first press www.theglobalsite.ac.uk 2001

Jean-François Thibault

As if the world were a virtual global polity: the political philosophy of global governance

"… we seldom notice that the formation of a single world-space has given us the means to conceive, beyond cultural differences, political systems and development inequalities, a sole social condition, a total command of human relations under the sign of the One" (Lefort, 1999: 250. Emphasized in the original).

"It continues, creates effects, changes the world, long before the very preconditions of consensus are established. Long before the expected outcomes materialize, and even independent of their ever doing so, expectations have real effects on operations, quite untroubled by their … ‘as if’ status." (Schütz, 1997: 283)

Contents:

• Introduction
• Exploring the "Political" beyond "Politics"
• The Politics of Global Governance
• The Fashioning of a Globalized Space
• Concluding Conjectures on the Virtual Global Polity
• Notes
• References

Thinking about international order, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) developed at the end of the eighteenth-century a new idiom, the ius cosmopoliticum, restricted to the "conditions of universal hospitality" and expressing the "highest purpose of nature" in a world where states are no longer subject to any external legal constraints but nevertheless, along with individuals, are "coexisting in an external relationship of mutual influences … as citizens of a universal state of mankind." (Kant, 1991b: 98-99). Dictated by practical reason, which is the decisive legislative power on these matters, this ius cosmopoliticum was for Kant a moral reaction to the Law of Nations (ius gentium) developed by the seventeenth-century natural jurisprudence tradition which justified the independence and equality of states and gave extensive liberty of action to the most powerful among them.

Organized as a permanent congress of autonomous states (Völkerbund), this cosmopolitan project for a politically pluralist order was for Kant a negative substitute and the second-best option humanity could hope for short of a world state (Völkerstaat) which would mean the "amalgamation of the separate nations under a single power" overruling the rest (Kant, 1991b: 113. See also Bohman, 1995). The best being here the enemy of the good, Kant believed a world state would soon grow too large, become unwieldy and ineluctably transform itself into "the most fearful despotism." (Kant, 1991a: 90) When, in the aftermath of the Cold War and confronted by the various processes and dynamics of globalization that make this possibility particularly salient, we are drawn to the boundless and somehow unconsciously revive the fantasy of a comprehensive space of global neighborhood encapsulating all humanity as the only pragmatic solution for what is by now "a more crowded, interdependent world with finite resources" (Commission on Global Governance, 1995: 6), are we not as a matter of fact disregarding Kant’s warning about global despotism?

Perhaps we wanted so much to find a way out of those "contradictions of modern political thought and practice" (Walker, 1995a: 395) that we easily let ourselves be seduced by a very powerful and actually quite comfortable discourse suggesting that, in the words of one influential and enthusiastic postinternationalist, this new global neighbourhood of ours "knows no boundaries – geographic, social, cultural, economic, or political." (Rosenau, 1995: 15)¹ Caught in a Gramscian-like interregnum between an old political order that is dying and a new one which has not yet fully emerged, we are fascinated by this overlapping discourse on global governance which tells us to act and to think as if the world were already a virtual global polity simply waiting to be lived in and worked out, one way or another. Hence, despite rapidly becoming essentially contested and generating intense discussions about its proper meaning, this discourse on global governance nevertheless appeals to our collective political imagination as an architrave representation of the upcoming whole supporting a quest for universal order where politics can hope to escape its fragmented past and loom out of the fog in a new virtual setting. In those circumstances, expressing what ontology often seems to be all about, global governance is becoming the "common sense" of our epoch, telling each of us "what is significant in the particular worlds we delve into – what are the basic entities and the key relationships." (Cox, 1994: 34)

