The Pragmatism of Global and European Governance: Emerging Forms of the Political `Beyond Westphalia'

Abstract

This essay argues that debates on, as well as practices of, global and European governance reflect a `pragmatist attitude' in international relations. This pragmatist attitude is hardly avoidable if global and European governance are seen as evolutionary processes in which a semantics apt for coming to grips with a `post-Westphalian' world is developing. The article considers how the pragmatist attitude of global and European governance discourses is evident in their refusal to fix the contours of the political beyond the nation-state in its analytical, synthetic, and normative dimensions. It further argues that attempts to provide comprehensive accounts of governance beyond the nation-state are necessarily characterised by failure, because they do not engage the meta-theoretical problem of analysing an era in which the constitutive rules of the game of global politics are undergoing a dramatic shift. After establishing some contours of this `non-capital-p-pragmatism' in international relations, the article discusses some of its implications for traditional International Relations (IR) agendas.