4. The International Tax Community and the Politics of Expertise

Abstract

Since the origins of the international model treaties at the League of Nations, and the negotiation of some of the earliest bilateral agreements, tax treaties have primarily been the proj ect of a community of international tax prac ti tion ers. Many have a common educational and professional background, they meet each other regularly, share in the per for mance of negotiations among states or between states and businesses, and have a vested interest in protecting the internal coherence of what they see as a technical proj ect against po liti cal interference.1 There is little pretense during the formal po liti cal scrutiny of tax treaties that they are understood by ministers and other politicians in any kind of detail. This chapter therefore turns the attention away from mechanisms that act on such policymakers and toward the experts who develop the multilateral models and negotiate the bilateral treaties themselves. Whereas the tax treaties myth leads nonspecialists to seek treaties as a way of stimulating investment by lowering investors’ tax costs, those with detailed technical knowledge take a dif fer ent view. For them, tax treaties transmit a series of procedural and content rules concerning the taxation of investors, from the authors of model treaties— a community of specialists revolving around the OECD— to the signatory countries. They translate transnational softlaw standards into hard, enforceable law. To be sure, these negotiators have strong incentives deriving from the national sphere, which can produce intense disagreements in bilateral and multilateral negotiations. But they share the longterm proj ect of creating a consistent global approach to taxation modeled on OECD standards, to enhance trade and investment flows, a public good to be diffused as widely as 4 THE INTERNATIONAL TAX COMMUNITY AND THE POLITICS OF EXPERTISE