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By Root 1392 0

Democratic success stories suggest that democracy is a slow, developmental process that comes into being not through a single magical moment of founding, but through a long evolution in which the founding is usually only a culminating symbolic moment. Those who would construct some form of global democracy require patience. They also require stubbornness, however, for to preserve, let alone extend, democracy under these rapidly evolving conditions will require acts of bold political imagination and self-conscious political willing that cannot in themselves be expected to emerge from the dialectical interplay of Jihad and McWorld. Patience, political will, and boldness: not an easy combination of traits to cultivate, above all when democracy is under duress.

Traditional Global Institutions in the New World Disorder

THE EASY ANSWER to the hard question of how to order a supranational world has often been: globalize law!—establish new international institutions or fortify traditional ones like the United Nations and the World Court. From the nineteenth-century faith in the Concert of Powers and its balance of power politics, to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the League of Nations (which America never joined) that grew from its following World War I, and on down to the United Nations established after World War II as a manifestation of the cooperation of the Allies in overcoming fascism, the hope has been that sovereign states will somehow overcome their national interests and sectarian policies; that they will cede a degree of their sovereignty to supranational bodies capable of ensuring peace and cooperation among them. Although law speaks the voice of sovereign authority, the quest for world order has placed its faith in a global law whose voice will not be muted by the absence of a global sovereignty. Unhappily, however, while law is power’s solemn voice that legitimizes its brute force, power is law’s indispensable condition without which its legitimacy has no muscle. Consequently, the law has always been the destitute camp follower of the itinerant armies of transnationalism—earlier, the armies of imperialism, communism, international commerce and markets; today, those of telecommunications, ecology, financial and currency markets, and global pop culture. It facilitates rather than constrains the powers it serves. As go the fortunes of nation-states, so go the fortunes of international law.

Ironically, this linkage cripples law when states are strong since they refuse to allow global law to curb their sovereignty. Yet when they are weak, it leaves international law without an enforcer. Law does not lead but stumbles along behind real power in a manner that belies its claims to transnational regulatory competence. Fans point to the law of the seas, human rights conventions, space treaties, and the new thrust toward global environmental regulation (the Montreal or Rio treaties for example); they boast with some reason about the role the European Court of Justice has played in fostering European integration. Yet events in Europe since Maastricht—indeed, since the founding of the League of Nations10—suggest the continuing priority of power over law, whether it is the power of national sovereignty to obstruct and negate international law, or the power of international markets to deflate and circumvent international fishing or environmental regulations.

Where positive international agreements are concluded, they reflect either a rare consensus of interests among signatory nations (as on the Law of the Seas) or the overriding interests of transnational entities like global firms that have persuaded their patron states to support them. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, to take a recent example, actually utilizes its treaty provisions to prevent nations from taking environmental measures that interfere with trade, using “law” as a screen for the advancement of raw economic interests to which the treaty compels sovereign nations to acquiesce. The law is at best utilitarian—handmaiden to the interests of nations