[governance] China's next-generation internet is a world-beater - tech - 10 March 2013 - New Scientist

[William Drake]

Hi Parminder

On Mar 14, 2013, at 7:12 AM, parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> wrote:

> 
> On Wednesday 13 March 2013 08:31 PM, William Drake wrote:
>> Hi P
>> 
>> On Mar 13, 2013, at 1:57 PM, parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> <snip>
>> 
>> 
>> You've made clear that you have an issue with industrialized countries, especially the US, engaging in bilateral, regional, and plurilateral agreements.  Although I've never been clear whether the fact that developing countries also do this bothers you as well…India for example is in lots of exclusionary FTAs, and not with the great satan.
> 
> Bill
> 
> All 'agreements' where unequal power is leveraged to obtain unequal gains bother me.

Fair enough, it's a principled stance, albeit one that would seem to require being permanently and pervasively bothered.  But back to where we started, I recognize that you feel that universal multilateralism is inherently better than smaller-n collaborations, and for certain classes of problems I'd agree with you.  I guess we would disagree on the other classes, and on whether that 'better' also includes by definition a greater propensity to the sort of overarching principles and norms you value and a lower propensity toward power games and relative gains.  On these points I'd argue it's preferable to be guided by empirical analyses than by a priori assumptions, and that whether multilateralism or minilateralism is more functionally effective and politically palatable in a given case may depend on a variety of factors—issue area properties, linkages to other policy spaces, institutional capacity, etc.  Sometimes big just works less well and smaller is more beautiful, and a lot of the effort that's gone into devising more diverse arrangements over the past 30 years or so—plurilateral/regional/transgovernmental/public-private/multistakeholder etc—cannot be explained simply as a drive to maximize power and exclude less powerful states, especially insofar as the latter are often participants.  Nor is it necessarily the case that the expansion of architectural options comes in a hard binary way at the expense of multilateral institutions; their roles instead have been rearticulated in a more diverse topography, as per the WTO in a world of varying trade agreements.  Anyway, I'm sure I can't persuade you, but I think it's fair to ask that you not just assume that anyone who expresses reservations about omnibus multilateral 'oversight' etc. must be doing so because they favor imperial power relations and domination etc. If you make absolute fealty to multilateralism an article of faith you're going to be bothered by a lot of colleagues a lot of the time and give short shrift to alternatives that merit due consideration…

Cheers

Bill


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