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AbstractThe processes of globalization have led to a proliferation of spheres of authority and significant challenges for global governance. In this paper is discussed the concept of spheres of authority, the factors that encourage their proliferation, and the prospects for global governance in a world of disaggregated authority. The proliferation of spheres of authority does not mean that global governance is impossible, but that it will not result from a global government. Instead, governance will emerge from the interaction of overlapping spheres of authority; regulation will be achieved not through centralized authority but through the spread of norms, informal rules, and regimes.

This paper proceeds from the premise that profound changes have transformed the structure of world politics and that, consequently, a new, transnational paradigm of the global system needs to be developed. All the existing paradigms are found to be incapable of handling the proliferation of actors, the declining capacities of governments, the mushrooming of subgroup loyalties, the growing demands of the Third World, and the expansion of the range of issues on the global agenda - to mention only the most salient of the transformations that have rendered world politics both more decentralized and more complex. What is needed, it is argued, is a model organized around micro units of analysis that are common to both the new and old actors, issues, and structures and that thus form the foundation of the many new macro aggregations which have come to share the world stage with governments and international organizations.
After developing a conception of four types of aggregational processes through which micro parts are converted into macro wholes, the analysis focuses on two types of transnational roles as worthy of consideration as the basic micro units of the new paradigm. The two types are designated as primitive and derivative roles. The former refers to roles in macro units that would not exist if their activities did not span national boundaries (the multinational corporation is an example), while the latter refers to roles in macro aggregations that do not depend on transnational interactions for their existence even though performances in them to have transnational consequences (examples are farmers, parents, and car drivers, who are both active and inadvertent participants in, respectively, today's global food, population, and energy issues).
Whatever the issue involved, and irrespective of whether they are primitive or derivative, all transnational roles can be located on a legitimacy-authority continuum and seen as varying between two extremes, one which gives exclusive priority to the citizen role in a nation-state and the other which accords exclusive loyalty to the transnational role. The tourist and the terrorist are offered as examples of roles at the two extremes of this important continuum.

Although much remains the same in world politics despite claims that a new global order has emerged out of the rubble of the Cold War, there is a level at which the emergence of a new order can be discerned. If one probes beneath the outcomes of international affairs and focuses on their underpinnings, it is possible to trace the utlines of new foundations of global politics. This new world order is depicted in terms of three basic parameters that bind the global System, each of which is posited as undergoing profound and enduring transformation. At the micro level the analytic skills of individuals everywhere are conceived to have undergone extensive expansion. At the macro level of systemic structure the transformation involves the bifurcation of world politics into a state-centric world and a multi-centric world, neither of which is predominant and both of which are responsive to the other. At the macro-micro level, which links individuals to their macro collectivities, transformation is seen to have occurred in authority relations, with the dynamics of change having moved authority structures from being in place to being in crisis. While these fundamental transformations are seen as fostering endless tensions between the centralizing and decentralizing forces at work in the world, the resulting turbulence is not viewed as amounting to disorder. Rather, the emergent global order is viewed as encouraging the institutionalization of the tensions, the outcome of which is readily discernible in present day relations among the states analyzed in this symposium.