By 1964 the antinuclear movement was waning. Its influence had been, Stuart Hall later claimed, “ENORMOUS … politically it was very, very influential”, but paradoxically, the bomb was “the one thing [it] couldn't do anything about” (Taylor & Pritchard 1980: 109, emphases in original). It had major international impacts, especially by stimulating “CNDs” in other countries, from Ireland to Australia. But its principal effects, which form the main focus of this chapter, were to pave the way for other campaigns and movements, which in turn would lead nuclear disarmers to embrace opposition to wars and nuclear power and other goals. The shifts in radical politics that the movement helped produce, which accelerated rapidly towards the revolutionary year of 1968, would in turn challenge some of its core beliefs, particularly its commitment to nonviolence.

CND and the Wilson government's nuclear policies

Diluted effects of the movement could be seen in the British political mainstream in 1964. CND contributed to the climate that helped a new Labour leader, Harold Wilson, narrowly win that October's election. The party's manifesto criticized Polaris in CND's terms: “It will not be independent and it will not be British and it will not deter”, and many CND members campaigned for it (Parker 2021: 68–9). The Liberal revival, a mild form of middle-class radicalism, largely accounted for Labour's victory – since its share of the national vote barely increased while the Liberals’ rose markedly at the Conservatives’ expense – and as we saw at Orpington, disarmament had played a part in this. Yet defence was not prominent in the election. The Tory leader, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, tried to make it an issue – a poster showed a lolling protestor holding a CND sign, with the strapline: “meanwhile the Conservatives have signed the Test Ban Treaty” – but with little success (Butler & King 1965: 129–30).

In office, Wilson appointed the first minister for disarmament, the Times journalist Alun Gwynne Jones, who as Lord Chalfont appeared twice in Sanity in 1965. Wilson also cut back civil defence in 1966 and 1968. However, from CND's point of view, Labour offered no real change. Wilson advocated alliance control over NATO's nuclear weapons, but CND opposed what would have been a multilateral nuclear force. With its activism in decline, there was little to prevent civil servants and military chiefs from convincing Wilson that cancelling Polaris would be a mistake: he accepted the system, although reducing the number of submarines from five to four.

The danger of nuclear war, which almost disappeared from public consciousness at the end of the twentieth century, has returned in the third decade of the twenty-first. In the 1980s, when the threat came from a new stage in the nuclear arms race, mass movements protested across the Western world. Yet when a threat of actual use arose during a major war in Europe in 2022, public concern was muted. It was as though the protests of earlier decades had been forgotten. This book, which tells the story of the antinuclear campaign in Britain – one of the first places where it developed and was influential – offers a reminder that since nuclear weapons were invented, people have acted to prevent the catastrophe they could cause.

The world first became aware of this danger on 6 and 9 August 1945, when the United States of America destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, instantly killing tens of thousands and irradiating many more. Millions had already died during the Second World War, but most recognized the “atom bomb” as a radically new threat. Alarm grew much further as the Cold War sharpened and both the USA and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) developed thermonuclear hydrogen weapons or “H-bombs” – a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb – as well as intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to deliver them to each other's countries, opening up the prospect of a new age of warfare that could destroy human society.

In Britain, Clement Attlee's Labour government decided secretly in 1947 to develop its own atomic bomb, making it the third nuclear-armed state; the UK and Canada had helped the USA in the wartime Manhattan Project that developed the bomb, but the US McMahon Act of 1946 barred further nuclear collaboration. By the time Britain tested its first bomb in 1952, under the Conservative government of Winston Churchill, antinuclear activism was beginning. In 1958 the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was founded and quickly generated a new type of mass protest movement, famously centred around marches from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire, to London's Trafalgar Square. Its slogan, “Ban the Bomb”, and its new symbol soon spread around the world.

On 17 February 1958, 5,000 people crammed into Central Hall, Westminster, and three overflow halls for the launch of CND; a thousand were turned away. The following day several hundred supporters sat down in Downing Street. From its first public moment, CND became a mass movement rather than the elite pressure group that most of its founders envisaged. That Easter saw the first Aldermaston march from central London to the atomic weapon research establishment – from the following year, the direction would be reversed. Public meetings were held in many cities and towns, so that by the end of the year there were over 200 local groups, as well as women’s, scientists’, artists’, regional and youth sections. In 1959, CND expanded much further and by 1960 there were 459 groups. In August that year, the conference of the opposition Labour Party adopted unilateral nuclear disarmament as its policy. In two and a half tumultuous years, the new movement had brought nuclear weapons to the forefront in Britain, changing the face of its politics and culture, in some ways for ever.

