立命館大学　政策科学会　2025年３月

Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Policy Science, Vol.32, No5, March 2025, p. 39-59

            Open to Omnilateralism With Interpopular Support: 

From Only International to Wider Interpopular Global Governance  

Wolfgang PAPE, Bruxelles

“We the peoples ...” read the historic words of the UN Charter. However, it is not interpopular but only intergovernmental; hence generally called the United Nations (in Japanese 国際連合). The “people” (from Latin populus, cf. Greek demos) find formal representation in the United Nations Organisation only indirectly and through recognition as “nations” by the governments of the other “nations” already in the closed clubs of the UN, from the General Assembly of 193 to the most powerful but mostly ununited Security Council of only five permanent members. This recognition is hardly based on any common and clear definition of what constitutes a “nation” to become a member.

For instance, the United Kingdom in its own definition is a state composed of four different “nations”, but only the UK’s single government in London sends one official representation to the UN. Whereas the European Union now comprises 27 states which are all one-by-one individually members as “nations” of the UN, and the EU as such is recognised as a full member/participant in many agencies, conferences and conventions of the UN (e.g. FAO, WTO etc.). ^ⅰ

Due to its divergent use, the term “nation” (from Latin nativa, nativus = born) throughout its turbulent history in European languages finds variant definitions in different dictionaries depending on the context and viewpoint. Many historians date it back to developments in Europe since the 15^th century and then in particular leading to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 under the motto of ‘cuius regio, eius religio’ (Latin for: ‘whose region, their religion’) which set up the system of absolute sovereign nations. However, that peace would not last long and the identity of place and belief linked to the ruler’s sovereignty could not sustainably secure what became “national borders” in Europe.

It is the irony of history that it was the setting of borders in faraway South-East Asia already earlier in the 17^th century, that conflicts between European colonisers with a similar religious antagonism of Catholics against Protestants had led to one of the founding documents of “international law” with the publication of Hugo Grotius’ seminal pamphlet ‘Mare Liberum’ (The Free Sea). He claimed for the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie maritime access and the right to trade wherever Portugal and other powers had not yet established colonial settlements on land. This contest between the two European empires “would ultimately lead to the first ‘world war’, reshape Southeast Asia and give us the system of international maritime law which underlies the conflict in the South China Sea to this day” ^ⅱ .

Back in Europe, however, after two disastrous World Wars in the 20^th century leveraged by nationalism, an elite of statesmen came to realise the need to pool the sovereignty and integrate neighbouring nations in order to preserve peace and bring together the people under common freedoms of movement and supranational laws at European level. Membership growing from the original six to twenty-seven, they now call themselves Member States that have transferred key competences exclusively to the European Union. Its Parliament since 1979 is directly elected by their peoples, and there is rarely talk of “nations” for its members in its institutions at its de-facto capital Bruxelles. Likewise, the term “international” is hardly applied to its organisation, unless by less informed foreigners in third countries. Starting with the Benelux as well as France and Germany, the relations among these peoples with a common currency, the Euro, and the same European passport and rights as EU citizens have literally become “interpopular” (cf. Latin populus for people) for each other beyond borders. Such “interpopularity” differs from internationality by not connecting any particular official “nations” but it includes all people-to-people relations crossing borders. Hence, for instance the collaboration of NGOs across borders not only within the EU but also at global level like at the Climate Conference of the Parties (e.g. COP29, November 2024 in Baku) is clearly “interpopular” and not international. In contrast to diplomats, these civil society groupings do not represent any particular nation but global interests of people as stakeholders. They legitimately raise their voices bottom-up to convince by their expertise and arguments, before the (only 193 or even less) national representatives cast their votes in the final internationally legal decision, possibly committing or even formally binding the nations of the traditional Westphalian System. Thus, these qualitative voices of NGOs etc. interpopularly inject necessary global knowledge and experience into the often smallest common denominator of quantitative national interests from various governments.

Among East Asians, historically the notion of the “nation” with fought-over fixed territorial borders for “natives” hardly carries any homespun myth like in Europe’s tradition. ^ⅲ In the

central case of China, one can trace a long history of a sort of statehood through administrative divisions dating back since Shang Dynasty of the second millennium BC ^ⅳ , the origin of the long-lasting ‘Middle Kingdom’ (i.e. 中国 still nowadays in its own and Japanese naming). Their pattern of thinking about the state has long been less as a comprehensive area-wide institution with fixed borders for those native on that territory to call it a “nation” in the European sense of the term. The Chinese mandarinates of the past would not imagine China as a “nation” in competition with other nations. ^ⅴ Even the Great Wall of China has hardly ever served as a border between nations but rather as a line-up of fortifications to control movements of local tribes. Thus, Genghis Khan’s Mongols at a time could circumvent them and advance all the way to besiege the Chinese capital, present-day Beijing.

Through centuries, the political centre was rather radiating soft power and influence which had diminishing impact with distance, like in the concentric pattern of Mandala ^ⅵ , following the Confucian three principles of good governance, i.e. trust of the people, provision of sufficient food and adequate military ^ⅶ . Commonly, for many China is called a “nation” in the sense of European languages only recently since the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, although it already gained strong statehood millennia ago, at least with its unification in 221 BC. Even its current President Xi Jinping avoids the term nation and rather propagates political programmes as Civilisation Initiative or ‘Xivilising’ Mission ^ⅷ .

