Regional Agreements and International Law

• Author: Xu Qian
• Position: Hundred Talents Program Fellow, Guanghua Law School of Zhejiang University
• Pages: 35-53

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Unit 3: Regional Agreements and International Law1

Moderator: Xu Qian (Hundred Talents Program Fellow, Guanghua Law School of

Zhejiang University)

Wei Shen (Professor, KoGuan School of Law at Shanghai Jiaotong University)

Topic: Reflections on Multilateralism and Regionalism

Hello, everyone!

My topic today is “Reflections on Multilateralism and Regionalism”, but will focus

more on minilateralism, so “Reflections on minilateralism and regionalism” might be a

more reasonable title. There are many views on multilateralism and minilateralism. For

example, “Multilateralism is the practice of coordinating national policies among three or

more countries by means of special arrangements or institutions.” Also, “multilateralism

with fewer parties is minilateralism”. There is a view that during the formation of the

Bretton Woods System, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank’s special

majority voting mechanism itself is a kind of minilateralism. There are also views that

minilateralism is highly effective and is a way for a small number of countries to solve a

certain type of problems.

It is worth noting: minilateralism is not a concept of right or wrong, but a concept of

efficiency.

Chinese scholars seem to be less agreeable with the concept of minilateralism,

believing that multilateralism refers to real multilateralism. The minilateralism outside of

multilateralism is a pseudo-multilateralism, a relatively fake multilateralism.

There are also views that, in addition to quantity, minilateralism is also ad hoc and

issue-oriented; distinguishing multilateralism from minilateralism is not a simple

calculation of quantity, but also includes the type of organizational relationship.

Furthermore, how does minilateralism differ from multilateralism? Mainly, the

participating subjects are limited to specific regions and countries of the Commonwealth.

Minilateralism is exclusive, elitism, procedural injustice, and self-serving.

Chris Brummer is one of the scholars who have recently systematically studied

minilateralism in mainstream American law schools. He published a book titled

“Minilateralism” by Cambridge University Press in 2014. He believes that the dominance

of multilateral trade institutions has been broken, and minilateralism has exclusive

characteristics; this exclusive characteristic has had a relatively large impact on the

cooperation mechanism of multilateralism. He also hopes the United States will continue

the path of minilateralism to promote a trade and investment agenda that will be eventually

beneficial to the United States.

Willian T. Tow pointed out that minilateralism is becoming an increasingly prominent

trend in geopolitics.

At least there is some overlap between multilateralism and regionalism. If they are

two circles, they have intersections and differences. Accordingly, I make some distinctions.

1 This Unit is translated by Qianhan Qian (East China University of Political Science and Law) and Xiaofu

Li (Associate Editor of FLIA Review). The translation has been modified and confirmed by the speakers.

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Today I focus on the operandi of the United States in the practice of minilateralism

from the Donald Trump administration to the Joseph Biden administration. In fact, the

Donald Trump administration is evidently promoting minilateralism. For example, the

United States has withdrawn from some multilateral agreements, and at the same time, is

leading and dominating new small-scale trade agreements, including the United States-

Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and those between the United States and Japan, the

United States and Singapore, the United States and Europe, the United States and South

Korea.

The Joseph Biden administration does not follow the same approaches as the Donald

Trump administration, but applies a new term “New Internationalism”, for example, the

four member states of the Pacific Alliance, the Five Eyes, the three-nation mechanism of

the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. To a certain extent, these also belong

to minilateralism, as a kind of small groupism, or pseudo-multilateralism criticized by

Chinese scholars.

In my opinion, when criticizing the ideologicalization of international trade rules by

the United States, Chinese scholars may view the minilateralism practice of the United

States through an ideological lens or “moral glasses”. But whether multilateralism has 5, 6,

or 164 members as the World Trade Organization, it does not matter whether it is “fake” or

“true”, as the idea of minilateralism is to promote multilateralism that is beneficial to

themselves.

What I will say next is the connotation and theoretical framework of US-orientated

minilateralism.

There is an interesting issue in international economic law —the mathematical

problem of “how many sides are appropriate” for international economic and trade

agreements. From the concept itself, “few” and “small” themselves contain the meaning

that the number of participating parties in the global multilateral system is reduced,

narrowed, and limited, which itself is a dynamic change. It itself does not have a scientific

and quantitative definition. For example, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are all theoretically possible.

The multilateralism that international law scholars talk about is actually a WTO-

centered multilateralism. There is a problem with this multilateralism — the collective

action dilemma, what is also called the efficiency of collective action. The core feature of

minilateralism is to make up for efficiency problems or to solve this efficiency problem.

Therefore, Miles Kahler argues that the “majority” (involving multiple parties) is an

insurmountable obstacle to collective activity, and this is a reality. For example, when it

comes to advancing the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road,

there is also a collective action dilemma: China is leading, and other countries are

cooperating, but they are not promoting the initiative as hard as China. This is a clearer

example of the collective action dilemma.

What are the main goals of minilateralism? One goal is to expand rules. Minilateralism

is to establish some new rules in a small scope, but its purpose is to expand these rules,

resulting in rule spillovers, which play a role in the extension of these rules. Organizations

or other countries can also absorb such rules.

Another goal is to achieve national interests —be it multilateralism or globalization.

In the process of promoting multilateralism or participating in multilateralism, the purpose

of a country is to achieve national interests, such as promoting national development,

improving people’s living standards, and promoting scientific and technological progress.