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39 Cornell Int'l L.J. 501 (2006)
Global Institutional Reform and Global Social Movements: From False Promise to Realistic Hope

handle is hein.journals/cintl39 and id is 509 raw text is: Global Institutional Reform and Global Social Movements: From False Promise to Realistic Hope Richard W. Millerf Introduction ..................................................... 50 1 I. The Fatal Lure of the Institutional Fix .................... 502 II. Institutionalizing War against Injustice ................... 503 III. The Institutional Framework of Globalization ............. 507 IV. Plague and H ope ......................................... 508 V. Improving a Social Movement ............................ 511 Introduction Because of the terrible things that governments do and the terrible situations that governments neglect, friends of humanity seek improve- ments in the political processes that currently produce decisions with important, pervasive international consequences. This search for improve- ment in global governance often leads to proposals of major reforms to strengthen global institutions, i.e., multigovernmental institutions in which all, or the vast majority, of the world's governments take part. Among aca- demics in the United States, such proposals are especially attractive to lib- eral theorists who are concerned with stark international inequalities of power. They think that morally urgent global needs are ill-served by cur- rent political processes in which, as Stanley Hoffmann sees it, military and economic giants will not be pushed around by hordes of pygmies,' a process which, in Robert Keohane's view, makes current international organizations... institutions of the privileged, by the privileged and all too often for the privileged2; Richard Falk even goes so far as to warn that the unchallengeable military preeminence of the United States is being mobilized in an emergent global fascism.'3 The diagnosis condemns the cure, or so I will argue. Because of facts of global power that stimulate proposals for large-scale reform of global institutions, such advice is more likely than not to harm humanity, if it makes any difference. The search for an institutional fix distracts from f Professor of Philosophy, Cornell University. 1. Stanley Hoffmann, World Governance: Beyond Utopia, 132 DAEDALUS 27, 34 (2003). 2. Robert 0. Keohane, Governance in a Partially Globalized World, 95 AM. POL. Sci. R. 1, 7 (2001). 3. RICHARD FALK, THE DECLINING WORLD ORDER: AMERICA'S IMPERIAL GEOPOLITICS 249 (2004). 39 CORNELL INT'L J. 501 (2006)

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