# **SpringerBriefs in Political Science**

**Anja Mihr**

# **Glocal Governance** How to Govern in the Anthropocene?

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Anja Mihr

# Glocal Governance

How to Govern in the Anthropocene?

Anja Mihr Center on Governance through Human Rights HUMBOLDT-VIADRINA Governance Platform Berlin, Germany

OSCE Academy Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

ISSN 2191-5466 ISSN 2191-5474 (electronic) SpringerBriefs in Political Science ISBN 978-3-031-02107-7 ISBN 978-3-031-02108-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02108-4

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Street Art, Berlin, 2018 (Photo copyright: A. Mihr)

# **Contents**


# **Abbreviations**



# **Chapter 1 The Evolution of Glocal Governance**

While back in 1941 at the height of World War II (WWII), Erich Fromm assessed the root causes of the rise of nationalistic dictatorial regimes, and spoke of the inability of modern man and woman to act independently and self-confidently because s/he feels emptiness and powerlessness after attaining his/her freedom and emancipation from royals and autocrats—and therefore tends to fall for despotic leaders. Nevertheless, he also argued that the 'post-modern people must convert these freedoms and individualizations into responsibilities and participation as the only way to overcome tyranny' (Fromm et al., 1990). Today we know of no single governance model that would fit best for what he had hoped for, albeit many political systems and regime types have tried and some modern constitutional democracies might come closest to his ideal.

Glocal Governance is a manner of taking decisions and implementing them that comes closest to Fromm's vision. And because local and global political world orders are currently in transition, it comes as little surprise that in 2021, the first global Summit for Democracy took place in Washington DC, with over 100 heads of government, civil society, and the private sector discussing democratic renewal and tackling, through collective action, the most significant threats faced by democracies today (US State Department, 2021). Representatives of governments, international organizations, and city mayors and civil society leaders met to discuss the challenge of modern governance. The dates chosen for this summit, namely the 10th of December, the International Day of Human Rights, underlined the global principles by which modern democracies are guided globally and at the same time are run by various stakeholders locally, and hence glocal.

Glocal governance is a multi-stakeholder governance practice following international human rights norms and democratic principles. It is, as Haller et al. (2019, p. 1) phrase it, the interaction between local participatory governance and the development of institutions combined with a political economy approach that focuses on the global changes as it relates to the increasingly globalized expansion of capitalist modes of production, consumption, and societal reproduction.

**Fig. 1.1** Glocal governance triangle

During the summit, governmental and civil society representatives prepared the ground for future challenges for such interaction between the local and the global, highlighting the challenges and pitfalls of strengthening democratic institutions and of preventive measures to stop authoritarianism from happening under the threats of global warming, widespread corruption, and the challenges of the digital age. In short, the summit tackled the paradigm shifts of governance in the Anthropocene, an era during which our human activity has been the dominant influence on the climate and environment of the entire planet. Or in other terms: If we were able to destroy the planet, might we also be able to fix it? Along with this, the participants strengthened the concept of Human Security, and hence the desire to be free, free from want, and live a self-determined and dignified life, the essential driver for enhancing democracy.

Glocal governance can, in brief, be described as a procedural, rotating, and nonpermanent regime of different actors and stakeholders that gather, consult, and build consensus in adherence with universally agreed norms and standards. Glocalized governance is a triangulation between a (1) diverse set of stakeholders and actors both on local, global, and national levels; (2) good governance and democratic principles; and (3) universal values and global norms and standards (Fig. 1.1).

Glocal governance has been for decades discussed as a part of an ongoing global transformation process, starting in the 1990s, and that, on the one hand, is localizing and individualizing responsibilities. On the other hand, it is part of the New Cold War between political systems: liberal democracies on the one side and authoritarian surveillance regimes on the other. Against this backdrop, glocal governance is a conceptual framework to understand better the political and social paradigm shifts in the global South and the global North. Moreover, it is a proposal to assess and explain the local–global connectivity and implementation of global norms and concepts, such as human rights and democracy, on local and community levels. Glocal governance is a multi-level decision-making process in which different actors and stakeholders in the private or public sectors take joint decisions, divide responsibilities, and enforce decisions locally, according to global universal principles, norms, and laws. These processes and actions allow for a transparent and participatory process to solve and fix problems locally. If political decisions and implementation processes are intransparent, have hidden agendas, are controlled by exclusive, elitist clubs, and if these stakeholders cannot be held accountable because they are above the law, then mistrust and corruption grow among citizens and communities.

Looking back into antiquity, we see that our admiration for *Eunomia* (EÙνoμια´ ), the Greek goddess of good order and lawful conduct, stands at the beginning of what we can call today glocal governance. She represents our longing for a society in which everyone, no matter a person's background, ethnicity, gender, or social status, can prosper, enjoys equal opportunities, and live in peace and dignity. Sometimes we claim this ideal society to be communitarian, liberal, or simply the struggle between the fittest, the strongest, and the weak. Nevertheless, whatever we claim it to be, *Eunomia* keeps reminding us of our desire for internal stability, based on good laws and the maintenance of civil order.

Furthermore, the goddess reminds us that the more hierarchical and autocratic a social order is, the more likely conflicts and wars are to occur; and if it is anarchical and without leadership, chaos also rises. In 2019, the European Union launched its Competence Centre on Foresight, issuing its first paper on 'Glocalisation of Governance.' In this paper the Union highlighted that the multi-level and shared power principle, characterized by subsidiarity, collaborative, and participatory working habits, can improve governments' effectiveness and legitimacy, and this will guide the Unions governance reforms. Local communities should engage more actively in international cooperation and world politics and act more agilely (EU Competence Center, 2019). With this statement, the EU is the first organization to launch a campaign under the title 'The Future of Government 2030+' in line with the 2015 launched UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). It is favoring a citizen-centric perspective on new government models. The EU is fully aware of the urgency to reform modern Nation-States, but not abolish them.

Hence the question to what extent glocal governance changes or contributes to make governmental regimes more functional and effective is to what extent do people manage to organize a governance system that is horizontal and inclusive, even beyond statehood? From the early works by Rhodes (1997) who is defining good governance as a set of principles of transparency, accountability, and participation, in the light of the changing modes of governance in Europe, to the seminal works by Bhaskara Rao and Sriram Shankar (2012) or by Hufty (2011), good governance is a decisionmaking concept that includes on horizontal levels as many diverse stakeholders as possible in facing societal challenges and solving problems. Hufty paraphrases it as making decisions regarding joint public policy problems, thereby creating standards, rules, and institutions, that can be voluntarily shared by the majority of people and is therefore built on consensus (2011). Hence, governance points to the interplay of institutions, procedures, stakeholders, and actors steering the shared decisionmaking and implementation of a social entity, be it a state, an organization, a group of people, or a club. These principles of governance are the normative foundations to respect human dignity, which requires individual freedom, justice, and solidarity and are grounded in international human rights treaties.

One way of approaching Fromm's uncertainties of modernity is to investigate the concepts of glocalization, glocality, and glocalism as a basis for different modes of governance, namely glocal governance—explained more in detail later in this book. Glocal governance has emerged because some national governments have proven to be incapable or unwilling to fix problems of transnational or global dimensions within their own countries, such as global health, climate change, or cyber security. Hence, thinking global and acting local can be seen in two ways, first, as a threat to erode national sovereignty and authority, as Grinin (2012) argues, and second, as an effective and practical alternative governance model to corrupt and bureaucratic national governments, according to Stiglitz (2008).

National governments are losing sovereignty and legitimacy in a globalized world at both ends. On the one side, they share and transfer power—willingly or not—with three different entities: first to international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) or the European Union (EU). On the other side, local community leaders, city majors and private entrepreneurs, and civil society organizations and actors (CSOs) fill power gaps that governments leave behind if they are unable to respond to citizens needs or problems. If citizens instead trust the abilities of WHO, UN or EU, or of business, and NGOs more than governments to fix their day-today problems of schooling, income, health, or access to information then national governments are mere Potemkin villages. Glocal governance has its roots in the incapability of corrupt and authoritarian leaderships that adhere to a static nationalistic form of statehood that no longer responsed to global demands of citizens, for mobility, individual opportunity, and human security.

In our thriving bipolar world which is on the one side is populated by a globally interconnected Internet-literate citizenry, which is approx. 60% of the world's population, and on the other side, people living in authoritarian, often autocratic, patriarchal, and nationalistic societies which make up to approx. 40% of the world's population, a New Cold War between modes of governance is thriving along these 'societal divides.' Hence, we have a 60:40 divide that marks the frontier of the New Cold War between democratically and autocratically governed societies and countries. Moreover, it is here where glocal governance comes in as an approach to test and to reform governance regimes of all types. The financial crisis in 2009 and the pandemic in 2020, let alone the wars in Central Europe in 2020 in Caucasus and 2022 in Ukraine, lifted the covers of the plethora of dysfunctional regime types, in democracies and autocracies alike. The latter were not inter-ethnic or civil wars, but wars among political regimes, namely between regimes such as in Ukraine and Armenia who slowly dared to turn into democracies, and others, such as Russia and Azerbaijan who became more autocratic.

In a glocal setup, citizens ought to hold all stakeholders accountable for failed politics on all levels, even in the virtual and cyberspace. Prior to the 2022 war in Ukraine and at the dawn of the New Cold War era in 2021, Russia's President Vladimir Putin and US President Joe Biden met in a video conference to discuss militarization issues in Central Europe. After the talk it became clear that there is not only a geographical divide, but also a virtual one between the two regimes, marked by a new 'Digital Curtain' instead of Iron Curtain. The new curtain marks the battlefield between democracies and autocracies, those who uphold fundamental freedom rights on the Internet and those regimes which censor them as a means of control over their citizens. Apart from the physical front lines and Cold War curtains between the East and the West in Europe, cyberspace also has its virtual front line marked by censorship and blocked websites. Cyberspace has become the virtual battlefield combining the local and the global. But it is also a glocal space to inform, learn, meet, discuss, consult, and make business. It is the battlefield of propaganda and ideas, facts and fakes, opportunities, and surveillance at the same time. In this respect, the glocal cyberspace is a combination of the formal and informal, hence of multi-stakeholders, operating within fluid borders between the local, the national, and the global.

## **1.1 Think Global, Act Locally**

'Think global, act locally' is the essence of glocalism. Glocal governance means that local stakeholders, such as businesses, civil society, city councils, authorities, and activists actively participate in decision-making. Different stakeholders, including local, international, and domestic ones, make decisions on standard rules and regulations while operating, controlling, implementing, and enforcing them locally—and wherever needed. Many of these decisions meet global or international standards. Such standards can be universal UN human rights norms as enshrined in international human rights treaties and agreements, and trade norms established by the WTO to regulate trade, tax, or copyright.

The founder of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Klaus Schwab, asserts the changes he has observed in governance in his 2020 Manifesto. He highlights that private enterprises and businesses, overall ICT Tech giants, such as Meta and Amazon, have become de facto key governors who carry responsibility for citizens' common good and prosperity because '*The purpose of a company is to engage all its member's stakeholders in shared and sustained value creation. In creating such value, a company serves not only its shareholders, but all its stakeholders – employees, customers, suppliers, local communities and society at large*' (WEF, 2020).<sup>1</sup> The most prominent economic union in the world, the EU, responded to these shifts in governance between the virtual, local, and national by setting global regulations on 'Ethics and Data Protection' and 'Supply Chain' policies in 2021 regulating consumer protections beyond Nation-States. And in the same vein the G20

<sup>1</sup> Klaus Schwab Manifesto, 10 October 2020. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/internati onal/world-news/the-davos-manifesto-2020-by-klaus-schwab-founder-executive-chairman-worldeconomic-forum/articleshow/78591740.cms.

launched 'Global Minimum Tax Deal' in 2021, and by this both the EU and G20 were exercising de facto glocal governance.<sup>2</sup> To underline these shifts within the EU, Morlino et al. (2020) found out that state governments are no longer critical holders of sovereign power in the EU, but different stakeholders are. Instead, the authors argue that if state authorities are no longer capable of balancing people's desire for freedom and equality, the idea of the multi-class state will begin to take hold, reflecting a wish for autonomy and the organized forces arising from civil society. Democratic power in the traditional sense of representative democracy declines, but the desire for technical-scientific expertise rises. It means that the democratic backsliding must be compensated for in other ways, namely through procedural multi-level and multi-stakeholder participation (Morlino et al., 2020).

Earlier, in 2004, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published a set of Principles of Corporate Governance, providing a guideline to evaluate practical policy impact through the multi-stakeholder approach that would soon replace or complement delegative systems in modern democracies. Other existing analytical frameworks highlight how private or corporate actors enjoy political legitimacy if they provide public services to communities in the absence of effective government (Bernstein & Cashore, 2007). The Global Governance Framework offered by Dingwerth and Eichinger (2010) and the concept of Governance beyond Nation-States (Parker, 2017) focus on the links between standards, values, and how national governments and businesses respond to them.

Glocal governance is not only emerging when governments fail to exercise their obligations toward their citizens; it also emerges to make democratic political systems more effective and strengthen them, whenever glocal decision-making meet citizens' expectations (FAO, 2017). Civil society organizations (CSO) or private actors act complementary to democratic government, but can be an alternative mode of governance for autocratic or corrupt regimes. Instead, in a 2012 UNDP report on Good Governance and Development in the world, the agency already emphasizes that only looking at governmental performance is too short-sighted to understand economic growth or societal development, let alone democratic development and the role that social media and the Internet has for it. The existing frameworks to measure governmental performances and governance output explain the level of accountability, effective time management, or how decision-makers comprehensively monitor results, but not whether societies are well governed or not.

Thus far, International Relations (IR) has best responded to the global paradigm shift toward glocal governance. For IR scholars, the Nation-State is no longer the key actor in IR, and hence it should be called Glocal Relations (GR) instead. GR encompasses all institutional levels and stakeholders that govern when solving transnational conflicts. GR scholars reckon that state authorities and national governments play a less significant role in managing transnational trade, migration and peoples mobility, border conflicts, let alone the consequences of climate change, or cyber security.

<sup>2</sup> EU, Venice 10 July 2021, Taxation: Historic global agreement to ensure fairer taxation of multinational enterprises. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip\_21\_3582 (August 2021).

During the 2020–2022 global pandemic, it was largely civil society engagement and international aid and relief organizations and private enterprises that responded to the medical needs of people and provided food and shelter. Global governance theorists, such as Zürn (2018), illustrate that global principles based on human rights, democracy, and the rule of law adopted by national and local authorities can lead to norm contestations and conflicts. Nevertheless, global norms, adhered to and adapted by local actors, can lead to faster solutions locally. Such norm diffusion and local practices enhance glocal governance, but on the other side, it de-legitimizes and erodes national institutions and state authority with negative consequences for law enforcement.

To govern glocally is first and foremost to conceptualize governance beyond the classical concept of territorial and sovereign statehood. Secondly, we must see different actors' capabilities and entitlements and their contribution to solving problems and facing day-to-day challenges, and thirdly, it is worth looking at various political, civil, and private actors who participate in any decision-making process.

Global and local paradigm shifts are always driven by crisis and technologies that permanently change how societies govern their commons. Hence, what makes these twenty-first-century shifts so different? One reason is that it turns the traditional modes of governance up-side-down, giving more voices and decision-making capacity to private and civil actors. The twentieth-century international order of composed of sovereign governments, resolving issues between states and, that control a certain territorial space and citizen living in this space, no longer works in the Anthropocene. The twenty-first-century glocal governance approach, instead aims to fix the broken relationships between citizens and their state authorities. The advantage of glocal stakeholders is that they adhere directly to universal standards while responding directly in the community, locally. Glocally active stakeholders can network and exchange best practices with other stakeholders immediately through new information and communication technologies (ICTs).

Be that as it may, the question remains, how are global norms and agreements implemented and enforced on the local or individual level without much interactions by state authorities? Over the past decades the developments of extraterritorial and universal jurisdictions allowed law enforcement agents and judges to hold perpetrators accountable no matter in which corner of the world they hide.

The Climate Protection Act in Germany in 2019,<sup>3</sup> for example, illustrates how local actors and CSOs, such as Fridays-for-Future (F4F) and the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (BUND) jointly lodged a constitutional complaint against the German government for not fulfilling its duty to fight global warming. In April 2021, the German Constitutional Court confirmed the complaint of these individuals who claimed that the government is violating global norms, not only in its territory but also globally. By allowing to hear complaints that deal with global threats, the court deteriorates state sovereignty to some extent, or it challenges state authorities to undertake more actions outside its own state borders to protect

<sup>3</sup> Federal Climate Change Act, Germany, 12 December 2019. https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ englisch\_ksg/englisch\_ksg.html (August 2021).

people from the consequences of climate change. If state authorities are unwilling or incapable to act, other actors fill in the gap and aim to look at responsibilities and hold stakeholders accountable for damage and crimes done elsewhere in the world.

In the same vein, in December 2019, the Dutch Supreme Court, the highest court in the Netherlands, decided on a claim filed in 2015 known as the 'Urgenda Climate Case.' The judges found that the Dutch government has obligations to reduce emissions urgently and significantly in line with its human rights obligations. Earlier in 2015, the District Court of The Hague ruled that the Dutch government must cut its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25% by the end of 2020 (compared to 1990 levels) to save peoples' lives, not only in the Netherlands. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva responded to the ruling by stressing, 'that the Government of the Netherlands and, by implication, other governments have binding legal obligations, based on international human rights law, to undertake strong reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases.'4 Similar rulings are seen elsewhere by national courts, and they follow a trend that started back in 1793 with the US Alien Claims Tort Act, which allows holding someone accountable for his/her wrongdoings elsewhere in the world, in front of US courts. This Act is the predecessor of the modern concept of Extraterritorial Jurisdiction, endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 2019, for example, to fight global terrorism glocally, meaning that persons who are accused of terrorist acts can be put on trial no matter what their citizenship is and no matter where they committed these acts.5 It gives national governments the legal ability to exercise authority beyond their national boundaries.

At the same time, the 1960s, rise of CSOs seems to be unstoppable. It started with The Russel Tribunal for Peace, Amnesty International for Human Rights, and the International Commission of Jurists in the 1960s, and when these citizen-driven organizations were demanding governments to comply with global and universal human rights norms to protect people locally elsewhere in the world. The aftermath of the post-Cold War period from 1990 to 2015 was perhaps the most democratic quarter-century in world history and the most citizen driven at the same time, as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue in their book on 'How Democracies Die' in 2018. Now we are in a period of disenchantment and leaders either adhere to global norms, and act democratically, or break these norms, leading to political leadership's reauthorization. US President Donald Trump's term from 2016 to 2020 was a global norm breaker. Being a populist and nationalist, he jeopardized global democratic norms such as inclusiveness and fairness and eroded the democratic system in the US (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p. 205). However, he seriously damaged the regime for most parts where it was already weak and unconsolidated, such as for example worsening the already weak social welfare system and the deeply ingrained racistdriven law enforcement mechanism. Global participatory norms and fundamental

<sup>4</sup> Urgenda, 20 December 2019, Landmark Decision by Dutch Court. https://www.urgenda.nl/en/the mas/climate-case/.

<sup>5</sup> UN General Assembly, Sixth Committee Speakers Say Member States Must Increase National Extraterritorial Jurisdiction, Hold Officials, Experts on Mission Accountable for Crimes, 10 October 2019. https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/gal3595.doc.htm (August 2021).

freedoms are the essences, of democracies that makes it an intriguing model for the millions who feel deprived of their rights and freedoms. If these freedoms are abused, for example by making use of extensive hate speech and broadcasting of false information, democracy is weakened. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that human rights norms foster 'mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance' among people beyond formal rules, and hence it is the attitude, adherence, and behavior toward freedoms and rights that matter, not institutions. In the past democratic actors established 'a set of shared beliefs and practices that helped make those institutions work' for all despite their diverse backgrounds (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, pp. 212–213). This makes democracy so intriguing for many people worldwide and is currently fueling ongoing mass protests and claims for freedom and democracy since the 2010s from Santiago de Chile, via Tel Aviv, Beirut, Minsk, Moscow to Bangkok, and Hong Kong, without slowing down. Even though, many protests are not successful in changing political regimes and activists need to move into exile, the claims for more freedom and selfdetermination became louder not more silent. In his earlier works about the American Creed in the 1960s, Gunnar Myrdal found that the strict upholding of the principles of individual freedoms and egalitarianism speaks to most of us and what we expect from governments across the globe and have therefore become fundamental principles and universal benchmarks for good governance.

## **1.2 Glocal Modes of Governance**

If governance is the institutionalization of norms and needs, aiming to overcome individual anxieties, corruption, nepotism, and despotism, then human rights are the normative benchmarks to set the standards for this institutionalized mode of governance. Norms determine the manner how we organize and institutionalize the society in which we want to live. Goddess *Eunomia* can only be as effective as the norms and principles she adheres to. They allow us to negotiate social contracts in the form of constitutions and treaties among all relevant stakeholders. By this, we also define which mode of governance we want to be ruled and even controlled by. The modes range from individual anarchical to strictly hierarchal authoritarian, such as monarchial, patriarchal, oligarchic, cleric, and warlord regimes, or horizontal parliamentarian democracies or council-driven regimes. Emirates and Sultanates such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, or The Sultanate of Brunei and one-party regimes, such as the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China (CPC), mark one of the most hierarchical and autocratic modes of governance. Others are religious and ideological forms of governance, such as the Catholic Vatican State, The Islamic Republic of Iran, the Jewish State of Israel or the Marxist-Leninist socialist Republic of Cuba. Ideological or religious-driven regimes must constantly outmaneuver their self-imposed exclusive privileges given to citizens based on birth, religion, or party membership by using strong nationalistic narratives and a propaganda machinery. That leads to a constant competition—if not suppression—with democratic principles and practice. China's CPC, for example, needed to create a centralized 'surveillance State' that is opposed to democratic-constitutional states and free elections that would allow for fair and equal competition between suitable candidates. Modern states run by hereditary constitutional monarchies, such as Norway, Australia, the Netherlands, or Japan, often score high on democratic performance but suffer a lack of legitimacy in governmental leadership that sometimes ends in political violence by anti-royalists. But even non-hereditary democracies such as Switzerland or Germany, face today serious challenges of representative and parliamentarian democracy, by ineffective oversized parliaments and heavily bureacratized administrations.

Formally, all modern constitutions, even the one by China, are adhering in principle to fundamental freedoms and human rights and have installed some level of the Rule of Law. However, the way they govern these norms and laws in practice could not be more different. The most common mode of governance today in Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America is a hybrid mix of authoritarian and democratic rulership, called anocracy. Anocracy is also known under the notion of defective, embedded, electoral, and semi-democratic regime type. At least half of the world's constitutional regimes show elements of anocracy by the way they exercise a formal division of parliamentary and presidential powers, frequency of elections, and censorship of media freedoms and civil society. Pseudo-family-driven, clientelist political elite or organized criminals run for president and the parliament and distribute public offices depending on ethnicity, language, patronage, or other forms of clientelisms.

The different modi of glocal governance can also be measured along the lines of *inclusiveness versus exclusiveness* of democratic practices. What is meant by it is how inclusive state institutions act; do they include all members of minorities, no matter their ethnicity, gender, or religion, in an equal share in the decision-making? Or are people excluded based on endogenous criteria such as faith, race, family, income, or caste? The more exclusive a regime is, the more it tends toward autocratic and top-down patriarchal governance. The more it tends toward a pluralistic and horizontal governmental structure based on merits and qualifications instead of heritage, the more inclusive it is.<sup>6</sup> Yet, the level of governance performance can be best measured during times of crisis, when a political regime must respond quickly to threats that affect the entire society within its state boundaries. Autocratic governance regimes are most vulnerable to exercising inclusive policies at times of crisis, and often respond with harsh measures, such as lockdowns, martial laws, or censorship. The marginalized or vulnerable are often most heavily affected by these measures and suffer even more than during 'normal' periods. Autocratic regimes are often fearful regimes and therefore opt for radical measures to solve problems. The weaker they are, the more likely they threaten groups of people with expulsion or other countries with war. Political violence, corruption, and even poverty rise, because the battle for scarce resources is tighter than before and equal distribution system was never developed in times of tranquility. Democratic systems instead, in times of crisis, are even more pressured to be transparent and accountable to citizens. Dialogue with

<sup>6</sup> Indices, for example, V-dem, Polity V, Bertelsmann Transformation Index, Freedom House, and IDEA, World Value Survey, World Justice Project.

citizens, inclusion of private actors, enterprises, and public-private partnerships itensify during these periods and direct consultation with those most affected by the crisis. Millions lost their homes and work during the financial crisis in 2009, and so did the war refugees from Syria in 2015, and those directly affected by the Covid pandemic in 2020 and the wars in Central Europe in 2020 and 2022, and it were mostly different private and public stakeholders who came to rescue during these periods, overall from and within democratic countries.

The Nation-State that is currently dissolved was built as an answer to the consequences of the industrial and colonial era of the eighteenth/nineteenth centuries Building Nation-States was the answer to nineteenth-century erosion of monarchies. Todays respond to the erosion of Nation-State is glocalization. In the twenty-first century, the glocal battle is between people and statehood, and to what extent regimes are adhering or bypassing human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Strictly holding to the concept of the Westphalian Nation-State from 1648 can be seen as one of the root causes for the current regimes in crisis. The Westphalian principles of the coexistence of sovereign states is seriously jeopardized by two factors, namely (1) globalization and ICT and (2) the rapid mobility and migration of people. Both dynamics are intertwined and affect citizens' lives directly, locally, not nationally.

The other key factor that forces us to rethink governance is growth and how we measure it. In times of national sovereignty, economic growth was defined by territorial space, public and individual property, and effective exploitation of natural and human resources, productivity, innovation, and capital. A sovereign state is one that has de jure and de facto control over its (1) territorial resources, (2) the security forces, as well as (3) currency and trade in order to facilitate economic development and give safety guarantees for its citizens, in exchange of taxes and loyalty to the laws. This social contract between classical statehood and citizens is not longer working. If we look at these three core principles of statehood, we see that, many states no longer have de facto that control. In many countries warlords run the security sector, and the state monopoly over the 'use of force' is transferred to private mercenaries' companies such as Black Water (US), Wagner (Russia), the Frontier Service Group (China), who are paid and sent by governments on missions in war torn countries. Similarly, transnational enterprises develop their own rules to determine the economy of other countries and undertake all necessary transactions in Dollars, Pounds, or EUR as lead currencies. In addition, the slogan 'who controls the Internet, will control the world' adds to the de facto erosion of statehood because much of private and local business is today run on platforms owned by companies and CEOs that are mostly in the US, Europe, or China and hence beyond state control of most countries. Territorial property and clientelism become relative but no less contagious. Those authoritarian states that lose de facto control over their territories, such as recently Lebanon, Tajikistan, Nigeria, or Venezuela, are marked by a rise of ethnic-nationalistic-populist (male) leadership that wants to hold back, by all means, the status quo of the Westphalian principles of sovereignty. They justify political violence and human rights abuse and even military interventions with the goal of winning back state sovereignty.

## **References**


## *Online Sources*


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# **Chapter 2 The Glocal Between the Local and the Global**

Glocalism is a process of norm diffusion from the local to the global and from the global to the local. It is the generic idea illustrating how, for example, ICT and the global economy have been shaping our modern way of life since the 1990s. For Viktor Roudometof, the glocal and glocalism cannot yet theoretically explain or justify why we are better off in a glocalized world rather than in a national territorial state (2016). Whereas we understand through the global economy and thus globalization, the transfer and exchange of goods and knowledge around the globe, the dynamic of the local–global economy changes the picture. The new glocal economy is not only a green economy but also recycling processes of hardware as well as the sharing economy, i.e., sharing cars, industrial goods, etc. Many of the new local economy ideas are exchanged via the Internet and makes them accessible for consumers globally. Start-ups and small enterprises share ideas and tips between Bolivia and Kyrgyzstan which have otherwise little in common. There are no language or otherwise physical borders on the Internet, thanks to automated translation programs, which makes this new local economy a glocal one. Guilherme et al. (2019) have investigated how and to what extent our language and communication have been glocalized over the past centuries, turning every local language in some mix of glocal language with English terms. The phenomenon of adapting words from other languages into one's own is not new, but the speed by which it happened over the past decades is breathtaking. With a harmonized glocal language, communication becomes faster and easier, and many other aspects are connected to it.World economy becomes more glocal, too, and even the concept of capitalism is at stake, because in the local–global shared economy, the benefit for individuals and economic growth of societies are measured differently. Enterprises often no longer pay any taxes to national authorities, if their company is spread in locations around the globe. The trend toward a glocal economy is inevitable, also due to the growth of the world population and its density. Apart from share economy, today goods can be developed in one country, and manufactured in another or 3D-printed locally—or recycled for that matter, yet in another country. State authorities have little control over where trade and goods go during the production and consumer cycle.

Whereas globalization is an interactive process between stakeholders and public resources around the status quo, namely that glocality and glocalism is a mixture of both. Glocalism is by no means sufficiently explained, neither academically nor in practice, to serve as a theory or as an ideology. Unlike other 'isms and theories, it does not yet fully explain why solving problems in a glocal manner could serve as an alternative to Nation-States. Statehood and glocalism can both go hand in hand, albeit Nation-State excludes all those who do not belong or identify themselves with a certain Nation or do not hold citizenship and is rather contradictory to multistakeholder-based governance.

Glocality and glocalism seem irreversible since the rise of civil society in the 1960s and the IT revolution in the 1990s. One individual empowered Internet-literate person can change world politics today, as seen by the global movements such as the Anonymous, Me Too, Fridays for Future, or Extinction Rebellion.

In 2021, Facebook's CEO Zuckerberg, launched the Network-Messenger Giant 'Meta' combining Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, in today's largest glocal Tech company in the world, with annual revenue of 86 billion Dollar and only sixty thousand workers glocally. But CEO Zuckerberg, cannot be held accountable for violating global norms of anti-racisms, by one country alone. If people face hate speech and cyber-discrimination on Facebook in India, Meta may be able to delete the harmful entry on Facebook in India, but not in Bangladesh. National governments face hard times to justify their authority and irreplaceable functionality if they no longer can control companies operating in their territory and violating citizens' rights. Every sphere of our lives has become glocal, and informal stakeholders are a much more important part of policymaking today than state authorities.

In the light of the 2005 Responsibility to Protect (R2P) debate at the UN Security Council along with the inauguration of the UN Human Rights Council in 2006 and the installment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002, we have seen a certain level of global norm saturation. It was the period when the individual rights of people were defined, in an ever increasing number of international treaties dealing with setting global standards and implementation mechanisms for monitoring them. Once our rights were manifested in treaties, we started to execute them ourselves. These are not governmental rights, but people's. And by doing so, we became glocal actors and overall consumers. Global logistic companies such as DHL and glocal virtual shopping malls such as Amazon and Alibaba have democratized consumer monopolies because we anticipate equal access to consumer products—providing we have financial credits and access to the Internet. Although the virtual world is not as inclusive as it seems, it is non-territorial. It rather depends on whether each of us has a bank account and a credit card, whether we are blacklisted by the company or not. Our citizenship, let alone with nationality, does not matter, only our personal 'credibility.' Consumer protection in this wild-web-cyber space, which has (yet) few rules and regulations, remains the key human security challenge for the state and the users (Mihr, 2014).

Glocalism only explains what we observe on global and local levels. Glocalism conceptualizes the sequence of paradigm shifts triggered by global mobility and ICT-based connectivity. For Ritzer (2016), glocalism is an analytical concept that illustrates how a set of different ideas and notions in our minds change and build our identity and, overall, our attitudes toward our surroundings. Meanwhile, our moral values, habits, culture, and institutions, and consequently our behavior and responses to daily matters, change. Our identity has more in common with people on the other side of the planet than was the case 50 years ago. Our common 'glocal identity' is not simply a cosmopolitan attitude but also a similar behavior that turns into similar habits. During times of global capitalism in the 1990s, our glocal attitudinal behavior, according to Ulrich Beck (2000), has slowly emerged and led to a global– local citizen identity. Ritzers (2016) describes glocalism as anything that is fluid, constantly moving, and changing, and that determines how we perceive and solve local and global problems at the same time. People share similar perspectives on the impact of climate change around the world and would not say that climate change is 'nationally' and 'traditionally' different in Vietnam than it is in Norway. The consequences of climate change are, of course, different, but the concept of climate change is not, and nor are the measures to be undertaken to mitigate its catastrophic effect on our habitat.

Therefore, glocalism is far from new and can be found among Utopians promoting a one-world society and common humanities centuries ago. During the period of the fifteenth century, Italian Humanism, and sixteenth-century Renaissance thinkers' glocalism was a widely shared concept. In the aftermath of the eighteenth-century American and French Revolutions and Immanuel Kant's 'Perpetuate Peace' (1795), he already proclaimed that a World Republic governed by morally guided leaders that act according to universal human rights norms might be the best form of governance for all to overcome despotic monarchs. The nineteenth century was the period of Nation-State building, and the once utopian concept of inclusive glocalism turned into our modern idea of democratic constitutional statehood. Its most perverted form is today's modern 'nationalistic electoral democracy' in which authoritarian leaders seek legitimacy through controlled elections and citizens' participation.

The closest form of glocal governance regime in the nineteenth century was the Paris Commune of 1871. Its 20,000 communitarians gave themselves a constitution that defied global capitalisms and promoted equal human rights for women and men in line with the legacy of the French Revolution ninety years earlier. Article 4 of the French Declaration for Human Rights of 1789 states that 'Freedom consists in being able to do anything that does not harm others.' Nationality, gender, and language did not matter among its members, and its leadership was elected as an egalitarian council taking the role of a 'management board' to solve problems. Strikingly, the Commune only lasted for two months before it was dissolved by the French nationalist army, which saw its attraction and competition. The French government feared the success of the Commune that would turn France into a socialistic Marxist state. 7,000 people lost their lives in the battle between communitarians and state soldiers. But songs and ideas of the democratic experiment of the Commune survived and serve until today as an example for glocal governance.

We find traces of the Commune in many other utopian concepts of modern times. One prominent example is that of Francis Fukuyama's 1992 bestseller 'The End of History and the Last Man,' illustrating how governing beyond the Nation-States under direct democratic and human rights principles could be possible. In this view, glocal governance is more pragmatic and less idealistic, including the concept of direct democracy and the redundancy of political parties. Going back further into history and mythical figures, we find glocality based on equalitarian principles and inclusiveness, for example, in the saga about King Arthur and his Round Table diplomacy, resembling the human desire for equality and inclusive participation—which is, until today, a blueprint for thousands of phantasy novels and films. Glocalism has inspired not only writers and filmmakers but also a plethora of artists. For example, Josef Beuys, an artist and social activist scandalized the public with his vision of glocal governance at the world's largest Modern Art exhibit *Documenta* in Kassel, Germany, in 1971. Beuys proposed a democratic governance regime without political parties and with direct participation and voting rights for anyone, regardless of his/her citizenship. He also proposes a basic income for everyone to avoid inequalities. He was ridiculed for his ideas and performances at his time but left a remarkable legacy for modern authors.

Whereas the global is often equated with universally agreed norms and international treaties, the local is much more difficult to grasp. Localization of decisionmaking is best seen by direct consequences for citizens, for example, the building of local labor unions, women's safe houses, introducing codes of conduct for local business, or adapting global hygienic standards in local hospitals. The multi-stakeholder bases approach (MSA) to glocal governance carries the risk of finding consensus on minimum levels only, and hence the whole—and often very long—multi-stakeholder process becomes redundant.

Local ethnic-nationalistic populist and faith-based community leaders are more difficult to challenge let alone convince to change their governing practices, than global actors. They are often guided by traditions and habits rather than visions, norms, or global standards. If there is no strict normative order or legitimate statehood, local leaders can dominate, suppress, and intimidate local communities and define anything beyond their community as evil, dangerous, and simply as the 'others.' Most often, they adhere to patriarchal and traditional practices and are either ignorant of, or refuse, global standards. Instead, traditional or faith-based leaders cherish traditional motherhood through 'mother-tongue' and paternalistic principles of seniority. Women are child breeders and housekeepers, and men must always be ready to fight and die for the community and the fatherland. This toxic mix and a vicious cycle can be broken through global incentives given by external factors such as IOs and CSOs, allowing for local communities to question and change their leaderships. Instead, installing leaders that solve problems in a more inclusive manner than traditional practices do.

In local and traditional communities, one image we find anywhere in the world is symbolic figures such as 'mother of the nation' or 'mother of the land' and female statues resembling 'victory' and the limited role that women play in society. Women are limited in their role in governance, but because they are often reduced to only being mothers without which no nation can exist, they are also pivotal for any paradigm shift of societal order.

The reduced female role justifies for many traditionalists or faith-based community leaders that women must be 'protected from public' and preserved and enclosed in homes or behind a veil. Societies in search of belonging to a nation that is worth identifying with often end up in a rough state, what we see in most post-colonial countries such as post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, for example. The country's domestic laws illustrate the search for women's roles in nation-building in bizarre ways. The countries' marriage laws do not allow for Kyrgyz women to marry foreigners to avoid foreign influence into family traditions, but Kyrgyz men can marry foreign women and give them their names while assimilating them to become Kyrgyz nationals (Isambaeva, 2012). Traditional nationalists articulate how women should dress, behave, and have strict roles for home and private spheres. Their social status is defined exclusively by the number of sons they breed, not by their talents and skills. But the exclusive and discriminatory practice of the 'others' and women can also be a trigger for change. As Dankwart Rustow, in his 1970 concept of Transitology, paraphrases it, system and governance change are always linked to the uprising of those who perceive themselves as underprivileged and disempowered, and therefore excluded and discriminated against. Women's empowerment over the past decades has led to massive protests against patriarchy and many changes in societies across the world. Therefore, today, as a response by autocratic leaders, we see efforts to 'retraditionalize' women in these societies, and push them back into their roles as mothers. Women pass on culture and national identities such as mother tongues and habits. If they become skillful and economically independent it will allow them to decide for themselves whether they will become mothers or not, and hence some of them may decide not to bear children for a patriarchal society will keep them at home. One reason why billions of women are deprived of proper higher education and working mobility relates to the fact that society should be prevented from any changes and transitions of the status quo that are set by the patriarchy. It means that thus far, we have been governed by political systems in which predominantly the oldest men according to the principles of seniority—take political 'father-like roles' as head of states and the family. Their successors are reckoned through the male line, which can be seen when state governors aim to pass on their power to their sons, disciples, followers, or male relatives. Women are generally excluded from taking higher political positions or leadership roles. However, glocalization of all aspects of social life might have a side-effect on women and minority emancipation.

