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Tuesday, October 19, 2004 |
Tony Judt gives us an excellent review of America's imperial adventure in the New York Review of Books. The article is not just a sensible and well-argued piece of criticism, but also clearly and elegantly written.
In reviewing Anne-Marie Slaughter's New World Order, Mr Judt talks a little about the new world of global governance:
Some trans-state links and networks are based on an explicit treaty or agreement; others[~]such as the US committee on international judicial relations in which American judges collaborate with their colleagues abroad [~]remain informal. But the mere existence of this horizontally networked world[~]some of it truly venerable, like the International Postal Union or the Nordic Council, but with new intergovernmental entities "popping up" every year[~]encourages convergence and cooperation with, and compliance by, the vertically organized states in its embrace. The result is not top-down imposition of rules but an accumulation of common cross-border practices and the domestic incorporation of regulations and procedures first applied or proposed somewhere else. In the longer run Slaughter sees this producing, in her own field for instance, a global legal system "established not by the World Court in The Hague, but by national courts working together around the world."
Mr Judt points out that there is not much room for democracy in such a world. Well, indeed. The Athenian Society is an attempt to create an international democratic institution that is not the self-appointed "voice of the people" provided by groups like Globalize Resistance, but also not just a global opinion poll.
To that end, I'm working on some proposal papers setting out a draft of the workings and financing of the Society. More on these will follow before too long.
11:24:59 PM 
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