ABSTRACT
The lens of global governance expands our peripheral as well as in-depth vision. It allows us to see the fledgling steps that have already been taken to advance international order, predictability, stability, and fairness and to realize that we are not starting from scratch. In some ways many current global problems reflect, ironically in part, past successes with international cooperation-for instance, more states as a result of decolonization, more globalization as a result of trade liberalization, more institutions as a result of the processes of collaboration and specialization. We can observe the steady consolidation of the results, expectations, and rules in what Hedley Bull and his followers in the so-called English School call “international society”—perhaps more than he or we might have anticipated. One “exists when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, forms a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions.”1 Moreover, to the mix we add the energy, resources, and problem-solving skills of IGOs, NGOs, and TNCs-or “world society” in Barry Buzan’s re-envisioning of the English School’s approach to international society.2 Peoples and transnational nonstate
actors have mixed with states, or nonterritorial with territorial elements, in contemporary international relations.
