en el escenario internacional: el Tercer Mundo. Aunque en un principio representó un contrapeso frente al control ejercido por las grandes potencias sobre la Asamblea General, los países subdesarrollados tuvieron una participación más simbólica que real. Llegado a este punto el autor describe cómo, durante la posguerra y hasta 1973, la confrontación entre el capitalismo y el socialismo se hace totalmente evidente. EE. UU. estaba convencido de que tenía mejores herramientas para mejorar las vidas de los marginados del Tercer Mundo, y por ello toman más importancia organizaciones como la de las Naciones Unidas para la Alimentación (FAO), la Mundial de la Salud (OMS) y las no gubernamentales (ONG). A pesar de que EE. UU. dejó a un lado la estrategia militar, la URSS siguió siendo ideológicamente más atractiva para los jóvenes. En cierta forma, el mundo ya no deseaba vivir dentro de una realidad binaria o polarizada; en este sentido, las ONG ofrecieron una alternativa al convertirse en denunciantes de los abusos de una u otra superpotencia. Esto transformó la dinámica global y organizaciones como Amnistía Internacional y Human Rights Watch adoptaron las tecnologías de la información para hacer más eficaz la protección de los derechos humanos.
Más adelante, en la década de los setenta y después de 25 años de un crecimiento económico jamás visto, Mazower afirma que el mundo entró en una etapa de crisis profundas y recurrentes. Esto se intentó remediar con la creación de la Organización Mundial de Comercio y un discurso optimista de globalización e igualdad. Sin embargo, como no se logró un cambio de fondo en la situación mundial, resultó contraproducente y condujo a choques entre culturas (el ataque a las Torres Gemelas y otros atentados terroristas). Así, siguen enfrentadas las tesis del libre mercado y la del Estado fuerte: Mazower discute la redefinición del concepto de soberanía como responsabilidad de proteger y como justificación del intervencionismo “humanitario” con el fin de reparar “Estados fallidos”. Finalmente, la entrada en escena de potencias emergentes y la continua generación de nuevas tecnologías, hacen difusos los conceptos de soberanía, Estado y leyes. La gobernanza global se convierte, entonces, en una idea muy peligrosa, ya que bajo ella todos tienen algo que decir y las prioridades reales del mundo pasan a segundo plano.
Mazower escribe apoyándose, por un lado, en una amplia bibliografía (artículos académicos, libros, notas y editoriales periodísticas) y, por otro, en un gran número de comentarios y opiniones de personalidades (políticos, soldados, diplomáticos, banqueros, funcionarios gubernamentales y de instituciones privadas, etc.) que hacen que su libro sea amplio y atractivo en su contenido, y ameno en su lectura. En ese sentido, Mazower cumple con el objetivo que se propuso de hacer un recuento histórico con una clara línea de evolución de la idea del internacionalismo. Si bien el autor logra describir cabalmente la historia reciente de la gobernanza mundial, queda la impresión de que dedicó poco espacio a la exposición de la compleja coyuntura actual y sus posibles desenlaces. Así, el libro no presenta una tesis concreta o específica hacia dónde deberían dirigirse los esfuerzos para construir un legítimo gobierno de todos para todos. Poco se dice, por ejemplo, del ejercicio de gobierno entre Estados que se está llevando a través de la Unión Europea. Dado que en el periodo analizado EE. UU. ha tenido un rol protagónico, en Governing the World se escuchan escasamente otras voces e ideas. Aunque en algún momento la lectura de este libro puede ser abrumadora por la cantidad de información y bibliografía que abarca, para el estudiante de Relaciones Internacionales es valioso como referencia imprescindible acerca de una idea: ¿es posible gobernar el mundo? Y, de ser así, ¿cómo hacerlo?
REFERENCIAS
Anderson, Kenneth. “Book Review: ‘Governing the World’.” Columbia Magazine, primavera 2013. https://magazine.columbia.edu/article....
Columbia University. “University Lecture with Professor Mark A. Mazower.” Video de YouTube, 55:54. Publicado el 15 de diciembre de 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imY8H....
Dudziak, Mary L. “Nations United? How the idea of global governance became a resource of American power.” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, no. 27 (invierno 2013). https://democracyjournal.org/magazine....
Mark Mazower. “Biography.” Consultado el 1 de septiembre de 2021. https://www.mazower.com/m_bio.html.
Mazower, Mark. Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present. Nueva York: Penguin Press, 2012.
Other Press. “WHAT YOU DID NOT TELL by Mark Mazower.” Video de YouTube, 4:26. Publicado el 6 de octubre de 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7uO5....
Conteo de palabras: 1280
RESEÑA A Mazower, Mark. Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present.
Nueva York: Penguin Press, 2012.
Para el estudiante de Relaciones Internacionales promedio estudiar los asuntos globales es una perspectiva atemorizante. Lleno de teorías, hipótesis, reglas (explícitas y no dichas), instituciones, Estados, organizaciones, individuos e ideas, el sistema internacional es una construcción heterogénea formada por piezas irregulares, que hacen su ensamblaje difícilmente armonioso. Su edificación, entre azarosa y premeditada, es aún más difícil de comprender. Sin embargo, para el humano —ser inquieto por concebir el mundo donde habita— y, en específico, para el científico social, la odisea parece valer la pena. Mark Mazower, autor de Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present, es uno de los valerosos dentro de la disciplina: mediante un repaso de su conformación histórica, muestra cómo algunas ideas (elemento generalmente subestimado) tuvieron y tienen la capacidad de construir y transformar nuestra realidad.
Mazower, historiador y escritor, nace en Londres (Reino Unido) en 1958 y —no sería exagerado señalar— crece en una época convulsa que le proporciona al autor más de una razón para enfocar sus estudios en cuestiones globales: se enfoca en la Grecia moderna y la Europa del siglo XX, y se especializa en historia internacional. La curiosidad y maestría del autor en dichos temas producen textos como No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (2009) y Greece and the Inter-War Economic Crisis (1991) (Mark Mazower, s.f.).
Ahora bien, sin llegar a ser un liberal empedernido como Kant ni un realista incorregible como Maquiavelo, Mazower destaca por mantener una perspectiva liberal equilibrada y objetiva: comprende la lucha de poder entre los Estados soberanos, pero confía en la capacidad del derecho e instituciones internacionales para establecer límites a su convivencia irrestricta en el sistema internacional; conoce la naturaleza egoísta y el interés propio de los gobiernos, pero se fía del ideal universalista que busca un reconocimiento pleno de los derechos humanos y una gobernanza mundial de todos para con todos (Anderson, 2013). No obstante, a pesar de propugnar instituciones que promueven dichos ideales, como la Organización de las Naciones Unidas (ONU), el mismo Mazower confiesa que “no podría explicar tan fácilmente la razón por la cual está a favor de [ella].” (Columbia University, 2011). De ahí que, lo que más salta a la vista de Governing The World es la resolución del autor por identificar a la organización internacional por excelencia como un medio para hacer cumplir los fines de las grandes potencias, en general, y de los Estados Unidos (EE. UU.), en particular.
Así pues, el inicio de la peripecia de Mazower de escribir Governing The World data del último decenio del siglo pasado. La disolución de Yugoslavia y la invasión a Irak fueron sucesos que pusieron bajo los reflectores a la ONU y que dejaron mucho que desear después de presenciar su intervención. Lo anterior llevó al autor a preguntarse ¿Para qué sirve la ONU? Mazower argumenta que rastrear el origen y el fin de la organización internacional nos lleva, invariablemente, a descubrir que esta es solo una pieza más de un rompecabezas mucho más complejo: el ideal de un gobierno intergubernamental y la clara hegemonía estadounidense en los asuntos globales (Columbia University, 2011).
En cuanto a su estructura, Governing The World se divide en dos secciones: “The Era of Internationalism” y “Governing the World the American Way”. En esta última, se presenta la evolución de la idea del internacionalismo desde la perspectiva estadounidense. El escritor reconstruye la visión romántica de la ONU, haciendo evidente que —en realidad— fue creada como seguro (para afianzar la estabilidad en Europa), como alianza (en tiempos de guerra) y como medio de difusión (para un régimen político-económico ad hoc para los países capitalistas). Posteriormente, Mazower relata cómo, con el inicio de la Guerra Fría y la creciente rivalidad entre EE. UU. y la Unión Soviética (URSS), el campo de batalla se trasladó de Europa a Asia. En este contexto queda claro que la ONU fue utilizada para contener el avance del comunismo y con ella aparece un nuevo actor en el escenario internacional: el Tercer Mundo. Aunque en un principio representó un contrapeso frente al control ejercido por las grandes potencias sobre la Asamblea General, los países subdesarrollados tuvieron una participación más simbólica que real. Llegado a este punto el autor describe cómo, durante la posguerra y hasta 1973, la confrontación entre el capitalismo y el socialismo se hace totalmente evidente. EE. UU. estaba convencido de que tenía mejores herramientas para mejorar las vidas de los marginados del Tercer Mundo, y por ello toman más importancia organizaciones como la de las Naciones Unidas para la Alimentación (FAO), la Mundial de la Salud (OMS) y las no gubernamentales (ONG). A pesar de que EE. UU. dejó a un lado la estrategia militar, la URSS siguió siendo ideológicamente más atractiva para los jóvenes. En cierta forma, el mundo ya no deseaba vivir dentro de una realidad binaria o polarizada; en este sentido, las ONG ofrecieron una alternativa al convertirse en denunciantes de los abusos de una u otra superpotencia. Esto transformó la dinámica global y organizaciones como Amnistía Internacional y Human Rights Watch adoptaron las tecnologías de la información para hacer más eficaz la protección de los derechos humanos.
