EPISTEMIC GOVERNANCE AND SYNCHRONIZATION OF NATIONAL POLICIES

The global system  Remarkable isomorphism  Nation-states as copies of each other  National anthems, flags, genres of art  Global standards in describing and measuring society, culture and economy  Yet no world government

The dominant role of dominance theories  Applying the model of a state hierarchy to the global level  The United Nations  The World Bank  International Monetary Fund  The OECD

The dominant role of dominance theories  The idea of superpowers  The cold war framework  Huntington’s clash of civilizations  The U.S. Unilateralism  Wilkinson’s point in “Unipolarity without Hegemony” (1999)

The realist paradigm in international politics  The dominant paradigm argues that the international system is driven by anarchy, egoism, groupism and power politics (Donnelly 2008)  Dependency theory and world systems theory  The world is dominated by the “core” comprising the global north

World society theory  Emulation  Stresses the role of rationalized “world culture” that gradually permeates the world, causing growing homogeneity  Actors as agents constituted by world culture enact cultural scripts  States and policymakers as unthinking conformists

World society theory  The diffusion model  The empirical picture: world models stemming from the global North to the global South  The world history as “globalization”

From globalization to synchronization  The question of whether the world is becoming increasingly homogenous is different from the question of how national states synchronize their policies  States that adopt models from others are not becoming part of world culture and society

From globalization to synchronization  Rather, following other states’ policies, assessing the efficiency of different states and models and using all this information as justification for national policies is most common among developed countries  Synchronization of national policies takes place through such interdependent decision making  It is seldom easily recognizable “policy diffusion”

National differences Table 1: Frequency of references to other countries in parliamentary debates in Canada, The United Kingdom and the United States (%)

Table 2: Frequency of references to other countries in parliamentary debates in Argentina, Chile and Mexico (%)

Epistemic governance  The bulk of the synchronization of national policies is voluntary  Of course states or any other actors in the interdependent world are never free to do what ever they wish – decisions are adaptations to external conditions

Epistemic governance  Governance in national, subnational or supranational contexts is always a power play  Power is most efficient when it is able to hide its own mechanisms  Hence the simple view of power as external coercion, as a pure limit set on freedom, is part of its acceptability (Foucault)

Epistemic governance  Epistemic governance does not refer to a particular form or resource of power, for instance “soft power” in contrast with coercion  We study governance as ways by which actors work on people’s conceptions of reality in order to make them behave in a particular way  This entails strategies that affect people’s wishes and aspirations, but (a threat of) military force and economic constraints are also means to affect people’s conceptions of the situation and hence make them adopt a particular line of action

Epistemic governance  Supranational contexts  IGOs and INGOs  Cross-national comparisons, benchmarking, ‘best practices’  Country reviews and recommendations  Conditions imposed on governments for economic assistance or loans

Epistemic governance  National contexts  Policymakers and stakeholders  Scientists and policy experts  Citizens through the media  Opinion polls  Demonstrations  Introducing references to other countries as justification for or against reforms

Epistemic governance  Introducing catchwords and phrases  The national interest and group interests  Articulating a group interest as the common national good  Articulating the global good also as the national interest  Subnational contexts  Introducing international or national comparisons as justifications for policies  Introducing catchwords and phrases  Constructing shared local interests articulated with group interests