Global political and legal governance : a critical overview

Despite the long history of globalizing political relations, world politics can still not be described as a comfortably integrated system. There is, for example, little possibility – even on the far horizon – of the emergence of a single global government. Neither can it be simply said that there is a single co-ordinated system of global governance. Even the United Nations, for all its globalizing reach, does not constitute the overriding locus of global governance. The closest we have come to an integrated system in the political-cultural domain is the global system of nation-states organized around the now-global principle of state sovereignty. However, in narrow political terms, each nation-state continues to treat its own political and legal foundations as self-generated and self-constituting. The faltering political (including legal) co-ordination between the world’s nation-states continues to mean that it is possible to negotiate many different political (and economic) outcomes by moving either between different nation-states or between different levels of jurisdiction – national, regional and global. This is, for example, the modus operandi of globalizing corporations as they optimize their situations by constant legal adjustment and movement of capital.