Más adelante, en la década de los setenta y después de 25 años de un crecimiento económico jamás visto, Mazower afirma que el mundo entró en una etapa de crisis profundas y recurrentes. Esto se intentó remediar con la creación de la Organización Mundial de Comercio y un discurso optimista de globalización e igualdad. Sin embargo, como no se logró un cambio de fondo en la situación mundial, resultó contraproducente y condujo a choques entre culturas (el ataque a las Torres Gemelas y otros atentados terroristas). Así, siguen enfrentadas las tesis del libre mercado y la del Estado fuerte: Mazower discute la redefinición del concepto de soberanía como responsabilidad de proteger y como justificación del intervencionismo “humanitario” con el fin de reparar “Estados fallidos”. Finalmente, la entrada en escena de potencias emergentes y la continua generación de nuevas tecnologías, hacen difusos los conceptos de soberanía, Estado y leyes. La gobernanza global se convierte, entonces, en una idea muy peligrosa, ya que bajo ella todos tienen algo que decir y las prioridades reales del mundo pasan a segundo plano.
Mazower escribe apoyándose, por un lado, en una amplia bibliografía (artículos académicos, libros, notas y editoriales periodísticas) y, por otro, en un gran número de comentarios y opiniones de personalidades (políticos, soldados, diplomáticos, banqueros, funcionarios gubernamentales y de instituciones privadas, etc.) que hacen que su libro sea amplio y atractivo en su contenido, y ameno en su lectura. En ese sentido, Mazower cumple con el objetivo que se propuso de hacer un recuento histórico con una clara línea de evolución de la idea del internacionalismo. Si bien el autor logra describir cabalmente la historia reciente de la gobernanza mundial, queda la impresión de que dedicó poco espacio a la exposición de la compleja coyuntura actual y sus posibles desenlaces. Así, el libro no presenta una tesis concreta o específica hacia dónde deberían dirigirse los esfuerzos para construir un legítimo gobierno de todos para todos. Poco se dice, por ejemplo, del ejercicio de gobierno entre Estados que se está llevando a través de la Unión Europea. Dado que en el periodo analizado EE. UU. ha tenido un rol protagónico, en Governing the World se escuchan escasamente otras voces e ideas. Aunque en algún momento la lectura de este libro puede ser abrumadora por la cantidad de información y bibliografía que abarca, para el estudiante de Relaciones Internacionales es valioso como referencia imprescindible acerca de una idea: ¿es posible gobernar el mundo? Y, de ser así, ¿cómo hacerlo?
REFERENCIAS
Anderson, Kenneth. “Book Review: ‘Governing the World’.” Columbia Magazine, primavera 2013. https://magazine.columbia.edu/article....
Columbia University. “University Lecture with Professor Mark A. Mazower.” Video de YouTube, 55:54. Publicado el 15 de diciembre de 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imY8H....
Dudziak, Mary L. “Nations United? How the idea of global governance became a resource of American power.” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, no. 27 (invierno 2013). https://democracyjournal.org/magazine....
Mark Mazower. “Biography.” Consultado el 1 de septiembre de 2021. https://www.mazower.com/m_bio.html.
Mazower, Mark. Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present. Nueva York: Penguin Press, 2012.
Other Press. “WHAT YOU DID NOT TELL by Mark Mazower.” Video de YouTube, 4:26. Publicado el 6 de octubre de 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7uO5....
Conteo de palabras: 1280
Read
September 4, 2021La trastienda del sistema internacional
Reseña a Mazower, Mark. 2013. Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present. 1a ed. Nueva York: Penguin Random House LLC. Part II: Governing the World the American Way.
Marina Medina de León
3 de sempiembre del 2021
Abrumante, intricado y sumamente interesante. Aquellos tres adjetivos describen, en gran medida, el sistema internacional. Entender el engranaje del plano internacional es una tarea ardua. Al embarcarse en dicha odisea, uno se da cuenta rápidamente que no puede combrender el sistema actual sin entender sus orígenes. A partir de la Primera Guerra Mundial comenzó a gestarse el sistema internacional que rige la actualidad. Sin embargo, es a partir de la Segunda Guerra Mundial cuando verdaderamente se materializa. Después observamos un incesante juego de tira y jala entre potencia, surgimiento y decadencia de políticas e instituciones, discusiones incesantes sobre la manera en que se tienen que hacer las cosas. Todos estos cambios han sido (y segurán siendo) impulsados por entes que muchas veces olvidamos que nos rigen: las ideas. El texto de Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present, es un buen lugar para comenzar nuestro estudio del sistema internacional.
Mark Mazower es un historiador y escritor británico, nacido en 1958. Se especializa en la Grecia moderna, Europa el siglo XX y la historia internacional. Estudió asuntos internacionales [international affairs] en la Universidad Johns Hopkins y tiene un doctorado en historia moderna por la Universidad de Oxford (Mark Mazower, s.f.). Comenta sobre asuntos internacionales y revisa libros para el Financial Times, Nation, London Review of Books, entre otros. Es director fundador del Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, el cual reúne a académicos, artistas, escritores, compositores y cineastas de todo el mundo (Department of History, s.f.).
Es importante señalar que la presente reseña no es del libro en su totalidad. El texto completo está dividido en dos secciones (cada una de siete capítulos): “La era del internacionalismo” y “Gobernando el mundo a la manera americana”. La segunda sección abarca desde finales de la Segunda Guerra Mundial hasta la década de 2010. Sin embargo, también rescata detalles del periodo entre las dos guerras (principalmente asuntos vinculados a la Liga de Naciones) y hace algunos comentarios sobre las expectativas del futuro. Es un texto esencialmente histórico y explicativo, aunque su objetivo está lejos de simplemente desarrollar los eventos históricos de mediados del siglo pasado en adelante. La sucesión de capítulos no sigue un orden cronológico; cada capítulo abarca un tema específico, el cual sí se desarrolla de manera bastante lineal dentro de cada sección.
El libro presenta el origen de muchos conceptos que actualmente usamos de manera cotidiana (sin prestar mayor atención al contexto en el que surgieron y la carga histórica que conllevan): modernización, Tercer Mundo, desarrollo sustentable, Estados fallidos, globalización, gobernanza global, estanflación, neoliberalismo e intervenciones humanitarias, entre otros. También es un gran catálogo de personajes de relevancia histórica, tanto académicos como políticos, desde George Kennan hasta Angela Merkel. Expone textos que moldearon el mundo: Política entre naciones, de Hans Morgenthau, Las etapas del crecimiento económico, de Walt W. Rostow, y Los condenados de la tierra, de Frantz Fanon, etcétera.
Exponer todos los temas que toca el libro en un espacio reducido es imposible. Pero sí se pueden mostrar algunos los contenidos más recurrentes. Mazower muestra el desarrollo de múltiples instituciones internacionales, especialmente el de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas (ONU), la cual inicia como una alianza en tiempos de guerra. Explica aquellas situaciones en las que las organizaciones internacionales han sido un triunfo y aquellas en las que simplemente obstaculizaron el progreso. Muestra cómo las diferentes teorías económicas han impactado el mundo, creado políticas, enriquecido países y generado hambrunas. Demuestra la manera en que las potencias han utilizado a su favor a las distintas organizaciones, pero también cómo las organizaciones han frenado a las potencias. Enseña las continuas transformaciones de la política exterior de los países, especialmente de Estados Unidos (EE. UU.), y su impacto en el mundo. Explica cómo ha variado la relevancia del concepto de soberanía: primero inexistente para los países débiles, después en un derecho primordial, finalmente condicionado a que cada país proteja a su gente (de lo contrario una intervención humanitaria es excusable). El libro termina exponiendo la delicada situación actual, la pérdida de fe en los gobiernos y las instituciones internacionales, los mayores problemas a los que nos enfrentamos en el presente y algunas posibilidades del porvenir.
Todo el libro es de suma relevancia, pero como población civil de un país perteneciente al Tercer Mundo, hay dos capítulos que resaltan. El capítulo nueve explica el surgimiento del término “Tercer Mundo”, originalmente dirigido específicamente a las coloniales de Asia y África. “La Conferencia de Bandung en 1955 [...] marcó la entrada del Tercer Mundo como una fuerza política”, precisamente en el momento en que la división histórica entre este y oeste se dejaba atrás, para dar paso a la división entre norte y sur. A partir de 1955 comenzaron a entrar más y más países a la Asamblea General de la ONU. Para la década de 1960 el bloque afroasiático dominaba la Asamblea General. Esto mismo impulsó la lucha por la descolonización y la autodeterminación de los Estados. El capítulo once habla de los derechos humanos y el surgimiento de las organizaciones no gubernamentales (ONG). La gente común y corriente estaba (y sigue estando) ansiosa por poder participar en el escenario internacional, mediante las ONG aprendieron que las “ideas tienen poder y que se podía avergonzar a los gobiernos para obligarlos a actuar”.
Muchas de las posibles críticas se desvanecen rápidamente. Podría acusársele a Mazower de centrarse demasiado en EE. UU., sin embargo, la segunda sección está destinada a explicar la manera en que los estadounidenses moldearon el sistema internacional, además, no deja de lado al resto del mundo en sus explicaciones. Se le podría cuestionar que su libro no es apto para el público en general, puesto que para su profunda comprensión se requiere contar con bastantes conocimientos previos, pero claramente el público que Mazower busca ya sabe bastante de la historia más reciente, de sistemas políticos y nociones del sistema internacional (aunque cualquier persona dotada de suficiente paciencia y con el apoyo de otras fuentes de información es perfectamente capaz de leer su libro). También podría criticársele que es un texto denso, complejo y atiborrado de detalles, pero simplemente está reflejando la historia y la realidad internacional.
