Process philosophy and the principles of cybernetics, which were already making heady inroads in technology, commerce, and even psychology—personal therapy relies heavily on process-oriented mental reconditioning—began to find their way into discussions of governance. Political scientists argued that the rational top-down bureaucratic approach to public policy does not allow for appropriate feedback or input by all the actors involved—both the agents and the affected constituencies. A new generation of political scientists and policy analysts favored a process approach to governance that would replace the old closed hierarchical model with a new open-systems model. They argued that effective governance is less a matter of imposing, from on high, predetermined decisions on passive recipients at the bottom than of engaging all the actors—government, business, and civil society players—in an ongoing process of deliberation, negotiation, compromise, and consensus with the radical suggestion that the best decisions are the ones reached democratically by everyone affected. The process itself—with its emphasis on continuous feedback—becomes the new governing model. In the process-oriented model, networks become the best mechanism for continuous engagement between the parties.
The idea that governance encompasses a broader range of players and activity than just government was revolutionary in its implication. While the modern nation-state, especially the French and U.S. models, gave homage to the idea of government of, by, and for the people, in practice, as government took on greater responsibilities and their bureaucracies ballooned, the political game narrowed to a binary relationship of the governors and the governed. Government was seen as a self-contained activity, separate and distinct from all the other activities that occur in society.
The 1968 student rebellion played a seminal role in loosening up the idea of governance. Students argued that the university was a community of shared interests and that they ought to enjoy some say in how it is to be governed. They sought to break out of the narrow container that kept all decision-making in the hands of a remote board of trustees and university bureaucracy. Governance, they declared, stretched far beyond the confines of academic rules and institutional protocols to include the totality of relationships and activities that make up the life of the university community. They demanded an ongoing process approach to university decision-making that would include all of the actors engaged in relationships within the university—trustees, administrators, faculty, support staff, students, and even the grounds-keepers and other workers who service the community, as well as members of the broader surrounding communities in which the universities were embedded. Governance, said the student reformers, was not edicts and rules passed down from the top, but an open-ended deliberative process entered into by equal players, each with their own interests and aspirations, but all interdependent and ultimately responsible for one another’s shared welfare.
A similar upheaval occurred at the state level a decade after the student revolt. Philosophers such as Michel Foucault argued that in a post-modern world of increasing complexity, density, and interdependence, every action of every player affects the nature, quality, and distribution of power across the entire system. He wrote that government
refers to all endeavors to shape, guide, and direct the conduct of others, whether these be the crew of a ship, the members of a household, the employees of a boss, the children of a family, or the inhabitants of a territory.
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Foucault and others claim that the old model did not make room for feedback and inclusion of all the potential actors. In the new way of thinking, every level of governance is embedded with every other level in a continuous process of engagement—what Foucault calls “governmentality.” Sociologist Mitchell M. Dean defines governmentality as “the relationship between the government of ourselves, the government of others, and the government of state.”
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Government becomes only one player, among many diverse players, in the political game. The state is no longer sovereign. It loses its power as the exclusive agent responsible for disciplining its citizenry. The exercise of power becomes much more diffuse and decentralized. Dean calls this new kind of governance “government without a centre, a form of administration in which there is no longer a centrally directing intelligence.”
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The new communication technologies figure prominently in the deconstruction of state sovereignty. Now the players that were once isolated and powerless at the bottom of the old nation-state governing pyramid have the means of communication at their disposal to connect with their kind and with others who share mutual interests in a field that crisscrosses, penetrates, and transcends the nation-state container. Governance is re-conceived as the management of communication flows, and players position themselves at strategic nodes, embedded in multiple interacting networks, where their every decision and action has consequences that flow across the network and beyond.
The dramatic growth in global connectedness, made possible by the new communication technologies, so increases the interdependence of everyone that the old nation-state governing unit is simply incapable, on its own, of managing the sheer volume and flow of human exchange and interactivity that is generated.
Network Governance
In the early 1990s, the EU began to look to the new decentralized information and communication technologies that were remaking commerce and social life as well as to the new network models being used to organize the increasingly complex exchange activity brought on by the new technologies, with the idea of making them the centerpiece of a new approach to governance. There was widespread agreement that the European Union had to catch up to the new technologies that were revolutionizing society.
In 1994, the European Commission published a report entitled
Europe’s Way to the Information Society: An Action Plan.
The report spelled out a series of initiatives for making the European Union the first fully integrated information society in the world. The plan called for integrating a host of EU cross-border activity into interactive networks and included proposals for a network of universities and research centers, a teleworking network, a distance-learning network, road-traffic and air-traffic control networks, health-care networks, and a trans-European public administration network. In a 1996 follow-up report entitled
Europe at the Forefront of the Global Information Society: A Rolling Action Plan,
the EU honed and refined the earlier vision, placing more emphasis on extending the new technologies across industry and establishing the proper regulatory regime and stimuli to make network ways of doing business viable and effective. The plan also emphasized the integration of the new information and communication technologies and network practices into the educational system, as well as making them part of the everyday life of European citizens. Most important of all, the EU began to reinvent its style of governance to accommodate the many changes being introduced to usher in an information society.
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The various EU government agencies and organizations were encouraged, and even required, to establish “high levels of inter-action and networking between European level agencies, state, provincial and local governments, NGOs, business and corporate actors, educational organizations, research institutes and a variety of user-groups.”
