Contingent Economic Legal Ordering

Abstract

This chapter queries the history of the principle of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources (PSNR), often heralded as a watershed moment of the push to decolonise international law. It shows that the principle has a much longer and more complicated history that places this principle’s origins in Latin America in the interwar period. While predating the movement for decolonisation in Africa and Asia, many of the same aspirations existed in the Americas: the push to control economic development through natural resources; protection against (neo)imperial forces; and an aspiration for international (economic law) world-making. Our counterfactual is that pre-PSNR pivotal moments in international legal history, such as the 1933 London Monetary and Economic Conference, and the Bogotá Economic Agreement of the Organization of American States, had they come into force, would have precluded the need for PSNR in the form we know today, and achieved the same objectives, but as an integral part of economic legal architecture, rather than the exception to it that PSNR is. Posing this counterfactual helps us query contingency by revealing the strength of path dependencies in international law, and that the precise formulation of ideas is incidental to their context and what is achievable, while closing down the possibilities of what international law can be. Therefore, shedding light on the baselines we take for granted in international law-making through (alternative or revisionist) history allows us to rescue functional equivalence and the creative possibilities of the field.