Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [129]
Law has, in any case, moved beyond the Hobbesian imagination, primarily because international relations are no longer primarily a matter of relations among nations. International law journals today are at pains to emphasize how nations and their boundaries are being rendered permeable by ecological, commercial, and technological forces that, even as they call out for international regulation, necessarily defy it. Maurice F. Strong, for example, writes: “What is needed is recognition of the reality that in many fields, especially environmental issues, it is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states.”11 As issues move beyond the competence of nation-states, there are no effective regulatory bodies to replace them. Oscar Schachter complains that environmental law has remained entirely “soft—composed of principles and standards of conduct not clearly accepted as obligatory and uncertain in application.”12 Geoffrey Palmer is more despairing still: “We lack the institutional and legal mechanisms to deal effectively with transboundary and biospheric environmental degradation…. As matters stand, we lack many of the necessary rules and the means for devising them, we lack institutions capable of ensuring that the rules we have are effective.”13 The appeal to traditional international institutions is an appeal on behalf of the weak to the goodwill of the powerless.
What is true of environmental issues, where transnationalism and subnationalism threaten anarchy, is even more true in other domains. New telecommunications technologies cross borders at will without being technically susceptible to transnational regulation of any kind—even were there effective international regulators on the scene. The virtual networks such technologies create in stocks, bonds, and currencies are likewise beyond the rational control of any entity, national or international. If totalitarian command states like the Soviet Union and Albania were unable to control pirated videos, ubiquitous computer networks, multiplying photocopy and fax machines, and satellite television transmissions (all of which helped bring them down), are weakly motivated market-subordinated states like Britain or Canada likely to do so? And should we expect the still more anemic entities that pass as international organizations and are often little more than special interest trade and market promoters to fill the gaping breech pusillanimous sovereign states have left behind?14
The conundrum on which the very idea of a transnational or international institution is founded is that the truly global institution depends on the cooperation of sovereign states whose sovereignty necessarily circumscribes its every move; yet its capacity to act internationally is radically undermined by the passing of the very national sovereignties that constrain it, because it has no alternative source of political legitimacy or executive enforcement. International institutions are consequently impotent as autonomous entities because of national sovereignty but are also impotent in the absence of national sovereignty; for without the agency, the goodwill, and, most critically, the capacity for armed intervention of the hegemons on which they depend, they cannot operate at all. International organizations can neither live with nor live without their obstreperous sovereign members, as the contrapuntal paralysis of the United Nations and NATO in Bosnia demonstrates.
In his compelling book urging an end to laissez-faire ideology in global economics, Robert Kuttner