In what follows, an attempt will be made to offer a broad analysis of the philosophical significance of this new setting which arises from contemporary discourse on global governance and appears to signal a mutation in the symbolic ordering of human relations. More specifically, I will argue that the political (le politique) content of global governance is to a certain extent lost when we only focus on and investigate the politics (la politique) of global governance understood as all those co-ordinating and regulating practices, formal and informal, concerned with the administration and management of global affairs. The fact is that those empirical practices from above or from below that constitute the concrete politics of global governance produce simultaneously what William E. Connolly calls a set of onto-political presumptions that "fix possibilities, distribute explanatory elements, generate parameters within which an ethic is elaborated, and center (or decenter) assessments of identity, legitimacy, and responsibility." (Connolly, 1995: 2). It is this set of onto-political presumptions that gives those empirical practices their meanings by reiteratively establishing the settlement upon which they will finally be understood as common sense politics of global governance. This is precisely why we are able to speak of global governance as constituting the topoi and doxa of our epoch. Hence, what remains central to all those practices beyond their obvious differences is the idea that the world would turn out to be, in the words of the french philosopher Claude Lefort epigraphed above, a single world-space open to "a total command of human relations under the sign of the One." It is this underestimated idea – e.g., the apparent closure of the global community onto itself – that makes us think and act the politics of global governance as if we were at last entitled to apprehend this virtual world-space as a genuine, although for the most part embryonic, global polity.

Exploring the "Political" beyond "Politics"

My argument is heterodox and will likely be disruptive. Therefore, it calls for some preliminary but succinct remarks. At first glance, the distinction between "politics" and "the political" seems to point towards a tautological relationship where the former refers to and names "the occurrence of a type of activity" and the latter "refers to a nominalization of the adjective that describes this type of activity." (Arditi and Valentine, 1999: 12) Given these conventional definitions, it seems doubtless this distinction which appears to unnecessarily play on words will lead to confusion rather than to clarity. This has been especially so within the context of disciplines such as political science and international relations where the predominance of a positivistic logic of investigation and the marginalization of philosophical reflections has broadly inhibited the development of a critical stance and has favoured instead the analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of competitive empirical explanations.

What has often been assumed in this context is that what is fundamentally at stake, if one wishes to make a true contribution to knowledge, is nothing other than clarity and rigour. Under these circumstances, the primacy accorded to epistemology presupposes that either "you have access to criteria of knowledge that leave the realm of ontology behind or that your epistemology provides neutral test procedures through which to pose and resolve every ontological question." (Connolly, 1995: 5. See also Ball, 1983) On the basis of that epistemological primacy, the tautological appreciation of the distinction between politics and the political has made it much easier – and even

seemingly legitimate – to bypass a range of issues that would not be upheld under the conventional and narrow representation of politics as a constricted object of inquiry organized around the calculation and the distribution of power, interests and resources. Too preoccupied to fix and to reign over the explicit empirical functioning of human organization and activity, we therefore tend to stay oblivious to the implicit symbolic functioning of politics.

What has consequently been kept hidden and not deemed to be relevant in this tautological appreciation of the distinction between "politics" and "the political" is the fact as pointed out by Connolly that politics is always embodied in a broader set of onto-political assumptions within which evidence and arguments are ultimately selected, organized, and presented (see also Dillon, 1999). It is precisely on the basis of those constitutive assumptions that practices will eventually acquire or lose its specification "as practice" (Beardsworth, 1996: 158n1). Emphasized in the original). Hence, what often is crucially at stake for the political is what politics will take for granted without further consideration as the very ground upon which everything considered important relies. The problem comes from the fact that politics do not usually want to acknowledge that this ground, and the order it subsequently legitimizes, are not naturally given but have been and are still permeated by historical polemics that should be seen here as markers of the political. In repressing, obscuring and silencing its polemical content, politics often tends to negate and neutralize the fact that any consensual, uniform and apparently stable order is de facto the contingent product of a political work that has enabled it in the first place, but which is subsequently forgotten as such.

This process of enabling and of forgetting is akin to what Lefort called the double movement "whereby the mode of institution of society appears and is obscured. It appears in the sense that the process whereby society is ordered and unified across its divisions becomes visible. It is obscured in the sense that the locus of politics … becomes defined as particular, while the [political] principle which generates the overall configuration is concealed." (1988: 11) It is in this process of enabling/appearing and of forgetting/concealing that, for Lefort, a society is shaped [mise en forme] by giving meaning to social relations [mise en sens] and by staging them or by determining how they will appear [mise en scène] (1988: 218-219). Moreover, it is this political process that renders intelligible those practices associated with politics by establishing a frontier between the rational and the irrational, between the reasonable and the unreasonable and between the legitimate and the illegitimate. So, even when by that process politics appear on a day-to-day basis "in accordance with the nature of things" (Lefort, 1988: 219. See also Arditi and Valentine, 1999: 14), that is to say when politics seem perfectly rational, reasonable, or legitimate, we nevertheless have to keep in mind that being political, this process is also the expression of a hegemonic power relationship which has been able to draw a frontier and compel submission and discipline. Hence, this process of enabling and of forgetting will be, first and foremost, the actual manifestation of a political effort "to make the world appear as it is and not something else" (Doucet, 1999: 307).

