The collection International Economic Law after the Global Crisis: A Tale of Fragmented Disciplines, edited by Chin Leng Lim and Bryan Mercurio for Cambridge University Press, aims to explore ‘the theme of fragmentation within international economic law as the world emerged from the 2008 global financial crisis, the subsequent recession and the European sovereign debt crisis which began in early 2010’ (p. 1). The editors see the post-crisis ‘moment’ as a contemporary backdrop to the volume's focus on fragmentation, as they trace the development of the international economic system from the original Bretton Woods design in the aftermath of the Second World War to the present time.
The backgrounds of the contributors are balanced. The skilful design of the volume by the editors leads to a compilation of insightful scholarship from a broad range of experts in international economic law, comprising both established and younger scholars and practitioners. The variety and diversity of their views significantly add to the volume.
Interestingly, this volume began life partly as a collection of papers delivered during the second conference of the Asian International Economic Law Network (AIELN), a regional sub-group of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL). The conference – dubbed ‘AIELN II’ – was hosted by Doug Arner and the two editors, and it was held at the University of Hong Kong during the summer of 2011. The conference focused on a number of emerging issues confronting that international economic system that was slowly emerging from the global financial and economic crises at that time. These issues included the adequacy of financial regulation, questions about the regulation of credit rating agencies whose role was highlighted by the global crises, as well as questions of trade regulation, investment, and intellectual property protection.
The editors explain that they did not merely seek to reproduce the proceedings of the conference. They state that the volume subsequently also benefited from the participation of additional international experts, following a round of invitations to contribute to the book. Among the chapters that were then added are those on China's currency policies (Chapter 6), the extension of Europe's Emissions Trading Scheme to airlines worldwide that exercise landing rights within the EU (Chapter 19), and the progression of the European Debt Crisis (Chapter 4). These issues were also rapidly gaining visibility, but had not been previously discussed by the conference panels. The final result is a richly textured snapshot of current issues scattered across the whole landscape of international economic regulation.
By their own admission, the editors acknowledge that comprehensiveness was an impossible goal. In general, however, they have ventured into areas which, although pivotal, have to date been under-explored in the literature. In this regard, the collection certainly achieves the goal of charting new areas of research in a coherent manner. The editors should be commended for this achievement. All the contributions are organized in a way that leaves the reader with the impression of a well-structured monograph rather than a merely compiled work.
By way of a brief overview, the book covers issues concerning monetary cooperation, trade, and finance (Part I), trade and its linkages (Part II), investment law and intellectual property protection (Part III), and aspects of climate change regulation (Part IV). By connecting a wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary survey of international economic law with the contemporary theoretical debate over international norms and authority fragmentation, the editors' aim is to demonstrate the ‘essentially fragmented and multi-focal’ nature of the system of international economic regulation (p. xiv).
The volume is in essence an international economic law book which focuses on ‘norm fragmentation in a historical sense’ (p. 3). Although the collection offers a snapshot of various issues and debates in the field of international economic law that emerged during the current post-crisis phase, such as the issue of more rigorous financial regulation (Chapter 4) and the regulation of credit rating agencies (Chapter 3), its conceptual focus is on fragmentation in the specific context of the historical development of international economic law and regulation.
Many changes to the Bretton Woods system occurred over several decades. What had been envisaged during the post-war years has given rise to what the editors call ‘a fragmented discipline of international economic law’ (p. 5), a system whereby trade, investment, monetary and exchange rate cooperation, financial regulation, intellectual property protection, goods and services trade regulation, and international developmental efforts have evolved away from an initially coherent design.Footnote 1 This process has, in turn, ‘produced a multiplicity of norms which are not always easy bedfellows, a plurality of international institutions (p. 5)’ and, at times, global norms of a different kind altogether with no formal institutional anchorage (i.e. ‘soft laws’).
