Abstract: This seminar will discuss the historical section of my forthcoming book on the rights of foreign investors. This book project is analytical, historical and focuses on the political economy of foreign investment relations. Its aim is not to study individual arbitrations or decide whether certain investment awards are ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ according to a doctrinal, justice or economic rationale. The objective is to examine the ‘inside’ of foreign investor rights, discussing how each investment treaty model, influential piece of scholarship and investment award become building blocks of the rights of foreign investors under international law and investment treaties. In this seminar, I will concentrate on the work that organisations such as the International Chamber of Commerce and the Society to Advance the Protection of Foreign Investment undertook from the late 1940s until the early 1970s. Ideologically close to the neoliberal project, I argue that the primary motivation of these bankers and lawyers was nevertheless pragmatic – business as usual. Their audacious thinking about foreign investor rights allowed them to make some victories on the terrain of law, for instance at the World Bank, which then shaped the background of foreign investment relations. This favourable terrain for foreign investors, however, was contested during this period. I will illustrate this contestation looking not only at the New International Economic Order but also at the more moderate initiatives of the International Chamber of Commerce and the United Nations in the 1970s. From today’s perspective, an important lesson that can be drawn is that the main contribution of these lawyers and bankers to the current international investment regime was not through the neoliberal ideology, which they emphasised or played down depending on the times, but though audacious thinking about transnational law, property and contracts.

A buffet lunch will be served.