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INVESTMENT LAW’S ALIBIS
This book aims to connect narratives associated with the past to the
international regime that protects property and contract rights of foreign
investors. The book scrutinizes justifications offered to sustain practices
associated with colonialism, imperialism, civilized justice, debt and devel-
opment, revealing that a number of the rationales offered in support of
investment law disciplines replicate those arising out of this discredited
past. By revealing these linkages, the book raises concerns about investment
law’s premises. It would appear that the normative foundations for today’s
regime reproduces discursive practices that are less than compelling. The
book argues that citizens deserve more than historically discredited reasons
to justify the exercise of power over them – something more than mere
pretext.
A list of books in the series can be found at the end of this volume.
DAVID SCHNEIDERMAN
University of Toronto
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009153492
DOI: 10.1017/9781009153515
© David Schneiderman 2022
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: Investment Law among the Ruins 1
1 Colonialism of Investment Law 16
2 Imperialism of Investment Law 38
3 The Decline and Rise of Standards of Civilized Justice 66
4 The Stifling Threat of Debt 89
5 The Difficulty of Decolonizing Investment Law 129
6 Divesting for Development 153
Conclusion 171
Bibliography 180
Index 225
vii
Introduction
Investment Law among the Ruins
1
Benjamin (1999) at 833.
2
Memmi (1991). I was thumbing through a second hand, English language paperback
edition (Memmi 1967), which I purchased while pursuing undergraduate studies at
McGill university.
3
For an introduction to the regime, see my two previous books: Schneiderman (2008) and
Schneiderman (2013). On the number of international investment agreements in force, see
UNCTAD (2020) at 106.
4
On not ‘privileging methodology’, see Foucault (1977a) at 404. On the uncertainty of
proceeding without a clear methodological path forward, see Foucault (1985) at 7 (‘as to
those, in short, for whom to work in the midst of uncertainty and apprehension is
tantamount to failure, all I can say is that clearly we are not from the same planet’).
5
In the nature of a ‘discursive account of power’ as theorized by Jessop and Sum (2001) at
93. I was operating under the influence of Hall (1977) and Hall (1982).
6
Stoler (2013).
7
If the terms Global North and South are ‘slippery’ terms, smoothing over many complex-
ities, I refer to this hemispheric binary in order to emphasize not only the gaping divide
but the intimate relationship between the two. See discussion in Comaroff and Comaroff
(2012) at 45–47.
8
Reciprocity in treaty making is no new thing. The question is whether this reciprocity is
genuine. See Roy (1961) at 876, 882–83.
9
Dolzer and Schreuer (2012) at 5.
10
On rupture versus reinscription, inspired by Foucault, see Stoler (1995) at 89, 199.
11
Sornarajah (2019) at 193.
12
GA Resolution 3281 (XXIX) of 1974.
13
Sornarajah (2010) at 82–84.
14
Sornarajah (2015) at 86.
15
Sornarajah (2019) at 179.
16
Miles (2013) at 32.
17
Miles (2013) at 32, 387. For Miles, the past ‘is of fundamental importance to the shape
and character’ of present-day investment law in Miles (2013) at 32. It drives the cycles of
‘constraint’ and ‘resistance’, helping to explain the rise of the contemporary regime as a
response to the threat posed by the NIEO in Miles (2013) at 115. Miles devotes only the
first half of her book to this account of investment law’s origins (in ‘Part I: Historical
Evolution of Foreign Investment Law’). See my review in Schneiderman (2014).
18
Anghie (2004) at 224.
19
Van Harten (2020) at 17.
20
For example, Vandevelde (2017).
21
See, for example, Pinchis-Paulsen (2018), Blandford (2017) and Paparinskis (2013) parts
I and II.
22
See, for example, Perrone (2021) and St. John (2018).
23
An exception is the edited collection of disparate papers in Schill, Tams and Hoffmann
(2018).
24
Bloch (1992) at 32. Similarly, when ‘one discursive formation is substituted for
another . . . [it] is not to say that all objects or concepts, all enunciations or all theoretical
choices disappear’ in Foucault (1972) at 173.
