Evolution or Revolution? Transitional Justice Culture Across Borders
In recent years, both a theory and a practice of "transitional justice" have taken hold in democratizing contexts worldwide. As an organized and systematic set of beliefs and a way of ordering individual, group and state behavior according to those beliefs and practices, it can be characterized as a “culture,” one which has diffused transnationally via a variety of vectors, such as human rights NGOs, international lawyers, international criminal tribunals, and the media. This culture has been overtly didactic: it offers templates, normative guidance and a veritable database of national experiences to bolster the contention that transition to democracy requires a public accounting of the crimes of the past authoritarian regime. An interesting wrinkle in this story of one-way diffusion is provided by the experiences of countries which have defied or contradicted this master narrative, either by managing their democratic transitions and their consolidations through amnesties and pacts (Chile and Spain), or by reversing processes of transitional justice in response to untenable instability (Argentina). But the wrinkle deepens when we consider that all three of these countries have experienced, at different moments and to varying degrees, a return to transitional justice practices and debates at a later date, often years into consolidation. Was this the result of the increased projection of transnationalized “transitional justice culture,” responsible for a “revolution” in expectations underscored by the Pinochet arrest in 1998 and the Milosevic trials a few years later? Or are there more compelling “evolutionary” domestic-level explanations? This paper explores the competing hypotheses, analyzes the precepts and ideological contradictions of “transitional justice culture,” and contends that a key dyad connecting the revolutionary and evolutionary dynamics at work in the spread of anti-impunity norms across borders is formed by victims’ groups and national courts. Both have been the targeted reception sites for trasnationalized norms, and they have served as potential nodes of transformation for their respective national legal cultures. By suggesting that universalizing revolution is channeled, tempered and ultimately transformed by particularlized evolution, this paper argues for a more nuanced, multi-dimensional approach to transitional justice politics, at once highly globalized and yet not in the least homogeneous.
Welfare Mix, CSr and SoCial CitizenShip
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is an important undertaking by corporations in order to advance social citizenship. In the last decades a growing implication of businesses and NGOs in welfare development has run hand in hand with a noticeable increase of both: (a) the for-profit welfare provision of policies and services to the general public, and (b) those programmes made available by corporations to their employees. All these developments, together with the provision of social policies by governments, have coalesced into a welfare mix of entitlements, interventions and policy instruments with long-term effects for the improvement of citizens’ living conditions. In this paper an analysis of the worlds of welfare capitalism is contrasted with a CSR typology of policy governance within the context of the European Union. Considerations are made on the impacts that both the global order and the new social risks (NSR) have for the promotion of CSR and the advancement of social citizenship. A brief review of the case for the reconciliation of work and family life seeks to illustrate how CSR might induce a greater role for businesses in welfare systems. In the final section, proposals and hypotheses are put forward for future research endeavours.
The Constitutionalization of International Law and the Legitimation Problems of a Constitution for World Society
With the monstrous mass crimes of the twentieth century, states as the subjects of international law forfeited the presumption of innocence that underlies the prohibition on intervention and immunity against criminal prosecution under international law. Since the end of the Second World War, of course, international law has not developed solely in response to wars of aggression and mass crimes; the advances have not been confined to the security and human rights regime of the United Nations. Both inside and outside the United Nations, forms of international governance have developed in the fields of energy, the environment, finance, and trade policy, of labor relations, organized crime, arms trafficking, combating epidemics, etc. Continental alliances between states are also developing in tandem with common markets and currencies. The accelerated incremental growth of international organizations can also be understood as a response to the need for regulation generated by the increasing interdependence of an emerging world society whose functional subsystems cross national borders. With these innovations in international law, there is also a growing need for intercultural communication and interpretation between civilizations shaped by one or more of the major world religions. During the same period, the sovereignty of the subjects of international law was not only formally restricted within the context of the international community – for example, with regard to the elementary right to conduct war and make peace. Nation-states have in fact lost a considerable portion of their controlling and steering abilities in the functional domains in which they were in a position to make more or less independent decisions until the most recent major phase of globalization (during the final quarter of the twentieth century).1 This holds for all of the classical functions of the state, from safeguarding peace and physical security to guaranteeing freedom, the rule of law, and democratic legitimation. Since the demise of embedded capitalism and the associated shift in the relation between politics and the economy in favor of globalized markets, the state has also been affected, perhaps most deeply of all, in its role as an intervention state that is liable for the social security of its citizens. These historical developments must be taken into account when it comes to theorybuilding; hence it is counterproductive to cling to the state-centered tradition of modern political thought. It seems more promising to me to take up Kant’s idea of the cosmopolitan constitution at the requisite level of abstraction with the goal of liberating the notion of a constitutionalization of international law2 from the idea of a world republic that is rejected for good reasons.3 On the other hand, the very historical developments alluded to above call to mind a resulting problem that remains unsolved. For as international institutions form an increasingly dense network and nation-states lose competences, a gap is opening up between the new need for legitimation created by governance beyond the nation-state and the familiar institutions and procedures that have hitherto more or less succeeded in generating democratic