Last week I had the pleasure of attending Chatham House’s annual one-day autumn conference, and spent a truly fascinating day listening to a very wide range of speakers. I attended the first of these now-annual events about five years ago and it was impressive to see how it has developed over that time. Although the first conference in 2002 was good and interesting, this year they put on a truly impressive range of very high-calibre speakers. This was reflected too in the quality of the audience, with a strong presence of well-known journalists and former diplomats and politicians, as well as academics and others - I found myself sitting all day, for instance, between a professor of international relations and the Swedish Ambassador. It was only a shame that as usual I found myself very much indeed on the younger end of the age spectrum!

Obviously through the day there were a very wide range of issues covered, and I may come back again to comment on some of them, but if there was one theme running through the day which interested me most of all, it was the number of speakers, from different perspectives, who commented on the whole notion of the development of a rules-based approach to global governance.

For me this was an interesting echo of the point made by Nick Clegg in his speech two days before, that “The challenge before us then is to construct a system of global governance capable of controlling global power.”

One common point about how this should be approached came across loud and clear from all those who spoke on it at Chatham House (and also from Nick): that if the UK wishes to seek to achieve this or any other global goal then it is much best advised to try to do so through the European Union, which as a bloc is a seriously weighty player on the global stage. Unsurprisingly I completely agree with this: although clearly not identical, both the views and the interests of the countries of the EU are to a very large extent shared amongst all 27 countries, and this is to me very clearly the best way of giving British views maximum clout on the international stage.

But beyond this there was much less consensus about what we might actually do differently to help to try to achieve “a rules-based system of global governance”.

One speaker who did float a number of interesting ideas was Robert Cooper (who has a very long and complicated job title but is basically top bod in charge of developing the EU’s foreign and security policy, as well as the author of the influential The Breaking of Nations).

He floated the idea of the G8 changing into a reformed permanent G10, constituted as he put it “like the Premier league” so that it always composed the top ten nations by GNP or some other relevant numerical measure (and numbering ten so that not too many of the current G8 would obviously immediately not qualify for it). And he said that the hegemonic economic power of the USA is still so great that if the occupant of the White House could ever be persuaded to insist they would not attend unless it were so reconstituted, it could in practice be achieved relatively easily.

And like others he thought there was likely to be a growing role for regional groupings - led by the EU, but joined hopefully by an emerging African Union, and an ASEAN “finally getting its act together in the face of the threat from China” and perhaps even too a South American grouping - though he qualified this last rather by saying of it the not totally inspiring line “so many failed attempts in the past but you never know”.

And he went on further to make the case for international institutions which cross the current boundaries between sectors: it does not seem to be the best way of organising things, he said, to construct international co-operation often around sectoral groupings, so for example security co-operation through NATO, development assistance co-ordinated by international development departments, and foreign policy through diplomats, and so on. It would make more sense to bring these together and also ensure that such structures are under proper political control, not just professional sectoral dominance. These could look more broadly and more effectively at appropriate strategies for dealing with particular issues, which could help avoid, for example, seeking to use a military solution where a non-military one where it might be more appropriate - and he mentioned particularly that what the world really needs to create security is more (a) helicopter and (b) policemen trained in post-conflict situations, and a system which allowed us to get them, even at the cost of say the odd frigate or two, would be more use.

At least I am pretty sure this was the case he was making. His exposition of it was suddenly rather rudely interrupted when he good-naturedly in passing checked with the chairman that the session was being held under the Chatham House rule, only to discover rather to his visible shock that it was in fact on the record! In the end he didn’t, as threatened, simply stop saying anything at that point, but it did rather interrupt his flow!

However this call to bring international organisations together across sectoral boundaries, with a strong system of regional co-operation, and a “premier league” of the global top table, seemed to me very interesting - and potentially pointing the way to some kind of broader global structures, under political control.

And Cooper perhaps even seemed to foresee some kind of role for a democratic link in this system (as opposed to a purely intergovernmental structure), by talking of the need to recognise institutionally the link between, say, local environmental impacts and decision-making at a global level. And this seemed even clearer from his closing remarks that in future we need to talk not only of “liberal democracy” but of “liberal international democracy”.

From my point of view in the longer term if we are going to talk of making a rules-based system of governance, which actually engages citizens, work at a global level then it does have to have some kind of citizen engagement.

A second speaker on the day discussed many of the same issues, but seemed to go less far. Edward Mortimer, who had been Kofi Annan’s Director of Communications at the UN, certainly seemed to agree on the need for the global community, if it wants to tackle global challenges, first to develop “the capacity to frame global strategies” (including crucially systems “which can gain wide support”), then secondly to construct an institutional framework for implementing it, and thirdly actual instruments for doing so. But he was explicitly disparaging of any notion of “world government”, and more generally emphasised the need not so much to look to creating new institutions but to work through existing ones, and to seek to use “rules-based systems”, including actually using and enforcing the rules and laws that are already there.

This seems less ambitious than some of what Cooper was talking about, but it’s clear that there is some very interesting thinking going on about how exactly you do try and create a system of global structures which can control power, both held by states and by other organisations, at a global level.

The clear constraint, of course, is the reluctance of national governments to cede any of the control they currently exercise - which they and particularly their electorates like to think of as unfettered by any international agreements (however simplistic and just plain wrong this often is). And the more powerful the nation, the more reluctant it is.

But even if for this and other reasons the answers aren’t at the moment very clear, then these seem to me to be crucial questions, in our globalised, environmentally degraded, unsafe and increasingly well-armed world, to be asking.