This panel was convened at 2:15 pm, Friday, April 5, by its moderator, Steve Chamovitz of George ... more This panel was convened at 2:15 pm, Friday, April 5, by its moderator, Steve Chamovitz of George Washington University Law School, who introduced the panelists: Kinji Akashi of Keio University; Umut Ozsu of the University of Manitoba; Ileana Porras of the University of Miami; and Iain Scobbie of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. THE POLITICS OF "MULTIPOLARITY" By Umut Ozsu * It has become fashionable in recent years to argue that non-Western states have exerted considerable influence over the creation and application of international law's most fundamental rules and principles. Equally fashionable are arguments to the effect that sustained growth in "emerging markets" is on the verge of destabilizing Euro-American dominance in the international legal and economic order. These claims tend to resonate with critics of Eurocentrism and American exceptionalism, who rely upon notions of "multipolarity" to develop "incl...
I would like to begin by proposing that IEL suffers from a foundational problem having been struc... more I would like to begin by proposing that IEL suffers from a foundational problem having been structurally hampered by its birth in the heyday of "globalization" hype. Conventionally, we trace the history of the discipline back to the early 1970s and the Stockholm Declaration. Yet, its flowering really began in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Thus, the discipline came into its own as the cold war ended, and a new cosmopolitan, borderless world beyond the sovereign state could be envisaged. This early, optimistic version of globalization predicted that the global community would rise above its narrow national or local interests. IEL seemed particularly designed to capture the spirit of this new cosmopolitan age, for our environment was a "shared environment" and our world was "one world." Our shared world--captured in iconic form by photographs of planet earth resplendent in all her beauty taken from outer space by Americans--somehow would produce a shared interest and a common ethic as we worked towards shaping "our common future." Environmentalists emphasized that the environment as a natural phenomenon was beyond national borders, that environmental harm escaped beyond national borders, and that many natural resources were shared. Many critical problems could only be addressed by a common commitment, and environmentalists urgently advocated addressing them today before they created irreparable harms. Protecting the environment and safeguarding our children's future was our common responsibility. It was an appealing image. It is sometimes hard to remember those heady days with ubiquitous images of networked nongovernmental organizations, coalitions of women, indigenous groups, children, and so on, joining hands in pursuit of goals beyond national interest. It was a world beyond politics in which we could imagine a global citizenry adopting environmental protection as a universal goal. That heady moment is long past. First, a less optimistic view of globalization emerged, one in which the borders were down but the embracing networks were those of corporations and what flowed across was capital and trade. Now, even that image of globalization has begun to recede as we begin to recognize that the sovereign state, its borders, and national interest are still very much a part of our world. Today, we no longer talk so glibly of "our common future" as we observe the world sinking ever further into deep divisions between the haves and the have-nots and watch new forms of imperialism emerge. The other trend that colored the early development of IEL and has come to characterize it today is the turn to policy science and economics that typified the late 1980s and early 1990s. Perhaps in reaction to what was experienced as the excessive romanticism of environmentalism, or perhaps as a response to its apocalyptic bent, international environmental lawyers increasingly embraced the technical. International environmental problems were approached as complex yet quantifiable. Elegant models would be built to reflect the state of scientific knowledge and economic assumptions, multiple variables and speculative scenarios could be incorporated, and as the science improved and the economic assumptions shifted, the models would be perfected. …
The recent Encyclical by Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, On Care for our Common Home, is a remarkable ... more The recent Encyclical by Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, On Care for our Common Home, is a remarkable document, both original and continuous within the tradition of Catholic social doctrine. Emerging from and grounded in a very specific religious tradition and constrained by the peculiar encyclical literary form, the document nonetheless seeks to open a dialogue with “every person living on this planet,” about care for our common home. Using the urgency of addressing global climate change as its point of departure, the Encyclical does a superb job summarizing the scope of the present environmental crisis and the disproportionate harms suffered by vulnerable populations of the poor and excluded. It also provides a careful analysis of the root causes of environmental degradation, mapping out the complex linkages and tensions between globalization, economic growth, liberalized trade, unsustainable patterns of consumption and production, environmental degradation, involuntary migration, immi...