25
Orford (2012) at 9 observes that, for lawyers, the past is ‘constantly being retrieved as a
source or rationalization of present obligation’.
26
Koskenniemi (2016a) at 106.
27
See Arvidsson and McKenna (2019) for a helpful mapping.
28
Foucault (2003a) at 66 describes history’s functions as ensuring the ‘greatness of the
events or men of the past could guarantee the value of the present’.
29
Anghie (2004) at 241.
30
Orford (2013) at 175 and Orford (2017) at 304. See also Craven (2016) at 34 (inter-
national law is a ‘field of practice whose meaning and significance is constantly organized
around, and through the medium of, a discourse that links present to past’). Even
d’Aspremont’s call for a radical historical critique of international law calls upon scholars
‘to redraw the past and mobilise it to serve a present claim’. See d’Aspremont (2019)
at 114.
31
Orford (2013) at 176. Orford has since authored a book-length response to contextual
historians, identifying a variety of methods and styles that international lawyers can
deploy as they engage with history, in Orford (2021) at 318–19.
32
Orford (2013) at 174.
33
Foucault (1978b) at 86 famously wrote that ‘power is tolerable only on condition that it
mask a substantial part of itself’.
34
D’Aspremont (2020) at 481.
35
The term ‘matrix of practices’ is a mash up of Foucault’s ‘discursive practices’ and his
‘regime of practices’. Foucault describes discursive practices as not confined merely to
what is said but ‘embodied in technical processes, in institutions, in patterns for general
behavior, in forms for transmission and diffusion, and in pedagogical forms which, at
once, impose and maintain them’ in Foucault (1971a) at 200. Bacchi and Bonham (2014)
at 177 describe ‘discursive practice/s’ as ‘Foucault’s primary analytic category’. The term
‘regime of practices’ is described by Foucault ‘as places where what is said and what is
done, rules imposed and reasons given, the planned and the taken-for-granted meet and
interconnect’ in Foucault (1980a) at 248. I prefer ‘matrix’ over ‘regime’ in order to
distinguish this network from the investment law regime.
36
Scott (1995) at 204.
37
No single thread predominates. See Forst (2017) at 45 (‘A modern economy is not based
on a single grand narrative alone’).
38
An understanding of ruination as a ‘process’ is described by Stoler (2013), particularly at
7 and 11.
39
Black (1979) at 61 and Holthouse (1846) at 17.
40
See Derrida (2002) at xxvii.
41
We are ‘justifying beings’, Forst (2017) at 50 reminds us.
42
Forst (2017) at 50–51. Mantena (2010) at 17 distinguishes between ‘justifications’ and
‘alibis’ for empire, identifying a movement away from ambitious universalist and civiliz-
ing justifications for empire in the direction of a pragmatic and tentative mode of empire
associated with ‘indirect rule’ (at 11–12). I prefer, as in colloquial usage, to not distinguish
too sharply between the two (see OED, 3rd, 2012).
43
Foucault (1977a) at 404, translated in Foucault (2003a) at 287–88.
44
Hereinafter Archaeology. By analytics, I borrow Koopman’s distinction between
Foucault’s analytics (or methods) and concepts in Koopman 2014 at 90–91.
45
Foucault (1969a) at 62.
46
Consider Kermode’s (1973) at 8 harsh judgment: ‘for the most part an elaborate set of
methodological doodles in the margins of the old . . . one easily grows impatient’.
Compare Deleuze (1988) at 18, who describes the book as a ‘poem of his previous works’.
Rueff comments that the book did not arouse zealous critique, as had Les Mots et les
Choses (The Order of Things, 1970a), but it did sell 11,000 copies in its first year in Rueff
(2015) at 1423.
47
Foucault (1972) at 16–17 and Foucault (1969a) at 61. Foucault’s archaeology was
apparently inspired by prior historians of systems of thought, particularly Georges
Dumézil, in Karup (2021).
48
Associated with the ‘whig interpretation’ of history. See Butterfield (1931).
49
Foucault (1972) at 145.
