In an earlier post I distributed the text of the remarks I had prepared for delivery 11 September 2025 at the ESIL International Business and Human Rights Interest Group Workshop, (here). The Remarks are entitled "Internationalism in Multiple Tracks: The UN Binding Treaty on Business and Human Rights Between the EU, China, and the U.S."
This post includes the PowerPoint that I have prepared for that presentation that the PowerPoint for those Remarks. The images suggest the alignment between contemporary pop culture visual representations of contemporary social-political spaces and the more abstract and "scholarly" discourse engaged in by the elites most immediately guiding the discussion of the Business and Human Rights Treaty, and more generally the premises of international law within which it is meant to acquire authority. In a sense the narrative arcs of KPop Hunters, the Chronicles of Riddick, and Warhammer in some ways are more profoundly evocative of the tectonic forces within which the more surface engagements manifested in the transformation of the international system and its "business and human rights treaty case study" than the scholarly and sober language that has been the traditional language of exposition and obfuscation. The reason is simple enough, these reflect at an unconscious level the normative baselines from out of which societies are rationalized and the core premises emphasized. When they recreate worlds, they are actually creating a visualization of our own, at least with respect to those normative elements that both give it form and which form its conceptual cage. They are the ikons (εἰκών) of our political master narratives, and thus of the meta cages of collective organization.
It is in the spirit of KPop Hunters that I offer here the concluding passage of the remarks:
Where does that leave the Treaty; and where does that leave international law for the moment? The answers are not definitive but the trajectories appear clear. The United States side will likely find in the Treaty another space for the performance of its rejection of the old order premises. Even under the leadership of a traditionally more agreeable political party, the Treaty would be applied only as translated into and through U.S. constitutional conceptions, and built around the emerging human rights and sustainability sanctions mechanisms, with a large dollop of protection of national security and State (techno) secretes. The Chinese side position would be more complex. They are likely to sign onto whatever it is that is produced, not at the OEIGWG stage but thereafter when it is finalized for signature. During that process, slowly the Chinese will seek to seep into the Treaty text, as best they can, to insinuate within it, the kernels and elements of what they can then extract from it as elements of a Chinese Socialist Internationalism applied in the context of economic activity. The European side will remain truest to the underlying premises of international law and its trajectories from out of the 1990s. Buy they, too, will likely seek to bend the Treaty to their own Green Deal vision. Here, though, the dialectics of national, regional and international legalities and their practices may be best aligned, for the moment. The Global South, like the Chinese side, appears to understand the Treaty as a useful tool for redressing what they view as historically skewed power imbalances. They will seek to protect their own local economic instrumentalities, defined strategically and likely in a contextually relevant and mutable way, and then seek to use the treaty in two ways. One would shift risk of business activity up to home state entities; the other would be to shift downward the proportion of the value added along production chains.
Beneath this performative space is an international law platform that is more fragmented, formally, and more willing to tolerate—de jure—fundamental conceptual differences arising from the circumstances of cultures, nations, and places. Sovereign authority in, through and against that of State collectives is back. But it is back in fragmented form. For the Americans, one protects sovereignty as a means of protecting the authority if autonomous private actors to engage in (and bear the risks of) private economic ordering transactions which, in their longitudinally driven iterative manifestations project in aggregate form the foundational premises and expectations of the system. The protection of the integrity of transactions sits at the apex of the normative pyramid of this approach. For the Chinese sovereignty is also back, but as a means of protecting and protecting, the power of collective action guided and led by a vanguard of leading forces to which political authority is delegated and form which authority over all other aspects of collective life may be bent to the fundamental realization of the goals of a political-economic system. The protection of the integrity of collective development sits at the apex of the normative pyramid of this approach. For both international law resumes a new form inter-governmental character; international institutions become the instruments of that collaboration; and rules become a blending if contract and expectation among the community of States. The Global South understand the value of international law as protection, as a basis for building regional solidarity, and as a means, like tort and contract law, of assigning and shifting risk and defining the scope of liability. The notion of international law as the authoritative expression of international convergence solidarity operationalized through a complex interlinking system of compliance directed from international institutions appears to be losing ground. And the European, they are left as the holders, and once the drivers (at least in the last generation) of the old system of convergence based liberal democratic regulatory supervision based internationalism. But even there the battles over the curation of the fundamental approach of Europe to internationalism (and with it of the role and positioning if international law and international norms) has just gotten started.
One is not speaking revolution here, either in the approaches to international projects for the production of law or norms. The structures and operations of public international law remain useful. What it does suggest is that the general belief in the objective of convergence may have lost its unchallenged prominence. In its place one encounters coordination, and a devolution of powers of interpretation and application, at least within national borders, to States. At the same time, one might note a shift from global to regional or bilateral international arrangements as the workhorse of international legality and normativity. That, certainly is the phenomenological essence of the Chinese and American Internationalism—one focused on routes and pathways, the other on transactions. Lastly, and perhaps as collateral damage, is the challenge to the project of regulatory supervision, at least as currently conceived in its European variation—the bureaucratization of production, its shift in objectives from economic to public policy goals, and its oversight by coordinating organs of public and private bodies serving the interests of the State through increasingly intricate managerial supervision of production. In Europe that challenge was crystallized in the Draghi Report and the reconsideration of the implementation of the European Green deal in the name of efficiency and competitiveness. In China, the challenge to regulatory supervision is bound up in the elaboration of evolving conceptions of socialist modernization and high-quality production, including the production of regulatory supervision. In the United States the challenge is direct, suggesting a redirection in the nature and scope of regulatory supervision, though not an abandonment of the role of the State as an overall guiding force and curator of markets and market behaviors. What happens next remains unclear; what is clear, however, is that the age of solidarity around older notions of international law and governance may well be passing.
The PowerPoint follow and may also be accessed here: BACKER_ESIL_IBHRIREMARKS_v3_2025;
ACCESS PPT HERE: ACCESS PPT HERE: ESIL_2025_IGBHR_BACKER.
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