In 1927, when Coquet launched his movement for a European customs union, Riedl initiated an elaborate programme to use the League to bring about Anschluss gradually by embedding Austro-German bilateral economic integration in a multilateral system. He sought to bypass the formal treaty constraints that prevented the Austrian and German governments from pursuing this course by facilitating low-level administrative rapprochement through business organizations, using the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). By the time Riedl arrived in the ICC in 1927, it had already become an important organizational auxiliary to the League. Up to that point, the ICC’s engagement in League trade policy had focused on specific areas of business regulation, such as commercial arbitration and trade credit. Riedl pushed the ICC into a more political role by intervening in debates about the fundamental architecture of trade treaties. In the process, Riedl provoked new debate about the League’s authority to mediate relations between national governments and international business.

This chapter examines institutional hybridity in the International Chamber of Commerce’s (ICC) regulatory prowess as the primary organized business interlocutor for intergovernmental bodies in global commerce. The empirics follow various ways in which the ICC embeds itself in global institutions through issue-definition, agenda-setting, and rulemaking. Institutional linkages allow the ICC to organize international markets while boosting the privilege of global corporate elites to reap the benefits of trade and investment at the expense of others. Balancing the legitimacy blowbacks to this elitism is at the core of the politics of institutionalizing rules for global commerce. Moreover, the study of the ICC helps us see that “transnational private authority” need not necessitate a retreat of the state, but rather a recomposition of what it means to regulate across borders. The ICC’s Lived Sovereignty relies fundamentally on the Idealized Sovereignty of governments to keep its institutional status.

This chapter ponders the apparent neglect of the history of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) by jurists and historians alike and ventures to offer some explanations. It also provides an overview of the Age of Institutionalization, from approximately the 1920s to the 1950s. This period witnessed the creation of arbitral institutions, such as the Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce in 1923 and the American Arbitration Association in 1926. These institutions not only administered cases but also established rules and principles, such as the ICC Rules of Arbitration. Through such codification efforts, they also developed international commercial arbitration from within. The Age of Institutionalization was marked by a much more internationalist spirit or legal consciousness. It lasted until the 1950s, when the 1958 Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (the New York Convention) ushered international commercial arbitration into a new era.

This chapter is divided into two sections. The first probes the origins of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and its Court of Arbitration, from the Atlantic City Conference (1919) to the foundation of the ICC (1920) and its Court of Arbitration (1923). The creation of the Court, a body set up to administer arbitration cases, was a clear sign that international commercial arbitration was becoming more institutionalized. The second section explores the tension between renewal and anxiety in the Age of Institutionalization. It presents the Geneva Protocol on Arbitration Clauses (1923) and the Geneva Convention on the Execution of Foreign Awards (1927) as expressions of that anxiety and the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (1958) as signaling the swing toward renewal. Along the way, this chapter hopes to demonstrate that the key “builders” of the current regime of international commercial arbitration were not the “grand old men” described by Dezalay and Garth in their seminal book Dealing in Virtue, but predominantly private business leaders and members of arbitral institutions.

This chapter provides an overview of each of the book’s chapters and summarizes a key objective of the book, which was to identify three broad phases or periods in the modern history of international commercial arbitration: the Age of Aspirations, the Age of Institutionalization, and the Age of Autonomy. It also asks whether we are entering a new age in the modern history of international commercial arbitration – an Age of Disruption, where the tension between the mercatocracy and the State is exacerbated by unfamiliar circumstances that could threaten the integrity of the arbitration system as a whole. These circumstances include such phenomena as the rise of nationalism, the reemergence of protectionism, and broader fears about globalization. It points to what Judge Crawford described as a “risk of erosion in the current political climate,” and asks whether this “erosion” could signal a shift from the Age of Autonomy to the Age of Disruption.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, there was no tacit or express global agreement to reduce or eliminate dual nationality. In fact, dual nationality has proliferated since the 1970s. While the erosion of coverture globally has, for the most part, eliminated the problems faced by married women with regard to their nationality, little other progress has been made on the subject. In the postwar world, the international legal system shifted away from nationality and protection by states – embracing instead an individualist paradigm. As Eduard Benes said, ``The protection of minorities in the future should consist primarily in the defense of human democratic rights.’’ And so, alongside the Charter of the United Nations was born the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. René Cassin, one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration, like Benes, was dubious and, at times, scornful of the minorities regime. The Universal Declaration as a set of legal norms and principles, thus, should be read in the context of the rejection of group-based rights systems – particularly those dependent upon nationality as a legal status. In its place emerged a system of individualized international rights.

While politicians, scholars, and lawyers argued about whether individuals ought to be subjects of international law and bear rights within the international order, commercial organizations, like the International Chamber of Commerce, began to advocate for the protection of property and investments at the international level. Investors, they argued, ought to be able to hale a state before a neutral tribunal in order to defend their property rights. While refugees did not have access to international courts or tribunals to defend their rights in the interwar period, commercial organizations increasingly did.

The chapter considers, on the one hand, the ways in which international arbitration was a source of inspiration for Philip Jessup when he elaborated the notion of transnational law. On the other hand, it considers how the notion of transnational law constitutes a relevant tool for the analysis of international arbitration. The chapter relies in particular on the documents gathered in the Philip C. Jessup Collection at the Library of Congress, which include early drafts and preparatory works for the Storrs Lectures at Yale University. It examines three discrete stories that each illustrate one salient aspect of the notion of transnational law (norms, actors and processes) and its relevance for the analysis of international arbitration.