Normative Parameters of Exceptionalism: Community Governance Patterns in the field of Security and its implications for a future global governance as responding to the internal rules of globalisation, existing or to be

Objectives

The primary objectives of this WP are two-fold:

To establish the normative patterns of globalisationand analyse the internal rules of a ‘borderless order’, as evolving and as compared to the particular model of the EC governance, in their interactions.

To draw the implications of the patterns of globalisation in the field of foreign affairs, defence and security, particularly in terms of: a) providing normative criteria for assessing the state of exception and b) redefining the freedoms of the individual in their various meanings.

Description of work

This package builds upon the expertise in ELISE and FORNET - 2 FP5 projects financed by DG Research. In the age of globalisation, several factors point to the regression of the State as the fundamental paradigm of our social/political being but still a type of association with a central role in providing safety and welfare for its citizens. Traditional institutions established at national level do not seem to be in a position to guarantee, on their own, efficient solutions against a series of transnational and widely diffused risks, ranging from health and environment protection to more traditional risks related to physical integrity and safety due to external force, as manifested by terrorism and specifically by the dramatic events of September 11.

Still, there do not exist, at this point, not only any truly supranational structures of government at a global level, but even any instituted patterns of governance comparable to those already existing in the EU order. The existing structures at global level either based on the principle of State sovereignty or expressing an elitist logic in favour of certain States, e.g. the permanent members of the Security Council or the wealthiest countries (G8). In any case, there is a patent absence of a model of governance, as inspired by the Community method, which might provide normative criteria for circumscribing the field of ‘national security’ and ‘public policy’ exceptions as illegitimate incursions on the market freedoms of the EC citizens.

In this context, contrasting views have been put forward in order to describe and explain the changes taking place in a global perspective. The concept of Empire has been revived with the aim to put emphasis on the emergence of a new inclusive order without any external boundaries, extending to all social relations and functioning through a ‘pouvoir de police’. On the other edge of the spectrum, a State centred approach claims that the unilateralist rhetoric and practices of the only superpower point to a new Hegemony, bringing about structural changes to the international system of sovereign States. Yet, one may argue, and it is the working hypothesis of this working package/research, that a ‘borderless normative order’ is already at work, based not on Mega-institutions, such as the State and its administration components or even international organisations, but on internal rules of globalisation in the intertwining of the political and the economic spheres. Adequate conceptual tools will have to be worked out in order to show why and to what extent these internal rules form a normativity not formally induced by the State or any other Mega-institutions, but stemming from a complexity/ variety of actions, conflicts and reactions/ interactions of actors on the market and other social/ political networks, which need to be brought out and more thoroughly examined. More importantly, these internal rules focus on the individual and its scope of action and not on the powers of public authorities;thus, they provide normative criteria for assessing the state of exception from the standpoint of the economic/ market freedoms and eventually of the constitutional/ political liberties of the individual. In this respect, comparison with the model of governance developed within the Community framework seems very promising; the role of the individual as agency in the internal market has led to important developments not entirely by national institutions, in particular to strict limitations on public policy exceptional measures introduced at national level and obstructing with the operation of the unified market.

Thus, the research will have to be based on a thorough conceptual analysis and a comparative perspective in order to explain the underlying principles and the working methods of the global order.

More precisely, the WP will include the following specific tasks

 1) Scrutinize the most representative trends of the existing literature on globalisation in order to bring out possible readings of a ‘global normative order’, e.g. Hardt-Negri, Bauman, Falk, Held, Wallerstein, but also works on governance, in particular Foucault, Deleuze,

2) Specify and analyse the internal rules of globalisation, in particular the principles governing free trade, the management of population flows and the management of risks, whatever their source, e.g. natural disasters, epidemics, environmental degradation due to human error, but also terrorist threats. Focus on the relationships between market building/expanding and security threats on the operation of the global order and its infrastructure (human and institutional),

3) Compare the merging patterns of a global ‘borderless normative order’ with the model of EC governance in the economic field, in particular market integration without a central government based on sovereignty,

4) Analyse security conceptions within the EU (micro-macro-security and different institutional schemes) in their articulation with their global environment and examine the possibility of diffusion of the EU paradigm, in particular with respect to the common management of trade and population flows; case study on the extension of four freedoms of the internal market to the ‘Circle of Friends’; the WTO rules already point to that direction, but the main question arises as to whether there could be a limitation on national exception based on public policy grounds, as it is actually the case within the EU,

5) Draw the implications of the internal rules of globalisation with respect to exceptionalism; study on the normative criteria for assessing the state of exception. The focus, in contrast to WP1, will be on normative criteria of assessment of the state of exception and not on sociological/institutional ones,

6) Examine the role of the individual as agency, in particular its procedural rights in different institutional settings within the global order and the ways the exercise of these rights interacts with the internal rules of globalisation

7) specifically builds upon FORNET expertise to analyse how to organise an overall structure of the EU giving the EU a voice of its own in the context of post-September 11, war in Afghanistan and Iraq and taking into account the process of globalisation.