The Concertation Impulse in World Politics

Abstract

Abstract This book unravels the centrality of contestation over international institutions under the shadow of crisis. Breaking with the widely accepted image in the mainstream, US-centric literature of an advance of global governance supported by pillars of institutionalized formality, the book points to the retention of a habitual impulse towards concertation related to informal institutionalism. The focus on the durability of a concertation impulse challenges common assumptions about change and continuity with special reference to the debate over fundamental institutions in world politics. With the mainstream institutionalist international relations (IR) literature situated as the scholarly foil, the book relies for conceptual guidance on the recovery of a valuable component in the intellectual contribution of Hedley Bull. If the overarching theme of this book is to expose the core defect of institutionalist IR analysis by its constricted neglect of the concert model, however, the subsidiary aim is to examine forensically an extended array of basic gaps, and so refine and accent our understanding of the context and content of institutional design in world politics. Operationally, the work underscores the striking—and unanticipated—persistence of an organizational variant with origins in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As highlighted by the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, even when the supply falls short, some demand for stratified concertation persists. This imbalance becomes more pronounced when the concertation impulse separates from apex plurilateral summitry as illustrated by the Group of Twenty (G20) to challenger variants of informality: whether animated by Trump’s disruptive populism or by the tensions in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) between a solidarity concert model and a looser construct.