The Global Order

Due to the spread of democracy and market economy, globalization shaped the world we used to live in. The laws were getting similar, economies - integrated, transnational non-governmental actors - significant. However, recent geopolitical developments and the COVID-19 pandemic led to a paradigm shift. Supply chains are broken, territorial conflicts resurface, democracies refuse to obey the universal standards of rule of law and human rights. The law is either ignored or reinterpreted, sometimes used for political and economic interests. It seems unable to secure values that were the cornerstone of the global order. The case that focuses all of these problems is the subject of borders. Border management is again at the forefront of statehood, both as a mean of control of flows and a tool for securitization of internal politics. It is symbolic, but also deserves attention per se. After all, the border is the place where law meets politics and the international meets the domestic.

Global governance, its law, and institutions, are at the heart of the debates in every crisis the world goes through. Considered as a  possible solution to avoid future armed conflicts, global governance has been - and still is - a subject that has been taken up by jurists, philosophers, and political scientists. Their works,  often future-oriented, constantly refer (almost paradoxically  sometimes) to the Kantian works on cosmopolitanism, to the point of having erected him as the true founding father of the  cosmopolitical doctrine. This positioning of Kant as the father of all cosmopolitical doctrine could be put into perspective and reconsidered by taking into account previous legal and philosophical works (from Greek philosophy to Spanish scholastic). Repositioning Kant's thought within this juridical-philosophical typology is primarily of interest in order to critically re-examine the concept of supra-nationality developed by more recent jurists (starting with Hans Kelsen).

People say foreign policy is a special sort of public policy. This article challenges that claim. It argues that judges should treat foreign policy in the same way they treat other sorts of policy. The article responds to four related lines of argument: that foreign policy is special on account of the constitutional separation of powers - that it demands a special sort of democratic legitimacy - that it is especially complex, secret and prophetic - and that it is simply more important than other aspects of public policy. These might be good reasons to defer to the government in general, but they are not good reasons to grant special deference to foreign policy.

Both justice and governance talks have taken on global significance. Yet their relationship in the global setting remains unclear. To make sense of the idea of global justice, this paper proposes a three-layered framework in conceptualizing the relationship between justice and global governance: the pursuit of justice beyond nation-states, the institutional framing of global governance according to justice, and the idea of justice as suggested in the overall architecture of global governance. While the pursuit of justice is not necessarily linked to global governance on the first layer, the idea of justice goes global on the second and third. The ‘political‘ question looms large on all three layers: at the core of the first layer is whether there exists a political framework within which justice challenges are to be met - justice as challenge to global governance and global governance as challenge to justice are the key political questions on the second and third layer, respectively.

Rule of law is prerequisite for peaceful resolving of conflicts in the world in which still, bellum omnium contra omnes, prevails. In such situation, it is important that powerful countries restrain themselves by the rules they accepted in order to preserve a major interest. Classical example of such self-restraining is the case of Julian Assange, where UK Government respected the rule of inviolability of the premises of Embassy of Ecuador. But, unfortunately, there are also many opposite examples. This paper will analyze the crisis of the principle of rule of law in the contemporary world. Special attention will be given to two cases of violation of the international law: the Russian aggression in Ukraine and Greek unlawful breach of principle pacta sunt servanda by imposing veto on Macedonian accession to NATO in 2008. Despite of use of different kind of force by these countries, in both cases the rules of international law were violated and the principle of rule of law undermined.