Another example of glocalism and glocal governance is the dramatic rise of the informal labor sector. Today, most of the local GDPs come from informal and hence unprotected labor and therefore need to connect directly to international labor and business standards. Most people working in the informal sector are women. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that over two billion people work in the informal economic sector alone, which is predominantly local, and that comprises approximately 60% of all workforces globally. Local small and medium enterprises, local markets, and farmers make up to 40% of the GDP in Sub-Saharan Africa and up to 10% of the GDP in North America. Much of the national GDP comes from the informal sector and from transnational corporations that exploit natural resources in these regions. And increasingly, more states depend on remittances from their youth migrating abroad. At least half a million of the young population (mostly men) leave Tajikistan per year to work abroad. Most workers, domestically or abroad, don't enjoy labor or employment rights, insurance, pension funds, or other modes of protection. They are vulnerable in many senses and often subject to violence if they speak up against their employers. Where the informal sector is high, statehood is often low and locally organized groups start to help themselves and also turn into pressure groups. Most of them are led by working mothers.

Furthermore, the volume and the share of remittances of the national GDPs around the world has doubled since the 1990s. This shows weak or even failed state governance. Countries such as Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan in Central Asia 'export' working migrants and live on their remittances coming from Russia, Turkey, and the Arab Peninsula. These remittances make up 30% of GDP, and most of them are found in post-colonial contexts such as Armenia 10%, Georgia 14%,Moldova 15%, Nicaragua 15%, Honduras 24%, and in Lebanon, Jamaica, and Kosovo, up to 20%, and Somalia up to 35% of all sources of income.<sup>1</sup> Dysfunctional state authorities are often remittance dependent, up to 10% on average, or depend on exploitation of natural resources and are often connected to illicit financial flows. The same countries that depend on remittances lack a well-organized economy and trade policies—which is one of three core functions of a sovereign state. One consequence of this dysfunctionality is that organized crime groups often operate major business sectors in these countries. In comparison, in consolidated democratic countries, like Germany, Denmark, South Korea, or Canada, the remittance rate is between 0.1–0.5%. Consolidated democracies are often the target of OC groups but not the origin. In Europe alone, the estimate of active OCs is between 4,000 and 5,000 groups, many of them closely involved in politics and in a local business, but originating from the Middle East, Eastern and Southern Europe, and Central Asia. In 2021, former mayor of New York, De Blasio, even declared former US President Donald Trump's Corporate activities in the city as OC with an attempt to issue criminal investigations against him.

Furthermore, in the remittance-depended countries, it is the diaspora youth that keeps the state alive. But the fact that they work abroad will prevent them from triggering a necessary change in their home countries. They are de facto excluded from political participation in their home countries and hence cannot oppose corrupt or dysfunctional leadership. The control mechanism against corruption that works in consolidated democracies, namely the (young) civil society which seeks change and opportunities, does not work in countries who 'export' their youth as migrant workers abroad. Without an active and free young population, change is impossible. This triggers a downward spiral caused by the lack of young opposition to seniority, outdated traditions, and corruption. The more state authorities refuse to issue reforms, the more the frustrated and disillusioned youth will leave the countries, with their families often being their only ties back to their homelands. It does not take much to link this situation to the failure of national governments to respond to the needs of their citizens sufficiently. This vicious cycle continues for generations.

<sup>1</sup> World Bank, Remittances ranking and development. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX. TRF.PWKR.DT.GD.ZS?end=2020&start=1970&view=chart.

Nonetheless, worldwide we observe a youth mobilization of people born after the major democratic paradigm shift of 1991 when most countries undertook substantial democratic reforms, which most of them never implemented. The failure of these democracies, and the backsliding of their performance, goes along with the rise of organized crime and NSA, fueled by an army of young desperate men and women who have been disenchanted by the promises of the 1990s. It also goes along with the rise of Violence against Women and the withdrawal of the Istanbul Convention by authoritarian regimes such as Turkey. Gender-based discrimination and violence against women is always a means to measure the level of an inclusive society and democracy. One reason why ISIS in the Middle East, Boko Haram in Africa, or the Maras in Latin America are growing in numbers, is the endless supply of disillusioned, often young males, who have been disenchanted by their governments and elites and are now fighting back.

While the youth in these countries, in my view, are intentionally 'exported' as labor forces abroad to keep the country's old-male patriarchal systems alive, the diaspora youth also works as a boomerang thanks to global mobility and ICT. They reconnect via Facebook, Telegram, and WhatsApp and are slowly but steadily infiltrating the next generation with new ideas and concepts. During the global paradigm shifts and peace movements of the 1970s, these same people and global movements were protesting for 'peace' and ended the Cold War; in the 1990s, they did for 'freedom' and brought the totalitarian regimes down; in the 2010s, they sacrificed their lives for 'justice' and held many regimes and leaders accountable for their wrongdoings; and in 2020 it is their claim for equal 'opportunities' and fair treatment.

We observe an inevitable change going on because IT-based civil society today make up 60% of participation and public policy engagement. In India, the estimate is that there is one NGO/CSO for every 400 citizens, and globally over 15 million groups can be considered organized activist groups, most of them run by people below 30—there were only a few thousand two decades ago. Private donations to support CSOs have doubled over the past decades and compose its own market worth billions of dollars. Three out of four volunteers or staff in NGOs are women, and in the US, for example, NGOs contribute to 5% of the GDP. These developments show that they can become significant political actors, lobbyists, community leaders, and influencers in any country of the world.2 Needless to say, that not all have a humanitarian and liberating agenda, but the growing numbers illustrate that people start to organize themselves beyond statehood. According to a CSO survey by the UN in 2012, 61% of grassroot groups contribute to the social sector locally, namely in health, literacy, education, and social services, 20% of all CSOs engage in women's affairs and 10% in youth activities, and 14% work on behalf of marginalized groups, such as the homeless and refugees.<sup>3</sup> These figures illustrate that wherever the number of CSOs

<sup>2</sup> Global Leadership Bulletin, 2015, Facts and Stats about NGOs Worldwide, Articles & Interviews on 6th October 2015. https://www.standardizations.org/bulletin/?p=841 (August 2021).

<sup>3</sup> United Nations, 2012, UN-DESA Survey of Civil Society Organizations, Statistical data and respondents' comments reproduced verbatim, New York. https://www.un.org/en/ecosoc/qcpr/pdf/ cso\_survey\_annex\_8\_june\_2012.pdf.

is highest, the countries are governed by dysfunctional regimes, but with growing influence from external actors that often apply global norms and standards directly on the local level. CSOs fill the power gap in the public sector and replace state responsibility, which poses a huge problem for governmental authorities. More so, they often also fill the political gap wherever elected governments fail at responding to public health, climate change, cyber security, or migration problems, for example.

ICT based platform activisms enjoy many more millions of followers and supporters than ever before. Platform activists are quick, respond to specific issues, and advice to fix a problem on the ground. At the same time, they have globally connected exchange experience with others also thanks to the Open-Source technology of Tech giants such as Meta, Google, or Weibo, disseminating global norms directly to the local and individual user, for example, on matters related to domestic violence, labor standards, and unfair payments. Much of the localization we observe today is triggered by Open-Source Software such as GitHub or Linux, allowing for everyone's use and often making their patents accessible to anyone for free, as are scientific Open Access books—such as this one—and journals and Wikipedia. This provides new forms of knowledge transfer and global connectivity through public digital infrastructure—if one has access to it. Hence the control over users is by the users themselves. This makes them an 'open data resource' that can also be used or exploited by anyone if there are no rules and regulations for all in place.

Another example illustrating the shifts from the local to the global is the 'MeToo' movement starting in 2017 that triggered similar movements around the globe. The anti-sexual harassment and abuse campaign initiated by female Hollywood celebrities started as a campaign against sexual harassment and discrimination in the film business in the US and soon enjoyed millions of followers even in the most remote corners of the world. The same is true for 'Fridays for Future' and 'Extinction Rebellion' in 2018, starting as a youth protest in Stockholm and London, today supported by billions of followers of all shapes and colors. What these movements have in common is a simple message, namely Adhere to global standards and implement them locally!.<sup>4</sup> In 2021, the Earth Overshoot Day was marked on 29th July, the earliest ever measured; hence half a year we are exhausting 150% of our resources on a day-to-day basis. Only half a century ago, in 1971, the Overshoot Day was 20th December, marking the date when our demand for ecological resources and services exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year. Glocal activism has become the norm, thanks to ICT. In 2018, within less than a year, the Fridays for Future's, F4F, campaign started with Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg, which by September 2019 had over eight million supporters around the world (Díaz-Pérez et al., 2021). The recent developments confirm what Roudometof paraphrased earlier, namely that civil society is the 'blender of the local and the global' (Roudometof, 2017). But Robertson (1992) and Ritzer (2014) have also warned that glocalization of attitudes and actions, such as F4F, can be somewhere between top-down hierarchy and anarchy.

<sup>4</sup> UN Department for Economic and Social Affairs, 2020.

## **2.1 Bridging the Rest to the West**

Glocalization is a de facto motor of diffusion of Western lifestyles to the non-Western world. We are bridging the rest of the world to Western norms and standards, not in a geographical sense—as one might assume—but rather seeing the Western way of life, that Ritzer called McDonaldization (Ritzer, 2014), and mode of governance as an intriguing alternative to corrupt, nepotistic, and dysfunctional statehood in different parts of the world.

Glocalization is more than linking the local with the global and vice-a-versa. It can bridge different political systems, ideologies, faith, and lifestyles through conviction. The notion of the East and the West and the Global South and the North are popular ones, and we use them or read these terms at least once a day and believe we have a clear idea of what they represent. But in fact it is the West against the rest.

During 20 years in diaspora, as a European, I learned that the 'The West' stands for a liberal 'way of life,' in which women can earn a decent income and young men and women can choose freely their career path, beyond family traditions, beliefs, and habits. The West resembles a composition of attitudes and opportunities. The fact that this lifestyle is connected to human rights and democracy is not necessarily seen by those with no direct experience with a functioning democracy. A peaceful, free, just, merit and opportunity-driven society organizes itself in a particular mode of governance, mostly democratic and secular. Deities and holy books may be valuable moral guidance but not a justification of one's corrupt rulership. Over the century, this division between state and faith allowed people not only to dream of personal freedom but also to exercise it.

Moreover, the liberty and mobility to develop these personal capabilities, no matter one's background or citizenship, is what the West stands for—at least ideally. This is far from new, but currently under global scrutiny when we look at how societies will govern themselves in the years to come. The fact that autocratic regimes such as China and Russia openly threaten and even supported or launch a war against democratizing states in Myanmar in 2021 and in Ukraine in 2022, is a setback for global freedom movements. Political thinkers have always looked for the best way to overcome these cleavages. So we learn from the Greek philosopher Plato (300 BC) that anything that excluded or prohibited individual striving and personal development will lead sooner or later to conflict, as we see today. Ethnic, class, or religious superiority of one group over another leaves no air to breathe for merit-based societies. To inherit property and build on it might be not harmful per se, but it will discriminate, exclude, and deprivilege those without property and who must build skills and merits on their own, and even the most liberal attempt to govern people's faith has its limits. Faith-based communities have always tried to break inequality between classes and castes and left traces in our languages. The Greek word for 'democratic assembly' (600 BC), for example, is 'Ekklesia,' and we find it today in the Latin language in the Church term, *iglesia* or *eglise*, illustrating that any attempt to govern a society, through governance regimes, of free men and women has its rules and boundaries.

Striving for divine or ideological legitimacy is particularly strong among weak leaders and governments who cannot adequately respond to citizens' needs and problems, even in modern democracies. Former US President Donald Trump (2016– 2020) enjoyed being portrayed as a Christian Messiah, and even his speeches had a prophetic eclectic and apocalyptic tone. Refusing to acknowledge his loss in the election in 2020, he launched an unsuccessful coup attempt against the Congress with the support of his white supremacy disciples and male followers, the 'Proud Boys,' in 2021. Trump described the failed coup as 'sacred' on his Twitter account, namely that 'These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been unfairly treated for so long.'<sup>5</sup> The democratic institutions have stood against this coup, thus far, but without the active support of civil society it might fall one day.

Nevertheless, with all its many weaknesses and shortcomings, the West has not lost much of its intriguing power, and this serves as a linkage between the global and the local. It becomes even more elusive when we look back to the roots of 'Westernism' and its first reported polemic dating back to the fourth century AD. The concept of the West comes from the Western Roman Empire that declined during that period. At the heights of its decline, Roman citizens demanded the division of the divine and earthly power to save their Western living standards, but they were beaten down and the Roman Empire ceased to exist. Over a five hundred years later, this claim eventually succeeded in the division of powers between the heads of the Catholic Church and the ruling monarchs in the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation in Europe from the tenth to the eighteenth century. Due to the division this empire became the longest-lasting empire in Europe that impacted much of the world's governance regimes today, and eventually branded the term 'Western' lifestyle and mode of governance. It first manifested in the *Magna Charta Libertatum* in England in 1215 and the Corpus of Melfi in Italy in 1231 promulgated by the German Holy Roman Empire, demanding clarity on the divine, the royal, and more importantly, the role of citizens. Even though many of these treaties bear any modern human rights and democracy standards, and instead strengthened the power of the God-given ruler, centralized rulership, and diminished the power of his feudatories, peasants, army, and citizens, it also established an equal Rule of Law regime for all. The West started with the Rule of Law before moving to capital-driven democracy by the sixteenth-century protestant reformer Martin Luther in Germany. In 1517 he proclaimed secularization and citizen-driven governance, hence the beginning of modern democracy and capitalism. Until present times, we aim to organize our modern democratic societies much along these lines, and after a multitude of wars, genocides, and suppressive regimes, we know at least one thing, namely that centralistic regimes have never been able to resolve the problems of societies over a more extended period unless they use coercion, violence, and initiate wars. Ever since, the West was equated with Europe, and later with the US, and today 'Western values.' The American and French Revolution in the late eighteenth century were the

<sup>5</sup> Twitter Trump, 7 January 2020.

continuation of what started 800 years earlier, namely striving for separating inherited and divine powers from merit-based and individual powers. The French Revolution in 1789 aimed to finish with God-empowered-royalties once and forever and to end totalitarian rulership. Despite its failure at the time, alternative modes of governance were high on the agenda throughout the nineteenth century, all proclaiming fair and merit-based representation. Marx and Engels' most prominent promoted equalitarian and inclusive governance and a mixture of communism-socialism. Their ideas eventually led to a successful overthrow of one of the last absolute empires in Europe, Czarist Russia, in 1917. The second wave of democratization, according to Samuel Huntington, started afterWWII in 1945 as a response to despotic totalitarian rulership of Nazi-Germany and decolonization process in the French, Spanish, and Britisch colonies. Western values, norms, standards, and the idea of liberal democracy based on universal human rights standards that are enshrined in the UN Charta of 1945 and the subsequent UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 building the foundations of modern Nation-States. This world order, however, has been seriously damaged over the past years and for some it has ended with the Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2022.<sup>6</sup>

More than ever in this New Cold War, the West stands as a 'way of life,' despite its many flaws and rollbacks, and remains an attractive system to millions of people and not necessarily connected to a particular preference for political regimes.

But why, despite this attractiveness of the Western democracy has autocratic patriarchy been such a successful and sustainable governance regime for millennia? The short answer is: it has worked out well for many, thus far. It began with the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy during the Bronze Age and solar cults. Early civilizations such as the societies that founded Goebekli Tepe in Turkey (10,000 BC), Goseck in Germany (4000 BC), Uruk in Iraq (3500 BC), Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Delta (2500 BC), and Minoans in Crete (2000 BC) were non-hierarchical and non-patriarchal but adhered to more female deities than male. What archeologists argue is that these early mixed nomadic-pastoral-agro cultures had no male nor female priest cast because they had not yet settled in cities and temples to worship them, let alone steady councils to discuss politics. Community leaders of that time met during seasonal events, build necropoles for their ancestors, and met at these locations several times a year when they took decisions for the whole communities in the months to come. They managed sizable administrative cities like storage places in Knossos in Crete, Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Delta, and Goebekli Tepe for harvest and seasonal ritual ceremonies. They were no palaces, no kings, no queens, no hierarchies. Hence, female deities and the fertility of 'Mother Earth' were more appreciated than male figures, let alone leaders, who had one purpose—to cultivate and protect the harvest. We can find the legacy of these rituals and beliefs in the 'Mother of the Nation' and fertility cults across the world until today.

But to govern settlements and farmland, led to power shifts and competition. With the growing numbers of settlements and cities, the *civitas*, we transformed into what we know as civilizations, with a growing priest and administration cast and temples,

<sup>6</sup> Winkler, 2017, *Zerbricht der Westen*, C.H. Beck Publisher, pp. 15–21.

towers, and fortresses. Military leaders and kings and knights became mystical and even divine male heroes, with the sole purpose to protect urban settlements, turning later into dynastical monarchies around 2000 BC. Most prominently became Babylonian half-god-half-man rulers (1800 BC), Egyptian divine Pharaohs (1500 BC), Zoroaster Emperors (1000 BC) cumulating in Persian Kingdoms (600 BC), Chinese heavenly-son-emperor dynasties (200 BC), that continue in the way modern autocrats portrait themselves. A strict patriarchal regime was established and lasted for thousands of years, and remains mainly in non-Western countries until modern times. Nevertheless, signs of structural weakness showed soon which led to the first democratic experiments in Greece (400 BC) and later Rome (300 BC), namely to build a treaty-based *civitas* and *republica*. Even though these early experiments failed because they were neither inclusive nor equalitarian but only made for male citizens, the idea that these alternatives were first explored in Europe, stigmatizes until today democracy and human rights as a Western concept.

But it wasn't only the Greeks and the Romans who revolutionized governance, there were even earlier reported attempts to do so. In 1300 BC Egypt it was a revolution of social order and hence governance,—albeit unsuccessfully—when Pharaoh Akhenaton shifted from plural Gods to the first monotheist deities in Egypt, aiming to concentrate power and rulership. The second attempt only happening 500 years later during the Zarathustra era (800 BC) and much later the rise of all Abrahamic religions. What they nevertheless kept in common was that the divine power was male and a warrior like king, protecting civilizations and, hence fueling patriarchy. Most of today's religious rituals, ceremonies, and even seasonal holidays, like Christmas (Jesus) in winter, Nauruz (Zarathustra) in spring, and Maulid an-Nabi (Mohammed) festival in fall, are alleged birthdays of these male prophets. Moreover, they manifest religions and belief systems that are social orders and governance regimes tailor-made for men, not for women. The day-to-day legacies of these male caste and brotherhood governance regimes continue until present times in the plethora of brotherhoods and Freemasonries everywhere in the world, spiritual sports clubs like the Zurkhaneh 'House of Strength' in Iran, with the difference that these brotherhoods govern modern states in non-democratic societies, and hence have institutionalized themselves, and in democratic societies they are either faith-based or political organizations. Cicero (50 BC) already responded to these vicious cycles of male brotherhoods and dependencies that fueled a toxic cycle of Aristocracy, Oligarchy, Monarchy, Tyranny—that 300 years earlier were illustrated by Socrates and an incapability to share power, and eventually lead to democratic movements. He resumes that if power holders and leaders are not under control by the population, tyranny is inevitable. How present this idea of brotherhood style governance is today, shows the infamous speech by Belarusian autocratic President Lukashenko in response to the failed democratic coup against him in 2021 and the support to Russia's invasion in Ukraine in 2022, praising Belarussian and Russian governance regimes as a shield against Western liberalism, he claimed that 'Because this brotherhood is above the contrived umbrage and short-sighted political ambitions. Our unbreakable ties represent the foundation of common security and survival.'<sup>7</sup>

However, democracy can only work if all citizens see the benefit of it and an effective alternative vis-a-vis autocracy, as Socrates (400 BC) had already highlighted.<sup>8</sup> But when moving from exclusive patriarchy to an inclusive form of governance, the devil is in the details. Both regime types 'compete' which one better deals with issues such as public health, primary education, fair access to work, and security?

In their attempts to do so, Europe's powerhouses such as France, Italy, Great Britain, Germany, and Russia, far too often gave up on democracy and returned to nationalistic, even totalitarian, and absolute modes of governance. Nevertheless, since WWII, we have witnessed a more sustainable effort to change patriarchal governance regimes. The struggle for freedom, diversity, and inclusive participation is at the center of these efforts. Today these are the markers describing the West. Far from perfect, these societies stand for the ability to critically self-reflect and learn from mistakes, which many traditional, patriarchal, and so-called non-Western countries and societies do not.

In the 2020 survey, the World Value Survey (WVS) highlighted that the demand by citizens anywhere in the world for more local decision-making and individual responsibility—regardless of the regime people are governed by—has risen dramatically over the past decade. The images and stories drive this demand for a different yet often Western way of life, vis-a-vis the incapability of corrupt, dysfunctional, and patriarchal leadership from where the people escape, seeking equal and more opportunities to grow and live in dignity.

Apart from patriarchy, there is also an intellectual divide to community life that is different in the West and the rest. Nothing less than the debates about 'Family Values' mark the current debate. Yet, not only Western observers often ask what do Family Values stand for? Carefully phrased, they stand that, first, family ties are the only safety net, both socially and economically for those living in dysfunctional societies. Family networks guarantee shelter, food, and help in an emergency and medical treatments. The family patron(s) pay for education and decide which sons must go abroad to earn money for the family members left behind. In an ideal scenario, families protect and promote their members. Per contra, they often disregard individual talents, wishes, or capacities of the young, overall the women. They leave little space, if at all, for individual development or talents, let alone for young women to become anything else but mothers and child bearers and home keepers, and young men to be the breadwinner of the family taking any work, even if he is not equipped for it. Therefore, family values often stand for the opposite of a Western lifestyle that resembles free choice and opportunities for everyone Dahrendorf already highlighted in his earlier writings in the 1960s, that the foundation for any liberal democratic

<sup>7</sup> BELTA News, 28 January 2022, Lukashenko praises brotherhood of Belarusians, Russians, Ukrainians. https://eng.belta.by/president/view/lukashenko-praises-brotherhood-of-bel arusians-russians-ukrainians-147303-2022/.

<sup>8</sup> Cicero, 2012, *Der Staat, De Re Publica*, Akademie Verlag, 2012, p. 115.

society is the investment in human capital, regardless of gender, age, ethnicity, or class, to provide equal opportunities, and this is overall what differentiates Western values from Family values, today (Dahrendorf, 1979).

When it comes to the emotional ties toward family and relatives, there is not much difference anywhere in the world. According to the WVS, between 80 and 90% of all people value their families across the world, but for different reasons. In secular democracies such as Canada and the Netherlands, it is 79%, and in ideological autocracies such as China, the value of 'families' scores up to 86%. In cleric autocracies such as in the Islamic Republic of Iran, for example, it is 94%.9 Hence family is an essential factor for all human beings globally, no matter the mode of governance; but their role and function are different in democratic and autocratic countries. In the West, they serve as overall emotional and moral support for one's development; in societies without a social welfare system, they are simply a matter of survival.

Less than 1% globally find family 'not important at all,' which illustrates that family and social networks are pivotal for any society, no matter the regime type. Instead, the growing anti-Westernism is, to some extent, rooted in envy or fear that people have to take individual responsibility for their own faith and that not everyone is willing or able to take.

Therefore, alternative mode to the Western style are becoming more intriguing. China's government, for example, is a modern and successful constructor, open to modernization, technology, and science. For many disillusioned youth around the world, it is an intriguing authoritarian model despite its patriarchal structure and total surveillance, because it has infrastructurally developed the country. The regime in Beijing propagates itself as a caretaker that fixes problems, even global ones, such as the pandemic and climate change—and it largely complies in terms of anti-covid strategy and renewable energy plants. It is not to be confused with the destructive policies of the Russian governance model, which works mainly through negative propaganda and blame policies against the West to maintain legitimacy. China resembles today the most striking example of a system opposed to what glocalization aims for and what the West stands for. It is top-down, patriarchal, and autocratic regime with specific 'Chinese characteristics.' It is a consultive mode of governance, not consensus-building one.

Nevertheless, China has issued a white paper on democracy launched in early December 2021 in response to the US Presidents' Summit of Democracies a few days later (to which the Chinese president was not invited) and the New Cold War rhetoric of the political regimes. The paper is titled 'China: Democracy that works,' and in which the CPC highlights the importance of 'political consultation' between the government and the citizens, but it defies consensus-building among political leaders and civilians, as liberal parliamentarian democracies claim to do. It also defies the weakness of Western regimes explicitly and states that China did not duplicate Western models of democracy but created its own and hence, China is not against democracy, and by this makes concessions to its citizens and youth,

<sup>9</sup> World Value Survey Wave 7, 2017–2020, Databank: https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVS Online.jsp (August 2021).

but it defines it by its terms (The State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China, 2021, p. 45). It simply means that those who aim for more decentralization and individuality, or participation are excluded from society—or in Chinese terms, 'pacified.' The number of 're-education concentration camps' has dramatically grown in numbers over the past decade. Ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang province and Tibet are the norm, and lawyers, journalists, bloggers, and CSO activists have disappeared for years. China's way of autocratic governance style took increased speed after the 2013 launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) around the world—a motor for China's own economic development and an effort to change world order. This project came to pause by the 2020 pandemic and closure of the country toward foreigners, but did not end there. Building roads and railways, energy plants, and gas pipelines where there had been none before are compelling to young people. In less than ten years, China has invested approximately 50 billion dollars overall in over 138 countries worldwide in the energy, logistics, and transportation sectors, improving many people's lives and giving opportunities to them. Development for all, no matter the political costs, is the striking new ideal and a proxy-ideology that finds more followers every day. China has become a lead nation in the 'New Cold War' between the West and the East.10 Ever since the term New Cold War has entered world politics and is used to grasp what has been in the air and confirmed by the Chinese foreign minister in January 2021 and later US president Biden in March 2021. The New Cold War started in January 2021, when China's Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, said in a press conference, '(…) Some see China as the so-called biggest threat and their China policy based on this misperception is simply wrong. What has happened proves that the US attempt to suppress China and start a new Cold War has not just seriously harmed the interests of the two peoples, but also caused severe disruptions to the world (…).'<sup>11</sup> The US response followed shortly. In March of the same year during the G7 summit, newly elected US President Biden counteracted by saying '(…) I suggested we should have, essentially, a similar initiative "(author\* BRI)," pulling from the democratic states, helping those communities around the world that need help (…).'<sup>12</sup> The battle for the minds and capacities of young people have started. Despite any diplomatic rhetoric, the 'war is on' and the New Iron Curtain, for the years to come, draws its line between China and Europe, along the Ukrainian border with Russia. Central Asia in the middle, creating a form of buffer or no-man's-land. Which mode of governance and regime type will be 'winning' the

Europe's response to this New Cold War came promptly in 2021, shortly before the 'Summit of Democracies' in December 2021. The EU launched its own BRI,

war is the one that is able to best adapt to global challenges locally.

<sup>10</sup> The New Cold War has begun, 7 January 2019, Foreign Policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/ 01/07/a-new-cold-war-has-begun/ (August 2021).

<sup>11</sup> Wang Yi, Chinese Foreign Minister, 2 January 2021. China hopes next US administration will restore normalcy to bilateral ties. http://sb.chineseembassy.org/eng/zgyw\_12/t1844086.htm (August 2021).

<sup>12</sup> Joe Biden. 26 March 2021, Reuters' Biden says he suggested to UK's Johnson a plan to rival China's Belt and Road by Jarrett Renshaw. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-britain-bidenchina-idUSKBN2BI32M (August 2021).

namely the Global Gateway Initiative (GGI), mobilizing a total of 300 billion Euros for infrastructure investments in emerging countries by 2027. The focus is on digitization, energy, transport, health, and education. Unlike Chinas BRI, the EU provides the funds in the form of grants connected explicitly to the states' human rights and democracy performance. The European State hope that from the perspective of the receiving countries, the GGI has a decisive advantage over loans from China, which drive up the high mountain of debt in emerging countries and is also one in the battle over a better governance system (GGI, 2021).

China is an intriguing case study when measuring glocal governance because its autocratic leadership is successful in many aspects of managing the public good, albeit there is no free civil society or media, and the economy is firmly controlled. Beijing complies with international norms, albeit cherry-picking, and denies them when dealing with the conflict in the South Chinese Sea with Japan and the Philippines or in their trade disputes with the US and Canada. Annually, Beijing is sending up to 100,000 students to the US and 50,000 to Europe to learn, copy, and implement back home—a precondition to stay patriotic when studying abroad. Beijing also supports thousands of students from its BRI countries. They receive scholarships to come to China to study, and by that, the regime in Beijing has successfully mobilized a youth globally in its favor—by scholarships, not coercion, but not by conviction. Hence, Chinese investments seem to have put food on millions of tables and filled in security gaps wherever needed along its BRI in Asia, Africa, and South America, and even Central Europe. Notwithstanding, the winds seem to have changed over the past years, and many governments and citizens protest the 'Chinese way' of development aid.

Because, whereas the 'Silkroad' of the past has often been romanticized as a synonym for East–West connectivity by peaceful means of trade, cohabitation, and 'harmony,' as Frankopan argues, the new BRI is far from the same principles. BRI is a one-way road from China to the rest of the world, but the road is closed and heavily controlled if one wants to enter China (Frankopan, 2017). China does not apply the same policy standards to foreign investors inside China as it expects other governments to grant to them. This dichotomy will sooner or later lead to domestic conflicts and an erosion of the CPC governmental grip, both in foreign policy and domestic ones. It started between 1976 and 1986 when China opened to global trade and even put former leaders of the CPC on trial, the 'infamous 4,' 'bandit-group,' under Mao Tsetung's widow Hu Yaobang. She was sentenced to death and publicly disgraced as a female(!) sacrifice for all the bad the CPC had done. After all, this sacrifice did not cleanse the CPC of responsibility, let alone atoning for the massive human rights violations in the past. 'Socialist democracy' by Den Xiaoping (1904–1997) in 1979 and his call to 'dare the change'—copied from German Chancellor Willy Brandt's 1969 slogan to 'dare more democracy'—did not last long, and neither will the newly launched 'Democracy that works.' Instead China's 'wall against democracy' and any attempt to rewrite 'democratic norms' by excluding citizens from participating in decision-making started with the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, when China decided not to be part of the global paradigm shifts after the Cold War and cumulated today with approximately two million people in concentration and re-education camps.

In the light of this re-autocratization and backlash against democracies since the early 2000s, Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay in the British Guardian in 2007. In the article, he was explaining what he had meant by his much-disputed 1992 book, 'The End of History,' namely that the idea of freedom, democracy, and modernization will first unite people around the globe, and consequently will lead to a paradigm shift in terms of governance against autocratic leaders. Today's mass conflicts and protests in Syria, Belarus, and Thailand and the fearful resistance of Ukrainians against Russian invadors are only the peaks of the iceberg that Fukuyama had predicted in 1992. These protesters and fighters want a government that provides fair and accessible opportunities for all and self-determination. Some do not necessarily want to change the regime (as most of these countries have *de jure* constitutional democracies) but they want to change the mode of governance. However, Fukuyama also highlighted that if the idea of democracy does not stand up to its promises and sustainably solve peoples' problems, it will be weaken and eventually fail—as can be witnessed in many young democracies around the world. Back in 2007, Fukuyama also proclaimed that the future governance regimes would follow democratic principles but look more like the supranational EU because it stands on the subsidiary principle of local governance. Hence, the EU today is a rough example of glocal governance. The EU more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary US. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a 'posthistorical' world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military he ends.<sup>13</sup>

Harrikari and Pauhala (2019) consider the global tendency to glocalization rather a form of modernization and transformation. They suggest a new concept in the era of glocality, that of 'compressed modernity.' This modernity connects global norms with individual activism and people who take the faith of their community into her/his own hands and solve problems faster and more effectively, without much state interference. Glocality thrives when the centralized state fails to deliver, but vanishes when the governments resume their obligations vis-a-vis citizens. However, if that were true, we would not see glocal governance in democratic regimes, too. During the deadly Tajik–Kyrgyz border enclave conflict over water in April 2021, after the installation of Chinese surveillance technology to control people's access to water, Kyrgyz accused Tajiks of stealing water and in the fights 80 people were killed, including children. Thousands of people have been evacuated from the conflict zone and became homeless. A few days after the shootings and killings around the enclaves in Batken, around 500 people went to demonstrate in the capital city of Bishkek, demanding that the authorities hand them weapons so that they could 'protect their homeland'—because the state failed to protect them. Left alone by an incapable or unwilling government, these people turn to IOs to resolve their problems, even preparing a lawsuit before the ICC as a last resort, but without any chance of being heard. They bought illegal weapons, primarily Chinese. After all, the conflict was

<sup>13</sup> *The Guardian*, 7 April 2007. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/apr/03/thehistor yattheendofhist.

also triggered by local elites to challenge and replace the state power in the region. In the end, the new hegemon in the region, China, organized a meeting among the two foreign ministries of the countries in conflict two weeks later in Xian in China. China instead delivers to the claims of its 'clients' in this case, conflicting parties and taking de facto control in Central Asia, leaving the former hegemon Russia out.<sup>14</sup>

Less dramatic but nevertheless intriguing are examples of governance shifts within the EU, where Poland and Hungary have turned their backs on democracy and Rule of Law over the past years. The Hungarian President Orban is seen as the prototype of an 'illiberal' anti-democratic leader, successfully—as it seems—appealing and responding to the needs and fears of millions of citizens. His role models are Russian President Putin and Erdogan in Turkey, President Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Xi Jinping in China. Populist leaders, such as Orban, believe that democracy cannot work because it is not what people want. He calls other EU countries 'chaotic' and in disorder and positions himself as the only guardian of order to end the chaos and provide for 'his people.' Nevertheless, his patriarchal attitude toward governance erodes, as he was no longer able to deliver in times of crisis in 2015 and 2020 while losing absolute power in later elections.

As strange as it might sound, climate change can be the bridge builder in the New Cold War era. It is also the engine that drives much of what glocal governance stands for, namely dealing with global threats locally. For example, after China agreed to the UN FCCC, China's Foreign Ministry envoy Xie Zhenhua, at the 2017 Climate Change summit in Germany, emphasized that the successful reduction of Chinas CO2 emissions by 2020 is

'(…) the recognition of our country's long-term efforts and achievement of coordinating of both domestic and international dimensions, (…).'15 By this Xi provided an avenue for Chinese citizens to hold their leaders accountable in case of noncompliance. If a centralistic government over a longer time preaches one thing and does precisely the opposite, it paves the ground for rebellion because it produces a political system that shows a constant bias against the pursuit of the public interest (Petracca, 1991).

Other compelling examples of the 'Bridge between The East and The West' can be found globally when visiting the largest megacities in the world. They are multidiverse, multi-lingual, and often run by multi-stakeholder groups, even in Shanghai with 24 million inhabitants, Delhi with 19 million, and Lagos and Istanbul with 14 million, next to Lima and Kinshasa with 10 million inhabitants, London and New York with up to 9 million inhabitants.16 At least 60% of the world's population lives in urban city-like areas. Some of the most densely populated are the Netherlands and city-states like Hong Kong. Most megacities are in sub-Saharan

<sup>14</sup> 24.kg News, Bishkek, 11 May 2021, A Morenko, Foreign Ministers of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, hold talks in China.

<sup>15</sup> China Meets 2020 Carbon Target Three Years Ahead of Schedule, 28 March 2016. https://unf ccc.int/news/china-meets-2020-carbon-target-three-years-ahead-of-schedule (August 2021).

<sup>16</sup> Urban net, News and Database on Municipal and Local Governance, sustainable urban development and decentralization, Infographics. https://www.urbanet.info/world-urban-population/ (August 2021).

Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Asia is the region that has experienced the most rapid urbanization since the 1990s. It takes little to assume that in urban dwellings, governments need to respond much more diligently to changes and demands by citizens by providing hygienic standards, work opportunities to earn a decent income, schooling, and security, just to name a few. When it comes to governing these megacities, glocal governance is often the only solution.

Not surprisingly, it is the urban-dwelling megacities where we see the symbols of the West, in their architecture and infrastructure, and they are much alike everywhere in the world. Overall, the places of consumption are alike, the shopping malls, the McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants, and Starbucks Coffee shop franchises. They resemble the global–local capitalist political economy (Haller et al., 2019) in a glocal way of life, garnished with free Wi-Fi, vanilla-flavored Cafe Lattes, and refill sodas. For all that, copying a particular way of life is a statement more than anything.

The variance of effective governance is determined by how sustainability problems are solved following good governance and human rights principles (Shapiro, 2005). Many governments respond to these trends by making concessions, ratifying international treaties introducing reforms, and allowing franchises to come to town. However, in doing so, they often stabilize the existing ineffective or corrupt regimes. They make them more static and inflexible than practical (Croissant, 2004; Levitsky & Way, 2010). Corruption and lack of social mobility are obstacles to prosperity of the society, and the day-to-day corruption and dysfunctionality of the institutions outside the coffee shop cannot be sipped away with a cappuccino.

