Global Governance, International Political Economy and the Global Legal Order- The Challenge Ahead (original) (raw)

Introduction: International lawmaking in a global world

Research Handbook on the Theory and Practice of International Lawmaking, 2000

International lawmaking in the past 70 years has become increasingly varied and has come to involve different loci of authority, levels of governance and shades of normativity. The perception that our time is very different from the early days of the United Nations era has inspired for example the well-known psychedelic image of [a] brave new world of international law where transactional actors, sources of law, allocation of decision function and modes of regulation have all mutated into fascinating hybrid forms. International Law now comprises a complex blend of customary, positive, declarative and soft law. 1

Global Economic Governance and the Challenge Facing International Law in the 21st Century

The present movement toward globalization has posed a tremendous challenge to traditional international law and, in fact, its various branches including international economic law. The challenge is both horizontal and vertical. The international lawyers, international policy makers and international relations scholars of the 21st century will have to walk initially the tight-rope towards a new domain of international law which is very much needed for global governance in the new era.

Global Governance and Public International Law

Kritische Justiz, 2004

We, citizens of the European Union, Paradise, Americans ironically remark, share an intuition about how the world-the international world-is and how it will be in the future. We think it will be like we are. We are familiar with our national governments, our neighbourly relations, the Commission in Brussels, the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights. Romano Prodi appears to us as a serious leader of an impressive, supermodern bureaucracy. All this is very familiar, domestic, domesticated. And we need not travel far-just cross one border-to arrive in Geneva where we encounter a rather similar-looking environment: office-buildings of glass with acronyms on their roofs: WTO (World Trade Organization), WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), WHO (World Health Organization), UNHCR (High Commissioner for Refugees), High Commissioner for Human Rights, the United Nations European headquarters, Palais des Nations. Thus, when in Geneva or New York, the two great cities of public international law, we Europeans interpret the architecture and the acronyms in light of our experience. National governments govern at home; the Commission governs in Europe, and the UN administers a world society-the »international community« so dear to international lawyers. 1 Perhaps the thickness of government diminishes as we proceed from the domestic to the global. But at each level-national, European, international-common affairs are administered by a law providing order and security to the respective societies. The international, we Europeans think, is fundamentally just another domestic-larger, perhaps more complex, but there is no qualitative difference between it and what we experience at home. 2 What possible reason could there be, we ask, to apply in the international world principles of criminal accountability that differ from those we apply at home? The International Criminal Court is not just another diplomatic manoeuvre but an expression of political logic: if the legitimacy of the domestic realm depends on its being administered by law, why would it not be equally important for the legitimacy of the international that it be so administered? Three European traditions converge here. Six years into the French revolution, in his Zum ewigen Frieden (1795) Immanuel Kant sketched the structure of a cosmopolitan federation, the international world as a society of free states under the rule of law, individuals as the ultimate subjects of a single global order. This followed from his Idea of Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, which had appeared a few years earlier, articulating world federation as a necessary end-point of the development of human societies. Even if there might not be a world government, there will be a »cosmopolitan situa

INTERNATIONAL LEGAL THEORY Law and the Political Economy of the World

The interpenetration of global political and economic life has placed questions of 'political economy' on the scholarly agenda across the social sciences. The author argues that international law could contribute to understanding and transforming centre-periphery patterns of dynamic inequality in global political economic life. The core elements of both economic and political activity-capital, labour, credit, and money, as well as public or private power and right-are legal institutions. Law is the link binding centres and peripheries to one another and structuring their interaction. It is also the vernacular through which power and wealth justify their exercise and shroud their authority. The author proposes rethinking international law as a terrain for political and economic struggle rather than as a normative or technical substitute for political choice, itself indifferent to natural flows of economic activity.

Globalization and Politics, Vol. 1: Global Political and Legal Governance (2014)

2014

Despite the long history of globalizing political relations, world politics can still not be described as a comfortably integrated system. There is, for example, little possibility—even on the far horizon—of the emergence of a single global government. Neither can it be simply said that there is a single co-ordinated system of global governance. Even the United Nations, for all its globalizing reach, does not constitute the overriding locus of global governance. The closest we have come to an integrated system in the political-cultural domain is the global system of nation-states organized around the now-global principle of state sovereignty. However, in narrow political terms, each nation-state continues to treats its own political and legal foundations as self-generated and self-constituting. The faltering political (including legal) co-ordination between the world’s nation-states continues to mean that it is possible to negotiate many different political (and economic) outcomes by moving either between different nation-states or between different levels of jurisdiction—national, regional and global. This is, for example, the modus operandi of globalizing corporations as they optimize their situations by constant legal adjustment and movement of capital. How then is the global governance system best described?

