The world’s prospects are terrible. A nuclear power has invaded its neighbor Ukraine, while another threatens to destroy Taiwan’s independence as it has Hong Kong’s. Populist nationalism ascends in the West’s leading liberal democracies as well as rising powers in the South. All stymie international cooperation and law. Yet meeting the great threats on the horizon — proliferation of terrible weapons, pandemics, global warming, ever growing inequality, mass migration in the face of failed states and environmental catastrophe, terrorism, the pollution of cyberspace, the death of privacy, and the metastasizing of state surveillance — demands international trust and cooperation. Are we doomed?
What brought us to this perilous state? The knowledge economy doesn’t explain everything, but it does a lot. The explosion in technological breakthroughs that makes us wealthier and more powerful also drives the forces that feed these threats. How can we adapt?
The situation is dire but not hopeless. The unfolding of this century has overturned lot of what many did and believed at the end of the Cold War. But pathways to productive international cooperation exist and can be extended.
This book portrays international law as the canary in the coal mine. It shows how the many projects of the 1990s — the conversion of the GATT into the WTO, the European Communities into the EU, the reinvention of NATO from military alliance to values entrepreneur, the privatization of foreign investment protection, the human rights revolution, open borders for migrants, and the invention of cyberspace — have become targets of populist revolt. It calls for new approaches based not on grand international architecture, but on state-led innovation. Trial and error may not save us, but nothing else will.