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The French seemed happy with gouvernement économique instead of insisting on gouvernance and the Spanish got gobierno económico rather than gobernanza económica. The Germans welded the notion into one word Wirtschaftsregierung, but the German press noted that the British preferred die wirtschaftspolitische Steuerung, which the French press rendered as pilotage économique. It was a riot of what Herman Van Rompuy, the EU’s brand new President, called ‘asymmetric translation’.
The use of governance is not so weird as it would have been a generation ago. Sir John Tusa remembers that when Harold Wilson’s book The Governance of Britain came out in 1976 ‘we all thought he was mad. We didn’t know what he meant. Today every board of every arts organisation spends hours pondering its governance.’ At the time, Private Eye had mocked the book as The Governess of Britain. It was an eminently mockable book, written at top speed and published within seven months of Wilson’s resignation. Purporting to analyse the workings of government, it degenerated into a series of anecdotes.
It was not that Wilson had invented the word. ‘We regard it neither with anger, nor with aversion,’ wrote Newman of the Church of England in 1850. ‘It is but one aspect of the State, or mode of civil governance.’ The word was old then, having been used by Chaucer of the regulation of clocks and by Milton of divine providence. It might mean nothing more than behaviour; Caxton wrote of ‘folissh and outrageous gouernaunce’. But it has also long possessed a strain of meaning equivalent to ‘mastery, control’ — which would not please Mr Brown’s linguistic mandarins.
Since the 1980s, the word has bloomed. The City was expected to make its governance transparent; hospitals were said to have clinical governance and Oxford its own university governance. In 2007, with no sense of irony, the government began to issue a series of documents on constitutional reform called ‘The Governance of Britain’. It was as if Harold Wilson had never lived.
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