Based on the Planning of John IKENBERRY, INOGUCHI Takashi, and ONUMA Yasushi
[Objective of the conference]
There are two important new political developments surrounding our globalized world to be noted. One is the increasing number of diversified challenges, such as finance, energy, security, trade, climate, and poverty. The other is the emergence of the BRICs and other newly emerging countries driving the majority of the world’s growth and at the same time driving the majority of the world’s political risk.
Globalization is progressing against this new background. We may call it “globalization at the second stage” following the first stage in the 1980s and 1990s.
The issue of global governance today is attracting the attention of academics, policy practitioners, and business people, because we increasingly need to reach solutions agreed upon by all nations to a wide range of challenging issues as quickly as possible. However, it is increasingly difficult to achieve a global consensus on these issues as the gap between the developed nations represented by the G5-G7 and the emerging nations is growing in terms of developmental momentum, global norms and rules, and institutional competences.
Such a serious gap in terms of fundamental attitudes towards global political and economic challenges is a major culprit, for example, in the deadlock at WTO negotiations today. In the world of international trade, a significantly increasing number of FTAs have replaced the WTO’s mission, but as is well known to many, without multilateral norms and rules of trade, the existence of plurilateral rules and norms among different FTAs would lead to confusion in international trade rules, such as the so-called “Spaghetti Bowl Syndrome” possibly caused by the co-existence of different rules of origin.
In this regard, it is crucial to restore the WTO Round to a normal track, overpowering this growing asymmetry between developed and emerging nations.
It may be necessary to see the current world in terms of power versus international law. A global legal order against power games may be necessary not only in the trade domain but also in other domains. We may need to have an objective, transparent and convincing logic accepted by both the increasingly diversified groups, namely the developed nations, and emerging nations.
For example, the G8 or G20 process may as well be reconsidered in this light, since selection of these leading nations seems to be rather arbitrary and we will need more objective criteria, such as the size of GDP or the size of population, in selecting them.
In order to avoid a vacuum in global governance, as well described by Ian Bremmer in his recent book on a “G-zero world” as a result of no nation or group of nations being able to take the initiative in developing norms and rules on increasingly challenging global issues, having been only engaged in their domestic politics, we should concentrate our intellectual efforts on examining the current situation and working on finding a direction to achieve the best global governance.
Obviously this is not an easy task and we will need a variety of talents and intellectuals from all over the world, since this is, needless to say, an interdisciplinary project.
The Japan Economic Foundation (https://www.jef.or.jp/) affiliated to the Japanese Ministry of Economy and Trade and Industry, has been working on examining this issue during the past couple of years with distinguished international political science experts, such as Prof. Takashi Inoguchi, Prof. Yasuaki Onuma and Prof. John Ikenberry.
After our preparatory as well as exploratory discussions, our conclusion is that we should take a big step forward towards an academic and intellectual project to collect worldwide knowledge on this issue and publish our results for the world to read and respond to.
We also believe such a project would be a very important Japanese contribution to a global “knowledge society” and that Japan in particular would be one of the countries most seriously affected by a lack of global leadership, since these abovementioned challenges requiring global solutions through appropriate global governance could be key to Japan’s survival this century.
In this light, we aim to organize a seminar in Tokyo with JEF sponsorship for which the detailed program is as follows.
[Program]
| 9:00-9:30 am | Opening Remarks |
| by HATAKEYAMA Noboru (Japan Economic Foundation) | |
| 9：30-12:00 | Panel 1: Key sectors of global governance: finance, energy, security, and climate change |
| Finance: IWATA Kazumasa (Japan Center for Economic Research) | |
| Energy: Vaclav SMIL (University of Manitoba) | |
| Security: G. John IKENBERRY (Princeton University) | |
| Climate change: ONISHI Takashi (Science Council of Japan) | |
| Moderator: Prof. INOGUCHI Takashi (Niigata Prefectural University) | |
| 12:00-13:30 | Lunch |
| 13:30-15:30 | Panel 2: Schemes of global governance |
| a) total non-polarity / David GORDON (Eurasia Group) | |
| b) bipolarity / Chung-in MOON (Yonsei University) | |
| c) resilient club of G5-G7 / Yves TIBERGHIEN (University of British Columbia) | |
| d) G20 / Alan ALEXANDROFF (University of Toronto) | |
| Moderator: Prof. INOGUCHI Takashi (Niigata Prefectural University) | |
| 15:30-15:50 | Coffee Break |
| 15:50-17:50 | Panel 3: Round table on global governance in Asia |
| Deepa Gopalan WADHWA (Indian Ambassador to Japan) | |
| Zhang YUNLING (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) | |
| G. John IKENBERRY (Princeton University) | |
| Rizal SUKMA (CSIS, Jakarta) | |
| Marcos GALVAO (Brazilian Ambassador to Japan) | |
| Moderator: ONUMA Yasuaki (Meiji University) | |
| 17:50-18:00 | Concluding Remarks |
| by KUSAKA Kazumasa (Japan Economic Foundation) |