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Professor Heurtebise explores the implications of China’s legal views on global governance and their contribution towards the growing importance of non-trade concerns in the international legal arena. While engaging in this challenging analysis, by reconstructing historically the steps of legal thoughts, the Author offers, first and foremost, an original contribution to comparative law and comparative legal theory between West and East, that is essential to everyone who is interested in how theoretical ideas have a concrete impact in shaping the international legal regime as we know it. First, Professor Heurtebise seeks to understand problems of global governance through the dichotomy between power and legitimacy, as two inextricably intermixed concepts. In doing so he points out the actual dissociation between them in the contemporary global legal and financial regime – whilst the “power” (and emblematically, economic power) is increasingly attributed to supranational entities and organizations, “legitimacy” is still a notion that belongs to States. How can the newly created global organization be legitimate? Is it sufficient to fill the democratic deficit they undoubtedly suffer of? Or – more importantly - have they to embed and embrace new non-economic values and principles? And if yes, how can this be fruitfully achieved? Th Author looks at the answers through two different dualities: the one between natural law and positive law (in the Western Legal Tradition) on the one hand, and the one between Confucian and Legalist view of the legal phenomenon (in China), on the other. This is, methodologically speaking, the framework provided that helps to clarify this debate. The main arguments, here, are: (1) that the Western dichotomy between natural law and positivism is now resolved by constitutional movements and, specifically, by the concept of rule of law; (2) that China has not gained that synthesis between the two Western concepts. Building on this analysis, Professor Heurtebise offers then a new account of the rule-of-law in the global context, based on the evolution of the concept of human rights, as a notion detached from State-nations. By examining the impact of human rights, he concludes arguing that including non-trade concerns in the WTO decision-making activity only can provide the economic global governance the legitimacy it needs.
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