Source: https://legalform.blog/2018/10/26/rethinking-the-structures-of-the-hegemonic-discourse-of-the-wto-judge-and-investment-arbitrator-a-gramscian-analysis-edoardo-stoppioni/
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 02:00:27+00:00

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This post uses the work of Gramsci to analyze the discourse of WTO judges and investment arbitrators with respect to international law sources conventionally deemed exogenous to the “economic” proceedings over which they preside.
The power to receive amicus curiae briefs in investment disputes provides a similar example. Tribunals have begun to recognize that their cases involve important “public interest” aspects extending “far beyond those raised by the usual transnational arbitration between commercial parties”.  The growing movement to accept amici allows “exogenous” factors to permeate the field of investment arbitration, but conflicts with the rather weak consideration that is given to such factors in the actual legal reasoning of tribunals. The language of expansion serves the purpose of self-legitimation, shoring up the authority of the tribunals involved, to a far greater degree than that of systemic integration.
Even when investment tribunals display openness toward “exogenous” international law sources, their discourse entails an expansion of the “economic” idiom without a proper commitment to taking these sources seriously. In the Phoenix case, the tribunal enlarged the concept of “protected investment” and introduced an implicit condition of legality and good faith to the Salini test, the theoretical justification of which lies in a “teleological reading” of “protected investment” based upon general principles of international law.  Nevertheless, the tribunal explained that “nobody would suggest that ICSID protection should be granted to investments made in violation of the most fundamental rules of protection of human rights, like investments made in pursuance of torture or genocide or in support of slavery or trafficking of human organs”. If basic human concerns are taken into account at this early stage of legal reasoning, the hyperbole that finds expression in the award (even jus cogens violations are countenanced) shows that there is often a felt need to select extreme examples so as not to diminish the overriding importance of investment concerns.
For Gramsci any hegemonic relation is necessarily a pedagogical relationship.  Displaying a pedagogical attitude towards those who espouse “extra-systemic” values, the economic adjudicator builds their own legitimacy and normalizes their own vision of economic relations.
In mainstream legal analysis, it is not uncommon to encounter suggestions to the effect that the WTO and investment arbitration are impermeable to “exogenous” sources–that they function in more or less splendid isolation from the rest of the international legal order.
This is yet another form of hegemonic discourse, in this case linked to the free-trade ideology. This ideology is capable of being explained through Gramsci’s account of “economism”. For Gramsci “economism” is “the theoretical separation of the economic dimension from a social and political ensemble: more specifically, the reduction of this ensemble to its economic causes”.  In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci associates such separation directly and explicitly with the ideology of free trade.  Free-trade ideology’s attempt to separate the “economic” from the “social” and “political” informs much of the posture adopted by WTO judges and investment arbitrators.
The discourse of the WTO judge and of the investment arbitrator with respect to legal sources traditionally dubbed “exogenous” or “non-economic” oscillates between two positions. The first such position is distinguished by the achievement of hegemony through expansion. The judge uses a language of dissemination, striving to make their own idiom the dominant form of legal expression and subordinate “non-economic” to “economic” considerations. The second position is marked by the achievement of hegemony through isolation. Here the judge prefers to use a discourse of containment in order to ensure that their power is not contested, cordoning the “economic” off from the “non-economic”. Both positions are the work of ideology, and both are capable of being illuminated through Gramscian analysis.
 Martti Koskenniemi, “Hegemonic Regimes”, in Margaret A. Young (ed), Regime Interaction in International Law: Facing Fragmentation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 305, at 318.
 See especially Andreas Fischer-Lescano, “La théorie des systèmes comme théorie critique”, 3 (2010) Droit et société 645.
 Franco Lo Piparo, “Studio del linguaggio e teoria gramsciana”, 25 (1987) Critica marxista 167.
 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci e lo Stato. Per una teoria materialistica della filosofia (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1976), 75.
 Prison Notebooks, notebook 13, §17.
 WTO Appellate Body Report, United States–Standards for Reformulated and Conventional Gasoline, WT/DS2/AB/R, 29 April 1996, at 30.
 This dictum has become a classic one, since the Appellate Body used it in the last paragraph of its first decision, the Gasoline case, and it is particularly evident in the Shrimps case (WTO Appellate Body Report, United States–Import Prohibition of Certain Shrimp and Shrimp Products, WT/DS58/AB/R, 12 October 1998, §185). This kind of legal reasoning, joining balancing with a retrospective justification by means of obiter dictum, was clearly applied to tobacco policies in the Clove case (WTO Appellate Body Report, United States–Measures Affecting the Production and Sale of Clove Cigarettes, WT/DS406/AB/R, 4 April 2012, §96 and 235).
 Methanex Corporation c. États-Unis d’Amérique, affaire CNUDCI, décision du tribunal sur la demande de tierce intervention du 15 janvier 2001, §49.
 Prison Notebooks, notebook 10, at 1331.
 GATT Panel Report, Canada–Administration of the Foreign Investment Review Act (BISD 30S/140, 1984), §1.4.
 WTO Appellate Body Report, Mexico–Taxes on Soft Drinks, WT/DS308/AB/R, 6 March 2006, §56, 78.
 Biloune and Marine Drive Complex Ltd v. Ghana Investments Center and the Gouvernement of Ghana, UNCITRAL award, 30 June 1990, 203.
 WTO Appellate Body, European Communities–EC Measures Concerning Meat and Meat Products (Hormones), WT/DS26/AB/R, 16 January 1998, §123.
 David Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935 (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 422.
 Prison Notebooks, notebook 13, §18: “The approach of the free trade movement is based on a theoretical error whose practical origin is not hard to identify: namely the distinction between political society and civil society, which is made into and presented as an organic one, whereas in fact it is merely methodological. Thus it is asserted that economic activity belongs to civil society, and that the state must not intervene to regulate it. But since in actual reality civil society and state are one and the same, it must be made clear that laissez-faire too is a form of state ‘regulation’, introduced and maintained by legislative and coercive means.” This translation is taken from Forgacs, Gramsci Reader, 210.
Edoardo Stoppioni is Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for International, European, and Regulatory Procedural Law in Luxembourg.

References: §17
 §185
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 §1
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