How do International Organisations support better Rules for Globalisation?

This keynote speech from Alan Pellet was given at the first session of the third OECD meeting of International Organisations in April. The session was entitled: ‘International Regulatory Cooperation: Fostering the Contribution of International Organisations to Better Rules of Globalisation.

It was a strange idea in Céline Kauffman’s imaginative mind to have kindly insisted that I introduce this session. I am much less imaginative and have been, and still am, a bit puzzled by this kind, and honourable but quite perplexing proposal… I am only a lawyer and the only perspective with which I can deal with the topic assigned to me is legal. Even if it is the “best school for imagination”, law is certainly unable to account for all aspects of this promising and wide topic. Happily others are more likely to analyse it in all its complexity.

Whether legally or factually, international organisations do not exist nor act in a vacuum. Their actions and, in particular the role they play – or not – or could play, or should play to support a better governance in the framework of our global (or globalizing) World cannot be examined in “clinical isolation”. And a brief explanation for my preference for the word “globalizing”: it implies a move, while “global” is static and presupposes that the goal has been reached or that the change is already effective – in other words, that we would have passed from a Westphalian World entirely shared and governed by sovereign States to a “post-modern” society where a diversity of non-State entities exercise a decisive influence. Although I am fully conscious that we do not live anymore in a purely Westphalian World – admitting that it had existed at all in the past, which is dubious – I am also convinced, to paraphrase the well-known formula of the late Professor Henkin, that 'The Reports of the Death of [Sovereignty] Are Greatly Exaggerated'!

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