Consumer Citizenship in Postnational Constellations?

Michelle Everson; Christian Joerges

No 47, EUI-LAW Working Papers from European University Institute (EUI), Department of Law

Abstract: It is perhaps a truism to note that ‘the consumer’ is but a role that is played by human subjects. This insight leaves us, as lawyers, with one vital question: how can or does the legal system meaningfully rationalise its encounters with the consumer? Can it, and if so to what way, shape the act of consumption? Can it even ensure that the ‘fact’ of consumption translates into ‘good’ normative institutions. In a summarizing account of legal encounters with the consumer since the era of laissez-faire liberalism we seek to show that this potential does exist within the constitutional state. However, as markets, political systems and consumers have broken free from national communities we need to ask: will the achievements of constitutional democracies survive Europeanisation and Gliobalisation? In our assessment of current trends in the EU we diagnose a seemingly paradoxical alliance between a new orthodoxy of neo-liberalism within market relations and a de-legalisation of regulatory policies. At international level, our analysis is restricted to a single case (namely, the recent report of a WTO Panel on the controversy over Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). It has become increasingly clear that the notion of a international consumer interest has been reduced to one of health and safety that is identified and secured with simple recourse to ‘scientific expertise’. ‘Sound science’ has become transnationally binding yardstick that both orients and limits consumer policy. The vision of a ‘consumer citizen’, who would actively participate in the transformation of consumption into a normative ‘good’, has become a matter of utopian history.

Keywords: governance; WTO; risk regulation; international trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-reg
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/1814/6547 Full text (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erp:euilaw:p0076

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EUI-LAW Working Papers from European University Institute (EUI), Department of Law
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Machteld Nijsten ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).