Apologies for some delay in answering. I have been out of net, and wsn was
occupied by hum.nat. discussion. Maybe it's high time now to turn to
basic questions raised by R.Moore and Ch.Chase-Dunn about the desirable
image of global future which from my viewpoint must be based both on
humanistic values and contemporary political-economic knowledge.
> From: Jozsef Borocz <jborocz@orion.oac.uci.edu>
> To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
> Not to be picky, but, dear Nikolai, how are you going to achieve legality
> without a state to enforce the law? Isn't it meaningless to divorce the
> former from the latter? If you want global rule of law, you have to want a
> world state. Or, do you have an alternative enforcement mechanism in
> mind?
Extremely strange for me, dear Jozsef, to get questions of this type.
For many centuries (at least since The Peace of Westphalia, 1648)
international law exists and influences global development without
any world state but using agreement and ratification by legitime state powers
of nations-participants.
New level of international legal system was achieved by creating UN:
any country entering UN must agree with its Charter - a battery of basic law-
like statements. Keeping in mind all just criticisms of UN and its daughter
organizations (such as FAO, UNESCO, Security Council, commision for global
environment, Interpol, etc) we should not reject,as I hope, significant and
mainly positive influence of UN legal principles and correspondent programs
for after-WWII global processes.
Now we need a new level of innovation and integration of international
legal system (in world trade and economics, in arms trade, in national debts
policy, in international monetary and banking system, in exporting non-
renewable natural raw resources from periphery
to core, in exporting pollutive industry from core to periphery, etc etc)
Each country entering these new legal agrrements must correct its own
national legal system and supply correspondent forces (police, bearucracy)
for realization of new international laws. Old and new profiled international
organizations (such as FAO, Interpol, WTO, etc) can and should accomplish
those functions of new legal system that cannot be supplied by national
forces.
Don't tell me please how many problems are raised here, I know it but I
am sure that the problems of creating World State, the problems of supplying
it with necessary political and financial power (without which it would be
just a fiction!) and the problems of further defence against this new Global
State Monster would be much more complicate.
(The only one I, with my limited imagination, can think of is the
> mafia; that gives me no alternative but to clearly prefer the state in its
> bourgeois democratic form thank you very much.)
I also prefer MULTIPLICITY of bourg.democr.states integrated by
voluntarily accepted GLOBAL LEGAL SYSTEM over all kinds of visible and
invisible mafias that seem to be first in grasping benefits of any World
State Power.
Further comments on the problem
State or Law?
Nikolai
Nikolai S. Rozov
Professor of Philosophy
Moderator of the mailing list PHILOFHI
(PHILosophy OF HIstory and theoretical history)
http://darwin.clas.virginia.edu/~dew7e/anthronet/subscribe
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Dept. of Philosophy
Novosibirsk State University Fax.: (3832) 355237
630090, Novosibirsk E-mail: rozov@cnit.nsu.ru
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RUSSIA