Quinn Slobodian, Wellesley College
Quinn Slobodian, Wellesley College
BGIE Seminar - Ordoglobalism: The Invention of International Economic Law and the End of the Third World Project
BGIE Seminar - Ordoglobalism: The Invention of International Economic Law and the End of the Third World Project
Since the “shock of the global” in the 1970s, mainstream accounts have defined globalization as markets set free. The world is flat, as one metaphor has it. Capital and goods, if not people, supposedly flow according to the logic of demand, ever more liberated from the fetters of regulation and restriction. Yet this was never true. The world economy was not set free into an ungoverned space. Rather, it was increasingly legalized, and moved progressively from the oversight of governments to the oversight of the law. Deregulation has always meant re-regulation amid proliferating forms of multilevel governance, alongside both hard and soft law.
My talk focuses on the invention of the discipline of international economic law (IEL) in the 1970s and 1980s and its rapid expansion since the end of the Cold War. The creators of the field of IEL, including figures from the German ordoliberal tradition, designed it as a direct response to the increasingly strident demands of Global South nations, especially in the context of the New International Economic Order in the 1970s. The acolytes of IEL saw the propagation of the rule of law in the world economy as a response to disruptive southern demands for special and differential treatment. Formal and not substantive equality was the goal for the philosophy of world governance that I call “ordoglobalism.” Their success, however pyrrhic, in the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1996 marked the end of the Third World project premised on a two-tier system of global trade law for the earth’s poorer nations.