The Stagnation of International Law

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2012

Traditional international law and its instruments are stagnating both in terms of quantity and quality. New, alternative forms of cross-border cooperation, in particular processes of informal international lawmaking, have emerged and gained prominence since the 2000s in response to an increasingly diverse, networked, and knowledge-based society. This transformation impacts on the three axes of actors, processes and outputs in the international legal order. We challenge the assumption that traditional international law is, by definition, legitimate and that this would not be the case for new forms of informal lawmaking: whereas traditional international law is often based on "thin state consent", a "thick stakeholder consensus" underlies many of the new forms of cooperation. It is submitted that the evolution in the international legal order demands an adjustment of models to keep both new forms of cooperation and traditional international law in check. This paper thereto assesses the legitimacy of international legal processes, tackling also the question whether new forms benefit powerful actors and how to keep activity accountable, both domestically and internationally, towards internal and external stakeholders, through ex ante, ongoing and ex post control mechanisms, involving not only managerial or administrative checks and balances but also political and judicial oversight. The paper furthermore examines whether some of the new outputs of international cooperation could already be seen as part of traditional international law and how traditional and new forms are (or could be) interacting before international courts and tribunals. To conclude, a redefinition of the academic discipline of international law to keep both the field and its students sociologically relevant is proposed.

The Global Challenge to Public International Law: Some First Thoughts

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014

Public international law has been 'global' in its application since at least the 1960s, when most Western colonial empires had disappeared. Still, it is far from being left untouched by the fundamental changes which law is undergoing worldwide and which scholars often catch under the term 'globalization'. The gradual decline of the monopoly of States in the field of international relations and the ongoing globalization of the economy and the challenges mankind is facing threaten the autonomy of public international law and even stretch it to its vanishing point. The authors argue that while international lawyers should not react defensively, we should be even more careful not to sacrifice the central position of the State in international law too readily as it is the prime locus of democracy and the rule of law. They also plead for a shift in international legal academia from the traditional focus on the formal role of international law within the system of law and global governance to studying its societal impact and potential in facing global challenges.

International Law in Perplexing Times

_______________________ It is a great honor to have been invited to present the keynote address at this conference. In her remarks, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright provided us with an insightful overview of the role of international law in international relations. Drawing from her rich experiences, she detailed both the potential and the limits of international norms and institutions in a complex and rapidly changing world. I will try to complement Secretary Albright's thoughtful observations by approaching similar themes from the relatively detached perspective of an international law scholar. 1 Our conference title directs us to explore evolving conceptions of international law and governance. I take this as an invitation to engage in the wonderfully creative task of imagining the future of the global legal order. It would be difficult to identify a topic that is more and retains the informal nature of my oral remarks. I am grateful to Professors Michael Van Alsti...

International Law and Global Governance

2021

This book explores the methods through which international law and its associated innovative global governance mechanisms can strengthen, foster and scale up the impacts of treaty regimes and international law on the ability to implement global governance mechanisms. Examining these questions through the lens of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the book looks at environmental, social and economic treaty regimes. It analyses legal methodologies as well as comparative methods of assessing the relationship between the SDGs and treaty regimes and international law. Contradictions exist between international treaty regimes and principles of international law resulting in conflicting implementation of the treaty regimes and of global governance mechanisms. Without determining these areas of contest and highlighting their detrimental impacts, the SDGs and other efforts at global governance cannot maximize their legal and societal benefits. The book concludes by suggesting a path forward for the SDGs and for international treaty regimes that is forged in a solid understanding and application of the advantages of global governance mechanisms, including reflections from the COVID-19 pandemic experience. Addressing the strengths, gaps and weaknesses related to treaty regimes and global governance mechanisms, the book provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of this increasingly important topic. It will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners with an interest in sustainability and law.