The crisis of the late 1950s

This outbreak of antinuclear politics was, in retrospect, well prepared. The years after the bombing of Japan saw frightening new international tensions in which Britain was heavily involved, from the 1948–9 Berlin Blockade to the 1950–3 Korean War. The possibility of nuclear war became a part of British life, and in this pre-H-bomb phase, the government actively prepared the public for it: annual publicity campaigns brought half a million people into the Civil Defence Corps by 1955 (Grant 2009: 4–5, 2016: 92–4). Although concern about atomic weapons was expressed by the Peace Pledge Union in 1945 and gradually grew in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the focus of pacifist, liberal and left-wing circles was mostly on other repercussions of the Cold War, such as the reintroduction of conscription in 1948, Britain's involvement in Korea and German rearmament in 1954. Quite a few of those who would warn of nuclear dangers in the late 1950s were content to accept them in the 1940s (Sedgwick 1959: 7).

In Britain, the alarm about the NATO decision was sounded by E. P. Thompson (1979), fittingly in the New Statesman and elsewhere, 21 years after J. B. Priestley's essay that launched CND. He expressed the core argument that would be made across Western Europe in the next four years: “why, since there is already terror enough, ten times over, ballistically poised at both end of Power's great divide, do we need this intermediate additive of terror at all? Ah, it is a safeguard to prevent the ultimate horror of a Soviet/US nuclear war! It is to ‘localize’ nuclear war: that is, to keep nuclear war local to us, and to West and East Europe, and away from America” (emphases in original). Attacking the secrecy and lack of democratic accountability, as well as a reported British decision a month earlier to replace Polaris by Trident, Thompson returned to the case for active neutrality that the New Left had advanced 20 years earlier.

He followed this clarion call with private overtures to prominent left-wing Labour MPs Tony Benn and Eric Heffer. However, it was after Ken Coates of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation rang him that the first steps were taken towards a pan-European campaign against the cruise and Pershing missiles. Coates had worked with East European and Soviet dissidents over the previous decade and had been calling for a new European initiative: NATO's decision and Thompson's outcry gave him the target that he had been lacking. With input from Coates, Mary Kaldor and Dan Smith, Thompson then drafted an Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament, which was widely discussed and circulated for signatures in Britain and elsewhere before being publicly launched in London, Oslo, Paris, Berlin and Lisbon on 28 April 1980 (Coates 1987: 11–14; Burke 2004: 39–52).

The Appeal (European Nuclear Disarmament 1980) provided a political framework that would inspire much of the campaigning across the continent throughout the 1980s, and endorsing it was the basis for being involved in the END process. Unlike CND's constitution, which framed the nuclear problem as one that should be solved first by national action, it developed a European approach and addressed the political underpinning of the nuclear arms race, the Cold War.

This has been a short history of a long campaign. Yet after many decades of protest, no end to nuclear weapons is in sight. Most states have signed a treaty against nuclear proliferation and many have signed one to abolish nuclear weapons, but proliferation continues, both horizontally to new states and vertically in the enhanced weaponry of both recognized and unrecognized nuclear powers. In 2023, nine states had over 12,500 nuclear warheads between them, over 11,000 of which belonged to the USA and Russia, and the UK and France remained the only other states to actually deploy the weapons (SIPRI 2023: 248).

Over this time, states have evolved ways of managing war without using nuclear weapons and society has lived with the threat of nuclear annihilation. Although the danger never disappeared – it needs only one sequence of misjudged reactions to cause a global catastrophe – at times even antinuclear activists ceased to believe in it. Bruce Kent, whose campaigning spanned almost the entire period of this book, commented nine years before he died that in the old days, CND used The War Game to arouse fear of nuclear weapons, but “nobody believes there's going to be a nuclear war today, so there's no point in playing the fear card” (Kirby 2013: 22).

