The world we are living now is wholly appearing as a scene of fast globalizing with an enormous increasing of its interdependence. By observing the proliferation of recent global threats, it can be concluded that most of global threats were resulted by the advance of that fast globalization. Because as widely realized, beside growing some positive effects such as sparking economic development and providing people with larger opportunities, the advance of globalization is also accounted as a main cause of global threats’ expanding, as like the expanding of environmental degradation, uneven wealth distribution, the use of nuclear weapon, political clashes, the ongoing global crises and so on.
The above globalization’s realities had been enhancing humanity to make more and more huge efforts to comprehensively tackle those global threats. One of the effort is in a form of International Cooperation, which is due to the mentioned proliferation of global threats, had been continuously developed and initiated, in order to reach its most qualified form in tackling those globalization’s negative effects.
As far, it can be generally stated that the achievements of International Cooperation is quite noticeable, with the consideration of variety in form, approach, procedures, legal tradition and the different level of economic and institutional development of agencies world-wide.
Those achievements can be firstly observed from EU’s perspective, where according to Philip Lowe, the Director General of Directorate General for Competition in European Commission, EU has achieved a lot toward its two distinguished main pillars of cooperation, which are case cooperation and policy dialogue.
Philip described that in case cooperation, EU’s achievement sample can be observed in the EU’s bilateral cooperation with partner jurisdictions on cartel cases (including the planning and coordination of dawn-rides, for example the International Cooperation in the vitamins and graphite electrodes cartels), and also in EU’s cooperation on abuse cases. While in policy dialogue, EU’s achievement sample can be observed in the exchange of views on policy initiatives and experiences.
Secondly, we can observe it from multilateral level, where ICN, OECD and UNCTAD have gained importance over few years, especially after unsuccessful attempts at including competition law into the WTO framework.
And the third, we can also observe it from the roles of International Cooperation agencies. Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) for instance, with its existence as one of world’s largest bilateral development agency, JICA had been gaining many achievements, as like strengthening the peace building, restoration and reconstruction through its fast track system in eastern Sudan, Palestine and Mindanao. And also its achievement in helping the world’s developing nations toward its far reaching merger with Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), where in this sector, Indonesia has gained a lot since Indonesia was devoted as the first receiver of Climate Change Japanese ODA Loan that JBIC is providing as part of the “Cool Earth Partnership”.
Nevertheless, despite stating that the current system of International Cooperation has gained its achievements in many aspects, we also find that it still has some drawbacks in demonstrating its roles and objectives. Those drawbacks, however seem difficult to be generalized, could be summed up as bellow:
First: The jurisdictional gap. This gap could be observed from the discrepancy between a globalized world and national—the two separate units of policy-making. In this case, we can see that International Cooperation still stays in its traditional place as an “external affairs” with its limited authority in tackling today’s challenges which are mostly global. Therefore, it is highly required in order the future International Cooperation able to undertake its position as a policy-maker applicable to most of issue areas.
Second: The participation gap. As it is still primarily an intergovernmental process in which other actors participate on the fringes, undermining the effectiveness of traditional efforts to address global policy issues. While on contrast, it is widely realized that for many decades, the emergence of important new global actors had been witnessed, to avoid such participation gap which is extending to marginal and voiceless group.
Third: The incentive gap. With the broader scope of International Cooperation, the implementation or the operational side of international agreements becomes more important. But unfortunately, the operational follow-up to these agreements relies too exclusively on the aid mechanism, ignoring many other practical policy options that could make cooperation a preferred strategy for both developing and industrial countries.
Fourth: Some difficulties resulted by the controversial on some areas. As like the difficulties in coordination of investigations, or the difficulties in dealing with different legal system, priorities and other common hurdles include language problems, lack of transparency, etcetera.
Thus, the above mentioned drawbacks should be carefully learned by the related stakeholders, in order the International Cooperation will gain its most effective system to create a better look of our world, which is secure peace, greater economic well-being, social justice and environment sustainability.
