In this book, I have tried to make sense of legitimacy at the international level, especially in relation to international law. I have paid a lot of attention to international law, in particular aligned with the demands of legitimacy and justice. But international law is only one aspect of the forces and the ecosystem that shape international order. Therefore, alone it cannot engineer the change that the international system requires today. This change has to be part of a more comprehensive approach. Here is not the place to offer a full account of the areas on which research could concentrate in the future to further encourage justice and legitimacy at the international level. However, it is worthwhile to present a general overview of these areas. In particular, three domains offer a possible road map for facilitating a constructive path forward: globalization, emotions and passions in social life, and the geopolitics of tomorrow.

The changes at play in the contemporary world bring about challenges that are impacting political legitimacy. They make legitimacy at the same time more problematic and more relevant, at both the national and international levels. From this perspective, how these changes and challenges are going to be addressed in the coming years is likely to determine, to a large extent, the evolution of political legitimacy—nationally and internationally. Among the changes and challenges underway, and their associated events and trends, I highlight the following eight: (1) the challenge of integration and disintegration, (2) the economic and financial challenge, (3) the geopolitical challenge, (4) the normative challenge, (5) the technological challenge, (6) the reassessment of globalization challenge, (7) the crisis of democracy challenge, and (8) the governance challenge. I unpack them in turn and, for each of them, allude to their possible meaning and implications for political legitimacy.

This chapter addresses questions concerning history and international law. First, it focuses on what traditionally has been, until relatively recently, the relationship between international law and history, including the history of international law itself. Second, this chapter reflects on the globalization of international law and its ambiguous nature and results, combining empowerment and disempowerment. In particular, it highlights that the ambiguity of the globalization of international law has been on display not only with the connection between modern international law and Western power in the context of colonization but also with decolonization since, to a large extent, after decolonization, this connection has continued in the form of neocolonization. The chapter refers as well to the ambiguity of the globalization of international law in relation to the rise of the individual as an international rights holder in the framework of international human rights. Ultimately, international law has both alienating and emancipatory effects.

The old international tax regime (ITR) was created during the era of the League of Nations in the 1920s based on the consensus to allocate tax jurisdictions to avoid international double taxation. Underlying the consensus is the Benefits Principle that distinguishes between active business income, which is primarily taxed in the source country, and passive business income, which is primarily taxed in the residence country. The old ITR has been embodied in the model tax treaties developed by the OECD and the UN and in the over 3,000 bilateral tax treaties. However, the old ITR suffered from weakness due to the rise of large multinational enterprises and the growth of internationally mobile capital. Thus, a question arises whether the old consensus can still be justified, or a new consensus is needed.

Globalization, technological advances, and the mobility of capital resulted in international tax competition, in which sovereign countries lower their tax rates on income earned by foreigners within their borders to attract both portfolio and direct investment. Tax competition, in turn, threatens to undermine the individual and corporate income taxes, which traditionally have been the main source of revenue for modern welfare states. The response of developed countries has been, first, to shift the tax burden from (mobile) capital to (less mobile) labor, and second, when further increased taxation of labor becomes politically and economically difficult, to cut the social safety net. Thus, globalization and tax competition led to a fiscal crisis for countries that wish to continue to provide social insurance programs to their citizens while aging populations, increased income inequality, job insecurity, and income volatility that result from globalization render such social insurance more necessary. This chapter contends that both economic efficiency and equity among individuals and among nations support limits on tax competition.

The past decade has witnessed the creation of a new international tax regime (ITR). Since the advent of globalization in the 1980s and digitalization in the 1990s, the original ITR ceased to function as intended. The main problems were the increased mobility of capital related to intangibles, a relaxation of capital controls, and increased tax competition. The outcome was a significant fall in tax revenues that threatened the social safety net of the modern welfare state. The financial crisis of 2008 and harsh austerity measures led the public to pay attention to rich individuals and large corporations paying little tax on cross-border income. A new ITR has been created to resolve those problems. In particular, the United States enacted the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which contributed for the OECD to develop a Common Reporting Standard for the automatic exchange of information; the OECD launched the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting project 1.0; and the EU enacted the Anti-Tax Avoidance Directives. These developments still have some limits, resulting in the advent of BEPS 2.0 consisting of two Pillars. The key question is how the new ITR will deal with inter-nation equity.

Important developments are currently affecting the global trading system. We witness increasing calls for protectionism and a surge in populism in some major economies, while other trading nations continue to liberalise trade, driven by the dynamics of global value chains (GVCs). Even committed trading nations have shown an increased willingness to use industrial policies and have elevated the pursuit of geopolitical concerns through trade. On top of this, calls have increased to tackle the climate crisis through trade policy instruments. In short, important shifts induced by politics and economics shape today’s trade policies.

Understanding the causes of intrastate armed conflict and civil wars – whether as individual cases or in a more general sense – is the most compelling but perhaps also the most elusive challenge in the study of such conflicts. In this field, causal relationships are complex and difficult to establish beyond doubt, and discrete direct causes rarely exist. This chapter explores the methodological challenges that arise when seeking to identify direct or indirect causes of civil wars, in particular across multiple cases. It presents key theories of civil war onset in relation to political, economic, social, institutional, ecological, identity, and governance conditions. It gives particular attention to “greed” and “grievance” as key concepts for understanding why intrastate armed conflicts occur, the association between democratization and increased risk of violent conflict, and the concept of “ethnic conflict” as a cause of civil war. The question of whether it is more helpful to focus on enabling factors – the conditions that allow violent uprisings to occur – or motivations for participating in armed conflict to understand the causes of civil war is also discussed. The chapter concludes by considering the implications these debates raise for policies designed to prevent violent conflict and build sustainable peace.

