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Home arrow Research Projects arrow IP1 - Constitutionalism arrow NCCR Publications arrow Spoiling the Party? Multilateralism, Participation, and International Cooperation
Spoiling the Party? Multilateralism, Participation, and International Cooperation Print
Paper prepared for delivery at the conference on "The New International Law", Oslo 15-18 March 2007.
Abstract

In order to understand the prospects of a new international law, we need to look in more detail at the willingness of states to build multilateral legal regimes. How willing are they to act in concert through multilateral treaties to create new law and solve global problems? Theories of both international law and international relations tended to gloss over differences among individual states, focusing instead on general structural impediments to cooperation. But evidently the differences among the constituent members of international society matter. We provide a descriptive statistics of multilateral regime building treaties concluded between 1990-2005 and argue that there is an essential division between states that are regime sponsors, on the one hand, and a core group of states that are regime ‘spoilers’, on the other. Drawing from the literature on peace processes, we develop a taxonomy of spoiling and sponsoring and look at the specific implications of the division: how has the tension between spoilers and sponsors usually been played out? What are common techniques for spoiler management? How do spoilers react to emerging legal regimes? Using selected evidence from case studies, we conclude that the phenomenon of spoiling goes a long way in understanding the prospects of present-day regime-building, and consequently, of a new international law.

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