Vercauteren, Pierre
[UCL]
When the end of the cold war happened in 1989, the question of the nature of power seemed obsolescent. It was until then subject to debate as it was considered as a fundamental concept of international relations. Such debate which in some aspect gave the picture of an intellectual rivalry between the main trends of theories of international relations had been going on for decades. It was mainly presented as a confrontation between two nearly irreconcilable schools of thought, the realist approach advocating the principle of power mainly defined in terms of “hard power” (Morgenthau, 1993) based on means of constraint and military force, on the one hand, and the liberal approach advocating the principle of a more diverse nature of power (more specifically based on economic resources…) impacted by phenomenon such as interdependence (Keohane and Nye, 2001) The end of the cold war not only affected the perspective of the question of power. It also revealed trends and phenomena such as globalization and governance which appeared as data’s and paradigms to be henceforth taken into consideration in the analysis of international relations. In this context, the issue of global governance became more and more salient. More specifically, the question of governance – as defined by the World Bank as “… the way in which power is exercised in the management of the economic and social resources of a country for its development” (World Bank , 1992, 1) - seemed first to induce a paradigm shift from “government” to “governance” (Vercauteren, 2014). It was propagated in a context in which economic affairs were considered as the dominating issues in the world system. It was somehow summarized by the phrase attributed to Bill Clinton during his first presidential campaign in 1992: “It’s the economy stupid!”. Since the beginning of the 21rst century, the advent of the emerging countries phenomenon (called as the BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) opens the hypothesis of a redistribution of power in the contemporary international system (Grevi, 2009). In this perspective, the aim of this contribution is to investigate the strategies developed by these countries towards global governance and to assess how it impacts the debate on the nature of power.
Bibliographic reference |
Vercauteren, Pierre. Transformation of power through global governance: The case of emerging powers. In: Tanguy Struye de Swielande and Dorothée Vandamme (eds.), Power in the 21st Century: Determinants and Contours, PUL, Coll. Scène Internationale : Louvain-la-Neuve 2015, p. 125-136 |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/168559 |