This has to be seen in the context of the limitations of the linguistic transfer of the European notion of the nation in East Asia. In order to translate “nation” into Chinese and likewise into Japanese script, the basic character 国 of the ‘Middle Kingdom’ is used as such with its original meaning and only pre- or postfixes are added, e.g. 国際 for international (with an edgy joint, i.e. 際どい) ^ⅸ , 韓国 for (South) Korea (but North Korea 北朝鮮 remains without meaningful 国 , although it is also a full member of the UN 国際連合 since 1991).

Not surprisingly, in Chinese written language, the character 国 ranks high as number 63 in frequency of usage ^ⅹ and in Japanese newspapers ^ⅺ as high as number 27, but in Chinese as well as in Japanese the symbol of a house is added, i.e. 国家、 to give it the meaning of ‘state’ in English. Both translations as nation and state are often used interchangeably. Moreover, in practice when watching a Chinese national opera abroad and following along the Chinese and foreign subtitles, one is struck that this same character 国 has dozens of different English words used to convey its meaning: country, land, state, province etc. This lack of terminological clarity gets even more complicated when one introduces concepts such as the member state of a union. In this sense, a member ‘state’ as in Europe (欧州) and in the USA has again a completely different sign, namely 州. A standard Japanese law dictionary/ encyclopedia defines 国 as a 国家 : that is a body organised through law and is unified, but without reference to any European term (hence pre-national). But when defining this term itself in combination, 国家 , it immediately refers confusingly to “state, état, Staat” and not to the elements of nation. ^ⅻ

This indicates how the symbolic script conserves and continues to shape the cultural and even political patterns of understanding in East Asia and beyond in distinction from the fluctuating use of terms like “nation” in the history of alphabetical languages of Europe. It encompasses the wider China and Japan, partly still Korea despite its very elaborate and useful sound-based Hangul-writing,^xiii and in the past also Indochina, especially Vietnam. This distinguishes East Asia from Latin-America and Africa where European tongues dominated and radically destroyed local expressions and entire cultures after colonial conquest by the western imperialists, except for very basic common features, for instance in counting. Traveling near Cancun, one can find evidence of original Mayan writing of a few numbers similar to Chinese symbols.

In ideogrammes, the original meaning is conserved more concretely than in phonetically written languages. The meaning remains visually alive in contrast to the dead languages of the Romans and Greeks where we must search their etymological history to better understand the original sense of a word. Hence, phonetically written languages change their meaning with their use in daily life and are clearly more prone to abstract definitions agreed upon at a specific time, compared to ideogrammes that visually present a concrete picture from the past.

Particularly hard to render into ideogrammes are abstract terms developed in one culture, that have no equivalent historic experience in the other, as seen above with the term ‘nation.’ Exemplary are the difficulties we encountered at the diplomatic Delegation of the European Commission in Tokyo when the European Community (EC) changed to the European Union (EU) with the Maastricht Treaty of 1991. The task was to make sure that little got lost in translating this (“ever closer”) ‘Union’ into 欧州連合. (連合 was like in the case of the UK and UN, but not like 連盟 for the old League of Nations.) However, the EU thereby applies characters other than those used for the union of the USA (アメリカ合衆国). Is it not actually a trans-formation of the actual substantial meaning which can only be understood correctly by those who comprehend the original foreign term, i.e. EU or USA; rather than a translation when rendering terms into such ideographic characters that mostly have prior concrete use, unless resulting in a new combination of characters?

A typical result of the late adoption of the euro-centric idea of the nation and its fixed borders is the fact that in spite of Vietnam’s numerous local skirmishes fighting the Chinese over centuries, it was only in 1979 that Vietnam and China went to war over their current borders, namely as nations.^xiv This, of course, is also related to the current re-emerging centrality of China (still 中国！ ) and the traditional concentric structure of statehood in Asia, onto which the Chinese now overlay a western-inspired, negative nationalism with increasingly hard power characteristics.^xv The almost uninterrupted influence of Chinese culture including on the script in Vietnam, can be traced back to the 2^nd century BC when mass Han Chinese migration led to Chinese rule and dynastic dominance, Mandala-like without clear peripheral territorial borders of today’s nations.

No major change occurred in Vietnam until the French overcame the Chinese in the Tonkin Campaign in 1885 and colonised the whole of ‘Indochina’ with a clear border separating it from China in the North. The name says it all, but it is of course widely exaggerated, as Indochina covers neither parts of India nor China, but rather reflects the poor European knowledge of the diversity of the Southeast Asian peninsula in-between these two major countries. In typical fashion, a French missionary had romanised Chinese-style ideogrammes and topped his alphabet with elaborate diacritics for appropriate pronunciation. At first sight they actually look very francophone, but the reality is more complicated. The shifting of frontiers was also less clear with overlapping between the two, the Kingdom of Vietnam and the ‘Kingdom of the Middle’ (中国). China is now a dominant power again and disputes in international law over its national borders have arisen in the South China Sea, not far from the Singapore Strait where a conflict in 1604 between European powers ‒ as explained above - led to a Dutchman, Hugo Grotius, to ironically become the “father of international law” through a case far away from the origin of the concept of the “nation”.

Evidently, while the notion of the nation is based upon mainly western history and values, it has been petrified through colonization and predominance over centuries as a primary unit of law. However, in the meantime many of its particularly nationalist adherents are withdrawing even from the “inter”-national aspects of Westphalianism by increasingly walling themselves off ^xvi.

