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Perhaps the least discussed aspect of the 1919 settlement is its provisions on social justice, and yet an entire section of the Versailles Treaty and an article of the League Covenant were devoted to the international regulation of labour, which resulted in establishment of the International Labour Organization. These developments reflected the activities of the trade union movement, and particularly its Congresses during the war, as well as heightened sensitivity to labour in the context of both the war and the outbreak of the Russian revolution. It is clear that inclusion of a section on labour was sponsored by all of the Big Three powers for various political and instrumental reasons. What was radically new about the structure of the ILO was that it allowed membership from state representatives, but also from business and labour, thereby recognizing world society membership in an otherwise international society forum. The decisive argument was that social justice was properly the business of international society because it was fundamental to achieving international peace.

Little analytical attention has so far been devoted to the issue of rules of origin in a services and investment context. This chapter wades into this largely uncharted territory by advancing a few thoughts on a range of economic and legal considerations arising from the way in which various agreements seek to determine and condition who gets to benefit from services trade and investment liberalization. It focuses on the practice of preferential and non-preferential services trade liberalization as found in various bilateral and regional trade and investment agreements as well as the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). It addresses a range of conceptual issues relating to services trade that impinge upon the design and implementation of rules of origin for services. The discussion draws attention to a number of salient characteristics of trade in services that limit the usefulness of concepts and approaches to origin developed in the context of trade in goods. Attention is also drawn to a number of economic considerations that should inform the design of rules of origin for services trade to minimize the potentially adverse effects of trade and investment diversion, and maximize the economy-wide gains in allocative efficiency that well-designed services liberalization can entail.

This chapter evaluates the effect of globalization on the extent of a country’s labor regulation and the influence of national and international labor regulations on labor conditions. There is no evidence of an international race to the bottom in labor regulation. Other things considered equally, neither the size of a country's trade sector nor its trade policy appears to influence the extent of labor protection afforded by national labor legislation. The evidence also indicates that the system of international labor standards regulation administered by the International Labor Organization has not significantly improved labor conditions. Countries tend to ratify ILO labor standards that their domestic regulations already satisfy, rather than incurring the political costs of introducing or altering national legislation to meet higher standards. National labor regulations rarely benefit workers generally; instead some groups of workers gain at the expense of other workers.

After the end of the Cold War, many in the West viewed Africa as a testing ground for the solidarist argument that sovereignty was no longer an absolute principle and that the international community could intervene to protect individual from human rights violations. This argument seems particularly challenging in the African context, given the continental leadership’s historic commitment to territorial integrity and non-intervention. However, as the author shows, African leaders from 1945 to 1990 were largely upholding the pluralist international norms of the time. In other words, the case for humanitarian intervention – and the problems posed by the practice – are not region-specific. The early 1990s, during which the United Nations intervened in Somalia, seemed to confirm the solidarist position. However, the failure to intervene in Rwanda in 1994, and the more recent experience of interventions in Sierra Leone, present a more mixed picture. Humanitarian intervention remains a controversial practice because of its coercive means, and its tendency to attribute blame or responsibility in what are often very complex civil conflicts.

Considers how domestic political processes affect American behaviour in and towards multilateral organizations. The author first discusses the nature of American exceptionalism and looks at the ways in which what he describes as a deeply ingrained sense of American exceptionalism coupled with pragmatism affects the country's approach to multilateral institutions. An examination is then made of the ups and downs of US policies towards UN over the course of the 1990s, the contrasting politics of the 1994 decision to join the newly created World Trade Organization (WTO), and US financial withholdings in the 1990s and the steps taken towards partial payment of the resulting arrears in 1999–2000. Far more positive attitudes are noted towards the WTO than the UN, the latter being perceived as a riskier venue for the promotion of US interests. It is concluded that, while the US is generally reluctant to defer to multilateral processes, it cannot be accused of being hostile to all forms of multilateral organization: it is pragmatic and peacekeeping case‐specific in its choice of foreign policy tools.

An examination is made of the relationship between the US and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and its successor, the World Trade Organization, addressing the crucial question of the likelihood that the US will exit, or through its behaviour undermine, the multilateral trade organization in favour of regional or bilateral alternatives. It is concluded that the probability of a US‐inspired weakening of the WTO is low, although the incentives for protectionism in the US are strong and growing as a result of globalization and the changing international division of labour. The US domestic political system gives voice to such protectionist interests in international trade policy through a set of administrative and legal remedies that are reinforced by principles such as reciprocity and ‘fair trade’. Countervailing factors to this situation include the growing power of US export interests, the effectiveness of the Executive in deflecting the protectionist tendencies in the US Congress, and the exceptional power and influence of the US over the multilateral regime, in which it is a rule maker rather than a rule taker, enjoying the power to bend the rules selectively to serve its interests. As such, the WTO tends to reflect and reinforce US economic interests, and the US is, therefore, likely to continue in overall terms its efforts to comply with and generally strengthen the multilateral organization, rather than to break away from it.

