Globalism Versus Universalism: The Legal Structuration of Global Commerce from Colonial Law to Global Value Chain Law and Beyond

Commerce have had a factual global reach for more than five hundred years. Throughout, its legal-institutional structuration has taken manifold forms. Few regimes have been stable or dominant for more than a few decades and opponent regimes and perspectives have always operated on the margins. Taking a bird’s eye view three organising approaches however appear dominant. One has global norms as its core, i.e. legal-managerial norms which can deployed anywhere in the global space without this implying a claim to supremacy or coherency. The second has universalist norms as its core, i.e. norms based on claims of hierarchy, coherency and ‘complete applicability’. The former is mainly associated with international private law and the latter with international public law and both has a European origin. The third is the manifold countermovement’s, relying on resistance norms, observable throughout global history whenever yet another layer of the global space became penetrated by globally interconnected forms of commerce. Departing from the above threefold distinction the paper zooms in on the (dis-)continuities between colonial law and contemporary forms of global law. The point of departure is the hypothesis that the two forms of law are functionally equivalent but normatively dis-equivalent. This again has substantial consequences for the argumentation strategies of post-colonial counter perspectives. The era of fragmented globalisation we now live in, i.e. a world characterised by global interconnectedness and interdependence but with no centre, is moreover likely to be one characterised by a relative dominance of global norms.