The Political Foundations of Conflicts Law

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the conflicts law approach developed by Christian Joerges, the basic features of a transnational concept of the political are developed. The starting point is the insight that statehood has undergone rapid expansion in both depth and scope in recent history. Thus, the central site for democratic decision-making is not in decline. Statehood has, however, always been a limited form of social ordering which has operated in conjunction with other forms of social ordering located beneath, beside and above the state. The central structural cause behind the expansion in statehood was the implosion of the eurocentric world and the subsequent decolonisation processes that unfolded in the twentieth century. Besides leading to a globalisation of statehood, this transformation also implied a transformation of transnational forms of ordering away from colonial centre/periphery differentiation and towards the kind of functionally delineated regulatory regimes that represent the dominant form of transnational ordering today. Understanding the consequences of this fundamental transformation is the central issue with which contemporary transnational legal and political theory, including the conflicts law approach, is dealing. But whereas central aspects of a new concept of transnational law have already been developed, a concordant concept of transnational politics is still lacking. Such a concept must reflect the functional delineated setup of contemporary transnational processes as well as the specific social functions that transnational processes reproduce.