Spaces and Narratives. The Clash of Legal Systems and the Struggle for Power in the 'Geopolitics' of the Law

The aim of this paper is to analyse the way in which the world is divided into different 'legal traditions', in order to understand the actual establishment of a ranking of the various legal systems, as it is used as a powerful device for global governance, directed to mould policy projects of reforms and development.I shall try to discuss the two major "economic narratives" that have been used in the last 40 years to maintain the superiority of the Common Law. The former is the theory purported by the movement of Law and Finance, and the latter is the theory of the "spontaneously ordered complex phenomena" elaborated by Von Hayek. The approach of the chapter will be a critical appraisal of both these theories to show that they are narratives. Fictitious stories purporting political claims deprived of any other consistent historiographical basis.The conclusion is then that we are, once again, entrapped in what can be called "political romanticism", where the 'world' is reduced to an 'occasion' for story-plotting. From this point of view, the works of Beck, Levine and Hayek can be appreciated as really good works of literature, but I think that a proper approach to the comparative law and economics of globalization must still be found, moulded and crafted