Despite undoubtedly being meaningful, those practices that are part of day-to-day politics cannot themselves readily furnish an account for this process of political mise

en forme involved in their activities (Edkins, 1999: 3). In some ways, they simply lack the reflective awareness and critical capacities necessary to understand this political moment of polemics when they themselves institute the ground and the frontier between a political subject and its political other (for instance, the public vs. the private, the inside vs. the outside, the friend vs. the enemy, or more recently the global vs. the local) that is not as such prior or pregiven but on the basis of which they however "infrastructurally" make sense as normalized practices of politics. Rather, what is needed here is an examination of these political conditions of possibility that make conceivable those normalizing practices that seem to be the real – i.e. "the visible and the sayable" (Rancière, 1998: 29) – stuff of politics under conditions of apparent historical stability.

Consider, for example, the territorial understanding within which modern practices of politics have been imagined and embodied since the middle of the seventeenth-century. Having the sovereign state as its basic unit and being spatially circumscribed as a close and exclusive place within which a community can assert itself, this territorial understanding provides what everybody easily considers to be the necessary conditions of a politically ordered existence. From that territorial perspective argues R.B.J. Walker, modern practices of politics "can occur only as long as we are prepared – or able – to live in boxes." (1995b: 307) Those boxes mark in a way the spatial limits of modern politics and without them, adds Walker, it would even be quite "difficult to make sense of politics at all." (1995b: 314) This being said, we have to understand that this territorial understanding which enlightens the modern practice of politics would actually be meaningless without being itself predicated upon the crucial distinction between interiority and exteriority – a distinction which was impossible to conceive before – as well as upon the demarcation between what is the realm of politics and what is not (Bartelson, 1995: 89; Rose and Miller, 1992: 180; Doucet, 1999: 305). To be receptive to the foundational quality of this predicament or to this particular way of being political and to acknowledge its implications for our comprehension of the concreteness of a given situation is in a way to move from an instrumental and problem-solving reading of politics² to a philosophical appreciation of the political condition of possibility that goes well beyond the assumption of a tautological relationship.

In fact, this move to "the political" beyond "politics" would involve a more sensitive awareness about how those events that contribute to the materialization of an empirical situation – a situation the concept of "politics" seeks to delimit as if there were no excess and no remainder over appearance or as if what was left out of the representation was altogether irrelevant – were made possible in the first place. Ultimately, this understanding of "the political" will aim at the logic, at the underlying principles or at the very intelligibility of that materialization of "politics". Thus, in so far as practices of global governance contribute to a deterritorialized mise en forme of the world that breaks qualitatively with the more antiquated conditions of politics – be they international, transnational or multinational – I think an appreciation of the political content of global governance is necessary. For instance, it can be useful in helping us to better appraise what is going on and what is symbolically at stake in the contemporary transversality of global governance politics, a transversality which not only goes beyond, passes through and transgresses numerous boundaries but more

fundamentally "questions the spatial logic through which these boundaries have come to constitute and frame the conduct of international relations." (Bleiker, 2000: 2. See also Ashley, 1989: 270, 296-297; Campbell, 1996: 23-24; Rosenau, 1997: 5 and Sogut and Whitehall, 1999). However, before entering too far into this analysis in the last section, we must have an understanding of the current signification conveyed by what I shall call the politics of global governance and of its bearing with respect to the predicament of order in international relations.

