Books and Articles in the Field of International Dispute Settlement (Autumn 2002) Compiled by Ingrid Kost

Books and Articles in the Field of the Prevention and Peaceful Settlement of International Disputes (Spring 2003).

That the international system has changed dramatically in the years since the end of the Cold War has become a commonplace. But which changes are most profound, and what is their significance for international legal order? The last decade of the twentieth century generated dozens of books and articles hailing a transformed world order and interpreting its political, economic, and social consequences. We have more distance now. The first years of this century have underscored the significance of changes in the structure of international affairs – but they also demonstrate how difficult it is to interpret them with confidence.

In this presentation I shall describe (i) a process of expanding the institutional frameworks of economic and social development that apply on a global scale principles found in the Anglo-American world; (ii) the reinterpretation of these institutional frameworks by ascribing to them a narrow – to a certain extent ideological – meaning which does not reflect the variety of meanings carried by those institutions in the Anglo-American world; and (iii) the undermining of sovereign decision-making by states in order to regulate economies and social systems in a manner that does not pose limitations to the expansion of the institutional framework as described above. This hegemonic programme of ‘globalization’ is at the heart of policies promoted by the United States and such international institutions as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

Among many goals which governments and individuals always pursue, the broadest and most common is security. It is the basic context in which most other values are enjoyed, in the expectation that they will last for a long time. However, the meaning of security has always been ambiguous. At the end of the twentieth century the world held great promise: the Cold War was over and we hoped to see a peaceful, secure future after the century of interstate conflicts, taking full advantage of globalization and minimizing its negative effects. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, new challenges to security are looming over the horizon. We are facing today the emergence of a global society, which crosses national borders and makes the world closer economically and technologically.

The network of international economic, political, and social organizations established at the initiative of the first world constitute a nascent global state whose function is to realize the interests of the powerful states to the disadvantage of third world states and peoples. The evolving global state formation may therefore be described as having a neo-imperial character.

My thesis is that our problem is not a lack of law but a surfeit of law, that the situation of international political culture at the moment is not one in which we need to worry about making the legal culture more dense, rather that we should worry about finding sites and opportunities for increasing the possibility for politics, for contestation of the outcomes and procedures of the existing legal regime. The difficulty is how to do that. How does one build the possibility for politics, progressive or otherwise, in such a technocratic decision-making structure?

It would have been a good deal easier to write the summary of the events, given the extreme complexity, contradictoriness, diversity, and above all the richness of contributions, had I not listened to them.

Books and Articles in the Field of International Dispute Settlement (Summer 2003) Compiled by Ingrid Kost