The Theory and Practice of Global and Regional Governance: Accomodating American Exceptionalism and European Pluralism
Theorising about international relations has a strong intellectual tradition. Theorising about regionalism also has a long, if not entirely successful, pedigree. But theorising about global governance—which should not be confused with international relations—has only become fashionable in the post Cold War era, which we might also refer to as the ‘era of globalisation’. As in many areas of the social sciences, in terms of both theory and practice, this theorising has been largely dominated, for a range of explainable reasons, by North American scholarship. The aim of this paper is to provide a small corrective to the lop-sided nature of this debate by looking at European understandings of global governance in comparative perspective to the North American literature. For heuristic purposes, these competing perspectives are given the short-hand descriptions of ‘American exceptionalist’ and ‘European pluralist’ approaches to governance.
