Competition or confluence? Private international law and fundamental rights in global governance.

Summary The contemporary irruption of fundamental rights in the field of private international law responds to a need for governance that the traditional model has become unable to meet. It is to be expected that the political-methodological irritation that they induce within the latter will stabilize until the new equilibrium is upset in turn in the name of a complex and evolving alliance of radical and regressive forces. The purpose of the present contribution is not to re-articulate the ideological debate but rather to explore the ways in which private international law, challenged and put in crisis by fundamental rights, could take advantage of it to reposition itself on the map of global governance, from which it remains so remarkably absent.