Scholte (2016), in his essay on 'Whiter Global Theory,' argues that the process of glocalization is 'transscalar.' Transscalarity describes the shift in social relations; for example, in a Western-style Cafe, young people forget for a moment the ethnical, racial, religious and overall social divides of their outside reality. This hybrid experience turns into a spatial, multi-dimensional complexity by abandoning, or purposefully being ignorant to for a couple of hours for the hierarchies between people, state institutions, countries, regions, federal or local versus national, etc. Wearing (real or fake) Adidas sneakers, working with a MacBook at a Starbucks coffee house, and sipping an Italian cappuccino is the highest expression of this hybridity these days in dysfunctional regime societies. Experiencing different realities in one day, when moving from the Western style Cafe home to a traditional environment, serving tea to elderly family members and obeying their words out of tradition and respect for seniority. This is a toxic mix of Family values and Western norms. Escaping to the cafes is also about escaping clientelism or patriarchy. Transscalarity is a slow but steady process in which neither side dominates but instead creates a new glocal reality. It is less hierarchical, but it is not necessarily functional if there are no clear and transparent norms and rules to which all can freely adhere.

Transscalar glocality replaces separate concrete domains as traditions, habits, or belief systems, but it can also be infused in authoritarian regimes because it is a manner of governance or living, not a regime. With this premise, the 'transscalar' methodology does not distribute causality between discrete spaces, such as global decisions at the UN level, nor does it determine national trade policies; rather a mutually interrelated and collaborative decision-making process in which all sides take their share of implementation and enforcement. Indeed, transscalarity, as Scholte argues, does not stipulate in advance what geographical or multi-level dimensions or actors dominate in each situation. Against this backdrop, glocalization is an analytical framework that helps assess how national boundaries erode and the global, national, and local modi of governance change. Consequently, Western standards and norms will diffuse into other lifestyles, It can change and penetrate geopolitics, power relations, the role of family, and cultural distinctiveness such as language, faith, and role of men and women.

Russia is another crucial player in this new global divide and the New Cold War. This immensely large country is geopolitically located between China and Europe in the heart of Eurasia, and slowly moved from its democratic commitment to a full fletched autocratic oligarchy. Its closest political and strategic partner is China and former Soviet Republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus. But Russia has nevertheless always been looking westward in its history, knowing that its most reliable partners are in Europe and the West. When realpolitik kicks in and the global crisis must be resolved diligently, much of the authoritarian and populist leaders of the world turn to the West for answers and solutions as seen during the pandemic in 2020–2022, the economic crisis in 2008–2009, and in times of climate change. Whoever takes the lead in the Kremlin will ally or fight its neighbors in Europe for economic terms and political stability. Russia already allied with European countries during the Afghan crisis in 2021 and will continue to do it. China will sooner or later find itself isolated from global politics, and the government in Beijing will feel more pressure from within the country.

When George Ritzer curbed the term glocalization and illustrated it with the McDonaldization of the world's society in 2013, he observed a phenomenon, that people obviously do not go to McDonald's because of the quality of its cheeseburgers, but because they seek refuge in an environment that resembles a way of life they seek to. To go to McDonald's for lunch has become a status, and a statement for wanting to live a different life. The same can be observed with Starbucks Coffee and its plethora of imitations that resemble a 'certain way of life.' People indulge themselves in the illusion of equal opportunities and free choice. For all this, this diffusion of lifestyles goes in both ways; there is also a substantial influx of non-Western lifestyles, mostly Eastern, in the West, mainly seen in the cultural context of food, fashion, music, and language. However, what remains Western is the combination of a remarkably open and diverse lifestyle through democracy.

Apparently, Starbucksization of the world has one more element to offer than just a democratic lifestyle, and that is the intriguing and compelling effect of coffee itself. Whether we like this hot and bitter beverage or not, coffee stands for renovation and individualism. Since their first appearance in Europe, coffee shops have been the places of gatherings for opposition, intellectuals, and writers. Hence, they have posed a threat to autocratic powers since they first popped up in the fifteenthcentury Ottoman Empire in Constantinople. In the later period of Enlightenment in Europe in the sixteenth century, coffee places in Italy and France were the cradle of new political thinking. A café is an open and spacious transparent place of debate, exchange, gossip, observation, and new ideas, often in opposition to the leading role model of divine powers and the ruling class. Similarly, before the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, in the Western part of Kabul, coffee houses were a refuge for the youth. Many places were run by women, providing a place where intellectuals and opposition met, discussed, and set up a business—but overall escape to a different lifestyle from the burdens of survival in conflict torn Kabul city.

It seems that coffee houses have often been the catalyst for change. In 1789, the French Revolution started in coffee shops in Paris, and there again, 80 years later, Karl Marx developed and discussed his communist ideas that were the cause and fuel for the next World Revolution in Russia in 1917. The correlation between the number of coffee houses and revolutions has for long triggered the interest of historians and chemists, alike, claiming to have found evidence that coffee contains not only physical stimulus but that it also improves our analytical thinking.<sup>17</sup> The century-old teahouse culture in Central Asia, for example, has the same purpose, providing a private, non-governmental space for deliberation and exchange. Their owners are often easy to bribe to keep silent and receive 'donations' from community leaders and businesses to not pass on information to local police.

Coffee- and teahouses are gathering spaces for community leaders and civil society at the same time. To what extent there is a causal link remains to be proven, but Starbucks imitations are found today in the most remote places of the world, and even when their coffee is overpriced and the quality of the beverage can be discussed, they have many customers, resembling the 'transscalar' act that Scholte has highlighted to. How controversial coffee houses are, even in modern societies, is illustrated in the opening of the Starbucks Café in the Forbidden City in Beijing in 2000, and which became extremely popular among Chinese youth immediately after it was opened. It was closed in 2007 after a government-driven online campaign accusing Starbucks of violating Chinese cultural values. In other words, people going there made a clear political statement about which way of life they preferred, especially in a country that had never been serving coffee to the public before (Han & Zhang, 2009). Examples like this illustrate that opening a Starbucks or imitating it is not a simple matter of drinking coffee, let alone enjoying it. It is a sign of desire to change societal and political culture. As Fukuyama predicted in 1992, a pro-Western attitude, even expressed through pop culture and coffee houses can threaten autocratic regimes that uphold their powers on so called traditional values.

Robertson (1992), Huntington (1996), and most recently Fukuyama (2018) have long postulated cultural clashes between Western ideas and ways of life, if the natural diffusion of ideas and lifestyles cannot merge freely among the people. If governments restrict and prohibit this diffusion and exchange of ideas and lifestyles, there will be resistance by citizens against the political regime, which in response will counteract with political violence. Robertson et al. (1995) argue that the West and

<sup>17</sup> Pearce Rotondi, Jessia, 2020, How Coffee Fueled Revolutions—And Revolutionary Ideas. From the Ottoman Empire to the American and French Revolutions, coffeehouses have offered a place for (sober) people to discuss new waves of thought. https://www.history.com/news/coffee-housesrevolutions (August 2021).

its representations, overall business, and franchises like Starbucks, for that matter, willingly or not, shape and change identities worldwide. This is more so in societies and regions of the world that have thus far neither been significantly penetrated by European colonizers nor been in closer contact with Europe and the US. The way we dress, the kind of music we listen to, blockbusters we watch, and the way we carry our coffee-to-go are symbols of the lifestyles we attain. So does architecture, the way we build apartments, or how we decorate and spend our leisure time in Disneyworld Parks and their adaptations worldwide. The 'Youth Cult' and the billion-dollar antiaging industry are equally shared globally, coming from Western beauty styles. In every society, we find the same youth hype. However, these rapid cultural, economic, and political shifts would not be possible without ICT and rapidly growing global pop culture industry, which in return has made it a prime target for propaganda, channeling, censoring, shaping, and often blocking.

Because with the cultural change comes political change, and what we expect from our political leaders, tomorrow. Mythical King Arthur, for example, has enjoyed dramatic renaissance over the past decades ad the ideal leader of a free world of brotherhoods. Although 'kings' seem unlikely to deliver and respond to peoples needs in a glocally intertwined world and the Anthropocene, he resembles an egalitarian mode of governance. Successful leaders today act as chairperson and look, dress, and act rather as CEOs and managers of political affairs, instead of knights and heroes. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, was such a new type of leaders. During her terms from 2005 to 2021 she saw herself as a servant and manager of people, not as their leader. Jens Stoltenberg, former prime minister of Norway from 2001 to 2013; and Tsai Ing-wen, the president of Taiwan, reelected once since 2016, strongly emphasized the consensus building way of governance they would follow. What they have in common is that they are democratically elected, served several scandal-free legislative periods, and rarely are on the front cover of a fashion magazine. Moreover, they delegate large parts of decision-making to local authorities and citizens and rather act as supervisors. One might call future glocal governors as being politically non-biased, truly gender-neutral, and hence calling for the end of patriarchy (Öztimur, 2007).

The idea of transcending, bridging, and overcoming borders, whether territorial or societal, is not new. Borders are always boundaries to overcome, but they serve as control mechanisms and safety guards in the form of checkpoints, lockdowns, and sanctions. ICT-Firewalls in Russia and China, the Cold War Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall till 1989 in Germany, and even heavy sanctions against rough states such as Russia in 2022 and Iran in 2018, indicate, that classic top-down state diplomacy and politics have failed. Whether territorial borders still are the best boundaries to protect people today from what is commonly understood by significant threats and challenges remains to be seen. Last but not least, borders lead to exclusivity and, in many cases, to a homogeneous society which will—if we follow similar historical terms—always lead to the use of coercion and violence by governments because the lack of exchange and transparency will lead to dissatisfaction with the regime.

## **2.2 Theory of Glocality**

The dissemination of global norms and the empowerment of local actors eventually led to what is glocality. Local actors become active because national governments fail to deliver, manage problems, and respond to citizens' needs and for good grace or ill, share power with local leaderships on the one side, and international and global players, such as international aid organizations, on the other side.<sup>18</sup>

Glocality determines the way we perceive and respond to challenges and which actors we ask to solve problems when they occur. If the Chinese government solves border conflicts between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan because the governments on both sides are unwilling to do so, and when the China's BRI allows them to rebuild public schools and provide food for victims of the conflict, then this is one form of glocality and glocal governance. Furthermore, if glocalization is a process, then glocality is the theory that would allow us to explain the advantages and disadvantages of glocalism. For example, glocalists claim that glocal governance allowed faster global health norms to be implemented by local director of hospitals during the pandemic because they directly adhered to the recommendation of the WHO in Geneva.

Critical theory and method as proposed by the Frankfurt School in the 1950s helps us to assess glocalization and what we know about it. It critially assesses information, knowledge, and education and lets us ask whether and to what extent education and information, and even pop culture lead to attitudinal and behavioral shifts without ideological or religious interference (Theodor et al., 2017). How ICT and global markets have led to more global and local connectivity and why not between governments of different countries—which the Westphalian order would suggest? Being aware of one's analytical subjectivity and cultural bias toward everything is the essence of critical thinking. In short, we aim to be as objective as possible when looking at current paradigm shifts, as there is no wrong, and there is no right; it is just different.

Against this backdrop, a theory of glocality is grounded in global principles that seem to change our values and morals, attitudes, behavior, and habits, through conviction not coercion, according to specific and socially preferable mode of conduct or end-state of traditional and static existence (Robbins & Judge, 2012). No matter how we comprehend our attitudinal and behavioral shifts, values lay the foundation for people's attitudes and motivation and influence our behavior. Beliefs are rooted in lifestyles and cultural habits, which Ritzer described as McDonaldization, as mentioned above, and which we can see among others in the globally shared pop culture and coffee drinking culture, as long as they stand for forward looking perspectives and opportunities.

After all, if we take the pro-Western lifestyle example, as illustrated above, obviously that works in the other direction too, in anti-Westernism. Today's anti-Western movements and followers proliferate within anti-capitalist, anti-globalist movements.

<sup>18</sup> Multi-stakeholder approach for cyber security, read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/ commentary/joseph-s--nye-contrasts-multilateral-and--multi-stakeholder--approaches-to-govern ing-cyberspace#3tHlru7sIjTo2Qsf.99.

Glocal movements such as We are the 99%, 'F2F,' and 'Queer,' and other populist and conspiracy movements such as Q-anon, express radical and often violent religioustraditionalist and nationalistic view. Some albeit a few, support terrorist acts, even allying with groups such as ISIS or the Lord Resistance Army.

Other examples of anti-glocal movements, are the *Les identitaire* in France, the *Proud Boys* in the US, and *Hindutva* movement in India who oppose anything close to glocal and prefer strict hierarchical and patriarchal order systems. Some do accept women as members, but most are predominantly male brotherhoods. They are the essence of the claim that the 'World is divided' today between the Western lifestyle embracing diversity and liberal individualism, and the Anti-Western lifestyle living in homogeneous societies based on religious values and family traditions. Hence the West does not stand for the geographical West but for a particular mode of governance.

When looking at the governance paradigm shifts in the Anthropocene, the gender inequality seems to be one major obstacle to move on. Female teachers in Greece such as Sapho (600 BC) and Attika 440/430 BC had a short period of equal access to resources and prosperity, but whenever women became too influential in matters of governance, patriarchy retook full control. Although the experience of all empires and societies has been that when governance is inclusive and society is diverse, innovation, trade, and economy flourishes and life is better for all. Men take over and establish exclusive order regime. Diversity and inclusivity and equality only seems to appeal to people when times are difficult, but not when they are overcome. At the same time it is very challenging to govern in a hierarchical top-down manner, no matter the gender. Hence, even if we realize that diversity is an asset, if we do not change the mode of governance, that asset will only prevail for a short period of time.

One of the early feminists whom we can associate with a theory of glocality, and of whom there is a record, is Christine de Pizan, and her book on the City of Ladies, '*Le Livre de la Cite des Dames*,' from 1405 (2005). She illustrates how essential virtues such as reasoning, rectitude, and justice flourished under female leadership, but not under male. She observed how women were systematically expelled from leadership for that reason because they govern more sustainably and provide for future generations, too. Therefore, she wondered whether so many men hate women, maybe for their ability to concentrate on problems and fix them more effectively locally, rather than conquerors of society and imperialist (Hinterberger, 2020). Even female emperors, such as the Russian Empress Catherine II, the Great (1729–1796) were known for their different way of governing. Catherine was known for her social reforms and sustainable policies among them introducing a public health service for all people in Russia at that time.

Sociologist Max and Marianne Weber highlight in his 1904 works on 'Protestant Ethics and Capitalism' that effective and sustainable governance might be linked to the Protestant attitude and actions that allow for inclusive innovation during industrialization to flourish. The works paved the way for Samuel Huntington's (1991) assessment of the first wave of democratization from the 1780s to 1920s. But any of these ethics, he goes on, can also be self-destructive if there is no free and civic control over capitalistic powers and leadership. Protestantism and its (global) values certainly dominate today's global liberal capitalistic political economy and are currently questioned in the West and the East alike, because they create inequalities when there is no civic control (Haller et al., 2019). Both observations have in common that there must be virtues and principles to govern successfully.

A glocal governance theorem can, too, be explained and measured via ultimatum game and change theories (Reinholz & Andrews, 2020). The change theory describes a tipping point for successful change and shift from one system to another, namely when we have convinced or gained the trust of 33% of any given cohort of society. It explains that change makers need to convince 1/3 of any sum or society in order to move on to aim for a consolidated 2/3 majority of the total population. Being in the minority and only having 5–10% of the population's trust or conviction that equality and opportunities is worth fighting for, will not make change happen. To reach a consolidated majority of 66% through sheer persuasion and convictions is an extremely long and difficult path. If we reach or convince at least 1/3 of a population to join the cause for change, i.e., through an ideology, religion, constitutional setup, then there is a likelihood of reaching out to more people, to at least a simple majority of 51%. Simple majorities can shift and decline at any moment and therefore are not a stable majority. Therefore any changemaker and thinker, such as Socrates or Marx, with a new idea on democratic governance should aim for getting at least a consolidated majority of 66% that support their ideas, in order to make sustainable change (Thornton, 2017). The reason why Socrates, Luthers, and Marx's ideas were so revolutionary and successfully is because they published and marketed them widely at their time, and by this reached out and convinced more people at the time. The Ultimatum test game and theory involves two players. One of them receives a sum of money which she must share with a second player. The first player, the proposer, can decide how much she offers the second player, the responder. That player can either accept or reject the offer. If he rejects, neither of the players receives any money. Mathematically, the first intuition is to offer the opponent the smallest amount possible. However, during the game, players routinely reject even high offers if they deem the split unfair, which proves that together with change theory, fairly split and consolidated forces (team work) will effectively change society (Güth et al., 1982). In conclusion, one can deduct from both theories that successful change only occurs if a saturated and consolidated majority supports the mode of governance because they think it is in the best interest of all.

In their book 'Why Nations Fail,' Acemoglu and Robinson proof change theory. They argue that throughout history, sustainable change and state stability over a more extended period was possible by a mix of government-induced incentives of which a consolidated majority of at least 2/3 of society felt they could benefit from (Robinson & Acemoglu, 2012). Effective and consolidated governance is determined by how freely change is taking place by most people, namely 66%. For this, Transitional Justice procedures such as truth commissions, trials, or memorials to delegitimize past autocratic regimes can be a successful toolbox to consolidate and legitimize new democratic regimes. Measures such as vetting and lustration, memorials, and history commissions can shed light on wrongdoers, exclude them from the new political game and pave the way for political reformers who take democracy and human rights more seriously than their predecessors (Mihr, 2017). Thorough lustration processes, such as corrupt and criminal stakeholders and political leaders, paired with incentives, work slowly but steadily, and can trigger sustainable regime change. Transitional Justice measures, such as compensations, reparations, restoration, and affirmative actions, can enhance and fairly distribute resources of land and water considering climate change-induced migration and urbanization. In these incentive policies, the governments take a mediator role between the global and the local. Whenever incentive policies comply with the vision of fair distribution of public resources such as education, clean environment, health, and access to a decent income, the vicious circle leading to a Mafia state will have less chance to continue.

However, to trigger the change and move from 5% to 33% support rates, one slowly and steadily propagates and campaigns to convince people and stakeholders alike to go to new avenues better for all. Empowerment and education programs aim precisely at that. They explain how to reach constitutional majorities. In short, in any given society or market share, there is always a tiny margin of change-makers on the one side of the spectrum and the change phobics, on the other side. The undecided rest of the cohort, the 90%, can go either side, with or against the proposed change. Change-makers must make concessions and compromise to win over many of those undecided people. Someone who proposes a new idea or concept, such as glocal governance, will not be able to trigger significant change for the whole cohort or target group if she does not at least win over a number of up to 33%. If only 20% of the cohort believe glocal governance is a successful way to outmaneuver corrupt leadership, it will not succeed.

Populist leaders—for better or worse—know change theory, and apply them when using rhetoric such as 'We against the others,' and dividing societies in order to gain even a fragile 51% majority of supporters. They see the 1/3 as the 'critical mass' and the minimum threshold to make change happen. Once reached, it can lead to reach a larger majority and move most of the society. Once we have convinced people and often compromised our ideas to reach this 33%, we can move on—and compromise even more—to reach the consolidated, absolute, and constitutional majority, the 2/3 of votes, which is often used in referenda. That is why in autocracies fake opinion pools highlight support rates of 70% or 80% of leaders. We also know from electoral turnout and constitutional majorities that the simple majority of 51% is weak and unstable to justify major changes. This equation is more elusive, because the rest of the non-consolidated crowd, the other 33%, if fragmented, does not pose a significant threat to the 66%. If they organize and compromise, they can become the new change-makers or social movements to topple the 'old regime' that felt comfortable with 66%. Change theory explains the current shifts and flows of movements and countermovement toward glocal governance. More so, it explains why some leaders, once they reach 66% of public support, use coercion, propaganda, censorship, and lockdowns to maintain their powers. They will do anything to keep the remaining 33% of opponents fragmented and intimidated, so that they cannot build a coalition against them. Democratic leadership that does not work with censorship and coercion, and only by convictions and attitudes, will see significant shifts in power and difficulties in maintaining consolidated support for the system.

Even if a democratic government keeps its 66% of votes and supporters through free and fair elections, it is a constant struggle to maintain that support. To keep its consolidated majorities in parliament and among its constituency, policymakers must make constant concessions compromises, build coalitions and consensus, and not lose support (Emerson, 2016). In a democracy, leadership that cannot deliver, manage, and respond to most people will fail. Democracies resemble change and ultimatum theory principles, but we do see that in many parts of the world, white male supremacy and patriarchy, with its winner takes all mentality, leads to an exclusive 'all or nothing' mode of governance.

Hence, despite populist tendencies in a globalizing world and a trend toward *Patriarchal Reconquista*, billions of people's faith and ideals have dramatically changed over the past decades. Through the McDonaldization and Starbucksization, and shared pop culture on Weibo, Netflix, and Youtube, and Telegram or Tik Tok, global norms have been disseminated, and people are more aware of their rights and possibilities instead of collective identities (Almond & Verba, 1963; Frank, 1995; Hirschl, 2004; Inglehart & Welzel, 2005, North et al., 2009; Rohrschneider, 2005; Simmons, 2009 and others). 'Civic disobedience' has been globalized as a form of resilience toward autocratic leaders, as elaborated by Thoreau in 1848. It grows every time, as he paraphrased, when people feel or perceive themselves to be deprived of their opportunities and capabilities. Protests and civic disobedience target three main areas of power control, (1) political/juridical, (2) economic/financial, and (3) religious/educational. Who holds control over these three public sectors holds control over society. Hence it is here where change begins (Barrington, 1993).

Since the 2010s, when a globally exhausted and disenchanted youth in Tunis, Tel Aviv, New York, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Cairo, Hong Kong, Tehran, Madrid, Athens, and Moscow turned to the streets, disobeyed authorities, and demanded justice, while often facing political violence; civil disobedience had a more vigorous revival, they were in fact asking for changing modes of governance.

Those who grew up in the 1990s had no hegemonic, ideological, religious, or otherwise belief system dominating their education or public surroundings. What impacted them instead was the fact that they never could build trust in governmental institutions, let alone having the confidence to make a change on their own, because of the massive corruption and strong nepotism they were surrounded by. Explaining why their frustration turned into protest movements around the world, we can use the help of Aristotle.

Aristotle (400 BC) coined the metaphor of the three-generational turns: first, the grandfather builds the house (1/3), second, the father consolidates and improves the house (2/3), and third, the grandson maintains or destroys the house (3/3). Hence, once people take democracy for granted, they tend to destroy it and turn it into tyranny. After that, the cycle starts from the beginning, and people seek more democracy. The rise and decline of human matters seem to be trapped in a vicious cycle of change theory. New evolving regimes ought to stand through at least one generation of 20– 25 years—as highlighted by Aristotle—to see the actual change in people's behavior and thus trust in these newly established institutions. Historians like Koselleck call it the 'levels of time' or pace of change that impact peoples' belief systems and behavior, taking a minimum of one generation. Despite the historical facts or status quo, only our normative belief system and moral understanding determine whether we justify and adhere to a political system, and Koselleck calls it the divergence between power and justice (Koselleck, 2000). The question is, whether glocal governance which is a mode, not a regime type, can break this vicious cycle in the future?

At first, it does not look like it. Powerful male priest and warrior casts and brotherhoods, as explained earlier, have for millennia dominated and controlled societies. They defended the cities, the territorial fatherlands, and the family under patriarchal dominance. The past was more about conquest or defense of territory and women in the name of a religion or ideology. Most of these patriarchal regimes are built on fear and suppression, and much of these governed societies turn into populistnationalist societies. Michel de Montaigne, a sixteenth-century philosopher, warned that 'We should fear a society that is fearful and afraid of others,' and he, as did Dahrendorf and Fromm in the post-WWII context, called upon policymakers, that to overcome fear they must empower people individually, giving them the confidence to stand up against usurpers—only then has tyranny no chance. When Thoreau in the 1840s called for civil disobedience of the masses, he meant that at least in the US people are empowered enough to turn their anger and dissatisfaction with a regime into peaceful and targeted protest. The era of Enlightenment was when reasoning, science, and morals were secular and beyond divine absolutism. In 1996 Huntington wrote his book 'The Clash of Civilizations,' arguing in the same direction, namely the empowered versus the non-empowered and fearful people. Those reasoning and searching for the truth and knowledge will less likely believe in irrational and absolute systems (Huntington, 1996).

These debates remind us that we are going through an epoch of Enlightenment and struggle similar to the one 300 years ago. Then, too, it was not much of a surprise when the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers and activists put the human being in the middle, urging every individual to be self-reflective and critical. Descartes' sentence *Cognito ergo sum* (I think therefore I am) became a slogan of emancipation from fear at that time—as it is today in the debate how and to what extent artificial intelligence (AI) will determine the Anthropocene. Another resemblance is the growing youth rebellion against the establishment and traditionalists. Hollywood blockbusters mirror these changes and disseminate Western values, screening a plethora of High School movies where young people disobey elders, seek their own opportunities and find their solutions to problems in the light of the 'right cause.' By this, more than anything, 'Western values' are transported through pop culture, songs, and movies and represent a rebellious youth that protests seniority. In societies, mainly in the East, where that is unheard of, these rapidly incoming new ideas through pop cultures cause the clash of civilizations, but not among countries as widely believed, rather within societies and families, between a disenchanted and angry youth and traditionally obeyed elders.

#### 2.2 Theory of Glocality 43

The theory of change and the clash between youth and elders have always been the subject of political assessment. Machiavelli's 'Principe' or Thomas Hobbes' 'Leviathan' (1651) explain the nature of men in politics and his desire to control and do what is best for the community and then pass it on to their sons. Dynastical regimes are probably the most dysfunctional of all governance regimes but have determined much of our history and the concept of governance, which is overall exclusive, and hence a matter of time until it collapses. Considering Aristotle's three-generationmodel and change theory, and according to Hobbes the cycle goes as such, 'the first men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation.' The first generation conquers to make themselves masters of other men's persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles.

Nevertheless, patriarchal concepts and dynasties have survived, and traces are found even in liberal democracies, despite their horrendous failure of the past, culminating in Hitler's male supremacy Nazi elite and Stalin's victorious *homos sovieticus*. Yet, in modern-day autocracies such as Belarus or China, the patriarchy system is preeminent even though societies embrace a Western lifestyle. During the 2020 rebellion in Minsk, leading protesters were predominately women, and hence Belarusian totalitarian leader Lukashenko felt he had to retaliate against women specifically. He lost the elections against a female opposition leader and urged these protesters not to pit women against him and explained what he meant by saying that a woman cannot yet become president of Belarus, arguing that '(…) that our Constitution is such that it is hard to even for a man to carry this burden. If this burden is placed on a woman, she will collapse, poor thing.'19

Patriarchal traditions are one thing, and religious rituals are another, albeit they mutually reinforce each other. Both are hierarchal and exclusive by nature and seek followers, obedience, and submission. Faith-based patriarchal organizations and even states, such as the Catholic State of the Vatican, the Taliban Emirate, are strictly patriarchal by order. Mostly we find a mixture between faith and governance in all modern societies. For example, almost all national hymns reference God and a belief system, even more so to the many brave men who lost their lives for the fatherland and nation. National flags often resemble the blood that men spilled for the fatherland and the bright skies and fertile grounds and pastures of 'mother-earth' who nurtures them. Half of the nation's population, namely girls and women, are not resembled in hymns or national symbols, other than child bearers. In short, our traditional understanding of the Nation-State includes male knights and conquerers, territorial warriors, and sacrifices in defense against others to safeguard women and their reproductivity.

The recent break-up with traditional forms of government is also a struggle for acknowledgment of the LGBTIQ community. The fact that patriarchy is rooted in reproductivity of men and his number of children and descendants, as well as in the father–son relationship, explains why gay men have been excluded from the political elite—unless they live a hidden or a bisexual life and produce a male heir. Many gay

<sup>19</sup> KIROVSK DISTRICT, 20 June 2020 (BelTA)—Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko urged not to pit women against him.

men are attacked, tortured, and even killed as a form of 'honor killing' by other men to defend the pride of male reproductivity.

Gay Parades, Cancel Culture, and Me Too protests are thematic rebellions seeking a social change toward more respect for individual identity and at the same time diversity and inclusiveness. It also stands for a rupture with tradition and customs, including the so-called 'family values' that assign a man and a woman to a specific role to keep societal order. Anything beyond that order, overall, including the rights of intersex, transgender, people of color, or gays and lesbians, is disruptive and hence a threat to traditional societies. Those who prefer the comfort zones of traditions and patriarchy fear the new and 'the others.' They respond with either populist, nationalistic, or otherwise radical movements and violent actions—of which domestic violence is often only one of many phenomena.

Fashion styles introduced by Western and white Anglo-Saxon masculine and intriguing enough, often homosexual—designers have become the universal uniforms by male and female officials in particular in international settings. Locally they more often appear in traditional suits of their countries—signs of frustration over lost masculinity and brotherhoods toward diversity. The young, skinny, androgyny body shapes have become universal beauty standards, and heavy female shapes seem unsuitable and thus women incompetent. Women in office have to resemble male shapes in order to be recognized. Although this debate is not new either, its radicality is. Decades of feminist movements, millions of court cases on unequal and discriminatory treatment among the genders, and a global 'Me Too' movement illustrate how difficult it is for society to accept female leaders. Some 3,500 years earlier, in 1458 BC, the Egyptian female Pharaoh Hatshepsut had to disguise herself as a man with a fake beard to be a credible and legitimate leader and chief-priest and to receive the respect of her subordinates. Feminine shapes are viewed as weak and not fit, whereas broad shoulder pads in male suits signify competence, and if women stand for endurance and men for strength—no matter its scientific truth—it does replicate in the way they govern.

During the 2016 US presidential election campaign, the body shape and hair of the first female candidate, Hillary Clinton, seemed to be a more meaningful measure of her abilities to govern than her previous achievements as Secretary of State. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's (1979–1990) dress code received more attention from the press than her mode of governance. Ukrainian Prime Minister Julia Timoshenko (2007–2010) was assessed according to her beauty, New Zealand's prime minister Jacinda Ardern's (2017–present) pregnancy was covered daily, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel's (2005–2021) weight loss and hairstyle made it into the headlines.

Women in politics are not only reduced to their body shapes, female attractiveness, fertility, and appearance alone, but also to their status as widows, daughters, or granddaughters of former state leaders, and hence judged according to their family lines. Such was the case for presidents and head ministers Indira Gandhi in India from 1966–1984, Isabel Peron in Argentina from 1974–1976, Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan from 1988–1996, and Imelda Marcos in the Philippines (1995–2008), or Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar (1991–2021). They are measured by the reputation of their deceased fathers or husbands. Individual female competencies and merits are secondary, which says a lot about how we view women in politics today.

Nevertheless, questioning these traditions and political symbols of national identities can be deadly, as seen by the example of the mayor of Prague, Zdenek Hrib, in the Czech Republic in 2020. He and the heads of the city council became a victim of a poison attack by the Russian Secret Service (FSB) because they had ordered the removal of a 1980 bronze statue of Soviet 'war hero' Marshall Konev from the main square in the city center to a museum. Citizens of Prague had petitioned for the removal because the Marshall symbolized crimes against humanity during times of occupation of the Czechs until 1990. Russian intelligence, however, saw this as an attack on the victorious and liberating narrative promoted by patriarchal presidential leader in Russia, who was fearing that it would spill over to questioning the role of the Soviet Union during its existence.

In the same vein, the concept of Cancel Culture aligns with the LGBTI and Feminist movements as a rebellion against patriarchal traditions. Moreover, the search for true identities and self-empowerment follows the slogan of George Orwell's novel 1984, 'He who controls the past controls the future, he who controls the present controls the past.' Today, one could add, 'those who controls the Internet, controls the present.' Tearing down statues of war heroes; removing portraits of governors and politicians who were enslavers and traders; changing street names and asking for the return of stolen and abducted archeological artifacts from the British or Berlin Museums and the Louvre to their countries of origins, is a cultural rebellion against Western and white male Anglo-Saxon hegemony and the status quo. If Western society responds to it in an inclusive and participatory manner and returns the artefacts, it will remain a cultural and political leader in the world; if not, it will lose its leading role. Hence, as a standards setter, the West has to perform according to its own values and norms. One example that is worldwide watched and followed is how Europe treats its minorities. Over the past decades, homophobia has become a new pseudo-religion of anti-pluralism and anti-democracy. Russian President Putin uses anti-gay propaganda as rhetoric against Europe, claiming that the EU's only goal is to make Russian men gay. After the end of the Cold War in 1990, hardly anyone could have imagined that it would be Anti-Feminism and Homophobia who would replace anti-capitalist propaganda from the Cold War.

It is not determined how Western societies will respond to it because retaliation by the traditionalists waits no longer, neither in the West nor in non-Western societies. We are in the middle of a glocal culture rebellion that is part of the New Cold War. President Xi Jinping has started his own top-down cancel culture rally introducing an AI-driven Social Scoring System (社会信用体系) and surveillance technology to dismantle so-called 'unicorn' companies such as Huawei and Alibaba who represent the Western capitalistic way of life, and therefore culture. Anything Western, even business and leisure culture, ought to be either reinterpreted as Chinese or be abolished, as seen by the example of Starbucks in the Forbidden City. Instead, the attempt for glocal change is replaced by patriotism as a form of a pseudo-religious mix between ideology and personal identity, for which many people are willing to sacrifice their lives. Consequently, China has become a 'fearful giant' and is closing itself up again, step by step.

Switching continents, the much-underrated press statements by UNWorld Conference against Discrimination, Racism, and Xenophobia in 2001 in Durban, South Africa, already foresaw that 'multi-ethnic States is the new norm,' not the exception. Its enemies are those, who fear erosion of homogeneous, exclusive, and autocratic societies, and inevitably sooner or later using coercion to maintain their homogeneous status quo. With that warning in mind, one can also assess current conflicts and to what extent they are related to the hopeless retaliation of some governments to channel, stop, and even prevent the influx of migrants or mobility by others. Attempts to impose unilateralism often come at the expense of those who do not seem to fit in these cultures, such as migrants or ethnic minorities, and this creates social inequalities that, in return, will lead to conflict. To fight marginalization, minorities often intensify their efforts, even using political violence, to preserve and protect their identity. The hardening of opposing forces can cause increased intolerance and, in the worst case, armed ethnic conflict. In such cases and to prevent escalation, the protection and promotion of minority rights becomes essential.20

Global human rights norms and standards aim to ease and help negotiate this transition process from homogeneous exclusive societies to more inclusive and diverse ones. The normative frameworks of freedom, cultural, political, or social rights are general benchmarks against which glocal policies are measured. Human rights treaties are toolboxes to fix problems in society and create a more inclusive and egalitarian society for all. A vast array of international human rights declarations, conventions, and agreements such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 1948, the two significant covenants of 1966 (1976), the Inter-American 1969 or European Convention for Human Rights 1949, the African Banjul Charter 1981, the Arab Charter on Human Rights 1994 (2004) of the Charter for Fundamental Rights of the European Union from 2000 (2010), to mention but a few, all determine the human rights standards that serve as normative benchmarks and standard-setting tools to resolve, for example, child abuse, adequate housing, access to water, or fair working conditions. The advantage of human rights and good governance standards is that they are adaptive to different cultural, economic, environmental, demographic, or other circumstances of society because they are qualitative, not quantitative, by nature. Thus, parliaments or executive councils responding to citizens' demands for education and professional development would follow these standards—but it does not necessarily say anything about how to respond, under what circumstances, and its outcome. The fact that there is a nonviolent response would already leverage the quality of governance in the long run. Therefore, this framework can be applied to all kinds of political regimes, regardless of traditions or political circumstances, because it only defines those responsible and accountable for practical actions and implementation.

<sup>20</sup> UN World Conference, Durban, 2001. http://www.un.org/WCAR/e-kit/minority.htm.

With 80% of the world's population under the age of 40 and over half of them with regular or permanent access to the Internet, the world is about to change forever. These digital natives have already formed one global society and generation, and they have more in common than apart. They do not even need a common language, territory, or faith, except for their access to the Internet. Net Neutrality is a global CSO movement demanding that Internet platform providers such as Google, Facebook, or Instagram treat all Internet communications equally and not discriminate or charge differently based on users' background or content. Cyber and Internet Justice and free and neutral access are unresolved since free access is not working without the commercialization of the Internet and the heavy use of AI. Instead, AI has become an ally and tool for glocal actors and their identity.

## **References**


## *Online Sources*

*Global Gateway Initiative (GGI), European Union*. (2021). https://ec.europa.eu/commission/pressc orner/detail/en/ip\_21\_6433

*The State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China*. (2021, December 4). https:// www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202112/04/WS61ab0795a310cdd39bc7957e.html

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# **Chapter 3 Glocal Challenges in the Present and the Future**

There are a vast number of indicators to measure the interlinkage between global and local, including local habits, customs, and preferences such as music, pop culture, the food, or faith-based rituals. A prominent example of glocal diffusion is the blinking colorful Christmas Tree found in every shopping mall between Shanghai and Santiago de Chile.

To identify glocal challenges, that emerge from the dramatic diffusion between the local and the global, we can start by looking at societal dynamics locally, including the vastly growing number of angry young people and the rising number of local violent and armed conflicts, that are prominent symptoms if not outcome of bad governance. Half of the world's population is under the age of 30 and today live far from fair opportunities and social mobility, and that can be the cause for dramatic and not always peaceful changes in society. Today, we find a 50:50 split globally, with one side leaning toward democratic regimes, the other half toward authoritarianism. As it seems, the 'end of history and victory of democracy' is currently on parole or taking a break (Fukuyama, 1992).

In response to this, in 2021 US President Biden proposed a New Global Deal to bring the democratic welfare state back in and summon a 'coalition of democracies' worldwide, marking a turning point in the debate on democracies in crisis through 'backsliding,' norm-breaking, and otherwise dysfunctional democratic practices.<sup>1</sup> And the EU responded to the backslide of democracy by launching the Global Gateway Initiative (GGI) that will allocate billions of Euros in investments, including for education and democracy.

Whenever there is a push for change, there is resistance. At the same time the EU was opening its borders to migrants and calling for more diversity and democratic reforms, elsewhere in the world, Russian President Vladimir Putin was resuming his life-long leadership as Father of the Nation in 2012, and Xi Jinping was installing himself as the 'Eternal President' of China in 2013. Around that time, Islamists were taking power across the Middle East, Afghanistan, and the Sahel and in Turkey

<sup>1</sup> Biden, Joseph, 2021, US President. Speech US Congress, Washington, 28 April 2021.