In the present World Order, nations still claim absolute sovereignty with their monopoly of violence within their borders and vis-à-vis interference by others since they are recognised as the only official members at the UN. However, outside and across their borders (except within the EU due to its ‘supra’-national competences) they leave a mostly unruled global market to the so-called ‘multi-national’ corporations in a ‘winners take all’ competition. It reminds us of Thomas Hobbes’ doctrine of state sovereignty necessarily leading to international anarchy. The current ‘international’ system omits major non-state stakeholders ranging from civil society to representatives of various other groups, all who have global interests at stake and expertise to contribute to global solutions in an interpopular way like increasingly at COP. Nor do the system’s mainly Anglo-Saxon-inspired institutions reflect equilaterally non-western traditions and values of good governance and performance legitimacy. A shift of world hegemon within the West from a war-damaged UK (aggravated by Brexit) to the overwhelming powerhouse of the USA - without falling into the historic ‘Thucydides Trap’ of a war between them - let President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill design the post-war system from the Atlantic Charter in 1941 to the UN Charter in 1945 almost entirely in their own patterns. In addition, they basically could select the initial 51 nations to sign the latter in San Francisco. The Americans did extremely well out of both world wars financially and would gain greatly from the deepening of a relatively open global trading system ^xvii. They saw the UN as a toolkit to promote their western capitalist interests to expand worldwide. At whatever cost necessary, the Anglo-Saxons wanted the UN to avoid the fate of its failed predecessor, the League of Nations, and thus keep the World War II coalition of the Great Powers intact.^xviii It led to the declining representativeness of the present system in the Security Council.^xix

Only those recognised as ‘nations’ (with proportionally less and less real ‘natives’ due to migration and globalisation in general) are allowed to sit in the official bodies at the very core of this so-called multi-lateral order of the world. These about two hundred officially listed members of the United Nations, operating under the principle ‘One Nation-One Vote,’ hardly represent the weight of their various people back home. For instance, China has 145,000 times the number of inhabitants of the tiny island-nation of Nauru, but both have equally one vote each in the General Assembly of the UN.^xx

Hence amendments to enhance global governance have a dire need to not only better weigh votes amongst the present nations but also to further open the multi-lateral system of nations-only to wider voices, i.e. interpopularly: for an omni-lateral participation by all legitimate stake holding people concerned. These voices today are most vociferous amongst the younger generations, still denied votes in both national and global decisions. However, they gain attention and public impact by massing their voices in the streets and on the worldwide Internet. The governance system must move beyond votes-only towards voicestoo, thus strengthening an inclusive democracy. It cannot afford to leave them out on the rocky road towards unruly violence (cf. ‘Battle of Seattle’ in 1999), amidst dangerously dark digital echo-chambers. Democratic governance can be only truly “inclusive” when monitory might^xxi, exercised by all (and not monetary might wielded by a few) dominates our deliberations. People must avoid quasi-plutocracies spreading worldwide. And monitoring must not merely happen at election time, but in the years in between.

However, at the global level of governance the so-called multi-lateral organisations - notably the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank - are not only run foremost by Westerners, but their necessary monitoring by the public is weakest in the East and South of the Planet. One of the main reasons for such deference lies in the physical distance of the major inter-national institutions which are still almost all installed in the West, from New York to Washington(-Consensus?) and Paris to Genève (Swiss neutrality?). There have in the interim been first the economic rise of Japan (hence the UN University in Tokyo), but now the even stronger re-emergence of China (and partly India); and politically the spreading impact of Islam worldwide. The West can no longer risk the infamous ‘Clash of Civilisations’. An already polarising New Cold War motivates also an incipient New Bandung Spirit for the Non-Alignment Movement re-emerging from the 1950s and spreading in the Global South of today. Paul Tucker^xxii recently proposed to deal with the “Global Discord” through legitimation circles to avoid superpower struggles and to reshape a world order characterised by sharing basic norms at least at its new top table. To prevent clashes or splitting on issues of common global concerns by parochial national interests, the world has to accommodate the enriching ‘otherness’ in values and experience that lie beyond the Western world. It must re-orient western multi-lateralism by opening to an all-encompassing omni-lateralism.

With the cross-border initiatives of China ranging from the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), there is a new chance and dire need to extend the global governance system. To move it from a merely multi- to an openly omnilateral and interpopular one, including all in deeper and wider engagement, omnibus, namely by and for all.

Due to the often declared ‘death of distance’ through digitalisation and communication technologies, there continues to be an enormous increase in cross-border activities despite the enduring impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, namely “... an emerging re-globalisation ... driven by new, non-western and non-traditional forces”^xxiii. It obviously has become necessary to set legitimate and globally enforceable rules for these activities as well as for the widening and deepening application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) beyond national limits, that are omnilaterally accepted. Specifically, this very same technology also puts into question the legitimacy within those territorial borders of concentrating those powers at the national level only. There is not only the ‘Rise and Fall of Nations’, but history also has moved beyond the understanding of the almost absolute sovereignty of the nation-state that emanated in Europe from the Peace of Westphalia, almost four hundred years ago. The concept of national sovereignty was imposed onto the world by Western colonialism and increasingly has become a dysfunctional legal fiction with globalisation and the rise of emerging economies as well as regionalism worldwide (since the EU; from Mercosur, African Union to ASEAN and more recently in Asia CPTPP and RCEP). In particular, seen against the background of the pre-colonial history of Asia with a more concentric Mandala pattern of soft power (e.g. China, in its own writing 中国 still the ‘Middle Kingdom’, centrifugally spread the Han culture - notably its script - all the way into Japan in the north and Vietnam in the south), one is tempted to call the imposition of sovereign borders of a nation a historic aberration. It started with Hugo Grotius’ doctrine of ‘international society’ given concrete expression in the dividing borders drawn in the Peace of Westphalia under now obsolete historic circumstances. Nota bene, already two millennia ago, a kind of ‘globalisation’ by moving about without restriction was a fact of life.^xxiv

