Summary

This chapter explores the centrality of private transnational governance to the crisis of global leadership. It focuses on the role that private transnational lawyers, accountants and expert systems of knowledge play in recasting relationships between leaders and led in the face of global capitalism's deepening crisis. Transnational lawyers and financial experts are analysed as the organic intellectuals and leaders of the nascent global, neoliberal market civilization whose role is to provide the legal expertise and infrastructure for expansive global capitalism. Binding rules facilitate capital expansion by securing investors against existing, new and emergent business risks. Organic intellectuals' success turns upon their ability to legitimate ‘expert’ rule by successfully characterizing this predominantly private system of governance as public in nature and effect and as ‘common sense’. However, the chapter argues that the domain of experts, like that of common sense, is in fact contested, revealing cracks and openings that enable the development of a critical understanding of private transnational governance.

Introduction

This chapter explores the significance of private transnational governance in regulating the global political economy and its centrality to the crisis of global leadership. Transnational governance is a mode of governance that ‘structures, guides and controls human and social activities and interactions beyond, across and within national territories’ and is ‘embedded in and supported by other modes of governance’ (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006: 6). Transnational governance comprises a multiplicity of actors and institutions, including governments, international organizations, transnational business corporations and various private business associations. It is associated generally with the expansion of global capitalism and neoliberal principles that privilege the market as the template of ‘good governance’ and ‘common sense’ (Djelic 2006). The particular focus of this chapter is on private transnational governance and the central leadership role played by private actors in linking local and global political economies together into complex governance arrangements that serve to discipline national economies and societies according to delocalized and private systems of rule. Corporate and professional actors, such as lawyers, arbitrators, accountants, bankers, insurers and underwriters, as well as systems of private transnational law, assert significant leadership in the global political economy.