This chapter explores the doctrine of the providential function of commerce in the work of Franci... more This chapter explores the doctrine of the providential function of commerce in the work of Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1492–1546), Alberico Gentili (1552–1608), and Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). In this chapter, I argue that the doctrine’s persuasive power lies in the interplay between two factors. First is the fact that while the doctrine is not in origin a religious doctrine, its elements and its narrative logic carried an unmistakable religious sensibility that became indissolubly associated with international trade. But the doctrine’s true efficacy lies in a more subtle internal effect. In essence, the doctrine, which holds at its core an act of exchange among distant peoples, allowed its adherents to idealize international trade by blurring the distinction between the act of commercial exchange and that of gift-exchange. In this manner, international exchange came to be portrayed as an act of friendship and community recognition, rather than a commercial act between strangers.
This article explores the relationship between international law and the natural environment. We ... more This article explores the relationship between international law and the natural environment. We contend that international environmental law and general international law are structured in ways that systemically reinforce ecological harm. Through exploring the cultural milieu from which international environmental law emerged, we argue it produced an impoverished understanding of nature that is incapable of responding adequately to ecological crises. We maintain that environmental issues should not be confined to a disciplinary specialization because humanity's relationship with nature has been central to making international law. Foundational concepts such as sovereignty, development, property, economy, human rights, and so on, have evolved through understanding nature in ways that are unsuited to perceiving or observing ecological limits. International law primarily sees nature as a resource for wealth generation to enable societies to continually develop, and environmental d...
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is often claimed to be a "promising beginnin... more The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is often claimed to be a "promising beginning" for the reconciliation of trade and environment. Professor Porras, however, suggests that the form that "reconciliation" takes in NAFTA is extremely problematic. Harmonization of standards to facilitate the free flow of trade is a familiar trade goal NAFTA 's provisions regarding environmental standards, however, are not a straightforward requirement to harmonize standards. Rather, NAFTA recognizes state autonomy in standard setting, on the one hand, while requiring a form of upward harmonization, on the other. According to Professor Porras, the result of such an arrangement is the perpetuation of economic and political inequality among states. States with low environmental standards are not given the opportunity to set their environmental standards in accordance with their own values, capacities, and priorities, but must instead divert resources to achieve the stan...
This panel was convened at 2:15 pm, Friday, April 5, by its moderator, Steve Chamovitz of George ... more This panel was convened at 2:15 pm, Friday, April 5, by its moderator, Steve Chamovitz of George Washington University Law School, who introduced the panelists: Kinji Akashi of Keio University; Umut Ozsu of the University of Manitoba; Ileana Porras of the University of Miami; and Iain Scobbie of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. THE POLITICS OF "MULTIPOLARITY" By Umut Ozsu * It has become fashionable in recent years to argue that non-Western states have exerted considerable influence over the creation and application of international law's most fundamental rules and principles. Equally fashionable are arguments to the effect that sustained growth in "emerging markets" is on the verge of destabilizing Euro-American dominance in the international legal and economic order. These claims tend to resonate with critics of Eurocentrism and American exceptionalism, who rely upon notions of "multipolarity" to develop "incl...
