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Spec mapping (AQA 7037): Paper 2, §3.2.1 Global Systems and Global Governance — the concept of global governance; the role and effectiveness of IGOs and the UN; interactions between sovereignty and global governance; the impacts of globalisation on the nation-state; the global system promoting growth and stability but also inequalities, conflicts and injustices; "global governance" and the issue of sovereignty. This lesson is the synthesis of the depth study, pulling together trade (Lesson 2), TNCs (Lesson 3), finance (Lesson 4), the commons (Lessons 7–8) and the globalisation debate (Lesson 1). It is heavily AO2/AO3 (applying IR theory and the hyperglobalist debate to located cases; interpreting trade-value and emissions data) and demands the 20-mark "to what extent" essay.
Sovereignty — a state's supreme authority over its territory and people — is the organising principle of the international order, yet globalisation appears to erode it from every side: capital, information, people and pollution all cross borders that states struggle to control. The central question, which reaches back to Held and McGrew's debate in Lesson 1, is whether globalisation has transcended, transformed, or merely constrained sovereignty — and whether global governance can fill the gap.
Key Definition: Sovereignty is the supreme legal authority of a state over its territory and population, free from external interference. Global governance is the sum of formal and informal institutions, rules and norms through which states and non-state actors manage shared affairs in the absence of a world government. The two exist in permanent tension.
The modern concept derives from the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years' War and established four principles: territorial integrity, non-interference in other states' internal affairs, the legal equality of all sovereign states, and mutual diplomatic recognition. The Westphalian nation-state remains the basic unit of world politics, underpinning the UN Charter (Article 2 affirms sovereign equality and non-intervention) and the principle of self-determination.
But Westphalian sovereignty has always been, in Stephen Krasner's phrase, "organised hypocrisy" — an ideal honoured in the breach. Powerful states have always intervened in weaker ones (colonialism, Cold War interventions, regime change). And globalisation now pressures sovereignty along several axes simultaneously: economic (TNCs and mobile capital — Lessons 3–4), political (pooling authority in the EU/UN), environmental (the commons require ceding autonomy — Lessons 7–8) and informational (the internet penetrates borders). The result is best captured by the transformationalist thesis (Lesson 1): sovereignty is rescaled and reconstituted — pooled upward to supranational bodies, downward to regions, and sideways to TNCs and INGOs — rather than simply lost.
A crucial distinction: supranational bodies wield authority above states (binding members even against their will), whereas intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) are arenas for cooperation in which states retain sovereignty.
The EU is the world's most advanced supranational order: a directly elected European Parliament, an executive Commission, a Court of Justice (ECJ) whose law has primacy over national law in areas of EU competence, a Single Market of free movement (goods, services, capital, people), and common policies (CAP, fisheries, trade, competition). Members thus accept binding regulation, ECJ override of national courts, loss of immigration control over EU citizens, and — in the Eurozone — surrender of monetary policy to the ECB. Critics allege a democratic deficit; defenders argue this is pooled, not lost, sovereignty — influence a single state could not wield alone.
The UN is intergovernmental, yet its Security Council can override sovereignty by authorising sanctions and force.
| UN organ | Composition | Power |
|---|---|---|
| General Assembly | 193 states, one vote each | Deliberative; resolutions non-binding |
| Security Council | 15 members; 5 permanent (P5: USA, UK, France, Russia, China) with veto | Binding resolutions, sanctions, authorisation of force |
| International Court of Justice | 15 judges, The Hague | Settles inter-state disputes; advisory opinions |
| Secretariat | Secretary-General | Administration |
The P5 veto is the central paradox of global governance: it was the price of getting the great powers inside the system, but it means the UN cannot act against a P5 member or its allies — hence paralysis over Syria and Ukraine. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine (2005) asserts an international duty to protect populations from genocide and atrocity even at the expense of sovereignty — invoked in Libya (2011) but conspicuously not in Syria, exposing its selective, power-dependent application.
| IGO | Founded | Members | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| WTO | 1995 | 164 | Governing trade (Lesson 2) |
| IMF | 1944 | 190 | Monetary stability (Lesson 4) |
| World Bank | 1944 | 189 | Development finance (Lesson 4) |
| NATO | 1949 | 32 | Collective defence |
| African Union | 2002 | 55 | African integration |
IGOs provide forums, set rules and pool resources, but depend on members for funding and compliance, and are disproportionately shaped by powerful states (the US IMF veto; P5 veto) — the structural inequality that links this lesson to Lesson 4's reform agenda.
The defining problem of global governance is the mismatch between the global scale of problems and the national scale of authority:
Underlying this is a tension between effectiveness (capacity to solve problems) and legitimacy (democratic accountability and fair representation): the P5 veto and weighted IMF voting buy some effectiveness from great-power buy-in at the cost of legitimacy in the Global South, while genuinely democratic bodies (the UN General Assembly) lack binding power. Increasingly influential non-state actors (TNCs, INGOs, social movements) add capacity but lack formal accountability.
graph TD
GAP["THE GOVERNANCE GAP<br/>global problems vs national authority"]
GAP --> S["SOVEREIGNTY<br/>states guard territorial control"]
GAP --> G["GLOBAL GOVERNANCE<br/>IGOs, regimes, norms — no world government"]
S -->|free-rider problem;<br/>great powers resist constraint| FAIL["Climate paralysis,<br/>Syria/Ukraine veto deadlock,<br/>non-binding migration compact"]
G -->|pooled sovereignty,<br/>R2P, treaties| COOP["EU integration,<br/>Montreal Protocol,<br/>High Seas Treaty"]
FAIL -.->|effectiveness vs legitimacy| OUT["Outcome depends on<br/>whether great powers cooperate"]
COOP -.-> OUT
The South China Sea is the world's sharpest test of whether international law can constrain a great power — the ultimate realist vs liberal case.
