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Transforming UN and WTO legal systems through 'international legal policy competition' and 'lawfare'
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1725-6739
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EUI; LAW; Working Paper; 2024/16
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PETERSMANN, Ernst-Ulrich, Transforming UN and WTO legal systems through ‘international legal policy competition’ and ‘lawfare’, EUI, LAW, Working Paper, 2024/16 - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/77212
Abstract
Comparative international law explains why conceptions of UN and WTO law as universal legal systems risk neglecting the geopolitical rivalries and competition among (trans)national legal policies increasingly transforming UN and WTO rules and institutions. Section I describes the constitutional pluralism driving this ‘international legal policy competition’ among UN member states and international organizations with conflicting constitutional, political and economic governance goals. Section II explains why the post-1950 construction of a new European international legal order governed by multilevel democratic, republican, and cosmopolitan constitutionalism remains without equivalent outside Europe. Section III shows how the emerging ‘authoritarian international law’ among non-democratic countries - and business-driven, neoliberal policies undermining WTO rules and dispute settlement procedures - increasingly disrupt UN and WTO governance of the universally agreed sustainable development goals (SDGs). The Lisbon Treaty has prompted EU leadership for internal and external sustainable development reforms, for instance through free trade agreements, reforms of trade and investment adjudication, multilateral emission trading and carbon border adjustment mechanisms, and human rights policies making access to Europe’s common market conditional on compliance with the SDGs. Even if regulatory competition and ‘lawfare’ among authoritarian and democratic countries prioritize diverse ‘international legal policies’ aimed at ‘re-ordering international law’, disagreements on democratic and cosmopolitan constitutionalism have not prevented protection of some SDGs through functionally limited, transnational rule-of-law systems (like multi-party interim arbitration in the WTO, judicial remedies in free trade and investment agreements).