| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 61

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Susanne Soederberg, Global Governance in Question: Empire, Class and the New Common Sense in Managing North-South Relations (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing 2006)

THE SUBTITLE that Marx gave to Capital, his magnum opus, was A Critique of Political Economy. In that work, Marx seized the fundamental categories of bourgeois political economy – land, labour, capital, wages, rents, profits and commodities – and subjected them to a penetrating analytical critique. Marx argued that these bourgeois concepts were in fact ahistorical abstractions. As such, when they were deployed in social analysis, they obscured as much as they illuminated. Bourgeois political economy, constructed uncritically upon these concepts was necessarily silent on some of the fundamental features of capitalism, such as the social relations that stamp the structure of capitalist society and the nature of capitalist exploitation.

In the volume under review, Susanne Soederberg takes a similar methodological approach, and does for the concept of global governance what Marx did for the bourgeois conceptualization of capital and the other categories of classical political economy. Marx's critique of political economy finds a modern-day parallel in Soederberg's critique of the mainstream, conventional understanding and analysis of global governance. Specifically, the critique lays bare the hierarchical class relations and power structure that, for Soederberg, actually constitute the apparatus of global governance. Furthermore, the critique pointedly identifies the ideological and legitimating services that the mainstream approach implicitly provides.

The book begins with a presentation of the conventional understanding of global governance. For Soederberg, this perspective is best represented by the 1995 "highly influential" (1) report issued by the Commission on Global Governance (CGG). The CGG, established in 1992, evolved out of a set of earlier commissions and initiatives that includes the Brandt Commission on International Development, the Palme Commission on Disarmament and Security, the Brundtland Commission on Environment and Development, Nyerere's South Commission, and the Stockholm Initiative on Global Security and Governance, all of which confronted emerging issues of international concern and policy.

The CGG's own definition of governance, quoted by Soederberg, is given as follows: it is "the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. It is a continuing process through which conflicting or diverse interests may be accommodated and co-operative action may be taken." (1) Soederberg's particular focus is global economic governance, but she uses the CGG definition as a point of departure. In developing her critique, Soederberg argues that the mainstream understanding of global governance is in fact underpinned by a view of globalization that attributes this phenomenon primarily to exogenous factors, particularly technological innovation; a view of civil society that abstracts from the structured power relations that define the character of that society; and a paternalistic view of international economic development that abstracts from the historical effects of colonialism and imperialism, but which promotes capitalism as "the only desirable form of social organization." (31)

Soederberg rejects these conventional underpinnings and draws instead upon core propositions of radical political economy. This tradition demands explicit recognition of the social relations that define capitalist society, capitalism's inherent tendency to produce economic crises, and the economic restructuring that such crises induce; as well as the role of the state in this restructuring process. In conjunction with these, the particular nature of contemporary us imperialism is essential to understand the current functioning of international capitalism. This foundational shift produces an effective transformation of the concept of global governance. As a result, global governance can now be "understood as a moment of global capitalism, with all its underlying contradictions and class conflicts." (51)

The specific understanding of global governance developed in this book is, however, dependent upon Soederberg's particular theoretical stance concerning each of these underlying elements. This is especially relevant in regard to the issues related to economic crises under capitalism. For example, while there is widespread agreement within the political economy tradition that capitalism possesses an inherent tendency towards crisis, there is decidedly less agreement on what the forces generating that tendency actually are. Soederberg, drawing upon the work of David Harvey, adheres to the position that crisis is essentially a crisis of overaccumulation, understood as a lack of profitable investment opportunities. Following Harvey, resolution of the crisis involves some spatio-temporal fix, and in the neo-liberal era, that fix is achieved to a significant degree through accumulation by dispossession. Harvey has his critics though, and adherents of alternative theories of economic crisis will need to make their own emendations and qualifications to Soederberg's analysis of global governance.

Harvey's influence, along with that of Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, is also prominent in Soederberg's position on the nature of the state and American imperialism. On the nature of the state, Soederberg, following Panitch, argues that the state seeks both to recreate the conditions of its own power while simultaneously addressing the crisis tendencies of capitalism. American imperialism is understood as a set of "contradictory and international class-led strategies aimed at the wider restructuring of the social relations of capitalism." (45) These particular perspectives are well established in the global political economy literature, but competing views of the state and imperialism remain extant. Soederberg virtually ignores these debates, and it would be interesting to see what the implications for our understanding of global governance would be if alternative radical approaches to crisis theory and the theory of the state were developed and deployed in a manner analogous to the project undertaken here.

The effectiveness of Soederberg's critical reconstruction of global governance is put to the test in the form of three applications. These address, respectively, the issues of corporate social responsibility, sovereign default, the structure of transnational debt, and, finally, development assistance in the form of the us's Millennium Challenge Account. The analysis here is rich and illuminating, and Soederberg's reconstruction proves to be quite robust. The specific character of global governance as it pertains to each of these issues is effectively situated in its historic context as the imperatives of economic restructuring are constrained by and often clash with the challenge of maintaining the legitimacy of capitalist power and imperial rule. The issue of corporate social responsibility, for example, was ostensibly the rationale for the United Nations' launch of the Global Compact (GC) in 2000. Soederberg convincingly argues that this is in fact the modern-day counterpart to the UN's 1974 Code of Conduct for Transnational Corporate Activity in the South. Both were arrangements intended to normalize and legitimize the power of transnational corporations in the South, but the GC is a specific form incidental to contemporary neo-liberalism, and, as such, is structured to distance capital and trans-national corporations from the state and state-based regulatory apparatuses. The chapters on managing Third World debt and international development assistance follow a similar format, and the overarching theme is that neo-liberal versions of the institutional arrangements for addressing debt and development are the outcomes of the larger, ever-evolving struggles surrounding the capitalist accumulation and legitimation processes.

The demands placed upon social scientists endeavouring to fully comprehend the ongoing interplay between political and economic forces are not eased by the institutionalized demarcation of the various disciplines. The division between economics and political science is a case in point, and Soederberg's strengths manifest themselves more effectively in the latter sphere rather than the former. As a result, economists are not likely to glean much from those parts of the book where the economic analysis itself is given centre stage. An example is the somewhat casual description and explanation, presented in Chapter 5, of us economic growth from the 1990s into the new millennium. Soederberg attributes the growth in the 1990s primarily to "a speculative bubble in the stock market," (138) a proposition which is highly debatable given the restructuring and successful war waged by capital against American workers throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The twin deficits which have marked the us macroeconomy in recent years are noted by Soederberg. She repeats the conventional wisdom that they pose a potentially huge risk to the global economy, but a deeper analysis of the issue is not offered. In Chapter 4, a table of Global Current Account Balances, expressed as a percentage of GDP, is provided. Soederberg refers to the table and claims that it "confirms ... [that] ... capitalism does not lead to economic prosperity and equality." (102) This argument, however, is wholly unpersuasive. A connection between changes in current account balances and economic prosperity and equality, on its own, is spurious.

Overall, the economic analysis in the book is rather perfunctory. Fortunately, it does not undermine the strength of Soederberg's conceptual framework or the power of her exposition of global governance as it operates in the specific arenas identified above. This is a welcome and important contribution to global political economy.


FLETCHER BARAGAR University of Manitoba

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.