A semi-enclosed sea of ~3.5 million km², carrying an estimated US$3.4 trillion of trade annually, with major hydrocarbon and fishery resources. Six claimants (China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei) assert overlapping sovereignty. China claims roughly 90% via the "nine-dash line" (drawn on its maps in 1947), overlapping the UNCLOS EEZs (Lesson 8) of its neighbours, and has built artificial islands on Spratly/Paracel reefs, fitting them with runways, radar and missiles.
In 2016 the Permanent Court of Arbitration (The Hague), in a case brought by the Philippines, ruled the nine-dash line has no legal basis under UNCLOS and that China had violated Philippine sovereign rights. China rejected the ruling as "null and void" and continued militarising — a stark demonstration that international law lacks enforcement against a powerful, non-complying state. The USA responds with Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPs), while ASEAN is split between contesters (Philippines, Vietnam) and states reluctant to confront their largest trading partner (Cambodia, Laos). The case strongly supports the realist reading — that institutions reflect power — while liberals note the normative cost China pays in legitimacy and regional trust.
Brexit (referendum 2016; formal exit 2020) is the defining Western case of a state reasserting sovereignty against supranational integration — the mirror image of the EU's pooling.
The Leave case centred on "take back control": restoring parliamentary sovereignty over EU-law primacy, regaining immigration control by ending free movement, reclaiming regulatory autonomy, and pursuing an independent trade policy. The Remain case argued that pooled sovereignty is not lost sovereignty (more influence inside than outside), stressed single-market economic benefits, security cooperation, the need for collective action on shared challenges, and the danger to the Good Friday Agreement of a hard Irish border.
Evaluation: Brexit shows (i) the live tension between national sovereignty and the benefits of integration; (ii) the power of identity and nationalism in geopolitics (linking to the populist backlash below); (iii) genuine trade-offs — the UK regained formal autonomy but at measurable economic cost (new trade frictions); and (iv) that sovereignty has no clean solutions — the Northern Ireland Protocol/Windsor Framework had to leave NI partly aligned with EU rules, demonstrating that in an interdependent world absolute sovereignty is unattainable. Brexit thus confirms the transformationalist thesis: a state can reassert sovereignty, but only by renegotiating — not escaping — interdependence.
A core spec theme is the tension between intervention (acting in another state, on humanitarian or security grounds) and non-interference (the Westphalian norm). This is one of the most genuinely contested questions in international relations.
The intervention dilemma exposes the unresolved tension at the heart of global governance: a system formally built on sovereign equality and non-interference (the UN Charter) yet increasingly invoking conditional sovereignty (R2P). The defensible judgement is that intervention is neither always justified nor always wrong, but that its legitimacy depends on (i) genuine humanitarian necessity, (ii) proper multilateral authorisation (Security Council, not unilateral action), and (iii) realistic prospects of improving outcomes — criteria that the contrast between Libya, Iraq, Rwanda and Syria shows are rarely all met. The recurring problem is that the power to intervene and the legitimacy to do so seldom align — the realist constraint on the liberal aspiration.
| Perspective | View of global governance | Reading of the cases |
|---|---|---|
| Realism (Mearsheimer, Waltz) | States are primary; institutions reflect/serve great-power interests; cooperation is thin and fragile | South China Sea — China ignores the law because it can |
| Liberalism (Keohane) | Institutions enable cooperation and constrain states; shared interests make cooperation rational | Montreal Protocol, EU, High Seas Treaty — durable cooperation is possible |
| Constructivism (Wendt) | Ideas, norms and identities shape behaviour; "anarchy is what states make of it" | R2P, climate justice and human-rights norms reshape what is thinkable |
| Indicator | 1990 | 2023 (approx.) |
|---|---|---|
| US share of global GDP (PPP) | ~21% | ~15% |
| China's share of global GDP (PPP) | ~4% | ~19% |
Manipulate: China's share rose by about 15 percentage points (a near-fivefold increase) while the US share fell by ~6 points; China's relative position grew by roughly 419−4×100=+375%.
Explain: This quantifies the shift from a post-Cold-War unipolar moment (US dominance) towards multipolarity, eroding the West's ability to set global rules unchallenged and explaining the rise of rival institutions (BRICS bank, AIIB — Lesson 4) and contested arenas like the South China Sea.
Evaluate: PPP shares flatter China (market-exchange-rate GDP shows a smaller Chinese share); GDP is not the only power resource (the US retains military, financial-system and soft-power dominance — Lesson 6); and a single ratio cannot capture influence. Multipolarity is a trend, not an accomplished fact — but it reframes every governance debate.
The system faces multipolarity, fragmentation (competing blocs and bilateral deals displacing multilateralism), a wave of populism and nationalism (USA, UK, Hungary, Brazil, India — partly the political backlash to globalisation's uneven gains, Lesson 9's "elephant curve"), disruptive technologies (AI, cyber, space — Lesson 7) and climate urgency. Proposed reforms include UN Security Council expansion (India, Japan, Germany, Brazil, an African seat), stronger international courts, reweighting the Bretton Woods institutions towards the Global South (Lesson 4), and new regimes for cyberspace and AI.
The spec requires assessing the role and effectiveness of the UN, which is best done through its security function — where its achievements and failures are starkest.
The UN deploys peacekeeping operations ("blue helmets") — currently many thousands of personnel across multiple missions — to monitor ceasefires, protect civilians and support political transitions. Its record is genuinely mixed:
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