I would like to begin by proposing that IEL suffers from a foundational problem having been struc... more I would like to begin by proposing that IEL suffers from a foundational problem having been structurally hampered by its birth in the heyday of "globalization" hype. Conventionally, we trace the history of the discipline back to the early 1970s and the Stockholm Declaration. Yet, its flowering really began in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Thus, the discipline came into its own as the cold war ended, and a new cosmopolitan, borderless world beyond the sovereign state could be envisaged. This early, optimistic version of globalization predicted that the global community would rise above its narrow national or local interests. IEL seemed particularly designed to capture the spirit of this new cosmopolitan age, for our environment was a "shared environment" and our world was "one world." Our shared world--captured in iconic form by photographs of planet earth resplendent in all her beauty taken from outer space by Americans--somehow would produce a shared interest and a common ethic as we worked towards shaping "our common future." Environmentalists emphasized that the environment as a natural phenomenon was beyond national borders, that environmental harm escaped beyond national borders, and that many natural resources were shared. Many critical problems could only be addressed by a common commitment, and environmentalists urgently advocated addressing them today before they created irreparable harms. Protecting the environment and safeguarding our children's future was our common responsibility. It was an appealing image. It is sometimes hard to remember those heady days with ubiquitous images of networked nongovernmental organizations, coalitions of women, indigenous groups, children, and so on, joining hands in pursuit of goals beyond national interest. It was a world beyond politics in which we could imagine a global citizenry adopting environmental protection as a universal goal. That heady moment is long past. First, a less optimistic view of globalization emerged, one in which the borders were down but the embracing networks were those of corporations and what flowed across was capital and trade. Now, even that image of globalization has begun to recede as we begin to recognize that the sovereign state, its borders, and national interest are still very much a part of our world. Today, we no longer talk so glibly of "our common future" as we observe the world sinking ever further into deep divisions between the haves and the have-nots and watch new forms of imperialism emerge. The other trend that colored the early development of IEL and has come to characterize it today is the turn to policy science and economics that typified the late 1980s and early 1990s. Perhaps in reaction to what was experienced as the excessive romanticism of environmentalism, or perhaps as a response to its apocalyptic bent, international environmental lawyers increasingly embraced the technical. International environmental problems were approached as complex yet quantifiable. Elegant models would be built to reflect the state of scientific knowledge and economic assumptions, multiple variables and speculative scenarios could be incorporated, and as the science improved and the economic assumptions shifted, the models would be perfected. …
The recent Encyclical by Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, On Care for our Common Home, is a remarkable ... more The recent Encyclical by Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, On Care for our Common Home, is a remarkable document, both original and continuous within the tradition of Catholic social doctrine. Emerging from and grounded in a very specific religious tradition and constrained by the peculiar encyclical literary form, the document nonetheless seeks to open a dialogue with “every person living on this planet,” about care for our common home. Using the urgency of addressing global climate change as its point of departure, the Encyclical does a superb job summarizing the scope of the present environmental crisis and the disproportionate harms suffered by vulnerable populations of the poor and excluded. It also provides a careful analysis of the root causes of environmental degradation, mapping out the complex linkages and tensions between globalization, economic growth, liberalized trade, unsustainable patterns of consumption and production, environmental degradation, involuntary migration, immi...
This chapter explores the doctrine of the providential function of commerce in the work of Franci... more This chapter explores the doctrine of the providential function of commerce in the work of Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1492–1546), Alberico Gentili (1552–1608), and Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). In this chapter, I argue that the doctrine’s persuasive power lies in the interplay between two factors. First is the fact that while the doctrine is not in origin a religious doctrine, its elements and its narrative logic carried an unmistakable religious sensibility that became indissolubly associated with international trade. But the doctrine’s true efficacy lies in a more subtle internal effect. In essence, the doctrine, which holds at its core an act of exchange among distant peoples, allowed its adherents to idealize international trade by blurring the distinction between the act of commercial exchange and that of gift-exchange. In this manner, international exchange came to be portrayed as an act of friendship and community recognition, rather than a commercial act between strangers.
This article explores the relationship between international law and the natural environment. We ... more This article explores the relationship between international law and the natural environment. We contend that international environmental law and general international law are structured in ways that systemically reinforce ecological harm. Through exploring the cultural milieu from which international environmental law emerged, we argue it produced an impoverished understanding of nature that is incapable of responding adequately to ecological crises. We maintain that environmental issues should not be confined to a disciplinary specialization because humanity's relationship with nature has been central to making international law. Foundational concepts such as sovereignty, development, property, economy, human rights, and so on, have evolved through understanding nature in ways that are unsuited to perceiving or observing ecological limits. International law primarily sees nature as a resource for wealth generation to enable societies to continually develop, and environmental d...
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is often claimed to be a "promising beginnin... more The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is often claimed to be a "promising beginning" for the reconciliation of trade and environment. Professor Porras, however, suggests that the form that "reconciliation" takes in NAFTA is extremely problematic. Harmonization of standards to facilitate the free flow of trade is a familiar trade goal NAFTA 's provisions regarding environmental standards, however, are not a straightforward requirement to harmonize standards. Rather, NAFTA recognizes state autonomy in standard setting, on the one hand, while requiring a form of upward harmonization, on the other. According to Professor Porras, the result of such an arrangement is the perpetuation of economic and political inequality among states. States with low environmental standards are not given the opportunity to set their environmental standards in accordance with their own values, capacities, and priorities, but must instead divert resources to achieve the stan...
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