This collection of articles, derived from the inaugural conference of the New Zealand Center for International Economic Law (NZCIEL) held in December, 2007, provides an interesting panoply of what are essentially case studies of specific expressions of the tension between binding international economic legal rules and institutions on the one hand, and national regulatory independence on the other. That the conference in question was held in what now seems like a different, distant era – that is, before the onset of the series of international financial crises that have plagued the world economy since 2008 – should not deter the reader interested in the volume's topic. As the most recent developments in both international trade and international investment law demonstrate (for example, legal challenges both in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and in investment protection arbitration to national policies relating to cigarettes and smoking),Footnote ¹ the sensitive relationship between international economic regulation and national policies is of continued, undying importance. Many of the volume's contributions relate to issue areas that have not been significantly affected by the global economic crisis, e.g. the rather theoretical contribution by Jason Beckett on fragmentation (whose connection to the book theme is in any case weak); or Henning Grosse Ruse-Kahn's rigorous analysis of the impact of WTO dispute settlement and enforcement procedures on national regulatory policy through the lens of the WTO dispute between the United States (US) and Antigua and Barbuda over the cross-border provision of online gambling services.

Indeed, the book does not include analysis of international financial regulation and its effects on national financial policy, although this important interaction is far from new,Footnote ² but it has one chapter on the impact of international financial institutions on national development policy (by Yuka Fukunaga) and two chapters on international investment law (one by Ko-Yung Tung, one by Kate Miles), whose analyses remain as relevant today as they were in 2007. Otherwise, the volume is dominated by chapters on international trade issues, primarily WTO related. In any event, there is much to ponder on in this well-structured and diverse offering.

The concept of ‘national autonomy’ is not defined in the book, neither as a theoretical concept nor as an operational one, leaving a great deal of flexibility − autonomy, as it were − to the authors in their particular areas of research. The editors' concise introduction refers to the fact that international economic treaty obligations ‘impact on governments’ ability to exercise complete autonomy in the establishing and administering of national policy objectives’, resulting in ‘limitations on countries’ ability to make a wide range of regulatory decisions’ in areas that ‘until relatively recently … were regarded as policies almost exclusively to be determined by sovereign nations’, such as public health, the environment, and immigration (p. 1, emphasis added). While this observation is undoubtedly true, it understates the underlying reasons for the erosion of national autonomy in the relatively crude sense of complete regulatory independence, namely that many of the international commitments in question relate to difficulties that ‘could not have been solved by strong individual nation-states’ uncoordinated exercise of sovereignty’ (as noted by Robert Howse, p. 12). The notion of full independence in the conduct of a state's internal and/or foreign economic affairs is clearly a thing of the past (if ever it existed), and the reason for this erosion is not necessarily international economic law as such, but rather the existence of transnational economic relations in a variety of fields, that give rise to collective action problems requiring international coordination.

The flexibility of approach to the question of ‘national autonomy’ means that the various authors relate to two very different dimensions of the term. Some chapters in the book consider issues relating to the ability of states to act freely in their foreign economic relations, that is in determining their external economic policy. Other contributions relate to the more interesting internal aspect – the infringement of international economic legal obligations upon domestic regulatory policy. This observation bears upon the very use of the term ‘national autonomy’, which at least in the past might have been considered something of an oxymoron: in general international law parlance, states enjoy ‘sovereignty’ whereas ‘autonomy’ is the lesser bundle of authority enjoyed by quasi-states and sub-national entities. In this more traditional sense of the word ‘autonomy’, the focus is clearly on the internal dimension of authority: the term is ‘understood to refer to independence of action on the internal or domestic level, as foreign affairs and defense normally are in the hands of the central or national government’.Footnote ³ Recourse to ‘national autonomy’ rather than ‘sovereignty’ in the context of this volume therefore implies both the erosion of sovereignty de facto if not de jure in the face of international regulation, and the blurring distinctions between external and internal dimensions of national regulatory independence.