It is increasingly difficult to remain so sanguine. The idea of a pervasive “nuclear taboo” does not entirely convince (Freedman 2013), and nearly 40 years after the peace movement helped end the Cold War, NATO and Russia have come closer than ever to a hot war in Europe, while something like a cold war is developing between the USA and China. In 2022–3, Russia engaged in nuclear blackmail, and although NATO limited its military support for Ukraine so as not to provoke Russian nuclear use, it was not only CND that said that the danger was greater than for decades.

Weapons technology and strategic thinking are also changing, with some analysts raising the spectre of a “third nuclear age” (Futter & Zala 2021; Crilley 2023). If the first centred on the prospect of mutually assured destruction by the superpowers and the second saw the West countering the proliferation of WMD to hostile regimes, in the third, it is argued, “strategic non-nuclear weapons” will blur the line between conventional and nuclear war.

In the previous chapters, we analysed the ways in which obstacles for international collective action to meet the challenges of the present day have been overcome – or not – in different policy areas. We have shown that conventional reasoning does not adequately reflect or explain the diverse reality of successes and failures. The question then is what consequences should be drawn from this for the times ahead, in a context significantly different not only from that of the years of triumphant globalization, but also from that of the years ushered by the Trump presidency.

This new world will be characterized by an unprecedented combination of interdependence and fragmentation: interdependence due to the intensity of trade, the multiplication of health risks (of which the Covid crisis has only given a glimpse), the rapid deterioration of the climate due to rising temperatures, and certainly migratory pressures further amplified by future climate crises; and fragmentation as the result of the de-Westernization of a world that was once unified by its colonial legacy but is now openly at odds with it, of the rivalry between China and the United States for world leadership, and of the return, in Europe, of large-scale military confrontation with the war in Ukraine.

We simply have no experience of this combination of forces and events. Globalization was built on the assumption that increased trade would bring people closer together, lessen rivalries and prevent wars. This may have been true in yesterday's world. It is totally false today. As for the perception of a common destiny that the rise of global threats – be they health, climate or technological – should inspire, the truth is that both the pandemic crisis of 2020 and the worsening climate crisis suggest that we should not put too much faith in the rationality of collective behaviour.

A fragmented world

We have in previous chapters already explained our analysis of interdependencies. But we have not set out the reasons why fragmentation is likely to increase in the decades ahead. The first is the heterogeneity of preferences. In the early 2000s, most people in emerging and developing countries believed that the road to prosperity lay in imitating the advanced countries of the West. Expansion of trade and of financial globalization, anchored in a rules-based international order and liberal values was the order of the day and the road to take.

Never before have the stakes been so high. From climate change and global health to AI governance, financial stability, international trade and migration, across a number of old and new policy areas, the magnitude of the challenges faced call for an unprecedented effort and the nature of the problems require coordinated international action. And yet, perhaps never before have global governance rules been so weak, institutions so discredited, geopolitics so fractious, politics so hostile to engaging in collective action that can support global public goods and the basic principles on which economic interdependence has been founded.

This fundamental gap between what is required and the realities at hand is the biggest political challenge we face today.

Broadly speaking, there are three approaches to international collective action issues: those of legal scholars, economists, and international relations experts. Each offers a particular view on the problems it faces and on the nature of the solutions.

For the jurists, it is all about the force of law. As the great legal theorist Hans Kelsen wrote as early as 1934, “All law is, by its very nature, an order of constraint […] If international law is a true law, a law in the same sense as domestic law, it must necessarily include an order of constraint; it must be able to compel the states subject to it to adopt a definite attitude, by establishing the sanction which must be imposed on a state which does not adopt the prescribed attitude”. Kelsen did not hide his contempt for the League of Nations, which failed to establish such an international order, and in retrospect it is hard to disagree.

What Kelsen (1934) is aiming for is nothing less than a global rule of law based on principles that are sufficiently universal to be incontestable (see Stern 1936). The issue, he says, is not moral or political. It is a question of establishing the appropriate means to achieve a goal that is beyond discussion. This problem must be addressed by the technique of international law, which he places at the top of the hierarchy of legal norms.

Reality will never strictly conform to the architecture envisioned by Kelsen. But in its purity, the global rule of law designates an ideal to which many would refer in the 1940s when the question arose à propos the building of the international system of the postwar period. Among others, the International Monetary Fund (negotiated in 1944 at Bretton Woods), the International Trade Organization (negotiated in 1948 but never ratified), the International Criminal Court (established in 1998, but far from universal) bear this mark. The same is true of the European Union, whose law is superior to national law. In this spirit, a lawyer will always begin by examining the texts to determine whether states are subject to real obligations, and whether the institution in charge of a given area has the capacity to sanction breaches of these obligations.

