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By Root 1579 0

of the crisis or banking reform in its aftermath. It has been handled by national governments with ad hoc international discussions as needed. Another painful gap is the absence of effective international management of the policy response to climate change, described in chapter 1. The mechanism has been overarching targets set at high-profile international conferences—Kyoto in 1997, Copenhagen in late 2009. Both were largely failures. There is no consensus between developed and developing nations about the targets and how to share the burden of adjustment. Policies are on the whole set at a national level, albeit with the exception of the EU.

In fact, the European Union is the only example of an effective international framework for setting policies and governing its members’ economies, and it’s fair to say both that it too has proven flawed in the light of the financial crisis and that its citizens hold its institutions in low esteem. This esteem varies from country to country—smaller and newer members are bigger fans of the EU. But turnout for EU parliamentary elections is low, while the EU Commission is effective but is not all that well known and not admired. In some member countries, notably the United Kingdom, the “Brussels bureaucrats” are populist bogeymen conspiring to undermine the national way of life. The Commission and European Parliament certainly lack popular legitimacy.

Even so, the EU has created a practical and effective framework for the organization of almost all economic matters, including international trade, defense, the law and police cooperation, and many social matters such as employment law as well. There are twenty-seven nation-states operating in a harmony that is only moderately quarrelsome; fifteen have given up their national currencies for the euro. Citizens of the member states move freely around the whole of the EU, for work and pleasure. Above all, the prospect of a third terrible pan-European war is remote indeed, after the carnage of the first half of the twentieth century. Yet it is fair to say that even this most successful example of international governance in the world suffers from severe institutional weaknesses. National politics is held in low regard throughout Europe; EU politics in lower regard still.

Looking beyond the EU, the picture is even less inspiring. There is a large research literature on issues of international governance, whether at the level of the EU or any other regional grouping, or at the level of the main multilateral organizations, such as the UN, IMF, World Bank, and WTO.22 On the whole there is a consensus that the governance of the world economy through these institutions is flawed. There have been some moves to increase the representation of rapidly growing economies, and thus the G20 has become more important than the G7, and the voice of countries such as China and India has been increased in the World Bank. Yet on the whole a handful of the largest and richest countries still dominate the various organizations. All of these organizations are politicized and unwieldy, and most find it hard to adjust quickly to circumstances. They tend to lack transparency about the way they operate and their decisions, although this is (very) slowly improving; recently the World Bank made freely available all the data on which it bases decisions.23 Some—many UN agencies for example—charge very large sums of money for access to their data. None publishes minutes or accounts of their decision-making processes, but prefer instead to issue bland press releases.

However, there is no settled view among scholars as to what improved institutions for a globalized world would look like. The constitutional historian Philip Bobbitt set out in a major book several scenarios about possible alternative frameworks, including a return to a more nationalistic approach, a retreat from our present limited multilateralism, and what he terms the “market state,” in which more of the functions of international governance are left to private sector negotiations.24 At the time of publication,