Abbott K

Althusser L

Baars G

Baudrillard J

Becker Lorca A

Berman N

Douzinas C

Duménil G

Ehrlich E

Fakhri M

Foucault M

Friedman L

Friedmann W

Galbraith JK

Gardner RN

Gathii JT

Goldstein JL

Gramsci A

Grewe W

Hanafi S

Haskell J

Hobsbawm E

Horwitz MJ

Hudec R

Jackson J

Kennedy Da

Kennedy Du

Knox R

Koselleck R

Koskenniemi M

Lang A

Latour B

Lukács G

Mutua M

Ollman B

Plant R

Rasulov A

Ruggie JG

Schlegel JH

Searle J

Srinivisan TN

Steadman Jones D

Taylor C

Thomas C

Wilcox C

Wood EM

Zeiler TW

Baars, G.

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Baars, G. (2014). Remarks on Andrew Lang's World Trade Law After Neo-Liberalism. Social & Legal Studies, 23(3), pp. 433-436. doi: 10.1177/0964663914533048 City Research OnlineOriginal citation: Baars, G. (2014). Remarks on Andrew Lang's World Trade Law After Neo-Liberalism. Social & Legal Studies, 23(3), pp. 433-436. doi: 10.1177/0964663914533048 Permanent City Research Online URL: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/12254/ Copyright & reuseCity University London has developed City Research Online so that its users may access the research outputs of City University London's staff. Copyright © and Moral Rights for this paper are retained by the individual author(s) and/ or other copyright holders.  All material in City Research Online is checked for eligibility for copyright before being made available in the live archive. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to from other web pages. Versions of researchThe version in City Research Online may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check the Permanent City Research Online URL above for the status of the paper.EnquiriesIf you have any enquiries about any aspect of City Research Online, or if you wish to make contact with the author(s) of this paper, please email the team at publications@city.ac.uk.Marks S (2009) False contingency. Current Legal Problems 62(1): 1–21.Wood EM (1999) The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism. London, UK: Verso.Wood EM (2003) Empire of Capital. London, UK: Verso.Remarks on AndrewLang’sWorld Trade LawAfter Neo-LiberalismGrietje BaarsCity University London, UKAndrew Lang concludes his monograph on international trade law – without a doubt oneof the most important recent contributions to liberal international law scholarship – withthe call for ‘the reformulation of a legitimating collective purpose to ground the work ofthe trade regime’ (Lang, 2011: 347). Having focused in his book on the ‘ideational con-ditions of possibility’ for the development of the world trade law regime over the pastseven decades, Lang asserts that this regime finds itself in a ‘crisis of legitimacy’ (Lang,2011: 313) as a result of challenges raised by various parties including those makinghuman rights claims. International lawyers can and indeed must ‘rescue’ the interna-tional trade regime from this crisis (and presumably from its demise) through the ‘col-lective reimagination’ of its raison d’eˆtre. No explanation as to the necessity of thistask being given, one may presume this is for no reason other than that ‘law must bedefended’. Lang’s argument thus seems to build on a premise that, whilst outwardlyself-conscious, implicitly celebrates the role of lawyers as civilizing agents.In this short commentary, I want to explore Lang’s conclusion, and, more generally,the subject matter he addresses in the lead essay of this symposium, from a different van-tage point. My first claim in this regard will be that Lang’s thesis fails as an explanatorytheory of legal interpretation for the reason of his sole focus on the ‘ideational’ or super-structural half of the story (Lang, 2014). Approaching the matter from a historical-materialist perspective, the supposition that a legal regime may be saved by an act ofcollective reimagination would seem unlikely, yet to critique Lang’s argument solelyon this basis would be ungenerous as well as uninteresting. A more interesting approachmight be to view Lang’s conclusion to his ideational story precisely as a product of theparticular social context in which it was articulated and to investigate the relationbetween Lang’s argument and this context, in other words, to look at it as existing withinthe dialectic between the ideational and the material aspects of the global trade regime.Lang’s scholarship, like ‘any scholarly enquiry into the intersubjective frameworks ofmeaning operating in a particular social field’ (Lang, 2014: ___) is produced by this self-Baars 31same dialectic and forms an inseparable part of it.AQ11 An attempt at identifying the specif-ically ideational therefore is necessarily artificial and only tentative or proximate whilstgiving rise to an immediate risk of fetishisation. The production