The Welfare State Globalization And International Law

The book deals with the role of the international level in securing or supplementing national welfare functions. The authors evaluate the role of international labour law, social rights as human rights, the World Trade Organisation, non-governmental organisations and international taxation law, in the effort to maintain and promote welfare rights and the welfare state. The functions of national migration law and of social security law are analysed in case studies.

In recent years, major social forces such as: ageing populations, social trends, migration patterns, and the globalization of economies, have reshaped social welfare policies and practices across the globe. Multinational corporations, NGOs, and other international organizations have begun to influence social policy at a national and local level. Among the many ramifications of these changes is that globalizing influences may hinder the ability of individual nation-states to effect policies that are beneficial to them on a local level. With contributions from thirteen countries worldwide, this collected work represents the first major comparative analysis on the effect of globalization on the international welfare state. The Welfare State in Post-Industrial Society is divided into two major sections: the first draws from a number of leading social welfare researchers from diverse countries who point to the nation-state as case studies; highlighting how it goes about establishing and revising social welfare provisions. The second portion of the volume then moves to a more global perspective in its analysis and questioning of the impact of globalization on citizenship, ageing and marketization. The Welfare State in Post-Industrial Society seeks to encourage debate about the implications of the most pressing social welfare issues in nation-states, and integrate analyses of policy and practice in particular countries struggling to provide social welfare support for their needy populations.

Demonstrating the crucial role that private international law and legality has played and continues to play in shaping globalization, this book argues that the rules, institutions, and actors that make up the practice of private international law have been critical in translating political and economic power into legal regimes that have facilitated the processes of globalization. These processes depend on two fundamental types of socio-political action – the legal structuring of emerging transnational spaces and flows of goods, capital, and finance, and the legal-political reconfiguration of state power and priorities to facilitate the growth of these spaces and their penetration into national political-economic-and social spaces. While a variety of processes were involved in these forms of action, the material practices of private international law played a central role in this project of political economic reconstruction. Offering a theory of private international legality as a practice that intersects with and provides a vehicle for the mobilization of political and economic power, this book examines the construction and enrolment of private law expertise and the structural condition of pluralism in the global political economy to argue that private international law has helped construct a global political economy responsive to the priorities of powerful actors and resistant to the demands and interests of the rest of the world’s populations. It will be of interest to academics and students exploring the relationship between law, international political economy and the nature of state power.

Welfare state models have for decades been the gold standard of welfare state research. Beyond Welfare State Models escapes the straightjacket of conventional welfare state models and challenges the existing literature in two ways. Firstly the contributors argue that the standard typologies have omitted important aspects of welfare state development. Secondly, the work develops and underlines the importance of a more fluid transnational conceptualisation. As this book shows, welfare states are not created in national isolation but are heavily influenced by transnational economic, political and cultural interdependencies. The authors illustrate these important points of criticism with their studies on the transnational history of social policy, religion and the welfare state, Nordic cooperation within the fields of social policy and marriage law, and the transnational contexts of national family policies. This fascinating work contributes to the understanding of the current changes of welfare states by discussing the relationship between globalized capitalism and social political regulations and by arguing that transnational transformations importantly take place within and between nation states.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the global political economy has undergone a profound transformation. Democracy has swept the globe, and both rich and developing nations must compete in an increasingly integrated world economy.How are social welfare policies being affected by this wave of economic globalization? Leading researchers explore the complex question in this new comparative study. Shifting their focus from the more commonly studied, established welfare states of northwestern Europe, the authors of Globalization and the Future of the Welfare State examine policy development in the middle-income countries of southern and eastern Europe, Latin America, Russia, and East Asia. Previous investigations into the effects of globalization on welfare states have generally come to one of two conclusions. The first is that a global economy undermines existing welfare states and obstructs new developments in social policy, as generous provisions place a burden on a nation's resources and its ability to compete in the international marketplace. In contrast, the second builds on the finding that economic openness is positively correlated with greater social spending, which suggests that globalization and welfare states can be mutually reinforcing.Here the authors find that globalization and the success of the welfare state are by no means as incompatible as the first view implies. The developing countries analyzed in Globalization and the Future of the Welfare State demonstrate that although there is great variability across countries and regions, domestic political processes and institutions play key roles in managing the disruptions wrought by globalization.

Poverty, inequality, and dispossession accompany economic globalization. Bringing together three international law scholars, this book addresses how international law and its regimes of trade, investment, finance, as well as human rights, are implicated in the construction of misery, and how international law is producing, reproducing, and embedding injustice and narrowing the alternatives that might really serve humanity. Adopting a pluralist approach, the authors confront the unconscionable dimensions of the global economic order, the false premises upon which they are built, and the role of international law in constituting and sustaining them. Combining insights from radical critiques, political philosophy, history, and critical development studies, the book explores the pathologies at work in international economic law today. International law must abide by the requirements of justice if it is to make a call for compliance with it, but this work claims it drastically fails do so. In a legal order structured around neoliberal ideologies rather than principles of justice, every state can and does grab what it can in the economic sphere on the basis of power and interest, legally so and under colour of law. This book examines how international law on trade and foreign investment and the law and norms on global finance has been shaped to benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of others. It studies how a set of principles, in the form of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), that could have laid the groundwork for a more inclusive international law without even disrupting its market-orientation, were nonetheless undermined. As for international human rights law, it is under the terms of global capitalism that human rights operate. Before we can understand how human rights can create more just societies, we must first expose the ways in which they reflect capitalist society and how they assist in reproducing the underlying terms of immiseration that will continue to create the need for human rights protection. This book challenges conventional justifications of economic globalization and eschews false choices. It is not about whether one is "for" or "against" international trade, foreign investment, or global finance. The issue is to resolve how, if we are to engage in trade, investment, and finance, we do so in a manner that is accountable to persons whose lives are affected by international law. The deployment of human rights for their part must be considered against the ubiquity of neoliberal globalization under law, and not merely as a discrete, benevolent response to it.

This collection of essays explores different dimensions of the relationship between the third world and international law. The topics covered include third world approaches to international law, non-state actors and developing countries, feminism and the third world, foreign investment, resistance and international law, and territorial disputes and native peoples. It is a further contribution to the work done by scholars intent on elaborating what might be termed Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). This initiative seeks to continue and further develop the important work that has been done over many decades, particularly by scholars and jurists from the third world, to construct an international law which is sensitive to the needs of third world peoples. This body of scholarship has attempted to extend and expand the concerns and materials of international law. The essays in this volume are animated by these same motives at a time when unprecedented issues confront third world peoples, particularly since the contemporary international system appears to be disempowering third world peoples, intensifying inequality between the North and the South, and indeed, importantly, within the North and the South. TWAIL scholars attempt to look afresh at the history of colonial international law, engage previous trends in third world scholarship in international law, take cognizance of the dramatic changes which have characterized the body of international law in the last few decades from the perspective of third world peoples, record their resistance to unjust and oppressive international laws, and advance new approaches that address their needs and concerns. These are the broad themes and concerns which animate this collection of essays.