International law at the United Nations: does it matter?

Abstract

In 1926, the creation of the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (U nidroit ) as an auxiliary organ of the League of Nations could have appeared almost as a visionary challenge, given the complex and turbulent historical moment. In fact, in those days, the clouds of tragedy of the First World War had not been driven away by the new era of peace and cooperation but, rather, by the first winds, the first signs of an international tension that would later unleash the Second World War. This challenge, far from being visionary or useless, was reading the future instead: it predicted the future decades in advance. That young Institute was to play a key role in a context of international relations that every day would become increasingly interdependent and, finally, in the most recent decades we have been living, even globalized. Today, more than ever, the political and economic architecture of a globalized world needs a solid foundation. In a word, it needs to be based on a common and uniform law that grants stability, predictability, and certainty to the international political and economic relations in order to also ensure fairness, justice, and equality of treatment between nations, through the modernization, harmonization, and coordination of private and trade law. For 90 years, the activities of U nidroit have represented an invisible web, a fine fabric wrapping international relations, giving them the stability and certainty that is a necessary prerequisite for a peaceful and cooperative world. It has been a continuous and complex effort that was relaunched in an even more ambitious and in some ways more visionary way in 1940, when at the eve of the tragedy of the Second World War, the Institute survived the failure of the League of Nations and regained life and autonomy as an intergovernmental organization based on a statute.