Nowadays, various developments of global society have significantly chipped away authority from such nation-states as the core polity of governance. Instead, it favours decision-making at wider regional, continental and even ‒ to some degree - global levels. Just think of migration, the growing worldwide interdependence through trade and finance, transnational terrorism and pandemics, the digital ‘death of distance’ in communication, Cyberspace with the Internet and Outer Space to be discovered, traffic on the High Sea and the mining of the Deep Sea, global common goods like the climate and environment, supranationality for enduring peace like in the EU - officially recognised by the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize - etc. Increasingly conscious of these wide-ranging developments, more and more ‒ notably younger - people realise that global problems call for global solutions beyond borders, which even the mightiest individual nation cannot achieve on its own. Through the incapacity and lack of cooperation amongst only nations, a vacant space has opened to address this interdependence. It opens a path of broader inclusion than under the mere multilateralism of nations, a path towards a comprehensive omni-lateralism with all legitimate stakeholders in interpopularity.

In view of the pressing needs to act for instance on climate change, people must fill this vacuum. Where formal votes by nations do not yet bring sufficient changes (e.g. in the UN, COP etc.), voices de facto begin to fill the void interpopularly. In particular, young people - still lacking voting rights but fearing for their future - join civil society groups and organisations of towns (e.g. 勝手連 Katteren in Japan) and even some businesses in the fight against climate change. The failure and outright incapacity of individual nation-states to manage these issues has been mounting for some time. For instance, the man-made radioactive clouds from the nuclear melt-down in Chernobyl in 1986, which flew high over national borders; and likewise the contaminated shipwrecks from Fukushima which crossed the Pacific Ocean and landed on American shores. Nevertheless, they claim ‘national sovereignty’ in wide reaching decisions over such common environmental global goods - like air, water and the energy produced from their territories - that can greatly affect the health of all humanity together. The aggravating problems of humankind with nature in our Anthropocene period and their harm to our habitat are the most obvious cases that render impossible purely national solutions. Obviously, they are neither merely national issues, nor can only nations solve them adequately in the current multilateral system. For it is based on purely (and highly unequal) national representation, as in the UN. Rather, all accountable stakeholders must get involved here. They must receive and share powers and responsibilities upstream beyond the nation, omnilaterally.

When one is surfing the fast-growing World Wide Web (WWW), one is hardly aware of national borders because such surfing is purely interpopular. However, when one encounters problems of privacy protection, difficulties in e-commerce, crypto currencies etc., one realises that not only are issues of cybercrime and access to knowledge and services at stake. A notable case of global legal services on the Internet is evolving de facto with so-called Cyberjustice and its Alternative Online Dispute Resolution platforms that blur borders of national jurisdictions by the pluralism of laws applicable without any state involvement. However, Cybercrime alone costs the USA 0.64 %, China 0.63 % and the EU 0.41 % of GDP.

The Internet’s governance controversially remains mainly in the control of the USA-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Since 1998, the WWW has clearly outgrown its earlier humble beginnings as the ‘virtual village.’ The more than three billion users of the WWW of today will soon rush to link up with tens of billions of devices on the ‘Internet of Things’ perhaps even with ‘Thoughts’. This burgeoning interdependence brings along new and complex vulnerabilities that single national governments cannot control. Reports of cyberwars and such interventions with network effect into foreign countries’ politics and in particular elections hardly match the traditional definitions of conflicts between nations, not to mention asymmetric wars. Rather, other agents are in the mix. They include terrorist groups and organised crime, which pose huge problems to cyber security. Such common enemies of safe communications across national borders can crystallise incremental global cooperation of concerned stakeholders. That is why participants in the biannual Conference on Cyberspace have since 2015 called them ‘multistakeholder’ events, as they appropriately include some 2000 representatives from different levels of government and NGOs, multinationals and academics. It was China and Russia that sought to overcome the ‘Conspiracy of North-Atlanticism’, and they have proposed a treaty for broader UN oversight of the Internet for information security, while the USA still plans to strengthen ICANN by having it also supervise the Internet’s ‘address book’. Europe on the other hand promotes its 2001 Budapest Convention on Cybercrime with at least the involvement of Interpol and Europol to tackle such problems over borders. It was signed by some seventy states, including the USA.

Like cyberspace there is on this planet yet another huge space without rules, namely the High Sea. Sixty percent of the earth’s surface is deep ocean. However, (except in the EU) the currently still nation-centric laws hardly cover it, touching merely its edges. Some 40,000 industrial-sized fishing ships are hauling kilometre-long nets of huge volume scraping the sea bottom and overfishing halibut and cod, amongst other species. What is even more disturbing, they dump back about a quarter of the catch mostly in the form of dead fish. These annual tens of millions of unwanted ‘by-catch’ cannot be landed legally, because they are either too small fish, the wrong type or caught in the wrong season. Even if some authorities, like the EU, legislate a ban on such ‘by-catch,’ how can administrations effectively enforce it on the High Sea, far away from any possible policing, unless through interpopular and omnilateral monitoring that responsibly involves the fishing industries themselves and other responsible stakeholders with the necessary information?

