5 GOLD MERCURY INTERNATIONAL Global Governance: Towards a New Ethic
and helped lay the preliminary basis for a global moral community. A strengthened global values framework in action should bolster global governance institutions which should, in turn, reinforce the accountability and legitimacy of the state to its citizens. The nation state is today the most relevant political unit for citizens. What is not so clear is how the concept and management of state and national sovereignty will evolve in a more regionalised and globalised world. We have seen clearly how individual and sovereign nation states failed to predict and avoid a global financial crisis in 2009 and how a group of nations acting as a group (the EU) are moving to rescue member states on the verge of collapse.
The late-2000s financial crisis (often called the Credit Crunch, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), and sometimes referred to as the Great Recession is considered by many economists to be the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
This paper argues that sustainable global governance must be seen through the lens of an engaged and normative discussion of global values that form a global ethic. Once sustainability is understood as a key moral concern of global governance, the principle could exert great influence on the shape of the future governance system. Values, principles and ethics are often seen as the ‘soft’ side of global governance, but sustainability cannot be achieved without considering them, and without questioning whether and to what extent sustainability is a moral problem that transcends old boundaries—be they political, cultural or economic. As well as considering the global governance system today, with examples of it in action, we will lay out a roadmap for a new global set of values that can shape tomorrow’s governance system when promoted by the right kind of leadership. Ultimately, the global community strives for a new set of norms to underpin a set of constitutional guarantees in all nations, leading towards a global ethic that supports a robust international governance complex.