Constructing International Order: An Intellectual History of Projects to Govern Sovereign Debt (1870 - 1939)

The private law perspective has come to dominate juridical thought on international interactions in finance, while the public international law perspective has become less prominent. However, this was not always the case. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, international jurists considered public international legal institutions and private law as relevant paradigms for imagining solutions to the problem of international ordering in areas of international finance, in particular sovereign debt relations. In the struggle over the formation of the law governing this area of international finance, these two paradigms developed in tension with each other. This thesis examines how, over time, a project of private legal ordering became the dominant way of thinking about the international order in the area of finance, while the public international law discourse moved to the background. The analysis reconstructs the social and historical context in which this process of incremental transformation of legal thinking took shape. It analyzes how international jurists reinterpreted and reframed relations between the concepts of “contract”, “private law” and “international law” in their reflections on international financial obligations. The analysis will focus on the formation and interaction of those concepts and the intellectual assumptions underpinning their use in the context of juridical controversies on the definition of these norms and legal expert knowledge ordering public debts. Focusing on a select group of international jurists from the US and Europe in the period from the late nineteenth century to the interwar era, this thesis examines the projects and normative philosophies underpinning their juridical writings on financial obligations. It situates the texts of these societal actors within their historical context and interpret them in light of the debate about the relationship between “international law” and “private law”, which became central frameworks for thinking and construing the interwar international order. From a sociological and historical perspective, the analysis foregrounds international jurists, their legal expertise and narratives to provide an understanding of how private law, while interacting with international law, became a dominant frame in construing and ordering questions on sovereign debt and financial relations.