States can raise financing through relationships that depend on market accountability or political accountability, respectively, and one can be substituted with the other. In the EU, market accountability as a dominant mode of raising financing has been steadily supplanted in the EU by political accountability in the relationship between debtor states, on the one hand, and creditor states, the EU and the ECB, on the other, thus engendering democratic tensions in the evolution of EU economic governance. One way of solving the widely maligned ‘democratic deficits’ within the EMU would be to restore the market accountability enshrined in the Treaties, as evident in part on the ban on monetary financing, bailouts and state aid. Moreover, market accountability can be likened to the accountability concept of Dawson and Maricut-Akbib, with openness, non-arbitrariness, effectiveness and publicness underpinning various procedural and substantive dimensions of market accountability.

This chapter focuses on the shareholder and its increasingly important place in international economic law and, in particular, international investment law. The increasing importance of the place and role played by shareholders is a consequence of the increasing importance of multinational corporations on the international scene. The more pronounced place and role played by private actors on the international scene leads to the appearance of “new” real parties in interest. Because shareholders qualify as “investors,”,+ they are protected under international investment treaties and can have recourse to investor-state arbitration. As investors, the protection of shareholders in international investment law must be acknowledged in order to preserve the latter’s legitimacy. This chapter also identifies the different conflicts of interest which may exist among different categories of shareholders (minority and majority shareholders or foreign and domestic shareholders), as well as among shareholders and creditors. These conflicts of interest are important to understanding the dynamic at stake in shareholders’ claims for reflective loss and, in some instances, can justify shareholders’ claims for reflective loss in investment arbitration.

Financial structures were not the only reason for middling insecurity. Imprisonment was also social and circumstantial. It was the result of decisions made by creditors, based upon perceptions of a debtor’s credibility and reputation. Chapter 3 turns to the perspectives of creditors. The positions and reasoning of those who used the prison as a tool are crucial to understanding insecurity. The chapter considers why creditors chose to send their debtors to prison and how it was in their interests to do so. Imprisonment depended upon how economic failure was perceived, as well as upon creditors’ entangled financial, social and emotional positions. While imprisonment could provide a useful tool for enforcing contracts within an economy that offered little protection to those who lent money, the importance of emotion and social perceptions of failure tempers the weight that we afford to ‘rational’ decision-making within the modernising economy. Like credit, debt was understood as part of a moral economy.