The Geopolitics of Global Governance: Crisis and New Actors

All economic and financial crises are rightly feared: not only countries are ready to undertake emergency actions when the crisis explodes; they are also willing to devote resources in trying averting future crisis. The mere fact of experiencing a crisis changes – at least for a while – the relative priorities of policy makers, both within and across countries. We now feel in the middle of the road. Relative priorities of national policy making and international policy dialogue have indeed been transformed by the 2007-08 crisis and its aftermath. The crisis expanded from the sub-prime loans market to the whole set of structured financial products, to the inter-bank market, to the global financial market, National and regional vulnerabilities became apparent, as the world experience further round of localized crises; this phenomenon was particularly evident in the case of sovereign debt crisis in some European countries, with Union-wide institutional consequences. We surely learned that a global crisis has plural facets. Can we also say we learnt something about improving global governance? Was the crisis a moment of transformation in our understanding of local, national and global dimensions of economic and financial governance? Did the articulated policy response to the crisis help us re-connect various policy dimensions, usually analysed by ultra-specialized experts in isolation, as if the coeteris paribus condition really held? How do public financial sector support, financial regulation, surveillance mechanisms, trade interventionism connect with each others in shaping the global outlook in the aftermath of the acute phases of the crisis? The crisis entered a world increasingly regionalized as a result of a long lasting process. Its impact seems to be towards exacerbating regionalization of the economic order and, possibly, of the political order. Inside this process, we look at the developments for three major regional actors: China as the very core of the rising Asian centrality; Africa -the weak power of the new (and old) economic order- as seen from the perspective of African regional integration; some countries of Latin America from the perspective of an alleged ‘resource curse’ and its implications for foreign policy.