5 - State Responsibility as World Order

Summary

The establishment of the League of Nations created institutional opportunities to codify state responsibility. Legal experts had two sources upon which to draw for codification purposes: the US practice of alien protection and German theories of international responsibility. Anglo-Americans expected to crystallize their arbitral gains through codification. Latin Americans sought to proceed with codification more systematically, based on German theory. Experts within world bodies were irreconcilably split over the relevance of international arbitration for decades. By the 1960s, the US approach became a minority view within world bodies. Latin American representatives had accumulated sufficient voting power to reject any attempt to entrench the US practice. This history ends in 1962, with the replacement of Special Rapporteur García-Amador with Roberto Ago. Under Ago’s leadership, the UN uncoupled its efforts from the intra–American arbitrations and codified state responsibility based on German theory instead.