FK - FS paper Rome 140604

With networks increasingly assuming the tasks and roles of
States, some concern with respect to democratic accountability
of such mechanism seems to be in order.
Interestingly, a similar analysis can sometimes be found on
the (far) left. In “A Theory of Imperial Law: A Study on U.S.
Hegemony and the Latin Resistance” (Global Jurist Frontiers,
Volume 3, Issue 2, 2003), Ugo Mattei writes: “The rethorical
device used in the process of repressing deviance has been a
genuinely legal concept, that of “international human rights.”
Indeed, a doctrine of limited sovereignty in the interest of
international human rights has threatened the traditional
nature of international law as a decentralized system based on
territoriality, and has advocated the need for centralization
in order to make international law more similar to systems of
national law. The International Criminal Court is the most
advanced point of this shift. Ad hoc courts, such as the one
presently used against former Yugoslavian president Slobodan
Milosevic, are the product of an even more open use of
international law as en ex post facto legitimating factor of
war. Today we believe that international law is not natural
but positive law, whose fundamental sources are treaties and
customs. Tomorrow, we might believe that international law is
a worldwide legal system grounded in uniformity and in
commonly shared ideals of law and order. (…) Hence,
sovereignty can be routinely addressed as deviance from a
standard of legality grounded in U.S.-constructed
international human rights.” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
point to the same in “Empire” (Cambridge, 2003): “The
transition we are witnessing today from traditional
international law, which was defined by contracts and
treaties, to the definition and constitution of a new
sovereign, supranational world order (and thus to the imperial
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