Going Dark: The Business of Drafting A Treaty About Human Rights in Business

 

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I am always delighted to read about the operationalization of the processes through which a small but dedicated group of insiders have sought to manage global opinion--and the text of a draft international instrument--to suit their (ideological) tastes and political-normative objectives (respecting the role of markets, the instrumentalization of the state apparatus, the taming of individual autonomy, and the (re) imposition of a hierarchically constituted set of social relations in which the appearance of personal autonomy is cabined by the realities of a managerial accountability regime). All this, of course, is in adi of a cause with respect to which few can object (I certainly cannot). Yet one sometimes wonders whether there is an equally desired objective which can only be realized under cover the the normative one-- the preservation of a privileged space for a self-constituted vanguard of social forces to guide the rest of us toward some sort of idealized state they envision they might bring into the world).

One might be excused for having these thoughts swirl through one's head (unless of course one is in that vanguard in which case suppression of this kind of thinking is a first order priority), as one considers the next steps in the so-called process drawing the rest of us toward the culmination of a years long project to foist onto the world a very specific vision of the regulation of the human rights effects of economic activity that carries with it  (undiscussed) a set of radical transformations of the basic principles of the global order buried beneath the arcana of an overwrought international regulatory apparatus. 

More specifically, one might refer to the recent publication by the IGWG Chair of guidelines for the intersessional work, aimed at stage managing the regional consultations to be held by the "Friends of the Chair." The object of this stage management appears to be to cut out civil society organizations frm the process (they HAVE) served their purpose and they should have the good manners to know when, their utility spent, it is time to  take on the role of quiet and submissive bit players in a drame that, ramped up, requires the majesty of the political state and its international institutional instrumentalities. 

One must congratulate this dedicated group--these are quite important and necessary building of the props that will lend an air of legitimacy and inclusiveness to a process that virtually form the first has been tightly controlled by an inner circle of ideologues united in their opposition to certain core elements of the UN Guiding Principles (as they might be brought to interpret them) and dedicated to the resurrection of some sort of version of the now long abandoned Norms and the heady sensibilities (re-imagined to suit the times) of that moment in the 1960s-1970s when everyone wanted to play at revolution.  That, at this point, perfumes the air more with the odor of the reanimation of something now well decomposed rather than of the scent of something fresh, new, and vigorous. Still looking backwards through a golden hazy of altered memory of some ideal that never was appears to be a bedrock of the human condition.  

At the same time one must acknowledge that tis is a variation of business as usual in the sausage making that is international law and norms.  Certainly there are far too many people to produce effective consultation at the international level.  One has always indulged the (necessary) fantasy of states as representative bodies and have increasingly relied on CSOs as a means of providing an orderly means of aggregation states for broader consultation. The Friends of the Chair mechanisms is as good a method of disciplining and controlling a  narrative leading to a workable "product" as any. Yet here is the rub: to employ these methods thoughtlessly though quite strategically int he context of the drafting of a treaty instrument for business and human rights suggests a certain level of disconnect between the methods of treaty making and those democratic and inclusive modalities that the treaty means to insert into the operations of the objects of the treaty itself.

The text of the guidelines follow.