Mark Mazower persigue la verdad. No se dedica a plasmar sus opiniones ni a criticar, simplemente expone de manera detallada. Su libro no muestra blancos y negros, sino una escala de grises. No teme exponer las contradicciones de distintos países, las dos caras de la moneda: el EE. UU. que lucha por los derechos humanos y la descolonización, y el EE. UU. que fomenta golpes de Estado y coloca dictadores en el poder. Es un libro que profundiza tu comprensión del mundo y cultura general. No sólo los internacionalistas deberían de leer el texto de Mazower, sino cualquier persona deseosa de entender el mundo que habita y las instituciones que lo rigen. Es un libro merecedor de leerse (varias veces).
Bibliografía
Department of History. "Mazower, Mark." Consultado el 3 de
septiembre de 2021. http://www.mazower.com/m_bio.html.
Mark Mazower. “Biography.” Consultado el 3 de setiembre de 2021.
https://www.mazower.com/m_bio.html.
Reseña a Mazower, Mark. 2013. Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present. 1a ed. Nueva York: Penguin Random House LLC. Part II: Governing the World the American Way.
Marina Medina de León
3 de sempiembre del 2021
Abrumante, intricado y sumamente interesante. Aquellos tres adjetivos describen, en gran medida, el sistema internacional. Entender el engranaje del plano internacional es una tarea ardua. Al embarcarse en dicha odisea, uno se da cuenta rápidamente que no puede combrender el sistema actual sin entender sus orígenes. A partir de la Primera Guerra Mundial comenzó a gestarse el sistema internacional que rige la actualidad. Sin embargo, es a partir de la Segunda Guerra Mundial cuando verdaderamente se materializa. Después observamos un incesante juego de tira y jala entre potencia, surgimiento y decadencia de políticas e instituciones, discusiones incesantes sobre la manera en que se tienen que hacer las cosas. Todos estos cambios han sido (y segurán siendo) impulsados por entes que muchas veces olvidamos que nos rigen: las ideas. El texto de Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present, es un buen lugar para comenzar nuestro estudio del sistema internacional.
Mark Mazower es un historiador y escritor británico, nacido en 1958. Se especializa en la Grecia moderna, Europa el siglo XX y la historia internacional. Estudió asuntos internacionales [international affairs] en la Universidad Johns Hopkins y tiene un doctorado en historia moderna por la Universidad de Oxford (Mark Mazower, s.f.). Comenta sobre asuntos internacionales y revisa libros para el Financial Times, Nation, London Review of Books, entre otros. Es director fundador del Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, el cual reúne a académicos, artistas, escritores, compositores y cineastas de todo el mundo (Department of History, s.f.).
Es importante señalar que la presente reseña no es del libro en su totalidad. El texto completo está dividido en dos secciones (cada una de siete capítulos): “La era del internacionalismo” y “Gobernando el mundo a la manera americana”. La segunda sección abarca desde finales de la Segunda Guerra Mundial hasta la década de 2010. Sin embargo, también rescata detalles del periodo entre las dos guerras (principalmente asuntos vinculados a la Liga de Naciones) y hace algunos comentarios sobre las expectativas del futuro. Es un texto esencialmente histórico y explicativo, aunque su objetivo está lejos de simplemente desarrollar los eventos históricos de mediados del siglo pasado en adelante. La sucesión de capítulos no sigue un orden cronológico; cada capítulo abarca un tema específico, el cual sí se desarrolla de manera bastante lineal dentro de cada sección.
El libro presenta el origen de muchos conceptos que actualmente usamos de manera cotidiana (sin prestar mayor atención al contexto en el que surgieron y la carga histórica que conllevan): modernización, Tercer Mundo, desarrollo sustentable, Estados fallidos, globalización, gobernanza global, estanflación, neoliberalismo e intervenciones humanitarias, entre otros. También es un gran catálogo de personajes de relevancia histórica, tanto académicos como políticos, desde George Kennan hasta Angela Merkel. Expone textos que moldearon el mundo: Política entre naciones, de Hans Morgenthau, Las etapas del crecimiento económico, de Walt W. Rostow, y Los condenados de la tierra, de Frantz Fanon, etcétera.
Exponer todos los temas que toca el libro en un espacio reducido es imposible. Pero sí se pueden mostrar algunos los contenidos más recurrentes. Mazower muestra el desarrollo de múltiples instituciones internacionales, especialmente el de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas (ONU), la cual inicia como una alianza en tiempos de guerra. Explica aquellas situaciones en las que las organizaciones internacionales han sido un triunfo y aquellas en las que simplemente obstaculizaron el progreso. Muestra cómo las diferentes teorías económicas han impactado el mundo, creado políticas, enriquecido países y generado hambrunas. Demuestra la manera en que las potencias han utilizado a su favor a las distintas organizaciones, pero también cómo las organizaciones han frenado a las potencias. Enseña las continuas transformaciones de la política exterior de los países, especialmente de Estados Unidos (EE. UU.), y su impacto en el mundo. Explica cómo ha variado la relevancia del concepto de soberanía: primero inexistente para los países débiles, después en un derecho primordial, finalmente condicionado a que cada país proteja a su gente (de lo contrario una intervención humanitaria es excusable). El libro termina exponiendo la delicada situación actual, la pérdida de fe en los gobiernos y las instituciones internacionales, los mayores problemas a los que nos enfrentamos en el presente y algunas posibilidades del porvenir.
Todo el libro es de suma relevancia, pero como población civil de un país perteneciente al Tercer Mundo, hay dos capítulos que resaltan. El capítulo nueve explica el surgimiento del término “Tercer Mundo”, originalmente dirigido específicamente a las coloniales de Asia y África. “La Conferencia de Bandung en 1955 [...] marcó la entrada del Tercer Mundo como una fuerza política”, precisamente en el momento en que la división histórica entre este y oeste se dejaba atrás, para dar paso a la división entre norte y sur. A partir de 1955 comenzaron a entrar más y más países a la Asamblea General de la ONU. Para la década de 1960 el bloque afroasiático dominaba la Asamblea General. Esto mismo impulsó la lucha por la descolonización y la autodeterminación de los Estados. El capítulo once habla de los derechos humanos y el surgimiento de las organizaciones no gubernamentales (ONG). La gente común y corriente estaba (y sigue estando) ansiosa por poder participar en el escenario internacional, mediante las ONG aprendieron que las “ideas tienen poder y que se podía avergonzar a los gobiernos para obligarlos a actuar”.
Muchas de las posibles críticas se desvanecen rápidamente. Podría acusársele a Mazower de centrarse demasiado en EE. UU., sin embargo, la segunda sección está destinada a explicar la manera en que los estadounidenses moldearon el sistema internacional, además, no deja de lado al resto del mundo en sus explicaciones. Se le podría cuestionar que su libro no es apto para el público en general, puesto que para su profunda comprensión se requiere contar con bastantes conocimientos previos, pero claramente el público que Mazower busca ya sabe bastante de la historia más reciente, de sistemas políticos y nociones del sistema internacional (aunque cualquier persona dotada de suficiente paciencia y con el apoyo de otras fuentes de información es perfectamente capaz de leer su libro). También podría criticársele que es un texto denso, complejo y atiborrado de detalles, pero simplemente está reflejando la historia y la realidad internacional.
Mark Mazower persigue la verdad. No se dedica a plasmar sus opiniones ni a criticar, simplemente expone de manera detallada. Su libro no muestra blancos y negros, sino una escala de grises. No teme exponer las contradicciones de distintos países, las dos caras de la moneda: el EE. UU. que lucha por los derechos humanos y la descolonización, y el EE. UU. que fomenta golpes de Estado y coloca dictadores en el poder. Es un libro que profundiza tu comprensión del mundo y cultura general. No sólo los internacionalistas deberían de leer el texto de Mazower, sino cualquier persona deseosa de entender el mundo que habita y las instituciones que lo rigen. Es un libro merecedor de leerse (varias veces).
Bibliografía
Department of History. "Mazower, Mark." Consultado el 3 de
septiembre de 2021. http://www.mazower.com/m_bio.html.
Mark Mazower. “Biography.” Consultado el 3 de setiembre de 2021.
https://www.mazower.com/m_bio.html.
September 11, 2021
Un orden internacional Norte Americano
“Las instituciones de gobierno hoy en día han perdido de vista el principio de la política arraigada en valores colectivos de una res pública, incluso mientras continúan defendiendo la “civilización del capital”.”(Mazower, 2012). Es una de las tesis principales que sostiene Mark Mazower respecto a la gobernanza global en su libro Governing the World: The Rise and Fall of an Idea, 1815 to the present.
M. Mazower es un académico con doctorado en Historia Contemporánea y maestría en Relaciones Internacionales, además, es profesor en la universidad de Columbia, Nueva York y colabora activamente con medios como The Guardian, The New York Times y London Review of Books.
Governing the World explica y narra la evolución que la gobernanza global ha tenido durante los últimos tres siglos; desde la coordinación entre políticos y académicos intelectuales para crear organizaciones internacionales como la Liga de las Naciones y la ONU, hasta la influencia e intervención que han tenido ONG y corporaciones en el orden mundial. Mazower sostiene que a pesar de la incorporación de nuevos agentes al orden internacional, por ejemplo, el Consejo de Seguridad y en un principio la Asamblea General de la ONU; estos no son más que representantes y títeres de las grandes potencias que buscan perpetuar la hegemonía del poder. Tesis que ejemplifica muy bien en el capítulo 9 (The Second World, and the Third), en donde se analiza cómo Estados Unidos utilizó el secretariado de las Naciones Unidas, mayoritariamente conformado por consejeros americanos, para facilitar la aprobación de las propuestas hechas por EE.UU como la descolonización de ahora países africanos y posteriormente instalación de bases militares en ellas, designadas como “territorios de confianza estratégica”; y resaltar que la Unión Soviética no tenía interés real en la cooperación internacional, sólo en temas que entraban en su esfera de interés; probando que al país nortemaericano no le importaba nada más que asegurar el estancamiento del comunismo y esparcir su influencia sobre el Europa .