More accessible to most people as travellers are the activities of the financial system. In particular, the international currency trading system urgently needs global rules and policing. Notably, over recent years it hit the headlines with scandals that concern everybody beyond the claims of national sovereignty. Money often flows digitally over borders and no single nation can control - or much less correctly tax - such movements. Driven by speculation for windfall profits, it speeds around the world in unimaginable quantities: more than five trillion euros in just one day and in this way, it escapes from most national rules, but frequently rather results in plutocrats’ tools of corruption. Some call it the ‘perfect market’; others claim that it has created crony capitalists. Globally, there seems to be ‘no regulation, but only speculation.’ Not until the ‘Forex Scandal’ of 2013 was there any wider debate, because it was outside the public political sphere, which people’s illusion of sovereignty still naively sees purely within national borders. Some governments try to control those banks nationally. However, most indeed rather protect them through subsidies, even more so actually in the aftermath of each of the major financial crises since the first major Bank Panic as early as back in 1791 in the USA. The amount collected from taxpayers to support the rich world’s banks in the year 2011-2012 amounted to a total of $630 billion, more than the GDP of a midsized industrialised country like Sweden. This led for instance the EU and some countries to call for the banks to pay back at least some of that money through a Financial Transaction Tax. Yet international taxes make sense only if applied equally omnibus, by and for all on this globe, as proposed by the OECD for the minimum taxation of multinational corporations in 2021 and gradually implemented worldwide with its 2024 Administrative Guidance for over 140 countries and jurisdictions. Once more, here the nations must put it into their legislations. Otherwise, some privileged persons will always find tax havens that welcome evaders.

These enormous funds would find better distribution as investment in less developed regions to bridge the gaping cleavages between rich and poor, within and beyond the nationstates. From Thomas Picketty’s global bestseller and others, readers know of the growing inequality gap that is aggravated by global markets, which have gone out of bounds and lack sufficient rules. In most developed countries’ jurisdictions, unabashed competition in ‘winnertakes-it-all’ fashion, which naturally leads to monopolies, is ruled out by law, in order to allow newcomers’ entry into the market. However, with the laisser faire of neo-liberal globalisation, many multinationals and in particular the GAFA (Google/Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook/Meta and Apple) and BATX (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi) of Big Tech with their network effects and advancing AI have grown into unchecked dominant positions worldwide. One important reason for this globally lawless situation is the fact that the so-called Singapore Issues of Competition Rules etc. did not make it onto the World Trade Organisation (WTO) agenda. Already in 1947, the USA Congress voted its opposition against basic rules on competition proposed in the Havana Charter laying the groundwork for the thus limited General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).^xxv

Profiteering beyond the reach of national rules, these so-called multi-nationals often not only avoid adequate taxation (until full enforcement of the recent OECD guidelines for at least minimum rates of the Inclusive Framework on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting, BEPS), but also remain unbridled by principles of fair competition. The aggressive advances of dominant multinationals through bundling their products and buying up innovative newcomers have reached such an extent that only omnilateral rules for all beyond national borders can achieve fair and sustainable globalization of the world markets. Despite further ‘slowbalisation’ of major economies, the high level of interdependence through the selective approach and fragmentation of production chains by multinationals also significantly impacts domestic employment, a politically highly sensitive issue in most markets. This relationship in terms of official trade across borders is partly ruled by the WTO, but the interdependence of the millions of jobs at stake and their protection hardly find any recognition by the current multilateral system, not even at the tripartite International Labour Organisation (ILO). The problems of this interdependence, however, make striking headlines when suddenly a health epidemic disrupts substantial supply chains, as with the coronavirus since early 2020 or the wars in Ukraine or the Middle East now.

Based on the Atlantic Charter of 1941, this Anglo-Saxon dominated post-war multilateral system has become dysfunctional to provide for appropriate global governance worldwide. Its fiction of national sovereignty is increasingly failing.

The protagonists of national sovereignty originally in Europe and America and more recently also in Asia and elsewhere seem neither willing nor capable to implement the necessary changes to render the legal system conform with current realities and to accommodate emerging economies as well as new political constellations to make the UN truly representative of the entire world. A most evident case of declining democratic representativeness of the present multilateral system is the only UN organ whose decisions are legally binding, namely the Security Council. Its “five permanent, veto-wielding members who happened to be on the winning side in the Second World War” decide over most consequential actions for or against the welfare of humankind in an unchanged fashion since more than seventy years until today.^xxvi In the eye of many in the media, the self-appointed G20 has stepped into the void as a de-facto almost global governance body. Again, however, it grew out of a merely ‘western’ initiative in 1972 with a Group of Six (incl. Japan in continuing bondage to the USA) that only after the Cold War and pressure from developing countries expanded to become more representative, albeit still only at the level of national governments plus the EU (not without President Jacques Delors’ nudge by a proposal of an “Economic Security Council’ of regional bodies for the UN). Although the coinciding meetings by the Civil 20 (C20) of non-state stakeholders try to influence the media-mighty declarations by the G20, some civil society representatives in a spirit of non-alignment avoid being drawn into arrangements with certain governments. While this risk of being logged into one or the other camp has considerably grown with the recent worldwide polarisation, the need for apolitical and science-based solutions of global issues has exponentially increased.

Here the interpopular pluralism of civil society with its more object-oriented (“sachlich” would be the clearest German word) and less ideological contributions can considerably bridge the widening cleavage between mostly parochial national officials and generalist diplomats. In contrast to lower-level governance where we can practice more direct democracy, for most issues at highest, i.e. global level, consensus-building must be the final aim to solve problems like climate change that is caused not only by all humankind but also impacts all of us increasingly in the long term. Already at the stage of the EU, some 80 percent of decision in the meetings of the Council with member states are reached by consensus. If one is outvoted at village level, one can easily move to ‘Village B’ that might be more suitable. However, at global level there is no ‘Planet B’ (yet), and we all have to live with the decisions made here on earth. Hence, finding a common denominator for the global good needs all expertise worldwide independent of national origin or choice, that is interpopular.

