Globalisation is a contentious subject, much criticised in street protests as well as in seminar rooms. But though many of the critics claim to defend the interests of ordinary people in the developing world, the voices of those people themselves have seldom been given as much attention as those of western protestors and academics.

Globalisation – in Stiglitz's working definition: ‘the closer integration of countries and peoples of the world’ (2002, p. 9) – is a process usually viewed from above. Our own perspective is less Olympian. We are interested in globalisation not viewed as a world-wide process but from the perspective of the public in developing countries, who see it as an external challenge to their own country or locality. For them, the key questions are about greater economic and cultural ‘openness’ to an external, rapidly integrating world; about participation in multi-national or supra-national organisations; and about embracing or resisting the inward flow of foreign ideas, customs, symbols, capital, and personnel, as well as foreign technology, economic goods and services.

From a democratic perspective, grass-roots public opinion is important in itself. But even in countries that are only partially democratic, or not democratic at all, grass-roots opinion can be important. Indeed governments may be more exposed to public opinion in such countries just because they have so little ‘process-legitimacy’. The climate of public opinion affects elites and elite policy in most contemporary societies. It can always influence, if not determine policy.

With an internal market economy, exposed externally to world markets, and with a plethora of international organisations deciding political and economic policy, what role is left for the nation state? This chapter looks at public perspectives on the state: the role that the public in developing or transitional countries feel it should play in the life of their nations, and their perceptions of its actual role and performance in practice. They see at least four possible roles for the state in an era of globalisation: as national economic entrepreneur, as physician or protector, and as advocate – all of which they would support; and as a conspiracy against the public, which they condemn. To explore that fourth role more fully, we take a closer look at the differences between public and officials.

‘Decline of the state’ or transformation?

Robertson (1985: p. 307) suggests that ‘the State may be the most commonly-used and the most opaque term in the whole of political vocabulary’. Its meaning certainly varies according to context. It can be distinguished from transient ‘government’ in the narrow sense of a small group of ministers. But it is not so different from ‘government’ in the wider sense of the ministry plus all the civil and military servants at their command. In Vietnam it is equated with the Party, and both Party and government are regarded as permanent insofar as any socio-political structure is ever permanent.

This chapter looks at public attitudes towards an ‘open economy’ – where producers and consumers are exposed to freely operating world markets externally, and to a freely operating domestic market internally. In principle it might be possible to have one without the other. Communist regimes did engage in external trade with each other and with a wider world market though they attempted (not entirely successfully) to suppress domestic markets. Conversely, it would be possible to conceive a regime with an entirely free market internally, yet sealed off from the world economy – some remote Himalayan kingdom, an idealised Chinese or British Empire founded upon ‘imperial preference’, or a more inward-looking European Union. Some of our Czech focus group participants looked to European Union (EU) accession as a means of insulating themselves from the world market as much as integrating into a pan-European market. But the much debated ‘Washington Consensus’ (Teunissen and Akkerman 2004) was based on the ideal of a seamless market, independent of political boundaries. Thus the Fraser Institute's (2004) Economic Freedom of the World rankings, for example, are based on indicators of both an external and an internal market. Though a country may score higher on one than the other, both are regarded as essential components of a truly ‘free market’.

Like outside observers, most of the public in our countries could distinguish between the internal and external components of an open market economy, however.

In Chapter 3 we found the public were evenly divided on their attitudes towards an internal market, though more positive towards opening up to world markets. Even those who had, on balance, positive attitudes nonetheless had plenty of criticisms. Contentment was mixed with discontent. This chapter looks at public attitudes towards the articulation of that discontent, towards resisting the downsides of internal markets and economic openness – low wages, unsafe working conditions, pollution, or unfair international regulations.

International companies have faced both local and international protests against their alleged pursuit of global wealth at the expense of local interests. Oil companies like Shell have faced persistent local protests against their operations in Africa. Brands like Nike (in 2003 the largest private employer in Vietnam) have faced strikes by badly paid or badly treated workers across Asia – backed up by consumer boycotts and court actions in more developed countries. But the most spectacular ‘anti-globalisation’ protests have been the series of protests at meetings of international organisations or self-designated groups of ‘world leaders’, beginning with the Seattle riots of 1999.

