Reforming Multilevel Governance of Transnational Public Goods Through Republican Constitutionalism?—Legal Methodology Problems in International Law

Abstract

Globalization transforms most national into transnational public goods (PGs), which no state can protect unilaterally without international law and multilevel governance institutions.

Democratic, republican and cosmopolitan constitutionalism have proven to be the most effective “legal methods” for protecting transnational “aggregate PGs” like open, rules-based markets and public health (I). They require challenging the “chessboard paradigm” of “disconnected UN/WTO governance” by promoting “republican network governance” empowering citizens to invoke and enforce international “PGs treaties”—like UN, WHO and WTO agreements protecting equal rights, rule of law, public health and mutually beneficial markets across national frontiers—inside domestic legal systems. Even if “global democracy” and “global justice” are likely to remain utopias for a long time, stronger republican and cosmopolitan rights and judicial remedies can empower and motivate citizens—as “republican owners” of PGs (res publica) and “democratic principals” of governments—to challenge and limit “market failures” and “governance failures” through “countervailing rights” (II). “Connecting” interdependent local, national, regional and global governance of “aggregate PGs” through cosmopolitan rights and “multilevel constitutionalism” can strengthen “republican governance” of PGs, whose effectiveness is empirically confirmed by rights-based commercial, trade, investment, intellectual property, labour, environmental, criminal, health and human rights law promoting accountable “bottom-up governance” of PGs beyond national borders (III-IV).

Keywords: constitutionalism, cosmopolitanism, international law, legal methodology, multilevel governance, public goods, WHO, WTO