What do such seemingly distinct spheres of government as political-military planning and banking supervision have in common? In this paper we argue that in fact the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) are having similar effects on the development of both interstate politics and national politics due to the transnational coordination of policies by national experts. The process in both cases is strikingly similar, and had significant consequences for both national accountability and international hierarchies.
These domains of policy are heavily impacted by the processes of transnationalisation, but in ways that highlight the process of harmonisation and provoke questions on the desirability of their outcomes. In essence, the increasing technical complexity of both domains of policy has accelerated a greater decoupling from national lines of hierarchy towards coordination among national experts brought together in networks.
In the case of political-military planning, the extensive global coordination of security networks throughout the past decades has further disconnected the armed forces from national elites. This is specifically the case in post-military Europe, where the political-military experts develop and share their worldviews and instrumental preferences through the NATO institutions and networks rather than within national lines of planning. In the realm of banking comparable developments have led to a functional and/ or epistemic community of banking regulators and international banks. Their role as transnational diffusion network has contributed to the harmonisation of national banking standards in the developed world – and by this contributed to regulatory failure prior to the recent banking crisis.
This paper will be a first attempt to crystalize the relevant factors that affect policy-making under transnational governance arrangements.