The violence and disorder of ‘Seattle’ methods of protest provoked adverse reactions in the affluent West. Yet they might resonate with the frustrations of ordinary people in relatively poor, developing or transitional countries. Indeed anthropologists such as Scott (1985; 1990) have suggested that poor people in poor countries might be willing to use what he called the ‘weapons of the weak’ against their oppressors.

Over the last two decades or so, all four of our chosen countries, the Czech Republic, Korea, Ukraine and Vietnam, have experienced a great deal of economic, social, and environmental change. Much of that has been attributed quite rightly to globalisation, to the movement towards a more market-based economy internally, and towards opening up the national economy more to world markets. Other economic, social, or environmental changes that have happened at the same time might well be associated in the public mind with the process of globalisation, if only by the coincidence of timing. Public perceptions of change have thus provided a basis for public attitudes towards globalisation.

We cannot assume that economic, social, or environmental change – as described in official statistics or the reports of widely respected non-governmental organisations – would translate automatically into public perceptions, still less into public satisfaction or public discontent. Nonetheless these official or semi-official reports provide a backdrop – part explanation, part contrast – to public perceptions of trends in economic prosperity, inequality, pollution, crime, corruption and culture; to public satisfaction or discontent with ‘the way things are going’; and perhaps therefore to public support for the processes of marketisation and opening up.

The statistics of change

Opening up (South) Korea adopted an export-led growth strategy in the 1960s and opened up to foreign imports and investment in the 1990s (World Bank 1993).

Since the mid 1970s, all four of our countries have had some experience of regime change. The Czech Republic emerged at the start of 1993 from the more diverse Czechoslovakia. In South Korea the increasingly democratic Sixth Republic replaced the authoritarian Fifth Republic in 1987. That change had regional implications because the authoritarian regime in Korea had reputedly favoured the ‘home regions’ of the authoritarian rulers (Min 2004) and the leaders of the new democratic regime came from other regions. But we focus on Vietnam and Ukraine, where the imprint of regime change might be particularly evident in regional differences in public attitudes towards marketisation and opening up – differences between public opinion in North and South Vietnam, and between public opinion in East and West Ukraine.

In Vietnam the free-market South was forcibly reunited with the communist North only in July 1976 and experienced scarcely more than a decade of classic communism between reunification and Doi Moi, in marked contrast to the much longer experience of communism in the North. If there were any legacy from the period before reunification, we might expect the public in the South to feel more competent and more comfortable with markets and an open economy and perhaps less comfortable with government from Hanoi. The historical legacy would provide a plausible explanation for polarised opinion between North and South – if that was a significant pattern.

In Chapter 1 we outlined some good reasons why the public might wish to change their traditional culture or preserve it; why they might welcome or resist cultural globalisation. Our aim in this chapter is to see how the public themselves define and value their culture. Do they fear that their culture, however defined, is threatened by opening up the economy? Insofar as opening up might erode their culture, are they willing to strike a Faustian bargain and trade culture and identity for material gain?

A Faustian bargain?

By instinct, the public were not very modest about their ‘culture’, whatever they meant by that. (We explore their meanings later.) Two-thirds agreed their ‘culture’ was ‘superior to others’ and wanted more emphasis on their own country's distinctive ‘culture and traditions’ (see Table 4.1).

At the same time, two-thirds felt that opening up the economy would inevitably bring cultural homogenisation and that their ‘traditional way of life’ was already ‘getting lost’. Significantly, it was in Ukraine and Vietnam, where the public felt their culture was strongest and homogenisation was less likely, that they were most keen to emphasise it more. Cross-nationally, public support for emphasising national culture therefore reflected cultural security rather than cultural fright. Nonetheless, even in Ukraine and Vietnam around 60 per cent felt opening up the economy would inevitably erode their cultural distinctiveness, and only around 24 per cent disagreed.

INTRODUCTION

An essential ingredient of politics is winning. What counts in politics is the passing of a bill, the amendment of a proposal, getting a policy accepted, or the enforcement of a decision. However, in general, it is impossible to win by staying alone. In politics, including European politics, it is necessary to form winning coalitions in order to enforce decisions.

