Fragmented States and International Rules of Law
| Date | 01 June 1997 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399700600205 |
| Published date | 01 June 1997 |
| Author | Sol Picciotto |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
FRAGMENTED
STATES
AND
INTERNATIONAL
RULES
OF
LAW
SOL
PICCIOTTO
Lancaster
University,
UK
N
1995,
THE
UK’s
Economic
and
Social
Research
Council
(ESRC)
identified
and
publicized
three
main
’thematic
priorities’:
globalization;
regulation
and
governance;
and
social
integration
and
exclusion.
Both
the
selection
of
these
topics
and
the
way
in
which
they
have
been
expressed
are
very
revealing
of
much
current
public
discussion.
The
issues
themselves
are
far
from
new,
indeed
I
myself
have
been
concerned
with
all
three
during
most
of
my
academic
life.
However,
in
current
discussions
they
appear
under
new
and
modish
guises:
now
we
have
the
concept
of
globalization,
replacing
inter-
nationalization ;
governance,
instead
of
government
or
the
state;
and
social
integration
and
exclusion,
instead
of
class,
race
and
gender.
The
newer
terms
are,
I
think,
rather
more
fuzzy
and
elusive
about
the
nature
of the
social
pro-
cesses
to
which
they
refer.
The
inflection
results,
I
think,
partly
from
changes
in
the
character
of
those
processes
but,
more
significantly,
from
new
ways
of
perceiving
and
shaping
those
processes.
Not
surprisingly,
there
is
consider-
able
debate
and
contestation
about
all
three.
°
GLOBALIZATION
AND
STATE
FRAGMENTATION
Many
are
ambivalent
about
the
current
fashionable
discussions
of
global-
ization.
Has
there
really
been
such
a
transformation
of
international
SOCIAL
&
LEGAL
STUDIES
ISSN
0964 6639
Copyright
©
1997
SAGE
Publications,
London,
Thousand
Oaks,
CA
and
New
Delhi,
Vol.
6
(2), 259-279
259
260
interactions,
resulting
in
a
global
homogenization
of
social
and
cultural
life,
as
the
term
suggests?
Why
has
the
concept
become
so
popular
in
both
aca-
demic
and
everyday
discussions?
In
some
cases,
it
seems
to
result
from
an
abrupt
awareness
that
common
assumptions
about
our
social
world
are
no
longer
valid,
without
too
much
inquiry
about
how
far
they
ever
were:
a
real-
ization
that
we
don’t
just
live
in
and
can’t
just
study a
society,
a
single
legal
system,
or
a
national
state,
and
that
the
world
contains
a
multiplicity
of
diverse
and
interacting
societies,
states
and
legalities.
But
if
this
is
the
case,
why
the
term
globalization,
which
misleadingly
suggests
an
increasing
global
homogeneity,
rather
than
awareness
of
diversity
or
interconnectedness,
as
I
think
internationalization
does?
In
another
perspective,
globalization
debates
seem
to
result
from
post-
Cold
War
concerns,
to
envisage
and
construct
a
New
World
Order,
which
might
be
more
cohesive
and
coordinated
than
was
previously
possible.
Yet
if
globalization
is
about
projects
to
improve
or
rationalize
world
government,
actual
proposals
along
these
lines
do
not
seem
to
have
much
popular
reson-
ance.
I
think
that
this
was
shown,
for
instance,
by
the
resounding
silence
which
met
the
Report
on
Global
Governance,
produced
recently
by
a
group
of
eminent
statespeople,
which
put
forward
proposals
for
far-reaching
reforms
of
the
United
Nations
system
and
international
organization
gener-
ally
(Commission
on
Global
Governance,
1995).
Equally,
we
have
only
to
consider
the
wide-ranging
opposition
which
seems
to
have
grown,
at
least
since
the
signing
at
Maastricht
of the
Treaty
on
European
Union,
against
any
idea
that
we
might
need
a
European
super
state
to
govern
the
Single
Euro-
pean
Market.
Rather,
what
seems
to
have
gone
global
is
The
Market,
or
at
least
ideolo-
gies
of
free
trade
and
open
markets.
Yet
even
here
things
are
not
quite
as
they
seem.
Globalization
is
generally
said
to
involve
an
increasing
volume
or
velocity
of
international
flows,
in
economic
terms
of
trade,
investment
and
finance,
in
cultural
terms
of
artefacts,
signs
and
symbols.
Certainly,
globaliz-
ation
could
be
said
to
have
’given
a
cosmopolitan
character
to
production
and
consumption
in
every
country’,
so
that
’in
place
of
the
old
local
and
national
seclusion
and
self-sufficiency,
we
have
intercourse
in
every
direction,
uni-
versal
inter-dependence
of
nations’.
Yet
those
are
quotations
from
the
description
of
the
creation
of
the
world
market
given
almost
150
years
ago
in
1848
by
Karl
Marx
and
Friedrich
Engels
in
The
Manifesto
of the
Communist
Party.
While
the
nature
of
the
world
economy
has
greatly
changed
since
then,
it
is
not
obvious
that
there
has
been
any
substantial
increase
in
the
degree
of
what
they
already
at
that
time
described
as
’the
universal
inter-dependence
of
nations’.
Attempts
to
quantify
the
growth
of
international
transactions
over
the
past
century
or
more,
at
least
when
calculated
in
proportion
to
local
or
national
transactions,
do
not
generally
show
a
significant
relative
increases.
1
What
seems
to
be
more
important
is
the
increased
potential
for
such
flows,
resulting
from
the
reduction
or
elimination
of
national
and
local
barriers
to
all
kinds
of
trade
and
investment.
The
gradual
reduction
of
tariff
barriers
and
elimination
of
exchange
controls
during
the
1960s
and
1970s
widened
during
To continue reading
Request your trial