Papers presented by Madeleine Dungy since 2019
2023 Detroit, MI, United States
"Shifting Relations between Trade Law and Business Practice in the League of Nations"
Madeleine Dungy, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Abstract:
This paper examines the interaction between public and private rule-making in early multilateral trade law, under the League of Nations. It will focus on key areas of public trade law that helped business leaders create new normative structures to organize their own activity – namely contract arbitration, patents, and commercial representation. In these areas, League of Nations – working in tandem with the International Chamber of Commerce – sponsored formal intergovernmental treaties that enshrined business actors’ normative authority. This process of private ordering had already begun in the nineteenth century in an ad-hoc way but became more systematic and integrated under the League of Nations and ICC. This paper will engage with the bourgeoning scholarship on the construction of transnational legal orders as a key facet of globalization, past and present. This paper is part of a forthcoming monograph, Order and Rivalry: Rewriting the Rules of International Trade. It traces the formation and development of multilateral trade structures in the aftermath of the First World War in response to the marginalization of Europe in the world economy, the use of private commerce as a tool of military power and the collapse of empires across Central and Eastern Europe. Focusing on the League of Nations, the book shows that this institution’s legacy was not to initiate a linear forward march towards today’s World Trade Organization, but rather to frame an open-ended and conflictual process of experimentation that is still ongoing.
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2023 Detroit, MI, United States
"Planned Environmental Migration: Internationalizing the End of ‘Land Settlement,’ 1930-1970"
Madeleine Dungy, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Abstract:
This paper will discuss international efforts to coordinate agricultural migration from Europe to Latin America. These efforts began in the 1930s in the International Labor Organization (ILO) and then were picked up after 1945 by the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM, the predecessor of today’s International Organization for Migration). Both institutions explicitly presented “migration for settlement” as a program of social and environmental transformation. The goal was to send European farmers to establish commercially viable farms. This program was motivated by a complex conception of economic, social, and environmental sustainability – understood as predicable profits, as inter-generational family continuity, and as the cultivation of soil nutrients. These goals often proved difficult to combine in practice, and international policy priorities often conflicted with local policies and commercial realities. The campaign to internationalize ‘migration for settlement’ is noteworthy because it absorbed considerable institutional resources and because it lasted for a remarkably long time, from the 1930s through the 1970s. Thus, it covered the transition from the late League of Nations – where there was a strong emphasis on rural development – to the early United Nations – where industry-driven models of modernization gained wide purchase. This paper will explore how the relative position accorded to agricultural migration changed in relation to other economic objectives as international organizations responded to the shift from a world economy organized around empires to a world economy organized around nation-states.