The Future of International Law: Global Government. By JOEL P. TRACHTMAN
- Justin Desautels-Stein
- 2015/06/28
- 已被閱讀 295次
- Journal of International Economic Law, Vol. 18 (2), Jun. 2015, pp. 479
Since the last decades of the 20th century, many international relations theorists and international lawyers have united around the utility of the term ‘global governance’.1 As Joel Trachtman explains in his recent book, The Future of International Law, the popularity of global governance as a way of understanding increases in transnational linkages, and the way in which governing the globe happens in the absence of formal legal and political structures, has much to do with the appeal of soft law.2 But in a twist on the conventional take, Trachtman argues that these ‘soft’ aspects of global governance are, for the most part, poor guides for understanding the directions the world will soon be taking.3 The future, it turns out, will see the steady increase in ‘hard’ constraints, international law in the mode of ‘global government’, and not mere governance.4 Trachtman’s predictions, as anyone familiar with what is now his oeuvre on the economic structure of the international legal order,5 suggest that global welfare will ultimately be maximized to the extent that international law gets better at tracking changing social needs, which in this case means that international law will steadily get harder: less conflicted, less fragmented, and generally more like law made in the service of true (domestic) government.6 Through a series of case studies, Trachtman identifies areas in which inefficiencies persist in the gaps between the needs of international society, and the present state of international law.7 Assuming there exists a global preference for eliminating these inefficiencies, inefficiencies that are the result of thinking about international law in the governance register, then the turn towards global government will be, on Trachtman’s account, simply irresistible.8 Trachtman is very careful about the methodological premises serving as the basis for his prognostications. The …
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