Mazower relata cronológicamente el dilema y la complejidad de la gobernanza mundial, esté siendo los intereses particulares de las naciones. En la primera mitad del libro habla de cómo surge el proyecto de la Liga de las Naciones y su muerte; en la segunda, el tema es el surgimiento de las Naciones Unidas y la gobernanza mundial al estilo Americano (Estados Unidos), quienes tras un fuerte envolvimiento en los asuntos europeos, durante y post segunda guerra mundial, se dan cuenta que si quieren mantener su hegemonía en América y expandirse a Europa y Ásia, deben de involucrarse más en materia internacional; es esta segunda parte de la cual se hablará en la reseña (del capítulo 7 al 14).
El autor comienza relatando cómo las Organización de las Naciones Unidas surgió como un instrumento para que Estados Unidos e Inglaterra tomaran el rol de policías del mundo; la idea de formar la ONU era poco popular entre la opinión pública Americana, sin embargo, Roosevelt logró convencer al pueblo norteamericano que a través de este nuevo organismo internacional se podrían combatir problemas como el hambre y la pobreza; además, con una emergente Unión Soviética ante el orden internacional, Estados Unidos no podía darse el lujo de permitir que se esparciera la idea bolchevique a través de lo que sería su nueva esfera de influencia (Europa). Y fue así como, tras un interés de mantener el “orden en el mundo” EE.UU se integró a las Naciones Unidas. Esta nueva organización, explica Mazower, fue fundada bajo los mismos principios y poderes como lo son el legislativo, el ejecutivo y el consejo de gobierno, que tenía la Liga de las Naciones, reviviendo la estructura e idea de cooperación internacional que la primera organización internacional proponía, sin embargo esta nueva organización abarcaría temas más especializados como la economía mundial y el derecho internacional.
Dentro de todos los temas que se hablan en esta segunda parte del libro, uno a resaltar es la política exterior de los Estados Unidos; Mazower habla del debate interno entre políticos y pensadores con la finalidad de decidir cómo debía ser la participación Americana dentro de la nueva organización internacional. George Kennan, un político, diplomática e historiador estadounidense, presenta su política de contención al gobierno americano, la cual insiste que la única manera de contener y controlar el esparcimiento del comunismo es interviniendo y expandiendo el área de influencia de EE.UU, esta es aceptada por el congreso y el presidente, designando como el encargado de las relaciones exteriores de EE.UU. Este personaje no es solo importante por lo previamente mencionado, sino que también por su contribución a la Teoría Realista, en materia de relaciones internacionales; dicha teoría fue y es con la que EE.UU ha orientado su participación en el orden internacional.
Más adelante en el libro, el autor plantea que Hans Morgenthau describe a la ONU como una “gran alianza” en oposición a otra gran alianza, siendo los soviéticos y sus aliados. Asimismo, se menciona que en consecuencia de la muerte de Stalin, se redirigió a la Unión Soviética a explorar nuevas oportunidades y extender su área de influencia, lo que se materializó en la búsqueda de la descolonización de Asia y África. De la misma manera, Estados Unidos se opuso al movimiento de descolonización, pues esto no significaba más que debilitar a sus aliados europeos así como la posibilidad de poner bases militares. Sin embargo, en un giro de tuerca, Estados Unidos depositó la confianza de descolonizar en la ONU. Ésto hizo que la autodeterminación de los pueblos se convirtiera en un tema central de las relaciones internacionales, dando más y más importancia a la ONU en cuanto a gobernanza global.
Estos sucesos abrieron las puertas a otro tema importante: los derechos humanos, ONG, y el cuidado del medio ambiente. Se comenzaron a crear organizaciones dentro de la ONU que incrementaron su papel así como el Banco Internacional para Construcción y Desarrollo (Banco Mundial) y el Fondo Monetario Internacional. A pesar de la creación de estos cuerpos, sus fuertes relaciones y dependencia al gobierno americano forzaron a que se perpetuara únicamente un modelo capitalista.
Las Naciones Unidas se convirtieron en el instrumento de una nueva misión civilizadora, que recaía mucho en el lenguaje del derecho internacional el cual apelaba a los valores universales morales y los legitimizaba. Las tragedias de Yugoslavia y Rwanda demostraron las limitaciones del poder de la ONU en la ausencia de Estados Unidos. Otra ejemplificación es la impunidad que presentó Estados Unidos ante la Corte Penal Internacional , garantizando una libre intervención.
Mazower concluye que la gobernanza global no sólo tiene como agentes a naciones sino que cada vez está más atomizada y el poder recae más en sus intereses privados y no en el sentido de cooperación.
El libro está muy bien fundamentado y ejemplificado, acierta al explicar la importancia del gigante Norte Americano en el orden internacional, sin embargo, creo que falla al no tomar en cuenta que nuevas potencias como India y China están emergiendo, lo que repercutirá en una reconfiguración del orden internacional
El libro brinda una gran aportación al entendimiento y estudio del cómo la gobernanza global y las relaciones internacionales han ido cambiando desde 1815 hasta la fecha, sobretodo, hace un muy buen trabajo al exponer y contrastar al viejo sistema internacional de tratados entre naciones con el nuevo sistema que busca la imparcialidad pero la falta de recursos y la aparente inevitable intervención de los intereses privados terminan por evitar la llegada al punto medio.
“Las instituciones de gobierno hoy en día han perdido de vista el principio de la política arraigada en valores colectivos de una res pública, incluso mientras continúan defendiendo la “civilización del capital”.”(Mazower, 2012). Es una de las tesis principales que sostiene Mark Mazower respecto a la gobernanza global en su libro Governing the World: The Rise and Fall of an Idea, 1815 to the present.
M. Mazower es un académico con doctorado en Historia Contemporánea y maestría en Relaciones Internacionales, además, es profesor en la universidad de Columbia, Nueva York y colabora activamente con medios como The Guardian, The New York Times y London Review of Books.
Governing the World explica y narra la evolución que la gobernanza global ha tenido durante los últimos tres siglos; desde la coordinación entre políticos y académicos intelectuales para crear organizaciones internacionales como la Liga de las Naciones y la ONU, hasta la influencia e intervención que han tenido ONG y corporaciones en el orden mundial. Mazower sostiene que a pesar de la incorporación de nuevos agentes al orden internacional, por ejemplo, el Consejo de Seguridad y en un principio la Asamblea General de la ONU; estos no son más que representantes y títeres de las grandes potencias que buscan perpetuar la hegemonía del poder. Tesis que ejemplifica muy bien en el capítulo 9 (The Second World, and the Third), en donde se analiza cómo Estados Unidos utilizó el secretariado de las Naciones Unidas, mayoritariamente conformado por consejeros americanos, para facilitar la aprobación de las propuestas hechas por EE.UU como la descolonización de ahora países africanos y posteriormente instalación de bases militares en ellas, designadas como “territorios de confianza estratégica”; y resaltar que la Unión Soviética no tenía interés real en la cooperación internacional, sólo en temas que entraban en su esfera de interés; probando que al país nortemaericano no le importaba nada más que asegurar el estancamiento del comunismo y esparcir su influencia sobre el Europa .
Mazower relata cronológicamente el dilema y la complejidad de la gobernanza mundial, esté siendo los intereses particulares de las naciones. En la primera mitad del libro habla de cómo surge el proyecto de la Liga de las Naciones y su muerte; en la segunda, el tema es el surgimiento de las Naciones Unidas y la gobernanza mundial al estilo Americano (Estados Unidos), quienes tras un fuerte envolvimiento en los asuntos europeos, durante y post segunda guerra mundial, se dan cuenta que si quieren mantener su hegemonía en América y expandirse a Europa y Ásia, deben de involucrarse más en materia internacional; es esta segunda parte de la cual se hablará en la reseña (del capítulo 7 al 14).
El autor comienza relatando cómo las Organización de las Naciones Unidas surgió como un instrumento para que Estados Unidos e Inglaterra tomaran el rol de policías del mundo; la idea de formar la ONU era poco popular entre la opinión pública Americana, sin embargo, Roosevelt logró convencer al pueblo norteamericano que a través de este nuevo organismo internacional se podrían combatir problemas como el hambre y la pobreza; además, con una emergente Unión Soviética ante el orden internacional, Estados Unidos no podía darse el lujo de permitir que se esparciera la idea bolchevique a través de lo que sería su nueva esfera de influencia (Europa). Y fue así como, tras un interés de mantener el “orden en el mundo” EE.UU se integró a las Naciones Unidas. Esta nueva organización, explica Mazower, fue fundada bajo los mismos principios y poderes como lo son el legislativo, el ejecutivo y el consejo de gobierno, que tenía la Liga de las Naciones, reviviendo la estructura e idea de cooperación internacional que la primera organización internacional proponía, sin embargo esta nueva organización abarcaría temas más especializados como la economía mundial y el derecho internacional.
Dentro de todos los temas que se hablan en esta segunda parte del libro, uno a resaltar es la política exterior de los Estados Unidos; Mazower habla del debate interno entre políticos y pensadores con la finalidad de decidir cómo debía ser la participación Americana dentro de la nueva organización internacional. George Kennan, un político, diplomática e historiador estadounidense, presenta su política de contención al gobierno americano, la cual insiste que la única manera de contener y controlar el esparcimiento del comunismo es interviniendo y expandiendo el área de influencia de EE.UU, esta es aceptada por el congreso y el presidente, designando como el encargado de las relaciones exteriores de EE.UU. Este personaje no es solo importante por lo previamente mencionado, sino que también por su contribución a la Teoría Realista, en materia de relaciones internacionales; dicha teoría fue y es con la que EE.UU ha orientado su participación en el orden internacional.