In one contribution, Alberta Fabbricotti's refreshing approach to the legal relationship between the WTO and Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs), the concept of autonomy is even stretched to include the degree of freedom enjoyed by RTAs (rather than states as such) vis-à-vis WTO requirements. Fabbricotti makes the provocative claim that regional trade integration is not merely governed ‘top − down’ by Article XXIV GATT, implying a hierarchy between the WTO and RTAs, but that it should also be understood as a corpus of international customary law developed ‘bottom − up’ by state practice within the RTAs themselves. In any case, this is clearly an external perspective on national autonomy, at an organizational and regulatory level above the state. In contrast, another article on the WTO-RTA nexus by Pinar Artiran relates to its internal or domestic dimension. Artiran examines the interaction between the ‘external’ requirement of Article XXIV:5 GATT (simplified, whereby the creation of an RTA must not result in regulations that are more restrictive with respect to trade from states not party to the RTA) and food safety regulation within the RTA. Specifically, the article argues that the harmonization of food safety regulation in the European Union (EU) in the context of EU enlargement has resulted in increased restrictions on trade from non-EU states. Thus, properly pursued, international economic law would impose constraints on internal policy (here, too, at a level above the state – within the polity of the EU).

This complexity of multi-level governance and dimensionality is apparent also in the contribution by Susy Frankel (one of the volume's two co-editors), in which she provides a survey of the minimum standards of intellectual property (IP) protections imposed by the WTO TRIPS agreement, suggesting a relatively high degree of national autonomy. Frankel then provides robust evidence and analysis of the tendency of some WTO Members to further restrict their regulatory independence through ‘TRIPS-Plus’ commitments in RTAs, suggesting that the WTO sometimes provides more national autonomy than states want. The second co-editor, Meredith Kolsky Lewis, also makes such a counterintuitive claim, arguing that in at least one area the WTO provides Members with more national autonomy than they need – allowing states to restrict imports of indigenous products with a long record of safe use, based on the legal regulatory frameworks pertaining to sanitary and phytosanitary measures.

In substantive legal terms in the areas of international trade law, the volume's relative weaknesses stem from its lack of treatment of (increasingly)Footnote ⁴ significant impediments to national regulatory independence relating to technical barriers to trade,Footnote ⁵ and even more so to trade in services; the book includes two articles relating to the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), but both of them address only labor migration aspects of GATS,Footnote ⁶ with little reference to many other important challenges to national autonomy posed by the GATS, and especially the uncertain area of GATS Article VI ‘domestic regulation' – the least settled area of international economic law's intervention in the ‘internal’ dimension of national autonomy.Footnote ⁷

More conceptually, one of the most important and enduring contributions to the volume is the essay by Howse, prudently placed by the editors as the opening chapter, playing a written ‘keynote’ role. Howse develops a theme he has asserted previously,Footnote ⁸ according to which the (anti-)globalization debate is over, not least because the ‘anti-globalists’ have embraced globalizing concepts, with a resurgence of ‘strong sovereignty’. Howse's contribution also refers directly to the current financial and economic crisis, and is in one sense prescient: the wave of socio-political protest sweeping the world in 2011 − 2012, in Latin America, the Arab World, Israel, Europe, and indeed ‘Occupy(ed)’ Wall Street’, is not, by definition, an anti-globalist movement, but one aimed at national governments, and hence one that has the potential to empower autonomy against all odds.

Overall, this collection covers a broad range of issues that demonstrate in detail that it has become impossible to distinguish between drily, technically ‘economic’ international regulation on the one hand, and politically sensitive domestic issues on the other. Pascal Lamy, WTO Director-General and a central figure in the international economic law scene over the last two decades, has strongly argued that ‘the business of the WTO is trade liberalization, not regulation’.Footnote ⁹ Given the complexities of interactions between international economic law and national regulatory autonomy, as demonstrated in this volume, such a position seems gradually more outdated.