50
Foucault (1972) at 155 (‘A discursive formation is not, therefore, an ideal, continuous,
smooth text that runs beneath the multiplicity of contradictions, and resolves them in the
calm unity of coherent thought’). Foucault, however, expresses sympathy with Braudel
and the Annales school (Braudel 1958) and its account of history without subjects. On
this opposition, and affinities with third-generation Annales school historians, see Burke
(2015) at 130–31, Hacking (1981) at 29–30 and Dean (1994) at 37–42.
51
Foucault (1972) at 173. See also Foucault (1970a) at 50 (discontinuity begins with ‘erosion
from the outside’, by which he means ‘culture’). Koskenniemi (2001) at 3, 9 is animated
by Foucauldian discontinuities, describing a ‘radical break’ in the field of international
law in the course of the nineteenth century.
52
Foucault (1972) at 173.
53
Foucault (1972) at 120. I interpret the call by d’Aspremont (2019), to unlearn accepted
markers, periodisation and causal sequencing as following in Foucault’s footsteps.
54
Foucault (1972) at 120. For a study of contemporary debates over periodization of
international human rights law, see Hoffmann and Assy (2019).
55
‘As you know’, Foucault insisted, ‘no one is more of a continuist than I am.’ To ‘recognize
a discontinuity’, he says, ‘is never anything more than to register a problem that needs to
be solved’ in Foucault (1980a) at 248.
56
Historically ‘definite discursive systems for which it is possible to assign thresholds and
conditions of birth and experience’ in Foucault (1991) at 62.
57
Foucault (1991) at 62.
58
Foucault (1972) at 155–56.
59
Foucault (1972) at 173.
60
Foucault (1969a) at 57.
61
Stoler (1995) at 72.
62
Agamben (1999) at 139.
63
Vuillemin, proposing a chair on the ‘history of systems of thought’ to which Foucault was
elected, quoted in Elden (2017) at 11.
64
I believe this is what Rasulov (2020) at 9 means by ‘strategic deployment of history . . . for
the purpose of intra-disciplinary ideological programming’ (emphasis in original
removed). It is not quite what Carr (2001) at 117 had in mind when he characterized
as ‘objective’ the historian who interprets the past in order ‘to project his vision into
the future’.
65
Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982) at viii and Gutting (1989) at 259. Deleuze (1988) at
31 intimates that this would have been self-evident to Foucault (‘Naturally, environments
also produce statements, just as statements produce environments’).
66
Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982) at 95.
67
Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982) at 117. Foucault (1985) at 8 acknowledges his debt to
their critique.
68
Hacking (1981) at 33.
69
It is hard to explain Foucault’s earlier work as being preoccupied only with discourse.
‘This defines them far too narrowly’, complains Peltonen (2004) at 210.
70
Said (1982) at 61. What was ‘lacking’ with the problem of ‘discursive regime’, was the
effects of power peculiar to the play of statements’. The ‘central problem of power’ had
not yet properly been isolated’, Foucault (1976a) at 303 admits.
71
Deleuze (1988) at 32 and 49, referring to Foucault (1977b).
72
Foucault (1972) at 120. ‘Archaeology’, he declares, ‘reveals relations between discursive
formations and non-discursive domains (institutions, political events, economic practices
and processes)’ in Foucault (1972) at 162. Foucault acknowledges, in a set of written
responses to queries, that discursive formations – the ‘whole set of objects, types of
formulation, concepts and theoretical options’ – are ‘invested in institutions, techniques,
collective and individual behavior, [and] political operations’ in Foucault (1968) at 415.
Shortly after Archeology’s publication, Foucault acknowledges that knowledge-savoir is
‘embodied not only in theoretical texts or empirical instruments but also in a whole set of
practices and institutions’ in Foucault (1969c) at 7. Later, Foucault (1980c) at 194 adds
‘architectural arrangements, regulations, laws, administrative measures, scientific state-
ments, philosophic propositions, morality, philanthropy, etc’.
73
Foucault (1969b) at 66. This is the ‘grande rupture’ that distinguishes his earlier works
from his interest in power (‘rapport de forces’) in Gros (2015) at xxiii.
