Getting a Seat at the Table: The Origins of Universal Participation and Modern Multilateral Conferences

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Inclusive participation by all states is now taken for granted in many global governance efforts, but this was not always the normal practice. Nineteenth-century multilateralism, embedded in a world of “great powers,” actively rejected broad participation, valuing small numbers, hierarchy, and status in coordinating action. Construction of broader participation norms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a joint project that owes much to innovations in the Americas and regional norms developed within that group as it organized meetings among the American states. Central to these norms was sovereign equality that, in the American context, entailed universal participation of all American states and voting on a one state–one vote basis at conferences. This article traces the spread of these norms from the Americas to the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, and highlights the varied sources for many of our contemporary multilateral practices in these early events.