Surely, in any political system, individual preferences with respect to a decision-making problem will diverge. Consequently, conflict will be at the heart of politics. However, this does not mean that coalitions are not important. In order to resolve conflict in political decision-making processes, cooperation and hence coalition-formation is essential. Conflict and cooperation are different sides of the same coin. Indeed, even if conflict is so strong that no resolution is possible, coalition-formation is still essential: in the extreme, it is necessary in order to revolutionise the system itself.

Since cooperation is an essential ingredient of politics, coalition-building cannot be neglected in the modelling of political decision-making. A framework that explicitly deals with cooperation and coalitions is cooperative game theory. In this chapter, we will use cooperative game theory to analyse decision-making in European politics.

However, cooperative game theory has a serious drawback: it is mainly geared towards solving games in terms of payoff structures, not in terms of coalitions. For quite some time, political scientists have been aware of this fact (e.g. see Riker 1962).

This volume began with a set of questions asked at Park City, Utah, in May of 2002. The conference was titled “Delegation to International Organizations” and was organized by Scott Cooper, Darren Hawkins, Wade Jacoby, and Daniel Nielson, all of Brigham Young University. The conference asked why governments delegate authority to IOs, how they structure delegation relationships, and what problems result from such delegation. In many respects, this volume reflects the basic architecture of that early conference on the topic. We are thus grateful to the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies; the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences; and the Department of Political Science at Brigham Young University for making possible that initial exploration of ideas about international delegation.

While the broad themes of the volume were laid out in the spring of 2002, the scope of the project was narrowed and refined considerably during two conferences organized by Lisa Martin and held at Harvard University in December 2002 and April 2003. These meetings focused participants specifically on agency theory as a tool for understanding delegation to IOs. For funding and sponsoring these conferences, we are grateful to Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and its Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

To sharpen contributions to the volume, David Lake organized a final conference in Del Mar, California, in September of 2003. This meeting helped make clear the unifying themes of the volume.

States now delegate substantial policy authority to a host of international organizations (IOs). The chapters in this volume describe patterns of delegation by states to the multilateral development banks (MDBs), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Union (EU), United Nations Security Council (UNSC), the World Trade Organization (WTO), World Health Organization (WHO), and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the European Court of Justice (ECJ), and others. Many of these agents have been delegated greater authority by states – or have carved out greater autonomy for themselves – and are deeply integrated into the structure of global governance.

This chapter does not summarize the preceding chapters, but briefly highlights several themes. We conclude that delegation to IOs is remarkably similar in cause, structure, and effects to delegation within states. Principal-agent (PA) theory, which has proven useful in understanding patterns of delegation in the domestic arena, is equally applicable and powerful in explaining delegation to IOs. Most of the chapters in this volume focus on the design and efficacy of institutions to control agent opportunism; this is largely internal to the relationship between principals and agents. Incorporating the role of third parties (TPs), including the many NGOs that now make up global civil society, is the research frontier. We highlight the role of NGOs as potentially important actors in providing information that is essential to the success of international delegation. Thus, this chapter is an unusual conclusion for a collaborative volume.

In December 1999, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets into a mob protesting the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. A central theme of this and similar anti-globalization protests is that the WTO, IMF, World Bank, and other global institutions are “runaway” international bureaucracies implementing a “Washington consensus” formulated by professional economists and other neo-liberals who have made their careers within these agencies (Stiglitz 2002; Rich 1994). Other critics charge that these international organizations (IOs) are imperialist tools of the powerful, exploiting poor and disadvantaged countries for the benefit of the West. Although they have not yet taken to the streets, American conservatives, at the other end of the spectrum, argue that these IOs fail to promote the interests of the United States (Meltzer Commission Report 1999; Krauthammer 2001).

Meanwhile, Europeans complain about the “democratic deficit” within the European Union (see Pollack 2003a: 407–14). As the EU expands its competencies and grows to twenty-five members, critics charge that the simultaneous deepening and broadening of the union is driven by unaccountable bureaucrats in the European Commission and the highly insulated judges of the European Court of Justice. Divorced from electoral pressures, these increasingly powerful EU institutions have allegedly escaped popular control. French and Dutch voters retaliated against the Brussels-led integration project by rejecting the proposed EU Constitution in June 2005.