IngentaConnect The Religion in Globalization

Author: Strenski, Ivan

Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 72, Number 3, September 2004 , pp. 631-652(22)

Abstract:

Economic globalization has always required ideological legitimation. In the first instance this legitimation was explicitly theological; today in Roman Catholic circles it continues to be. The first modern legitimations of what would become economic globalization were made on the universalist bases of the “law of nations,” a derivation from “natural law” as it was conceptualized in the thirteenth century by Thomas Aquinas and interpreted by his sixteenth-century Scholastic successors, the Spanish Dominican and Jesuit jurists of the so-called School of Salamanca. The work of the Spanish jurists was both continued a century later and adapted to Protestant theological exigencies by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius and others. These early, theologically informed justifications of economic globalization are the bases for what has come to be known as “the law of nations” and hence our traditions of international law. Even today under conditions of the so-called secularization of international law, legitimations of globalization retain traces of reliance on natural law and, thus, of their original religious bases.

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