Más adelante en el libro, el autor plantea que Hans Morgenthau describe a la ONU como una “gran alianza” en oposición a otra gran alianza, siendo los soviéticos y sus aliados. Asimismo, se menciona que en consecuencia de la muerte de Stalin, se redirigió a la Unión Soviética a explorar nuevas oportunidades y extender su área de influencia, lo que se materializó en la búsqueda de la descolonización de Asia y África. De la misma manera, Estados Unidos se opuso al movimiento de descolonización, pues esto no significaba más que debilitar a sus aliados europeos así como la posibilidad de poner bases militares. Sin embargo, en un giro de tuerca, Estados Unidos depositó la confianza de descolonizar en la ONU. Ésto hizo que la autodeterminación de los pueblos se convirtiera en un tema central de las relaciones internacionales, dando más y más importancia a la ONU en cuanto a gobernanza global.
Estos sucesos abrieron las puertas a otro tema importante: los derechos humanos, ONG, y el cuidado del medio ambiente. Se comenzaron a crear organizaciones dentro de la ONU que incrementaron su papel así como el Banco Internacional para Construcción y Desarrollo (Banco Mundial) y el Fondo Monetario Internacional. A pesar de la creación de estos cuerpos, sus fuertes relaciones y dependencia al gobierno americano forzaron a que se perpetuara únicamente un modelo capitalista.
Las Naciones Unidas se convirtieron en el instrumento de una nueva misión civilizadora, que recaía mucho en el lenguaje del derecho internacional el cual apelaba a los valores universales morales y los legitimizaba. Las tragedias de Yugoslavia y Rwanda demostraron las limitaciones del poder de la ONU en la ausencia de Estados Unidos. Otra ejemplificación es la impunidad que presentó Estados Unidos ante la Corte Penal Internacional , garantizando una libre intervención.
Mazower concluye que la gobernanza global no sólo tiene como agentes a naciones sino que cada vez está más atomizada y el poder recae más en sus intereses privados y no en el sentido de cooperación.
El libro está muy bien fundamentado y ejemplificado, acierta al explicar la importancia del gigante Norte Americano en el orden internacional, sin embargo, creo que falla al no tomar en cuenta que nuevas potencias como India y China están emergiendo, lo que repercutirá en una reconfiguración del orden internacional
El libro brinda una gran aportación al entendimiento y estudio del cómo la gobernanza global y las relaciones internacionales han ido cambiando desde 1815 hasta la fecha, sobretodo, hace un muy buen trabajo al exponer y contrastar al viejo sistema internacional de tratados entre naciones con el nuevo sistema que busca la imparcialidad pero la falta de recursos y la aparente inevitable intervención de los intereses privados terminan por evitar la llegada al punto medio.
May 21, 2014
El libro empieza algo flojo, con reflexiones filosóficas demasiado alejadas en el tiempo como para considerarlas parte del tema principal del libro. Sobran los antecedentes.
No obstante, a partir del diseño y creación de la Sociedad de Naciones, el libro entra en el tema y se vuelve muy interesante. Trata de manera muy adecuada las cuestiones a las que se ha enfrentado el sistema de gobernanza internacional en las últimas décadas. Hace un análisis crítico de todas estas cuestiones y tiene un posicionamiento crítico con todos los actores, sin partidismos evidentes. Una obra de referencia muy completa.
No obstante, a partir del diseño y creación de la Sociedad de Naciones, el libro entra en el tema y se vuelve muy interesante. Trata de manera muy adecuada las cuestiones a las que se ha enfrentado el sistema de gobernanza internacional en las últimas décadas. Hace un análisis crítico de todas estas cuestiones y tiene un posicionamiento crítico con todos los actores, sin partidismos evidentes. Una obra de referencia muy completa.
August 18, 2019
Casually brilliant and oddly fond history of the UN et al.
Practical cosmopolitanism - the promotion of any supranational structure at all - was for a long long time a view held only by strange people indeed - visionaries and ranters and scifi writers - until it was suddenly in the works, laboured over by full secretariats with big bucks.
Mazower puzzles over why the US and Britain put so much into these structures, when the previous world order suited them fine. Answer? "Camouflage."
Practical cosmopolitanism - the promotion of any supranational structure at all - was for a long long time a view held only by strange people indeed - visionaries and ranters and scifi writers - until it was suddenly in the works, laboured over by full secretariats with big bucks.
Mazower puzzles over why the US and Britain put so much into these structures, when the previous world order suited them fine. Answer? "Camouflage."
July 20, 2022
Mark Mazower daha önce "Hitler İmparatorluğu" ve "Karanlık Kıta" gibi kitaplardan tanıdığım tarihçi. Kendisi özellikle Balkanlar konusunda yazmış olduğu kitabı ile popüler olmuş. Ama tüm kitapları okumaya değerdir.
Kitaba gelince, kitap tarih boyu, daha net olarak modern tarih boyu dünyanın yönetimi konusundakı fikirleri irdeliyor. Evrensel yönetimin nasıl olduğu konusunda fikirlerin tarih boyu nasıl değişim geçirmiş olduğunu bu kitap sayesinde öğrenmiş oldum. Ama yazarın objektif yaklaştığını da söylemem gerek. Tam olarak açıksözlü olmasa da ABD-nin dünya yönetimi fikrine yaklaşımını çok iyi açıklamış. Zira ABD-nin BM gibi kurumlardan kendi ulusal çıkarları için yararlanmayı öncelik haline getirmesini söylemesi pek öyle yabana atılacak bir şey değildir. Batıda Putin önyargı ve karşıtlığının izleri bu kitabda bile gözüküyor ama öyle saçma teorilerle falan değil. Yazar birkaç yerde sanki Putin dünyanın en büyük kötülüğü imiş gibi ima eder biçimde Putin adı zikretmişse de meseleyi çok kurcalamamış. Ayrıca Batını da kötülememiş. Sonlara yakın Batının tarihden ders çıkarmadığını söylemiş ama bunu da Batı ile dünyanın geri kalanları arasındaki bakış açısı farkı sebebile söylemiş, Batının pek öyle büyük yanlışı olduğunu ima edercesine de değil.
Yukarıda yazmış olduğum fikirlere rağmen kitabın bana birçok şey kattı kanısındayım. Uluslararası ilişkilere ilgi duyanların okumasını tavsiye ederim.
Kitaba gelince, kitap tarih boyu, daha net olarak modern tarih boyu dünyanın yönetimi konusundakı fikirleri irdeliyor. Evrensel yönetimin nasıl olduğu konusunda fikirlerin tarih boyu nasıl değişim geçirmiş olduğunu bu kitap sayesinde öğrenmiş oldum. Ama yazarın objektif yaklaştığını da söylemem gerek. Tam olarak açıksözlü olmasa da ABD-nin dünya yönetimi fikrine yaklaşımını çok iyi açıklamış. Zira ABD-nin BM gibi kurumlardan kendi ulusal çıkarları için yararlanmayı öncelik haline getirmesini söylemesi pek öyle yabana atılacak bir şey değildir. Batıda Putin önyargı ve karşıtlığının izleri bu kitabda bile gözüküyor ama öyle saçma teorilerle falan değil. Yazar birkaç yerde sanki Putin dünyanın en büyük kötülüğü imiş gibi ima eder biçimde Putin adı zikretmişse de meseleyi çok kurcalamamış. Ayrıca Batını da kötülememiş. Sonlara yakın Batının tarihden ders çıkarmadığını söylemiş ama bunu da Batı ile dünyanın geri kalanları arasındaki bakış açısı farkı sebebile söylemiş, Batının pek öyle büyük yanlışı olduğunu ima edercesine de değil.
Yukarıda yazmış olduğum fikirlere rağmen kitabın bana birçok şey kattı kanısındayım. Uluslararası ilişkilere ilgi duyanların okumasını tavsiye ederim.
July 2, 2019
Mazower indulges in some tiresome liberal bashing -- he does not care for finance or economic liberalism -- but he has written a broad and engaging history of internationalism and international organizations.
Read
October 5, 2023goodreadsi article tracker olarak kullanmak ne kadar etik bilmiyorum ama okuyoruz işte bunları da dursunlar bir yerde. mazower’ın dili bazen güzel bazen ne anlatıyorsun be güzel abim hissi yaşatıyor. yarın quizde üzmez beni umarım 🫡
Read
April 22, 2024i'm just gonna mark it as done today because the exam is friday and idc anymore
May 1, 2024
It was fine. Mazower's book was much more coherent and clear in terms of finding arguments; however, there was sometimes too much happening in each chapter, which made it difficult to stay focused. Overall, a great book about the development of global governance and international relations through an interesting historical perspective!
September 4, 2021
Governing the World: Una mirada sombría hacia las nuevas relaciones internacionales
Governing the World: The Rise and Fall of an Idea, 1815 to the Present es una obra del profesor Mark Mazower que expone la complejidad de un concepto como lo es el de la gobernanza global. Mark Mazower es Doctor en historia contemporánea, y actualmente se desempeña como profesor de historia en la Universidad de Columbia y director del Heyman Center for the Humanities. Pese a las lecciones históricas de instituciones como la Liga de las Naciones, Mazower demuestra constantemente que la gobernanza global se encuentra aún subordinada a las decisiones de los representantes políticos de los Estados hegemónicos.
