Kevin Crow (Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Asia School of Business; Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg) has posted The Concept of ‘Development’ in International Economic Law: Three Definitions and an Inquiry Into Origin on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The language of “development” pervades modern international law, yet the concept itself remains strikingly undertheorized in international legal instruments. This article investigates the meaning, origin, and migration of “development” in international economic law (IEL), arguing that the term carries embedded assumptions inherited from a specifically Western, post-Enlightenment view of history as linear and teleological. Drawing on the work of Gilbert Rist, Bruno Latour, Andrew Lang, and others, the paper first traces the philosophical genealogy of “development” from Aristotle and Ibn Khaldun—who conceived of historical change as cyclical—through Augustine, Descartes, Rousseau, Spencer, and Smith, whose writings reframed development as a continuous and necessary trajectory culminating in the “developed” Western state. It then examines how this construct was codified through the post-WWII Bretton Woods institutions and the International Bill of Rights.
The article’s central contribution is a close textual analysis of recent free trade agreements that parses out three distinct working definitions of “development” in IEL: (1) Development as a Context (e.g., sustainable development), (2) Development as Creation/Improvement (the bettering of conditions, institutions, or trade), and (3) Development as a Hierarchy (an ordering of states by relative power and capacity). Using the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a baseline, the paper compares deployments of these definitions across FTAs spanning both developed and developing parties (TPP, NAFTA, EU-Vietnam) and FTAs among developed parties only (CETA, EU-Singapore, TTIP).
Engaging Andrew Lang’s open question of whether “development” emerged from within IEL or was imposed upon it from human rights law, the paper concludes that the answer is “both”: Development as Context and Development as Creation/Improvement migrated into IEL from human rights instruments, whereas Development as a Hierarchy—deployed almost exclusively by powerful states toward less-powerful ones—emerged from within IEL itself.
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