Haley, John O. --- "Foreword" [2010] ELECD 414; in Hiscock, Mary; van Caenegem, William (eds), "The Internationalisation of Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Book Title: The Internationalisation of Law

Editor(s): Hiscock, Mary; van Caenegem, William

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849801027

Section Title: Foreword

Author(s): Haley, John O.

Number of pages: 3

Extract:

Foreword
John O. Haley

The internationalisation of law is especially appropriate for a symposium
celebrating the founding of Bond University. Bond's founding coincided
not only with the end of one millennium and the start of another but also
with a technological transformation that continues to alter and reshape
our lives. We already take for granted means of worldwide communication
that for many of us were unimaginable when this great university enrolled
its first students. Equally transformational have been the political events
of the past two decades. Who among us could have predicted two decades
ago the reunification of Germany, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
economic re-emergence of China, armed conflict, involving the most mili-
tarily advanced nations on earth, within one of the least advanced tribal
communities? In the wake of these developments and events, we have
also witnessed a global acceleration of evolutionary change or progress
without necessarily its positive connotations.
Yet little of what we tend today to label as `globalisation' or `inter-
nationalisation' is new. Centuries before the emergence of the earliest
kingdoms of Western Europe, goods and ideas flowed east and west
across Eurasia. While Alfred the Great was uniting England as a Wessex-
based kingdom, the Muslim rulers of Iberia were manufacturing silk and
cultivating rice introduced from Asia. Long before the Christian faith
had reached Lithuania, much of central and Southeast Asia had been
successfully proselytised by Muslim traders and evangelists. Only after
Magellan's circumnavigation of the world and ...