The review of magazines. Only in times of peace do international organizations function. Born in 1919 on the rubble of the First World War, the League of Nations (SDN) collapsed twenty years later. The UN, which took over in 1945, has just entered a zone of turbulence with ongoing conflicts (war in Ukraine, between Israel and Hamas, etc.).
Gold, “neither the League nor the UN have abolished, nor even seriously amended, the principle of power to make way for the idea of democracy”notes the political scientist Bertrand Badie, one of the sixteen contributors to the collection of the Institute of Legal and Philosophical Sciences of the Sorbonne (ISJPS), who chose “Democratizing the world space” as their theme. “Democracy has always had an ambiguous, often muddled, status in international relations”adds the specialist.
In addition, new legal reflections are now necessary to analyze the consequences of pandemics, such as that of Covid-19, or of climate change, documented by the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). . So many cross-cutting issues that concern nation states and international institutions. In fact, Marta Torre-Schaub, researcher at the CNRS, reports on the mechanisms of environmental democracy – including recourse to climate justice – and seeks to improve their effectiveness.
Cosmopolitan constitutional law
Lawyers Olivier de Frouville and Dominique Rousseau edited this rich and abundant issue which also deals with the themes of work, with contributions from lawyers Claire La Hovary and Nicole Maggi-Germain, as well as health. Without forgetting the question of migration or that of the fight against corruption on a global scale.
Dominique Rousseau addresses the new question of “connected democracy”, which includes online democracy and the use of social networks. He comes to the conclusion that, “if the adjective “connected” makes sense towards a method of interrelation of forms of democratic life, it also makes sense towards what animates it: hybridization”. For his part, Olivier de Frouville intends to rethink the concept of Constitution on a global scale to define a cosmopolitan constitutional right. While civic space tends to shrink in a certain number of countries, the objective would be to maintain or even strengthen sufficiently powerful transnational networks of citizens.
Finally, it is up to Frédéric Mégret, professor of public international law at McGill University (Montreal, Canada), to answer the question: “Can global governance be democratic? » If democracy seems to be the least bad of political systems, the idea of global democracy still stumbles on the always delicate subject of representativeness.
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