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2022

A. Mihr, *Glocal Governance*, SpringerBriefs in Political Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02108-4\_3

and Hungary democratic standards were dramatically in decline. In 2015, de facto King Mohammed bin Salam ibn Abe al-Aziz of Saudi Arabia tightened his power to become an absolute leader; and Recep Tayyip Erdogan pushed himself to the presidency in Turkey, after staging a coup in 2016. India's absolute Prime Minister Modi staged a military coup in Kashmir, manifesting his Hindu-nationalistic policies against Muslims and the West in 2019. What they all have in common is that they counter the desires of their youth and social mobility. Back in 2014, during a state visit to Europe, Chinese President Xi highlighted that all that matters is the outcome of governance, not the mode of governance: 'The fruit may look the same, but the taste is quite different.'2 Glocal governance is the complete opposite of that, it changes the mode and way decision are taken and implemented. It is mode of governance that looks into the medium and long term outcome, not short term. For short term authoritarian forms of governance it is important that people are quiet, seemingly happy, and kept busy, in order to keep stability in a country. Xi emphasized this mode of governance in the CPC's White Paper from 2021 with the title: 'Democracy That Works.' There he highlighted that China is not refusing the Western way of life in general, but its mode of governance of achieving it, namely through general elections, changing leaderships, and free media. Hence, China's ability to adapt to Western lifestyles in all aspects of architecture and day-to-day life is breathtaking; but to achieve Western standards or long term sustainable prosperity which China so much aspires to, cannot be achieved by autocratic means of governance.

China is taking the 'New Cold War' seriously, more than Western representatives who in majority have for long ignored it, believing in global connectivity, conviction, the power of persuasion. The Chinese government, in contrary has declared various measures to fight back Western lifestyle through pop culture, the myth of 'development for all' and cyber surveillance, led by a propaganda of the Han-Supremacy. All what we know from similar regime types and propaganda of the past, above all by Nazi Germany and Soviet Stalinism, this mode of governance is not going to end well, because fear, suppression, and closing up entire countries from the outside world is not sustainable. The governance model that Xi introduced is like those of past totalitarian regimes. He repetitively emphasizes his nation's urge to overcome the indignation and humiliation by the West in the late nineteenth century (Fenby, 2017). The more state propaganda fuels this—one sided—perception of the past the more people will be alienated from the West and others, let alone after the closure of China during the Covid-19 pandemic.

But even though history seems to repeat itself in the case of China, it also tells us that these measures will not blindfold the people for too long and a massive brain drain from China to the rest to the world will soon follow. Hence the concern that China will soon increase its internal surveillance as well as military presence in Asia and start its first external war in the region, potentially vis-à-vis Taiwan and in the

<sup>2</sup> *Irish Times*, 2 April 2014, Brussels, 'Democracy not for China,' says Xi Jinping, Political systems of other countries, would not suit Chinese.' https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/ democracy-not-for-china-says-xi-jinping-1.1747853 (August 2021).

South China Sea, to demonstrate its strength and to distract the public from domestic problems is not far-fetched.<sup>3</sup>

By the example of China one can illustrate that it is less the denial of modernity, not even that of globally shared values, capitalistic enterprises, or ICTs that stops autocratic regimes from embracing democracy. Rather, it is what Fukuyama described in 2018, namely the perceived distortion of a nation's dignity. Dignity is, in simple terms, the freedom to determine one's future and faith, free from coercion or want by others. To constantly fuel people's mind with past heroism, supremacism, nationalism, and populism against the 'others,' counteracts everyone's personal dignity and freedom.

Nothing of that is new Greek mythological figures Hermes and Prometheus were blinding society with their lies and populism, plotting, censoring, and using trick to successfully get public support. They were successful for a long time. But in times of crisis, eventually, they were unveiled because they had failed to prepare for these periods in such a ways that it would safe lives. As a consequence both were expelled from the community and into exile. They could not deliver their promises when their leadership was most needed. Blinding and plotting are used by modern autocratic leaders in the same way as in the past mythologies, employing propaganda and national sentiments. Stalin's chief propagandist Trotsky, for example, saw the importance of keeping the spirit of the Russian Revolution from 1917 alive, as long as possible, to make people feel victorious and happy. Trotsky coined the notion of 'keeping the revolutionary moment permanently alive' through propaganda and lies to blind society with false heroism and to govern as one pleases. According to change theory, the revolutionary moment is when 2/3 of the population supports the regime change by whatever it takes. Strategic propaganda of a narrative paired with fueling an enemy image can maintain an autocratic regime for quite long. Schumpeter highlighted the success of the 'permanent revolutionary ideal,' that even modern democracies need to constantly claim and fight for their human rights values and norms to keep the consolidated majority attuned.

To win the Cold War on one side takes more than just doom on the other side. For many Western liberal democracies, they must succeed with democratic reform at home to be credible in emphasizing democracy abroad. On many fronts, the authority to propel democratic progress resides within institutions and how they respond to crisis (Brown & Carothers, 2021, 23 July).

There is a new trend in adopting Western lifestyles while avoiding to introduce any democratic reforms, namely a form of 'piracy of Western lifestyle.' This piracy happens when elected populist leaders, like Sadyr Japarov in Kyrgyzstan, or nonelected warlords such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, violently and with no respect to treaties, expropriate and take over infrastructural investments by Western donors or companies, such as mining, hospitals, and put their comrades and family members in charge.Warlords have no problem asking international donors and organizations from Japan, the US and the EU, to keep providing basic facilities in their countries while

<sup>3</sup> The New York Times, 2018, Adolf Hitler, Educational Publishing Books, New York Times, pp. 31– 33.

they themselves deny any democratic procedures and disregard agreements and treaties. If Western donors give in and continue with aid packages they become accomplices of dictators and human rights abusers. Many of these donor dependent states have turned into 'addicts to donations' from third parties or otherwise cannot survive, may it be IGOs or NGOs. They are by no means a sovereign independent state, because they fail to deliver on their own the most basic goods to their citizens.

The West and Western donors must reconsider their aid policies and humanitarian actions and should no longer allow for the tax money of democratic citizens to nurture warlords and organized criminals who defy any human rights standards possible and disregard treaties. Like 'hunters and gathers,' these warlords 'hunt and gather' the goods and infrastructure that Western NGOs and IGOs have imported to their territory. Often these investments are seen as imposed Western lifestyles, but the fact that many of them are kept intact after the takeover by warlords and autocrats, means that they are not as alien after all. It is a solid image to picture the current situation of warlords and organized criminals taking over 30 years of economic and administrative infrastructure. Western donors hoped to resolve local problems in conflict-torn societies such as Afghanistan by these means.What remains is the desire of the people living there to have the same living standards as the West, but at the same time are steered by the incapability or the unwillingness to change any traditional mode of governing the commons. Glocal ways of life through brotherhoods and patriarchy, seems to be irreconcilable.

The story of the wealthy West 'feeding the poor in autocratic states,' while their leaders care nothing about democratic and human rights norms, has reached a turning point for many, notably the EU with its GGI policy. If there is no adherence to a minimum of fundamental rights and at least electoral democracy, there should be no investments and no money given to patriarchal regimes. Instead, prosperity for all will be measured by how inclusiveness and Rule of Law-abiding governments respond to their citizens' needs. The term New Cold War captures in many aspects the new cleavages, even more so when we look back at the height of the old Cold War until 1990, when the term 'Absurdistan' was used to describe autocratic (Soviet) type leadership, namely leaders that say one thing and do the opposite in a slowly eroding and declining political system (Politische Studien, 1971).

Today, one could say that *Absurdistan* is everywhere wherever there is a dysfunctional regime or community and even city government. We still use it when describing inefficient, corrupt, and suppressive governments and regime. Even though 'stan' literally translates into 'place,' it has become a stigma, almost a symbol for bad governance, not only of the autocratic and highly corrupt regimes in Central Asia, whose country's names mostly end in 'stan.'

Vicious circles of lousy governance practices often go hand in hand with 'toxic masculinity' and brotherhoods, as mentioned earlier. We find the call for *fraternité* in the slogans of the French Revolutions, calling upon brotherhoods to stand against the monarchy. Patriarchy, as outlined earlier, and toxic masculinity is the glocal challenge that is about to be overcome if we take our goal of inclusive governance seriously. Smiler describes these masculine circle-bounds as a 'dominant ethnic homogeneous male group, relatively well-educated, heterosexual and from the upper class' (Smiler, 2019). Any incentive to change can be perceived as a threat to it and if these brotherhoods see no benefit in changing their habits without losing what is key to their identity and power, they will fight back. Anything can be a threat: youth groups protesting climate change, especially if female leaders lead them, women wanting to go to university or homosexuals forming same-sex partnerships. Anything that stands in the way of masculine identity vis-a-vis female reproductivity must go.

In India, for example, the ruling BJP Hindu Party runs its own right-wing 'male-only circle,' the R¯as.t .r¯ıya Svayamsevaka Sa˙ngha, founded as early as in 1925 and composed of businessmen that form a deep state and de facto govern the country. Similar developments we see in the movements of the Muslim Brotherhood ( , Jam¯aat al-Ikhw¯an al-Muslim¯ın), founded back in 1928, as a wealthy male-only group, or sect, following Sharia Law that eventually sought power in Egypt after the Arab Spring in 2012. They successfully do charity in public sectors such as health and education, and they recruit young men and promote them to become wealthy influential stakeholders. Other brotherhoods work similarly everywhere, such as the earlier mentioned 'Proud Boys' in the US that flourished after Trump became president in 2016, and *Les Identitaires*, founded in France in 2003. Similar groups are vital in Hungary and the Balkans. They pop up when and wherever pluralistic and elected and representative governments and parliaments show signs of dysfunctionality and are too weak to respond to glocal challenges. The German *Bundestag* with over 700 parliamentarians is the second-largest congress after China's National People's Congress with 3,000 members, and its size slows down the inclusive and effective decision-making process in Germany. In Poland and Hungary, parliamentarians are de facto disempowered by veto powers of the prime minister who is part of the brotherhood-like ruling party. Radical male movements often fill the power gap that seems to appear when governments become dysfunctional. They are strictly hierarchically organized, representing order and discipline in an unorganized and presumably chaotic pluralistic and diverse world. Similar movements are organized by clerics: the Saloon movement in Iraq, the radical Christian Lebanese Forces (al-Quww¯at al-lubn¯aniyya), the *Juntos por el Cambio* in Argentina, 'Liberty Korea' in South Korea, and the Thai Palang Pracharat ( ) in Thailand, founded by former male military men who fear the decline of their influence. They follow an ethnic-nationalistic males-only agenda based on clientelism and faith and paired with the conviction that men are superior to others. They stand for law and order, conduct volunteer charity work for the youth, run public soup kitchens, award scholarships, and free education, and provide health care. Their charities often replace public services of the state, which in return is a sign of dysfunctionality of the same. By this they form 'deep-states,' often run by brotherhoods that follow religious rules and laws, such as Sharia Law or secret Codes of Conducts, and traditional 'Father–Son' dynasties. Not seldom, they occupy a branch of radical 'warriors' and fuel the rise of organized crime, and Mafia States. Organized movements and terrorist groups, such as ISIS, Boko Haram, or the Lord's Resistance Army follow similar governance patterns. Team sports, religious rituals, in most Abrahamic, Hindu, and Buddhist congregations, and their cloisters and schools for males only, aim at creating a brotherhood-led governance regime. It is for that reason, that a Hindu pujari, a Muslim Imam, and a Catholic bishop can only be men. Active memberships in these sports clubs and religious congregations require masculinity and obedience to traditional rules beyond any doubt, expressed in codes of honor and conduct written down in holy books which are followed blindly.

Confucius (500 BC) was in favor of brotherhoods and the father–son relationship as the most reliable form of governance because it guarantees obedience of the law. But if the father does not fulfill his duties to protect the family's safety, the son has the right to oppose and even kill him because non-obedience would be disruptive to the collective security of the family and society—a concept that justified millions of killings over the past millenia, even within Royal families, and more generally, during the cultural revolution in China from 1966 to 1976. Following this concept father–son relationship, there is no emancipation foreseen through enlightenment, self-determination, and teaching, let alone female emancipation, because collective security can only be guaranteed through obedience to rules, no matter how discriminatory and exclusive they may be.

Except for Buddha (5000 BC) and Socrates (400 BC), none of the philosophical thinkers of Antiquity highlighted individual empowerment and enlightening of an individual person, independently of any brotherhood or government. Buddha was one of the first of his kind who established monasteries for women and men, but those for women only survived for short period. Fanatic religious followers later abolished them. Until today brotherhood structure ultra-orthodox religious communities such as the protestant Amish in the US, the Hasidic Jews in Israel, and Lamaist Buddhists are following millenia old rules with the sole aim to protect urban settlements and family households and procreation. They consider women only as a means for procreation and children as their property, denying any concept of individual self-determination, human equality, and consequently share a sense of resentment against multicultural, diverse, and inclusive societies.

Female leaders and role models remain the exception in these power games. If they take the lead in authoritarian systems, they are often either the daughters or the widows of former male leaders, such as the case of Marine Le Pen, who led the Front National in France after her father declined, or Aung San Suu Kyi, former State Counselor in the government in Myanmar who is the daughter of Aung San the father of the nation. Hence, glocal challenges are not new, but they illustrate that the current paradigm shift is not only about how to respond to climate change and digitalization, but also how we govern our societies differently in the future. So far, as illustrated, all our modes of governance have been male-dominated and hierarchical for reasons found in the past.

Another example of contextualizing contemporary glocal governance is to take a snapshot of how popular culture and the billion-dollar film industry respond to the global and the local. Most intriguing of all, are fantasy, science fiction, and children's movies because they often portray an illusion and reality we wish for. One of the recent blockbusters that called attention, was the phantasy animation film 'Trollhunters,' from 2021, which shows how a diverse group of teenagers and seniors calling themselves Trollhunters are fighting evil Titans, resembling the Ice and the Heat that stand for climate change, to save the Earth from destruction. Nuri, a good female Titan and a mix between Greta Thunberg and Mother Earth, joins the group to fight the upcoming Ice Age and drought. After long fight against the evils she finally exclaims, 'My friends (the humans) set me free to fight you!' Eventually, and not surprisingly, together they defeat Ice and Heat, and mankind survives. Not less elusive, but quite the opposite approach when saving planet earth is taken up by the 2019 Chinese science fiction blockbuster titled 'The Wandering Earth.' The action film illustrates how a male-only (except for one schoolgirl who is the adopted daughter of the film-hero) and army-like Chinese troop of scientists and astronauts take the lead in world government on behalf of the UN. All other nations in the world gave up their sovereignty in favor to China, who seems to have the best regime to resolve the threat to planet Earth. Eventually, the main character, a Chinese astronaut, dramatically sacrifices himself by throwing himself into the burning Sun while exclaiming, 'The Earth will survive.' Striking is how different these two films visualize and illustrate the same fundamental matter, namely the extinction of planet Earth, and how different they respond to it in terms of inclusive or exclusive governance.

A different but engaging example of how governments and societies respond to glocal phenomena is how we deal with minorities, such as the LGBTIQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, inter-gender, and queer) community. One of the reasons why defending the rights of LGBTIQ causes many emotions across the world could be that it contradicts one of the most fundamental matters of male brotherhood and patriarchy, as well as male sexual reproduction and masculine identity. To replace millennia-old categories of male and female that kept systems in place, is a radical threat for many who prefer the male-dominant status quo. The LGBTIQ community, by its sheer existence, question the core identity of masculinity and brotherhoods, and for some this poses a threat worth fighting against (Smiler, 2019). So it is not surprising that despite all scientific evidence about the biological and natural causes of LGBTIQ, this topic stands today, like no other, for the divide between male supremacy and autocratic leadership on the one side and diverse democratic mode of governance on the other side.

People who defend LGBTIQ or belong to that community have been prosecuted, tortured, beaten, excluded, systematically discriminated against, killed, and massacred, and are de facto prisoners of consciousness in many regimes. Why on Earth would people torture someone who does not even show any signs of political violence, let alone is not threatening others? And why is it mostly men to hit and torture gay men, and not lesbian women? One answer is that some men feel threatened by gay men in their masculine identity. According to Smiler (2019), the sheer existence of the organized LGBTIQ community and their supporters in society, and their often-outstanding success as change-makers in art, business, and politics, infringes patriarchal rulership.

It also explains why the LGBTIQ community's symbol, the rainbow, is today a symbol for a diverse and more democratic and human rights abiding lifestyle. The rainbow first appeared in the 1960s, standing for diversity and peaceful coexistence of different shapes and colors of society, and has transferred to a symbol for the glocalist. Moreover, it has become the symbol of Western norms and ideas, and overall, what modern Europe and the EU stand for. Burning rainbow flags and colors in public is almost identical to burning national flags to express ones' disagreement with diversity, plurality, and change in society. On Poland's Independence Day in Warsaw in 2013, some 15,000 right-wing protesters marched through the streets and burned the rainbow installation T˛ecza, by a Polish artist, on the central Savior Square, that had been placed there in 2012. He had installed it, celebrating diversity, freedom, hope, universality, and independence and as a pro-European political statement, because it was first featured in front of the European Parliament in Brussels in 2011. Even though the rainbow was reinstalled after the 2013 events in 2014, it was burned down again in the same year and not reinstalled again.

#### Warsaw Poland, November 2013 (Photocopy right: Alamy)

The burning rainbow illustrates not only the cleavage between patriarchal brotherhood governance and glocal governance but could easily be the symbol of prodemocratic supporters in the New Cold War era, and has become a political statement today. One of the male domains in which the rainbow sign causes rebellion is soccer. It causes even more a stir when world-class male soccer teams wear the symbol. It can trigger diplomatic upheavals, as happened during the 2020/2021 European championship before and during a match between the German and Hungarian teams. The German soccer team wore the rainbow color band to protest the Union of European Football Association (UEFA) decision that prohibited the Munich soccer stadium from shining the rainbow colors as an expression of tolerance and to protest Hungary's recently passed homophobic laws that violate human rights in 2021. UEFA claimed that soccer games were neutral and forbade illuminating the soccer stadium in rainbow colors. In response to the German soccer team's decision to wear the rainbow colors despite UEFA's decision, Hungary's Prime Minister Victor Orban canceled his visit to Munich to watch the game. Since UEFA could only stop the colors inside the stadium but not outside, the whole city of Munich was shining that evening in rainbow colors during the match. German world-class soccer player, Manuel Neuer, who wore the rainbow armband during the game, was charged by the UEFA for violating its decision not to do so.<sup>4</sup> The charge was later dropped without further consequence, but illustrated how far patriarchy has mainstreamed our modes of governance.

## **3.1 Human Rights**

Human rights are the normative backbone of glocal governance. They set our normative frameworks and shape our attitudes toward others and for our day-today behavior. The assumption is that the more we know about the rights of others, the lower the level of interpersonal violence in our local communities. For example, in a case study on the impact of information, education, and human rights awareness campaigns in Mozambique, researchers found that the level of violence and corruption decreased, correlating to a higher level of human rights awareness. They conclude that the information and education campaigns in a local community generated a large increase in awareness of 25% points when information was distributed to citizens. The community treatment increased citizens' awareness and their depth of knowledge. The researchers also found that no effects of lowering political violence occur when only the leaders of that community are trained, suggesting that leaders did not introduce any apparent within-community effort to disseminate information about what they had been trained on, in order to avoid change and lose privileges (Armand et al., 2020). Instead, they found that a high level of transparency to pass on the information and direct engagement and empowerment of the population lowered the level of corruption and nepotism. It increased the level of wellbeing of the community and motivated citizens to take more beneficial actions for all. Therefore, empowering only the elites will not positively affect the local community, as Courbage and Todd concluded.

Over the past century, the increase of literacy has shaken the dominance of religious believers and value systems and thus led to a more self-determined society that controls economic growth and wealth through family planning (Courbage & Todd,

<sup>4</sup> 20 June 2021, UK News Today, Manuel Neuer, facing UEFA probe for supporting Pride Month with rainbow armband. https://todayuknews.com/shopping/manuel-neuer-facing-uefa-probe-forsupporting-pride-month-with-rainbow-armband/.

2007). The exciting correlation between literacy and thus the eligible access to information—also employing ICT—led to and empowered civil society across the planet, the most prominent example being the Arab Spring in 2011. One can conclude that building schools and allowing for media to act is one thing, but educating, informing, and empowering people, for example, through human rights and political education, is yet another. It goes much further beyond schooling and has a higher effect.

Human rights are a set of norms and standards of fundamental freedoms that can empower people. Today, ten core human rights documents called the International Bill of Human Rights encompass the critical standards on which glocal governance is grounded. These standards stretch from the rights of migrant workers to freedom of assembly, freedom of and from religion to the right to housing, and to be free from discrimination of any sort. At its core, the Bill is a normative framework that sets standards to distinguish between the violations and abuse of our natural entitlements, and the enhancement of these entitlements. Nevertheless, this normative framework has undergone a remarkable development in content and progress, starting with the UDHR in 1948, the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights (ICSECR), both from 1966 and thus far ending with the 2010 Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance (DPRED) as the most recent addition to the Bill.<sup>5</sup>

The treaties cover all key areas of human life and those causing suffering, injustice, and discrimination. The UN is currently considering one more global norm setter, a convention on the rights of elderly people. These treaties, nevertheless, are statedriven agreements between governments, which makes them the main duty-bearer to respect, protect, and fulfill, as well as violate them, vis-à-vis their right-holders, the citizens.

Regional human rights organizations and regimes, above all in Europe and Latin America are standard setters.<sup>6</sup> There are no legally binding human rights treaties or courts for the Asia Pacific region or the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)

<sup>5</sup> All documents are accessible via UN Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights, Database. https://www.ohchr.org/en/publicationsresources/pages/databases.aspx. As for the chronological order: 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), followed by the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD); 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR); 1979, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW); 1984, Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT); 1989, Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC); 1990, International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (CPRMW), 2006 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).

<sup>6</sup> Regional legally binding human rights treaties: The European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the ECHR in 1951, the Inter-American Convention for Human Rights (1969), Pact of San Jose, and the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (1986), Banjul Charter, have created their courts that can take decisions or to pass judgments over those states that are a member of the treaties and courts and that violate human rights. The three main regional human proper courts are the European Court for Human Rights (1959) in Strasbourg, France; the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (1979) in San Jose, Costa Rica; and the African Court on Justice and Human Rights (2004) in Arusha, Tanzania.

region. But there are some political and morally binding human rights agreements in place in Asia and the MENA region. For example, the ASEAN Bangkok Declaration from 1993 and the Asian Human Rights Charter from 1998 and the Arab Human Rights Charter from 2004 (Mihr, 2008). They stress cultural practices and development and that fundamental freedom rights must be respected, such as freedom of religion or freedom of assembly. The Bangkok Declaration also advocates for 'true democracy,' demanding 'good governance, freedom from corruption, and accountability of State and other authorities to the people.'<sup>7</sup> The Arab Charter was reformed in 2008 but never emphasized democracy and instead is highlighting the superiority of Sharia and domestic law over human rights law. It was, for that reason, excluded by the UN from being an inclusive human rights document.

Most international and regional human rights treaties and agreements have turned into customary laws and hence globally applicable human rights standards, both politically and legally, no matter whether governments have ratified them or not. Customary human rights law is an essential guidance tool for CSOs and businesses when demanding the implementation and respect for global human rights norms locally. What customary international human rights law can do for glocal governance is to guide and incentivize individuals to take actions that lead to a more inclusive community. These rules and regulations also guide what people can do, beyond any national state legislation, because human rights law is—in theory—above, and at least in compliance with, national law. Hence, human rights norms and standards often undermine state power, notably authoritarian regimes. The challenges current glocal governance regimes thus face is not a lack of norms but rather how these human rights can be organized for the common good so people in local communities can benefit from it equally.

For overcoming global disparities in the 1990s, the UN initiated its Millennium Development Goals in 2000 to set human rights-based benchmarks for more equality. Its successor agenda, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) from 2015, take one step further and serve today as normative and practical benchmarks for glocality. To both, all 193 UN member states have pledged to fulfill them by 2030 through their National Action Plans (Agenda 2030). The MSA is explicit in the SDGs. In addition, some UN member states have agreed on Global Compacts on business and human rights or migrants and refugees to materialize the SDGs. These Compacts give guidance to local and private actors on implementing global norms. The fast development to link global norms to local actions since the 1990s is dramatic, and since the global financial crisis in 2009, multilateralism and glocalization have sped up once again, as it did, too, during the global pandemic after 2020. National governments realize that they can only solve domestic and local problems if they collaborate transnationally and globally. For example, the EU and WTO effort to protect artists, developers, designers, and scientists' intellectual property rights shows how bilateral and plurilateral arrangements globally create stricter standards for protection and enforcement penalties.

<sup>7</sup> Bangkok Declaration on Human Rights, 1993 Paragraph 6. https://asean.org/.

Notwithstanding, intellectual property treaties are some of the oldest human rights treaties globally, starting in 1986 with the Bern Convention on Copyright Law and through the updated international agreements on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) within the World Trade Organization (WTO). The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) from 2018 has thus marked the peak of protecting individual rights in cyberspace and physical pace, not only in the EU, to protect our texts, photos, bank accounts, and other personal and intellectual matters. The International Monetary Funds (IMF) has likewise, over the past decade, fostered a decentralization process to secure the human rights of access to work and a decent income for individuals across the planet no matter the country (Acharya & Plesch, 2020). The principle of non-interference in domestic affairs has become redundant.

The key driving factor for glocalizing human rights is the intriguing possibility for individual accountability for anyone who violates these principles. Universal jurisdiction in the context of gross human rights violations at any domestic court is a milestone achievement. At its foundation in 2006, the UN Council on Human Rights Policy confirmed that many human rights and sound governance principles overlap. These principles and standards have transformed the relationship between governments and individual persons and citizens and at the same time turned every local court, into a potential 'international court' that can decide based on universal human rights principles and laws. It has made both sides, governments, and citizens, more responsible and accountable for their actions. The UN Council admitted that more research and assessment were needed to understand which forms of governance—other than governments—are affected by universal jurisdiction to leverage the achievement of these standards or vice versa (ICHRP, 2006, p. 14). North et al. (2009) underlined the need for this human rights-based governmental reforms and multi-stakeholder approach to it—otherwise, democracies will not survive in their present forms.

Bacl in 1997 and 2005 the UNDP reports on Good Governance in the World already alluded that the human rights-based approach (HRBA) through MSA is the best way to turn basic governance principles into good governance. TheWorld Bank's Governance Indicators in 2002, 2006, 2011, followed these recommendations and, in the following years, the Council of Europe's first World Forum on Democracy in 2012, and the European Union's ongoing Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) incorporated the HRBA and the MSA as key for realizing effective governance. Later, Landman and Larizza (2010) measured the correlation between good governance, human rights, and effective governance in their case studies on governmental performance of different regimes.

One can argue that over the past decades, this massive global diffusion and dissemination has led to what Scholte called 'transscalarity,' which in return led to a normdriven less hierarchal and egalitarian mode of governance. Today, people's expectations concerning effective governance depend more on achieving human rights and good governance than in the past. Additionally, the number of people who know, understand, and claim ownership of these principles has surpassed a critical mass of 33% within societies, having increased since digitalization and ICT fostered HRE (Childs & Mona, 2008; Thompson & Walker, 2008). The 2021 WVS report illustrates that human rights are globally supported. In over 160 countries, an average of 60% felt that human rights were somewhat respected and essential, and by this reached a stable majority appreciating human rights as a means for change.8

In that same line, Beth Simmons (2009) and Henkin et al. (2009) assessed that human rights had reached global acceptance some years ago and that the problem for human rights fulfillment is not the concept of human rights, nor the lack of knowledge, but corrupt and dysfunctional political systems. However, this has impacted citizens' demands, needs, and overall expectations toward effective governance, even in anocratic-led societies.

Human rights standards have become part of our daily lives, reaching a consolidated threshold of societal consciousness and attitudes, and are entering people's belief systems and political regimes. No other international document is disseminated in all the world's languages, as is the UDHR. Most social movements or networks refer to international human rights standards, independent of their political agenda. Parallel to this, international human rights law, conventions, and declarations have skyrocketed since the 1990s. Governments, companies, CEOs, and CSOs competitively emphasize that they aim to comply with human rights standards and good governance principles (Stadelmann-Steffen, 2008). The debates surrounding public–private partnership (PPP), the SDGs, the ICC, and the plea for a World Court of Human Rights are just a few examples of these developments. One can assume that governance regimes respond to societal or international pressure to comply with human rights and good governance principles but that, in fact, they also acknowledge that they will increase their legitimacy and might leverage their governance outcomes if they adhere to them. Therefore, many of these actors are today more responsive to citizens' demands for fundamental freedoms and equity, which they are more likely to be held accountable to than in previous decades.

In 2020, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the heads of State of France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and the EU launched a joint article in the newspapers with the title 'Only global Answers will work'9 to combat the pandemic asking for all stakeholders of society to share efforts to deal with the crisis. Accordingly, Syrian Nobel Prize Nominee Raed Saleh highlighted in his interview that peace and wellbeing in Syria could be established through a combination of civic and state actors under global standardized norms: 'No one should have too much influence in that matter and dominate another, (…) and by these resources should be distributed equally,' he hopefully expressed.<sup>10</sup>

<sup>8</sup> World Values Survey, 2021. Wave 7 (2017–2020) Results in % by country weighted by weight, Study # WVS-2017v2.0, Q253, p. 505.

<sup>9</sup> (FAZ 2. May 2020),

<sup>10</sup> Die ZEIT, 16 April 2020.

## *3.1.1 Competing Norms*

Human rights are constantly competing with other primarily traditional norms, cultural perceptions, religious rules, and ideological ideals. The main difference between traditions and human rights is that human rights are guiding principles and norms of global best practice. They have no symbols or icons, as faith-based groups or brotherhoods have. Human rights have no habits, music, dances, or other insignia to highlight their practice. The rainbow, however, may have become a symbol for human rights.

Because of their 'invisibility,' human rights have many other value-based habits and rituals that compete with them—although sometimes they complement each other. Above all in this regard are religious and traditional practices. The eleventhcentury Ulema State that developed in the Middle East, for example, rooted itself in seventh-century Islamic rules. Today's 'Islamic States' result from a political interpretation of that same belief system. One could say that the Islamic Republics of Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan follow the Ulema, and opposed to that, today's modern liberal democracies follow the concept of universal human rights. Nevertheless, whereas the universality of human rights depends on our responsibility and actions to construct a societal order, supporters of the Ulema State, organized in brotherhood style regimes, follow a centuries-old order regime.

Family and local communities are in the core of these regimes, and hence local actions combines both the normative and the order systems. In its 2021 reports, the WVS team asked people whom they trust most among various groups of people? An average of 96% of all interviewees, irrespective of whether they live in Tajikistan, Mexico, or Germany, responded that they overall trust family over friends and acquaintances.11 Regardless of religion and tradition, family stands for solidarity, based on kinship and marriage, and builds a socio-economic safety net. This safety net allows for members of the family to find work, go to universities, and support each others in case of expensive hospital costs when needed. But it also controls and prohibits any deviation from the norm for its members.

The expression 'family values' is not to be confused with emotional or tenderly love for family members or spouses, as many understand it in the West. One aspect that glocal governance can take away from this survey is that whatever normative framework families follow and whoever rules them sets the standard for the political regime.

Human rights-based governance is the opposite of 'family values'-based obedience toward the elderly; instead, it is individual empowerment to fix problems and determine one's own life. The person is in the center and builds capacity and solves her and his problems and collaboration with other individuals in society, under the do no harm principle.<sup>12</sup> Nonetheless, human rights do not exclude religious practices or family values. Quite the opposite, Article 18 of the UDHR paraphrases that

<sup>11</sup> WVS, 2021, Q58, 257.

<sup>12</sup> European Commission, 2014, Input on "Internet Governance Principles," NETMundial, Sao Paulo 23–24 April 2014 (Source: http://content.netmundial.br/files/176.pdf).

'Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion'; This article includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance. Moreover, in Article 16 (3) it states that 'The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State,' and hence an integral part of the exercise and living of one's human rights, if they do not infringe upon or breach others. The fact that the right to family and freedom of religion is prominent in various UN and regional treaties highlights the importance of its mutual complementarity and, hence, guidelines for governance regimes. However, the difference is that no one should impose on others a religious practice by force.

HRBA and MSA are a mix that can enhance glocality, and it can be a set of different private and public actors or governmental representatives and experts. The MSA has the advantage that all relevant actors can participate and be heard equally. They not only vote or decide on subject matters together, but they also commit themselves to the successful implementation of the agreed subject matters. Ideally, they set their standards and rules, defining possible repercussions or penalties for non-compliance by the involved stakeholders. Enforcement still relies heavily on cooperation with state actors, such as national security agencies. Private actors can conduct it through means of public pressure by, for example, utilizing naming and shaming tactics that may threaten the legitimacy of the respective company, state agency, or otherwise. MSA will not fully replace state agencies, but its process leads to more local, individual, and corporate responsibility.13

Human rights are often the sole guidance to govern during dissolving statehood and bad governance, as we see currently. They are the essence of constitutional states, but not of Nation-States. More so, when nothing else is left other than reputed family values, national pride, and traditions that cannot fix the problems that the Anthropocene is posting to local communities. The intriguing and comforting promises to progress without breaking habits, traditions, and religious practices, give little room for facing the challenges ahead. Hiding behind belief systems and turning them into guidance for governance, such as Buddhism in Myanmar, Hinduism in India, Islam in Afghanistan, and a plethora of Free Churches in Latin America promises an intriguing alternative, but far too often worsens the problems of social inequality, exclusion and lack of social mobility, instead of solving them. But faith-based governance modes enjoy much legitimacy from the people, as Zelditch notes, no matter whether they deliver according to universal norms (Zelditch, 2001). There are only three trustworthy entities for many members of these communities, namely the cleric leaders, the family, and the Internet, more than any state institution can ever enjoy. They draw a direct link between the individual and the community, whether virtual, spiritual, or personal. According to Brown and Marsden, the Internet has become an additional fundamental element of governance today (Brown & Marsden, 2013).

<sup>13</sup> World Summit Information Society Tunis Agenda (2005) (Source https://www.itu.int/net/wsis/ docs2/tunis/off/6rev1.html).

A plethora of competing normative orders enter all aspects of glocal life and challenge our comfort zones as we seek a governance system that we can trust. There does not seem to be a clear 'cultural lead,' rather a particular lifestyle that promises opportunities and the freedom of choice and that—it seems—can be found locally and in cyberspace. Regimes that provide liberty and social mobility are the ones that succeed. Much has been written about these overarching cultural values and norms by Almond and Verba's 'Civic Culture' (1963) to understand the role and impact of normative values on democratic governance, in line with Fukuyama's works on 'Identity' (2019), highlighting our eternal search for a self-determined and dignified life which, after all the searching, we find it best in free and self-determined societal setups. We see that whatever identity we may own or share, it is composed of faith, values, personal experience, habits, language, family, and education and hence is what we call culture. Though identity is never collective nor exclusive, it is individual and personal, and so are the human rights that are the toolbox and guidance to live our identities to the fullest. One problem with identity is what Fukuyama calls 'weaponizing identity' (2019), namely when we hide exclusively behind our identity and no longer see the identity of others as equal. In short, it is good to be sure of one's own identity, but it becomes dangerous if we do not adhere to universal human rights principles to respect and protect the identity of others. The lamentably divide and 'echo chambers' in modern societies is the result of this development.

German chancellor Angela Merkel's 'We can do that' (*Wir schaffen das!*) in 2015 was an effort to counteract this divide, at the height of the refugee and migrant flow from the Middle East into Europe. But the effort seems to have led to the opposite. It polarized Europe between those who say, 'we cannot' and those who say, 'we can.' One could also argue that like any other global crisis, it only sheds light on what already was below the surface, namely the societal divide among those who want to face glocal challenges and those who want to return into territorial, national comfort zones, in which the planet seemed to be a never running dry well of resources and growth. There is a difference between using 'we against the others,' which is classic for polarizing populist rhetoric or using 'we' as a unifying element against a global migration challenge. The 'we' against the 'others' seems easier to instrumentalize when people have only a few layers of identity. Nationalism, Islamophobia, and racism work along these thin lines of weak and collective identities. A glocal identity is different from collective identities, as it does not adhere to one specific religion or state borders and carries the risk of constantly questioning states' sovereignty.

Quoting Socrates (400 BC) again, when he was asked by his disciples what the best way would be to govern a state; Socrates figured the best governance practice was through universal value (morals)-driven personal empowerment. A century before, Confucius allegedly has answered the same, when asked. But Socrates' advice to the youth in Athens went further, calling for an uprising against the elders and a corrupt elite. This cost him his life in 399 BC. The council of elders accused him of spoiling the youth of Athens by making them think for themselves—which sounds very modern in today's autocratic societies and wars. As a result, many young men no longer wanted to serve in the military and go to war with Sparta, a city-state with which Athens was at war. The verdict was clear: Socrates had manipulated and empowered the youth to think for themselves, ask for individual justification, not for a collective one, and thus had become a threat to the city's stability.

The 'next generation' metaphor has always served as a threat to traditions because it stands for change and often revolution. A hundred years before Socrates took his life, during the Chinese Chu dynasty (500 BC), when Confucius concluded that the main challenge for governance is to overcome the cleavage between the old and the young, his disciples asked him 'Is there any one word that could guide a person throughout life?' He replied that it is reciprocity, and mutual respect, and 'that one should never impose on others what one would not choose for oneself' ( 論語, Analects). Over two thousand years later, Immanuel Kant's 1785 categorical imperative took up the sentence recommending, to 'act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law' and which today is the lead idea in the preamble of the UDHR.

Metaphorically, followers and disciples, throughout history, are usually illustrated by mystical numbers of young men of 7, 10, 12, or 77, resembling those who challenge traditions and governance systems often led by rebellious figures, prophets, and heroes from Antiquity to present times. From Confucius to Kant, the point is that no matter whether seniority allows it or not, if reasons stand against traditions, reasoning wins.

