Introduction to International Trade Law

The rapidity with which the economic and commercial institutions, on which our societies have been founded have evolved, has forced us to transform legal institutions to regulate in a more appropriate way the new social environment that such evolution supposes. Thus, in the field of commercial law, a vast community of economic operators have been consolidated, who in order to meet the needs of the general population and their own sector, have been demanding the development of their own and appropriate legal regime for International Trade Law.

Bellow, Rutgers Law School professor and specialist in international trade law, Ari Afilalo, explains the role that developing countries play in the current international trade.

The purpose of this Introduction to International Trade Law is to bring the reader closer to the basic concepts that are currently part of this new Law. Here, Ari Afilalo covers, in an understandable way, the extensive set of themes and concepts that surround the development of current international trade regulations. Knowledge considered not only necessary, but obligatory, for the academic and professional development of all those who must face the challenges of the new socioeconomic context in which we live.

Until 1945, International trade was characterized by a state dimension of private economic powers, strongly supported by the expansionary policy of the States from which they came. At that time the number of these States was very reduced: those where the accumulation of finances in financial capital, as a consequence of the industrial revolution, had fostered a policy of international expansion, namely France, Great Britain and the United States.

But, from 1945 onwards, adoption was necessary of a normative order capable of responding to the challenge of a radical change in international economic relations. The trade regime no longer responded to the demoliberal scheme of state economies, which at the international level was translated into three basic principles, which, with greater or lesser intensity, were present throughout the last century in the internal provisions of States and in general trade agreements.

It is, first of all, the principle of "freedom of trade", a true reflection of the economic liberalism proclaimed by the French Revolution; secondly, from the beginning of "free trade", winner of the protectionism that had characterized the previous period and indispensable for the development of international transactions and, finally, of the principle of "equal treatment between foreigners and nationals" in matters mercantile.

The new trade situation was projected on a scale universal as a forced consequence of political, economic and post-war social issues. According to Ari Afilalo, this was enough to retain the technological revolution and demographic, linked to the requirements of a development policy and reconstruction of a seriously damaged world after the war. It was about demands that when projected at the international level altered the approaches classics of bourgeois capitalism and state nationalism.