74
Gutting (1989) at 271.
75
Foucault (2003a) at 8.
76
Foucault (2003a) at 10–11. See also Foucault (1980b) at 83.
77
Foucault (1978a) at 277.
78
Defert (2013) at 274 quoted in Elden (2017) at 22. Gordon (1980) at 244 calls archaeology
‘essential ground’ for genealogy. For Dean (1994) at 33–34, they are ‘complementary’
though genealogy is ‘clearly dominant’. On applying both methods, see the ‘Introduction’
in Foucault (1985) at 11–12.
79
Foucault (1970b) at 54.
80
Foucault (1970b) at 71.
81
Veyne (2010) at 34 interprets Foucault’s discourse as resting upon ‘not only thought, but
also social classes, economic interests, norms, institutions and regulations’.
82
For a helpful summary, see Graham (2012), though she does not precisely capture my
‘method’. Another account congenial to this one can be found in Escobar (2012) at 11
(paying ‘closer attention to the deployment of the discourse [of development] through
practices’.).
83
Foucault (1980b) at 83 and Foucault (1971b) at 144. Boase (2018) at 325 purports to
employ the ‘historical method’ of archaeology that ‘forms part of a geneaological method’.
I believe there is some confusion here. It would be more accurate to describe the work as
inspired by Foucauldian genealogy rather than archaeology.
84
Translated variously as ‘apparatus’, deployment’, ‘set-up’ and ‘economy of power’. See
Peltonen (2004) at 206, Veyne (2010) at 9, 10, 31 (the set-up ‘consists of laws, actions,
words, and practices that constitute a historical formation’). Rabinow and Rose (2003) at
xv describe it as one of the ‘most powerful conceptual tools introduced by Foucault’.
85
Foucault (1980c) at 194. Also see a similar list in Foucault (1978a) at 59 (‘legislative
elements, rules, material set-ups, authoritative phenomena, etc’. that combine ‘mechan-
isms of coercion and contents of knowledge’). These are arrangements that Foucault’s
translator, Graham Burchell, describes as a both ‘strategic and technical’ in Foucault
(2006) xxiii. It ‘cheerfully intermingles things and ideas (one being that of truth),
representations, doctrines and even philosophies with institutions and social and eco-
nomic practices, and so on’ in Veyne (2010) at 33.
86
If this is an overly long list, it is because this ‘multiplicity of forces’ are the many means by
which power is exercised. See discussion in Bussolini (2010) at 92.
87
Foucault (1980c) at 195–96. Summed.
88
Raffnsøe, Gudmond-Høyer and Thaning (2016).
89
Dean (2016) at 106–07.
90
A dispositif of power ‘is a productive instance of discursive practice’, Foucault declares in
(2006) at 13. See also Jessop and Sum (2014) at 114–15.
91
On Foucault’s dispositif enabling resistance see Frost (2019) at 162 (‘the dispositif shows
us that resistance is always possible, and that power is never totalizing’). Also see Butler
(2004) at 193 (the ‘conditions for revolt’ are ‘also occasioned by submission’) and the
possibility of ‘reversibility’ in Foucault (1978a) at 66.
92
Foucault (1978a) at 61.
93
Quijano (2007) at 177.
1
This is Santos’ term (2018) at 109. Grosfuguel calls it ‘classical colonialism’ in (2011).
2
Foucault (1972) at 147.
3
El Habbouch (2019) at 3.
4
Quijano (2007) at 169. Baxi labels this ‘postcolonial legality’ in (2000) and (2012).
5
Mignolo (2018) at 121.
6
Mignolo (2005) at 4, 6.
7
Mignolo (2005) at 4, 6.
8
Mignolo also emphasizes structure in (2005), for example at 7.
9
Mignolo (2018) at 141.
10
Memmi (1991).
11
Osterhammel (1997) at 107 (generalizing risks ‘extreme oversimplification’). On colonial
varieties, its discontinuities and differing political rationalities, see Scott (1995) at 197.
