[David Schneiderman, Constitutionalizing Economic Globalization: Investment Rules and Democracy's Promise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 340pp.]

A.  Introduction

In an era in which democracy seems to have been relegated to a secondary place by processes associated with economic and political globalization, David Schneiderman's Constitutionalizing Economic Globalization: Investment Rules and Democracy's Promise is an unusual book.  Globalization, we have been told, comes accompanied by “a sense of newness, heterogeneity, and fluidity,” but Scheiderman's reminds us that all this emphasis on mobility and constant transformations “draws attention away from a transnational regime concerned with fixity and security.” This fixity not only compromises democracy's tendency towards openness and change, but restricts the state's economic functions and limits its redistributive capacity; in short, it reproduces an ideology according to which democracy is not to be trusted in economic matters. In this context, Schneiderman's proposal to “institutionalize a limited set of constitutional rules that do not impede the possibility of living up to democracy's promise, that of innovation through self-government for the purposes of collective betterment,” appears like a truly democratic call of arms.

In Constitutionalizing Economic Globalization,Schneiderman mounts an attack on “new constitutionalism.” New constitutionalism has been described as “the political/juridical form specific to neoliberal processes of accumulation and to market civilization.” It is a pre-commitment strategy that prevents future governments from taking measures contrary to the political project of neoliberalism by “removing key aspects of economic life from the influence of domestic politics within nation states.” New constitutionalism manifests itself through a web of international treaties that provide stringent legal protection to foreign investment (such as the investment chapter of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the international regime of Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs)). These agreements usually contain a series of legally-enforceable mechanisms that limit the power of government and legislatures to intervene in the market, binding them to a version of economic liberalism and narrowing in important ways their field of political...