Academic

Under pressure from the Pentagon, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) has been forced to back out of a joint partnership with a Swedish aerospace company to compete in a multi-billion dollar tender to sell new multi-role fighter jets to the Indian Air Force. The deal, estimated at a whopping $12 billion for over 120 new aircraft, is being fought over by Lockheed Martin's F-16, Boeing's F-18/Hornet, Russia's MiG-35 and BAE's Eurofighter. IAI was asked by Saab, manufacturer of the Gripen, to jointly develop an advanced model which would compete for the deal. The Defense Ministry ordered IAI to back out of the deal after the Pentagon expressed concern that American technology, used by Israel, would be integrated into the Gripen offered to the Indians. Yaakov Katz, IAI Forced Out of Indian Jet Fighter Bid, Jerusalem Post, July 5, 2009.

The conflation of public and private interests in the American actions to intervene in the competition was quite open.

"The stated concern was that Western technology in Israeli hands would make its way to the Indians," one Israeli official said. What was strange with the American request was that Boeing and Lockheed Martin - the two largest US defense contractors - are also competing for the Indian deal. For this reason, Israeli officials said it was more likely that the Americans were concerned that if IAI competed for the deal with Saab, it would force the American companies to lower their prices. Yaakov Katz, IAI Forced Out of Indian Jet Fighter Bid,supra.

The focus on the SAAB-Israel partnership could be understood in terms of power relationships at the political level. The Americans could effectively project its political power on the Israeli State in ways that would have been more difficult with respect to the governments of the other competitors for the Indian jet. At any rate, with the SAAB-Israel jet bid more crippled, the American government increased the changes that an American firm would win at least a part of the contract. It also reduces the possibility that BAE, another competitor, will win part of the bid through its association with the Gripen. State intervention, then, was used to reduce competition and to "nudge" the results to make it more likely that American private interests would profit. And this was done in the name of political, secrecy, concerns.

This is not the first time that an Israeli company has been forced out of a deal due to concerns that competing with American companies would endanger Israeli-US relations. Last summer, the MoD ordered Israel Military Industries (IMI) to back down from submitting a bid for a half-a-billion dollar deal to develop and manufacture a new tank for the Turkish Armed Forces. At the time, Turkey had informed the MoD of its interest in developing a new tank and asked if IMI would want to submit a bid. SIBAT - the MOD's Foreign Defense Assistance and Defense Export Organization - decided not to submit an Israeli offer so not to compete with the Americans and endanger Israeli-US defense relations. Yaakov Katz, IAI Forced Out of Indian Jet Fighter Bid,supra.

In the market for armaments, this conflation has already been internalized within its framework. This is well brought out n a recent analysis of the competitors for the Indian fighter order. India?s MMRCA Fighter Competition, Defense Industry Daily, May 25, 2009. The report noted: "Recent changes in India?s needs and the contest participants are changing the relative rankings of the contenders. Geopolitical considerations are also intruding, as most of these choices have the potential to improve relations with an important potential ally. Standardization arguments will also carry weight. As of January 2006, India?s Air Force operated 26 different aircraft types, and the IAF is not eager to add to its support headaches." Id. With respect to the Gripen, the Report concluded: "The Gripen?s acceptance carries no spin-off geopolitical benefits, however, and that last weakness may prove to be the plane?s most critical hindrance in this competition." Id.

The idea that economics is political, and that politics is economics, and that direct state interventions in all sectors of market activity is necessary, cannot be far behind. But understand, this is not a reversion to the Stalinism of the last century that passed for political economics. That model clearly remains discredited. Instead, it might be better understood as a modern, and globalized normative framework of a pre-Stalinist conception of the unity of the legal order.

In the eyes of the Marxists the economic structure of society is the fundamental factor for regulating social relationships. 'Private law' is therefore wholly dependent on public law because the latter gives legal form to this economic structure. To deny the distinction between public law and private law is therefor to affirm the unity of law, and this unity results form the fact that law, in all its branches, is essentially a reflection of the economic organization of society. René David and John E.C. Brierley, Major Legal Systems in the World Today (New York: Free Press, 1978), at 265.

Fascism, rejecting the distributionist preoccupations of socialism, advocated a program of national industrial development. Its focus was productionist . . . Fascist thought turned on two constants: production and the nation. The nation required rapid industrial expansion and to this end all the productive categories were to cooperate.A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York: Free OPress, 1969), at 161-162.

While these notions might have been laughable, and unworkable, or frightening, within traditional states--where power and territorial control provided a distinctive fundamental organizing principle of the state--it appears to have acquired some power, in fact (if not in form), at the transnational level. Here, there is governance without government, and government without a state, a global order in which states and enterprises govern through networks of power that are not tied to territory but to function. Economic globalization may therefore provide the only context in which it is possible to elaborate systems grounded in (1) the unity of law, as traditionally understood, but in which public law is not limited to assertions by the apparatus of states and (2) the episodic and partial merger of state and enterprise within a global context in which no state and no enterprise can assert a monopoly of economic or political power sufficient to dominate globally. Governance without government, then, may produce a revolution in the way in which legal frameworks are conceived.