12
This probably had something to do with his expressions of disappointment in the
governments produced out of liberation struggles, chiding them for being narrow-
mindedly corrupt and ineffective in Memmi (2006). This later book was received as a
betrayal for placing blame primarily upon newly liberated nations while mostly ignoring
the role of the colonial powers in ruling the structures of international political economy.
On its unwelcome reception see McBride (2011) and Salessi (2013).
13
Said (1993) at 328 describes Memmi’s book as ‘more simpl[e]’ than Fanon’s account
of colonialism.
14
Fanon (1966) at 40, 30, 73, 56.
15
Memmi (1991) at 147. The two sides are not treated as unitary entities but as exhibiting
some differentiation within. In his ‘portrait of the colonizer’, for instance, Memmi
distinguishes between the ‘colonizer who refuses’ and the ‘colonizer who accepts’ in
(1991) at xix.
16
Memmi (1991) at xvi. Some have hypothesized that the experience of anti-Semitism is
akin to the experience of racism. This may have rendered Memmi in the position of
standing in the shoes of both. Memmi adopts precisely this standpoint in his Portrait of a
Jew (1971) at ix (recalling The Colonizer and the Colonized, Memmi recognizes ‘mechan-
isms common to all oppressions’ in which ‘each possesses specific traits’. Anti-Semitism,
he writes, ‘had an indispensable place in a general picture of contemporary oppression’).
17
Weber (2009) at 152.
18
See Sornarajah (2015) at 29–30; St. John (2018) at 41.
19
Memmi’s analysis is less effective in so far as it does not take more seriously political
economy as a heuristic. He mentions ‘economic liberalism’ only in passing in (2006) at
134. Fanon’s Marxist leanings, by contrast, lead him to be more preoccupied with
economic power and the ‘redistribution of wealth’ in Fanon (1966) at 78. Memmi,
instead, eschews the undercurrent of Marxism present in Fanon’s work. On Memmi’s
evaluation of Fanon, whom he personally knew in Tunis, see Memmi (1973). Fanon
predicted that, in the period of decolonization, multinationals would lay down conditions
that are ‘inacceptable or unrealizable’ and ‘openly hostile’ to these newly formed govern-
ments. Unwilling to undertake any risk, they ‘demand political stability and a calm social
climate which are impossible to obtain when account is taken of the appalling state of the
population as a whole immediately after independence’ at 81–82.
20
Clayton v. Canada at para. 438.
21
Alvarez (2009) at 950. It ‘is not the law of any one national empire’, writes Alvarez, but is
better characterized ‘as the empire of law’ (at 973).
22
Linarelli, Salomon and Sornarajah (2018) at 147. Sornarajah asks elsewhere if history is
‘repeating itself’ in (2010) at 19.
23
Santos (2007).
24
Spivak (1988) at 294.
25
Said (2000) at 451.
26
Said (1982) at 59.
27
‘Postcolonialism’, writes Baxi, ‘is a troubled continent of contested conceptions’ in (2000)
at 540.
28
Fanon (1967a) at 81 defines colonialism as ‘the conquest of a national territory and the
oppression of a people: that is all’.
29
Young (2015) at 9.
30
On action at a distance, see Latour (1987) at 219–23. This is discussed further in
Chapter 2.
31
Arendt (1958) at 126.
32
On the distinction between colonialism and imperialism, see Said (1993) at 8 and
Osterhammel (1997) at 15–22. Hobson (1902) at 4–5 describes as ‘colonialism’ the
migration of Europeans abroad, as an extension of nationality, and imperialism as rule
of an ‘alien and subject people’. Most British colonies, outside of Canada, Australia and
South Africa, were, for this reason, ‘representative of the spirit of Imperialism’. On the
difficulty of carrying out metropolitan visions, see Koskenniemi (2016b) and, in British
North America in particular, Schneiderman (2017b).
33
Young (2015) at 29, 58.
34
Lenin (1975) at 85.
35
Loomba (1998) at 6–7.
36
For example, Alvarez (2009) and, generally, see Tully (2008a). As mentioned, however,
empire is not the focus of this analysis.
37
See Vernon (1971).