However, the contemporary theoretical debate in the field of international economic law has mainly focused on the conceptual and institutional puzzles emerging from this scenario. More specifically, international economic lawyers have quite extensively studied the way in which different norms (e.g. those derived, respectively, from trade law, environmental law, investment rules or the rules of monetary cooperation) relate to each other within the broader area of international economic regulation.
In contrast, the approach chosen by the editors is to remind us about how international economic regulation had been designed to work in the aftermath of the Second World War. In this sense, by situating the theoretical debate on norm and authority fragmentation as only one sub-issue within a broader historically orientated investigation, this volume examines the growth of normative and institutional differences that have progressively emerged in the field of international economic law. The originality and diversity of this approach is to refer to the issue of fragmentation in a more historically sensitive manner than the debate in the field of international economic law has sometimes been.
The editors state that they had set out to study actual fragmentation at this particular moment without strong preconceptions about the outcome of the research. They privilege this research method not only because they are convinced of the importance of a stock-taking of the underlying factual realities of the current theoretical debate on this topic, but also because they believe that an intellectual consensus has not yet emerged from it.
In short, the collection seeks to present an articulated and complex picture of the fragmentation of international economic law (and its sub-disciplines) during a significant period of economic uncertainty.
As far as the discussion of the legal developments following the 2008 and 2010 crises is concerned, some readers who look to the collection for another study of the post-crisis scenarios (and there have been many such studies) may be slightly disappointed. However, the volume does involve asking a series of questions about the relevance of the two crises for the international economic order. In this sense, at least two aspects in this collection deserve attention, and explain the editors' stance. First, the editors reject any claim that 2008 and its aftermath were necessarily crucial moments for the development of international economic law. With the exception of a few discrete and specific reforms in the international financial and banking sectors – primarily in the attempt to achieve a higher degree of financial stability in light of the limitations of financial regulation (Dalhuisen, Reference Dalhuisen2010), and the emergence of the G20 as the ‘high table of economic governance’ (Buckley, Reference Buckley, Lim and Mercurio2015), the modus operandi of international economic regulation has not for them undergone any major structural or substantive change. Although, the global crisis could have become one of the defining moments of the discipline, it did not. The global crisis has not led to a ‘grand redesigning’ of the international economic system. The view of the editors is that it could not have. Understanding the reasons why the Bretton Woods design never worked as originally imagined, and the variety of pressing issues today, demonstrates instead that the international economic system operates not by design, but by an accommodation of new issues and events without an ability to offer systemic responses. As the editors put it, ‘it is fragmentation which remains a persistent feature of international economic law’ (p. 6).
Secondly, the editors consider that the challenges posed by these recent crises should not overshadow other real challenges which continue to materialize from all sides. For instance, unlike the Chinese currency or Greek bond issues (Chapters 6 and 13), climate change has been an issue that is completely independent of the 2008 and 2010 crises and their after effects (Chapters 18 and 19). In this sense, the collection discusses a series of new issues that stand more or less apart from the global crisis, but that are at least crucial for a better understanding of the evolution of the international economic system. These include, inter alia: the recent bilateral investment treaty (BIT) disputes over cigarette packaging laws that have prompted investigation of the intersection of the fragmented regimes of intellectual property and investor/investment protection (Chapter 16); and the fascinating intersection between agricultural shortages, the food price crisis, and investment (Chapter 15).
In conclusion, the volume is innovative and provocative. It tells a tale of how the regulation of the global economy originated piecemeal, resulting in a series of fragmented regimes that continue to persist just as new issues continue to emerge. If a single sentence could capture the theoretical justification and potential practical relevance of this research, it would be the editors' bold argument that ‘at its most basic level, understanding fragmentation is about understanding how the global economy is presently regulated’ (p. 536).
By bringing insight and understanding into the constitutional, legislative, and regulatory aspects of the international economic system, the volume targets the vast and diversified international audience of academics and scholars, university students, lawyers, diplomats and policy-makers interested in a reliable guide and a high-level analysis of pivotal, contemporary issues in international economic law.
