BILATERALISM VERSUS MULTILATERALISM IN INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC LAW: APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE OF SUBSIDIARITY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article proposes a different perspective on the problem of bilateralism versus multilateralism than has been offered in the literature to date. The author proposes to look at the problem through the prism of the subsidiarity principle. While this principle has mainly been used in the context of allocation of authority between various levels of government in federal or quasi-federal systems of government, it is here proposed to use it in the analysis of the various layers of international economic law and in relation to the choice of bilateral, regional, or plurilateral regimes over multilateral ones. Such an analysis can provide both a normative criterion and an explanatory tool in relation to the reality of booming bilateralism. The objective of the article is to develop parameters analogous to those used in the federalist discourse but adapted to the subject matter of international economic law. These parameters incorporate both the efficiency and the political/ethical rationales of the subsidiarity principle, which dictates, in particular, that actions should be taken on less centralized levels, closer to the point of action, where measures more precisely targeted and more closely attuned to the need of the parties involved may be undertaken. Through this perspective, just as well-functioning provincial and local governments may serve as building blocks for a leaner, better functioning, and more democratic central government, bilateral and regional regimes may serve as important building blocks for a leaner, better functioning, and more democratic multilateral organization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".