38
See the corrective empirical evidence in Aisbett (2010).
39
The adjectives ‘lazy’, ‘impertinent’ and ‘child-like’ will also often be heard voiced under
either regime of rule. See discussion in text associated with notes 98–102, infra.
40
Anghie (2004) at 3.
41
Anghie (2004) at 5.
42
Anghie (2004) at 268.
43
On the idealized nature of these paths to economic success, see Chang (2002) and (2004)
and as ‘origin myth’ see Dussel (2000).
44
Mignolo (2018) at 141.
45
Mignolo (2018) at 140.
46
The research agenda is helpfully summarized in Escobar (2007) at 184.
47
Grosfuguel (2011).
48
Bourdieu (2014) at 121.
49
Bourdieu (2000) at 65.
50
Mignolo (2018) at 187.
51
Bentham quoted in Chatterjee (2011) at 6.
52
Fanon (1967a) at 31.
1.2 Profitability
At ‘the heart of the colonial relationship’ was profitability and privilege.57
According to Memmi, the ‘best possible definition of a colony [is] the
place where one earns more and spends less’.58 Moving to a colony is a
‘voyage to an easier life’. The change of residence ‘must first of all bring
53
Chatterjee (2011) at 11.
54
For Schmitt (1932) at 38 it has always been the sovereign who is the ‘decisive entity’ for
this purpose.
55
Santos (2018) at 110.
56
The intellectual project of decolonization, moreover, is promiscuous – open to a variety of
disciplines (it is ‘transdisciplinary’) and open to scholarship from many locales. See
Escobar (2007) at 190.
57
Memmi (1991) at xii.
58
Memmi (1991) at 4. Alvaredo, Cogneau and Piketty (2017) at 12 (‘In summary, top-rich
French and European settlers enjoyed the living standard of the top-rich metropolitans,
but only “relatively”. While their share in the colony’s income exceeded the one of their
French counterparts, they earned much lower incomes, by a factor of 0.2 to 0.6’). This
does not quite capture the purchasing power of colonists, however.
59
Alvaredo, Cogneau and Piketty (2017) at 3–4.
60
Alvaredo, Cogneau and Piketty (2017) at 9. See further discussion in Section 1.5.
61
Mérignhac (1912) at 205 quoted in Mbembe (2017) at 66 (‘Coloniser, c’est se mettre en
rapport avec des pays neufs, pour profiter des ressources de toute nature de ces pays’).
62
Svedberg (1982) at 22.
63
Svedberg (1982) at 279–80.
64
Cogneau, Dupraz and Mesplé-Somps (2018) at 4.
65
Rodney (2012) at 164. The ‘colonial state used law, taxation and outright force to make
Africans pursue a line favorable to capitalist profits’ at 165. Though there were variations
between colonial states. Frankema (2010) concludes that ‘fiscal regimes were predomin-
antly determined by local circumstances’ at 448.
66
Davitti (2019) at 160–66 (on the failed counterclaim in Urbaser 2016).
67
Voss (1982) at 686.
68
On developmentalist ideology, see Grosfuguel (2000).
69
Tucker (2018) at 68.
70
Suez (2010) at para. 231.
71
Pope and Talbot (2000) at para. 116.
72
Tecmed (2004) at para. 156.
73
Tucker (2018) at 72.
1.3 Improvement
Improvement was central to the colonial mission. Colonized peoples, it is
claimed, also ‘profited’ from colonization. Did the colonizer not ‘open
roads, build hospitals and schools’, Memmi asks?76 Railways were con-
structed and employment opportunities grew as did public expenditure.
Development, in other words, was a cornerstone of the colonial enter-
prise. This is how Guha understands the colonial mission in India.
