Theorizing the Relationship Between Social Law and Markets in Regional Integration Projects

This article explores regional integration projects in the global South and constraints upon them, in particular the social dislocations caused by global and European trade policies, and the response of states in the South to the institutional design of the global trade regime. Its focus is on the use of economic sociology of law as a methodological approach through which to rethink the relationship between law, markets and state – and to explore how these interact in the context of one regionalization project (the European Union (EU)) as well as interrogating whether economic sociology can similarly cast light on another regionalization project (the African Union (AU)). The rise of the market as the ‘metric of the rationality of law and policy’ challenges labour market institutions, especially in the context of cross-national market integration projects (namely the EU and the AU) of which a core raison d’être is that labour is commodified as one of the factors of production. The article examines the role of the ‘social state’ and of labour market institutions as part of an array of adjustment mechanisms responding to the liberalization of trade and the opening of national borders: to what extent can social law and social rights mediate the operation of markets, and what does this mean when viewed from the perspective of developing as well as industrialized countries