Doing so involves creating not just asset-holding and tax-avoidance structures but a new body of transnational institutions, which are expanding outside of any democratic process of checks and balances.
The array of transnational institutions that govern social, political, and economic processes is bewildering.
The second factor is scope: current arrangements of transnational institutions seem incapable of tackling the most pressing issues of a globalizing world —climate change, spread of infectious diseases, volatile financial markets, enormous poverty rates, unjust supply chains, just to name a few.
As the number of these transnational institutions has increased with globalization, so too has their capacity to exercise authority (Zürn et al. 2012).
From this perspective, economic globalization and the growing power of international and transnational institutions pose a potential threat to democratic ideals of civic equality and self-determination.
Many instances of bad judgment, self-delusion and moral cowardice in postwar politics may be rooted in the inability of national leaders and transnational institutions to cope with the lessons that should have been learned from the Holocaust.
Rawls's rejection of a world government does not negate the legitimacy and desirability of establishing international or transnational institutions to regulate cooperation between peoples and even to discharge certain common inter-societal duties.
The neo-liberal dogma that markets are good and government intervention in the economy bad, which has guided transnational institutions in many of their policies throughout much of the past two decades, will have to be finally shed.
If private or transnational institutions do not uphold the rule of law (as is the case when PMCs or UN peacekeeping missions too rapidly repatriate people accused of violating human rights), then social control and accountability both suffer.
Analyzing how these standards foster legitimacy in transnational institutions may actually help shed light on the fundamental constitutive features of the global political order (Macdonald and Ronzoni 2012, 525) and the limits of global democratization.