Nevertheless, many prophets who called upon the youth found the same deadly destiny as Socrates. Jesus Christ (30 AD) is one of them, and because of his rebellion, he was crucified, and as his disciples had spread the words of their masters against traditional leaders, they had to pay with their lives. Even Confucius and Buddha (550 BC) were condemned for treason and had to leave their homes, often followed by male disciples who passed on similar narratives and epics on how to govern best while wandering the earth spreading the ideas of reform and revolution. The seventh-century prophet Mohammed, quoted in the Kitab al-Kafi Dialogues ( ), responded to the question of guidance by one of his disciples, with, 'as you would have people do to you, do to them; and what you dislike to be done to you, do not do to them. This maxim is enough to go and act in accordance with it!' Like many before him, Mohammed had fled his home of Mecca to spread the message and hence shared this destiny with many before and after him.

Another figure behind modern times' normative order and governance regime is sixteenth-century German reformer, Martin Luther. He posted his '95 Theses' against the corrupt elderly Catholic Church, and unintentionally founding a new branch of religion, Protestantism. He, too, was calling upon the youth (disciples), to stand up against corrupt (male) clerics and noble elites. Protestantism was later seen as the cultural foundation of liberal democracy and finds its roots in Luther's concept of self-determination and critical thinking. What was different about Luther is that he not only challenged the father–son relationship and traditions and hence patriarchy led brotherhoods, but he also called for an inclusive revolution by men and women against the establishment. This however, resulted in a century of war between the confessions and ended with the Westphalian Peace Agreement in 1648 which has been so far the blueprint of modern statehood and International Relations. Only prophets like Jesus, Mohamed, and Martin Luther are reported to have had female disciples, which marked a qualitative shift in how people could identify themselves with the new religious doctrine. Father–son relationships, patriarchal governance regimes, often found in religious congregations, brotherhoods, knights, and forms of 'kurultais' (councils of elderly men), and other forms of fraternities all pretend to carry a specific exclusive knowledge, wisdom, and 'truth' that women in particular are forbidden to have access to. Like the Freemasons, they have hierarchical structures, strict norms, and often practice secret rituals, seeking control over the world.

Not surprisingly, the importance of youth in spiritual and political movements remained influential throughout the centuries. Every major political party and faithbased congregation has their youth branches, often the loudest when calling party slogans with sometimes radical views. The largest in the world is the Communist Youth League of China (CYLC), with over 80 million members, an influential party propaganda voice on social media channels. Youth is an important target group because they are easier to influence, and they stand for change and reforms and hence can challenge traditional norms.

How far this radicalization between glocalists and traditionalists had divided even some of the most robust democracies was seen in 2011 when a Norwegian right-wing Neo-Nazi and supporter of the US Proud Boys, killed 80 students of the Norwegian Labor Party Youth group during a summer camp in the island of Utøya in Norway. In court, he claimed that 'his actions were justified to save the country from multicultural forces' (Magnay, 2012). In his eyes, he fulfilled a 'sacrosanct duty,' arguing that these teenagers threaten traditional conservative values in Western society. Inspired by these murderous attacks, a white supremacist terrorist shot and killed 51 members of a Muslim congregation in New Zealand in 2019. Shortly beforehand, he posted a manifesto on social media, expressing hate against 'Muslim invaders' and justifying his atrocious acts against 'internationalists and globalists.' He, too, claimed to defend white people against non-white 'invaders,' the establishment against the outside threat (Toohey, 2019).

Radicalization of ideas and faith can trigger violence—this is far from new. However, what is novel is the individualization of terrorism around the world, often in the Dark Web and under the radar of public scrutiny. Mansour, the Palestinian-German psychologist who studied the phenomena of radical fundamentalist terrorism, explained that it is the consequences of insult and inferiority of the individual that leads them to become a terrorist—no matter where. In his example, Islamic faith practice is often incompatible with the open and diverse way of life of liberal-pluralistic democracies. The fact that people in liberal democracies can, through good grace or ill, accept and even respect the opinions of others without infringing on their freedoms makes these terrorists feel inferior. Even more so, when they hide behind this identity of inferiority and victimhood, as Fukuyama (2019) explains, and use this as a justification and weapon against others. For many radicals, the contact with a Western lifestyle is the moment of radicalization because, in their opinion, the tolerance, fundamental freedom rights, and the consensus-building nature of democracy demonstrate vulnerability and weakness. Mansour argues, that it is the openness and inclusiveness shown to others that irritate these traditionalists (Mansour, 2020). Hence liquid borders, diversity, LGBTIQ, climate change sensitivity, and One World-One People ideas, as portrayed in Western-style pop culture, suggest fair opportunities, equality, friendship, and a merit-based working system that is intriguing to some and a threat to others (Smith, 2018).

Here again, it is the pop culture that illustrates the worlds current societal divide, and it aligns with the success of the contemporary beauty and fitness industry, creating a globally shared youth and beauty hype that sometimes has bizarre forms. Beauty images of the young and fit are the largest globally shared culture and identity ever and have reached the level of a spiritual character and cult across language, religious, and territorial borders (Greenwood, 2019). Bearing in mind that according to UNESCO data, approximately over 50% of the world's population is under the age of 30, and in Africa, up to 70% (40% are below the age of 15), the divide between young and old will only increase. This hype divides society into those who claim to be forever young and caring about the future of the planet and others who are not. By its sheer figures, the youth dominate the world, at least in the Global South. In the North, it is the reverse. Willing or not, this 'post-1990' youth generation threatens patriarchal authoritarian forms of leadership rooted in century-old ideologies or religious rules, and causes millions of young people across the planet to leave their home countries, seeking a place in which they find opportunities and equality. Out of these generations comes protest against ruling elites. One of these groups are cyber-partisans that are (mostly) young Internet hackers and whistleblowers, sometimes organized in NGOs like WikiLeaks, but generally working individually and moving between darknet and Internet, who hack and publish data on leaders, clans, and anyone they do not like, and put this news on social media. Those who are following these cults see themselves as human rights defenders (HRD) in many respects, for example, calling for the right to information and access to neutral Internet, to physical and social mobility, to be free to live their sexual orientation and to be free to choose what to study, and where to work, where to live, and what religion to follow.

## **3.2 Democracy**

Democrats steer, dictators control. Therefore, democratic principles are fundamental for glocal governance. Democratic institutions and actors are dynamically interacting based on personal convictions and a level of institutional responsiveness by policymakers and compliance with norms manifested in national constitutions. Their actions are—ideally—in compliance with universal human rights norms. That is one reason why China does not oppose democracy as such; quite the opposite, it defines it anew based on Chinese norms in its White Paper on 'How Democracy Works' from December 2021. The CCP even claims to realize the so-called 'American Dream' and Western lifestyle, that gives everyone opportunities and prosperity, and by its own standards the Chinese government aims to surpass the Western model. Whether it will succeed in its endeavor to turn the core concept of democracy, namely inclusiveness, pluralism, and free choice, into one with 'Chinese characteristics' and what that exactly means, remains to be seen. So far the Chinese model of democracy has not been seen successful to deal with crisis and challenges of modern times, it rather lags behind when responding to migration, climate change, wars, and pandemics. Its model lags of a culture of reflection, constructive criticism, trial-and-error, and overall is not willing to accept different views on public matters and instead remains in copying Western lifestyle without developing it further.

What we do know is that countries that democratized successfully followed the same patterns. Linz and Stepan's highlight that democratization is successful and, that 'a democratic transition is complete when sufficient agreement has been reached about political procedures to produce an elected government, when a government comes to power that is the direct result of a free and popular vote, when this government *de facto* has the authority to generate new policies, and when the executive, legislative and judicial power generated by the new democracy does not have to share power with other bodies *de jure*' (Linz & Stepan, 1996, p. 3). Hence a constant bottom-up and reflective struggle between different stakeholders is needed in order to complete democratic institution building.

Most of today's 190 listed constitutional democracies worldwide are multi-party systems in which elections are the norm. Many of them have already adapted to direct democracy methods and introduced MSA. Others turned into de facto anocracies or electoral democracies, and left the path of liberal democracies. Countries with one- or no-party regimes remain the exception, most prominently China, North Korea, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Libya (Regel & Döring, 2019). These regimes are far from consensus-building modes of governance among different parties and positions, let alone in the key areas of public matters, which are the sectors (1) security/health, (2) economy/work, and (3) education/social mobility, and which they often either privatize or outsource to CSOs or international organizations. Anocratic or authoritarian regimes are less capable of dealing with the rough consequences of global crisis such as climate change, pandemics, cyber security, and migration.

Dankwart Rustow, the pioneer of Transitology and transition from autocracies to democracy, highlighted that '(…) People who were not in conflict about some rather fundamental matters would have little need to devise democracy's elaborate rules for conflict resolution. The acceptance for those rules is logically a pact of the transition process rather than its prerequisite' (Rustow, 1970, p. 362). Rustow understood that any society that fights and opts for a democratic system has to comply with four fundamental stages of transition: First, a sense of national and collective unity of different stakeholders making a clear commitment to democratic change (background conditions); Secondly, the readiness and willingness for political struggle by different stakeholders to overcome cleavages, disputes, and obstacles that have caused the wish for change of fundamental matters in the first place (preparatory phase). Thirdly, the collective will to agree on democratic rules that must be applied de jure and de facto and eventually the acceptance of shifts in power after fair and free elections (decision phase). Lastly, the most difficult of all is to turn a pro democratic attitude into daily habits and move from the acceptance of (democratic) rules to believing in them (habituation phase) (Rustow, 1970). Latter phase is hardly achieved even among the strongest and consolidated countries, today.

The biggest threat to backsliding democracies today are phases three and four when political leaders and civil society breach their own rules and norms that brought them into power in the first place. Rustow's concept of transition to democracy has inspired researchers worldwide to find out what is key to democratic consolidation. We find much of the same in Samuel Huntington's 'Waves of Democratization' from 1991 and later Wolfgang Merkel's concept of system transformation and democratic regime consolidation from 1999. Whereas Huntington overall describes the tricky avenue to complete the process of democratization, which can take between one and ten years, or two legislative periods, he also explains why so many countries never successfully democratize. They usually fail to comply with norms and rules during the first legislative period, when they start corrupting and undermining the normative orders, such as fair and free elections, freedom of media, inclusive voting rights, competitive party system, etc. Merkel sequences consolidation of a political system in four stages, and together they can take decades to complete. The first stage is to set widely agreed norms that are inclusive and acceptable by an absolute majority in the constitutions. The second stage is the representative and institutional role of all political, private, and business actors who abuse the norms. The functionality of an independent judiciary (the rule of law), free media, and civil society can be ways to measure this stage. The third stage, and much more challenging to reach, is the attitudinal and behavioral shift in society when all political, private, and civil actors not only believe but also adhere to constitutional norms and play a fair game—like Rustow's 'habituation.' This is almost impossible to achieve without continuous political and human rights education. The last stage of consolidation is what Almond and Verba named 'civic culture' when a free civil society interacts with politics through active and free participation and hence shows a high level of trust and free interaction in public institutions (Wolfgang, 1994). To illustrate consolidated democracy, we must look at one of the oldest democracies in the world, namely Switzerland since 1848 (some even date it back to the first democratic claims, the *Rütli Schwur* in 1291). It is a land-locked country that had passed several stages of improvement and backsliding over the past centuries, and whose national President is rotating on an annual basis. Chancellor Thurnherr, who, after serving two terms since 2016, said about his role, '*I do not see myself as the Chairman or Chancellor of the eighth Federal Council more as a top civil servant. My power is limited. But I have some influence. I can mediate or control, coordinate, and make suggestions; however, decision and consensus are driven by all stakeholders together.*' <sup>14</sup> Such a public statement by the lead governor of a country is unimaginable in authoritarian countries. Switzerland's multi-level and bottom-up governance regime, with its unique rotating governance regime and principles of direct democracy, serves today as a blueprint for modes of glocal governance. Local communities decide issues of collective relevance through direct voting and consensus-building.

A failed democratization process can be seen in the once promission example of transition toward democracy in Tunisia since 2011. In 2021 the Tunisian parliament

<sup>14</sup> Bundeskanzler Walter Thurnherr, Schweizerisch Eidgenossenheit, Bundeskanzlei. https://www. bk.admin.ch/bk/de/home/bk/bundeskanzler-walter-thurnherr.html (accessed August 2021).

was dissolved and turned back into a centralistic Presidential system, because it failed to undertake major political and societal reforms in the first two legislative periods. Huntington, in (1991) 'Waves of Democratization,' describes this erosion and backsliding as the 'spillover effects' of non-democratic states to the once in the process of democratization. An isolated and new fragile state, like Tunisia after the Arab Spring that remained as the 'only democracy in the region,' cannot survive among autocratic regimes by which it is surrounded in the region. It cannot, for long, counterbalance and resist anti-democratic infiltration from outside. In 2021 when the President finally dissolved and disempowered the parliament, Tunisia's first democratic experiment failed to consolidate. The Arab uprisings in 2011 and the following years were labeled 'revolutions' in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen and gave—at first—hope for entering stage one and two of Rustow's and Merkel's stages from transition to transformation. Rather than overthrowing authoritarian regimes, civil society and the angry youth protesters prompted some concessions. And in return, the Moroccan and Jordanian governments made massive concessions toward the youth and amended their constitutions to keep the regime alive and the protesters quiet. In fear of losing power, the highly dysfunctional Algerian government ended an almost two-decade-old state of emergency, and part of the government of Kuwait resigned in response to protests. These were signs of concessions, even though the patriarchal stronghold of older men remained at the end, and pro democratic regime change did not take place. There was not a fundamental will and enough threshold in society for a renovation of the regime that would have satisfied the needs of all its citizens. It is only a matter of a short time until the vicious cycle of unrest, protest, concessions, and suppression emerges again, and the Arab Spring will turn into the next Arab Autum.

The youth rebellion failed in the Arab Spring because it did not agree on fundamental matters, and it was too divided to speak with one voice. If they had called for fair and accessible opportunities, the governments would have been forced to make substantive changes in the education and economic sector and labor market. Since that was not the case, the revolutions failed. Protesters also failed to establish a joint coalition to negotiate the transition with the ruling elites. While mass mobilization in favor of political liberalization emerged across the region—and elsewhere in Central Europe, South America, and Asia—the hopes for more far-ranging political changes were often dashed, because protesters could not speak with one voice and organize themselves well enough to challenge the establishment. It would take another generation before it would rise again. Instead, civil wars emerged in Libya, Syria, and Yemen.<sup>15</sup> Another factor for the failed democratic revolutions in and around the year 2011, was lack of a pre-existing culture to compromise and build consensus, even on the local levels. Instead the patriarchal mentality and brotherhood like local governance regime, foster 'strong male leaderships' in which the winner of elections claims all the power instead of sharing it. Looking again back into ancient Greek writings, Plato's 5th book in *Politeia*, he, too, observed that it

<sup>15</sup> Source V-dem report 2021. https://www.v-dem.net/en/publications/democracy-rep orts/ (accessed September 15, 2021).

takes several attempts and learning experiences of reformers and protesters until a regime can successfully transform itself democratically (Grassi and Walter, 1990, p. 240). A successful outcome could be, according to Plato's disciple Aristotle (322 BC) the constitutional state as one with fixed norms and rules applicable to all. It is a state in which the middle class ought to govern and be responsive to the youth and next generation, and hence his visions reminds us today of a modern state that embraces the concept of sustainability. Aristotle connects the success of a constitutional state to the fact that its norms are transparent and applicable to everyone and at the same time universally—every member of society, can easily agree to these norms and they need to be perceived as a doable endeavor by all members of society. As he goes on, Aristotle argues that a constitutional state is legitimate based on the pursuit of happiness, and hence a fundamental matter for which people are ready to establish unifying norms and rules (Aristoteles, 1994, pp. 198–199). His slogan 'Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness' made it into the American Declaration of Independence from 1776, two thousand years later. Many of Aristotle's claims not only sound modern but even utopian. Another contemporary author, Wallerstein, in his World-System Approach from 2004, follows up on Greek philosopher's division of basic needs of people that must be satisfied and regulated before thinking about different kind or better statehood, and he adds that these needs and happiness need to be set out by explicit legally binding norms and standards accessible to everyone; otherwise, any new or old regime is doomed to fail. The three services the state must provide, according to Wallerstein, are (1) public education, (2) access to health, and (3) guarantee of lifelong possibility for solid income that allows each member of society to live a self-determined life (Wallerstein, 2019, p. 94). In short, the two-core task for governments is to provide for fair, free, and equal social mobility and a healthy environment for all. How this can be best achieved is the essence of the core divide between autocratic and democratic regime defenders.

Little doubt there is, that dysfunctional states are susceptible to corruption even in public schooling, hospitals, and the informal labor sector, but they are nevertheless successful for a period of time, and often enjoy a high level of prosperity. In a similar line, Carl Schmitt, a controversial German Constitutionalist, saw the German Weimar Republic of the 1920s in the same stage as many dysfunctional states are today, and a root cause for the rise of the Nazi regime and a destructive WWII. The Weimar leadership would not let go of traditional, hierarchical ways of governing by a militant elite. Schmitt drew upon Aristotle's writings in The *Politeia* (335 BC), elaborating that the main pitfalls of a constitutional state is that citizens and policymakers neither understand the laws, nor adhere to them. This mistrust will sooner or later corrupt the law by policymakers and lawyers if the law is not adhered to through conviction by society at large. Carl Schmitt's 'Political Theory' on Constitutionalism predicted the end of the first wave of democratization (Huntington, 1991) in the 1920s and the rise of nationalistic autocratic regimes in Europe and elsewhere—later leading the world into a devastating global war. He argued that if a state does not have a functioning normative framework and constitution, to which all stakeholders adhere to by conviction, the state and the political system will fail (Schmitt, 2015).

#### 3.2 Democracy 75

In the essays on Legitimacy and Legality, Schmitt highlights that every new democracy is doomed to fail, if people do not have the necessary culture and experience through a certain level of education and a free space to explore their own talents. The democratic state is one in which people get together, negotiate, and agree on shared norms and a law (the constitution) and then act accordingly. Hence, the transition to democracy is slow and might soon end up in reverse, even an authoritarian form of governance, if citizen do not carry and defend the constitutions (Schmitt, 2012). According to Aristotle the three core elements of bad governance, namely the rise and level of (1) mistrust, (2) helplessness and disempowerment of people, which leads to a shared sense of inferiority, and (3) the corrupt, submissive, and opportunistic behavior of public officers to a clientelist leadership; are contrary to what a constitutional state stands for (Aristotle, Politeia, p. 261).

We can see today, that tyrannical leaders will always aim toward a low level of education for citizens, claim obedience by public officers, and use propaganda to install fear and hostility toward 'others.' In reverse, autocratic leaders have portrayed themselves even as 'knights' and heroes and saviors of an intimidated and fearful population. Not much seems to have changed since Antiquity, if we look it at it? From the legendary figure of Herakles in Greece, Prince Ashok in India, to the mysterious King Arthur in England, and the evil-dragon fighting St. George across the Middle East and Europe, the good against the evil is always associated with a strong fighting man defeating the evil snake. There seems to be little room for MSA and a human rights-driven agenda? The mythical half-men-Jaguar Protectors of the Mesoamerican Mayas, the figure of El Cid during the Reconquista in Spain, the knight Parsifal in Germanic myths, as well as the Knight Manas in Central Asia, resemble nothing less than successful autocratic leadership. All fight for a unified, peaceful nation, independence, and self-determination. Their fan community remains unchallenged and their role models are found in a plethora of contemporary fantasy and graphic novels, movies, and games in which these figures are portrayed, until the twentiethcentury reincarnation as Superman and Iron Man. The hero is predominantly a lonely male fighter gathering followers to save a nation from evil. Even mysterious and religious prophets of the past follow that pattern. Heroic female figures, such as Greek Nike and warrior women, are portrayed as guardian angels, mothers, widows, divine, virgins, and seldom emerge as a prototype of Superwomen. These visions from good versus evil leadership in times of paradigm shift are not to be underestimated.

The popularity of these characters over the past decades grew, whether mystical, fantasy, virtual-avatars, or for real, are severe competitors for the way we perceive democracy. They portray a patriarchal, hierarchical, and populist way of governance. Mystical heroes are unbeaten in their intriguing success and achievements in fighting evil and the enemies of Nationhood—be it in modern times, terrorists, or aliens. Even contemporary leaders portray themselves as 'fathers of the nation' and liberators. Statues of Simon Bolivar remain untouched in South America. He was a freedom fighter against colonialist powers in the nineteenth century and symbolized the struggle for self-determination and dignity—but by no means was he a human rights defender. Che Guevara fought against social inequality, endorsed the use of violence for a higher cause, and became a pop-art symbol; Napoleon stands for a genius strategist who slaughtered thousands of innocent people; Mao Tzetung is the father and liberator from old traditions while killing millions; and Stalin portrayed himself as a father figure who takes care of his nation's children, while deporting and deliberately killing millions of citizens. These leaders all resemble top-down autocratic feudalistic leadership style modes of governance, liberators at the most, but not promoting human rights nor inclusiveness in governance. Mafia States and organized crime follow this concept until today and control large parts of statehood and the world economy. Russia's/Soviet Union's 'Great Fatherland War Victory' of 1945 is until present times commemorated every year on 9 May as in many of the former Soviet Republics with the sole purpose of keeping the fragile nations together and justifying centralized power in the hands of a benevolent father. Warlords and organized crime leaders successfully uphold similar images of liberators from a supreme and evil power or victims of the same, to legitimate their actions, as did Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the deceased founder of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq, who is today considered a hero among its supporters. Above all, they often stand for the despair of many, seeking a solid leader who offers solutions to problems.

Plato was looking for an answer what a 'just state' would be, despite the vicious cycle of hero-driven leadership? In *Politeia*, he cites Socrates search for a 'healthy state.' A sick state is one, in which bad manners govern and rules with tempers due to a lack of good education, inability to sideline and channel greedy and ill-minded people through a lack of control over the law, and the lack of public services. To set up a 'just state,' Plato suggests first to make sure there is a diversity of people in the state that can deliver what is needed to survive in terms of mercantile, food, and other goods of the daily allowance. Second, the state must provide an entertainment culture and good education for all. Third, the state leaders must provide services, such as trading and stock markets, schools, and hospitals; and fourth, a permanent defense system and security sector that can defend the state along its border (Platon, 1990, p. 110). Even so, some of the measures to sideline ill-mannered people sound radical to our ears today; but fundamentally, not much has changed since Antiquity when identifying what it takes, even democratically, to govern a community, society, or state. We also learn from Plato that any 'just state' sooner or later erodes and falls apart by inner forces if interests and stakeholders are not balanced and do not have the same access to resources or political participation. This happens, for example, when everyone enjoys all freedoms at once, without regulating or sharing them with others.16

Anocracies, however, seem to be the most successful model of governance today, and for many that is already a success, because they are neither fully autocratic nor fully consolidated democracy. According to the former foreign minister Rajaratnam of Singapore, liberal democracy is an ideal that can not be achieved. Instead democracy is the governing of deeds, and prefers anocracy and electoral democracy over liberal democracy. He coined the term 'democracy of deeds' in 1971,17 and ever since, the term describes a democratically set up regime that strongly controls the public

<sup>16</sup> Ibid., p. 261.

<sup>17</sup> August 14, 1971.

sectors, in the same way as it controls CSOs and media and puts citizen duties before human rights. Some 50 years later, in 2019, Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat called on the city's citizens to collaborate in what he called a Cohesive Society to 'build a democracy of deeds, where everyone chips in with our various strengths and passions to build a society we can all be proud of.'18 The government needs to keep its ears on the people and consult with them, instead of allowing them to raise their voice to hear them. Until now, the Singaporean model of 'democracy of deeds' has been a source of inspiration for many emerging and yet anocratic states in most of Asia, above all for China, and hence samples of Singapore's model can be found in the White Paper on democracy in 2021. This 'surveillance anocracy' needs public-spirited action and heavy surveillance technology to spy on people's problems and solve these problems top-down, claiming governmental solutions as a 'devotion to the welfare of the people.' Similar concepts and misuse of democracy are often found in authoritarian governmental rhetoric to calm people and give the image of people's free will, empowerment, and participation.

Unlike Singapore's model, deliberative and collaborative democracy has been claimed to be the highest and most solid level of democracy. They resemble pluralistic coexistence between government and civil society of the kind found in contemporary societies, mainly in Europe and North and South America (Morlino et al., 2020). Collaborative democracy equates Almond and Verba's definition of 'civic culture' and Rustow's approach to habituation and Merkel's designed attitudinal and behavioral level of interaction of all stakeholders based on law. It is quite contrary to the 'democracy by deeds' that Singaporean leaders prefer. Instead, the normative claim of the deliberative model is that all decisions are subject to discourse and those who determine or dominate that discourse—as seen in the Swiss model (Schäfer & Merkel, 2020, pp. 3–27).

By this definition, deliberative democracy is complementary to majority voting and reaching consensus. Its decision-making process aims at including as many diverse people as possible to agree on one subject and build at least 66% consensus on the solution. As described by many, deliberative politics is not a mode of decisionmaking but a criterion and method of seeking consensus decisions (Habermas, 1990, p. 42). This deliberative mode of governance is often accused of not challenging existing political conditions or opinions, and only building consensus on a subject matter, by any means, even with unfair methods, blackmailing, and vote-buying. In order for a deliberative model to contribute to the creation of existing social power relations, especially in times of populist governments and Social Media echo chambers, deliberative discourse can preserve opinions and political attitudes, and hence preserve old power structures instead of changing or transforming attitudes and behavior.

In any mode of governance, powerful lobbyists and businesses can be key stakeholders and a curse or blessing for an inclusive democratic model (Crouch, 2004).

<sup>18</sup> June 21, 2019, TODAY news channel: Cohesive society calls for everyone to build a 'democracy of deeds': Heng Swee Keat; Read more at https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/cohesive-soc iety-calls-everyone-build-democracy-deeds-heng-swee-keat.

Despite the many weaknesses that any democratic regime has, the only thing we know for sure is that states that are run by an autocratic elite or one-party regime will fail sooner or later to respond to citizen needs in times of crisis and global challenges. Democratic regimes, instead, need to adapt and reform themselves, if they want to succeed and those who already incorporate glocal governance methods, have managed both the financial crisis in 2009 and the Covid pandemic in 2020 and undertake most of all the global efforts to mitigate the consequence of climate change. One weakness (and strength) of democracies is their multi-party system that pushes governments to build coalitions and govern by consensus. In the height of new consolidated democracies in Europe in the late 1960s, Krippendorff spoke of the end of the party-state (1968). He saw multi-party regimes as the product of the early stages and phases of democratization processes that do not last more than a generation before they get corrupted because multi-party coalition leaves little room for opposition. Party-based governments cannot be voted out of the office quickly because they can renew themselves and have economic and ideological control instruments at their disposal. Candidates for office without a party or movement behind them have hardly any chances to win elections. According to Krippendorff, party regimes should only be an intermediate state, not a permanent one; once democracy is consolidated, direct voting should be the rule, not the exception. Another scenario describes a small government run by a freely elected elite of managers (party leaders) that take managerial functions to help local and international governance, but not overall power, like the concept of glocal governance proposes. Party leaders hence run most modern democracies, and the centralization and presidentialization of politics is turning weak democracies into autocracies. Samples can be witnessed anywhere, but most often in the post-soviet countries, such as in the Kyrgyz Republic. Within less than half a year, between October 2020 and February 2021, the semi-parliamentarian democratic system was turned into a full-fledged presidential one by a presidential candidate who was forcefully freed from prison with the help of organized crime groups. Similar but different is the case of France with President Emmanuel Macron, where his political movement *En Marche* allowed him to enter the Elysée Palace in 2017. Krippendorff was right; presidentialization of One-Party and minority governments are becoming the norm. Multi-party systems such as the Netherlands or Denmark have been governed by fragile minority governments for decades now. The consensus-building slows down, and decisions taken are weak rather than strong. It can be the beginning of the end of democracy, one way or the other.

The desire for strong and male leaders, even in democracies, is a legacy from century old narrative and illusion that only a single leader can be a good leader, and this is only slowly eroding. In Germany, for example, the notion of *Wutbürger*, 'angry and disenchanted citizen,' has entered political rhetoric over the past decades. They are the foundation of the radical-right, Q-Anon, and other movements, and *Wutbürger* is a citizen that is often satisfied with populist politics and easy answers to the overwhelming complex challenges of climate change and digitalization, for example. They have created their quasi-ideology, the 'anti-pluralism' and 'anti-parliamentarianism,' a kind of proxy religion against anything that is consensusdriven and respectful toward other identities. During the Covid pandemic, they were remarkably resistant to get vaccinated—despite all reasoning—, and during the global migration movement in 2015, they were the first turning against intruders that would violate their 'European values,' without ever defining these values. This crowd is growing and a severe threat to pluralistic and inclusive societies. Essentially, they fight against an order system based on pluralism and consensus-building while claiming that this is against their identity (Fukuyama, 2019). A multi-party system and parliamentarians is a way to show respect to different identities, and hence in times of using one's own identity as a weapon against others, democratically elected parliaments are the natural target of these *Wutbürger.* The *Wutbürger* and the *identitaires* traditionalists are across all political spectrums, and they often represent followers of the 'reverse-wave of democratization' (Huntington, 1991) and tend to follow 'Father figure'-led exclusive Nation-State.

## *3.2.1 Statehood*

The nineteenth-century concept of a territorially and sovereign Nation-State, run by an elected but elitist party government, has lost its purpose in the twenty-first century. This form of statehood no longer provides solutions to the global challenges of digitalization, climate change, and migration. Not surprisingly, discussion papers and studies on dissolving statehood have multiplied and today determine the political discourse on governance. For example, the essays on governance beyond Nation-States by Lankowski (1999), and on global citizenship by Langran and Birk (2016), on global justice and liquid borders by Moraña (2021), and above all, Zygmunt Bauman's concept of liquid modernity and democracy (2007), all aim to explain the significant paradigm shifts in societies, local communities, and overall statehood over the last century. Baumann, a pioneer of the concept of 'liquidity,' highlights that in a modern liquid democracy, states, borders, and national constitutions alone cannot provide for the three basic needs of people, namely health, education, and a decent income to live a dignified life, already outlined by Aristotle over two millennia ago. Liquid borders hence is a concept aiming to overcome dysfunctional state institutions that can only govern people's needs within territorial state borders, bound by it through their national constitutions and rules. Liquidity is, at a minimum, a two-way road that allows for diffusion. It overall applies to virtual space and quasinon-territorial proclaimed states, like the global Caliphate of the so-called Islamic State, which is in no need of a territorial state. It is based on and held together by a belief system and governed by local, albeit hierarchal leaders. Another dramatic transformation of statehood can be seen within the EU, based on European interests governed by a multi-level, relatively horizontal system. With its de facto constitutions, with the EU Lisbon Treaty in 2010, and its principles of subsidiarity which allows local communities to interact with EU institutions directly, the Union has slowly but steadily dissolved state sovereignty and transferred national powers to a supranational level, and in return shared them with to a local one.

Fragile post-Soviet states, for example, in the Caucasus and Central Asia, went through a strange mix of policies to become independent from the Soviet Union in 1991, and former republics of the Soviet Union, like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, were de facto expelled from the Union against their wish. In the 1991 autonomous referenda in almost all post-Soviet Union republics, people were asked whether they wanted to stay in the Russian Federation, the successor State of the Soviet Union, or leave. Over 80% wanted to stay. The former Soviet Republics became independent against their will after a regime change in Moscow, and neither in the Caucasus nor the Central Asian republics did any bottom-up approach by citizens toward democratic reforms ever happen. De facto it was a decolonization process against the will of the people colonized decades before by Russia. Because there was never a bottom-up approach to reform the political system and democratize, these states turned into hybrid anocracies. Today they are seen as the result of a failed Nation-State building process. One reason for its failure is that among society, there has never been cohesion and agreement on 'fundamental matters' such as, for example, striving for independence from the Soviet Union. The same happened in post-colonial countries in Africa and South America who, after the decolonization process in the nineteenth and twentieth century, continued with the type of leadership they knew, namely autocratic, male-dominated, and top-down. There was no bottomup movement for independence and a consolidated majority of citizens that would agree on fundamental matters (Rustow, 1970). Their state leaders copied Europeanstyle constitutions with a vital portion of continued habits from lead nations, England, Spain, France, and the US, but citizens never backed up institutional changes.

The few post-colonial countries that established functioning, democratic structures such as Botswana, Uruguay, Ukraine, and the Baltic States shortly after becoming independent often went through troubled times before reaching the independence they claimed to have. For many then, as today, the Nation-State remains an artificial construction of people living in a territory that allows for governing bodies, institutions, and mechanisms to set rules and regulate these people's lives. State leaders promise to provide security, economic security, public health, and education in exchange. If they do not respond to these requirements, state-building fails. Hence, to keep it alive, many leaders use coercion and violence to keep citizens attuned.<sup>19</sup> '*Panem et circenses'* (bread and circus/games) was allegedly used as a method of autocratic leaders to keep the Roman Empire intact. If adapting that metaphor today, it would be '*Panem et signification*' (bread and purpose and identity) that are constructed by this anocratic regime to keep people happy.

Nevertheless, statehood and Nation-States were meant as an answer to anarchy and to build a form of unity within constitutional limits. Two ways to exercise these limits are state borders and sovereignty. Today we define a Nation as a group of people with a common identity based on constitutional rights, religion, ethnicity,

<sup>19</sup> See for example: Huntington (1991), Linz and Stepan (1996), Lijphart (1984), Lipset (1959), O'Donnell et al. (2004), Schmitter (2003) and Tilly (2007).

history, language, or other forms of cultural identity. We often find a combination of all these forms of identities in ourselves. But if there is no more Nation-State with borders as we know it, so does our identity change. It is not surprising that the sheer thought of losing one's national identity scares many people across the globe.

The first significant crises of nation-building and statehood occurred between the two World Wars when many young democracies in Europe failed and became anocracies. In the aftermath of the war, the French philosopher Michel Foucault introduced the need for more 'governmentality,' meaning to have an inherent mind or mentality to govern and decide more strongly than just 'belonging to a Nation' (Foucault et al., 2011). He argued that a strong state is determined by governmentality and the way a society is governed, less on nationhood. Elected governments are mediators between those who hold power and the sovereign, namely the people, of a state or community. From his view, this power–sovereignty relation is formed by the law between citizens and their elected governors, not only by specific political parties or groups. In the essence of his thoughts is the idea of glocality, and in his eyes, political actors obey the law given to them by citizens. Foucault did not argue pro or against democracies or autocracies but raised the point 'whoever gains the trust, and the legitimacy by the people will govern' and build or maintain the state.

Just imagine no state with boundaries and many different nationalities, but rather local communities in which all people adhere to the same principles of human rights and the rule of law and contribute to it. It sounds utopian indeed, and Foucault answered that governmentality is, therefore, the relationship of power between various groups, individuals, institutions, or companies (Foucault, 2005). Territorial statehood is not a necessity for governmentality. Police or parliament is just one form of exercising local power empowered with the 'right to do something versus someone else,' but this relationship also exists in families, work, business, schools, and any fraction or section of society. In the same vein, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt proposed that while all people are aware of their inherent human rights, it will allow them to find the best modes of governance. For her, this can best be achieved in the context of a '*res-publica*,' hence a republic where the public sets the rules enforced by elected leaders. Republican theory is about constructing a system of governance built on the free will of people, which must continuously be fought for and developed further. As Arendt claims '(…), this freedom is never realized if the right to participate actively in public affairs to Citizens is not guaranteed' (Arendt, 1994, p. 281).

In 'glocal' times, it is—ideally, democratically elected—governments that set the rules and standards of implementing and enforcing human rights to which all other non-state actors and citizens involved comply and adhere to or not (Zürn, 2018). Global or regional political governance regimes are thus complementary to Foucault's concept of governmentality and the concepts of a republican and a constitutional state, and they invariably operate with much less hierarchy. Citizendriven regime change that led to the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1990 was based on claims for 'freedom' but not necessarily and participation, used in Southeast Asian waves of democratization at the same time. The millennials then started the *Facebook Revolutions* in the Arab World, and in China used *the Sina-Weibo* network to mobilize millions, and in Brazil, they used the *Fórum Social Temático* to ask for more social justice and fair opportunities, that is: social mobility. Only those successfully drove significant regime change, which turned their claims into fundamental matters and concerns and organized their movements locally successfully. However, democratization failed in many societies for many reasons, and one of them is that people seeked more freedom, but not necessarily wanted to participate in building up the new regime. They expected that governments and political elites deliver to them, like before, but in a different manner. Instead, the old political elite, simply changed colors, and remained the same and soon or later manifested the same authoritarian mechanism as before.

A fertile ground for organizing movements to fight for fundamental matters can be found today in urban dwellings. Over 60% live in urban settlements and megacities with 10 million people or more. 'Urban governmentality' and informal settlements illustrate how dramatic this shift and the struggle for effective governance is (Appadurai, 2001). These shifts in governance are fundamentally different from the democratization movements within a determined territorial state. In modern megacities, we find urban space no longer controlled by state authorities, but by CSO groups or organized crime. Schools and hospitals are built and run by humanitarian and often foreign organizations, such as UNICEF and foundations. Hence, cities have become a state within the state. Their local neighborhood councils, informally appointed or elected, are the managers of these urban spaces. They organize health care, schooling, policing, and regulate markets and business—and their most prominent opponents are organized crime groups, not the state. These informal governance councils organize and govern a diverse population of different languages, ethnicities, and religions in a surprisingly peaceful and fair manner. More formally, elected city mayors act and advocate transnationally on migration, and they are supported by a growing web of intercity networks spanning from knowledge sharing and lobbying to operational work. In parallel, cities' agency is rising as they acquire access and influence in interstate deliberations and decision-making fora. Glocal policy instruments like the foundation of the Global Mayors Forum in 2005, founded their own Global Forum on Migration and Development, the Global Compact on Refugees in 2018, and city mayors across regions initiated the 2019 UN Global Compact for Migrants. State governments play a marginalized role in crucial public policy issues. Cities and urban dwellings face the challenges of integrating migrants, dealing with climate change-induced floods and water shortages, and cyber security (Lacroix, 2021).