of ideational constructsengaged in by international trade law professionals and legal scholars (and we caninclude Lang himself in this group) is not only ‘structured by habits of thought and formsof rationality characteristic of the field’ (Lang, 2014: ___) but also influenced in somedegree by their class allegiances: Characteristic of the material context (the web ofmaterial relations) from within which and according to the logic of which, they oper-ate. International trade lawyers and scholars, members of international civil society,non-governmental organization (NGO) and United Nation (UN) professionals workingon issues affected by international trade law generally belong to a specific professionalsubset of local elites and the ‘global capitalist class’. For this group, an attachment toliberal values such as the rule of law forms the unstated premise to all meaning-creation that is never interrogated or fundamentally challenged.It is when Lang calls for the ‘remoralization of international trade law’ that he mostclearly evokes the language that is characteristic of this intellectual attitude, as evidenced,amongst others, in the writings of what one might regard as his intellectual predecessor,John Ruggie. Rather than arguing that in a ‘post-liberal age’, we must reconceive the col-lective purpose of international trade law, I would argue that it is exactly this call itself thatdefines the shift from neo-liberalism to what one might perhaps call ‘late liberalism’, butwhat to all intents and purposes is very much an iteration of liberalism and emphaticallynot ‘post-liberalism’ (Baars, 2011: 429). This is the moment of an attempted ideologicalreinvention of liberalism at the precise time of global crisis and unprecedented global pop-ular resistance to the reigning economic order. The ‘moralization of markets’ in the moveto ‘global governance’ specifically in the shape of the development of regimes such as‘corporate social responsibility’ and ‘socially responsible investment’ – key aspects ofRuggie’s ‘embedded liberalism thesis’ (Ruggie, 2008) – has been critiqued as in factamounting to the ‘marketization of morality’ by Ronen Shamir (Baars, 2011; Shamir,2008, 2010). In the context of Lang’s particular argument relating to the ideational devel-opment (and reinvention) of international trade law in the face of challenges brought to itframed as arguments from the fields of human rights and environmental law, one couldadjust Shamir’s broad argument as follows. Rather than a ‘marketization of morality’ thereimagination of international trade law’s collective purpose through its ‘remoralisation’through human rights and environmental law concessions leads to the confirmation that‘human rights’ and ‘trade law’ are two sides of the same coin and operate according to thesame logic, which is the logic of capitalism (Baars, 2012).For the sake of international trade law, Lang’s argument remains on the level of theideational. One might read this as a reflection of a certain need, in the interest of the sur-vival of the world trade regime, to adjust the ideological justification of this regime.Lang concedes this project will be difficult to achieve, and hurdles must be cleared(Lang, 2011: 343ff). However, one might argue, it is precisely its perception as difficultthat will make its success appear so much more valuable. By presenting internationaltrade law and human rights as opposites, and performing the discursive concession ofone to the other, a veil of ideational legitimacy is pulled over the continually increasinggap between rich and poor, exploiter and exploited.32 Social & Legal StudiesWhat this also conceals is that in order for the claims of the exploited to be able to com-pete with those of the exploiter, they are expected to be articulated as human right claims.The desire to be free from exploitation must be translated into a ‘right to development’ anda claim to a certain measure of material wealth. The exploited must articulate ‘claims foradmittance to law’ (Douzinas, 2010: 95AQ12 ). The practical effect of this is that individualsaffected by the particular excesses of capitalism in conflict are constituted as rights-holders who must seek to negotiate the ‘price’ of the harm done to them, under the com-modified responsibility relationship of global governance (Baars, 2012: Chapter 6). Theneo-liberal global legal ‘marketplace’ thus persists and is extended rather than rescinded.After all this, then, it comes as somethingof a surprise thatLang concludes his argument –in the original book but not in his essay in these pages –with one final recommendationwithwhich, as it happens, I findmyself in full agreement. Having focused on retelling the historyof the ideational, Lang concedes that there is a need ‘for more work [to be done] whichfocuses