Consumer Protection, the Nation-State, Law, Globalization, and Democracy

Abstract

Consumers are now participants in a global market, and possibly in a cybermarket. Law can only protect them (or us-we are all consumers) through rules which are essentially national, and which can only be enforced within national frameworks. Most of those rules have been enacted through a democratic political process. If the rules are useless in practice, people may question the usefulness of democracy and nation states. Consumer protection laws enable the correction of market failures and the redress of inequalities of information and power. Recent cases indicate that consumer protection laws, for a number of reasons, will be of little practical use to protect consumers in the global economy and in cyberspace. That raises the question of whether democratic politics can ever be used to bring countervailing force against those who abuse their position in the global market or the cybermarket. If so, what other national laws will be rendered useless: labor laws, environmental laws, other laws that result from an often vigorous political process? What functions remain for democratic politics?