The fundamental problem, however, lies in the question how to identify and legitimise such eminent experts and valid stakeholders and include them in the interpopular deliberations and the decision-making process. Their necessary involvement in global governance is hardly questioned anymore. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres clearly acknowledges their important input. In May 2021, upon a question by the EU about his idea of a “more inclusive UN” he himself identified the need for “... a mechanism to make sure that we integrate [civil society] contributions in our strategic thinking, in our decision-making.” More recently, some fifty nations and over two hundred NGOs supported the  Initiative calling for a Special Envoy for Civil Society to participate in activities all across the UN. Of course, there are already consultative bodies like the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the UN that encounters widely divergent criticisms.^xxvii On the one hand, some member nations in the global North want to do away with it altogether. On the other hand, the Global South would rather see it strengthened and with a broader mandate. Although their seats are differentially allocated to five regional caucuses, the ECOSOC’s members are listed as representatives of their nation of origin. Its membership remains based on an anachronic division of the Cold War period of the 1950s (now again?), neither reflecting numbers of people, nor their expertise at stake, nor their nations’ contributions to the UN budget. Thus, it suffers from numerous structural and functional deficiencies. Even the weighted voting proposed by Schwartzberg would not overcome the obvious limits of its effectiveness.

Much less could it fulfil the function in a monitory democracy that John Keane observed evolving since the end of WWII with new types of power-scrutinising institutions in big and complex societies where representative politicians are not easily trusted and seen as out of touch with citizens. This is especially the case on the higher level of governance (in thus farther away administrations). More trusted NGOs and civil society groups of stakeholders^xxviii address such concerns of citizens and break the grip of the majority rule principle ‒ the worship of numbers ‒ associated with representative democracy (Keane 2009). In most bodies of the UN, however, the representatives are not even elected by people to their position in the institution but are sent only by their national government to defend its vested interest. The narrowly mandated diplomats’ negotiations in New York with their “do ut des” (‘giveand-take’) seldom reach the best results for the common global good.

Much wider and more pluralistic are for instance the interests and values deliberated in so-called ‘Multistakeholder Advisory Group’ of the Internet Governance Forum which has been set up with very flexible working groups. It draws its members from candidates proposed by governments and the private sector, civil society and technical communities. Both developed and developing countries’ experts are in the mix as well as those from economies in transition; each serves for one year in their personal capacity as experts on Internet governance. With its stakeholder approach, the Group clearly reaches beyond representation by nations only, the defining feature of the United Nations elsewhere. It is an example of advances towards more interpopularity by moving ‘from votes to voices.’ It is a simplified form of stakeholder governance; but taken cum grano salis we see here that it is not only formal, quantitative votes by national representatives that count in the end. Governments and other groups of relevant stakeholders decide together; convincing voices that qualitatively shape the policy to be pursued. This trend ‘from votes to voices’ instills additional benefits into the decision-making. There is a meritocratic, democratic, bottom-up interpopular element to it. The process otherwise would be fixed globally by technocrats and delivered nationally by politicians. Such an opening to more democracy, through the contact and expertise of civil society (where merited) also adds legitimacy as it is drawn from a broader basis in society. By contrast, many governments that take decisions at the global level are autocratic; at best they exhibit mainly ‘output legitimacy,’ and not always that.

In many polities there is a growing critique of governance by the governed themselves, especially at the national level. However, different systems all over the world show clear variations in the kind and degree of their legitimacy. Observers nowadays distinguish between mainly three types of legitimacy: output, input and throughput. Output-legitimacy depends mainly on the effective outcomes or performance in solving issues, the ‘what.’ It is not limited to democracies; a skilful technocracy or even a benign dictatorship might achieve it. Truly democratic systems ought however to put more emphasis on input-legitimacy. That focuses on the participation of the governed and their contribution to decision-making. This ‘who’ of governance is most feasible in direct democratic processes in smaller polities, for example a very local level. A more recent discussion deals with throughput-legitimacy. This touches upon the ‘how’ of the political process: how openly and transparently are decisions taken? How impartial is the deliberation?

The involvement of non-state actors as stake holding experts from civil society, interpopularly from the bottom-up, has the potential to raise all three types of legitimacy. It raises input-legitimacy by more substantive participation, but also the throughput- (by more transparent deliberation) and possibly output-legitimacy by contributing to better solutions and implementation. Such non-electoral, democratic involvement could democratise global public power through people’s participation. It could be more easily applied to existing global structures than a conventional electoral institution.

Furthermore, there already exists a de facto trend towards omni-stakeholder governance in particular areas of global decision-making. The above-described COP process, evolving from 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, is the prime example. It is thickening with new generations’ voices, strengthening civil society world-wide interpopularly across national borders. Movements, such as ‘Fridays for Future’ and ‘Extinction Rebellion’ are at the controversial forefront. This shift from votes to voices is likewise reflected by people in general in their understanding of democracy. They not only want to be taken into account with their vote in elections every few years or so; they want their voice to matter more. In a European Movement International survey in 2019, only four percent of people in Denmark, Estonia, the Netherlands and Germany strongly agreed that they can make a difference in how their government works.

