A new cross-border field for public and private actors De-nationalized state agendas and privatised norm-making

Abstract

States today confront a new geography of power. This process cannot be simply described as an overall decline in the significance of the state, but as a transformative process: We are seeing repositioning of the state in a broader field of power, which is constituted through the formation of a new private institutional order linked to the global economy. A central effort in this paper is to revover the ways in which the state participates in governing the global economy in a context increasingly dominated by deregulation, privatisation and the growing authority of non-state actors. In many of these new dynamics, the state continues to play an important role, often as the provider of the instutional home for the enactment of the new policy regimes we associate with globalization. It is argued that the mode in which this participation by the state has evolved has been towards stenghtening the power and legitimacy of privatized and de-nationalezed state authorities. The outcome is an emergent new spatio-temporal order, which influences the broader institutional world. A crucial point is the capacity to privatize what was hertofore public and to denationalize what were once national authorities and policy agendas. The particular transformations inside the state and the new emergent privatized institutional order have the capacity to alter conditions for liberal democracy and the organiziational architecture for international law.