accessibility to the legal system that makes the EU distinctive from other
international governance models. Contrast it with the WTO, where only states
can make a complaint to the Dispute Settlement Body.In short, the EU, for all its shortcomings, is a community of sovereign states that
has proved that cooperation can be learned and that cooperation need not be a
zero-sum game. In essence, cooperation within the context of an international
governance system produces results where the participants can in many, if not all,
circumstances perceive cooperative action as a public good. But cooperation
among sovereign states or between states and non-state actors in the establishment
of a governance system is neither automatic nor easy. Successful cooperation to
date has depended on a public sector push, an emerging supranational structure
and the willingness of the member states to pool sovereignty in key areas, to
delegate decision-making and to accept authority in matters over which they
would otherwise have national autonomy. The EU has proceeded further than
any other regional grouping in the establishment of a governance system based
upon the principle of pooled sovereignty.
But the EU’s major problem, a problem for most international organizations, is that
it has only achieved a limited degree of democratic legitimacy. While the proposed
European Constitution may have reXected a desire to ensure democratic governance,
there was a clear imbalance between the supranational and the national democratic
structures. Finding legitimacy among its citizens and in public discourse within the
EU on the one hand, and among the actors and institutions of global governance on
the other, has proved diYcult. There is a ‘‘sovereignty trap’’ in the European
project. While states have done much to develop democracy and social justice in
the advanced economies, the limits of national governance, and of the concepts
on which it is based, appear less clear in regional and global integration processes.
This has implications for the role of international organizations as vehicles for
global governance. There are examples from EU experience, including the intro-
duction of the single currency, which provide us with a practical example of the
‘‘division’’ of sovereignty. But for international organizations to deliver better
global governance, it is necessary to escape from a bounded notion of sovereignty
and narrow deWnitions of security and state interest in international relations.
Central to overcoming these limitations, as normative scholarship suggests, must
be the recognition that sovereignty can be disaggregated and redistributed across
institutional levels from the local to the global (Held 2004 ).
3.2.2 International Organization and the Rise of Regulatory Regionalism
in the Developing World
While it clearly diVers from the ‘‘European project,’’ international organization in
the developing world has proliferated from the last quarter of the twentieth
international political institutions 623