Das Theater des Rechtsstaates

Abstract

Schlagwörter: Rechtsstaatlichkeit, Reform, Korruption, Regierungsführung, Privatisierung, richterliche Unabhängigkeit, Zivilgesellschaft, Weltbank, USAID

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The Theatre of the Rule of Law

Abstract

The promotion of the rule of law has become a multi-billion dollar industry and a mainstay of contemporary development policy. A close examination of the now extensive body of literature that has been generated in and around this work reveals an elaborate worldview consistently embedded and insistently reproduced through project activities – for example, that aim to „modernise“ judiciaries, „update“ laws and eliminate corruption – as well as through the relations between host states, non-governmental organizations and global congeries of financing institutions and investment mechanisms. In this paper I characterise rule of law promotion as a form of theatre: the staging of a certain morality tale about the good life. Rule of law promoters do not attempt to demonstrate the rightness of their propositions through empirical evidence (there is little), nor through reasoned argument (it is not open for debate), nor through historical analogies (there are none). Rather, the field bases its appeal on the force of repeated narratives involving the reproduction of a set of immutable themes (e.g. governance, corruption, privatisation, transparency, accountability, impunity, and judicial independence) that incorporate a recurrent group of morally-tagged actors (e.g. civil society, the judiciary, „the poor“, public officials, and „reform-minded constituencies“). This paper provides an account of the latent theory that animates the theatre of the rule of law.

Keywords: rule of law, reform, corruption, governance, privatisation, judicial independence, civil society, World Bank, USAID