The Euro-Arab Investment Treaty That Nearly Was

This article documents how members of the European Economic Community and members of the Arab League negotiated a draft ‘mega-regional’ investment protection treaty from 1976 to the late 1980s—the first of its kind. The negotiations produced a full draft treaty and came tantalisingly close to completion but ultimately ran into the political sands. Had it been concluded, the Convention would have been the most significant investment protection treaty ever negotiated at the time, and one of the most significant to this day. Negotiations were conducted within the cloak of diplomatic confidentiality, however, so the effort has remained unknown to even specialised scholars and practitioners to this day

Nationality and Diplomatic Protection

Nationality came during the nineteenth century to be regarded as conferring an entitlement to diplomatic protection by the national government. Powerful States used the rules against weaker ones to enforce rights of their nationals who had failed to secure justice through local remedies. Changes in the international order had the effect of diminishing the effectiveness of this practice. But the reduction in formal diplomatic protection for individuals and for companies has been matched by growth in compensatory mechanisms—wider human rights protection, government to government claims settlements and investment protection agreements

Signalling Demand for Foreign Investment: Postsocialist Countries in the Global Bilateral Investment Treaties Network

A unique dataset on bilateral investment treaties provides a novel source of evidence on the link between neoliberal globalisation and market transition. We argue that postsocialist countries of Europe and Eurasia, more than other developing regions in the world, signed such treaties to signal demand for foreign investment in the spirit of neoliberalism. We calculated the density of the whole BIT network since its inception in 1959 to 2009, and density and centrality of different regional blocks within it, and found strong support for our argument. Yet, even if bilateral investment treaties are designed to promote foreign direct investment, dynamic panel regression models show that signing them does not automatically translate into foreign direct investment inflows for postsocialist European and Eurasian countries in the 1990–2010 period