Como el mismo título del Capítulo 7 enfatiza, (“Las Ligas de las Naciones han Muerto, vivan las Ligas de las Naciones!”) los intentos por crear nuevas formas de integración internacional no pueden ignorar las barreras impuestas por el orden económico y político de las grandes potencias, particularmente de los Estados Unidos. A pesar del florecimiento de foros internacionales como el Banco Mundial o el Foro Monetario Internacional, el autor reconoce de manera sombría que dichos organismos han sido creados con el fin de contrarrestar la influencia de las Naciones Unidas, conclusión que es particularmente relevante hoy en día ante el incremento de las “problemáticas globales”.
La obra de Mazower está estructurada en dos partes, siendo el principal enfoque de esta reseña la segunda parte titulada “Governing the World the American Way”. Dicho segmento, que comprende los capítulos 7-14, parte del fracaso del proyecto de las Ligas de las Naciones y trata sobre todo acerca de la creación de las Naciones Unidas como una continuación del proyecto Wilsoniano. Para fundamentar esta premisa, el autor resalta la estructura tripartita que caracterizó a la nueva organización de las Naciones Unidas. Dicha estructura institucional no solo se asemejó al cuerpo de la Liga de las Naciones, sino que además reflejó los tres poderes primordiales de todo Estado-nación. Además, Mazower critica la creación del Consejo de Seguridad, calificándolo inclusive de ser uno de los medios principales mediante los cuales las grandes potencias lograron mantener su influencia intacta dentro del nuevo organismo.
No obstante, una diferencia importante que resalta el autor, y referencia importante para sus argumentos posteriores, es que los años de 1940-45 se caracterizaron por la participación de formuladores de políticas apegados más a nuevos temas académicos como el derecho internacional, políticas económicas y sistemas jurídicos globales. La propagación de esta nueva clase de académicos y políticos fue particularmente relevante para el surgimiento de instituciones internacionales como la Corte Internacional de Justicia o el Banco Mundial, cuyas actividades están estrechamente entrelazadas con el surgimiento del Tercer Mundo en el escenario mundial.
Una fortaleza del libro de Mazower es que en los capítulos 9 y 10 (probablemente los más relevantes y críticos de la obra) el autor explica la creación de la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas bajo el contexto del poscolonialismo y el surgimiento del Tercer Mundo como actor internacional. El historiador reconoce las fuerzas del movimiento anticolonialista que tomó fuerza en la década de 1950, y que formalmente se materializó con la Conferencia de Bandung. Además, resalta la participación del Movimiento de los Países No Alineados en las resoluciones de la Asamblea General, instrumento por el que fueron capaces de contrarrestar el dominio del Consejo de Seguridad. A pesar de que el libro señala que finalmente las políticas de las grandes potencias triunfaron sobre los principios postulados por el Tercer Mundo, es importante reconocer la influencia de este movimiento en el reordenamiento del sistema internacional.
Posteriormente, el autor describe la construcción del nuevo orden económico internacional que, contrario a las demandas del Tercer Mundo por un régimen en donde se condenara cualquier sistema semejante a los gobiernos coloniales, introdujo instituciones altamente autoritarias como el Fondo Monetario Internacional. Además, a pesar de que este proyecto neoliberal se basó en remediar las crisis económicas resultantes de la desregularización financiera de los años 70’s, Mazower señala que, paradójicamente, el sistema internacional enfrentó una nueva serie de recesiones ligadas a la deuda externa del Tercer Mundo y las políticas de ajuste impulsadas principalmente por Estados Unidos. De hecho, el autor concluye este capítulo con una predicción sombría para el orden del Consenso de Washington, señalando la inestabilidad de su régimen económico, así como el surgimiento de nuevas potencias rivales como China, India y Brasil. Como Mazower señala, el peso económico que estas potencias han alcanzado en los últimos años ha sido suficiente para cambiar el reparto de poder en el sistema internacional.
Finalmente, en los capítulos 13 y 14, se abordan los temas del derecho humanitario internacional y el proyecto de la Unión Europea respectivamente. Con relación al derecho internacional, el autor destaca el establecimiento de instituciones como la Corte Penal Internacional inclusive bajo el contexto del dominio estadounidense en las relaciones internacionales. No obstante, plantea que las aplicaciones más recientes del derecho internacional han dejado mucho que desear. Volviendo a la premisa principal del libro, el autor sostiene que el derecho internacional también se ha subordinado a los intereses de las grandes potencias, como lo demuestra la inmunidad de los Estados Unidos ante la CPI. Por ello, no es de sorprender que Mazower estudie con escepticismo la Unión Europea. De hecho, el autor menciona que, pese a que el proyecto de la experiencia europea representa un punto de inflexión para la gobernanza global por la creación del Tribunal de Justicia de la Unión Europea, el internacionalismo europeo nuevamente se ha subordinado a los mercados financieros y de capitales. Ante la decadencia de estos proyectos, uno no puede evitar notar el sombrío e incierto análisis de Mazower con respecto al futuro de las relaciones internacionales, especialmente ante la posibilidad de que un concepto como el de la gobernanza global pase a convertirse meramente en una “esperanza del pasado”.
Una limitante a subrayar de la obra de Mark Mazower es su crítica hacia las ideas relacionadas a la justicia internacional y las posteriores instituciones que surgieron a partir de estas corrientes del pensamiento. De acuerdo a Mazower, estas medidas solamente actuaron como “instrumentos de una nueva misión civilizadora” (Mazower, 2012, pp.687), particularmente de Occidente. Para defender esta postura, el autor recuerda al lector los casos en donde se llevaron a cabo intervenciones humanitarias de manera “arbitraria”, como el caso de la Guerra de Libia, por ejemplo, que inclusive conllevó a la remoción del régimen de Muamar el Gadafi por parte de Estados Unidos, a pesar de que la doctrina de la R2P no contemplaba tales medidas. Mazower concluye que esta clase de intervenciones humanitarias se llevaron a cabo bajo fines políticos y pragmáticos, particularmente con el objetivo de revitalizar el estatus de las Naciones Unidas. Asimismo, el autor plantea el supuesto de que, en caso de continuar favoreciendo el uso de la fuerza en contra de la soberanía de los Estados, el sistema internacional puede verse afectado, paradójicamente, por más conflictos y desastres humanitarios.
Como menciona el Dr. Jonathan Monten en su crítica hacia la postura de Mazower, los casos de estudio mencionados en su obra no resultan suficientes para sostener esta última hipótesis. Asimismo, su minimización de un concepto como el de la intervención humanitaria tiende a desconocer el cambio paradigmático que dichas ideas tuvieron dentro del sistema internacional. Finalmente, es importante subrayar que, debido a que el autor no sólo argumenta en favor de la soberanía de los Estados, sino que además no propone en el libro alternativa alguna a la intervención humanitaria, parece sugerir que en realidad se opone a cualquier uso de la fuerza para poner fin a las violaciones de derechos humanos. Si bien el historiador acierta al criticar la doble moral de las intervenciones humanitarias, finalmente fracasa en sus intentos por contraargumentar la idea básica de que siempre es mejor intervenir en vez de no intervenir en absoluto.
Palabras: 1,296
Mazower, Mark. Governing the World: The History of an Idea. Londres: The Penguin Press, 2012.
Monten, Jonathan. “Review Essay 18 on Governing the World: The History of an Idea”. The International Security Studies Forum, (2013) https://issforum.org/essays/18-govern... (Consultado el 30 de agosto de 2021)
Governing the World: The Rise and Fall of an Idea, 1815 to the Present es una obra del profesor Mark Mazower que expone la complejidad de un concepto como lo es el de la gobernanza global. Mark Mazower es Doctor en historia contemporánea, y actualmente se desempeña como profesor de historia en la Universidad de Columbia y director del Heyman Center for the Humanities. Pese a las lecciones históricas de instituciones como la Liga de las Naciones, Mazower demuestra constantemente que la gobernanza global se encuentra aún subordinada a las decisiones de los representantes políticos de los Estados hegemónicos.
Como el mismo título del Capítulo 7 enfatiza, (“Las Ligas de las Naciones han Muerto, vivan las Ligas de las Naciones!”) los intentos por crear nuevas formas de integración internacional no pueden ignorar las barreras impuestas por el orden económico y político de las grandes potencias, particularmente de los Estados Unidos. A pesar del florecimiento de foros internacionales como el Banco Mundial o el Foro Monetario Internacional, el autor reconoce de manera sombría que dichos organismos han sido creados con el fin de contrarrestar la influencia de las Naciones Unidas, conclusión que es particularmente relevante hoy en día ante el incremento de las “problemáticas globales”.
La obra de Mazower está estructurada en dos partes, siendo el principal enfoque de esta reseña la segunda parte titulada “Governing the World the American Way”. Dicho segmento, que comprende los capítulos 7-14, parte del fracaso del proyecto de las Ligas de las Naciones y trata sobre todo acerca de la creación de las Naciones Unidas como una continuación del proyecto Wilsoniano. Para fundamentar esta premisa, el autor resalta la estructura tripartita que caracterizó a la nueva organización de las Naciones Unidas. Dicha estructura institucional no solo se asemejó al cuerpo de la Liga de las Naciones, sino que además reflejó los tres poderes primordiales de todo Estado-nación. Además, Mazower critica la creación del Consejo de Seguridad, calificándolo inclusive de ser uno de los medios principales mediante los cuales las grandes potencias lograron mantener su influencia intacta dentro del nuevo organismo.
No obstante, una diferencia importante que resalta el autor, y referencia importante para sus argumentos posteriores, es que los años de 1940-45 se caracterizaron por la participación de formuladores de políticas apegados más a nuevos temas académicos como el derecho internacional, políticas económicas y sistemas jurídicos globales. La propagación de esta nueva clase de académicos y políticos fue particularmente relevante para el surgimiento de instituciones internacionales como la Corte Internacional de Justicia o el Banco Mundial, cuyas actividades están estrechamente entrelazadas con el surgimiento del Tercer Mundo en el escenario mundial.
