Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Virginia Journal of International Law
Publication Date
Fall 2025
ISSN
0042-6571
Page Number
63
Keywords
international trade law, domestic stability
Disciplines
International Trade Law | Law
Abstract
This Article challenges the theoretical frameworks through which we have so far apprehended the crisis of the liberal international trade and economic order, precipitated by relentless unilateral action--whether tariffs or industrial policy--especally in the United States. It argues that the conventional concerns about unilateralism overlook the ways in which unilateraism has been--and can be-- a foundation for international order rather than its antithesis. Our contemporary difficulty is that we typically understand unilateral action as a breach of an international norm. This way of thinking follows from nineteenth-century liberal internationalism. But a deeper tradition in the law of nations shows that unilateral action--at least when it is designed to internally reform a state-- provides a basis for meaningful participation in international order. That insight,far from being abandoned in an earier time, was central to the emergence of a post-Wor/d War II international economic order, which was based on the idea of economic cooperation between states pursuing domestic policies of full employment. Thus, unilateralism of a certain form is valuable to the international order. This Article excavates that form and the internal criteria by which we might judge a states unilateral action. It shows that unilateral action should be endorsed as laying the foundations of a cooperative international trade and economic order only when the po/icies it embodies are designed to create domestic economic stability, especially by mitigating inequality between wage labor and capital.
Recommended Citation
Sannoy Das,
Domestic Stability and International Trade Order, 66 Virginia Journal of International Law. 63
(2025)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/faculty-publications/1726