Papers presented by Filip Batsele since 2019
2023 Detroit, MI, United States
"Investors of the World, Unite! The International Association for the Promotion and Protection of Private Foreign Investments (APPI) and the Genesis of Modern International Investment Law 1958-1968"
Filip Batsele, Ghent University & Université Libre de Bruxelles
Abstract:
In the past few years, lawyers, historians, and economists have increasingly engaged in interdisciplinary research to better understand the origins and functioning of the legal rules underlying capitalism and the global economic order. One of the pillars of that order is the rulebook of international investment law, a set of mostly treaty-based rules that define the relationship between home state, host state and foreign investor. In this area, there is still little that we know of lobbying by the actors that investment treaties are meant to protect, namely foreign investors themselves. This paper sheds light on this question, analysing the activities of the International Association for the Promotion and Protection of Private Foreign Investments (APPI), a transnational business interest association (BIA) that was created by European companies in 1958 and that lobbied for better protection of private foreign investment under international law. Using a diverse set of private (chiefly the Historical Archive of Deutsche Bank, the TotalEnergies Archives as well as the personal archives of the Dutch former Shell-director Dirk U. Stikker) and public (the German and Swiss National Archives) archives, I discuss the origins, structure, iimportance,and success of the group. The paper shows that APPI served as an umbrella organisation for (chiefly) Big Oil and Big Banks to coordinate their lobbying in the area of international investment law. It analyses how during a period of 10 years (1958-1968), it was the most influential BIA in lobbying for three different multilateral investment treaties (an investment code, investor-state arbitration and investment insurance). Despite significant power and expertise, the paper also paints a nuanced picture of APPI’s eventual influence, showing that business interest did not automatically translate into policy success, and that APPI was mostly unsuccessful at achieving its directly desired legal outcomes.