A new economic model begins to emerge. After the turn of the century, the worldview made of free markets, globalization, and liberal democracy met multiple crises. While the political pendulum swings back toward government control, economists and independent agencies should promote balance, mitigating the tendency toward the extremes of public opinions divided into opposite camps. The tendency toward a stronger presence of the government in the economy must be controlled; the perimeter of open and competitive markets should not be restricted to the point at which they lose their creative force. In this book we reflect on these developments through the prism of one of the most ancient and fundamental societal institutions: money. Money is a mirror of society; it reveals the drivers, contradictions, strengths, weaknesses, and failures of society at large. We build on two convictions. The first is the value of history, to tell us what money is, what purpose should it serve, and how best it should be designed and governed. The second is that the fundamental purpose and requirements of money do not change through time or space. What changes are the manifestations of money. Technology is part of this process and should be used to serve money’s purposes better.

The telegraph is often seen as one of the most important technological innovations that helped usher in an age of global financial integration during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For the first time, information and capital no longer moved at electronic speeds, enabling unprecedented growth securities arbitrage across different markets, which brought prices into equilibrium. But this framework typically adopts both a technologically determinist understanding of the telegraph and uses only long-run, macroeconomic approaches to measure the financial effects of the telegraph. This chapter instead focuses on the practicalities of operationalizing the telegraph within the financial system. How was the telegraphic infrastructure that linked financial markets built, implemented, and maintained? By focusing on the telegraph’s infrastructural operation, this chapter argues that the telegraph integrated global financial markets in profoundly unequal ways. Moreover, it was through the seemingly small technicalities of telegraphic infrastructure – like the management of electric current, the maintenance of wires, the adoption of new telegraph apparatuses, and message delivery systems – that states, financial institutions, and firms sought to exert their power over the telegraph. The results of these conflicts over telegraphic infrastructure resulted in an unequal distribution of the telegraph’s financial benefits.

This chapter examines the lengthy history and usage of the terms "translocal," "translocality," and "translocalism," which have been crucial to humanistic and social scientific inquiry about issues of literature, culture, globalization, and territorialization since the 1990s. It recounts the evolution of these terms from seventeenth-century debates about religion through early twentieth-century ideas about politics, psychology, and artistic analysis. It then turns to the present, concentrating on the reemergence of these concepts during the 1990s among social scientists seeking to describe geography and space, human movement, migration, and boundary crossing (in the work of Massey, Appadurai, Clifford, Hannerz, Smith, and others). It describes how these concepts change scholarly studies of mobility, networks, and national and transnational identity (in the work of Kraidy and Murphy, Freitag and Oppen, Brickell and Datta, and Greiner and Sakdapolark), and then it recounts their impacts on literary, historical, and cultural methodologies, especially those involving European empires, poetry and poetics, and colonial and postcolonial literature (including Ramazani, Ballantyne, and Burton). Ultimately, this chapter suggests how literary and historical scholars might connect humanistic accounts of translocalism with social scientific notions of translocality to refocus scholarship on how migration and spatial scale have affected literature and culture.

Have we left postcolonial globalization behind with the demise of the Third World, the emergence of a global network society, and a shift away from debating fair trade predominantly in relation to South-North relations? This concluding chapter reconsiders the history of humanitarianism in the light of the evolution of the fair trade movement’s repertoire and goals. It argues that even though the legacy of colonialism is still with us, the practices and perspectives of fair trade activism have recently shifted to such an extent that we are indeed entering a new phase of the history of globalization.

The introduction posits the relevance of the history of fair trade activism to the history of postcolonial globalization to highlight three striking transformations: decolonization, the rise of consumer society, and the emergence of the internet. It underlines the importance of studying ‘moderate’ movements as part of a social history of globalization. It goes on to relate the history of fair trade to earlier historiography, demonstrating how the history of third-world movements, consumer activism, and humanitarianism can be combined to better understand the history of this movement. It finally introduces the structure of the book, which takes its cue from the materiality, which was crucial to the development of the fair trade movement by centring five products: handicrafts, sugar, paper, coffee, and textiles.

The ‘Cane Sugar Campaign’, launched in 1968, introduced a distinctly political perspective in campaigns for fair trade, exposing the unequal structures of global trade around the disparities in the global sugar trade. The campaign was ignited by the stalling negotiations of the United Nations Conferences on Trade and Development in 1964 and 1968. It thus directly responded to the impact of decolonization in international politics. Through transferring these issues to local activism, it related such international development to the everyday lives of people in Western Europe. The chapter charts the emergence of attempts to address global inequality through interventions in national, European, and international politics. It then shows how European integration in particular prompted activists to set up transnational campaigns, but also severely hampered attempts at campaigning because of the difficulty of transnational communication as well as a lack of experience in addressing transnational institutions.