Globalization, Neo-Globalization,and Transformations in Law and its Sources

Abstract

Through a critical and historical analysis, this article examines the transition from a unipolar globalization, hegemonized by the United States of America, to a neo-globalization led by major powers. This transition aims
to consolidate the global capitalist system —with certain adjustments— by ensuring an extreme concentration of wealth and control over commercial, productive, and financial activities, monopolized by the owners of transnational corporations. This occurs to the detriment of the sovereignty of dependent states, which barely retain the capacity to regulate even basic activities within their territories. Through a meta-legal study that combines doctrinal analysis, international treaties, and institutional and corporate practices, this article demonstrates that international public and economic
law has been transformed by both formal and informal norms. These norms emerge from a legal pluralism originating in new public and private sources. This authoritarian reconfiguration of law erodes its social role of protection and redistribution, and consolidates an opaque normative order, lacking democratic legitimacy and citizen oversight. Therefore, the article concludes that society and its key actors require a new global legal paradigm to limit the excesses of supranational power, restore the primacy of human rights, and promote a just, inclusive, equitable, and democratic global order.