Quantitative electoral systems were devised to establish legitimate, representative agency within a historically and institutionally very specific form of polity ‒ the territorial state. It was a fixed and stable site of public power. In global politics, however, the complexity and fluidity of both power and democratic constituencies make popular elections unsuitable.^xxix The practical experimentation of the COP has created mechanisms that can delineate the boundaries of ‘public power;’ authorise the participation of non-state stakeholders; and uphold accountability (despite some stakeholders being unelected). Such an opening of global public power stems also from the diminution in the democratic significance of states. It is a response to the reality that the theoretical fiction of the ‘closed’ society and the unitary ‘sovereign’ nation, fully independent within its border, are unsustainable ideals. It no longer fully fits our time of globalisation. With this further inclusion of civil society and other stakeholders, we make an essential advance in the opening of the hitherto only multi-national system towards comprehensive omnilateralism in interpopularity.

This trend ‘from votes to voices’ instills additional benefits into the decision-making. There is a meritocratic, democratic, bottom-up element to it. The process otherwise would be fixed globally by technocrats and delivered nationally by politicians. Such an opening to more democracy, through the contact and expertise of civil society (where merited) also adds legitimacy as it is drawn from a broader basis in society. By contrast, many governments that take decisions at the global level are autocratic; at best they exhibit mainly ‘output legitimacy,’ and not always necessarily that.

In conclusion, Europe imposed the notion of the nation onto the world and the EU has learned the lesson of history from colonisation to World Wars by now relativising the nation as only one of several stages of public power in today’s multi-level governance. With the pooling and sharing of the nation’s former absolute sovereignty and competences, the nation’s representation at higher level ‒ i.e. regional (e.g. EU) and global (UN) - accordingly has seen the nation’s agency diminish in its purely international relations. At the same time, other stakeholders such as NGOs, experts, multinationals (esp. in the media sector) have interpopularly gained influence and more public trust than governments^xxx and hence grown their political agency. Their selection and accreditation for participation in the process from de facto decision-shaping (e.g. in COP meetings, esp. since Paris 2015) to formal decisionmaking is consequently a crucial issue. For the global level, as quoted above, the Secretary General of the UN himself replying to a question from the EU has already pointed out in 2021 the need “to integrate civil society in decision-making”.

Thus, foremost the EU itself as the first and only major organisation of supranational competences ought to develop a framework for basic standards and operationalisable mechanisms to interpopularly select and legitimise non-state actors to participate in decisionmaking for the exercise of public power.

More than most national governments, the EU practises an open and receptive method of governance for input from civil society at large (cf. EESC, public consultations, Citizens’ Initiative, Conference on the Future of Europe etc.). However, the crucial criteria for the selection of legitimate participation in public decision-making ought to reach beyond the standards of good governance as followed in western ODA allocation. These criteria must include not only transparency, accountability, responsibility etc. but also science-based accuracy, ethical correctness and the interpopular public interest overall as well as in the specific sector of competence. With theoretical studies and practical experimentation of wider systemic openness to non-state actors, the empirical evidence of the EU governance could clearly evolve into stabilising steppingstones on the path towards an omnilateral monitory democracy at global level in interpopularity.

The expanding array of common global concerns - from climate change to the Internet and war and peace should urge - in particular European - people to open the institutions and toolkits of governance to the valid input from all legitimate stakeholders in a spirit of interpopularly open omnilateralism, omnibus for and by all.

Notes

ⅰ  Michael Emerson, Upgrading the EU’s Role as Global Actor, CEPS, Brussels, 2011, p. 117-119

ⅱ  Sic Bill Hayton, The South China Sea - The struggle for Power in Asia, Yale University Press 2014, p.36

ⅲ

Japan as a rather homogenous island-country might be regarded as an exception in East Asia. However, the separate history and independence of the Shunten Kingdom on the Ryukyu Islands developing its own ethnical, cultural and linguistic identity later symbolised by the magnificent Shuri Castle until 1879 and Okinawa as a “triangulation point” prove the opposite (see George A. Kerr,

Okinawa, The History of an Island People, Tuttle, Tokyo 2000, p. 50 ‒ 51 and 455 -460; 波平恒男（Namihira Tsuneo）, 近代東アシア史のなかの琉球併合、岩波書店、Tokyo 2014, p.24 ‒ 28).

ⅳ

The seminal work of the late Prof. Tan Qixiang (1911 ‒ 1992) at Fudan University confirms the frequent changes of China’s borders leading to the concept of three concentric circles: a stable core of the “Interior”, the constantly changing “Peripheries” and the foreign “Exterior”. While dynasties rose and fell, the core of “China” as a political and cultural entity persisted through the ages, see Ge Zhaoguang, The “interior” and the “exterior“ in historical China, Chinese Studies in History 2018, Vol.

51, No.1, p. 4

ⅴ

Oskar Weggel, China im Aufbruch - Konfuzianismus und politische Zukunft, Beck’sche Reihe,

München 1997, p. 113

ⅵ  See Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky, Making Sense of Buddhist Art & Architecture, Thames & Hudson,

London 2015, p. 176 - 187 ⅶ  Oskar Weggel, eodem, p. 111

ⅷ  Sic chinamediaproject.org, 4.5.2023, accessed 18.9.2024, referring to the Chinese newspaper Global

Times

ⅸ  “International” is a positive term in western languages, whereas 国際（kokukusai） with 際どい（kiwadoi = edgy） in Chinese/Japanese script with its entrenched conservative symbolism is still referring to a single ruler in a land; cf. Judy Yoneoka, What is a kokusaijin? A10 year study, The Language Teacher(24), Kumamoto, 2000; Wolfgang Pape, 国際化とコムニケイション (Internationalisierung und

