ABSTRACT
A central point of the previous chapter was the apparent absence of the functional synthesis between law and politics within transnational frameworks. Quite a number of legal scholars have argued for a re-conceptualisation of law, which would enable an understanding of law as a progressively more globalised ‘learning law’ which increasingly relies on cognitive, instead of normative, expectations. Common for these scholars is, however, that, while they observe a transformation of law, they tend to assume that the nature of the political has remained unchanged. They continue to see politics as an essentially normative endeavour which is mainly unfolded at the nation-state level and which is oriented towards the production of collectively binding decisions. A central argument of this chapter is, however, that not only has a new type of law emerged in the wake of the progressive materialisation of functional differentiated transnational structures, but also a new type of transnational politics has emerged which operates in a complementary manner to nation-state politics. A new type of the political which also primarily relies on cognitive expectations and which is characterised by its reliance on a number of functional equivalents to the basic infrastructure of the political in the nation-state form, since, at the transnational level, the concepts of the nation, the public sphere and representation are being substituted by the concepts of stakeholders, transparency and self-representation.
