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wealth from the South to the North, so that Northern control could
continue and the possibility of an expanded socioeconomic base
within Southern countries be foreclosed.
Hence has come the argument, introducing this chapter, that the
period 1980 2000 has seen such a weakening of the state infrastruc-
ture in the South that the North is on the point of having to comple-
ment its IGO (WB/IMF/WTO)-led SAPs and its decentralized,
subcontracting-led TNC management strategies, with a new, overtly
military-political role for the North. Hence the aim now in both the
EU and the US is to think of the development of rapid reaction forces
of a policing character and the evolution of doctrines of humanitar-
ian intervention to assuage the acute crises and divisions in numerous
Southern countries. Explicit doctrines of the export of the rule of law
and democracy are on offer, with the threat of economic sanction and
even military intervention albeit within a context in which the eco-
nomic options at a global level have already been set by the TNCs and
IGOs. Democracy, the rule of law, globalization of human rights, etc.
serve to prevent the Southern countries from deriving any legitimacy
from the development of local state structures, which could serve to
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Resistances to the Neoliberal International Economic Order 209
ensure the gradual evolution of local socioeconomic solidarity or
cohesion. This is reflected in the detail of WTO hostility to policies of
subsidization of local agriculture or industry, restrictions on foreign
ownership, and, hugely inconsistently in terms of liberal ideology,
in the maintenance of intellectual property rights. However, the
rhetorical character of this ideology must be underlined. The disap-
proval of economic nationalism in Western-educated opinion is
attributable to the economic imperialism of the pre-1914 years and
to the aggressively protectionist nationalism of the 1930s. In both
cases the culprit was taken to be Germany, which is the home of List-
based theories of economic development through state cultivation of
national industry based on the national market as a preliminary to
participation as an equal in international commerce. It is believed that
such a territorially and probably ethnically-based view of economic
development made inevitable German thinking in terms of the size of
colonial empires, and encouraged Germany, in the 1930s, to set about
constructing an identikit colonial empire in Eastern Europe, which
would enable it to remain autarkic in relation to the global system
dominated by Anglo-American economic power.40 Hence, there is
perhaps an unconscious Western tendency to see any serious, or
apparently serious, opponent to its world economic strategies in
terms of new Hitlers, especially in the Arab world. At the same time
such an historically-based ideology also serves present political inter-
ests of Western countries.
It is well known that many services, such as the media, entertain-
ment, computer software, and the food industry, directly embody cul-
tural values and symbols, or so-called cultural baggage, although
certain goods, such as clothing, cars, toys, etc., do likewise.41 In par-
ticular the media and audiovisual sectors swamp world markets. US
films now account for 70 per cent of the market in Europe, over 90
per cent in the UK and Ireland, and virtually 100 per cent of the
Caribbean market. Supposedly American industrial cinema now
controls 80 per cent of the world s culture. This is in spite of the fact
that, under the Uruguay Round, there was no agreement for liberaliz-
ing the audiovisual sector. Indeed, the free trade argument that a deficit
in one sector will be countered by a surplus in another is a furphy [i.e.
rumor] . . . because the more US culture we are forced to watch on
prime-time television the less of our own we see . . . . American films
and TV programs account for 40 per cent of the world market and
audiovisuals are the second largest US export sector after aircraft, and
yet imports account for barely 2 per cent of the domestic US market.
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210 Philosophy of International Law
It has been argued 42 that language has always been about power first,
culture and learning second. Blue jeans and Hollywood played their
part in this, but it was Cruise missiles and Stealth bombers that
became crucial to the process . . . Eighty per cent of home pages on
the Web are in English compared to 4.5 per cent in German and 3.1
per cent in Japanese. While there are many studies to argue the cul-
tural superficiality of globalized English, on the face of it the political
passivity of most governments of the world towards Anglo-American
hegemony, appears to bear out the success of methodological individu-
alism as a global role model. The positive rhetoric of the neoliberal
international economic order is that it spreads to and implants in the
non-Western world the legal values of democracy, the rule of law, and,
above all, human rights. However, the next section has to endeavor to
unpack the senses in which this legal ideology merely brings to a head
the absence of human value, which the above international regulatory
framework is supposed to serve.
CONCLUSION
The idea of a community giving itself a legal order of human rights
has to suppose a minimum consensus on the meaning of the human
person and I suppose that this does not exist at an international level.
I claim that the language of human rights supposes something evident
and beyond contest, while the global moral consciousness is obvi-
ously contested and will remain so. Human rights research is also
made problematic because the community of legal scholars who
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