Transnational Forces and Their Impact on Territorial Sovereignty

Abstract

Altered States: The Globalization of Accountability. By Valerie Sperling. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 389 pp., $29.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 979-0-521-54181-7). This book investigates five kinds of transnational force and the effects they have on “people's lives through how they encourage or discourage more accountable governments” (p. 4). The conception of political accountability is liberal democratic. The method is an investigation of the existing empirically-oriented literature for how it bears on this question. The relevant theoretical literature is generally neglected. Yet in good hands this book would make a fine textbook. The five kinds of transnational force are: global neo-liberal institutions with particular reference to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization and NAFTA; transnational interventions on behalf of democracy as in Cambodia and Bosnia; transnational military forces with a focus on private military contractors and international peacekeepers on United Nations missions; transnational judicial institutions with particular reference to the European Court of Human Rights in its jurisdictional impact on Russia, a member of the Council of Europe which ratified the European Convention of Human Rights in 1998, thus giving it the status of Russian domestic law; and finally, transnational civil society organizations which embrace democratic and social justice causes. I briefly discuss these five topics. In the chapter on economic globalization, interpreted exclusively in terms of “the Washington consensus,” the argument turns on two propositions. The first concerns pressure on the World Bank, WTO and IMF to become more transparent and accountable. Allowing that the World Bank has been more responsive to such pressures than the other institutions, the author concludes that “[d]ecision-making processes at all three… institutions are still relatively closed-door affairs” (p. 80). The second suggests that the neo-liberal agenda of free trade has incited transnational grassroots activism to make free trade agreements more accountable to labor standards, workers’ rights, and trade unions, all of which are dependent on the territorial jurisdictional sovereignty …