In his Eros and Civilization manifesto (1955), Herbert Marcuse called for a social revolution that would bring about what he called a non-repressive society: a society in which the individual would be freed from all institutional pressures, in which the satisfaction of his sexual drives would become socially desirable, and hedonistic gratification would turn into political values. Marcuse laid out the “liberation from repression” platform of the sexual revolution. He was its leading “intellectual agent.” Its operational agents enthusiastically set to work in the 1960s. From the onset, they had an internationalist perspective. In the shade of the Cold War, they established a partnership with the UN and wove their subversive objectives into the fabric of international cooperation. In the 1990s, the paradigms they forged (reproductive health and gender chief among them) became practical norms and cross-cutting priorities of global governance. For over a generation, the “non-repressive” agenda of a western minority has efficiently spread globally, down to the local level. The western cultural revolution and its globalization happened through a power grab. Power shifted from the alleged “repressors” to the alleged “liberators.” The “liberators” developed an ability to coerce and manipulate. The cultural revolution came along with a political revolution. A new politics quietly emerged, endowed with novel concepts and mechanisms. “Power-without-authority” has been both the ultimate goal of the cultural revolution and the political means through which it achieved its deconstruction-of-what-is. In this essay, in three flashes, I will reflect on the genesis and purpose of power-without-authority, its key conceptual features, and some of its operational mechanisms at the level of global governance.
Genesis
In all things, it matters to know the origin. The rise of power-without-authority was possible once authority, in both its rational and transcendent dimensions, had come to be associated with repression. A long and complex process laid the groundwork for the advent of an anti-authority politics. I will pinpoint four major historical milestones.
First came eighteenth-century deism. Leading figures in the birth of modern democracy, particularly in France, were deists. Deism deified reason, murdered God as Father, and replaced the Father with an impersonal Great Architect. As per deistic logic, the citizen of modern democracy is not a son engendered by a loving Father. He is not a person, but a mere individual, left on his own to organize the world and his destiny, relying on his sole reason and power. Not receiving
his identity, he must construct it on his own.[1] I would argue that the origin of power-without-authority is theological. The rejection of the Father from whom “all fatherhood on heaven and on earth is named” (Eph 3:14), as the loving and transcendent source of order and authority, impacted the modern concept of citizenship, in France more than in America.
Deism quickly led to atheism: the second milestone, this time in the nineteenth century. Nietzsche declared the death of God. He posited the superman as the remedy to the despair brought about by apostasy and the loss of morality that would logically ensue. The idea that salvation comes from power laid the foundation for power grabbing as a goal in itself. If the only Omnipotens from whom all power comes (cf. Rom 13:1) is proclaimed dead, then man must self-empower.
Third, the twentieth-century milestone, springing from the two preceding ones: the cultural death of the human father. As Henri de Lubac brilliantly observed in The Drama of Atheistic Humanism, the death of God leads to the death of man. Following Freud’s re-founding of anthropology on the libido principle, psychoanalysis soon identified the father—along with any form of authority, be it that of truth and reality, the voice of conscience, moral laws, civilization, its institutions and norms—with the repressor of our individual freedom and sexual drives.
The fourth milestone, pushing the “liberation” from the order of the Father towards social militancy, is French atheistic existentialism. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre wanted to make the individual exit from one’s given essence so that he could be liberated from it, could choose “freely” and live for himself (“existence”).[2] To exercise the power of his right to choose, the individual must, according to their logic, engage in negating whatever pre-exists that choice. It was not a matter of passively denying reality, of not doing anything, but of active commitment in this negation. The refusal to commit morally thus contrasts with the demand for commitment in social activism. A fish rots from the head down. The ideas of a few leading intellectuals became culture. Social movements and NGOs pursuing subversive objectives were born against this ideological backdrop in the second half of the twentieth century and started partnering with the UN.
Global governance rules at all levels (down to the grassroots). It establishes a transnational order. It uses regulation, command and control. The question is who rules over whom within global governance.
As the cultural revolution unfolded, it became ever clearer that at its core, its rebellious agenda consisted in negating what is, in particular, universal human nature, and asserting man’s power to reconstruct
himself, ex nihilo, according to his choices. This utopian project is doomed to fail: evil, as we know, is deprived of content and always self-destroys. All it can do is “deconstruct.” The deconstruction process has come to a head in recent decades, reaching the historic moment where man, aping the Creator, uses language to negate our sexual differentiation as man and woman and perform an identity of his choosing: an “identity without an essence,”[3]
as David Halperin, a gay activist, appropriately named it. In his book No Future, Queer Theory and the Death Drive, queer activist Lee Edelman
calls queers to “accede to their status as figures for the force of a negativity” that he links with “irony, jouissance, and, ultimately, the death drive itself.” He called “No Future” the tipping point the revolution has now reached. The writing is on the wall.
Promethean self-empowerment has now arguably superseded pleasure as the primary motivation for the human act. As any revolution, the Freudo-Marxist-Nietzschean rebellion is more about process than about content. Deprived of actual substance, it is what Marx called a “permanent revolution,” never satisfied with its “gains,” powerfully driving a political revolution.