Along with the shift from territorial state to local urban governance units comes the caveat of rising populism, notably locally. Populism is fueled by unresolved heterogeneity issues, which again become more potent by the number of migrants from diverse backgrounds flowing into the cities, where the integration and inclusion of migrants and other groups happen. Hence it is in urban spaces where future modes of governance are developing, and if not in a human right complying manner, populists and nationalists will take the lead. The search for a shared and common identity in a highly diverse and heterogeneous group of urban dwellers can quickly exhaust the most dedicated democrats and instead mobilize right-wing populists that deliver the easy answer: 'we against the others.' Populist led governments share common features, such as (1) joint, often heroic, narrative, and rhetoric 'we against the others,' (2) the need for drama, chaos, and action, (3) rhetoric to dismantle or humiliate the 'others,' (4) fuel general fears among the population, (5) spread fake news, and (5) nurture conspiracies. Not surprisingly, populism is strongest where the flow of liquid borders and migration has been objected to. Even within Europe, the idea of the Nation-State remains strong among supporters of populist leaders. David Runciman illustrates how democracy in Europe always grew out of fear against tyranny and populism. In Attica Greece, tyrants were often populist leaders who represented their own clientelist 'privileged elites' and who had no interest in guaranteeing the common people the rights and opportunities they deserved—always just enough so they would not notice that they are fouled (Runciman, 2018). This fear is deeply ingrained in the European narrative of the 'demos,' who 'demonstrate' and protest their will against a corrupt elite—or at least aims to control the elite. Contemporary attempts to discourage, intimidate, forbid, and dissolve political parties before elections, such as under Russian populist President Vladimir Putin's 'Unity' Party (Ed´inctvo) over the past decades, remind European leaders of the darkest time of European tyrannies. Populist former US President Donald Trump (2016–2021) also called his Republican Party 'our America First Movement for the people,' asking the masses to join his cause, but not the Republican party. And the French President Emmanuel Macron, who has strong populist tendencies, founded a hybrid party-movement-group *La République En Marche*! in 2016. Formal political parties have turned into hybrid forms, between civil society activism and political parties. Their gatekeepers are no longer party programs or parliaments but social media and messengers' platforms such as Meta, Weibo, and Twitter.

Like twin brothers, populism and ethnonationalism mutually reinforce themselves. Nations and nationalism go hand in hand, like a pseudo-religion and cover identity aiming to replace the concept of dynastical and even divine monarchies. The nineteenth-century invention of a European Nation-State had but one goal: One nation under one rule! Nevertheless, only for those living within its state borders, the state was far from being inclusive. The concept of state sovereignty and non-interference in internal matters is a legacy of this nineteenth-century concept and slogan that haunts us today in International Relations. What may have appeared novel and revolutionary to replace a millennium old and ineffective mode of monarchial and dynastical governance in the nineteenth century, namely the Nation-State, largely failed to provide peace and prosperity in the twentieth century, let alone in the twenty-first. Nationalism needs the other, and enemy against which it can justify the uniqueness of its nation. Hence, a Nation-State needs to legitimate itself via language, history, traditions, or religion vis-à-vis other states. In Eric Hobsbwan's terms, 'Traditions' are inventions, and more constructed than real, are key to this Nation-State, even when people claim to defend European or Muslim traditions. In eroding statehood, the nation based on constructed traditions and identities is often the only element left to justify the state. Hence, it shows its ugly side, turning identities into racism, xenophobia, and exclusions of others that kill and have heavy consequences for socio-economic development. The Nation-States are built for an egoistic reason and exclusive principles toward its constituency; therefore, hierarchical and top-down authoritarian leadership seems to be the most obvious form of governance. A pluralistic and inclusive governance model contradicts nationalism. In a representative study in 2000, Blank and Schmidt looked at people's different identities, whether they tend to identify themselves as nationalist or patriot and what that meant for building an inclusive and democratic society when dealing, for example, with migration and minorities. Not surprisingly, those who follow a nationalist agenda prefer to expel, blame and exclude migrants and minorities; those who consider themselves patriots of the country prefer integration and more inclusion of minorities through participation (Blank & Schmidt, 2003). According to Hobsbawm, constructed identities need strong leaders, who are often the strongest agitators of a toxic mix of traditions and nationalism. He refers to the nineteenth-century Catholic Pope Pius IX in his example. In his fear of losing papal (divine) state control in Europe, Pius called upon conservative traditions and infallibility to justify his stand against the radical democratization and liberalization movements while fueling antisemitism and hate (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1992). Another political, nationalistic leader, Victor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary since 2010, uses constructed traditions to rule. In his words, liberalism and diversity are the 'enemy of Christian Conservatism' and the universal political order that liberals propagate, only has one goal, namely to '(…) steal ones' Tradition that resume from the lives and experiences of our grand-grand, grand and parents.'<sup>20</sup> Although Orban argues that the liberal way of life is against Hungarian traditions, he does not explain why the ancestral experience of family heritage is opposed to global and universal values such as fundamental freedoms and human rights.

Global and non-nationalistic mass movements and protests such as We are the 99%, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Cancel Culture, and Post-Colonialism, started to deconstruct invented traditions that no longer match the reality of a global and diverse society. An urban civil society leads these movements, communicating in a few global world languages. Counter-movements, such as anti-feminist Men's Rights associations and male brotherhoods are fighting back against women's rights activists and gender equality politics and often find their constituency among rural or very elitist groups who fear the loss of privileges and customs.

To better illustrate this, it is again worth looking at what the popular film industry says about this. In the 2016 Netflix documentary 'The Red Pill'—in alignment with the Red Pill question in the blockbuster Matrix from 1999—men confess why they hate women and why they think that Feminism is a global threat: because it questions the 'natural supremacy' of man, and hence challenges an ancestral brotherhood system in which men worldwide found confidence and comfort to handle their matters. What many of these Anti-Feminism, Anti-Westernism, Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Colonialism, and Anti-Semitism movements have in common is the struggle of the perceived inferior against the superior. Undoubtedly, colonialism was one

<sup>20</sup> Victor Orban, 2020, Prime Minister of Hungary, in his annual speech 'Jointly we will achieve our goals' on 29 September 2020. https://visegradpost.com/de/2020/09/29/gemeinsam-wird-es-ern eut-gelingen-ein-essay-von-viktor-orban/.

of many ugly consequences of uncontrolled capitalism, to argue with Max Weber. Today, the global post-colonialism movements are more than only an Anti-Western movement. It is an anti-capitalism movement, too. Urban youth movements, such as cancel culture and a shared economy with a strong anti-capitalism urge, understand that a 'good way of life' is more than a materialistic life. The anti-'isms' are social movements against others' alleged 'superiority' and allegedly powerful wealthy elite.

The first global UN Anti-Racism Conference in Durban, South Africa, in September 2001 marked the beginning of deconstructing the Nation-State. Nevertheless, primarily forgotten because the day after it ended, the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon in DC were attacked by terrorists, today known as 9/11. The conference was closed, concluding that the main obstacles to good governance were the lack of equal and mutual respect and self-determination. The press release on 8 September 2001 stated that the unequal treatment, humiliation, and discrimination of the 'others,' may they be members of ethnic, religious, or language minorities, women, or elders, cannot be fixed with money. One '(…) could not put a monetary value on the restoration of that dignity, was a concluding remark of the conference.'<sup>21</sup> Hence, what it takes is a change in attitude and behavior to build a peaceful world. The military response to the deadly attacks in the US caused precisely the opposite and led to a plethora of proxy wars and conflicts across the world since 2001.

Ever since, 2001 stands for a turning point, highlighting identity politics as a critical challenge for the twenty-first century on the global and local agenda, as had been predicted by Huntington and Fukuyama ten years earlier. Assimilation, genocide, stolen identities, and 'cultural appropriation' describe century-long humiliation against people's identities and habits. Modern-day cancel culture and the return of stolen or betrayed cultural artifacts to Africa, Asia, or Latin America from the British Museum, the Louvre in Paris, or the Pergamon Museum in Berlin is a way to make up for it. The practice is highly disputed and controversial because the purpose of cleansing museums and memorials of unpleasant historical facts is unclear. Running away from an unpleasant past is the opposite of what Transitional justice claims to do when dealing with it (Mihr, 2018). Taking down statues of war heroes and enslavers or returning archeological and historical artifacts to the country of origin seems to be a good move. But this also carries the risks that people construct a past and identity according to their subjective understanding of it.

Along with cancel culture comes the destruction of the standard narrative of the one nation. National narratives were invented to cover the 'weakness and deficits of human beings' in the first place, according to some, in dire need of solidarity and reciprocity to survive.<sup>22</sup> Hannah Arendt contributed to the debate about the concept of solidarity and the needs of people living in urban communities and Nation-States. All religious and ideological streams offer their concept of solidarity and reciprocity

<sup>21</sup> Press Briefing by President and Secretary General ofWorld Conference on Racism,World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, UN DPI—News and Media Services Division, Durban, South Africa 31 August–7 September 2001, 8 September 2001.

<sup>22</sup> Gehlen, Arnold, on Hannah Arendt? https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/arnold-gehlen-on-arendtsthe-human-condition-2013-05-07.

to us and, hence, a form of governing that. What if people no longer need a religion, an ideology, or nationality and instead live their solidarity because there are human beings with different beliefs, identities, and ideas? Then the Nation-State is obsolete as an entity to govern.

A diverse, mobile, heterogeneous urban society has different needs than a rural homogeneous one. In his 1973 study at Stanford University, Granovetter investigated why heterogeneous societies, are more successful at maintaining peace and prosperity over a more extended period than homogeneous societies tied by kinship (Granovetter, 1973). In heterogeneous societies, they found out, is the need to form new bonds outside one's comfort zone stronger than in homogeneous ones. A kin urge us to be open, adapt, and respectful toward others and build new ties and friendships to survive. Automatically we collaboratively exchange views and ideas, generating innovation and progress. Diverse societies and transdisciplinary research groups have more innovative outcomes than homogenous ones. People who leave their homes and countries, triggered through curiosity or force, need to build trustworthy bonds with people they have never met before. This group is often young and seeks merit-based collaboration ties that at the same time aim to get the best results for all and both. The opposite of this is tribalism and clientelism and kinship, based on property and blood relationships, and those who solve problems based on traditions and customs, but not on merits and scientific evidence.

So why then, do homogenous nationalistic and territorial societies flourish at all? China exercised the ethnonationalism of the Han, Nazi Germany was partly successful while propagating the superiority of the Germanic race, and even the Soviet Union claimed that the *homos sovieticus* was new ethnic humankind, rising above all others. What these societies have in common is that at the beginning of their 'homogeneous empires,' as we see in modern-day China, they have a disciplined top-down controlled economic regime, using the best-brains in the country to make the new ideology successful in the eyes of the population—at the beginning of regime change. Engineers, scientists, physicians, and even writers and lawyers enjoy a certain level of freedom and liberty in the first decade of establishing the new empire. However, these liberties shrink after a decade, and control, surveillance, betrayal, and mistrust creep into all aspects of life—as seen in current-day China. The system corrupts and collapses from the inside and turns into tyranny. Along this downward spiral, all empires and societies turning into ethno nationalists have failed to succeed.

Lets take China, for example, ten years after its successful launch of 'global development for all,' initiative, the BRI strategy cracks. China cannot keep up its promises, its 'roads and highways' get attacked by angry mobs in Asia and Africa, energy projects are put on hold, there is the rise of military expenditure instead of development, as lands get violently annexed in Kashmir, Tibet, and Hong Kong, installing a Han Chinese way of infrastructural development. The CPC spends more on control and security than on infrastructural matters, and Beijing's leadership keeps its citizens happy at the cost of personal freedoms. Human rights abuses are increasingly being reported and sooner or later, this will trigger resistance in China and the BRI countries in Central and Southeast Asia and Africa.

#### 3.3 Universal Jurisdiction 87

Many leaders before tried to establish all sorts of autocratic governance regimes to reach societal prosperity without democracy, but often failed. Second-century Roman Emperor Diocletian, to keep the empire together, created a system called Tetrarchy, a multi-level decentralized governance regime led by four proxy emperors. This system was an early form of federalism to overcome high security risks and costs posed by ethnic conflicts and the fight against protesters in the colonized regions. Diocletian failed because he kept the last word and hierarchal autocratic structures and would not allow to share and decentralize powers. He would not allow for complete autonomy and liberalization of regional autonomies in Roman colonies because he did not trust their leaders; and hence the Tetrarchy failed and could not stop the empire's fall. A century later the fifth-century theologist and writer Augustine, claimed to have found the solution to the governance dilemma, namely theocracy. He proposed a divine, cleric, and God-led cleric state, similar to what we see today in the Islamic Republics of Iran, Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia. It was the basis for the Catholic reign over Europe for centuries and today's Vatican State. Theocracy eventually failed because it left little room for citizens to express different views and needs. The regime was responsive to a majority of people, but not to all. After all, the last word was always with the cleric elites and those who shared their belief. However, even when liberal democracy became a popular model of governance, Ludwig Hegel, a critical political thinker of the nineteenth century, had his concerns about it. He wanted a 'moral state' under the rulership of a strong, ideally, monarchial leader—like Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan. Hegel's caveat was that these moral leaders hardly exist, let alone as monarchs, and hence the system he proposed is not sustainable. Threats to autocratic hierarchical and patriarchal regimes always came from inside. When people loose trust in the central government, the regime collapses sooner or later. What Augustin, Hegel and others often overlooked is that they looked at governance model that would work for a majority of society, but not for all, let along minorities.

## **3.3 Universal Jurisdiction**

Universal jurisdiction is the rule of law on the global level. It provides for state authority anywhere in the world, namely domestic or regional courts, parliaments, and tribunals to exercise jurisdiction over crimes against international human rights law, even when the crimes did not occur on that state's territory and regardless of the defendant's nationality. A suspect subject to universal jurisdiction is someone who committed severe or gross human rights violations, such as massacres, genocide, and other crimes against humanity, and who is sought by an international warrant and hence can be put to justice anywhere in the world. This practice has eroded state sovereignty dramatically over the past two decades—and some would go as far that it replaced state sovereignty over jurisdiction. Universal jurisdiction, if exercised, highlights the incapability or unwillingness of countries' authorities to bring to justice to their worst criminals. The extent to which universal jurisdiction expands is decided by an assembly of member states to the system such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) who defines the legal framework of the universal jurisdiction.

Thus far, the most prominent legal instrument of universal jurisdiction is the Rome Statute (1998) of international criminal law. Its subsequent legal body is the ICC in The Hague (2002), dealing with most the severe and gross human rights violations, such as genocide, crimes of aggression, and systematic rape as means of suppression—if the state on which territory it is happening cannot or will not deal with it. Nevertheless, universal jurisdiction equally allows other national courts in third countries to address international crimes occurring outside that territory, to hold perpetrators criminally liable. *Genocidaires* of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, for example, who escaped the country and were later tracked down in Germany and Belgium, had been trialed, sentenced, and imprisoned there for a lifetime—thanks to universal jurisdiction and the capability of courts elsewhere in the world to apply international law.

Globalization and mobility have increased the need for universal jurisdiction to be applied extraterritorially—which, too, has significantly eroded our understanding of statehood. Extraterritorial regulations and trials build intersections between different forms of jurisdiction, local, national, and global, and erode governmental authority and domestic jurisdiction (Allen et al., 2019). However, universal or extraterritorial jurisdiction only applies when domestic governments and courts are unwilling or incapable to exercise jurisdiction according to international law. Extraterritorial jurisdiction, for example, means that a court of one country can exercise legal authority beyond its normal state boundaries. Domestic courts of one country must have an agreement either with the legal authority in the other country or with a legal authority that covers both territories. It mainly applied to cases of transnational terrorism and piracy and organized crime groups, environmental crimes, human trafficking, and cybercrime. For example, the storage of data Cloud Computing against the will and consent of the Internet user, can compose a cybercrime. The company, or programmer, responsible for it can be charged anywhere in the world if one finds lawyers, courts, and state attorneys that are willing to deal with the case. Trans-border criminality is nevertheless one of the most complex, glocal, and yet underdeveloped areas in terms of universal and extraterritorial jurisdiction thus far (Allen, 2019).

International criminal, human rights, environmental, and cyber laws are, for most parts, customary international law. But no matter their global acceptance, to implement these laws it does require collaboration and agreements by national governments, after the ruling takes place in one country and needs to be enforced in another. One of the first criminal trials worldwide on systematic and gross violations of human rights by a third state, namely Syria, in front of a domestic court in another country, was a trial against a torturer in Germany in 2020. The defendant, a former official at the Syrian General Intelligence Directorate, was found guilty by a district court in Germany, sentencing him to four and half years in prison in 2021 (Buerger, 2021). And later, in 2022, the German district court of Koblenz sentenced a Syrian colonel to life in prison for crimes against humanity. The former Colonel of the Syrian Army was linked to the torture of over 4,000 people in Syria's civil war. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, called the conviction a 'landmark leap forward' in pursuing truth23 and one could add it was a stepping stone for 'glocal justice.'

Under the same notion of universal jurisdiction, in 2021, the District Court of The Hague ruled against the Dutch government for not fulfilling its duty to combat climate change elsewhere in the world and protecting citizens in other countries from the consequences of environmental destruction.

Climate-related issues and cybercrime cases are the most frequent cases that call for global and local jurisdiction changes. Espionage of intellectual property and abuse of private or company data has reached approximately a damage volume of 450 billion dollars yearly. The number of international and hybrid trials against hackers, whistleblowers, and alleged cyberespionage has skyrocketed over the past years. The call for an International Cybercrime Court—in the style of the ICC—and global jurisdiction on cybercrime is louder than ever by CSOs and companies alike, highlighting the fact that domestic courts can no longer deal with what does not only fall under the category of transnational crimes in global cyberspace. Violation of rights in cyberspace forces governments of all states, local and national courts alike, to collaborate under existing international law (Mihr, 2017). The UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF), the European Court for Human Rights (ECtHR) endorsed and practice the European Convention against Cybercrime from 2001, turning it into global customary law and by this setting new legal benchmarks for global jurisdiction on these matters. Cases on cybercrime and data protection have skyrocketed over the past decade, mainly in Europe and North America. Yet, the main challenge is not the law or the lack thereof, but the law's applicability when the crime happened in 'non-territorial' cyberspace. IP addresses are often not traceable to a specific country, let alone a person. Based on European Union Law and the EU Fundamental Rights Charter from 2000, the EU's Court for Justice in Luxemburg ruled in 2020 against one of its member states, Romania, for failing to protect the privacy on the Internet of an abused woman, whose Facebook and emails were accessed by her ex-husband and who blackmailed her with harmful consequences. The court ruled that the Romanian government must pay compensation to the women because it failed to protect its citizen from human rights abuse (Barberá, 2020). States, let alone governments for that matter, are no longer the only duty-bearer of law; they can also be a service provider. The relationship between duty-bearer and rights holders has dramatically shifted over the past decade. The traditional concept that governments are the only duty bearers to be held accountable is no longer valid. Nowadays, all legal entities, i.e., companies, NGOs, and individuals alike, are duty bearers and therefore responsible for fulfilling human rights,<sup>24</sup> namely in the manner in which rights holders hold duty bearers accountable (EU White Paper, 2007; UN, 2007). Domestic jurisdiction

<sup>23</sup> BBS News (14 January 2022), German court finds Syrian Colonel guilty of crimes against humanity. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59949924.

<sup>24</sup> UN Report of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the Issue of Human Rights and Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises, John Ruggie: Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations "Protect, Respect and Remedy" Framework 2008. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/705860.

alone can no longer solve recent global–local and private cases. The development of universal and extraterritorial (country-to-country), and supranational jurisdiction (EU), has taken speed. However, what is remarkable in the light of glocal governance is that the court's decisions can be implemented by anyone who can implement them, whether it be the local authorities in Romania, Civil Society in Syria, and City Mayors in the Netherlands.

Another way to see the interlinkage between universal norms and politics in a glocalized world is to look at Outer and International Space Law and joint space shuttles. The first treaties and agreements in the UN Outer Space Treaty from 1967, setting norms and standards, agreed to by the Soviet Union and the US at that time, set out that the exploration and use of outer space shall not be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of one country alone. Instead, it shall be in the interest 'of all countries and shall be the province of all humanity' (1967). At the height of the Cold War, and apart from the other UN human rights treaties, this treaty paved the grounds for setting standards, governing a space and environment in a sustainable way, and for the benefit of all humankind. It is under no clear jurisdiction of a state government and territory and inspires many lawmakers today when facing governance issued in the context of climate justice or cybercrime.

Equally, this rapid change underlines the dramatic rise of domestic violence and sexual abuse during war and conflict or within one's family. For centuries rape and sexual assault have been seen as 'unavoidable collateral damage in times of war or pressure,' let alone a private matter within families and husband and wife. This harmful norm led to a dreadful spiral of more violence and impunity and hence again the struggle of many for vengeance and homicide. The Rome Statute on Crimes against humanity of 1998 and the UN Resolution 1325 onWomen's Rights and Sexual Violence during conflicts and at home aim to challenge our norms and attitudes of sexual violence and domestic violence and rape in war times so that it is no longer seen as collateral damage. Turkey's withdrawal and Hungary's and Croatia's blockade against the 2011 Council of Europe's Istanbul Convention against Violence against Women marked the tipping point of how serious of a threat women's rights are seen by patriarchal systems. Gender equality fundamentally erodes a millennia-old patriarchal governance system across the planet.

## *3.3.1 Rule of Law*

The rule of law is crucial for glocal governance to work. The most visible institutions that exercise the rule are administrative courts, hence local or district or city courts that deal with people's day-to-day issues. During the period of Soviet dictatorship, none of the socialist countries having administrative courts was one way to prove that in an autocratic regime, the day-to-day problems were not dealt with by courts but by political elites. Hence, fair and open trials were not possible, and people depended on the will and arbitrary judgment of political or clerical elites or clan leaders. Nevertheless, even though today all modern societies have at least de jure, administrative justice, if judges are seen to be underpaid and corrupt, and police and courts are not equipped with necessary equipment, the rule of law is nil.

The rule of law is more than anything a concept according to which arbitrary exercise of power is restricted by subordinating jurisdiction to overall agreed and established laws by citizens. Ideally, international, domestic, and local law is exercised based on this concept that can both be applied by local judges to sentence people and to solve disputes. The more independent and impartial judges are, and the more unrestrained and fairer the trials are run, the more likely that rule of law is practiced and the higher the trust in the judiciary and the more robust this institution is perceived publicly. International, domestic, and local formal and informal councils, courts, tribunals, etc., can practice the rule of law because it is a concept of how to govern, but not a law in and of itself. Human rights norms are integral to the rule of law but not sufficient unless buttressed by a commitment to principles such as the supremacy of law, equality before the law, and accountability to the law. Judges should respond not only to laws but also to people. Therefore, successful compliance with the rule of law principles depends on the levels of popular trust and confidence in the courts and the judges, predicting the accountability and responsiveness in institutions. Key indicators of whether the stakeholder, namely clients, defendants, witnesses, and lawyers trust institutions and hence the rule of law is if they bring their cases in front of the court in the first place.

According to the World Justice Project data report on the practice of the rule of law in 128 countries in 2020, it is dramatically downscaling across the planet, meaning that law is no longer impartially applied but instead abused by powerful elites. Domestic legal institutions are more and more corrupted, the judges threatened by clients and governments alike, or they are bought or underpaid, witnesses are intimidated, and claims by citizens denied. Hence, an independent judiciary is at stake and can no longer deliver citizens' needs. The questions asked by the Justice Project are whether domestic jurisdiction and courts can constrain governmental powers and hold up fundamental Rights, Order, and Security for their citizens. The average annual percentage drop in the rule of law is in states that have recently turned back to autocratic leadership or are governed anocratically, such as Egypt, Venezuela, Cambodia, the Philippines, Cameroon, Hungary, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Poland's recent decline of rule of law performance up to 10% is the highest in less than five years among democratic states. Even here, the rule of law is jeopardized if control mechanisms such as civil society, population empowerment, and fee and impartial media are not in place or cannot work freely. What is also striking is that small countries in each region, with less than 10 million inhabitants, score the best among their regional peers in upholding the rule of law. Size seems to matter. Those smaller countries who preform best among its regional peers are Nepal in South Asia, Georgia in Eastern Europe and Central Asia; Namibia in Sub-Saharan Africa; Uruguay in Latin America; the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East; New Zealand in East Asia and Pacific; and Denmark in the Western hemisphere.<sup>25</sup> Smaller states seem to have more transparency, mutual control mechanism, and shorter communication distances between governmental institutions and civil society and media. Whether this equation 'the smaller, the better' aligns with glocal governance entities remains to be seen, but for sure, mutual control, checks and balance systems, and transparency are more intensive in smaller communities than in larger ones. According to the Justice Project, large, populated countries such as India ranking 69:128 and China, 88:128, and score relatively low unless they decentralize and share power with local courts on the one end and accept universal jurisdiction on the other.

According to the change theory, the rising awareness of human rights and individual entitlement will challenge any dysfunctional and corrupt regime, as it has already passed the threshold of 33%, and the number of people who are sensitive to abuse of power and corruption is growing daily (Childs & Mona, 2008). This critical mass can trigger sustainable change and transformation, no matter the regime type. Welzel and Alexander asses this effect and found out that the '(…) lack of the rule of law depreciates the scoring of many nominally democratic countries. Sometimes this depreciation goes so far that nominal democracy scores lower ineffective democracy than some autocracies. Under recognition of democracy's purpose to empower people (…). Democracies that lack the rule of law fail to set popular rights into effect, and so they do as little to empower people effectively as do some milder versions of autocracy' (Welzel & Alexander, 2008, p. 30). In the same vein, and according to the V-dem index report of 2021, the backsliding of democracies around the world is intertwined with the abuse of Rule of Law in all world regions. State authorities manipulate democratic institutions, such as supreme courts, as tools to exercise their power and to keep a democratic facade. In India, for example, the populist Hindu BJP government has used laws on sedition, defamation, and counterterrorism to silence critics without providing fair and open hearings to those who challenge these laws. Street revolts and imprisonment of people were the consequence, over 7,000 people were charged with sedition after the populist government assumed power, and the rule by law became stronger. It applies mainly to hybrid and weak democracies that lack strong media and civil control mechanisms, but it is also a global trend showing the rapid erosion of statehood (Alizada et al., 2021).

It is what Hume, Kant, and others meant when highlighting that the concept of the rule of law is the positive law, deriving from Natural Law and the 'natural entitlement by all men' not states. Glocal governance aims to put these individual entitlements in the center of if rule of law concept, independently from the any regime-driven state. In short, everywhere, and at any time without any exceptions or excuses international law and practice can and should be applied, based on the born entitlements and natural rights of free women and men (Beitz, 2011 and Donnelly, 2003). Our natural entitlements are the fundamental freedoms such as the capability of logical thinking and speaking, and the desire for security and safety, but it also includes envy and vengeance. The rule of law aims to balance these natural entitlements and desires

<sup>25</sup> The World Justice Project, 2020, The Rule of Law Index, Washington, DC. https://worldjustice project.org/ (August 2021).

for fundamental freedoms. It is our reasoning and action that turns human rights into laws, and hence measuring the applicability and impact of the rule of law can best occur in a glocal setup.

## **References**


Regel, S., & Döring, H. (2019, January 7). Party facts: A database of political parties worldwide. *SAGE Journals*. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068818820671. Accessed 14 September 2021.

Runciman, D. (2018). *How democracies die*. Basic Books.


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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# **Chapter 4 Glocality Is the Current State of the Art**

International Law, the SDGs and the multitude of Global Compacts, and the mushrooming of regional organizations and World Fora, let alone the millions of CSOs and ICT platforms, have today fabricated connectivity from the local to the global and back to the local. Quite unique in human history, it is the state of the art of glocality, but it is, also orchestrated by exogenous and endogenous factors.

The stage for glocality was set in the early 1990s with the aim to link the local to the domestic and from there to the global and back to the local. Thus, the rise of ICT, and global mobility provided the ground for new models of governance, including public–private partnerships (PPP) and the first UN Global Compact for business and human rights in 1999, followed by the 2005 self-imposed Accountability Charter by NGOs to set ethical standards for all CSOs globally. Global and local stakeholders felt directly accountable to citizens and this accelerated the erosion of statehood. These were early signs that states would either need to share power with the global and local levels and hence decentralize in all directions or defend their power through coercion and turn back to autocracies. Today the world is divided into decentralized/glocalizing states and centralizing/automatizing states.

Boundaries of all sorts became fluid, and hybridity of anything that we once knew as territorial statehood became the new normal. PPP, for example, introduced in 1992 by the Conservative government in the UK, aimed at encouraging businesses to co-finance the public sector, and privatization and co-sponsoring of hospitals and schools has become the norm, not the exception in democracies and autocracies alike. In their book on *The Commons in a Glocal World* (2019), Haller et al. looked at several global–local governance cases around the world. They found that state and private property arrangements in a glocal world can potentially destabilize common property institutions, such as the public sectors, and therefore can undermine sustainable development if governments do not monitor them (Haller et al., 2019, p. 17). In a similar vein, the concept of shared responsibility between different stakeholders on one subject matter and the global deal on business supply chains are best to be realized when monitor by transparent governance regimes. Normative orders such as human rights have shaped the public sector today, independently from political orders or international regimes (Risse & Lehmkuhl, 2006). Hence, political culture everywhere has changed, albeit not always in the same direction, and so has the role of different stakeholders and actors (North et al., 2009). These exogenous and endogenous factors responsible for this change have shaped our expectations toward good governance (Geddes, 1999).

## **4.1 Exogenous Dynamics**

The exogenous dynamic of glocal governance is fabricated by externally imposed crises and globally shared challenges, such as climate change, global mobility, or pandemics that lead to new forms of urban governance and labor markets, and subsequently how we deal with public matters of health, schooling, work, housing, and security.

The growing number of World Summits under the chairmanship of the G20, the UN, or ASEAN, together with scientists, CSOs, businesses, and NSAs, are on the one side of the spectrum. On the other side are new forms of multi-level and multistakeholder responses by national and local actors that transcend national and international consensus among state governments. At first sight, these exogenous factors help maintain territorial and state stability, climate change, cybercrime, pandemics, and migration, but looking closer at it, they erode the state and its authorities as we know them to construct new modes of global and local governance regimes.

## *4.1.1 Climate Change*

Climate change is the mother of all paradigm shifts in the twenty-first century. For some, it has reached the level of a 'weapon of mass destruction,' making people lose their homes, become refugees and stateless, billions of people competing for scared resources and becoming genocidaires against people and fauna. For others, it has changed our way of life and priorities turning 'sustainability into a new and transformative ideal.' In 2021, the World Bank published a report estimating that by 2050 there will be 200 million climate refugees that need to be accommodated, trained, and housed. The majority of them will most likely live in megacities. For Vanderheiden, sustainability and renewability are the new benchmarks against which any type of governance regime must be measured (Vanderheiden, 2020). No matter the political system, whatever mode of governance can best deal with climate change and all its consequences, will be the one that receives the most support from citizens, and hence be a legitimate one. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that global temperatures will increase by two degrees. It will have beneficial impacts in some regions and harmful ones in others, but together it means there will be a need for governance change, most likely connected to dissolving of boundaries as we know them. The net annual costs for governments to respond to droughts, floods, and resettlement of their population will increase and, for some, accelerate their GDP.

Climate change triggers creativity, and problem-solving initiatives, and partnerships far beyond Nation-States. Ideology and nationalism become more and more redundant when people no longer have access to clean water or have adequate housing. It mobilizes in a short time millions of people, bundles the dynamics for universal jurisdiction, and increases technological innovations. In 2007 the IPCC received the Nobel Peace Prize for its unconventional governance in seeking bottomup and globally linked solutions among all stakeholders that mattered in the case of floods, disaster relief, or migration. The MSA approach allows for inclusive participation and consensus-driven solutions that must be timely and practical. The Pacific Island State of Vanuatu, in 2019, for example, sought an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague to stop sea levels rising so the state can exist. In alliance with the other Island States that will soon disappear from the surface of the world, they formally aim to secure the future of their citizens and call upon the obligations of states under international law to protect the rights of present and future generations against the adverse effects of climate change. Other examples, such as the citizen-driven Extinction Rebellion movement, or Fridays for Future (F4F), have been rising in less than a decade, enjoying billions of supporters. They are the most significant and most global citizen movements in human history. Global initiatives and projects such as the Youth Climate Pact Challenge and the My-World-Our-Planet initiative are among the largest globally accessible via the Internet and supported by thousands of different citizen movements worldwide.

After 2006 was the hottest recorded year ever, Pulitzer Prize-winner Thomas Friedman wrote about the consequences of climate change in 2007, calling for a global green deal that is agreed globally and implemented locally. In 2009 the UN launched an appeal for 'Global Green New Deal for Climate, Energy, and Development' that was later taken up by the US and the EU. Today thousands of local initiatives working toward the goals set later in the SDGs and the Paris Agreement in 2015. SDG No. 13 calls upon formal and informal actors and institutions to 'take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts and concepts such as climate and environmental justice.' Climate justice is by no means retributive but restorative and thus looking toward the future. All measures may be taken so that any intervention in the nature and energy sector needs to be sustainable and renewable, not exploitive, but beneficial for business alone. Globally, the Green New Deal (GND) refers to the goals set by the 2015 Paris Agreement on reducing global warming. Rifkin (2019), one of the pioneers of the Internet of Things, also argues that renewable energy is cheaper than fossil energy and that future economy including pension funds can be generated through renewable energy and a shared economy, albeit this climate-friendly energy sector being in the hands of people, not states or elites, and governed democratically. Friedman, however, suggested that the state needs to set incentives for innovation in renewable energies that would be taken up by business, industry, and science, and hence guide and channel a fundamental change to reduce the use of fossil energy and at the same time guarantee the thirst for the energy of an ever-growing population. By 2020, over 1,300 city governments in over 20 countries have jointly led the global call on the 'climate emergency' and established their local NGDs together with their citizens.

To win the battle over climate change is a joint endeavor among different stakeholders. Thus far, the EU Commission is the largest supranational investor and major stakeholder, with 2 billion dollars (1.8 billion EUR) allocated until 2030 to invest in science and technologies and new ways of creating climate-neutral cities and industries. Rifkin highlights that local and private households are essential for insisting on renewable energy. Hence the success of the climate change movement is in the hands of individual households. Only they can make the transition from fossil to renewable energy supplies possible. The GND is therefore more than anything a glocal initiative that needs private households and businesses to succeed and strengthens their position vis-à-vis governments to achieve global goals. Since over half of the global GDP has a high dependency on natural resources, investing in nature-based solutions locally will not only limit global warming but also result in about 4 trillion dollars in revenue for businesses and over 100 million new jobs each year by 2030, as the UN Environment Program predicts.<sup>1</sup> Governmental actions are thus far too slow and too fragmented, taking up only one or some aspect of environmental justice.

The local community leaders, the city mayors, farmers, and CSOs deal with the consequences such as re-settlements and migration. Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin argue that for the GND, the critical factor will be how stakeholders unambiguously demonstrate '(…) how climate stabilization is fully consistent with expanding decent work opportunities, raising mass living standards, and fighting poverty in all regions of the world' (Chomsky & Pollin, 2020, p. 154).

## *4.1.2 Global Mobility*

Another exogenous factor that changes our current mode of governance is human mobility. It is partly related to climate change. Refugees, migrant workers, global nomads, urban dwellers, and the stateless pose a particular exogenous challenge to governance. If mobility is uncontrolled and not channeled, it can lead to unrest and the rapid spread of a pandemic, human trafficking, and hence nurture organized crime. Migrants, no matter whether they come or go, and no matter with what intentions they come, interfere in the homogeneity of a nation, and hence are mostly perceived as a threat to national identity and values.<sup>2</sup> Social mobility is more than migration, it also transfers ideas, concepts, beliefs, customs, and habits. It allows people to move from one social class to another, taking chances or losing them.

Mass migration from the poorest countries to the Global North is only stopped through donor-driven development aid. However, Gaim Kibreab documented how development aid in one of the poorest countries in the world, Eritrea, led to the

<sup>1</sup> UN Environment Program. (2021). Facts about Climate Emergency. https://www.unep.org/exp lore-topics/climate-action/facts-about-climate-emergency (August 2021).

