Globalizing Global Governance: Peripheral Thoughts from Latin America

Abstract

The underpinnings of global governance since the end of the Second World War have been imbued with the Western norms of order. Today, the acceptability of those norms is encountering challenges rendering parts of global governance dysfunctional, at times layering onto it, at other times encircling it, disputing it, complicating it, but not overthrowing it. Contested conceptions may become a central feature of global governance opening a window for necessary changes. This article evinces the distinctly Latin American way of understanding global governance. The concept of autonomy, pragmatic and in permanent construction as it might, is actually one of the deepest and most meaningful aspects of self-determination. Dissatisfaction with the status quo ante was translated into a struggle for voice and autonomy, accommodation, or a search for opportunities to trim and reshape rules and reduce pressure for the policies governments wished to evade or delay rather than a big push to rewrite rules and establish altogether new foundations for global governance. This paper address the way Latin American countries conceptualized and viewed the need for autonomy, how that norm translated into region building and a legal approach to multilateralism, as preferred sites on the road to global governance.