Globalization and the Changing Face of International Law II

Why does it matter that FIFA forced the Nigerian government to bow to its threats and how does this indicate a new direction in international law? Nigeria’s capitulation matters because it demonstrates how states which used to be the main actors on the international law arena are being rendered irrelevant by a posse of newer actors and institutions. These newer actors are taking over the previous role of states by the sheer dint of globalization as well as the apparent failure of traditional mechanisms for the regulation of state behavior in international law. The United Nations is today almost out of focus, paralyzed by the manipulative use of the veto by the permanent members of its Security Council. The same paralysis afflicts the activities of the International Criminal Court except cases involving Africans indicted by the system. The international criminal justice system is being undermined by the world’s most powerful nations. Nor could any binding agreement be reached on the framework for international climate change governance. The UN system tried in Kyoto, in Copenhagen and most recently in Durban to put together a binding instrument with no breakthrough achieved. Yet there are challenges that these failed processes should be confronting – war crimes, gross human rights abuses, confronting the dangers of climate change. They require solutions that can only wait with disastrous consequences. And as international law is suffering paralysis on the most crucial issues facing the world community, solutions are being sought in the private sphere which unlike the public institutions that are trapped in a legitimacy bubble, offers more functional and practical alternatives. While some of the mechanisms are hybrid, incorporating private/public elements like the World Trade Organization and World Bank, others like the international Financial Action Task Force (FATF) are intergovernmental/voluntary and at first brush private but do impact the public sphere in very significant ways. FIFA on its part is purely a non-governmental institution registered as a public charity. It is different from the WTO, World Bank and FATF that has states as members. FIFA’s membership is drawn from national football associations which like FIFA itself ought to be non-governmental. But in reality they (especially those in Africa) are not. African football associations take government funds to run their activities. Yet they are difficult to control by those same governments. And while prevailing orthodoxy holds that sports (football included) do not mix with politics, the reality is different. Sports and politics can no longer be effectively separated. Otherwise why would some Western European governments threaten to use the occasion of the EURO 2012 in Poland and Ukraine to protest the treatment of Ukrainian opposition politician, Yulia Tymoshenko? Popular sport is therefore now a powerful globalizing force as well as potent international governance tool. How sport is deployed, in addition to its relationship to other international governance mechanisms, demonstrates that at present governance is supplanting law at the international level. It also shows that rather than international law, it might be more correct to speak in terms of global governance as the new direction for international relationships. This suggests a rethinking of scholarship in the entire field.