Una fortaleza del libro de Mazower es que en los capítulos 9 y 10 (probablemente los más relevantes y críticos de la obra) el autor explica la creación de la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas bajo el contexto del poscolonialismo y el surgimiento del Tercer Mundo como actor internacional. El historiador reconoce las fuerzas del movimiento anticolonialista que tomó fuerza en la década de 1950, y que formalmente se materializó con la Conferencia de Bandung. Además, resalta la participación del Movimiento de los Países No Alineados en las resoluciones de la Asamblea General, instrumento por el que fueron capaces de contrarrestar el dominio del Consejo de Seguridad. A pesar de que el libro señala que finalmente las políticas de las grandes potencias triunfaron sobre los principios postulados por el Tercer Mundo, es importante reconocer la influencia de este movimiento en el reordenamiento del sistema internacional.
Posteriormente, el autor describe la construcción del nuevo orden económico internacional que, contrario a las demandas del Tercer Mundo por un régimen en donde se condenara cualquier sistema semejante a los gobiernos coloniales, introdujo instituciones altamente autoritarias como el Fondo Monetario Internacional. Además, a pesar de que este proyecto neoliberal se basó en remediar las crisis económicas resultantes de la desregularización financiera de los años 70’s, Mazower señala que, paradójicamente, el sistema internacional enfrentó una nueva serie de recesiones ligadas a la deuda externa del Tercer Mundo y las políticas de ajuste impulsadas principalmente por Estados Unidos. De hecho, el autor concluye este capítulo con una predicción sombría para el orden del Consenso de Washington, señalando la inestabilidad de su régimen económico, así como el surgimiento de nuevas potencias rivales como China, India y Brasil. Como Mazower señala, el peso económico que estas potencias han alcanzado en los últimos años ha sido suficiente para cambiar el reparto de poder en el sistema internacional.
Finalmente, en los capítulos 13 y 14, se abordan los temas del derecho humanitario internacional y el proyecto de la Unión Europea respectivamente. Con relación al derecho internacional, el autor destaca el establecimiento de instituciones como la Corte Penal Internacional inclusive bajo el contexto del dominio estadounidense en las relaciones internacionales. No obstante, plantea que las aplicaciones más recientes del derecho internacional han dejado mucho que desear. Volviendo a la premisa principal del libro, el autor sostiene que el derecho internacional también se ha subordinado a los intereses de las grandes potencias, como lo demuestra la inmunidad de los Estados Unidos ante la CPI. Por ello, no es de sorprender que Mazower estudie con escepticismo la Unión Europea. De hecho, el autor menciona que, pese a que el proyecto de la experiencia europea representa un punto de inflexión para la gobernanza global por la creación del Tribunal de Justicia de la Unión Europea, el internacionalismo europeo nuevamente se ha subordinado a los mercados financieros y de capitales. Ante la decadencia de estos proyectos, uno no puede evitar notar el sombrío e incierto análisis de Mazower con respecto al futuro de las relaciones internacionales, especialmente ante la posibilidad de que un concepto como el de la gobernanza global pase a convertirse meramente en una “esperanza del pasado”.
Una limitante a subrayar de la obra de Mark Mazower es su crítica hacia las ideas relacionadas a la justicia internacional y las posteriores instituciones que surgieron a partir de estas corrientes del pensamiento. De acuerdo a Mazower, estas medidas solamente actuaron como “instrumentos de una nueva misión civilizadora” (Mazower, 2012, pp.687), particularmente de Occidente. Para defender esta postura, el autor recuerda al lector los casos en donde se llevaron a cabo intervenciones humanitarias de manera “arbitraria”, como el caso de la Guerra de Libia, por ejemplo, que inclusive conllevó a la remoción del régimen de Muamar el Gadafi por parte de Estados Unidos, a pesar de que la doctrina de la R2P no contemplaba tales medidas. Mazower concluye que esta clase de intervenciones humanitarias se llevaron a cabo bajo fines políticos y pragmáticos, particularmente con el objetivo de revitalizar el estatus de las Naciones Unidas. Asimismo, el autor plantea el supuesto de que, en caso de continuar favoreciendo el uso de la fuerza en contra de la soberanía de los Estados, el sistema internacional puede verse afectado, paradójicamente, por más conflictos y desastres humanitarios.
Como menciona el Dr. Jonathan Monten en su crítica hacia la postura de Mazower, los casos de estudio mencionados en su obra no resultan suficientes para sostener esta última hipótesis. Asimismo, su minimización de un concepto como el de la intervención humanitaria tiende a desconocer el cambio paradigmático que dichas ideas tuvieron dentro del sistema internacional. Finalmente, es importante subrayar que, debido a que el autor no sólo argumenta en favor de la soberanía de los Estados, sino que además no propone en el libro alternativa alguna a la intervención humanitaria, parece sugerir que en realidad se opone a cualquier uso de la fuerza para poner fin a las violaciones de derechos humanos. Si bien el historiador acierta al criticar la doble moral de las intervenciones humanitarias, finalmente fracasa en sus intentos por contraargumentar la idea básica de que siempre es mejor intervenir en vez de no intervenir en absoluto.
Palabras: 1,296
Mazower, Mark. Governing the World: The History of an Idea. Londres: The Penguin Press, 2012.
Monten, Jonathan. “Review Essay 18 on Governing the World: The History of an Idea”. The International Security Studies Forum, (2013) https://issforum.org/essays/18-govern... (Consultado el 30 de agosto de 2021)
July 23, 2013
A magisterial intellectual history of how people since the 19 century have imagined possible restraints on the power of great states, on the one hand, and the failures weak ones, on the other. This book is incredibly ambitious in the range of ideas that it attempts to synthesize, yielding a somewhat dizzying quality: It's not always clear what criteria Mazower used in deciding which characters, episodes, and institutions to write about in this book. While the book is built on a carefully theorized concept of international institutional development (with particular attention to the often underestimated role of lawyers in building transnational connections and institutions), much of this theorization is unstated or at least understated. What Mazower counts as a contribution to thinking about "governing" is defined in a very broad way (ranging from actual plans for world government to international development agencies to nongovernmental standards bodies and everything in between), but the same time he fails to focus on certain categories or individuals or episodes that a different writer might have considered important to include.
Of particular interest is his periodization of postwar international governance efforts. He describes so little influence to Daniel Patrick Moynahan's 1975 essay "America in Opposition." You very much captures the mood of that. When it seemed as if challengers to the bipolar Cold War order actually had a chance to realize their demands for global wealth and power redistribution. As US efforts in Vietnam came to grief, the Bretton Woods financial order came to pieces, and the US economy stagflated, Washington felt very much on the defensive, not so much from Soviets, as from challengers in the Third World, embodied in UNCTAD, Raul Prebisch, the G77 and the so-called New International Economic Order. While Mazower clearly has sympathies for the drams embodied by this movement, he also is clear about the internal divisions they faced in attempting to challenge US hegemony.
Finally his account of the way in which fortunes of United Nations have relaxed and waned in the eyes of the US bears reading all on its own. United Nations was of course founded in San Francisco and its headquarters put in New York at the end of World War II — Indicating how invested the Roosevelt administration was in the idea of international governance, led by the United States. With the rise of the G-77 in the 1960s however and the efforts of the United Nations to lead international development efforts, United States became increasingly skeptical of United Nations, culminating in the Reagan administration's active excoriation of the body. In the 1990s however undercover United Nations really gained relevance as a purveyor of "protection" in the case of so-called failed states. This is our points out however this beginning of relevance to place only because United Nations Kofi Annan were once again willing to serve the perceived interests of Washington. In short, United States has only ever been in favor of United Nations when the aims of that body coincided with strategic interests of United States, thus providing internationalist cover for the pursuit of self-interest. United States has never for one second been willing to subordinate its own national interests (much less its sovereignty) to any kind of international governing body that it did not thoroughly dominate. (This is arguably true even for the WTO.)
Of particular interest is his periodization of postwar international governance efforts. He describes so little influence to Daniel Patrick Moynahan's 1975 essay "America in Opposition." You very much captures the mood of that. When it seemed as if challengers to the bipolar Cold War order actually had a chance to realize their demands for global wealth and power redistribution. As US efforts in Vietnam came to grief, the Bretton Woods financial order came to pieces, and the US economy stagflated, Washington felt very much on the defensive, not so much from Soviets, as from challengers in the Third World, embodied in UNCTAD, Raul Prebisch, the G77 and the so-called New International Economic Order. While Mazower clearly has sympathies for the drams embodied by this movement, he also is clear about the internal divisions they faced in attempting to challenge US hegemony.
Finally his account of the way in which fortunes of United Nations have relaxed and waned in the eyes of the US bears reading all on its own. United Nations was of course founded in San Francisco and its headquarters put in New York at the end of World War II — Indicating how invested the Roosevelt administration was in the idea of international governance, led by the United States. With the rise of the G-77 in the 1960s however and the efforts of the United Nations to lead international development efforts, United States became increasingly skeptical of United Nations, culminating in the Reagan administration's active excoriation of the body. In the 1990s however undercover United Nations really gained relevance as a purveyor of "protection" in the case of so-called failed states. This is our points out however this beginning of relevance to place only because United Nations Kofi Annan were once again willing to serve the perceived interests of Washington. In short, United States has only ever been in favor of United Nations when the aims of that body coincided with strategic interests of United States, thus providing internationalist cover for the pursuit of self-interest. United States has never for one second been willing to subordinate its own national interests (much less its sovereignty) to any kind of international governing body that it did not thoroughly dominate. (This is arguably true even for the WTO.)
