[governance] Letter to Rod Beckstrom

[Jeanette Hofmann]

Milton,

as you well know, re-inventing the wheel means to end up with the 
institutions or processes that were discarded at some point.

I didn't claim that there are governmental achievements in the 
transnational space. Rather, I meant to say that national democratic 
institutions need to be transformed to make them effective outside of 
the nation state.

I agree with you that it is problematic to associate governmental action 
with pursuing the public interest. Yet, I find it even more problematic 
to expect that the invisible hand of the market produces superior 
outcomes from a public interest point of view. The remarkable thing of 
the net neutrality debate was that, suddenly, the state as a regulator 
and norm enforcement agency came back into Internet Governance.

Pragmatists are seeking to combine the best of both worlds. Isn't this 
what the discussion on transnational governance is about? The term 
de-nationalization suggests to me that we can do without governments.

In any case, national resources such as the rule of law and related 
means of norm enforcement will remain necessary -and valuable -, no 
matter how global the regulatory objects are.

jeanette

Milton L Mueller wrote:
>> In the long run, I think, a de-nationalized system of governance
>> would have to re-invent many of the governmental wheels that were
>> thrown overboard at the outset.
> 
> Jeanette: Precisely. These rights and procedures have to be
> reinvented or translated into the transnational sphere. And what's
> wrong with that?
> 
> Thrown overboard? In transnational communicative action there ARE no
> procedural achievements of nation-states - or at least I will hold to
> that thesis until you can provide me with an example of one.
> 
> At any rate let's not forget that some of the most valuable
> procedural and legal checks we are talking about are checks on
> _states_ not just private actors. Political economists have long
> exploded the myth that political institutions are somehow purely
> devoted to public interest and magically transforms the mystical will
> of "the people" into action. States often actuate and reflect
> dominant private interests.
> 
> --MM
> 
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