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Article Excerpt
This article examines a range of "good governance" discourses and practices at the United Nations as elements of global governmentality. It explores the emergence of "good governance" as a political rational for the UN, the mechanisms of governmentality that have been promoted as a consequence, and some of their most important effects. KEYWORDS: good governance, democratization, United Nations, global governmentality, post-Cold-War international regime
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In the post-Cold War era, the debate on democratization converged with the debate on security and development. Discourses on ways for achieving prosperity and peace shifted their focus from economic factors or the structure of the international arena to the quality of state institutions. In academia, democratic peace theories explained states' behavior with regard to war and peace as the outcomes of their internal political and institutional arrangements. (1) In policymaking, international organizations were increasingly called to improve the quality of state institutions as part of development programs and peacekeeping. (2) In response to the new challenges it had to face, the United Nations developed an intense institutional debate about democracy, its connections with development and peace, and the organization's role in bringing it about. In a process that was not free of contradictions, conundrums, and setbacks, "good governance" was adopted and adapted as the framework within which the United Nations organized and operationalized its activities in the 1990s.
Democratization, good governance, and the role of the United Nations in promoting them have been extensively discussed in the literature. Legal and normative approaches stressed the need for improving international institutions and increasing international rule of law; realist approaches maintained instead that these institutions reproduce and reinforce relations of power and that they cannot really function as independent factors of change; Marxist critiques argued that institutional reforms are meaningless without changing structural economic relations. (3)
This article analyzes UN "good governance" discourses and programs as elements of global governmentality. Instead of asking under which conditions and through what kind of interventions democratization can best be achieved, it uses the tools developed by Foucaultian studies on government to explore the conditions of emergence of good governance as the UN political rational, the mechanisms of government it promotes, and the political effects it produces. It therefore contributes to an innovative body of inquiries that applies concepts that have been mostly used to address domestic power formations and social dynamics to the analysis of various aspects of international life and international relations. (4)
The first section of this article outlines elements of the Foucaultian analyses of government that are useful for understanding the post-Cold War UN debate on democracy and governance. The second part explores the process by which, at the United Nations, the language of governance colonized the discourse on democracy, peace, and development and demonstrates the governmental character of the mechanisms of government promoted within this approach. In a final section, I explore the political effects of "good governance" and its connections with the post-Cold War international regime.
Governmental International Regime: The Enlightenment Project Revisited
While Foucault does not use the word governance, his analyses of "government" and "governmentality" provide useful tools for understanding the techniques of government spelled out within the "good governance" framework adopted by the United Nations in the last decade of the twentieth century. Foucault defined government as the "conduct of conduct." Defined this way, government refers to diverse modalities of influencing behavior, including the "government of the self" and the "government of souls and lives," as well as the "government of the state." The latter meaning is relevant for the argument I develop here. For Foucault, government (or governmentality) is a form of rule that--resulting from a series of transformations that started at the end of the Middle Ages--progressively supplanted sovereignty as a technique of power and took its present shape in nineteenth-century Europe. (5)
Foucault explores the genealogy of art of government through the anti-Machiavellian literature produced between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. One of the earliest examples of anti-Machiavellian literature, Guillaume de La Perriere's Miroir Politique, testifies to a radical change with regard to the advisory treatises to the Prince. These treatises, exemplified by Machiavelli's The Prince, focused on ways for maintaining the sovereign's status. Instead, Foucault sees in La Perriere's text one of the earliest elaborations of "government" as a form of rule (or modality of power) radically different from "sovereignty." Government does not pertain to the preservation of principality; instead, in La Perriere's words, "government is the right disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end." (6) This sentence encapsulates the elements that make government different from sovereignty.
First, government differs from sovereignty in its field of application. Sovereignty, as Foucault saw it manifested from the Middle Ages to Machiavelli, is exercised on territory. Territory constitutes the fundamental attribute of sovereignty, by comparison with which the characteristics and life of population are "mere variables." Instead, government refers to a number of different fields within which "things" are to be disposed and organized. Second, government is plural. It relates to an array of issue areas, such as the government of a family, convent, souls, children, and so forth, and concerns, beside the Prince, a variety of individuals. In this context, the relation of Prince to state becomes a special case among plural practices of government. Third, government differs from sovereignty both in its goals and in its tactics. In La Perriere's rendering, the goal of government is the common good.
For Foucault, within the tradition of sovereignty, the common good is nothing but submission to sovereignty. Instead, in the context of government, the common good refers to the maximization of an array of desirable results within specific fields ("the right disposition of things"), such as the family's wealth and health, the provision of the means of subsistence for the population. To achieve its plural goals, government uses multiform tactics. In summary, to use a modern term, government is a "managerial activity," arranging things wisely in order to maximize outputs in specific fields of application. Government's ability to arrange things is connected to capillary control and supervision on individuals and wealth. In order to govern through control, it is necessary to develop instruments to know what has to be governed.
For Foucault, the formation of the art of government was connected, starting in the sixteenth century, to the development of the administrative apparatus of the territorial monarchies and to the emergence, later in that century, of forms of knowledge that had to do with the "knowledge of the state, in all its different elements, dimensions, and factors of power, questions that were termed precisely 'statistics.'" (7) In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the discussion of the "art of government" was organized around the debate on "reason of the state." Reason of the state, understood in its "full and positive sense," designates the elaboration of a distinct form of rationality intrinsic to the state, which cannot be derived from "divine laws or the principles of wisdom and prudence; the state, like nature, has its own principles of wisdom and prudence, albeit of a different sort." (8)
Management of a plurality of aspects of population life, capillary knowledge as well as the increasingly regulatory character of law, are key features of modern government. For Pasquale Pasquino, (9) the formation of a "science of police" testifies to this connection between modern government and a specific body of knowledge. (10) Pasquino opposes to the current meaning of police as an organization for securing order, a "positive" formulation, still current in the eighteenth century, that speaks of police as "cura promovendi salutem," or "concern to develop or promote happiness or the public good." (11) In this sense, the science of police purported to control, order, and regulate domains of life that were not previously regulated. (12) The science of police is the point of departure of a modern body of knowledge (statistics, demography, social sciences) having as its object the population and as its goal the promotion of its health and wealth. In this context, the areas that in the feudal world were the subjects of traditional customs, various jurisdictions, and multiple relations of authority and alliance became the field of application of these new sciences, which purport to make visible, knowledgeable, regulated, and in summary predictable the medieval "no man's land" that we today call (civil) society.
The eighteenth-century demographic expansion and the emergence of the problem of population as a specific realm of knowledge and intervention led to the complete disentanglement of the problem of government from the framework of sovereignty. The central concern of government is now the population and its well-being, loosely identified as "common good." In Foucault's words, "[t]he population now represents more the end of government than the power of the sovereign; the population is the subject of needs, of aspirations, but it is also the object in the hands of government." (13)
Foucault calls biopower the modality of rule that has its application in the life of the population and is connected to the development of specific forms of knowledge. (14) As opposed to the power of the sovereign, which according to Foucault was "deductive," biopower is productive. Biopower has as its goal to "reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them." (15) Biopower "exerts a positive influence on life, ... endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations." (16) Population became the subject of needs and aspirations, the fulfillment of which was identified with the goal of government and the common good. Social engineering emerged as a state function aimed to "transform society with a view toward perfecting it." (17)
In summary, for Foucault government is distinct from premodern forms of rule (that is, sovereignty) in four ways: first, its goal is not the preservation of principality, but the promotion of the population's health, wealth, and happiness, or the "common good"; second,...
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