December 11, 2014
Mazower traces the idea and practice of international governance and cooperation from the Concert of Europe established after the fall of Napoleon to the modern experiments of the United Nations and the European Union. Within this broader narrative Mazower traces multiple strands of internationalist thought that were brought into the intellectual discourses from diverse sources, including the Christian missionaries who experienced a cultural renaissance in the conservative first half of the nineteenth century, as well as the legalists who laid the groundwork for modern conceptions of international law.
When approaching the attempts to put true international governance into practice in the twentieth century, Mazower is careful to point out that major powers attempted to cloak their own particular ambitions in the mantle of internationalism and universalism. The League of Nations became in many respects an attempt to prop up the waning British Empire, especially with the failure of the United States to join the organization. The United Nations was likewise used by the United States to give an air of legitimacy to its attempts to construct a new global states system to isolate the Soviet Union.
The concept of global governance remains a powerful one, but the problems inherent in attempting to institutionalize international cooperation remain as visible as ever as the United Nations is seen by many as a mockery of the ideals outlined in its charter of human rights, and the European Union struggles as productive nations like Germany want to keep the Eurozone solvent for their own economic benefit, but are compelled to lean on financially inept nations to reform themselves so that their financial aid is not wasted.
When approaching the attempts to put true international governance into practice in the twentieth century, Mazower is careful to point out that major powers attempted to cloak their own particular ambitions in the mantle of internationalism and universalism. The League of Nations became in many respects an attempt to prop up the waning British Empire, especially with the failure of the United States to join the organization. The United Nations was likewise used by the United States to give an air of legitimacy to its attempts to construct a new global states system to isolate the Soviet Union.
The concept of global governance remains a powerful one, but the problems inherent in attempting to institutionalize international cooperation remain as visible as ever as the United Nations is seen by many as a mockery of the ideals outlined in its charter of human rights, and the European Union struggles as productive nations like Germany want to keep the Eurozone solvent for their own economic benefit, but are compelled to lean on financially inept nations to reform themselves so that their financial aid is not wasted.
January 5, 2019
3 1/2 stars. It's a fascinating book, and I learned a lot from it, but it is a disjointed narrative - more a collection of historical episodes than a "history of an idea" as it claims to be. While reading it I was always wondering exactly what it was that Mazower wanted me to make of what he was chronicling.
June 9, 2015
After =Dark Continent= and =Salonica, City of Ghosts=, this book has pretty high standards to live up to. Let's see.
Yes, it lived up to expectations, and Mazower's earlier achievements.
Yes, it lived up to expectations, and Mazower's earlier achievements.
October 15, 2013
Excellently written, wide in scope and accessible. Top stuff!
March 4, 2015
Brilliant book
December 11, 2022
I used this book as preparation for teaching a course on Global Governance and I found it a useful overview of some of ways the idea of global government and governance have been conceptualised. The first half of the book feels much clearer in focus - presumably because governance (or at least Mazower's version of it) was, up until WW2, a concept theorised and used by a relatively tiny group of Western cultural and governmental elites. We are thus given relatively thoroughgoing accounts of the Concert of Europe, the rise of global law and humanitarianism, the competitive internationalisms of Marx and Mazzini (possibly my favourite chapter) and the emergence and mixed success of the League of Nations.
Unfortunately, thing start to spiral out of control during and after WW2. The establishment of hundreds of international organisations, alongside the growing importance of NGOs and business in global roles traditionally associated with states, makes the story increasingly difficult to keep track of. Mazower responds to this messiness by focusing on the role of the United States government as first the instigator and then the foil to global institutions such as the United Nations and the IMF. While these chapters are an insightful Schmittian account of the nakedly instrumental use of international law and organisations by US policymakers, we lose much sense of how the idea of global governance was changing in public, intellectual and non-American circles. Despite the vast increase in economic globalisation from the 70s onwards, business gets barely a mention.
Some of the most intriguing moments of book are those moments where the non-Western world reacted to Western attempts to establish global institutions - the Soviet jettisoning of proletarian Marxist internationalism in favour of the national model of the League of Nations and UN, as well as the post-colonial developing world's attempts to define international human rights as primarily a matter of self-determination. But these are brief digressions from the overtly Western focus of the book. We learn almost nothing of how African, Latin American or Asian regional orders or organisations have historically functioned, or their localised perspectives on what governing means.
From the vantage point of 2022, it's also apparent that Mazower missed the early signs of perhaps one of the biggest stories so far of the 21st century - the growing populist backlash against a supposed world controlling globalist elite. Far from becoming "yesterday's dream," the idea of governing the world has become a conspiracy that has shaped much of the politics of the last decade.
Unfortunately, thing start to spiral out of control during and after WW2. The establishment of hundreds of international organisations, alongside the growing importance of NGOs and business in global roles traditionally associated with states, makes the story increasingly difficult to keep track of. Mazower responds to this messiness by focusing on the role of the United States government as first the instigator and then the foil to global institutions such as the United Nations and the IMF. While these chapters are an insightful Schmittian account of the nakedly instrumental use of international law and organisations by US policymakers, we lose much sense of how the idea of global governance was changing in public, intellectual and non-American circles. Despite the vast increase in economic globalisation from the 70s onwards, business gets barely a mention.
Some of the most intriguing moments of book are those moments where the non-Western world reacted to Western attempts to establish global institutions - the Soviet jettisoning of proletarian Marxist internationalism in favour of the national model of the League of Nations and UN, as well as the post-colonial developing world's attempts to define international human rights as primarily a matter of self-determination. But these are brief digressions from the overtly Western focus of the book. We learn almost nothing of how African, Latin American or Asian regional orders or organisations have historically functioned, or their localised perspectives on what governing means.
From the vantage point of 2022, it's also apparent that Mazower missed the early signs of perhaps one of the biggest stories so far of the 21st century - the growing populist backlash against a supposed world controlling globalist elite. Far from becoming "yesterday's dream," the idea of governing the world has become a conspiracy that has shaped much of the politics of the last decade.
January 29, 2021
A decent summary of the history of international governance from the post-Napoleonic Concert of Europe to today's global architecture led by the U.S., the United Nations, and the European Union. Helped explain the influence of significant figures and movements, gave me a deeper understanding of the role and influence of the League of Nations, and showcased how international governance efforts are ultimately the combination of great power politics and idealist efforts to improve the world - both aspects are therefore relevant and influential in international governance today.
The book ended with some half-baked reflections that could have been explored more fully - reflecting on the negative effects of managerial bureaucracy and the philanthropy of the rich on modern day democracy, and arguing that international governance has evolved from being more rooted in national sovereignty to interfering with state sovereignty. I think these points are important to consider but would have liked to have seen a deeper engagement with them in the light of the history presented in the book.
The book ended with some half-baked reflections that could have been explored more fully - reflecting on the negative effects of managerial bureaucracy and the philanthropy of the rich on modern day democracy, and arguing that international governance has evolved from being more rooted in national sovereignty to interfering with state sovereignty. I think these points are important to consider but would have liked to have seen a deeper engagement with them in the light of the history presented in the book.
November 25, 2019
A concise overview of international politics as operant through intergovernmental institutions. Those interested in the 20th century should also see his 2008 work No Enchanted Palace, which is far more skeptical of the benign image that organizations like the League of Nations/United Nations often present themselves as having. Here, he tempers the role of international 'governing' institutions with more economic and financial ones like the Bretton Woods architecture. The US inevitably is the counterweight to such global processes, but it is hard to envisage a history of 20th century internationalism written otherwise.
April 17, 2020
Wonderful historical tale of the rise of international organization and the path that has lead us to our current state. Plenty of citations have increased my reading list significantly. My only issue, is that Mazower brings up the sovereignty of states and the subsequent actions that those states act upon in order to protect it, without much explanation for the definitional set used to describe what is meant by "sovereignty". Great read overall - I suggest it!
April 7, 2021
Oldukça öğretici. Uluslararsılık kavramının nasıl bir gelişim gösterdiğini, ulusal ve uluslararası alanda etkisinin serüvenini anlatıyor. Vizyonunun gelişemlerle uyum içinde olduğu Mazzini gibi kişilerle uyumsuz olduğu Marx gibi kişilerin 19-20.yy damga vurmaları ve 21.yy ise Mazzini gibilerin ve onların etrafında gelişen fikirlerin kalmasının hikayesi aynı zamanda.
Küreselleşmenin geleceğini kavramada oldukça yardımcı olacağını varsaydığım bir kitap oldu benim için.
Küreselleşmenin geleceğini kavramada oldukça yardımcı olacağını varsaydığım bir kitap oldu benim için.
September 16, 2019
Mazower is sometimes dismissive of other scholars and literature in this book, and his view can be a little too skeptical without due substantiation. Arguably, his Dark Continent is a more balanced read. Nonetheless, I appreciate his use of clear language and sound conceptional explanation. This book is still a great starting point to learn about international government.
October 14, 2021
Большая история идей и воплощений интернационализма и международных и наднациональных организаций за последнюю пару столетий. Несмотря на масштаб, книга не бесчеловечна, и несмотря на реализм, избегает цинизма. Перевод хороший (хотя и есть отдельные "торфяные войны" как перевод turf war).
December 27, 2023
Magisterial Review of ideas of international governance
I rated it so highly for its attention to detail, its breadth across defense, trade, law, banking, and human rights.
I made 672 highlights on 726 pages. It was that good.
I rated it so highly for its attention to detail, its breadth across defense, trade, law, banking, and human rights.
I made 672 highlights on 726 pages. It was that good.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews