Harmony-Thinking and Post-Political Ethics in Global Governance

This paper assesses critically the conceptual underpinnings of various soft forms of governance, such as the UN Global Compact and soft forms of governance in the EU.

It is argued that the regulatory design is premised on a 'harmony ideology', inter alia reflected in vocabularies on partnership, dialogue, learning, etcetera. The analysis explores what these types of flexible, network-based organizational procedures, and with little sanctioning capacity, do to the political, including the capacity to articulate political conflicts and diverse social interests. By narrowing down conflictual space and recasting political conflicts in ethical language, these governance efforts perform political operations despite being recast in post-political language. Moreover, it is suggested that the Market as a master narrative and liberal modes of thought not only linger behind these types of governance, but are constitutive of them. A critical perspective reveals the specific alignments of market rationality, responsibility, ethics, choice and voluntarism that mutually constitute distinctive spaces of new forms of regulation.