Paper's abstract

Horatia Muir Watt, Family Models Tried against Globalization (aspects of international private law)
International private family law today seems to be taken into hostage between the internationalisation of its sources, through the affirmation of fundamental rights and the breaking down of international order due to globalization. The traditional landmarks of the international lawyer, like the methodological tools allowing until now to solve the conflicts of law, fall back in front a new vision, dichotomic, of the latter which in fact is nothing more than the effect induced by movements that overtake him, hanging on the disintegration of private family law and on transformations altering the very foundations of legal orders. This is how we now see the coexistence of a space of confrontation of over-ideologised family models, which gives hold to the upsurge of a meta-conflictual way of reasoning, and another space, a local one, united by a community of values, inside which the differences are admittedly smoothed out through more pacific co-ordination means, which is threatened of being enslaved to purely economic aims. Divided between confrontation and instrumentalisation, international private family law has not been, for the moment, able to meet the challenge of globalization.

Key Words : family, international private law, globalisation
t. 45, 2001 : p. 271-284

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