From the World Trade Organization's now paralyzed Appellate Body to the OECD's Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) framework on multinational taxation, not to mention the Paris Agreement and its voluntary national contributions to combat climate change, international governance arrangements are remarkably diverse. Clearly, there is no single template for organizing international collective action, but rather an abundance of models that differ from one another in their principles, legal frameworks and institutional architectures.

Our analysis of this diversity leads to three main conclusions.

The first is that what we used to call the “rules-based multilateral system” covered only part of global interdependence: international trade in goods and interactions through capital flows. These channels, which at the turn of the millennium still accounted for the bulk of interdependence, are now relatively speaking of lesser importance. With data flows, climate and pandemics, or with the return, on a larger scale, of cross-border migration, we now understand that much is happening elsewhere than in the international exchange of goods and of capital. And what's more, global governance is in retreat in both of these latter cases.

The second conclusion is that none of the three approaches – legal, economic and geopolitical – that can be used to account for the successes and failures of international collective action is convincing on its own. Each one sheds an important but partial light, sometimes relevant but never decisive or complete. Success cannot be explained solely, either by the strength of the legal underpinning, or by the alignment of economic incentives, or by the coherence between geopolitical power and the balance of rights and duties.

The third conclusion is that, despite the many obstacles facing international collective action today, certain successes deserve to be highlighted and, above all, analysed. From a largely devastated landscape, islands of collective action are emerging and bearing fruit. This is important but also a motive for hope; it suggests not only that, despite heavy headwinds, success in certain policy areas is still possible, but also that underlying these successes perhaps there are principles, rules, procedures or norms that could be replicated to other areas and thereby advance the collective action agenda.

Google's global presence is ubiquitous; a daily tool used by billions of people across the globe, it dominates internet search engines to the extent that “to google” has become synonymous with the activity of searching the web for information. As in the case of other tech giants, its operation has for some time raised concerns about its market power and anti-competitive behaviour. In June 2023, and following a nearly two-year investigation that focused on how the company operates the sale of online ads, the European Commission took a historic decision to ask Google to divest part of its business – in other words, break up the company.

In formal terms, the European Commission initiated antitrust proceedings against Google and its parent company Alphabet for a suspected breach of EU rules. Its aim was to investigate whether Google has violated EU competition rules by favouring its own online display advertising technology services in the “ad tech” supply chain, to the detriment of competing providers of advertising technology services, advertisers and online publishers. In other words, the practice of Google selling advertising space on websites for website publishers and also taking ads from advertisers. While this initiation of proceedings did not signify a definitive finding of an infringement, it was the first time that the Commission signalled the need for a formal divestment or separation of activities.

It was not the first time, however, that the Commission has taken action against Google. In a series of competition policy decisions stretching over a decade, it had fined the tech giant a total of more than €8 billion, of which €4 billion has been upheld by the European Court of Justice.

This kind of aggressive action has been taken in the broader context of competition authorities worldwide looking into the market dominance of digital companies and a tacit understanding between the US and the EU to get tough on big tech. It must be understood within a particular and peculiar global governance framework whereby national or supranational authorities engage in “behind-the-border” regulation in several policy areas, from competition policy with its extraterritoriality elements, to the regulation of global banks and to the governance of international taxation.

The starting point for this book was the blatant mismatch between the demand for and supply of collective action. A number of unprecedented and urgent policy challenges demand global cooperation like never before: recurrent pandemics, a closing window to contain irreparable damage from climate change, a disintegration of the potential of international trade to underwrite prosperity and lift living standards around the world, and threats to financial stability, to name just a few.

And yet never before has the willingness to collaborate around commonly agreed global commitments and solutions been so weak. What is more, this is not a transient situation. It is the result of structural shifts in the global economy, diverse preferences, a rise in multipolarity and a broad challenge to established international norms around the world, not least because of a rising rivalry between the United States and China. The resulting systemic heterogeneity is here to stay; in this environment, the threat of fragmentation turning to fracture has become very real.

