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3. Free Burma Laws: Legislating Transnational Sanctions
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
101 The Massachusetts Burma law, passed in 1996, restricted the Commonwealth ’s own ability, including the ability of all of its agencies and authorities , to purchase goods or services from any individuals or corporations that were engaged in business with Burma.1 The strategy behind this law was to use Massachusetts’s purchasing power in a transnational marketplace , where it procures contracts amounting then to roughly $2 billion in goods and services annually,2 to force domestic and foreign corporations to make a choice: either seek profitable contracts with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or pursue contracts with the military state in Burma. Massachusetts did not initiate these sanctions unilaterally. It took action as part of a broader selective purchasing law campaign that, in addition to this regional state, was successful at getting nearly thirty municipal governments across the United States to legislate and enact Free Burma laws. These laws successfully influenced corporations to abandon their business operations in Burma. This case highlights legislative discursive contention over purchasing decisions by municipal governments and regional states over how they spend their money as market participants procuring contracts from transnational corporations. It illustrates how transnational legal space 3 Free Burma Laws: Legislating Transnational Sanctions 102 Free Burma Laws mediates the process through which global markets become embedded in politics. The selective purchasing law campaign deploys a transnational strategy through which the Free Burma movement attempts to get at the purse strings and leverage the purchasing power of municipal governments and regional states across the United States to force any transnational corporation , not just those headquartered in the United States, to choose between doing business with the Myanmar government or lose valuable contracts with these municipal governments and regional states. We should remember that at stake in this struggle is how, and by whom, state power can be legitimately used to reorganize transnational market relations with Burma. Neoliberal economic ideology asserts that markets, including global ones, function most efficiently and productively when states do not intervene in the natural process of their formation and operation. Yet it is clear that the state’s legislative intervention plays a fundamental role in constructing markets. As the Burmese government opened its national market to global trade, we see how even the United States’ legislative functions critically shaped the process of constructing the rules and regulations of market participant behavior and in no small way how the market can (and cannot) be organized. This case illustrates the political struggle over the legislative functions of the state to shape how (and how not) to regulate the way that corporations, as well as local governments acting to procure goods and services in a global marketplace , can legally both influence the formation of, and participate in, the market that was emerging in Burma. Once these selective purchasing laws were enacted, however, the U.S. government passed its own economic sanctions legislation. Corporations immediately launched an effective legal countermovement to challenge the constitutionality of the selective purchasing laws. The case worked its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Ultimately, the Court ruled the Massachusetts Burma law unconstitutional. As we examine below the discursive contention regarding the constitutionality of the Massachusetts Burma law, I want to emphasize how the Commonwealth’s attorneys skillfully deploy a series of transnationalist discourses that open a transnational legal space. As I explained in the Introduction, transnational legal space does not refer to a legal order or the institutions (e.g., the courts) within it. It is primarily a cultural structure that combines discourse and narrative to articulate a space of [3.141.24.134] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 19:50 GMT) Free Burma Laws 103 relations and practices whose legal meaning is unsettled, contested, and not yet institutionalized. Transnational legal space is constructed within and through the discourses and narratives that actors deploy in their effort to give particular legal meanings to these relations and practices. It is characterized by conflicts over the meanings of relations, practices , and rules that underpin the national and international legal order, as well as nonstate normative communities.3 At least one way in which it emerges is when, amid legal discursive contention over the meaning of the relationship between states, markets, and social actors (individual or collective), at least one party to the contentious interaction invokes or deploys a transnationalist discourse. A transnationalist discourse not only challenges the binary distinction between globalization and the nation-state, but furthermore insists on the continuing significance of borders, state policies, and national...