explicitly on the substantive outcomes of international economic law, tracing indetail the lines of causation from choices made in the global context through to their conse-quences on the ground’ (Lang, 2011: 352). It is in this seemingly contradictory call that wemay find the seeds of the new, truly critical project of international trade law scholarship.Those of us trained in the technical language and workings of the law have a contributiontomakehere:Wecan andmust showconcretely howboth international trade lawandhumanrights law constantly work hand in hand to uphold the same structures of governance anddomination, how ‘law congeals capitalism’. One cannot but hope that when the time comesfor Lang towrite the companion piece to his ideational exploration, this will be the directioninwhich his argumentwill turn.Without this, any rearticulation of the ‘purposes of the tradelaw regime’ would be a mere restatement of power cloaked in the mantle of legitimacy(Uvin, 2007: 603). With this, such work performed by international lawyers can hope tomake a contribution to effecting a realmaterial change. In the end, however,wemust remindourselves, such change will not be brought about primarily by lawyers and legal scholarsthrough their ideational work, but by law’s objects, the exploited, displaced and ‘wretched’of the earth, through their material actions.Notes1. AccordingAQ13 to the historical-materialist tradition, any historical change in general is conceived tobe the result of the constant dialectical interplay between contradicting forces in society.Change is not the result solely of our ideas or of our ‘willing’ of change. For further discussion,see, for example, Ollman (2003).2. For further development of the idea of the global capitalist class, see, for example, Hanafi andTaber (2005) and Uvin (2007: 603).3. This is partly the role of the local and international UN/NGO professional classes that channelthe subaltern’s claims into the structures of power. See further Baars (2012: Chapter 6).4. For a similar call, more generally to (Marxist) international lawyers, see Rasulov (2008: 259).ReferencesBaars G (2011) ‘Reform or revolution?’ Polanyian v. Marxian perspectives on the regulation of‘the economic’. Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 62(4): 415–431.Baars 33Baars G (2012) Law(yers) Congealing Capitalism: On the (Im)Possibility of Restraining Businessin Conflict through International Criminal Law. PhD Thesis, University College London.Douzinas C (2010) Adikia: On communism and rights. In: Zizek S and Douzinas C (eds) The Ideaof Communism. London, UK: Verso, pp. 81–100.Hanafi S and Taber L (2005)Donors, International Organizations, Local NGOs: Emergence of thePalestinian Globalized Elite. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies.Lang A (2011) World Trade Law after Neoliberalism: Reimagining the Global Economic Order.Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Lang A (2014) World trade law after neoliberalism. Social & Legal Studies (this issue).[Pleaseupdate reference Lang (2014).]Ollman B (2003) The Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method. Chicago, IL: University ofIllinois Press.Rasulov A (2008) The nameless rapture of the struggle: Towards a Marxist class-theoreticapproach to international law. Finnish Yearbook of International Law 19: 243–294.Ruggie JG (2008) Taking embedded liberalism global. In: Ruggie JG (ed) Embedding Global Mar-kets: An Enduring Challenge. London, UK: Ashgate, p. 234.Shamir R (2008) Corporate social responsibility: Towards a new market-embedded morality?The-oretical Inquiries in Law 9: 32.Shamir R (2010) Capitalism, governance and authority: The case of corporate social responsibility.Annual Review of Law and Social Science 6: 531–553.Uvin P (2007) From the right to development to the rights-based approach: How ‘human rights’entered development. Development in Practice 17(4/5): 597–606.Historicizing InternationalTrade LawAkbar RasulovUniversity of Glasgow, UK1. The argument which Andrew Lang presents in his essay – and before that in thesimilarly titled monograph (Lang, 2011) to which, as he puts it, the former ismeant to ‘serve[] as an entre´e’ (Lang, 2014: ___) – is very complex, multifacetedand ambitious. In these pages, I am only going to focus on one, relatively narrow,aspect of it, which should not, of course, be taken to suggest that I do not find therest of Lang’s contentions sufficiently interesting or deserving of attention; quiteon the contrary. Lang’s essay provides, to my mind, one of the most compelling,nuanced, and sophisticated accounts of the history of international trade law(ITL) offered in recent years. Tracing out its various strands has proved without34 Social & Legal Studies

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