An examination is made of US policy towards and participation in several key regional multilateral organizations in the Asia–Pacific area, with the aim of establishing how central these organizations are to the overall development of US policy and the extent to which, and how, they influence or constrain US behaviour. The first section of the chapter reviews US strategic goals and briefly discusses some of the domestic and external factors that have led to the development and implementation of these goals in East Asia. The next section discusses multilateral security cooperation in the region, and gives an overview of regional multilateral security organizations, focusing primarily on the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Regional Forum (ARF), given its all‐encompassing nature and relatively advanced (by Asian standards) stage of development; other US‐instigated multilateral institutions and initiatives (the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), and the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD) are touched upon briefly to assess how these more narrowly focused approaches also serve American interests. The third section looks at Asia–Pacific multilateral economic cooperation, and here the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) provides the centrepiece of the discussion; its role both in creating an Asia–Pacific economic community and, more recently, as a vehicle for political cooperation through the institutionalization of the US‐instigated Leaders’ Meetings, which bring many of the region's heads of state and government together annually, ostensibly for economic discussions. The conclusion to the chapter briefly evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of these organizations from a US perspective in order to understand better how security and economic multilateralism fits with the largely bilaterally oriented US national security strategy.

Takes up the relationship between the US and regional multilateral organizations in Europe, in particular, NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), and the European Union (specifically the common European security and defence policy, or ESDP). It is suggested that US relations with Europe are an indicator of the US commitment to multilateralism more generally, and argued that the US approach to NATO has been driven by a combination of international structural factors (the distribution of capabilities) and the key domestic factor of national character (the liberal identity of the US). These very same factors hold important consequences for NATO because the US is the decisive actor in NATO, which, as a political entity, reflects the multilateralism that has its foundations in US national character, but as a military instrument, reflects the dominant power of the US. The resulting tensions in NATO were finessed more easily during the cold war, in the face of a common enemy, but are more significant in the current unipolar system, which exaggerates both the incentives for the US to act unilaterally and the frustration of European states who are less able to constrain the US yet unwilling to act independently. The author expects NATO to become less rather than more important to the US in the years ahead, and thus to matter less as a multilateral organization. The different sections of the chapter are: Isolationism as Multilateralism's ‘Other’?; Sources of America's Eurocentric Multilateralism; Systemic Change and American Behaviour: The Case of NATO; Consequences for Multilateral Organizations: The EU and the ESDP; and The Bush Administration and the European Allies.

The central argument is that US power, once established as predominant in the hemisphere, has been nothing short of decisive in the founding, nature, and functioning of the regional multilateral institutions/organizations in the Americas in which it has taken part. The examples of the Pan American Union (PAU) Organization of American States (OAS) and of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are used to show this state of affairs in play; the most attention is paid to the OAS because of the lessons that can be derived from the very long history of US membership of this organization. In another case, that of Mercado Comun del Sur (Mercosur, or the Common Market of the South), it is shown how, even where the US is not a member of a multilateral organization in the hemisphere, its weight is still felt in terms of the aims and behaviour of that body. At the same time, it is seen that such organizations may on occasion be useful for the smaller states in restraining to at least some extent US behaviour, although in general such a restraining role is reserved for moments when US vital interests tend not to be involved and where Latin American, or more recently Canadian, actions to limit US unilateralism do not negatively affect goals perceived to be key by Washington. The first section gives an overview of the US and the hemisphere over the more than two centuries of its diplomatic and related action therein, the next looks at the specific experience of the PAU and the OAS, and the following two at NAFTA and Mercosur.

This chapter seeks to understand how Islamist movements have evolved over time, and, in the process, provide important background on the political and religious contexts of the movements in question. In particular, it shows that Islamist movements coevolve. Focusing on the histories of Morocco's two main Islamist movements—the Justice and Spirituality Organization, or Al Adl wal Ihsan (Al Adl) and the Party of Justice and Development (PJD)—it suggests that their evolutions can only be fully appreciated if they are relayed in unison. These movements mirror one another depending on the competitive context, sometimes reflecting, sometimes refracting, sometimes borrowing, sometimes adapting or even reorganizing in order to keep up with the other.

What happens when a new philosophy emerges from a supposedly non‐philosophical field? Must it follow the norm whereby a form of philosophy is recognized to be at work in this area (by a recognized philosopher, but one operating as an outsider), or by some kind of philosopher manqué (a native within the field) being discovered at work there (by this same outsider)? In other words, can something only be deemed “philosophical” in view of an implied subject who thinks in a particular way, discovering thoughts similar to those found in established positions of philosophy? What, alternatively, would it mean to think of a supposedly non‐philosophy realm, such as process organization theory, as immanently philosophical? This chapter explores the conditions by which, far from merely illustrating or applying extant philosophy (“Theory”), Process Organization Theory might actually be seen to create its own novel philosophical thoughts, immanently. By examining the non‐philosophy forwarded by François Laruelle, and the manner in which time and process resist any attempts to theorize them (to make sense out of them), we will outline a way of seeing process as a kind of resistant thinking (an idea first put forward by Henri Bergson) and, therewith, Process Organization Theory as a new form of philosophy. Interdisciplinary thought, on this view, is not about applying philosophy, but consists in philosophy renewing itself (making itself unrecognizable) by acknowledging how non‐philosophical realms (art, technology, science) might be capable of creating new philosophical thoughts. With that, however, must also come a transformation of what we mean by philosophy and even thought itself.