The Politics of Global Governance

For more than two centuries, and even though there were many different ways of envisioning its central qualities and consequences (Giddens, 1985; Ikenberry, 2000; Murphy, 1994; Nardin, 1983. See also Schmidt, 1998; Suganami, 1989), the enduring problem that became the focus of conversation for philosophers, publicists and scholars engaged with the international realm, has been how practices of sovereign states can be governed and its independent yet interdependent multitude looked after in the absence of a higher central authority. For more than two centuries, standard answers to this problem of order have insisted on the state’s power and interest – especially those of Great Powers – and have concluded that because the sovereign state was the only independent subject entitled to judge the justice of its own cause, international law and organizations – the only "world government we actually have had" (Murphy, 1994: 1) – must always be precarious and imperfect. To think otherwise, to assume that the state was in fact a pluralist polity, to presume that sovereignty was neither indivisible nor supreme and to infer that international anarchy might accordingly be mitiged once those fictions were rejected was to be at once naive and suspect of utopianism. As we are now entering the twenty-first century, this enduring problem has seemingly taken a whole new dimension stimulated by the manner we have come to understand its global character and by the way we are currently experiencing the limits of customary solutions which no longer concur with the qualitatively new reality of systematic interdependence.

More than any other rendering, globalization is the key word worth looking at here since with all its ambivalent and contradictory dimensions – at the very least it can be viewed as a process, as a condition and as a project (Harvey, 2000: 54-72) – it illustrates the changing symbolic circumstances within which, using words, we discursively produce an existentially significant structure of meaning and intersubjectively "perform" the world around us. Fuelled by numerous historical phenomena – the germinal phase arguably going as far back as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – that somehow hang together without having a necessarily common or shared sense, globalization offered itself as a forceful feeling of complex interconnectedness involving several spheres of human activities, embracing diverse kinds of interactions and including various types of state and nonstate actors. As a consequence of this feeling about the form and meaning of globalization, which "refers both to the compression of the world and intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole" (Robertson, 1992a: 8) rather than as a strict result of its material and empirical dynamics proper, the previous spatio-temporal consistency regarding social, cultural, economic or political matters is undermined and its core presuppositions have become increasingly problematic.

What is more specifically at stake seems to be the historical role "embedded statism" (Taylor, 1996) has played in defining the standard analytical assumptions upon which social sciences have relied since the nineteenth-century in investigating and interpreting the key congruent features of what was thought to be the singular bounded social, cultural, economic or political tangible territorial totality. Therefore, as globalization undermines the "iron-grip" that this "embedded statism" has had on the social sciences, it is the very imaginary derived from its boundaries which becomes misleading when attempting to understand all those ambiguities and uncertainties which are neither inside nor outside but both inside and outside it (Rosenau, 1997: 4-7). Without going too extreme as is the case with some globalization theorists who predicted the demise of the state (Guéhenno, 1995; Ohmae, 1995), we might nevertheless agree with what Jean L. Cohen recently has argued in the different but related context of citizenship, that a new language has to be invented that would be "both adequate to empirical development and normatively justifiable." (Cohen, 1999: 257) One avenue recently opened to address this situation has been articulated around the idea of "global governance" which is now presented as a compendious way to cope with what appeared as a practical imperative for order in the midst of manifold spatio-temporal inconsistencies.

Without real surprise, one of the central motives for this move to global governance stems from the changing circumstances in which the state currently finds itself. The point is not to rehearse truisms about the vanishing of that institutional form, but rather to acknowledge its changing fate and the ways it is increasingly involved with global structures where authority and legitimacy are no longer arranged around the state alone and where power and capacity cease to be in its hand only (Strange, 1995). Facing tremendous systemic changes which began to crystallize in the last twenty-five years or so³, the state appeared to have lost part of its grip on some aspects of what is now going on while restructuring its roles, its postures and even its forms (Cameron and Palan, 1999; Cerny, 1995; Glassman, 1999; Ó Tuathail, Herod and Roberts, 1998: 13-16). Recognizing and recording those changing circumstances, global governance is the catch-all term used to acknowledge the fact and to pattern the complex results of all those strategies, tactics, processes, procedures or programmes coming from a wide variety of interacting interdependent, public and private, individual and collective agents as they try to control, shape, regulate, manage and eventually master whatever is happening on this new terrain.

