EJIL: Talk!

Earlier this month we hosted a discussion of Guy Fiti Sinclair’s book, To Reform the World: International Organizations and the Making of Modern States. Below is Guy’s reply to the discussants. We are grateful to all of the participants for their role in this discussion

I am extremely grateful for the sensitive and sympathetic comments on my book in the posts by Jan Klabbers, Megan Donaldson, Devika Hovell, and Edouard Fromageau. Together, they offer a rich set of reflections on the book’s themes, each informed by their distinctive scholarly interests and expertise. In reading them, I found myself nodding along, with very little disagreement on even the more critical points. What follows, then, is not an attempt to debate any particular issue, much less all of them, in the systematic manner they deserve – but rather an effort to engage with a few of the wide-ranging concerns raised by four scholars for whom I have the deepest respect, in the hope that doing so will help to advance the conversation and stimulate further reflection and research.

Several of the posts raise questions relating to perspective and methodology. The book’s particular focus emerged from an effort to answer a relatively narrow set of questions, albeit ones that have broader implications for how we understand international law and organizations. Seeking to understand how international organizations have been able to expand their powers informally beyond the terms of their constituent instruments, and the role of international law in making that expansion seem possible and legitimate, led me to look beyond the relatively restricted set of legal materials traditionally examined by international organizations lawyers. Examining a handful of overlapping episodes involving three organizations with very different purposes, structures, and histories, the book adopts a socio-legal methodology which makes it possible to explore the variable role of (international) law in the public discourse and practices of those organizations.

But what does this kind of analysis help us to see, what does it overlook, and what does it obscure? While not the central thrust of his post, Jan Klabbers rightly points out that, by concentrating on fairly well-known organizations – the International Labour Organizations (ILO), the United Nations (UN), and the World Bank – the book leaves open the question whether the same framework of analysis could be extended to other organizations which are less well-studied and may present more anomalous or harder cases, such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the International Olive Council, or the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Moreover, as Megan Donaldson wonderfully shows through a vignette by Shirley Hazzard, the book’s focus on the speeches, writings, and actions of senior international civil servants leaves unexplored the perspectives of lower-level officials in the same organizations. Read the rest of this entry…

I would like to comment on a significant part, albeit a rather small one contentwise, of Dr Sinclair’s very interesting book – To Reform the World: the use of administrative law analogies in relation with the making of modern international organizations. Before going further, we would need to agree on a definition of analogy. Popular culture may help in that regard. According to Britta Perry, a student at Greendale Community College in the TV Show Community (video available here), an analogy can be defined as “a thought with another thought’s hat on”. In her convincing de Beauvoiresque analogy between “weddings” and “little girls’ tea parties”, Britta however highlights three differences between them, while analogies are generally focusing on “accepted similarities between two systems” (P. Bartha, “Analogy and Analogical Reasoning”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, available here).

Legal analogy, for Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, is not defined as an imperfect resemblance, but as an identity of relations within different domains (See C. Perelman & L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, La nouvelle rhétorique. Traité de l’argumentation, PUF, 1958, p. 500). Analogy then implies that a is to b like c is to d. The goal is to explain a relation that is unknown (a to b), called theme, with the help of a known relations (c to d), called phore. The theme states what one means or wishes to prove, while the phore states what one says so that it may better be expressed or proven. For example, One good piece of news does not guarantee happiness is like one swallow does not make a summer (O. Reboul, “The Figure and the Argument”, in M. Meyer (ed.), From Metaphysics to Rhetoric, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989, pp. 175-176). The phore is generally more concrete, or at least more familiar, than the theme. It is the resemblance between the two relations which allows us to infer the fourth term from the three others. We prove b given a, c and d, since the relation between a and b resembles that between c and d. The point of the reasoning, in this example, is that “one has no right to generalize”.

We should also distinguish analogies from metaphors. The metaphor occurs when analogy is condensed through the omission of certain terms. It reduces the resemblance to an identity by evacuating the difference. One can say to reassure an old person anxious about death that it is only a kind of sleep. This metaphor implies an analogy : that death is to living like sleep is to waking (O. Reboul, “The Figure and the Argument”, op.cit., pp. 175-176).

I would like to focus on one particular specie of analogy, the one in which the phore (the known relation) is domestic law, also known as domestic analogies. Read the rest of this entry…