The New Sovereignty

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In an influential 1997 essay for Foreign Affairs, Anne Marie Slaughter wrote about the disaggregation of the state into governance networks that overflow national boundaries. She called it Transgovernmentalism. Transgovernmental networks include meetings of Supreme Court judges from across the Americas, collaborations between different European police forces, and informal agreements between bureaucracies to facilitate the flow of goods, people, and capital, or to minimise environmental impacts: “The result is a world order in which global governance networks link Microsoft, the Roman Catholic Church, and Amnesty International to the European Union, the United Nations, and Catalonia.”