10 Apr International Tribunals as a Growth Industry
This Reuters article nicely highlights how international tribunals have become a growth industry, at least for the Hague (and also for Arusha, Tanzania). The unquestioned capital of all of this is The Hague, which is home to the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the Yugoslavia Criminal Court, and soon, perhaps, the trial of Charles Taylor by the Sierra Leone Special Court. Let’s not forget the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal and the Permanent Court of Arbitration and others I’m forgetting. There are obvious synergies from having everyone in the same city. But there are dangers too of creating a permanent international tribunal bureaucracy of individuals who staff and manage all of these tribunals and who develop into their own chattering class. Or maybe that has already happened.
Interesting.
Legalized gambling, prison construction, private prison contracting, alcohol manufacturing and distribution, weapons manufacturing, advertising…any industrial sector dependent on ‘conspicuous consumption’ associated with what Juliet Schor terms ‘the new consumerism:’ ‘an upsacaling of lifestyle norms; the pervasiveness of conspicuous, status goods and of competition for acquiring them; and the growing disconnect between consumer desires and incomes;’ rapid growth in any of these industries or sectors is cause for concern, but I find myself not even remotely troubled by the emergence of international tribunals, especially insofar as they seem to me necessary and thus welcome developments in the field of international law. For better and worse, the chattering classes are comparatively harmless: it’s the upper class I worry about (and the middle class to the extent it’s hypnotized by upscale emulation).
I think I’ll file this alongside Roger’s anxiety over ‘google juice.’