A discourse of improvement was advanced by metropole authorities so
as to persuade colonial subjects that ‘imperial dominance [was] accept-
able, even desirable’. Western-style education, standardization of weights
and measures, legislation to ensure the smooth operation of markets
across vast geographic distances and a ban on sathi (widow burning)
were all introduced into India by British colonial administrators.77
Tharoor’s book-length accounting of the ‘benefits’ accruing to India in
its economic, social and political domains is unambiguous: Britain’s
colonization of India was ruinous. In terms of wealth creation alone,
the British extracted £18 million per annum between 1765 and 1815.78
The caste system was exploited to ‘create perceptions of difference’,
preventing political unity and ‘justifying British overlordship’.79 The legal
and political system was designed solely to benefit the colonizers,
destroying familiar practices and structures, rather than serving the
interests of the colonized.80 A similar accounting of colonialism in
74
Ubilava (2020) at 548–49 (a study of 133 settled cases of which 86 provided specific
information about the amount claimed at 541–42).
75
Franck (2019) at 173–74. See the discussion in Chapter 5.
76
Memmi (1991) at 113.
77
See Guha (1997) at 31 for a more complete listing of colonial achievements.
78
Tharoor (2016) at 9.
79
Tharoor (2016) at 110.
80
Tharoor (2016) at 89. These were ‘enabling violations, in Spivak (1999) at 371.
81
Rodney (2012) at 261 (the ‘supposed benefits of colonialism’ are discussed in Chapter 6).
As a consequence of colonialism, ‘extraordinary possibilities were wiped out’, Césaire
alleges (1972) at 43.
82
Memmi (1991) at 113. See also Césaire (1972) at 42.
83
Linarelli, Salomon and Sornarajah (2018) at 168.
84
Perrone and Schneiderman (2019). See Chancel, Piketty, Saez, Zucman, et. al (2022) at 10.
85
According to Bonnitcha, Poulsen and Waibel’s assessment, ‘the literature suggests that
investment treaties do have some impact on some investment decisions in some circum-
stances, but they are unlikely to have a large effect on the majority of invetsment
decisions’ in (2017) at 166 (emphasis in original).
86
Colen and Guariso (2013) at 156 (a study of twelve central and eastern European states
challenges ‘the idea that BITs are a desirable policy tool to enhance development’).
87
Bellak (2015) at 19. This result is confirmed in Brada, Drabek and Iwasaki (2021) at 58
(the effect on FDI is ‘so small as to be considered as negligible or zero’) but the authors
acknowledge that better research methods may find a ‘small positive effect’.
88
Pohl (2018) at 19.
89
St. John (2018) at 218 distinguishes between the promise of investment flows and
improving investment climates.
90
The ‘primary purpose’ of the Convention, according to Broches, was to stimulate ‘a larger
flow of private international capital into those countries which wish to attract it’. Quoted
in Prosper Weil’s dissenting opinion in Tokios Tekeles (2004) at para. 3.
91
Poulsen (2015) at 96.
92
For example, Pope and Talbot (2000) at para. 115; Clayton (2015) at para. 438; Tecmed
(2003) at para. 156.
93
See the references in Poulsen (2015) at 96, fn. 127.
1.4 Distrust
Memmi maintained that joined to assertions of the colonizer’s ‘eminent
merits’ was disparagement of the colonized by ‘harp[ing] on the usur-
ped’s demerits’.98 ‘Having chosen to maintain the colonial system’,
Memmi declared, ‘[the colonizer] must contribute more vigor to its
defence than would have been needed to dissolve it completely.’ In which
case, he ‘will argue with vehemence to appear heroic and great’ while he
‘will persist in degrading them [the colonized] using the darkest colours
to depict them’.99 Oft-cited was the ‘trait of laziness’. ‘Nothing could
better justify the colonizer’s privileged position than his industry’,
Memmi observed. Conversely, he would complain that ‘employing the
colonized is not very profitable.100 The colonized were transformed,
instead, into thieves.101 ‘Confronted with a world ruled by the settler’,
Fanon similarly observes, ‘the native is always presumed guilty.’102
94
Dolzer (2005) at 953–54.
95
Paulsson (2010) at 347. One is left to wonder how, from an investor perspective, these
are reconcilable objectives.
96
Paulsson (2010) at 346.
97
Tucker (2018) at 72.
98
Memmi (1991) at 52–53. ‘These two attempts at legitimacy’, he writes, ‘are actually
inseparable’ (at 53).