Conceptual nature
The cultural demise of authority had political consequences. Inspired, as of the 1960s, by the post-structuralist French theory cultural movement, the new political perspective has devalued and weakened institutions, dogma, anything formal, juridically binding, considered to be top-down. By contradistinction, it has valued and empowered any informal, parallel, fuzzy, non-governmental, seemingly soft and bottom-up process. Authority being a service to the common good, it has swept away both notions of service and common good. Celebrating the individual’s absolute “freedom to choose,” his “sovereignty” and “autonomy,” it fed the illusion that, as it were, we no longer needed to be governed. The culture demeaning authority provided a breeding ground for the development of new political concepts. Let us pick two examples that have by now won the day: governance and soft power.
In the 1960s international relations scholar James Rosenau coined the governance
concept in reference to a pattern of managing affairs on an international platform. Incidentally, it is interesting that governance was conceived within an international perspective that soon became a global one. According to the renowned scholar, the difference between government and governance is that the former “suggests activities that are backed by formal authority,” while “governance refers to activities backed by shared goals that may or may not derive from legal and formally prescribed responsibilities.”[4] Governance is then “a more encompassing phenomenon than government. It embraces governmental institutions, but it also subsumes informal, non-governmental mechanisms.”[5] In the early 1990s, Rosenau defined global governance as “an order that lacks a centralized authority,”[6] as “systems of rule at all levels of human activity … in which the pursuit of goals through the exercise of control has transnational repercussions.” Deprived of formal authority—and to that extent seemingly “soft,” governance exercises effective power
through formal-informal means. Being “broader” than government, it transcends government. Global governance rules
at all levels (down to the grassroots). It establishes a transnational order. It uses regulation, command and control.[7]
The question is who rules over whom within global governance. As its concrete history demonstrates, the new concept allows for what is non-governmental, soft, informal, “sovereignty free”[8]
to quietly grab power and rule over what is governmental, hard, formal, “sovereignty-bound.”
Concomitantly with the breakout of the global governance revolution at the end of the Cold War, Joseph Nye elaborated a theory about alternative ways of exercising power and coined the soft power concept[9]: a power of “conviction” and “persuasion,” an ability to influence by attraction and cooptation. Nye acclaimed the author of cultural hegemony by consent: “Political leaders and thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci have long understood the power that comes from determining the framework of a debate. If I can get you to want to do what I want, then I do not have to force you to do what you do not want to do.” Surely, the agents of the cultural revolution have mastered the art of making their ideological perspectives appear “self-evident” or common sense for all, to the point of rendering impossible or senseless any alternative view. When closed to universal reason and transcendence, soft power, alias power-without-authority, is dangerously manipulative.
In consonance with its “soft” character, the global governance political revolution’s defining feature is to have been a quiet
revolution. It happened without bloodshed, coups, political repression, institutional upheaval, without infringing upon democratic principles. Institutional façades remained standing. The anti-institution revolution did not set in place new institutions. It was a revolution within. Its non-state agents of change ended up ruling over sovereign UN member states through global governance and soft power.
Mechanisms at the level of global governance
In a historical process I expose in Global Governance, History of a Quiet Revolution Within the United Nations (1945–1996),[10] the UN has—in practice “softly”, not juridically—transformed itself into global governance: a global, tripartite partnership coopting states, non-state actors and the global “people” for the purposes of achieving, “globally-to-locally,”[11] a corpus of interdependent paradigms largely absent from the UN’s foundational documents by “experts,” within a new framework called “sustainable development.” An ECOSOC-accredited non-state global elite not only forged the new paradigms but developed the political mechanisms through which they were intergovernmentally endorsed, implemented “globally-to-locally”[12] by an expanding web of partners, and their implementation has been surveilled. Through soft power mechanisms such as consensus-building, semantic manipulation, cooptation, “dialogue” and linkages[13] they wove the goals of the non-repressive society into the fabric of international cooperation as of the 1960s, and in the 1990s got them to become effective norms of global governance. Through mechanisms such as indicators of progress, they monitored implementation. I shall focus on another category of mechanisms which regards their own hegemonic empowerment.
As Bella Abzug (appropriately nicknamed “Battling Bella”), a hardline feminist and a leading advocate of the shift from institutions to “people” who led the Women’s Caucus at the UN conferences of the 1990s, told me in an interview, the word “partnership is in the documents [of the conferences] because we demanded it.”[14] Gender eco-feminists are the primary authors of the new partnership politics. The “convincing” and manipulative rationale the non-governmental agents of change used for the establishment of the partnership system was threefold. First, they argued the UN’s new socioenvironmental goals were mandatory, and government authorities, at all levels, had an (ethical) obligation to achieve them, as they had “committed” to do so by joining the conferences’ (soft) consensuses. Secondly, their scope would be such that their achievement would overcome governments’ sole capacities. Thirdly therefore, partnerships were needed at all levels, with all sectors of society without exception (business, industry, academia from kindergarten to post-grad, trade unions, media, young people and children, women’s movements, local authorities, indigenous peoples…). UN member states not only tolerated partnerships, but they formally endorsed them as a principle to implement sustainable development as an integrated agenda. National governments thereby became partners of experts and transnational NGOs in global governance.