This begs an obvious question: how can such a prospect be avoided? What kind of collective action is still possible in this environment of mistrust and conflict, so that truly global commons such as public health, climate and the digital infrastructure are shielded from deep-rooted disputes and the primacy of geopolitics? What rules and actions can help so that basic international flows of trade, investment and even people continue to feed a global economy that, on average, has become both more prosperous and fairer on the back of increased interdependence?

Our attempt to answer these questions started with a realization: despite the bleak overall picture, across a number of policy areas, there are today governance arrangements that actually deliver. They are not perfect, they do not necessarily conform to type and norms as one would expect, and often they leave much to be desired; but they show that just as failure can be rampant, success can be found in unexpected areas and have surprising characteristics.

We quickly realized that in analysing such areas, our approach needed to be eclectic. Legally established rules and norms by themselves could not explain success and failure, as policy areas with the most established rules also face the largest problems.

On 31 December 2019, an email was sent by the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control to the World Health Organization (WHO). The Taiwanese had learned from online sources that there had been at least seven cases of “atypical pneumonia” in Wuhan, China; they were alerting the WHO to that effect while also requesting further information.

In China, the term “atypical pneumonia” is commonly used to refer to SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), a disease with human-to-human transmission caused by coronavirus. Hence the message suggested the Taiwanese authorities were suspecting an outbreak and were particularly worried in light of the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday and associated travel. They also contacted the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention for more information.

The response from both the WHO and from the relevant Chinese authorities was procedural but ultimately underwhelming. The WHO triggered its incident management mechanism and began assessment of the situation, including through meeting with reluctant Chinese officials in Beijing to gather more information, and through issuing technical guidance to its member states. But by the time the WHO declared from its Geneva HQ the novel coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) on 30 January 2020, a number of countries in the Pacific region had already reported multiple cases and confirmed humanto- human transmission, while undoubtedly the disease had spread far beyond. The rest is history.

This email exchange highlights in a stark and succinct way the quandary of collective action to preserve the global commons in the twenty-first century – in this case averting a health pandemic. A venerable mission-specific global institution entrusted with world health, faced with limits to its remit and its power and – most importantly – encountering national political reticence for acknowledging the gravity of the situation and taking rapid decisions, is no match for a fast-transmitting but predictable (and indeed previously predicted) virus.

There had been no shortage of advance warnings. Since 2000 at least, increasingly frequent outbreaks of infectious diseases, some of which frightened global public opinion, had led the WHO to strengthen its procedures and give itself new legal powers. And yet, when the pandemic broke out, the existing global governance framework failed spectacularly.

Never before has the world been in such need of inventing new forms of collective action, but seldom has this undertaking seemed so arduous. It is this fundamental contradiction that we attempted to tackle when we launched the Transformation of Global Governance project, from which this book has emerged.

The idea was simple: to start from the ground up and to examine, in a series of policy areas, how international collective action had, or had not, adapted to this new context, and above all why, in some areas, it has achieved results while in others, it is facing failure.

For the Transformation of Global Governance project, ten thematic seminars were organized within the framework of the European University Institute, usually in cooperation with other institutions, universities or think tanks (Bocconi, Bruegel, the European Climate Foundation, Hertie, the OECD, the London School of Economics, the Oxford Internet Centre, as well as the Global Governance Programme, the Florence School of Banking and Finance and the Migration Policy Centre of the EUI Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies), before a final conference was held in Florence in October 2022. The results of this research work are presented in detail in the final report New World, New Rules? which brings together the conclusions of the thematic seminars, summary articles and the proceedings of the final conference (freely downloadable as an ebook at https://tgg.eui.eu/).

This research has proved to be rich in insights and it has served as the starting point of this book whose purpose is threefold: to analyse the origins of this contradiction; to assess, area by area, the state of global governance; and to draw lessons and map an agenda for the conduct of international collective action.

We would like to thank those who have made this ambitious project possible, in particular Renaud Dehousse, then president of the European University Institute, and the institutions that supported the Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa Chair (Bank of Italy, Banca Intesa, Generali). We would also like to thank the Robert Schuman Centre and the EUI's School of Transnational Governance. Finally, we are grateful to Adrien Bradley for his dedicated and persistent assistance, and to all the participants in our seminars for their insights, their criticism and the ideas they gave us.