99
Memmi (1991) at 54.
100
Memmi (1991) at 79.
101
Memmi (1991) at 90.
102
Fanon (1966) at 42. Fanon attributes to the colonizer the belief that the colonized are
‘insensible to ethics’ and exhibit a ‘poverty of spirit’ and ‘constitutional depravity’ at 34.
103
Memmi (1991) at 71.
104
Memmi (1991) at 68.
105
Memmi (1991) at 69.
106
This is Chatterjee’s argument in (2011) at 24–25.
107
Mbembe (2017) at 107.
108
Mbembe (2017) at 109.
109
Vandevelde (2017) at 22.
110
Quoted in St. John (2018) at 178.
111
Tucker (2018) at 64, also at 65.
112
Tucker (2018) at 73.
113
Tucker (2018) at 74.
114
Wälde and Weiler (2002) at 163. I have observed such paternalism at work at inter-
national meetings of the UNCTAD World Investment Forum.
115
Though they might not suffer at the hands of the system as do capital-importing ones.
See Van Harten (2012).
116
Comaroff and Comaroff (2012) at 12.
117
Tucker (2018) at 72.
118
With the qualification that capital-importing states typically will have little leverage in
negotiations with powerful capital-exporting ones. See, for example, discussion in
Poulsen (2015) and the case study in Schneiderman (2009).
1.5 Enclaves
The place, people and its customs ‘are always inferior – by virtue of an
inevitable and pre-established order’, Memmi observes. The colonizer
concedes ‘no merits to the colonial community, recognizing neither its
traditions, nor its laws, nor its ways, he cannot acknowledge belonging to
it himself’.122 We could say that the colonizer prefers to be wilfully
ignorant123 because he can simply rely on notions of ‘right’ by which
he can ‘rule and command’.124 Calvo-like equality of treatment is insuffi-
cient. Another regime, parallel to, even superseding, local law, needs to be
erected which excuses the colonizer from having to familiarize himself
with provincial predilections. A legal enclave is consolidated, conferring
specialized privileges on the foreigner that exempts him from local
conditions that may substantially diminish his privileges. A legal order
‘establishing his exorbitant rights and the obligations of the colonized are
conceived by him’, for his benefit, Memmi explains. The aim is to ‘upset
established rules’ and substitute them for his own.125
In Kenya, for instance, productive communal properties were declared
to be ‘waste’ and ‘unoccupied land’ and so appropriated to the advantage
119
Alden (2005).
120
See discussion in St. John (2018) at 222–26.
121
See Massoud (2014).
122
Memmi (1991) at 68.
123
Mbembe (2017) at 70.
124
Mbembe (2001) at 34.
125
Memmi (1991) at 9.
126
Okoth-Ogendo (2002).
127
Kaneri-Mbote, Odote, Musembi and Kamande (2013) at 17.
128
Rwegasira (2012) c. 2.
129
Frankema (2006) at 12.
130
Memmi (1991) at 95–96.
131
I write about the dampening of democracy as a consequence of the investment rules
regime in Schneiderman (2018a).
132
Memmi (1991) at 98.
133
Polanyi (1944) at 141.
134
Memmi (1991) at 98–99.
135
Even if only lex specialis, says CMS (2003).
136
Ginsburg (2005) at 121.
137
Clayton (2015) at para. 439.
138
There is ‘no general requirement to exhaust local remedies for a treaty claim to exist’
according to the tribunal in Arif (2013) at para. 334.
139
For a critique of Clayton (2015), see Schneiderman (2017a).
140
In circumstances, for instance, where the executive branch encourages an investor to
make an investment, the judicial branch condemns the executive action as illegal, and
the executive then respects the judicial ruling, there can be a denial of FET. See Arif
(2013) discussed in Sattorova (2018) at 146–47.
141
Arif (2013) at para. 537.
142
Massoud (2014) at 19.
143
Contributing to the phenomenon of ‘expansionary trends’ in investment treaty arbitra-
tion. See Sornarajah (2008) and Van Harten (2013) at 159.
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