The construction of the new regime demanded political restructuring. This restructuring took place formally-informally through power-sharing mechanisms and a quiet power redistribution of a historic nature and scope. The post-Cold War UN conferences redefined and redistributed roles in the implementation of a “global agenda” that was, in its subversive components, set by a minority of non-state actors. Governments were to enable change
towards the global platform[15] and global partnerships. To that end, they were to facilitate the empowerment of non-state actors, to which the new politics now granted no longer a mere consultative role as provided for in the UN Charter, but a political function, from policy- and decision-making all the way to surveillance.[16] As Agenda 2030,[17] the current “framework” of international cooperation, makes plain, the multi-stakeholder partnership, deprived as it is of checks and balances, has kept on consolidating itself since the conferences of the 1990s. With incontrovertible success, unaccountable soft power-grabbers—deprived of any legitimate authority—have made sovereign governments, which are the only legitimate holders of authority at the UN, behave as their fellow travelers. Thus, the UN stopped acting as a mediator among sovereign governments in negotiating international cooperation.
Conclusion
The rebellious son wanted to liberate himself from the transcendent and loving authority of the Father and set about to deconstruct what is given and construct a purely immanent and “non-repressive” brave new world. His thirst for power over the centuries led him all the way to the helm of global governance, a global “soft-hard” regime endowed with mechanisms through which he imposes his Promethean agendas on all nations. Now, however, is a Kairos moment. Let us seize the opportunity before us to liberate humanity from the oppressive and cynical Diktats stemming from a long process of cultural subversion and loss of faith in the Father. We have seen where power without authority can lead humanity. As we move forward toward liberation, let us remember that authority without love is equally dangerous and would provoke a backlash. Let us hope America will play its part and reawaken as a people to its leadership responsibility and vocation.
[1] See Marguerite A. Peeters, The Gender Revolution. A Global Agenda. A Tool for Discernment (St. Louis: En Route Books and Media, 2024).
[2] See Marguerite A. Peeters, The Globalization of the Western Cultural Revolution: Key Concepts, Operational Mechanisms (St. Louis: En Route Books and Media, 2023.)
[3] See David Halperin in his book, Saint Foucault, Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford University Press, 1997).
[4]
James N. Rosenau, “Governance, Order and Change in World Politics,” in Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4.
[5]
Ibid.
[6]
Ibid., 7.
[7] Ibid., 8.
[8]
James N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton University Press, 1990), 36.
[9]
See Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Soft Power,” Foreign Policy, no. 80 (Autumn, 1990), 153–71 and Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990).
[10] See Marguerite A. Peeters, Global Governance. History of a Quiet Revolution Within the United Nations (1945–1996) (Valencia: Tirant humanidades, 2024).
[11] To ensure the local implementation of global goals, global-to-local mechanisms allowed transnational pressure groups to wield power at the local level, in ways bypassing the national peoples’ democratic checks, such as Local Agenda 21, or partnerships with NGOs operating locally, as for example United Cities and Local Governments.
[12] The word mechanism
has belonged to the language of UN conferences since the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the environment. It appears 221 times in Rio’s Agenda 21 (1992). Beijing’s Women Conference (1995), for example, recommended the establishment of “mechanisms” to involve NGOs and other non-state, non-governmental groups in “government policy-making, program design, as appropriate, and implementation within the health sector and related sectors at all levels” (Platform for Action, par. 106 s).
[13]
Proactively, they linked their interests to the themes of international cooperation (for example, family planning to human rights, population stabilization to environmental protection).
[14] See Marguerite A. Peeters, Global Governance, 760.
[15] The Habitat II Conference (Istanbul, 1996) expressed the role the new politics assigned governments as follows: “Governments as enabling partners should create and strengthen effective partnerships
with women, youth, the elderly, persons with disabilities, vulnerable and disadvantaged groups, indigenous people and communities, local authorities, the private sector and non-governmental organizations in each country” (Report, par. 213).
[16]
Agenda 21 urged countries to “develop or improve mechanisms to facilitate
the involvement of concerned individuals, groups and organizations in decision-making at all levels” (par. 8.3.c). It provoked society, governments and international bodies all at once into developing “mechanisms to allow NGOs to play their partnership role
responsibly and effectively” (par. 27.5).
[17]
Agenda 21 recommended, for instance, that governments “review formal procedures and mechanisms for the involvement of [NGOs] at all levels, from policy-making and decision-making to implementation” (par. 27.6) and that NGOs be involved “in the conception, establishment and evaluation of official mechanisms and formal procedures designed to review the implementation of Agenda 21 at all levels” (par. 27.8).