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EU government agencies were tasked with facilitating the networks and becoming a co-member with other interested parties. Emphasis was placed on creating networks that transcend nation-state boundaries. The idea was to establish a European frame of reference. For example, research institutes applying for EU grants are required to establish transnational networks of players to qualify for funds. Many of these networks operate in a generally informal manner. Their activities often take place outside or alongside the more formal protocols and procedures that characterize the older top-down kind of governance that still exists.
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Each year, more and more of the daily work of EU governance is being given over to these more informal networks of players, changing the very way government is perceived. The old centralized top-down model of governance, with its rational performance standards and tight command-and-control mechanisms, is slowly giving way to a process-oriented model of governance, made operational in horizontally structured networks. The new information and communication technologies are driving the political changes as they did in commerce.
When the density of human activity leaps from a regional geographic plane to a global electronic field and from mimetic, linear, discrete exchanges to continuous novelty, feedback, and flow, hierarchical command-and-control mechanisms become too slow to govern activity. Statutes become outdated almost as soon as they are enacted, and old-fashioned top-down governing institutions prove too snail-like to manage the cascade of novelty and, as a result, experience a form of political gridlock.
The European Union is the first governing experiment in a world metamorphosing from geographic planes to planetary fields. It does not govern property relationships in territories, but rather manages open-ended and continually changing human activity in global networks. It has even become popular in the European Union to talk about “polycentric” governance in contrast to conventional government. Traditional government is associated with territorial rule. Polycentric governance is decentralized and is not just about what governments do. Rather, say the late social theorist Paul Hirst and political theorist Grahame Thompson, “it is a function that can be performed by a wide variety of public and private, state and non-state, national and international institutions and practices.”
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With polycentric governance, the governing franchise is expanded to include non-state players. It is a new political game that is far more complex and sophisticated, in which no one player can dominate the field or determine the outcome, but where everyone has some power to affect the direction and flow of the process.
The polycentric governing style is characterized by continuous dialogue and negotiations between all the players in the many networks that make up its ever changing economic, social, and political field of influence. The new genre of political leader is more like a mediator than a military commander. Coordination replaces commands in the new political scheme of things.
In a technological era where space is becoming a single unified global field, duration is shrinking to near simultaneity, and everything is compressed and sped up, historical consciousness characterized by great utopian visions, well-defined political ideologies, established bureaucratic procedures, and long-term social goals steadily gives way to a more therapeutic consciousness characterized by continually changing scenarios and expedient short-term strategic options. The EU is, as mentioned before, a post-modern political institution. Its world is one of ever changing contours and fleeting realities where only novelty itself is permanent and where duration has narrowed to an ever present now. If ancient dynasties were designed with the purpose of commemorating and ritualizing the past, and modern nation-states were charged with organizing an open-ended future, new political institutions such as the EU are designed to cope with a continually changing present.
So if the EU seems, at times, to represent many different faces depending on changing conditions and circumstances, it’s because its persona is continuously re-adjusting to the ever changing patterns of activity around it. Its chameleonlike ability to reinvent itself is its strong suit.
Unlike nation-states, then, the EU is perceived not as an agent of destiny but, rather, as a manager of momentary conflicts and competing agendas. In the new era, grand meta-narratives—the kind that motivated citizen loyalty in the nation-state era—are passé. In their place are numerous smaller stories, each reflecting the perspectives and aims of the different constituencies. Finding some common ground between the disparate players and forging an ongoing dialogue and periodic consensus that can move them together as a community, even as they retain their individual identities, becomes the mandate and mission of the European Union. “Unity in diversity” is the unofficial moniker of the new European Constitution.
The EU has continued to confound its critics and expand and deepen its political influence precisely because its organizational model has been more “process-oriented” over the past half century of its existence. The EU’s political success has been all the more impressive given the fact that its primary architects, the French, are known for their more conventional, hierarchical, and centralized way of exercising political control. Even though the old nation-state way of governing has attempted to put its stamp on EU governance at every step of the way—and continues to do so today—the new disaggregated technological, commercial, and social realities of a global era have forced the EU to manage more by process than by edict and statute.
“Multilevel governance” is the unexpected synthesis that has emerged out of the contest waged between the federalists and confederalists to define the community’s future. The continuous give-and-take between those favoring a more centralized approach and those preferring an intergovernmental approach resulted in countless compromises along the way that began to fundamentally alter the political dynamic in a manner neither side foresaw. For example, the introduction of the Subsidiarity Principle has become a mainstay of EU governance. The principle represented a compromise, of sorts, between the confederalists and the federalists. The principle, which has been incorporated into the new constitution, states that, whenever possible, governing decisions ought to be made as far down and as close as possible to the communities and constituents most affected by the decisions. The intergovernmentalists hoped that the Subsidiarity Principle would keep governing decisions tucked deep inside the nation-state container. The federalists hoped that the Subsidiarity Principle would free local regions from nation-state authority and give them greater license to bypass the state and work directly with Brussels. As mentioned earlier, a Committee of the Regions was established in 1994 to represent regional interests within the EU. The upshot of subsidiarity is that the regions have now become a kind of third force, and they play off their relationships with both host countries and the EU to advance their goals. And, they often bypass both governing institutions and create networks among themselves as well as with transnational global institutions to meet their objectives. They have added a new level of engagement to the European political potpourri. Now, the governance networks are increasingly made up of local, regional, national, transnational, and global players, in a myriad of shifting alliances, each attempting to influence the direction of the political game.