1) Bibliographic data
Cutler, A. Claire (1999) “Locating "Authority" in the Global
Political Economy.” International Studies Quarterly v. 43 no. 1 Mar:59-81.
2) Question(s) addressed by the author and working arguments
i) Emphasize the significance of private corporate power in the constitution
of the global political economy and hegemonic authority relations.
ii) Examine the changing nature of authority in the generation and
enforcement of international commercial norms.
International commercial norms (law merchant) or Private international
trade law, are essential to the historical constitution of the global
political economy, but their role is little understood by student of
international relations. This happens because the law merchant is a crucial
mediator of domestic and global political/legal orders. It establishes
the fundamental rules governing private property and contractual rights
and obligations operative across the full range of international commercial
activity, including international trade, investment, finance, transportation
and insurance. It provides a common language and normative framework,
enabling merchants from diverse legal and political systems to speak
one another and to transact in a relatively stable, predictable and secure
environment. Second, the prevailing ontological, epistemological, and
ideological orientations in the study of international relations and
international law render this foundation invisible and limit our understanding
of the nature of authority in the global political economy.
3)
Conceptual references to transnational – transnationalism
i) Significantly, world hegemony “is expressed in universal norms,
institutions and mechanisms which lay down general rules of behavior
for states and for those forces of civil society that cut across national
boundaries-rules which support the dominant mode of production” (Cox,
1993:62). This is an apt description of international law, in general,
which “rests on values, or at least interests, genuinely shared
by narrow or specialized transnational subcultures or communities.
ii) Global corporate property relations are advanced by a mercatocracy:
a transnational business class that includes private commercial actors
whose work is facilitated by cooperative governments and international
institutions.
iii) The global unification movement is providing a crucial ideological
service. It legitimizes the private, corporate ordering of transnational
productive relations, functioning very much as an integral aspect of
transnational capitalism.
4) Conclusions or Final Remarks
Corporate global power operates ideologically by removing private international
law from the domain of politics and hence, from scrutiny and review.
Unlike public international law, where critical theory is considerably
well developed, private international law is isolated and is rendered
resistant to criticism by an ideology that permits little challenge.
However, it is important to avoid overstating the “totalizing” nature
of this hegemony and underestimating fractures in national and transnational
social unity. The law merchant constitutes the juridical conditions
of modern capitalism, but it is obscured by its invisibility. To render
it visible, the normative foundations of transnational merchant law
must be examined, and processes and agents involved in generating its
norms and linking local and global political economies must be studied.
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