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This article begins by pointing out the discrepancy between, on the one hand, a certain political discourse which refers to a so-called New World Order in highly moralistic terms and, on the other hand, brute facts which attest to the contrary (resurgence of violent regional conflicts, atomization of global structures). It then examines the possibilities for analysing this discrepancy from a critical perspective centered on ethical norms. This leads the author to review the principal ethical approaches elaborated within the study of international relations since the Second World War. Emphasis is put on a major epistemological cleavage between academic disciplines, perhaps the most important demarcation in ethical theory : the one separating deontological from non-deontological theories. The systematic rejection or marginalization of deontology by the « discipline » of International Relations can be explained in terms of objective cognitive interests which have established, paradigmatically a genuine spirit of corporatism within the discipline. This article endeavors to explain such corporatism with a view to helping start a truly pluridisciplinary debate on ethics in the post-cold-war era

The study attempts to make a theoretically informed analysis of technology assessment (TA) as part of postfordist global governance. It focuses first on the FAST programme of the EC, designed to regulate the relationship between producers of new technologies (industry, states) and civil society. The author shows that this regulation, based on the expertise of the social sciences, is largely asymmetrical in favour of the former and an attempt to engineer social consensus at the supranational level. The focus shifts then downwards to the numerous national and regional TA institutions in Western Europe which are all parts of a FAST dominated transnational network, as well as upwards to various related global TA activities (OECD, Lisbon Group, etc.). These different levels of analysis demonstrate that TA is politically constructed as a polycentric, non-hierarchical web of interrelated regulation mechanisms. As such, it is argued, it steadily permeates and recombines existing political structures and levels in order to meet as quickly as possible precise demands of legitimization and accumulation, and should therefore be called a « fractal » regulation.