However, this descriptive content of global governance does not come alone. It closely links to a more prescriptive one where a new imagery of global public affairs is sought after which, in the words of the Commission on Global Governance, "can galvanize people everywhere to achieve higher levels of co-operation in areas of common concern and shared destiny." (Commission on Global Governance, 1995: 1) Here global governance seeks to lessen the historical burden of the government in the management and administration of those global affairs – public goods and public bads – and to disperse poles of competence, influence, interest and means to reach solutions and outcomes amongst a whole heterogeneous set of entangled self-organizing partnership-network activities of associations, institutions and organizations (Reinicke, 1998). The challenge and the goal are to work jointly to reinvent global governance as a centreless but nevertheless integrated "operating code" (Rhodes, 1996: 653) required

to face intricate global issues and pressing problems without actually forestalling or magnifying "world government or world federalism." (Commission on Global Governance, 1995: 4, 336)

What is emerging from this double-headed content is the descriptive (empirically adequate) and prescriptive (normatively justifiable) content of an object – of its connections and maneuvers, of its occasions and events, of its effects and stakes – that conventional stories about international, transnational or multinational relations, in which states and governments are still largely dominating interactions, no longer adequately address. In those descriptions of what is going on and in those prescriptions of what ought to be done, arguments about global governance are actually approximated efforts to appraise and interpret what are assumed to be the decisive characteristics of this new global space. Those being, on the descriptive side, the vanishing of the distinction between domestic and foreign affairs and, on the prescriptive side, the melting of the distinction between the place of politics and the place of other human activities. Hence, despite or rather owing to the fact that this discourse on global governance seems quite vague and indefinite by virtue of including almost anything we otherwise do not have a name for (Finkelstein, 1995: 368), and despite that it certainly lacks a uniting thread (Groom and Powell, 1994: 87) and that it is often considered close to faddishness (Karns, 2000: 40), it nevertheless takes on a pervasive possibility of its own and offers itself as a new imperative and multifaceted responsibility for this unfolding and all-encompassing whole that we now collectively and intersubjectively face.

One of its main qualities appears to be its flexibility which dimly points toward those soft patterns and configurations "which are constantly forming and reforming" (Smouts, 1998: 86). Viewed in this way, global governance can be understood as "a broad, dynamic, complex process of interactive decision-making that is constantly evolving and responding to changing circumstances." (Commission on Global Governance, 1995: 4) For James N. Rosenau, who has pionnered the assessment of its global content, the concept of governance refers to an all-embracing "sphere" of multi-level human activity featured by "purposeful nature". It can be the result of some self-conscious efforts or the aggregation of individual decisions, thus "being minimally dependent on hierarchical, command-based arrangements" (Rosenau, 1997: 145-146). Using the pre-modern metaphor of the pilot or helmsman who conducts or "steers" the body politic instead of dominating it as the modern heirs of Machiavelli’s Prince would do (Senellart, 1995: 21. See also Miller, 1987)⁴, Rosenau suggests that "the process of governance is the process whereby an organization or society steers itself … even in the absence of established legal or political authority." (Rosenau, 1997: 146-147) Hence the idea of a control or steering "continuum" running "from nascent to fully institutionalized" mechanisms performing and sustaining on a global scale "governance without government" (Rosenau, 1997: 152).

The notion of "governance without government" which has since become the alluring way of referring to the politics of global governance means that "the functions normally associated with governance are performed in world politics without the institutions of government." (Rosenau, 1992: 7) From this it follows that to govern in the sense of being somehow involved in a process of governance without government,

"entails trying to understand what mobilizes the domains or entities to be governed … to act upon these forces, instrumentalize them in order to shape actions, processes and outcomes in desired directions." (Rose, 1999: 4) Hence, any actors who resort to control or steering mechanisms "to make demands, frame goals, issue directives, and pursue policies" (Rosenau, 1997: 145) will engage themselves in the production and reproduction of a relational system of rules "of all by all for all" (Sewell and Salter, 1995: 373) which could be effective despite the fact that there is no formal authority "to overcome defiance and attain compliance." (Rosenau, 1992: 4) Thus understood, global governance without global government posits "a close link between governance and order" (Rosenau, 1992: 5) and provides a renewed entry into the issue of global order in which states – as well as state-centred multilateral institutions and international regimes – will only be a part in the larger portrayal.

