Transatlantic economic and legal disintegration? : between Anglo-Saxon neo-liberal nationalism, authoritarian state-capitalism and Europe's ordo-liberal multilevel constitutionalism

Abstract

The post–cold-war optimism of the 1990s led to transatlantic policy initiatives for global ‘democratic leadership’ (e.g. through a liberal world trading system based on WTO law and free trade agreements), the promotion of human rights (e.g. through the UN Human Rights Council, human rights conditionality of free trade agreements), enlargement of NATO to formerly communist countries, humanitarian interventions (e.g. in Serbia) and counterterrorist responses by NATO (e.g. in Afghanistan), the UN millennium and sustainable development agendas, and related investment and environmental agreements (like the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation). The 2008 global financial crisis, the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum and the US Trump administration’s nationalist assault, since 2017, on multilateral UN and WTO institutions revealed increasing ‘transatlantic disagreements’, for instance due to the shift of US political priorities to geopolitical rivalries with China, unilateral US strategic decisions (like termination of TTIP negotiations, withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan) and business-driven ‘regulatory capture’ of the US Congress. This chapter argues that path-dependent value-conflicts among Anglo-Saxon neo-liberalism, authoritarian state-capitalism, Europe’s multilevel constitutionalism and ‘third world conceptions’ of regulation will continue to distort ‘regulatory competition’. The geopolitical rivalries impede transatlantic leadership for protecting the universally agreed sustainable development goals.