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Governing the World: The History of an Idea. By Mark Mazower. Allen Lane, 496pp, Pounds 25.00. ISBN 9780713996838. Published 4 October 2012
Mark Mazower's stimulating work analyses how the world was governed (or at least how attempts were made to govern it) in the periods following three "settlements". First came the Concert of Europe, in which the leading powers managed things fairly amicably from 1815 until the Crimean War of the 1850s, and then in an increasingly fragmented and crisis-ridden way up to the cataclysm of 1914; next the brief and inglorious 20-year life of the fragile League of Nations, which succumbed to crises and conflicts, some of them built into the post-1918 "settlement"; and finally the long and varied experience of the United Nations, founded in 1945, which has survived for two-thirds of a century.
One of Mazower's original contributions is to examine how the formal arrangements set up by the world's leading governments - the Concert, the League and the UN - increasingly had to interact with the informal transnational bodies we now know as non-governmental organisations, or NGOs. He gives clear (although sometimes inevitably brief)...