The Fashioning of a Globalized Space

For Rosenau, to assess the "nature" of global governance is inevitably to inquire into the prospect for global order conceived as a relational system of rules within which world affairs are conducted. Rosenau goes even further to suggest that "[t]here can be no governance without order and there can be no order without governance" (Rosenau, 1992: 8). Here, the propinquity between global governance and global order works to lessen what was historically understood as the "instrumental value" of international order among states (Bull, 1977: 22; Bull, 1979). In keeping with Bull’s distinction between international order and world order – the latter being "more fundamental and primordial" and unlike the former, which is limited to the society of states per se, concerns itself with "order in the great society of all mankind" (Bull, 1977: 20) –, Rosenau equates the global order which arises in the shadow of global governance to an order that might be suitable for an "eventual community"⁵ although that community might still be lacking an "imagined vision" capable of supporting it (Rosenau, 1997: 141). Even if he is not overtly sanguine about this "eventual community", Rosenau appears nevertheless eager to acknowledge, and he is certainly not alone in wanting to explore this hunch, that there is a bona fide political mise en forme of a genuinely transversal horizon that is emerging in excess of the sole in-between sovereign states.

Read this way – i.e., in various discourses which contribute to saturate its ambiguous meanings and to acknowledge its centrality by making other terms more and more dependent on it (See Bartelson, 1995: 13) – global governance offers itself as a politics of transversal connection established on the possibility to contemplate the symbolic reconfiguration of a globalized space more or less autonomous from the boundaries of the state and the control of government. A good illustration of which, but by no means the only one, might be found in the emerging constellation of power, discourse and knowledge contributing to the formation of a global civil society "as the basis for global governance." (Rosenau, 2000: 170) For Ronnie D. Lipschutz, we can speak of a civil society that is global "not only because of those connections that cross national boundaries and operate within the ‘global, nonterritorial region’, but also as a result of a growing element of global consciousness in the way the members of global civil society act." (Lipschutz, 1992: 398-399) For Paul Wapner, all those efforts going beyond the state contributes to a "politicization" of the globalized space "that defines

the boundaries of good conduct and … animates how a host of actors … think about and act in reference to" (Wapner, 1995: 336).⁶ Hence, recondite beyond the politics of global governance and the functionning of its ensuing global order, lies the process within which a proper ground is reinstitued and the whereabouts of those transversal efforts become conceivable. It is that signification of global civil society that Lipschutz, Wapner and Rosenau are trying to give priority to as a way of freeing the mind from limits and of reimagining and redefining new vistas which, once described as if they were already open, operate to make sense of "a field of intelligibility" (Ruiz, 1994: 257) and to establish "the possibilities within which its assessment of actuality is presented." (Connolly, 1992: 119)

Therefore, the fact that politics might not be wholly circumscribed by the boundaries of the state and by the control of government has a crucial political significance and should not be tautologically confused with its mere occurence as an activity that can be empirically described as going beyond, passing through and transgressing those practices which were until now making sense. Those practices associated with global governance have a significance precisely because they work to suspend the overall validity of the old framework. Moreover, in "positing" the "presuppositions" of those practices going beyond, passing through and transgressing past orders, discourse on global governance backwardly brought into being a composite framework which will positively ground what end up being in excess of the old one. Therefore, from a "political" standpoint, the "politics" of global governance "institutes that which will henceforth count as a ‘political community’" while at the same moment putting "in place a narrative of its origins." (Edkins, 1999: 7. See also Palan, 1999: 56-57)

It is within this context that, as a political interpretation of global order, the politics of global governance can be understood as a modus operandi or as a principle of formation sketching the contours of a discrete totality believed to reflect the common framework rising from the unicity of tenet functionning as the cement of human condition. Therefore, as a skeptical scholar has observed in one of the finest interpretations of the politics of global governance, the important point about this discourse might well be that, "[t]he possibility of placing or viewing decisions, controls, and efforts at shaping social existence within the same field [of global governance] rests on a commitment to a vision of political life that is intra-existential." (Latham, 1999: 40. Emphasized in the original)

While Latham is most certainly right when he makes the assumption that the politics of global governance resemble "the relationship articulated between politics and planning … and may be becoming the new administration of things for the global" (Latham, 1999: 43). And while he may even be correct in conceiving the relationship between politics (or planning) and global governance "as essentially postpolitical" in the schmittian sense that it involves the temptation to "displace" and to neutralize the historical logic of "inter-existential politics" (Latham, 1999: 41, 44. See also Schütz, 1997: 283). His apparently sound solution which emphasizes the need "to take the nexus of states and societies as a starting point of an analysis that place politics in a global perspective" (Latham, 1999: 49) nevertheless passes over the significance of those onto-political assumptions about an intra-existential life.

