Polycentrism seems the least problematic of these labels. ‘Empire’ has existed in such diverse forms in so many historical contexts that the word does not easily evoke something distinctive about governance in the present-day more global world. The term ‘cosmocracy’ and the related ‘cosmopolitics’ (Archibugi, 2003) could be read to imply: (a) that the larger,
global scale has primacy over other spheres, possibly with a tendency towards world government; and (b) that the inhabitants of this polity have overriding cosmopolitan impulses towards universal human solidarity and global citizenship. Yet neither of these conditions holds today. The notion of ‘new medievalism’ is objectionable since, apart from superficial similarity in the broadest outline of the governance structure, there is very little of the medieval in the twenty-first century. The phrase ‘networked governance’ captures important qualities of the contemporary post-statist mode of regulation, but this name perhaps tends to overplay the significance of the links relative to the nodes, overemphasizing the connections between agencies relative to the agencies themselves. In contrast, polycentrism both captures the multi-sited character of current governance and invites an exploration of the interplay between sites.