Anthony Pagden is Harry C. Black Pro- fessor of History at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MA 21218, USA. He has written a number of books on the history of the political and social theory of European imperialism. His most recent publications are Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France (1995) and The Idea of Eur- ope: The formation of an identity from the Ancient World to the European Union (forthcoming). The genesis of ‘governance’ and Enlightenment conceptions of the cosmopolitan world order Anthony Pagden Introduction Ever since 1989, when the World Bank described the current situation in Africa as a ‘crisis in governance’, the term ‘governance’ has been widely, if not exclusively, associated with the politics of development, and in parti- cular with development in the post-colonial world (The World Bank, 1989). Although in this literature, the word is often equated simply with ‘governability’ within individual states, it is clearly part of a larger attempt to find a new way of characterizing inter- national relations which would involve not only states, but also non-statal and avowedly non-political bodies, in particularly the international monetary agencies and multinational corporations. Here, it would seem, is the basis for a language in which it might be possible to talk about precisely those ‘ideological and political considerations’ which the World Bank was forbidden to discuss yet which could hardly ever, in practice, be detached from the ‘techni- cal considerations of economy and efficiency’, which, in the words of the Bank itself, ‘should guide the Bank’s work at all time’ (Shihata, 1991, p. 95). 1 The ‘should’ here was perhaps a tacit re- cognition that the Bank’s initial attempt to dis- tinguish between economics and ‘efficiency’ ISSJ 155/1998  UNESCO 1998. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. and all other areas of human behaviour was theoretically naive and practically unworkable. Yet by introducing the notion of ‘governance’ into its operational criteria, the Bank seemed to have accepted the initial loss of its presumed political and ideological innocence, while at the same time avoiding the claim, loudly voiced by the opponents of all the international monetary agencies, that it, and the IMF, operate with a tacit, and frequently explicit, set of political and cultural assumptions – if not a covert political agenda – which are inescapably Western European. By insisting that it exists to sponsor ‘fairness’, justice, liberty, an independent judiciary, respect for hu- man rights, and an efficient and corruption-free bu- reaucracy’, and by insisting that these were ‘the basic requirements . . . for a mod- ern state’ (Shihata, 1991, p. 85), the Bank is certainly open to the charge that its objective is to impose modern Western democ- racy by means of economic incentives. By claiming, however, that such things are not part of government – or more generally of a Euro- pean system of values – but part of ‘govern- ance’, the Bank and its ideologues have con- trived to suggest that, in the modern global neighbourhood, all such non-statal values are culturally neutral. Governance can thus perhaps best be understood as a bid to create a new rhetoric