Perhaps due to the fact that he instinctively thinks in terms of "institutional substitutability" to the state (Ruggie, 1998: 174), Latham indeed resists acknowledging that the absence of a "political signified" congruent with that intra-existential life (Latham, 1999: 29) may well mark the possible exhaustion of a particular system of signification ground into the distinction between intra and extra. Hence, Latham’s critical analysis and the solution he offers to overcome the apparent shortfalls of a representation of global governance unable "to distinguish an ‘outside’" (Latham, 1999: 37) ignores the possibility that the issue might well go deeper and not be easily grasped from the standpoint of the state-society nexus whose formal intra- and inter-existential order the politics of global governance attempt to transgress. Displacing the discourse which make it possible to think in terms of intra- and inter-existential order, the primary function of the discourse on global governance is thus to enframe the descriptive and prescriptive content of a domain transgressing those lines. Hence, might it not be argued that it is precisely there, in what Latham understood as an "inability" to distinguish an outside to that self-enclosed intra-existential life, that the crucial political content of the politics of global governance resides.

From a political philosophy point of view, the intra-existential assumption brought into play by a discourse on global governance discloses that, when "viewed on a global scale" (Rosenau, 1997: 151), the overlapping of a "myriad" of mechanisms actually form an objective totality absorbing the reality as if it were coinciding with itself in forming a global order perceived as an encompassing condition and more or less conceived as a transparent condition. It is the apparent plenitude of that intra-existential life which global governance virtually brought into being while at the same time becoming intelligible by virtue of what has to be assumed at the outset to account for its presence. Conceived on an intra-existential plane as if a new global polity was actually stretching throughout the planet, global governance is more a matter of virtual substance than of specific phenomenon proper. It is as Craig N. Murphy recently writes, "a site" (Murphy, 2000: 799) in which struggles over power, interests and resources are taking place while at the same moment institutionalizing itself as a meaningful symbolic horizon.

Hence, the presumed absence of an outside to global governance corresponds to the assumed immanence of that self-generating global order in which differences are not so much masked or denied but subject to a whole new set of features which act as political markers between global governance and what would constitutively appear as its disordered other. As a somehow imperfect approximation, we might say this immanentist global order come in the form of an autopoietic-inspired account of a "system" of global governance distinguished from its chaotic outside "environment" in which differences are observed from the inside by the system itself and according to its own horizon of possibilities as a modus operandi⁷. Now, because that autopoietic-inspired system is conceived as self-generating, the zone of disorder surrounding it cannot be thought of as being structural. Even though that zone is infrastructurally making sense in conjunction with sites of global order, those differences are not participating in some sort of comprehensive totality and are therefore "downgraded from the level of structure to the level of events." (Schütz, 1997: 283)

Concluding Conjectures on the Virtual Global Polity

Notes

1. In a later work, Rosenau would reformulate this sentence to assert instead that it "is not confined by standard geographic, social, cultural, economic, or political boundaries." (Rosenau, 1997: 149)

2. By problem-solving reading of politics, I am of course refering to Robert W. Cox’s often quoted definition of a conservative attitude which "takes the world as it finds it, with the prevaling social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organized, as the given framework for action." (Cox, 1996: 88)

3. For instance, the 1975 Trilateral Commission Report speaks of a crisis of "governability" provoked by the complexification of the "social texture of human life" which raises the problem of its "management" (Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki, 1975: 20-21).

4. The best approximation might well be the one of the "rector" that Christian Wolff (1679-1754) used in his Jus gentium methodo scientifica pertractatum (1749) to speak of the leader of a virtual republic in contradistinction to the "ruler" of a real republic. On Wolff’s idea of rector, see Nicholas Greenwood Onuf (1998: 98-101).

5. The idea of "community" should be understood in this chapter as quite identical to the idea of "society" insofar as we have no room to discuss the distinction formalized by Ferdinand Tönnies and later developed by Max Weber between "Gemeinschaft" and "Gesellschaft". For a fuller analysis along this distinction, see the programmatic paper issued by the World Society Research Group (1996) as well as Roland Robertson (1992b).

6. For a critical reading of the "global civil society" as it is used in international relations, see my Jean-François Thibault (2001).

7. Think, for instance, of the way repeated humanitarian interventions have become persuasion tools in the management of what is presented as an "immanent emergency" crisis (Dillon and Reid, 2000: 126).

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