Kommunikation), in:　公証取引 (Fairer Handel), No. 49, Tokyo September 1985

ⅹ  Richard Xiao, Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese, Routledge, Milton Park 2009, p.359

ⅺ  See Tadashi Kikuoka, Japanese Newspaper Compounds - Order of Frequency, Tuttle, Tokyo 1970, p. 12

ⅻ  Sic 法学事典 Hougaku Jiten (Law Dictionary), Tokyo 1971, p. 216, 346)

xiii

 Hangul, the official writing system of both North and South Korea was compiled by a group of wise men under King Sejong in the 15^th century to correctly describe phonologically the sounds of the spoken words by mimicking the shape of the pronouncing mouth and the tongue for each sound. In combination it can efficiently represent some 11000 sounds, many of which are hardly writable in Roman alphabet. Although Chinese characters are still encountered frequently in Korea, on name cards, in eye-catching newspaper headlines (!) as well as on the streets, Hangul’s correctness for the pronunciation ranks high with linguists. They use it for instance to preserve dying minority languages in Indonesia, Nepal etc. (see Wolfgang Pape, European Development Policies at the Crossroads, in: 2011 KIEP Visiting Scholars’ Papers Series, Seoul, Korea, October 2012, p.233-234, where I argue in favour of Hangul as an important cultural educative asset, in the long-term richer than the now scandal-prone K-Pop).

xiv

 Sic Bill Hayton, eodem, p.154

xv

 On the issue of cementing rocks in the South China Sea, see Wolfgang Pape, Is the ‘American lake’ drying up in the China Sea? In: Foreign Policy, CEPS Commentaries, Bruxelles 31 July 2014, http:// www.ceps.be/book/%E2%80%98american-lake%E2%80%99-drying-china-sea

xvi

 Catherine Huguette (Un Monde de murs, Le Point, Paris 17.8.2017, p. 32 - 33) shows in a global graph the 40 000 km of walls ‒ “rideaux de fer” ‒ built since the 1950s over all continents; see also Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Zone Books, New York 2017, passim.

xvii

 William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange ‒ How Trade Shaped the World, Atlantic Monthly Press,

New York 2008, p. 384

xviii

 Mark Mazower, Governing the World ‒ The History of an Idea, Allen Lane Penguin Books, London

2012, p. 209

xix

 Joseph E. Schwartzberg, Transforming the United Nations System, United Nations University Press,

Tokyo 2013, p. 65 - 71

xx

 Schwartzberg, eodem, p. 7

xxi

 John Keane, , The Life and Death of Democracy, Simon & Schuster, London 2009, p. 688 - 695

xxii

 Paul Tucker, Global Discord ‒ Values and Power in a Fractured World Order, Princeton University

Press, New Jersey 2022, p. 324 - 329

xxiii

 Sic Financial Times, 24.12.2021

xxiv

 Peter Frankopan, The Silkroads - A New History of the World, Bloomsbury, London 2015, p. 12

xxv

 Wolfgang Pape, Socio-cultural Differences and International Competition Law, European Law Journal,

Vol. 5. No. 4, Oxford 1999

xxvi

 Schwartzberg, eodem, p.64

xxvii

 Schwartzberg, eodem, p. 95 - 100

xxviii

 See comprehensive global surveys confirming the clearly higher degree of trust in favour of NGOs in comparison with governments at 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, Global, https://www.edelman.com/ sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2024-02/2024%20Edelman%20Trust%20Barometer%20Global%20Report_

FINAL.pdf accessed 1.10.2024

xxix

 Terry Macdonald, Global Stakeholder Democracy ‒ Power and Representation Beyond Liberal States,

Oxford University Press, Oxford 2008, p. 132 - 133

xxx

 see above, Edelman Trust Barometer Global Report 2024

Related sources in literature:

Barber, Benjamin R., 2013, If Mayors Ruled the World ‒ Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities, Yale,

University Press

Berggruen, Nicolas, and Gardels, Nathan, 2013, Intelligent Governance for the 21^st Century, Cambridge,

Polity Press de Tocqueville, Alexis, 1835, De la Démocratie en Amérique, Paris

Kissinger, Henry, 2014, World Order - Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History, London, Allen Lane Penguin Books

Needham, Joseph, 1954, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 1, Introductory Orientations, Cambridge, University Press

Pape, Wolfgang, 2014, Is the ‘American lake’ drying up in the China Sea? In: Foreign Policy, CEPS Commentaries, 31 July 2014, http://www.ceps.be/book/%E2%80%98american-lake%E2%80%99drying-china-sea

Pape, Wolfgang, 2021, Opening to Omnilateralism: Democratic governance for all, from local to global with stakeholders, 汎地球主義　全边主義, AuthorHouse UK, Bloomington

Picketty, Thomas, 2013, Le capital au XXIe siècle, Paris, Seuil

Rose, Gideon, Editor, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2015

Rudd, Kevin, 2020, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/coronavirus-will-not-change-xi-jinpingchina-governance-by-kevin-rudd-2020-02

von Weizsäcker, Ernst Ulrich, and Wijkman, Anders, 2018, Come On! Capitalism, Short-termism, Population and the Destruction of the Planet - A Report to the Club of Rome, New York, Springer

(NB: The article’s author will freely send a digital copy of his 2021 book “Opening to Omnilateralism: Democratic governance for all, from local to global with stakeholders, 汎地球主義　全边主義” upon request per wolfgang.pape@gmail.com)