In August 1993, as the shadow of the Cold War began its slow retreat, the United Nations (UN) Conference on Disarmament decided the time was ripe to negotiate a treaty banning nuclear tests once and for all. The end of superpower competition had led three of the five official nuclear powers – the United States (US), Russia, and Britain – to announce testing moratoriums, and nonnuclear states were eager for a universal ban.1 The biggest potential spoiler was China. A “vocal outsider to the global nuclear order”2 and a “latecomer to the nuclear club,”3 China had historically viewed test ban efforts as “ploys intended to monopolize nuclear weapons and solidify the larger nuclear powers’ advantages.”4

In 2015, the international community adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals with 169 targets as part of a global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The ambition expressed in these goals is unprecedented; the Agenda aims at nothing less than ‘Transforming Our World’. But can this prominent example of global goal-setting, as a new central approach in global governance, help resolve the pressing challenges of economic development, poverty eradication, social justice and global environmental protection? This chapter sets out the central questions our scientific assessment aims to address, as well as the conceptual framework for evaluating the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals. We start with providing an account of the novelty of the Sustainable Development Goals. We then conceptualize the steering effects of global goals as encompassing any behavioural changes of political, economic and societal actors, including normative, institutional and discursive changes. Finally, we detail the assessment process and scope of our meta-analysis, and outline the assessment areas that form the organizing principle for the following chapters of the book.

The object of the chapter is to connect damage awards – the principal means of enforcing investment treaty disciplines – with the ruination produced by the debt crisis of 1980–89, when newly decolonized states experienced forms of tutelage at the hands of international financial institutions. Beginning with a social-theoretical discussion of how debt serves to curb the possibilities for political action, International Monetary Fund borrowing practices in the 1980s are reviewed, then followed by a discussion of the merits of comparison with contemporary investment law. The narrative frames arising during the 1980s debt crisis that resonate in the era of investment treaties are taken up in subsequent sections. In the course of the discussion, the Tethyan Copper award (a US$6 billion award against Pakistan for expropriation of an undeveloped mining site) is discussed. The aim is to reveal that indebtedness in the contemporary world serves functions similar to those in the 1980s, namely, to constrain public capacity in a wide range of sectors.

This chapter reviews the Transnational Legal Process approach to international law, sometimes called the “‘New’ New Haven School of International Law.” The term “School” is used here advisedly, to refer to a school of thought, belief, learning, or scholarship, often named after its place of origin, that comprises like-minded individuals who share common opinion, outlook, philosophy, or membership in the same intellectual, artistic, social, or cultural movement. Like its predecessor – the New Haven School of International Law, which arose after World War II – the Transnational Legal Process, or “New” New Haven, School of International Law of the late twentieth century traces its intellectual roots to Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut, historically the foremost training ground for legal academics in the United States.

But like most intellectual schools, neither school of international legal theory rooted in New Haven included all international lawyers who lived in New Haven, nor did all of the schools’ members reside there.

Amongst international lawyers, the approach to international law often labelled constitutionalism properly emerged at some point in the late 1990s, perhaps mostly inspired by millenarian anxieties. A short century after Oswald Spengler declared the decline of the West, and three quarters of a century after José Ortega y Gasset bemoaned the revolt of the masses marking the end of civilization, some international lawyers expressed concern about the survival of mankind, and proposed that only a reconstructed international law could come to the rescue – and quite a few of these international lawyers hailed from Germany.

This was curious, or so it seemed. The West, far from declining, had just triumphed over the East in the beginning of the 1990s. Western values (typically those endorsed by constitutionalist international lawyers) had already assumed prominence, so much so that Francis Fukuyama could famously proclaim the end of history, inspired by Germany’s national philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. And Germany itself had just been reunited (or united, as the case may be – these matters are politically sensitive).

As far back as the rise of unified Qin dynasty in 221 BCE, Asia’s predominant pattern has been concentrated power, not balance of power. Although Chinese power has waxed and waned over the centuries, what is perhaps most enduring was the centrality of China. Every other political actor that emerged in the past two thousand years emerged within the reality or idea of Chinese power. Regarding state formation, although the initial ideas for the subsequent bureaucratic Chinese state emerged at that time, it was neither pervasive, nor did the ideas result from war. Rather, the Qin state (221 to 206 BC) emerged as a result of hegemony, not about conquest or fighting or war. State formation was a result of unification and the need to administer a massive territory and also consolidate political rule beyond the aristocracy in the state and royal court itself. Indeed, what scant proto-bureaucratic innovations that did arise in Phase I were nascent and superficial in scope, and even in China the full Chinese state is usually seen to have emerged in the 7th and 8th centuries AD, not 800 years earlier during the Qin.

Why do some societies emulate a hegemon, while others do not? Why did most societies accept Chinese civilization while some resisted it, and why do some societies in general emulate a hegemon while other societies resist? Conversely, more rare were societies that rejected Chinese civilization. Located mostly on the sparsely-populated northern and central Asian steppe, some semi-nomadic societies did not see as appropriate or desirable almost anything about Chinese civilization: settled agriculture, written language, and territorial states. The contrast with Korea and Japan – and later, Vietnam – is clear. Culture, not geographic or material interests, explains why some societies did not emulate China.

This chapter traces Japan’s status concerns from the late 19th century leading up to the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty. It examines Japan’s approach to naval power after the First World War and derives expectations for how Japan would react to an international agreement such as the Washington Naval Treaty from two competing perspectives: material interests and IST. It tests these hypotheses through a detailed account of Japan’s approach to the Washington Conference of 1921–1922. It finds that although Japan faced a growing threat from the United States in the Western Pacific, Japan accepted greater restraints on warship construction in order to maintain its access to the great power club, alongside Britain and the United States, as part of the ‘Big Three’ at the conference. Subsequently, the US Immigration Act of 1924, which unprecedentedly banned Japanese immigration to America, served as a major betrayal of Japan’s sacrifices for the sake of the international order, thus altering Japanese perceptions of the openness and fairness of the Washington system. It convinced many moderates that the West would never consider Japan its equal, and it empowered anti-treaty factions begin the costly process of abrogating Japan’s commitment to the Washington system.