Global Social Movements and Emergence of Transnational Legal Cultures: Considerations from the Social Systems Theory

• In Event: 078 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 09. Culture and Globalization

Abstract

The paper represents an attempt on the basis of social systems theory (Luhmann, Teubner) to explore the cultural genesis of global law based on the differentiation between the given types of social systems: interactions, organizations, society and social movements. Some of the arguments developed in the paper can be structured as follows:

• The concept of global legal culture enjoys creeping manifestation in the sense that different authors use it explicitly in different contexts.
• The establishing concept of global legal culture is of a reductive nature and narrows down the influence of divergent cultural processes exclusively to political or economic interests thus excluding the very multidimensional power of culture shaping all functional spheres.
• Culture, broadly understood as societal power which can change nature (modern medicine, technology, science, art, military are functional examples) became the main source of modern global law – old visions of metaphysical natural law have been transformed by cultural law on the global level.
• The concept of global legal culture operating as a mere fiction has to be replaced by more realistic notion of transnational legal cultures representing cultural flows beyond the national frontiers.
• Transnational legal cultures reproduce both unity and diversity: unity on global level beyond national differences, but diversity – between functional domains.
• Systems theory gives an exceptional possibility to rethink emergence of global cultural processes through transnational interactions, organizations, functional regimes of society and social movements shaping the world law in all its fragments.

Author

• Lasha Bregvadze