International Law as Insulation – the Case of the World Bank in the Decolonization Era

This paper maps out how (international) legal concepts and norms were employed during the inter-institutional struggle between the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank (Bank) in the era of decolonization. The first contribution of the paper is historiographical. Drawing on material from the Bank’s (oral) archives, the paper gives an original account of the ways in which the organization bypassed the ‘universalist’ aspirations that were gaining a foothold in the UN’s democratic bodies. Secondly, the paper retraces how the event gave rise to a clash between opposing imaginaries of international legal order, where the ‘universalist’ aspirations voiced by states from the Global South were ultimately frustrated by a functionalist understanding of international (institutional) law, which justified the Bank’s institutional insulation. Finally, the paper seeks to provide a modest contribution to the study of international institutional law (IIL) on a methodological level. As a doctrinal discipline that is primarily grounded in formalist comparative inquiry, IIL has traditionally paid little attention to the sociological dimensions of legal interventions. The paper points to some merits in extending the archive of IIL and altering its methodological apparatus: drawing on Kratochwil’s notion that the meaning of norms only emerges through concrete instances of norm-use, this analysis operates on the level of praxis and seeks to retrieve the meaning and potency of legal acts in a non-essentialist fashion.