Final thoughts on Global Business and Private Actors

The rise of powerful private actors with capacities that sometimes are greater than that of state capacities has been a key development in the international community. The significant observed significance of this development is due to many of the questions it seems to bring about regarding sovereignty, authority, and capacity. Questions such as how corporations can be held accountable with these things in mind may have great impact on the future structure of the international environment. The type of methods that might be devised to achieve this and how successful these methods are may be definitive the continued development of the international community. These issues also seem to be indicative of motives of value vs. motives of interest.

                The Cutler article framed a difference between authority and cooperation as being based on whether an actor acts out of their own interest or out of obligation. Given recent developments such as Apple refusing the FBI, and Youtube refusing requests by governments by public actors to remove videos help to illustrate that companies that have grown to international levels are often willing to refuse government requests which shows a lack of obligation. Of course, laws can become a sticky thing once a company gains an international presence. Practices that are illegal in one country may be carried out in another country with more suitable laws for the MNC.  Due to the increasing capacity some companies seem to carry, the laws that they are supposed to be subject to seem less pressing than market and economic pressure. I spoke previously about the possibility of governments colluding in order to capitalize on corporate dependence on the market and using whatever influence they had on the economy (IE taxation and labor laws) to try and alter the behavior of private actors however this type of collusion between international public actors seems unlikely for reasons I stated previously.

                These issues bring attention to the striking difference between idealized authority and actual authority based on capacity or the right to act vs the ability to act. Many of the trends we have seen seem to indicate that the ability to act along with interests to do so are far more compelling than whether or not an actor has the right to act based on values to do so. Even acting through obligation might simply be indicative of the state’s ability to enforce its own right to make and enforce laws. Whatever the case, as these private actors and the economy continue to develop and as the public sphere develops in relation to them we are likely to see the continued emergence of a world where questions of authority and sovereignty are increasingly ambiguous.