Suchergebnisse

This article is based on the Skytte Prize lecture delivered at the University of Uppsala in October 2015.

The term governance does not have a settled definition today, and it has at least three main meanings. The first is international cooperation through nonsovereign bodies outside the state system. This concept grew out of the literature on globalization and argued that territorial sovereignty was giving way to more informal types of horizontal cooperation, as well as to supranational bodies such as the European Union. The second meaning treated governance as a synonym for public administration, that is, effective implementation of state policy. Interest in this topic was driven by awareness that global poverty was rooted in corruption and weak state capacity. The third meaning of governance was the regulation of social behavior through networks and other nonhierarchical mechanisms. The first and third of these strands of thought downplay traditional state authority and favor new transnational or civil society actors. These trends, however, raise troubling questions about transparency and accountability in the workings of modern government.

According to Jørgen Møller, democracy was not a latecomer on the European scene; it emerged in parallel with rule of law in a way that makes European development very different from that of Russia or China, but also from the vast majority of contemporary developing countries. Yet the crucial ingredient that permitted the evolution of medieval estates into the modern institutions of representative democracy was the spread of the idea of human equality in the seventeenth century.