<sup>2</sup> Ibid., p. 190.

stabilization of bad governance, and hence more corruption and eventually a highly militarized autocracy. These dictatorial regimes, nurtured by external aid, caused hundreds of thousands of young people to leave the country because the government saw no need to adapt to local demands and include people. Hence, more than anything, people flee corrupt and dysfunctional autocracies, not poverty as such. Climate change-induced droughts and floods often do the rest, causing millions of people to leave the region. In his study on Servitude for the Common Good and the Youth Exodus, Kibreab responded to Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize-winning theory on 'governing the commons' and why her concept can go wrong. Ostrom researched rural areas in Asia, Africa, and North America and argued that development needs a set of global principles and norms, supported by an effective mobilization for local management of the shared pool resources, whether human or natural resources. If the local management works well and finds support from national authorities, everyone benefits from it, independently of traditions, geography, and locality (Ostrom, 2015). Her studies fueled the glocalization debate of that time, but Kibreab adds to the story that these progressive developments based on collective actions can only work if there are a minimum of democratic standards in practice and the government is willing or in need of collaborating with local authorities and people. If the government is maintained by the flow of development or oil and gas revenues, it does not need to collaborate with local leaders or citizens. Ostrom accepted the intervention but added that common resources are well managed under any circumstances when those who benefit from them the most are near them. For her, the tragedy occurred when external groups, such as organized crime or clientelist elites and even external international donors exerted their power politically, economically, or socially to gain a personal advantage—and hence de facto take over the function of autocratic regimes.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UNHCHR, and the UN Population Dynamics database together estimate that today 1:5 persons are migrating from their home at some stage in his/her life. There are roughly one billion people on the move within their country's territorial boundaries and approx. 300 million migrate abroad and to other regions every year. Altogether, we estimate around 25 million (1:95) conflict-driven refugees in recent years. All migrants together would form the most densely populated state in the world with approx. 1.5 billion people. That makes 20% of the world's population with either limited or no legal rights to politically participate in state-driven formal electoral processes, and hence an ever-growing critical and angry number of people that either express their interests through other means of violence and disobedience or look for more local informal ways of participation. The Bidibidi refugee camp in Uganda with over 300,000 refugees, mainly from South Sudan, is the largest globally and a de facto city, for which the government in Kampala provided land and where people can work. The UNHCHR, UNICEF, and other private donors and faith-based organizations provide education and training and often practical tools to farm the land. These people have no voting rights, let alone citizenship, that would allow for full political participation in the decision-making process over their faith. If someone commits a criminal act, Uganda's government expels that person from the country. Uganda has become a 'camping state' where people have no permanent residence, are second-class citizens, and move from one camp to the other. Over the long haul, if more and more uprooted and mobile people get excluded from political participation, the territorial Nation-State turns into an 'empty shell.'

Climate change-induced migration is led by young angry wo/men who leave their homes because they do not find work, joining those who seek refuge because of war and conflict, as well as those who are trafficked and sold into slavery. According to the IOM, the rate of working migrants who sent home remittances in 1970 was 2.5% of the working population worldwide, and today it is 3.5%.<sup>3</sup> The exact figure of how many are on the move, uprooted, trafficked, and work as 'global nomads' can only be estimated, possibly up to 1:5. Both in countries they migrate to, and the countries they leave, this exodus of the youth has triggered populist autocratic regimes to rise, promising easy answers to this complex state of glocality.

In 2015 over 2 million war refugees from Syria flocked into Europe, many via Hungary and the Balkan route. Budapest was overwhelmed, and the dysfunctional government built a razor-wire fence to keep migrants out, beat and tortured them, and threatened to send them back to Serbia, from where they crossed the border. Despite international protest, the Hungarian government did not take down the fence and used war-like rhetoric calling migrants 'invaders.' Climate change challenges authoritarian regimes on various levels, because they cannot deal with it. From 2006 to 2011, a severe drought in Syria caused a mass migration of angry young families from the rural areas to Damascus, blaming the government for its incapability to provide for its citizens, and by this becoming part of the Arab Spring upheavals in the Middle East. The state suppression of these protests eventually led to civil wars, leading to mass migrations to Europe. Ironically enough, anocratic states like Syria and Hungary have no means to deal with the consequences of climate change and often use coercion, force, and even state terror. We can see a similar climate change-induced poverty and subsequent migration, so in January 2021, when 9,000 uprooted farmers from Honduras in Central America, wanted to cross the border of Guatemala to move further on to Mexico and the US and were held collectively in custody for weeks and months, causing much death without any government taking responsibility for them.4

Urbanization is yet another consequence of global mobility that cannot be dealt on state level only. In 1980, approximately 40% of the world's population lived in urban areas and cities, and today it is 60%. Over 80% of the South and North American population live in cities and over 70% in Europe and Australia. However, Megacities of 10 million people and more are found predominately in Asia and the Global South, where roughly 50% of the population lives.5 The fact that these numbers have risen dramatically in only one generation has led to radical responses by overwhelmed governments that often seem to be at war with their population. Urban dwellers have

<sup>3</sup> International Organization for Migration. (2010). The World Migration Report, Geneva, p. 21. https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/wmr\_2020.pdf.

<sup>4</sup> Al Jazeera. (2021). https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/16/thousands-hondurans-advanceon-foot-us-bound-caravan (accessed September 16, 2021).

<sup>5</sup> Urban net. (2016). https://www.urbanet.info/world-urban-population/.

instead created their own mode of governance to solve most daily life problems. And it seems that urban governors and local authorities best solve urban problems. In Mumbai, for example, the city dwellers cooperate with the city council, not the state for decades, because the government has no solutions to the dwellers' challenges, or is absent (Moonen et al., 2014).

As we have seen, mobility can result from a free choice to seek better economic or lifestyle opportunities elsewhere; or conflicts and droughts can impose it. However, the consequences are the same: uncontrolled, unplanned urbanization and pre-urban areas that cannot provide for basic needs. Cities may also positively impact migrants' inclusion when undertaken to strengthen the inclusion and resilience of diverse communities. However, urban planning for migrants' inclusion may raise more difficulties in slums. They often escape the reach of national and local authorities, resulting in a lack of access to essential services for residents, including migrants. Africa had the highest rate of urban change of all continents, with an urban growth that is eleven times quicker than in Europe. Across the continent, rural–urban migration rates are high, with increasing rates of international migration as well.

In 2016, 68% of the entire urban population in Africa lived in informal urban settlements, thus representing a consolidated majority of the population that had no permanent residence, many of them not registered and without voting rights. It made national elections completely redundant because they no longer represent the country's citizens. Apart from participation, local citizen-driven urban planning seems to have the highest impact on living conditions compared with state-led urban planning. Local communities engage directly with UN-led organizations such as HABITAT, UNICEF and Red Cross/Crescent, NGOs, and other private donors, like the Bill and Melinda Gates or the Agha Khan Foundation, in addition to development organizations such as USAID, GIZ, and faith-based organizations. Many of them have already replaced state functions and provide public goods such as nurseries, doctors, and schooling that are fundamental to keep the hollow state alive.<sup>6</sup>

Another driving force for migration is the lack of social mobility for the young. For 20-year-old young *wo/men*, it takes only a few cents to invest and watch sitcoms on Youtube that show a better life and more opportunities in other parts of the world. It is not a matter of lack of patriotism often not even poverty, which drives them leave their homeland. Much more, it is the hopeless striving for opportunities and fair conditions that they do not have in autocratic regimes. Today, Europe is seen for many as a social mobility project that appeals to young people from accross the world. The EU member states promise more freedom to choose works, skill training, and work opportunities for any of its citizens and residents. Migrants are welcome, if they are skill trained. Therefore, more than anything, the EU stands for a new Western way of life and if it could manage to turn social mobility into its core business and make it its flagship, then the EU will succeed over the long haul. If it closes its borders and exempts outsiders from enjoying opportunities within the EU it will fail.

<sup>6</sup> IOM. (2019). World Migration Report 2020, Geneva, p. 201. https://publications.iom.int/system/ files/pdf/wmr\_2020.pdf.

The lack of citizenship and no voting rights for refugees, migrants, and noncitizens threaten any sustainable good governance regime—no matter where. If 10% or more of a population has no voting rights, it can threaten inclusive governance, which is the case in most EU countries. In absolute numbers, that means that approx. 45 million people cannot participate legally in political decision-making and hence are overlooked by policymakers, and their voices and interests are unheard during decision-making processes. At the same time, demands for citizens' participation and dialogues are dramatically rising around the world, but state-driven laws and the way we define citizenships are outdated concepts that prohibit inclusive political participation.<sup>7</sup>

## *4.1.3 Urbanization*

'I think we no longer need a government,' Nour, a Lebanese NGO worker, told me in 2021 in Beirut, after Lebanon went through several years of consecutive crises and has become one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. First, the small country had to deal with the flow of refugees from Syria since 2011, then with the economic crisis, with droughts, and in 2020 with the explosion in the harbor in Beirut at the height of the pandemic. 'We have been organizing everything ourselves here in Beirut over the past years,' she continued, naming all the public services that either IOs or CSOs or the citizens themselves have been organizing and providing to citizens. There is no state, no law enforcement, and no public service. All services are either privatized or provided by external donors and civil society.

Carla, another NGO employee, says that 'we can see now how Lebanon turns into a camping State,' as people move from one refugee camp to the next, without any state authorities being aware of it, let alone stopping it; hence voting rights can no longer be granted, because people are not registered in one place. They no longer participate in state elections. Once the hope for democracy in the Middle East, Lebanon is no longer even an electoral democracy, to begin with, because no one goes to the elections, let alone anyone being interested in them. The only stakeholders who matter in these ample 'camping grounds' are international aid and faith-based organization, donors, and remittances from abroad.

Rapid urbanization goes along with the rising number of angry young people who feel deprived of their opportunities. Megacities and urban dwellings resemble glocality's state of the art in the most elusive way. Global Urbanism, as it is also called, refers to the fact that our modern cities and settlements are shaped somewhat by the outside, by migrants and its level of diversity and the flow of ideas coming to the cities, instead of from inside. In 2010, the OECD published a guidebook for urban

<sup>7</sup> For example, SHARE in Amsterdam, the 'Global Constitutionalism' project at Hamburg University, the 'Challenge to Democracy' project at NCCR in Zürich, 'The Impact of Normative Orders' project at Frankfurt University, the 'Urban Governance' projects at London School of Economics or the 'Good Governance and Human Rights' research at Cambridge University and Leuven University, to name but a few.

governance in which it highlights the needs of local stakeholders, namely to '(…) deal with internal tensions and imbalances within urban areas, which generates functional and social segregation and negative territorial spillovers (…) and to overcome (..), the lack of critical mass in medium-sized cities which require innovative forms of inter-municipal coordination (…).' The OECD emphasizes the importance of dealing with (…) The lack of capacity of local governments (financial, legal, institutional). (…) and instead '(…) aligned with central government public policies through an effective multi-level government framework.' Apart from the MSA, the Economic Organizations recommends using horizontal cooperation between ministries in the central authority and adhering to best practices globally of local urban governance. The MSA encourages CSOs' engagement, citizen dialogues, public–private partnerships, and other forms—breaking down central government silos and challenging the autocratic elite, which they conclude is key to optimizing the development and impact of spatial strategies.

Back in Beirut, in August 2020, the ICRC and volunteers took care of the wounded after the harbor explosion destroyed large parts of the city, and today, all refurbishing works of the city are financed by a mix of international donors and foreign embassies, especially the French, the German, and the US. 70% of school children have been out of public schooling since the pandemic started, and those who receive education go to private schools. Inflation is over 100%, and the dollar has become the only valid currency in the county. There is noise everywhere in the streets of Beirut, coming from privately run generators and water trolleys, offering electricity and clean water to those who can afford it. Public services have been privatized, and the traffic lights no longer run because local governments cannot pay for the electricity. Beirut is a laboratory for glocal governance. The governmental silos are long broken down and are hollow, but Lebanon remains a recognized state with all its functions.

Beirut is only the beginning, because anocratic governments are no longer able or willing to keep up with the paradigms' shifts.With over 60% of the world's population living in urban areas and cities, it makes cities a separate and local governance unit beyond Nation-States. The concepts of green cities, human rights cities, digital cities, smart cities, climate-neutral cities, inclusive cities, and sanctuary cities—to name but a few—are some of the recent innovative and yet practical examples. The EU supports human rights and refugee welcoming city projects.8 We do not read the same about countries. Cities seem to have taken over the function of states. Inclusive and climateneutral city programs and sanctuary cities are growing in the US and elsewhere in the world.

If the city is the new state, then mayors and town counselors are the key governments of our times. Together they resemble 'compressed modernity,' doing everything more interconnected, faster, and more diverse (Harrikari & Rauhala, 2019). Local actors such as city mayors and private enterprises, youth organizations and volunteers, city councilors, technocrats, and media, meet and interact with IGOs and other global actors directly. During the refugee flow in 2015, we have seen in Europe how city counselors bypass national laws, even ignore, violate, and at the most

<sup>8</sup> See European Welcome Cities project. https://europewelcomes.org/.

complement state regulations to help people waiting at their gates. Cities are more independent than ever; they collect and spend taxes locally, initiate incentives for business, and have become vital fixers of today's global problems. More commonly, a period of inter-municipal collaboration has paved the way for the successful consolidation of local councils into either a single-tier or a two-tier system. It means multilevel governance among different municipalities being part of a bigger city such as the two-tier governance regime of the 8 million people city of London that consists of various municipalities. In megacities of 10 million people and more, such as Mumbai and Manila, a metropolitan development authority has been created to provide planning and project management. The glocal governance systems are adapted to coordinate more actors to deliver better services and effectively implement policy and strategy. The sources of political powers have become more diffuse, but city leaders and elected mayors have gained the ability to bypass national systems to network globally with other cities (Moonen et al., 2014, p. 15). One of these networks is the C40. It is a network of mayors of the largest cities (C40) in the world who have built a global network to collaborate and commit and implement city-driven GND with the help of the UN and EU incentives, announcing determined actions from all its 100 city members, including Beijing, Guangzhou and Bangkok, Abidjan and Durban, London and Berlin, Delhi and Mumbai, Jakarta and Melbourne, and Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro, as well as New York. At least 30 cities in the network experience severe pressure and revolts from citizens to improve the cities' health standards because of pollution. It is the cities that must fix the problem, because governments are unwilling or overwhelmed in doing so. Some of these cities are among the dirtiest globally and suffer energy shortages, such as Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan or Delhi in India. They experience pressure from CSOs, but at the same time, have not managed to change the corrupt and hierarchical governance regime that prevents them from responding to the emergency. Nevertheless, the plethora of city and citizens networks that emerged over the past 20 years is breathtaking, telling us one thing, namely that over 60% of the world population is no longer willing to wait until corrupt and dysfunctional state authorities deliver and respond to the needs of their citizens. Peter Taylor describes these rapidly rising numbers of city networks as the 'skeleton' upon which globalization is built, and by this, political and territorial boundaries become redundant (2003).

We count over 100 global and regional city networks today, most of them located in the world's largest and most industrial continent, namely Eurasia. The largest networks are called WeGo, the World Smart Sustainable City Organization, the International Network for Urban Development, not to mention the thousands of regional and global city partnerships seen in exchange programs and national city networks. The one purpose they have in common is the guided exchange and mobility of people and the idea of managing local public affairs according to shared global norms and standards. City councilors, local businesses, and CSOs can react faster and are more responsive to people in their city.

To illustrate more vital locality vis-a-vis the state, using Wallerstein and Roudometof's concept of glocality, is the example of Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia. Land-locked, poor in resources with a Soviet-style industry, the country depends on over two million migrant workers' remittances every year. These 'Transnational villagers' send remittances to keep their families alive, donate money to religious groups, invest in houses, wedding ceremonies, cars, and smartphones, and by these contribute to glocalization through migrations. The UN Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers from 1990 had already planned to pay tribute to their precarious situation and lack of rights, but without much success among its member states, and it only came into force in 2003. The governments have failed to deliver any of the public's needs. Higher education is largely privatized, and the public sector has either not been reformed or corrupted. The health sector depends on donations and charity from Turkey and China and IGOs and local volunteers, and the security sector is left in the hands of the former hegemon and colonizer Russia. The public sector depends entirely on the external sector, whereas the rest is privatized. The only hope for many local businesses to survive is through global investments. However, if state authorities do not control these investments, they lead to anything but prosperity. An example again can be found in Kyrgyzstan, where a decade ago, a Turkish company invested in local farming, improved infrastructure, diversified farming, and increased productivity in the region of Talas. This increased income, the quality of food, and subsequently health. People no longer needed to migrate to Russia to make a living. At the same time, child labor rose to 40% because it was more beneficial for families to send their children to the fields than to school (Tilekeyev, 2013).

However, it is not only the informal economic sector and the rise of OC, the lack of tax collection, and migration that has dramatically eroded statehood in the post-Soviet space elsewhere, but also the willful destruction and negligence of what was left of it since the country's independence in 1991. Moreover, it is the common understanding that governments and political regimes come and go over the centuries, and so do their elites, and in the end, the only reliable source of income and social deliverables is family and the local community. Statehood, let alone a democratic one, is alien to what people experience, namely the satisfaction of basic needs.

Coming back to the example of Kyrgyzstan and its capital of Bishkek since 1991, the city council has not been able to build a single cultural building, which is a sad record: 0 museums, 0 planetariums, 0 theaters, 0 libraries, and 0 cultural centers and 0 music schools, 0 painting schools and only one art object of a 'heroic kind' that represent patriarchy in the form of a mythical warrior called Manas. Culture is often the clue that keeps local communities together, and if most cultural events and sculptures are privately sponsored by banks and businesses, or donated by locals and foreign embassies, then it is a statement about the stability of statehood. Instead, many cultural buildings, parks, and museums were destroyed to make room for new money laundering condo projects financed by dubious private investors and OC. At the same time, since 1991, dozens of mosques and madrassas (religious schools) were built, replacing the role of theaters and libraries and public schools sponsored by foreign countries and faith-based organizations. By this, local actors and stakeholders became more embedded in a reorganization of preferences and autonomous decision-making, albeit being twisted between a non-caring-state and external foreign dependence (Niemeyer, 2011, p. 124). Urban transformation, once from fortresses to multicultural settlements, is key to understanding contemporary urbanizations. Nowhere else can we see this development as fast as in new urban settlements.

In 2020 in Reno, the US State of Nevada wanted to become the first glocal city of its kind. The state government wanted to declare the city as new 'investment zones' with a separate governance unit, where people can trade with cryptocurrency, CEOs get de jure power over the wellbeing of that zone, and public office elections would no longer take place. Tech companies run the entire county if they invest 1.5 million US dollars and privatize education and health. Eventually the governors idea was blocked and voted down—for now. But it is only a matter of time until Big-Tech companies and online platforms have turned into indispensable glocal informants that together with CSOs and NSAs will operate below or above state regulations and run their own glocal city states.

Today cities and their representatives set their bylaws for sustainable business and investments, working conditions and education, and no longer keep the city's wealth safe and protect it from invaders. Undoubtedly, modern cities have limitations in the core fields of statehood, namely boundaries, currency, and defense. Municipalities adapt quicker to global discussions and facilitate cross-city learning, and hence become a more resilient space to live in and serve as protection against future crises. During the mass migration in the Middle East in 2015 and the pandemic 2020–2022, city majors, local school authorities, and businesses helped and provided basic needs for migrants and those getting infected with the virus. They responded faster and more efficiently than state governments could do.

Furthermore, urban space is the new resource for growth overall because ecommerce is more likely to fund there than in rural areas and because it attracts people with skills and innovative potential. E-commerce requires constant exchange of ideas and innovation, which takes place in urban settlements and needs space for experiments. Urban growth can be climate neutral, digital, and sustainable simultaneously. Strikingly enough, in 2021, the world's largest Architectural Exhibit, the Venice *Biennale Architettura*, chose the topic: 'How will we live together?' focusing on urban dwellings and proposing glocal city life. Over 100 Nations submitted their ideas on the future of sustainable and renewable cities and architecture and presented their visions for urban settlers' ways of life and quality of life. Not surprisingly, the exhibits presented a merged concept of the way of life of the East and the West, ranging from green and AI-based smart, 'inclusive, degrowth zone' to unitarian, family-friendly, and safer urban space. That year's Biennale Awards went to city concepts that combined human dignity and architecture under the slogan of 'flexible and open space for more inclusive experiments,'<sup>9</sup> and by that, turning city counselors into de facto 'state builders' of the future (2021).

Another development over the past decades is the rise of sanctuary and emancipatory cities and their agents. In the light of the dramatic rise of global mobility, in 2017, New York's mayor Bill de Blasio, and the major of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, together with the major of Danzig, Pawel Adamowicz, announced that they would go

<sup>9</sup> Biennal Architettura (2021). How We Will Live Together? 17th Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, p. 14.

their ways and implement policies concerning migration and climate-neutral cities, against state policies and their governments. Along with other global and multi-level partnerships, they initiated sanctuary cities around the world, taking a critical stand beyond or alongside national politics and state limitations when integrating children of migrants in schooling, providing housing and work, language courses, quickly and non-bureaucratically. These city mayors knew that if they waited for governments to resolve these problems, inequality and exclusion would trigger tensions among local citizens and lead to local violence and crimes. Local community leaders, such as these city mayors, have received more autonomy over the years; they can form tax regimes and bureaucracy depending on interests, problem-solving issues, and organization. Localizing matters of public policy also has the adverse side effects of corruption, blackmailing, organized crimes abusing public funding and running public sectors, and other problems due to a lack of established and legitimate leadership structures. The point of analysis is that a growing number of cities worldwide have taken governmental functions into their hand and started governing independently from state governments. In Europe's largest city, for example, Moscow, with over 13 million inhabitants and a Soviet-style top-down city and an autocratic national government, glocal governance initiatives face massive obstacles and lead to fragmentation of the city instead. The city's local business and economy have been based on military production, and with a welfare service provided only to the worker-residents of the Soviet period. To transit to a timelier decentralized, diverse, open space, and local approaches have caused major cleavages and conflicts. Turning the city into a green and modern IT city would have demanded a governance capacity combining both expertise and a planning horizon that is very different from the nepotistic anocratic system of the past. As a result, ICTs, business, and the new economy have moved to other sections of the city and hence have fragmented this city because there was no autonomous city planning by the city council, since Moscow is under the de facto control of the central government. Eventually due to the incapability to adapt to global changes, this decision, led to more fragmentization of society instead of inclusion.<sup>10</sup>

## **4.2 Endogenous Dynamics**

The endogenous factors are seen in the rapid growth of population to 8 billion inhabitants worldwide and subsequently youth mobilization and digitalization (Bache, 2004). The above-shown inter-exchangeability between human rights holders and duty bearers accelerates the dynamics of these factors, giving individual persons

<sup>10</sup> Oxfam (ed). (2015). Right to the city for a safe and just world: The brics case. Rio de Janeiro, p. 41.

and businesses, as well as CSOs and IOs, a more decisive role in governance and eventually making the state redundant.<sup>11</sup>

IGOs like the OHCHR have already established Master Plans to introduce small steps to enhance and increase compliance with international norms, such as human rights, in a world where states are no longer able, or the government is no longer willing, to comply with them. The fact that only approx. 16% of all UN member states and their governments respond to their own set of human rights norms and rules in their domestic constitutions, and 84% do not respond or adhere to international norms, speaks for itself.

Endogenous factors originate internally from within a country and a state. They are symptoms by which we see whether states and governance regimes adhere to democratic and human rights principles. However, there is no scientific evidence that bad or good governance or any regime type needs the redistribution of dominant elites (North et al., 2009). Many factors indeed contribute to the status quo of a state or a governance unit in today's Digital Anthropocene.

## *4.2.1 Digitalization*

The year 2000 was a tipping point to introduce the Anthropocene and the 'era of a man-made planet,' and for digitalization and the 'digital age' and the widespread use of ICT—both go hand in hand. Some 20 years later, the urgency to regulate digitalization is critical on any government's agenda, and in 2022, the member states have started negotiations on a global treaty to combat cybercrime.

The digital Anthropocene has two sides: what people can destroy; they may also fix it again? Milanovic (2018) redefines growth, focusing on how we reduce inequality, instead of looking at economic growth. A capitalist economy growth is the concentration of capital in specific industrial sectors, even in new technologies. In the Anthropocene, shared e-economy, digital transparency, and horizontal governance may lead to a different understanding of growth—so the assumption. We can see this by the actions toward global supply chain policies, sustainable markets, and shared responsibilities among and with all those contributing to production chains.<sup>12</sup> A group of researchers at the University of Amsterdam investigated the allocation of international responsibility among multiple states and stakeholders and identified multi-level stakeholder responsibilities of problem-solving and sharing responsibility in an increasingly interdependent and heterogeneous international legal order. From a normative perspective, the Digital Anthropocene goes hand in hand with a plethora of global norms and international law, aiming to regulate it for example in Article 19 of the UN ICCPR and Article 10 of the European Convention for Human Rights

<sup>11</sup> (Kyung-who Kang, UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, Vienna, 10 September 2012).

<sup>12</sup> University of Amsterdam, Shares, Research Project on Shared Responsibility in International Law. http://www.sharesproject.nl/ (August 2021).

and Fundamental Freedoms, or Article 9 of the African Union (AU) Banjul Charter for Human Rights, and Article 13 of the American Convention of Human Rights of the OAS. The articles articulate the right to freedom of expression, which includes seeking, receiving, and imparting information, in the ICT-driven digital economy. But these provisions also allow governments to limit the right to information for a legitimate purpose such as state security or privacy of a person. Governments respond often in two ways: either censor and block the Internet or give up control. To overcome this lack of control, governments have started to share power with private enterprises, developers, providers, and users, both de jure and de facto, to gain back partial control over cyberspace.

In 2000, there were roughly 400 million Internet/ICT users, or 'digital citizens,' and 20 years later, we counted 4 billion, which is half of the world's (overall young) population (Mihr, 2017). In Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia, Internet penetration is over 80%, and in Africa, it is the lowest, but still 70%, with rapid growth tendencies. Over the next decade, more than 90% of the world's population will have access to the Internet and spend most parts of his/her life in cyberspace. Wikipedia, Google, Meta, Weibo, and YouTube are essential for our day-to-day work and personal interactions. Looking back to what change theory tells us, the 30% threshold of digitalization and access to the Internet has long passed and hence the Internet can be considered major endogenous factors for a paradigm shift. Meta is on the way to being the primary governor of the new global, virtual cyber world of 4 billion users/citizens. The company is installing not only its own rules and regulations, but it also provides for its security and even currency, a bitcoin 'diem,' and an AI-based law and enforcement algorithm that controls and protects users' data and behavior. It has its e-commerce and e-economy platforms, and hence already operates like a de facto supranational and super territorial state. The main caveats are that it is not governed democratically and lacks powerful and legitimate mechanisms for accountability and participation.

Against this backdrop, the number of Internet users and the population (growth) in a country matter for how we will be governed in the future. The bigger the country or the more significant Meta gets, the more centralized the power will become. Decentralized and federal states, where provinces, districts, cities, and local communities already enjoy high levels of autonomy, democracy is getting stronger, not weaker. Another phenomenon is that in the Digital Anthropocene, the most active citizens are below 30. The International Business Standard Organizations estimated that over 10 million registered NGOs and an equal number of CSOs and start-ups or small medium-size enterprises that altogether make up 2 billion people who operate as grassroots activists thanks to the Internet.<sup>13</sup> Many of these activists and workers have never met in person, even though they work in the same 'virtual office' and 1:2 working persons are today involved in e-commerce and digital enterprise.

Notwithstanding, one can say that the Digital Anthropocene is a youth rebellion against the traditional economy, and it is rapidly progressing. Digitalization is

<sup>13</sup> International Business Standards Organization (IBSO), Facts and Stats about NGOs worldwide, 2015. https://www.standardizations.org/bulletin/?p=841 (August 2021).

earmarked by the rapid global dissemination of nanotechnology, quantum computing, and AI that determine the collection and use of big data, robotics, the Internet of Things, and 5G networks, and that penetrates everyone's daily life.

There is more to this new era for humankind: it makes us universal citizens—for example, the role of pop culture and its global dissemination through streaming and social networks. From streaming services to online platforms and the leisure industry, it dramatically affects our perceptions, attitude, habits, language, and subsequently our culture. In the most remote places globally, we see people wearing shirts with NASA and names of cities and universities in Europe or the US that they never went to. The use of (mostly) English phrases and emojis have become a universal language, in the digital world. Young digital natives today read at least one or more world languages—Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, French, or English—and for the rest use free software translation Apps.

In 2019, the 2012 Hollywood fantasy series 'Hunger Games' turned into a blueprint for youth to protest against corrupt authoritarian regimes in Thailand. The movie's protagonists use the 'three fingers' as a symbol of protest, and used as a sign in the protests against the corrupt military regime and monarchy in Thailand. It went so far that the series became a source of justification for the 'Future-Forward-Party' of the Thai businessman Thanathorb Juanggoongruangkit, who led the third strongest party in parliament in his first run. He resembles, among many, the fight of the young, mobile, and glocal players fighting against traditional ethnonationalist (military) elite men. According to Rustow's concept of 'shared fundamental matters,' this pop culture fantasy series has triggered protests accross the world with the common aim to change modes of governance.

Other than global visions such as the 'world parliament of men and women,' some modes of glocal governance might not even resemble parliamentarian or otherwise democratic regimes—particularly in the virtual cyber continent (Kennedy, 2006). The same is true for the claim of a World Human Rights Court. Although desirable and seen as an advancement vis-à-vis corrupt and disempowered domestic courts, a World Court would work under traditional albeit extended and shared-responsibility terms of state jurisdiction. Other than the earlier theories of globalization and cultural transformation that still see functional state institutions as key to stability and based on global modernity (Robertson, 1992), the dynamics of digitalization and the immediate and rapid exchange of people's views fundamentally change our concept of justice in all matters. Benedikter & Giordano argue that ICT and digitalization have globally virtualized our social sphere. It has become an 'outer process of transition' joined by an 'inner transformational drive.' It is a combination between the virtual and the local and individual. The state is deprived of its crucial function or is willing to share it with an algorithm-driven system. In 2021, China piloted the first automated algorithm-driven prosecution mechanism to investigate, identify petty crimes, charge verdicts, and issue penalties without a defendant ever seeing a judge or a courtroom. ICT and social media have changed the outer dimension of how we perceive, interpret, and handle our social lives and seek justice. It is thus transforming our habits of cultural consumption, and contemporary brain and consciousness research are changing the inner dimension of contemporary social life by dramatically re-shaping self-perception and interpretation of the individual. This happens through the findings, cultural distribution, and practical applications of neuroscience, thus questioning the conceptual cornerstones of sociality as conceived by Western societies (Benedikter & Giordano, 2011).

Hence, similar to the democratization movements in the nineteenth century, today's level of education and access to information via ICT determines whether a society meets the 'background conditions' (Rustow) to articulate its wish for fundamental change. After the background conditions are set, the endogenous spiral to glocal governance comes into speed; first, by exclaiming the wish for change and social mobilization and organization of groups; second, through secularization and the increasing equal access to political education and information that determines the setup of glocal governance. Thirdly, the Digital Anthropocene follows the visions of individual empowerment, and the slogan 'You can do it if you want it' gives the illusion of equal opportunities and social mobility. Fourthly and lastly, only in this diverse and self-critical and constantly rotating, reforming, and moving regime will innovation flourish and solutions to global challenges be found.

Against this backdrop, Schäfer and Merkel (2020) describe a modern concept of deliberative democracy and conclude that the independence of (social) media, existing mechanisms of communication between weak and robust public groups, structural opportunities for participation, such as access to the Internet, and, finally, culturally predominant hierarchies of evaluation must exist, if democratic modes of governance want to survive. The Digital Anthropocene is marked by a type of business management governance regime in which elected policymakers act like CEOs, and citizens often are considered clients and customers. Again, we can learn from Science Fiction as a forward-looking reflection and metaphor for the present.

Blockbuster science fiction movies such as 'Iron Man 2' from 2010, sometimes become surprisingly real some decades later. In 'Iron Man 2' the world-saving, never sleeping, entertaining, technically sophisticated, half-robot half-man hero, is finally held accountable for his actions in front of a hearing by US Congress. Iron Man responds to an inquisitive hearing committee on Capitol Hill about his mercenary intervention in Afghanistan with, '*I did you a big favor: I have successfully privatized world peace!*' He believes he has glocalized the world and brought peace to it. In the movie, Iron Man is questioned by the democratically elected policymakers of the US congress. These elected parliamentarians are ironically portrayed as overweighed, grey-haired, old white men who resembled the old world—the pre-Anthropocene. Iron Man has a massive fandom worldwide. As it turns out, the protagonist does not want to abolish the democratic system but to reform it from within and make it more glocal. There is a happy ending for democracy at the end of the film, but at the same time it undermines the current form of parliamentarianism. Foreseeing or not, in this version of Iron Man, multi billionaire and Space entrepreneur, Elon Musk, appears in a scene, promising money to Iron Man's peace missions in the world. Ten years later, during the war in Ukraine in 2022, Musk turned the fiction into reality and provided free Starlink satellite systems for Ukrainians and hence was the first investor to privatize a country's war defense in modern times. And in the height of the war, the Ukrainian President started a glocal crowdfunding campaign United24 for financing the war and the reconstructions of the devastated country. In the same vein, promoting glocalism is the 2018 African Fantasy Science Fiction blockbuster 'Black Panther.' In the movie, the panther resembles Iron Man and sends the same message across the world, namely that glocal power does not need democracy. A world-saving male hero, successful salesmen and AI scientist (thanks to his sister), and yet somewhat philanthropic and human rights loving handsome gentlemen and romancer, saves world peace and African black identity and dignity against evil (white and black) forces. Victorious at last, he saves the self-determination of his people beyond any corrupt statehood, but he denies them democracy. He is the absolute king and ruler based on hereditary power and then later by victory in single combat while taking unilateral decisions with the help of a woman, his scientifically emancipated and empowered sister. These science fiction and fantasy blockbusters idealize the privatization of peace and prosperity of societies, and by this they are holding a mirror to the world.

## *4.2.2 Non-state Actors and Civil Society*

The individual is the key actor in the Digital Anthropocene, and the individualization of power has created a strange combination of dysfunctional state institutions, civil society, business, and non-state actors (NSA) that together manage and sometimes govern the commons within and beyond state borders. By no means is this combination of stakeholders anarchical, but often act outside state institutions and hence they lack of effective enforcement mechanisms. In the quest for who is governing the commons and public sectors in a glocal world, Haller et al. (2019) note the rising demand for centralistic, primarily male, law-and-order populist-ethnic-nationalistic leaders emerging, and strangely enough, often backed by CSOs and NSAs at the same time.

Among the weak and dysfunctional states, we find those elected or appointed governments have lost de facto and de jure control over territory. That power vacuum is taken mainly by individual stakeholders, sometimes CSOs and NSAs. Public services erode, and so do state authority and sovereignty. The security sectors, for example, such as police or *gendarmerie*, can no longer protect citizens from external threats or fraud, let alone protect women from domestic violence and children from abuse, nor keep them safe within their homes and cities. They behave like predators, taking bribes and intimidating people. At that stage, the system has reached an ultimate level of dysfunctionality. The bargain citizens make with their governments to keep them from any harm, in exchange for allegiance and taxation—is broken when there is no trust in authorities.

Countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Mali, and Chad, or Yemen and Afghanistan and Myanmar, where non-elected bodies, paramilitaries, and warlords take over the security sector and de facto state control, the public sector such as schooling and health care are taken over by IGOs, privatized or run by CSOs. Hence, the state has no longer any de facto control over the commons, let alone taxation and human security. Corrupt state leaders do not have any interest and taking back control over these sectors and are much too happy to see international donors and aid agencies to 'replace' statehood. While political elites plunder their countries, they allow international donors to maintain what is left of the state. This type of failed statehood we find in one way or the other, in enclaves, such as in the Fergana Valley between Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, and occupied and separatist enclaves of Abkhazia Georgia and Russia or the Donbas between Russia and Ukraine. The same is true for non-recognized states such as Palestine or Somaliland. The only functioning institutions in these countries are often kinstate agents, international donors, charity organizations, faithbased organizations, CSOs, or IGOs, such as the UN, the OSCE, International Relief Council, UNICEF, or UNHCR. In Gaza, for example, UNWRA, the UN Relief and Works Agency, finances schools, distributes daily food, and runs the business. The entire existence of the city-state depends on international donors, and do not follow governmental rules. In Kosovo, after a bloody war from 1989 to 1999, the OSCE and international donor organizations managed to maintain a minimum level of state duties, including garbage collection and public administration, for over a decade before the country declared independence.

The UNHCR estimates today that there are between 4 and 10 million stateless people around the world that get their public services through international organizations. Furthermore, the OECD in its Fragility Report 2020 estimates that there are 2 billion people, that is 1:4 of the total world population, living in states that are failed or for most parts are dysfunctional. These people work informally and have no safety guarantees, let alone benefit from public sectors such as affordable health care or free education. Uprooted and forced to migrate, add approximately another 1.5 billion to these numbers and together round up, to 40% of the worlds' population that has no access to public services and full participatory rights and/or has so at an insufficient level. When adding the number of people living under totalitarian leadership, we can estimate that approximately 60% of the world's population is governed by dysfunctional, corrupt, suppressive, illegitimate, and violent regimes. This figure marks a tipping point of 'dysfunctional regime' against which we must see today's glocal paradigm shifts and youth rebellion.

In Central Asia and Africa, where we find most dysfunctional states, it is the two biggest private foundation, namely the Agha Khan Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which steps in to pay for and provide public services. For the Middle East, it is the Abu Dhabi Fund, and for the post soviet space the Soros Foundation, and in South America, the Inter-American Foundation often step in where governments fail to deliver and hence intentionally or not, they replace state services. These private actors collaborate with state institutions and international financial institutions, such as the Asian, and Islamic Development Bank, the European Union Development Funds, and the World Bank. It is a form of glocal PPP that has become the norm, not the exception, but at the same time it has dramatically eroded statehood as we knew it.

Ironically or not, even NSAs such as warlords or rebel groups often benefit from schools, hospitals, and infrastructural facilities built with development aid. They expropriate and take control over these facilities and by this excercise a form of 'piracy of public goods.' NSAs violently abduct and misuse these facilities which, ironically again, have been funded byWestern charity or donors that aimed to promote human rights and good governance principles. After the takeover by warlords, these principles are violated in two ways, first by the abduction of the facilities, and secondly by breaching universal norms. In the province of Tigray in Ethiopia, after the takeover by NSAs in 2021, the public facilities by private and international donors were deliberately kept intact to provide for the needs of people. It is a dilemma for both sides, the IGOs/CSOs that remain in a land governed by NSAs, do not share any common values with the warlords but they stay for humanitarian reasons. Through mutual tolerance and endurance, both sides follow their cause, the IGOs provide humanitarian aid that can be continued without interference by NSAs; on the other hand, warlords continue to reign over the territory. This is not sustainable, but it seems a Gordian Knot, unable to loosen for now.

