Document Type
Book Review
Publication Title
The George Washington International Law Review
Publication Date
2006
Volume
38
First Page
831
Abstract
(Excerpt)
It has become fashionable in some quarters of the United States to denounce the "outsourcing" of American sovereignty to international courts, the United Nations (UN), and the World Trade Organization (WTO).The central debate between these "sovereigntists" opposed to broad U.S. participation in international organizations (IOs) and "internationalists" who support such participation is not over the legal effect of conferring governmental functions on international institutions, but rather over the implications of such conferrals for democracy and national security: Does participation in international institutions strengthen or weaken U.S. democracy? Do IOs limit the ability of the government to protect national security?
The extreme end of the sovereigntist side of the debate has been marked by nativist fears of erosion of the American social and political fabric, and, most notably, by the belief that participation in international institutions and judicial processes actually weakens national security. At the other extreme, some internationalists, to the detriment of their own argument, have ignored the rumblings of popular opinion against an international trade system that is perceived to sacrifice local welfare and quality of life to corporate necessity and a UN that at times appears more concerned with protecting its own institutional reputation than with solving global problems.
Against this background comes Professor Dan Sarooshi's International Organizations and Their Exercise of Sovereign Powers, which seeks to provide a conceptual and legal framework to explain how international organizations carry out functions that traditionally have rested with national governments. In an earlier work, Professor Sarooshi formulated organizing principles for the ways in which individual Member States are empowered to carry out the functions of international institutions. The current project presents itself as obverse to the first, formulating organizing principles for the ways in which international institutions carry out the functions traditionally associated with states.
Comments
Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1076882