A Battle
of Verses for ‘Democratic Dominance’ –
Existential Menace of an
Emergent Post-Truth Politics in the East-West Throngs of an Emerging &
World Order
Public Lecture - RL
Vol. XI No. CCXC, MMXVII
Costantinos
Berhutesfa Costantinos, PhD
Professor of Public Policy & Sustainable
Institutional Reforms
Abstract
Post-truth politics, a
phenomenon that has now formally been adopted as an instrument of Global
Governance, is a political culture in which politics
(public opinion and media narratives) have become almost entirely disconnected
from policy (the substance of legislation) (Roberts, 2010).
Such is the post-truth era that when the Republican presidential hopeful, claimed that President Barack Obama ‘is the founder’ of Islamic State and the
Democratic candidate, the ‘co-founder’, even some of his supporters were
perplexed. Fake news – active
misinformation that is packaged to look as if it comes from a serious news site
– is a threat to democratic institutions. Nonetheless, such post-truth politics
harping on nuclear threats, populism and trade relations is giving way for
emerging market leaders such as China to fill in the void left by the ‘beacons’
of democracy, to chart new courses for global governance institutions.
Machiavelli thought pivots around a central, uncomfortable
observation: that the wicked tend to win. They
do so because they have a huge advantage over the good: they are willing to act
with the darkest ingenuity and cunning to further their cause. They are not
held back by those rigid opponents of change: principles. They will be prepared
to outright lie, twist facts, threaten or get violent. Global governance
shared the same fate after WWII, where the acerbic state leaders won the final
battle against the dilapidated people of Europe and Africa. Today, history
repeats itself by the same token where state leaders that are willing and able
to deploy their vast martial power on helpless nations and peoples such as Syria, Yemen and Libya. Global governance in most issue domains is
provided by a complex combination of these different bases, rather than by any
single one of them. In spite of all of the disorder and complexity associated
with global security issues, however, there is a great deal of purposive and
authoritatively rule-governed order present in the contemporary international system.
It is not always a very just or efficient system of governance, but it is
governance nevertheless, and is central to any understanding of attempts to
address contemporary security challenges (Biersteker, 2009: 11).
The lecture augurs on the analyses of transition
to global governance that are marked by several limitations. These include a tendency to narrow global governance to
the terms and categories of immediate, not very well considered, political and
social action, a naïve realism, as it were; and inattention to problems of
articulation or production of global systems and process within local politics
rather than simply as formal or abstract possibilities. Moreover, a nearly
exclusive concern in certain institutional perspectives on global governance
with generic attributes and characteristics of social, economic, cultural and
political organisations and consequent neglect of analysis in terms of specific
strategies and performances of nations in global governance creates ambiguities
as to whether society is agent or object of global change. Further, inadequate analysis
of the role of transnational companies and Bretton Wood Institutions and of
relations between global and indigenous dimensions of global governance creates
serious analytical limitations.
Key words: global
governance, analytical limitations, post-truth politics, emerging market
See link here or http://www.academia.edu/35179180/A_Battle_of_Verses_for_Democratic_Dominance_Existential_Menace_of_an_Emergent_Post-Truth_Politics_in_the_East-West_Throngs_of_an_Emerging_and_World_Order_RL_Vol._XI_No._CCXC_MMXVII
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