For that reason, one of the largest international donors in the field of governance, the EU, has reduced and partially stopped its aid in regions governed by NSAs. In 2021, after the collapse of the government in Afghanistan, NSA such as, the Taliban, ISIS, Northern Alliances Al-Qaida, and other OC groups filled the power gap. They seized what NATO/ISAF troops and the donor community had left behind. The Taliban established a Sharia law-based Emirate, and at the same time, urged international donors to stay in the country to take care of the public sector because they themselves are either unwilling or incapable of governing it. How a warlord regime wants to build a state only on force and terror remains a secret, but as long as they receive money through drug trafficking and the new ally, China, the system can remain stable for some time.Warlords are remarkably good at conceding international norms but without the slightest interest in forming a government according to them.

Another political actor that fills power gaps accross the world is China. It does not require any democratic or human rights conditionality. It is seen as another player in the big power games, a colonizer at the most, rather than an occupier. Along with the dysfunctionalities of 50% of the world's states, not surprisingly, NSA, warlords, and OC govern a quarter of the world's economy today, and hence have a significant impact on how glocality develops (Schönenberg, 2013). They act outside, below, or above the state radar, most formed in mafia-type structures and oligarchic forms. Warlords like the Taliban, ISIS in Asia, Boko Haram or the Lord's Resistance Army in Africa, and the Maras in Central America are only the most brutal and violent faces of these NSAs. However, underneath, there are many other more minor clan and family-based networks. They often share religious, linguistic, geographical, historical, ethnic, and blood ties, that serve as 'constitutional bounds' deeply rooted in devotion and locality and if these bounds are broken they get severely punished by other members of the community.14

Organized crime groups have become political actors; they run transnational enterprises in public sectors and even fight state authorities with legal means in courts. They bribe and blackmail democratic decision-makers, parliamentarians, ministers,

<sup>14</sup> Interpol, 'It is global business' 2021. https://www.interpol.int/.

and city mayors and hence de facto run much of a country's public sector. They have successfully increased their influence within the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. From the moment they aim to play with legitimate institutions such as the IMF, they come out of the deep state forced in making concessions according to global norms.

But the increasing role of OC and oligarchs in state-building and governance curbed the term Secondary Cities. These are vastly growing cities between 1 and 3 million inhabitants, often in peripheries of a country, with 'illegal' settlements and slum dwellers. State authorities often have little or no presence in these cities or neighbourhoods. Their city counselors often rather connect with international donors and organizations than with state institutions, to get things done. By this, they not only undermine statehood, but they also shape the geography and economy of the region in which they grow. This is de facto a form of glocal state building. These cities are at the state's margin and give room for improvization. Local commerce, trading routes, and smuggling networks determine the economics more than the capital cities of these countries (Roberts, 2014). In Secondary Cities, local warlords and businessmen often control or co-councel public matters, such as the 'Maras' in the metropolis of San Pedro Sula in Honduras, where everyone has to pass through them to run for office or to establish a business. In Kenya, for example, so called 'big businessmen,' go as far as running and entire city in the Makueni County, south of Nairobi. There they are controlling de facto and de jure the entire territory and the people that live of mining. It is here, as in many other parts of the world, that only humanitarian or aid organizations like the 'Kenya Water Partnership,' who resolve water supply issues, can enter the territory without being killed.

The same happens in India, where the 'Sand Mafias' control parts of the coastal territory and have bribed state authorities and killed hundreds of people who tried to stop them in recent years. They operate below state radar but also triggered necessary glocal forms of governance far from any democratic principles or human rights compliance. These local Mafias' biggest competitors are state-run cartels, such as drug traffickers collaborating with autocratic states, like China and Russia. A cheap synthetic drug, such as Fentanyl, from Chinese laboratories, for example, has challenged drug trafficking cartels from Afghanistan via Russia to Europe. Traditionally, 80% of all narcotics came from Afghanistan, but Fentanyl is cheaper, and it is trafficked via the BRI to Europe and hence poses a threat to the steady income of OC such as the Taliban and the Russian-Central Asian Mafia and brotherhoods. People in these countries seem to adapt easily and try to avoid politics. According to the 2021 WVS, 71% of people worldwide are more concerned about a 'stable economy' and 'more humane society' than about any 'progress toward a society in which Ideas count more than money' (10%) or the 'fight against crime' (16%).15 Hence, if NSAs provide for the basic needs and respond to the critical desires of people, they enjoy a reasonable level of support and can remain in power for a remarkable time. The survey also reveals that NSAs have become part and partial of the glocalization

<sup>15</sup> WVS 2021, Q156, p. 367.

processes and should be seen as one of many stakeholders in the game to get the complete analytical picture of glocality.

The biggest threat to NSAs are functioning democratic regimes, and hence this is one of the reasons why NSAs fight democracy and human rights. In his work on Gangsters and Other Statemen, Mandic investigated how OC and mafia deliberately undermine efforts of state-building, for example, in South Ossetia and Kosovo. They intentionally fuel ethnic conflicts and separation, and eventually wars, to continue their business with trafficking and smuggling (Mandic, 2021). Therefore, in most post-communist states, the OCs are omnipresent, and often it is not clear who is a warlord, who is a member of OC, and who is an elected policymaker. Since independence in 1991, many former soviet republics never gained complete control over the country's economy, nor the public or security sector. In the same line, even within the EU, we see Hungary's governments using public EU funds to establish a de facto deep Mafia State. In 2019 the European State attorney in Luxemburg filed a claim against Hungary, accusing it of being run by an oligarchic family with an OC structure. The Deep States, often run by populist or clerical leaders, are on the rise wherever democracy does not deliver to the needs of people. In 2019 the estimated flow of money that went into GPD and through the hands of NSAs went up to 4.2 billion dollars. Most of it is laundered through real estate and cybercrime. Counterfeiting is the most profitable criminal act used by NSA, with an estimated value between US\$ 930 billion and US\$ 1.5 trillion annually. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of these counterfeited goods came from China. The money is laundered through online gambling, fake accounts, the housing market, and tax fraud through big companies. In conclusion, NSAs have already become vital glocal players in the formal and informal sectors of all sorts.<sup>16</sup> Transnational OC groups alone has reached over 3 trillion dollars of revenues each year, twice as much as all military budgets in the world, and hence are not without reason seen as one of the key global players.17

The Russian-Eurasian organized crime groups, the so-called REOCs, are some of the largest internationally operating NSAs groups that conduct business on a large scale, control entire regions, and govern cities. The REOC, for example, organizes all structures of public sectors and addresses the desperate and angry youth in Eurasia. The supply of angry young men seems endless; born in the successor states of the USSR, bound by history, language, traditions in the search for income and identity, they are easy to recruit. They call themselves 'thieves in the law,' the 'obshyak' (obwak) and believe that the deep state is the most effective of all. They operate by their norms and 'constitutions,' claiming that they can guarantee security for people, steady income, health, and identity, but only if the people remain subordinate.

Consequently, they replace statehood. They even run their pension funds and insurance system, a community fund fed on illicit funds, which group members can use according to their hierarchy and particular circumstances, but also if a member needs

<sup>16</sup> 1990, the National Joint Working Group on Justice/Police (GAG) of the Federal Buro of Investigation of Germany. https://www.bka.de/DE/UnsereAufgaben/Deliktsbereiche/OrganisierteKrimin alitaet/organisiertekriminalitaet\_node.html.

<sup>17</sup> (Millenium Project, Challenge 12, 2021). https://www.millennium-project.org/challenge-12/.

health care and hospitalization.<sup>18</sup> All levels of governance are strictly hierarchically and exclusive. Each member of this exclusive group is obliged to contribute to this community fund that acts as a quasi-tax authority. OC often follows a secret code of honor that works like a pseudo-religion or ideology, and rules are above state laws. Many of these secret codes are related to religious principles, such as respecting and protecting the elders, helping the poor and underprivileged, and protecting women and children. Their members are ready to kill and sacrifice their lives for this code and honor. They offer brotherhood, trust, identity, and a safety net, making them the better alternative to corrupted state authorities and institutions. NSAs are predominantly male, as opposed to the civil society movements that are predominantly female. Apart from the global battle between youth against the old, there is a new dimension in the New Cold War namely the battle of females against male dominance. Collaborative civil society actors have composed an army of millions of volunteers around the globe that teach, treat people, and provide shelter.

Furthermore, most micro-businesses and startups are female. In South-east Asia, 1:3 successful e-commerce and family maintaining income sources are run by women. In the Philippines, that is a highly corrupt and dysfunctional state, it is even 2:3, with a rising tendency including family compatibility. Thanks to male power games that often have a dysfunctional outcome for society, the rise of women in business and the public sector has become vital for daily survival, notably for single mothers.

But from below, CSOs are thriving and many of them led by female or gay and lesbian leaders. In 2019, the US Council of Foreign Relations listed a thrilling rise of CSO-driven protests on a single day alone; in September 2019, 4 million protesters marched against climate change in one day in over 100 cities. In Chile alone, over 1.2 million people went to the street because of the rising cost of public transport; and in Lebanon in the same month, a hundred thousand protested on one day against a WhatsApp Tax. In Puerto Rico, one million citizens protested the censorship of Telegram, and in Hong Kong, in only one day in June 2019, two million people went against the extradition laws imposed by China. All these mass protests have in common: ICT and CSO driven, and with a fast pace that governmental authorities can hardly cope with.

The 2020–2022 pandemic has stirred up much displeasure with the political class and dysfunctional statehood globally. Self-efficacy came through civil society and volunteers who provided much of the social and medical care during the pandemic years. In the highly dysfunctional governed capital of Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, for example, with an estimate of 1.5 million inhabitants, an 'army' of 10,000 volunteers, called the *Druzhinniki*, first helped the infected and weak people during the pandemic and later that year protected shops from looting after mass revolutions against electoral fraud occurred during the parliamentarian elections in October 2020. Police and state officials were hiding in barracks and homes, afraid of doing something wrong in the absence of a functional government. 'The country turned into a land of volunteers and civic brigades,' as claimed by a Kyrgyz journalist on Facebook at that

<sup>18</sup> See Robert Kaplan (Die Welt 6 Juni 2020).

time. Volunteers protected shops, drove people to hospitals, distributed sanitizers that mainly were paid out of their pockets. In the aftermath, the interim government, led by a former criminal released from prison with the help of OC, ignored the new youth enthusiasm and instead imposed a strictly presidential regime in 2021. The former president of the country, Rosa Otunbayeva, nevertheless counteracted the widespread disillusion of the youth revolt, asserting that one cannot speak of an end to democracy but rather that Kyrgyz society is experiencing growing pains that will mobilize new forces. In her view, the educated and knowledgeable youth will not go backward but will fight, take risks, make sacrifices, move and drive political processes forward (Replication-Receiver, 2020). But what if the youth leave the country by the millions to work abroad and send back remittances? Who will stay to make the changes? There is not enough critical mass to trigger change for democracy according to change theory. One should not forget that the backsliding of democracies and the shrinking space for CSOs and human rights defenders reached a peak in 2021 also due to the fact that the youth often immigrated or were forcibly silenced.

The pandemic revealed many dusty covers that made us believe that countries develop democratically. On the contrary, under cover of democratic constitutions, they moved toward autocracies, and one way to break the downward spiral is the glocalization of local communities. For example, during the autumn 2020 Nagorno Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan, institutions like the ICRC were not allowed to look for missing soldiers and prisoners of war on either side. Eventually, desperate families turned to Facebook as a last resort, launching sides and platforms to exchange information across the battle lines to find their sons and spouces. Facebook became unintentionally a private corporate peacebuilder.

In the atrocious 2022 Russian War on Ukraine, the US tech giant, science fiction fan, and billionaire, Elon Musk has been supporting the military and civilian population in Ukraine with his satellite Internet service Starlink, as a personal contribution to strengthen the Ukrainian defense. He was not only glocalizing the war, but also responding to a request from Ukraine's Minister of Digitalization. He had contacted Musk directly via Twitter and ask him to help. And immediately after the war broke out, Japanese entrepreneur and billionaire Hiroshi Mikitani donated to Ukraine eight million euros as emergency aid without any conditionalities. International support for Ukrainians, interventions and sanction on Russia, private and governmental, has reached a never seen solidarity around the world, and turned this war into the first glocal war in the twenty-first century, marking a paradigm shift for the New World Order to come.

Moreover, the social network platform users responded to the claims, turning into the neutral players in the conflict to find missing persons. Facebook allowed the families on both sides to put pictures of their husbands and sons on Facebook and ask, in various languages, whether anyone had seen them? Many of them appeared and were reported to their families, and some of them eventually returned in a prisoner exchange.19 Similarly, in 2019, after heavy monsoon floods in Mumbai, Google started an early warning system when programmers set up an App for people to allow them to pass safely and dry through the city. People were finding it hard to navigate through most streets that had been flooded, and in the absence of the city and governmental, citizens turned to Google.<sup>20</sup> Who controls the Internet controls the world, seems to be real, and when in 2021 Facebook turned into Mega Platform, Meta, its manager Nick Clegg, a former British Deputy Prime Minister, announced in a blog entry that this investment is a vote of confidence in its strength.

Yet, ICT giants, such as Twitter and Meta, used by CSOs and NSAs alike, are undermining the legitimacy of state authorities. Digital players, like Twitter, have become, non-elected and non legitimized policymakers, interfering dramatically in public policy and electoral campaigns. In January 2021, after massive public protests, the company suspended the account of acting president Donald Trump for his alleged support for the violent attack on Capitol Hill, hence democracy, in Washington DC. Facebook and others followed, claiming that the president's tweets fueled hate disinformation and were, therefore, a threat to 'orderly transition' from one presidency to the next. Twitter and Facebook are not democratically legitimated actors, let alone impartial judges, but they nevertheless decided unilaterally, breaching democratic standards and often international human rights law, too. The action was justified by the company's CEO to stop 'glorification of violence and to prevent the country from further harm.'

Ex-President Trump filed a lawsuit on 'free speech infringement' against Twitter, Facebook, and Google for censoring his posts, claiming that their action violated law and basic standards of liberal democracy. A similar case happened in September 2020 when Twitter unilaterally suspended the account of the Hungarian government temporarily. Twitter's CEO explained later that the company did not agree with the government's and President Orban's hateful anti-migration policies justifying his concept of 'illiberal democracy.' The government went against Twitter, arguing that it is not the tech giant's responsibility to silence those who hold different opinions than their own.<sup>21</sup> These and many similar actions have triggered debates about shared responsibilities within the MSAs over the past years. How to exercise neutrality and responsibility on how ICTs are used and by whom makes tech-giants such as Google political players that de facto compete with elected policymakers.

Another example in that line of argumentation has been the arbitrary death of George Floyd in the US at the hands of a public police officer. At the height of the pandemic in 2020, his death triggered not only a global movement against racial discrimination but at the same time against unwilling or incapable governments. Like the worldwide protests of Islamists who attacked the editorial office of the

<sup>19</sup> Eurasianet. (2020). Ulkar Natiqqizi, Ani Mejlumyan, In Armenia and Azerbaijan, families of missing in action turn to Facebook, Hundreds of soldiers on each side are still missing three weeks after fighting stopped, 30 November.

<sup>20</sup> Business Line. (2019). Siddharth Mathew Cherian, Mumbai floods: How to report road closure using Google Maps, 3 July.

<sup>21</sup> Associated Press, 30 September 2020, Budapest: Twitter temporarily suspends Hungarian government's account.

satirical magazine Charly Hebdo in Paris 2015, civil society and protesters were demanding global solidarity with a 'free world' by exclaiming '*Je suis Charlie.*' City mayors worldwide illuminated city icons to show solidarity, from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to the Statute of *Christo Redentor* in Rio de Janeiro, and marches of solidarity emerged within weeks, globally. 'Freedom and tolerance' protests took place in London, Brussels, Madrid, Montreal, Moscow, Istanbul, Beirut, Jerusalem, and Ramallah, to name but a few. The same happened in 2021 after the death of George Floyd.

The 2021 Earth Hour, initiated by climate activist, became an event that broke all records of global solidarity. In over 190 countries, billions of households and hundreds of citizens dimmed their lights to save energy. 6.7 billion impressions, photos, art pieces, voices on media and YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter showed global support for sharing concerns over the sustainable energy security of our planet. Citizens beyond state institutions are apparent in their votes and protests and the 'corporate state' became the center of attention for a short while, in which software companies make the rules, not elected policymakers.

## *4.2.3 Private Enterprise and Business*

In 2021, the World Bank published a comprehensive study on the informal and formal economy ratio in over 160 countries. It confirmed all predictions, namely that the informal sector had by far outnumbered the formal one by 60:40, and that the economy and business are no longer under full control of governments. At least 2 billion people of the world's total population of approx. 8 billion, that is 1:4, is earning his or her living in the informal sector and micro-market (Ohnsorge, 2021). According to the ILO's World Social Protection Report (2021), that makes 4 billion people and hence half of the world's population lacking of any social protection. Many fall into poverty.

Any crisis, including the Covid-19 pandemic and the world grain-crisis in 2022, revealed and exacerbated the social protection gap between countries with high- and low-income levels. Unregulated and non-taxable Small Medium Enterprises (SME), street vendors, farmers, mechanics, and family businesses offer goods for daily needs and services to keep the country running. Many of them even own generators to produce energy for households, and apartment complexes run small private clinics and private education facilities PPP has gone out of hand in many countries, and business has taken over the public sector and the commons. If the state fails to regulate economy and currency, the consquence is that mafia, oligarchs, 'freelancers,' and 'self-employment' fuel the informal sector, operating below the taxation radar and not contributing to public services.

Approx. 550 billion dollars in remittances flow to low and small-income countries annually and boost the informal economy comprising up to 60% of the total income in these countries. In poor developing countries, up to 80% or 90% of the economy operates informally. The World Bank study also illustrates that with this dramatic rise of the informal sector, poverty rises, agricultural productivity shrinks, and public health and education suffer, and—not unnoticed—along with it, the gender gap grows, too.

Statistically, children in countries with a robust informal sector attend fewer years in school than in countries with a formal economy because they must work early to support their families.<sup>22</sup> But what on average is left of the formal sector, that is approx. 40–20% of the economy, needs state regulations in the form of taxation of products and services and incentives to set up business. But in the hands of corrupt governments that is unlikely to happen. The 2021 Global Taxation Pact and supply chain regulations endorsed by the G7 and the EU aimed to respond to this global phenomenon, since individual states cannot solve this problem.

One of the earliest initiatives to regulate the glocalization process has been the UN Global Compact for Business and Human Rights in 2000 and the Public–Private Partnership (PPP) initiatives in the 1990s. They paved the way for the G20 Global Tax Deal in 2021, aiming to guide governments—or what is left of them—in regulating global trade and protecting worker and consumer rights domestically. A coalition of UNDP, the WTO, the OECD, IMF, Moody's, and the World Bank has turned into a strange mix of global consumer protection leagues, demanding human rights compliance in business. This alliance has called for fair wages and safe working space and they have become key actors and stakeholders in the business arena. The economists Braithwaite and Drahos, for example, argue that effective and decent global regulation in collaboration with private business and CSOs are setting an influential agenda and pressuring decision-making bodies beyond state authorities to respond or withdraw (Braithwaite & Drahos, 2008).

However, suppose statehood is primarily about sovereignty and territorial control, including the value of the domestic currency—this is eroding, too. Today's two lead world currencies, namely the Dollar and the Euro, have become glocal currency, demonstrating that state authorities cannot even preserve the last domain of statehood, that is the currency. How dramatic this evolution turns out, was seen in the Russian government's attempt to save the Rubel from total collapse by banning households to withdraw dollars after international sanctions kicked in March 2022. Nevertheless, the withdrawal of foreign currency worth \$9.8 billion US Dollars from private accounts in one month cause a major financial and economic crisis in Russia for the years to come. In many countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, the Dollar is the de facto currency even for local shop owners. Transnational companies, international trade, and OC and NSA operate on Dollars and Euros exclusively. Nevertheless, where the domestic currency is weak and inflation is high, a new virtual cryptocurrency is entering the markets, genuinely glocal. Bitcoins are mined by anyone who has the IT facilities to do so, undermining state financial markets. It has made business and trade stateless and non-territorial. This digital currency was first created by a pseudonymous developer, 'Nakamoto,' in 2009 during the first financial crisis in the new millennia to respond to the fragility and uncertainty of state institutions. His real identity remains unknown—some say—but regardless of this, the

<sup>22</sup> Ibid., pp. 160–161.

cryptocurrency has developed today into an online payment mechanism throughout the world. Unlike national currencies, it is operated by a decentralized group of people, not a state. Cryptocurrency uses peer-to-peer (person-to-person) technology to facilitate instant payments, and those who own the computing power and network, known as 'miners,' create or mine the value of the currency by rewards—beyond any state control.

The value of any country's currency is trust, and if cryptocurrency operates without state backing with, for example, gold deposits, it makes any currency unreliable and a matter of risk rather than trust. Since 2018, Bitcoin grew and fell remarkably within a day, and thousands of people lost their savings, because of lack of trust. For now it remains a gambling currency unless it will be glocally organized and governed in the future. But there is little doubt it will, since some countries announce to officially launch cryptocurrencies. Other, such as Turkey, for example, a country with one of the highest inflation rates of up to 70% over the past decade, banned the use of Bitcoin after many citizens bought it to counteract the dramatic inflation of the Lira and to bypass state failure. Because crypto money is individually mined, the government could not successfully intervene and became obsolete in its crucial role as the guardian of currency and economy. If, in addition to these developments, as the economist Piketty claims, fiscal dumping and tax havens are the norms, not the exception, then any state has failed to deliver its last remaining piece of sovereignty, namely taxation to pay for public goods. State-driven tax havens compete for business by undercutting one another's tax rates and by this erode themselves from within (Piketty & Goldhammer, 2020). He argues that to overcome century-old inequality caused by a business elite, we need to explore new forms of a participatory economy based on equality, social property and education, and the sharing of knowledge and power. Shared economy, in Piketty's view, and fair distribution, and access to resources through Open-Source tools are one way out of the downward spiral of privatizing income and hence the dignity of people. The private ICT giants already are the key provider of Open-Source tools and even made it into the most classified parts of state governments. In 2013, the CIA signed a ten-year deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud services, and many enterprises followed. AWS and Google Cloud and today Meta are used by millions of users and by this, they put their data in the hands of a few remotely working programmers across their world. It is estimated that 99% of companies today use public clouding but keeping those data assets secure is business critical.

One spin-off from the e-economy is the crowd network economy such as Uber taxi services or food delivery services, and the big logistical and delivery giants, Zalando and Amazon, often run and organized by automated technologies and AI. Worrisome, there are no labor unions to guide, or speak for workers, yet millions work in these economies. An Uber algorithm calculates the salary by controlling the network that the driver deserves, not what s/he achieved. There are no social benefits or security, and hence this platform economy is not only informal but also not sustainable (Haller et al., 2019). Enterprise economy and OC often merge in this sector, and it is not always clear who is the duty-bearer and rights holder, when holding CEO or workers accountable.

In her essay in 'Ghost Worker,' Mary L. Gray and S. Suri wrote that this billiondollar platform economy had created a new global underclass of invisible Networkers and Micro-Workers, including those who earn their living as trolls and with fake identities and accounts (2019). They have become duty bearers and rights holders at the same time. When tech giants such as Meta and Amazon become influential political stakeholders, unilaterally decide about interpretations of human rights norms, regulate markets and manipulate individual users' choices, they appear even as moral authorities (Anderson, 2019; Hofferberth, 2019).

The 2014 open-ended UN intergovernmental working group on transnational corporations and other business enterprises for human rights (IWGW) has tried to elaborate an international legally binding instrument to regulate the activities of cloud and platform business.<sup>23</sup> The IWGW is collaborating with a variety of ICT giants and CSOs at the same time trying to make sure that governments keep the last word on how human rights are incorporated into the business, and in particular try to develop a concept to promote 'shared responsibility.' The group defines modern business as an economic activity such as manufacturing, transportation, distribution, commercialization, marketing, and retailing goods and services by a natural or legal person—no matter where and how they conduct the business. Victims of uncontrolled business are clients that have suffered losses and harm through harmful acts, such as omissions combined with climate change. It asked to 'bring the state back in' by trying to increase the liability of the governments and states to prosecute and trial business owners or their property in their own countries, and through extraterritorial jurisdiction.<sup>24</sup> Whether states who are unable to keep up the rule of law in their own country can do it in other countries is doubtful, but at least there are efforts to do so.

Cyber justice is a mechanism addressing citizens and states alike to claim back the sovereignty over the uncontrolled cyberspace, for example, via IP addresses that every digital device and its user has. This form of digital identification code allows courts to trace back users and hold persons accountable if they violate cyber and other international customary laws and rules. The EU, for that matter, pushed for having ethical principles for Artificial Intelligence to deal with these developments and in 2019 published the first 'Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI.' In 2022 it launched the 'Digital Service Act,' which pushed Big-Tech companies to make their algorithm transparent and allow customers limited personalized ads and provide grounds for a more self-determining use of the Internet. These guidelines and acts recommend and sometimes force companies to respect customers' laws, the rule of law in general and universal values of protecting one's privacy.

AI has become a gatekeeper to new private and individualized e-commerce, and hence a tool to push glocalization because global and local/private actors have to collaborate to handle the side effects of it. Nevertheless, since AI is not (yet) globally regulated, mechanisms like a global Cyber Court and domestically issued E-justice

<sup>23</sup> (UN Doc. A/HRC/RES/26/9).

<sup>24</sup> Chairmanship third revised draft 17 August 2021 Legally Binding Instrument to Regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises.

are high in demand and frequently discussed at Internet Governance Fora (IGFs). Social network platforms like TikTok and Meta were among the first to respond to EU claims. Their users want their data automatically deleted after a set period, but the companies claim that they get personal data—as currency—in reverse for providing 'free services' and can sell it to third parties. TikTok data is kept on servers in China, and the company is governmentally owned. When and where this data is used is generally unknown. But already it is assumed that both users and states have lost control over it. Data protection and privacy laws give us the illusion of independent states in many ways and leave us largely unprotected as Net users.

Glocal governance needs, therefore, a neutral Internet space in which Tech giants and consumers alike can respect and enforce human rights. Over the past years, Twitter, WhatsApp, TikTok, and WeChat have responded to the pressure from their consumers, agreed to compromise in intergovernmental agreements such as ITU about the configuration of net-mobility.

## **References**


Robertson, R. (1992). *Globalization: Social theory and global culture*. Sage.


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **Chapter 5 The System of Glocal Governance**

When in the aftermath of WWII, Fromm et al. wrote that the '(…) biggest problem of future governance will be to organize the societal and economic forces in a way, so that each human being would be master of his powers and leave slavery under these forces behind' (1990, p. 196). He could have been no more prescient at that time. Three generations, one Cold War and one failed post-soviet transition process later, and at the dawn of a New Cold War, we see the shifts that Fromm predicted in the form of glocal governance.

To no surprise, according to the WVS (2021), globally, approx. 55% of people prefer being governed by experts and technocrats, not governments, because technocrats take decisions according to what they think is best in any circumstances without political visions or the need for propaganda.<sup>1</sup> If half the world's population prefers technocracy over Nation-State government, and—as shown earlier— 20% of the world's population cannot participate in a formal political process due to their non-citizenry status; and, if 60% of the world economy is informal and therefore non-taxable; and, furthermore, if 40% of the remaining public and economic sectors are for most parts de facto under control of NSA and OC, then the territorial Nation-State has turned into an 'empty shell' that neither enjoys legitimacy nor sovereignty any longer—at least in some parts of the world.

As illustrated, glocal governance initiatives have filled power and the governance vacuum of dysfunctional or failing states. Today, most of the world's population work, live, and migrate below the state's radar, even in stable democracies. More than half of the worlds population organize their day-to-day lives in family-bound or clientelist structures and prefer to avoid too much contact with political elites and government.

The 'good and safe life' is part of the desired or idealist Western lifestyle, but far from their reality. Electoral turnouts in these countries are often below 40%, meaning that most do not care or believe in the current regime. Thus, glocal governance is, for most parts, virtual, local, and personal, as can be best seen in how public sectors,

<sup>1</sup> World Value Survey Report 2021, Q236, p. 478.

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2022

A. Mihr, *Glocal Governance*, SpringerBriefs in Political Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02108-4\_5

such as education, are run today. Weber investigated 'glocal schooling' in South Africa and concluded that it is in the best interest of students to apply generally agreed global didactics and curricula when it is adapted and amended to local needs and the interests of students, such as climate change, mobility, or health (2007). As he calls it, Glocal schooling turns teachers and principals into glocal policymakers and interpreters between the global and the local. Glocality is today an intriguing concept and form of governance for many—may it be complementary to, or replacing of statehood. Ewelina Niemczyk found that adopting global best practices amends and improves local classroom teaching much faster, for example, when responding to contemporary ecological and social issues in ways that consider the integrated nature of local and global processes, and is easier accepted by students (Niemczyk, 2019).

However, glocal governance of the public sector in communities requires a steady team of 'managers' or facilitators to organize, schedule, and supervise the decisions taken. More so if these decisions are taken according to international norms and laws. These managers can work remotely or locally and often occupy managerial tasks only, like the chancellor and council of state's role in the Swiss system. Apart from that, multi-stakeholder and multi-level glocal governance systems are democratic by nature because they require transparent actions and reporting, voting, and equal access to justice, and the ability to hold stakeholders accountable. Lastly, but most importantly, glocal governance allows for more inclusive participation across the whole spectrum of citizens. Head managers and council members are elected or selected according to representatives' systems (parliamentarian) and rotating systems. Much of it is already practiced locally in Town Hall citizen dialogues procedures worldwide, often using lotteries to select participants. Members at large in these decision-making bodies rotate in and out of the office and serve limited—not renewable—terms—at least until the job is done. The decision is based on consensus and implemented according to technocratic and scientific best practices.

These governance shifts beyond Nation-States are not utopian thinking, which was once proven by the democratic forerunner in Europe, namely France. The 2017 French presidential and parliamentarian elections to the 'Assemblée Nationale' were an experiment promoting glocal governance. Presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron's party-like movement, only founded a year before the elections, 'La République En Marche!' (LREM), combined several different societal stakeholders and attempts of glocal governance. Most of the members of this hybrid party regime had no experience in politics before. The LREM built a coalition with the other non-party group, the 'Movement Democratique' (MoDem). Together they won and occupied a substantive majority (350:577) of seats in parliament. 75% of the Assemblee members were newcomers in politics from CSOs and businesses. A record number of women were elected, and the average age of all members decreased by six years to 48; hence, the parliament became more gender-balanced, younger, diverse, and more inclusive. But strikingly, many of its newcomers left the parliament and instead initiated protest campaigns against parliament. It was much easier to protest than taking responsibility, and it seemed that the combination of bottomup grassroots politics and traditional top-down politics did not suit the newcomers. Another reason for the failure of the glocal movement in France was that it lacked loyalty and discipline by its supporters—there was no ideology, no vision, no 'right cause' that would hold them together. Eventually, in 2018, when the President wanted to reform the Assemblee and decrease its seats by 30% to introduce speedier, more glocal procedures, the remaining members rejected it. It would have meant more power to the president on the one side and local inexperienced, community movement, on the other side. Parliamentarians were fearing a 'triumph of technocracy over democracy.'<sup>2</sup> This glocal experiment has failed so far, but most parliamentarians agree on the urgency of reforms toward glocal governance in essence, but on another way.

Even though the concept of Nation-State vis-à-vis glocal and liquid borders can be resolved technically, mostly through ICT and AI—as the EU's supranationality and subsidiarity has shown; the issue of legitimacy and the lack of a uniting political or social vision, cannot. The legitimacy of governance bodies declines as one moves away from the core purpose of the governing regime and can no longer fully engage and identify with it. Scholte et al. argue that glocality and its 'transscalar' diffusion of global norms and local actions create new forms of relationship between normative and sociological understandings, and eventually of legitimacy. Therefore we have to rethink legitimacy, and the extent to which prevailing social norms impact legitimacy beliefs. This can be stronger than the de facto leadership role of an agent, chairperson, or other types of leader.<sup>3</sup> Against this backdrop, universally agreed human rights and good governance principles, designed to strive for 'equal opportunities for all,' might become a new pseudo-ideology which is worth compromising for glocally.

A key element of glocal governance connectivity as sworn in the triangle (Fig. 1.1) is deliberation, as highlighted by Merkel, Schäfer, Habermas, Huntington, Morlino, et al., earlier in this book. For example, procedural (democratic) moderation and glocal governance facilitate the participants' curiosity toward reasonable disagreement, and encouraging contentious debate (Morlino et al., 2020, pp. 8–9). For glocal and partially deliberative governance, no dominant and absolute narratives or argumentation can dominate, and neither is the absolute dominance by technocrats and scientists. The key to its success is balancing and moderating a facilitator's different views, experiences, skills, and attitudes. Hence it is not the outcome or the final decision that represents the success of glocal governance but rather the process toward it.

Nation-State-based governance and oversized parliaments such as the German one, or Presidential ones, are no longer the reference point for the young and angry today. Social movements across the globe of all shapes and sizes refer to international norms, transnational agreements, and local practice, even in the most autocratic

<sup>2</sup> RFI, 8 July 2018, Macron addresses French parliament on constitutional reform.

<sup>3</sup> Jongen, Hortense, Scholte, Jan Aart, 2021, Legitimacy in Multistakeholder Global Governance at ICANN, Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, Brill Publisher, Open Access.

and warlord-run states—at least they do so rhetorically and on their Social Media accounts. Whether they succeed largely depends on how they can accept diversity and the bridging of individual 'identity bubbles,' which have been the key obstacle to political reforms since the beginning of the Anthropocene, according to Fukuyama (2019). Diversity contributes to growth as governance institutions seek higher innovativeness, effectiveness, and productivity as diversity increases—and not only in developing countries (Khan, 2005; Meisel & Aoudia, 2008).

For a while now, we have seen Citizen Dialogues and MSA practicing direct democracy and glocal governance, mainly in small and medium-sized towns and (federal) states. The question is whether these elements of glocal governance will also work in strongly centralized megacities of 10 million people and more? As seen by the example of the megacity of Moscow, citizen-driven projects and startups instead are marginalized and use their identities as 'weapons,' the young against the old, the conservatives against the progressives. Last, they separate and move to peripheries instead of being included in the whole process of city governance. And an evaluation of Citizen Dialogues in Ireland in 2017, has shown that if the current political elite is absent in a deliberative process, the outcome of these dialogues lack any clear and prescriptive direction and outcome (Costello, 2021). Glocal governance can only work in an inclusive manner, and by this be an addition and improvement to dysfunctional regimes.

Almost all conflicts within the EU, for example, since its formal existence in 1992 (EU Maastricht Treaty), are related to inflexible national identity and territorial autonomy, i.e., the separatist self-determination claims in Scotland, Corsica, Catalonia, Northern Ireland, Greek Islands, and Northern–Southern Cyprus. If governments do not allow the people to move and decide independently about regional and local matters as they happen, it loses de facto power. Second, local conflicts today are closely connected to non-voting rights for migrants and foreigners, no matter how long they have lived and paid taxes in the respective country which is fatal in times of glocal mobility. It excludes this rising number of people in any community and subsequent conflicts. Thirdly, due to an imposed top-down value-focused debate, citizen dialogues were, at the beginning, not neutral dialogue. Lessons learned from the mistakes; the EU today is the most prominent donor for citizen dialogues worldwide.

The biggest competitors to glocal governance remain the patriarchal and hierarchal governance mode. These regimes can be successful for some time because, to cite Confucius, they based on the father–son relationship, and hence seniority principles, which are seen as fundamental to the family as a social security system. But sooner or later, they always end up facing inequalities that lead to conflicts, even wars, and destruction.

## **5.1 Human Security and Opportunities**

The youth rebellion asking for equal opportunities beyond its state borders, globally, is already in motion and cannot be stopped on both sides of the New Cold War curtain. In essence, they demand Human Security and Equal Opportunities for all, no matter where in the world. They represent an angry and disillusioned crowd upset about the incompetence and unwillingness of political leadership to respond to global challenges causing them major lack of social mobility. Human security is first and foremost individual security and the responsibility of governing elites to (1) protect people from severe, pervasive, and widespread threats by autocratic regimes, and (2) empower them enough to be free from fear, from want, and to live their life in dignity. Everyone can quickly agree on these human security principles (Franck, 1995). It they get systematically violated, as Rustow predicted, they will trigger fundamental change of the way societies want to be governed.

The right to human security appeals to these rebellious youth, and not surprisingly, in 2005, in a forecasting attempt, the heads of states met at a UN World Summit for Human Security and highlighted what is essential in the twenty-first century if planet Earth wants to remain peaceful; namely the 'right of people to live in freedom and dignity, free from poverty and despair (…) and are entitled to freedom from fear and freedom from want, with an equal opportunity to enjoy all their rights and fully develop their human potential.'<sup>4</sup>

The summit marked, willingly or not, a break with the Westphalian Peace concept (1648) and the concept of Nation-State of the nineteenth century; namely that the state alone guarantees personal safety and freedoms, territorial integrity, political stability, military defense, and economic, environment as well as currency stability.

Instead, today governors' main purpose is to create an environment in which everyone, independently of his/her/its background can enjoy the human security principles. These governance regimes will be less ideological and religious but relatively pragmatic.

## **References**


<sup>4</sup> United Nations Trust fund for Human Security, UNDP. https://www.un.org/humansecurity/whatis-human-security/.


## *Further Reading*

Franck, T. M. (1995). *Fairness in International Law and Institutions*. Clarendon.

Fromm, E., Mickel, L., & Mickel, E. (1990). *Die Furcht vor der Freiheit*. Verlag Ullstein GmbH.


## *Online Sources*


*Global Citizen*. http://www.globalcitizen.org/


*Human Rights Watch, International Human Rights NGO*. http://www.hrw.org/


*Latinobarómetro, public opinion survey in Latin America*. https://www.latinobarometro.org/lat.jsp

*Minorities at Risk Project (T. Gurr), A University of Maryland research project that monitors and analyzes ethnic conflict worldwide*. http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/mar/

*Normative Orders*. http://www.normativeorders.net/en


*Transition Report*. http://www.ebrd.com/downloads/research/transition/tr12.pdf


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.