Raneen Farooq ‘22
Guest Writer
Donna Faye Imadi ‘22
Staff Editor
This past Thursday, the Virginia Journal of International Law, in conjunction with the John Bassett Moore Society of International Law, hosted the 71st Annual International Law Symposium. The forum, split into several panels, focused on the topography of foreign commerce, the ways in which international lawmaking is changing in response to technological and cultural developments, labor standards and issues in the supply chain in response to the COVID pandemic, and the ways in which we can expect these issues to evolve over the near future.
The first topic of discussion was the future of trade agreements—how do we think about and conceptualize our economic relationships with other nations, and in what ways are those relationships likely to evolve? Digital trade, especially through internationally available internet platforms, is a particularly salient medium for the exchange and commoditization of data, though not all countries treat this in the same way. While data is an increasingly important commodity, and the digitization of trade has facilitated its growth, monitoring and controlling this kind of market presents unique challenges for each country’s national security departments. In particular, the European Union has developed especially stringent regulations around the regulation of information technology and dissemination, which will also impact the trade of physical goods that rely on those markets.
The next few decades are also likely to present problems outside the scope of individual countries or regions—namely, automation. There is not yet a consensus on how to deal with the decreased demand for labor as automation steadily increases in efficiency. It provides benefits (in freeing up individual actors to form closer relationships across international borders), but it can also exacerbate social problems like class and wealth disparities, particularly as countries are incentivized to join a sort of “race to the bottom” to be the most competitive in an international trade space, where each entity is essentially playing by its own labor practices and rules. Trade relationships with countries whose labor standards vary greatly from the U.S. must be carefully managed and will necessarily impact conversations about domestic trade. If we want our domestic trade policy to be influential, we must have conversations about international trade standards—to do so without that is to lose a key part of the competitive picture. This competition across countries with differing levels of labor regulation is not unique to a single country. This is all the more reason to be having these kinds of discussions and examining our relationships with international trade partners, since these problems are likely to only increase in scope if we do nothing about them.
A later panel included discussions of supply chain management, particularly amidst the disruptions it has suffered during the last few years of a global pandemic. When President Biden took office, almost ten million workers had lost their jobs due to COVID, and about four million were still out of work a year later. This hollowing-out of domestic manufacturing severely weakened the U.S.’s ability to contribute to the global supply chain and created interesting questions for essential product and material sourcing that expand beyond the reaches of this particular global health crisis.
The discussion then turned to the role of private industry in combating these problems. Private companies, on a large scale, tend to work with and mirror government entities in the sense that both have an aligned interest in creating an efficient, resilient, and reliable international supply chain. In the present day, sourcing all materials domestically tends to be neither the most efficient nor the most productive option, but favoring domestic supply sources is often required for entities that receive government funds. While it may be considered a laudable goal, it is prudent to recognize the role of international trade in supplementing and improving domestic manufacturing in the areas where it is most needed—where domestic supply simply cannot compensate for materials obtained abroad. It is also important to note that a preference for domestic goods does not indicate an attempt to eliminate foreign trade. Internal resilience does not translate to “closing off” the country—rather, the focus should be on promoting those individual industries where foreign or domestic sourcing makes the most sense, increasing sustainability of the whole system by doing so.
In finding solutions to these problems, governments must be careful to tackle these issues not with a single tool, but by combining all available resources into a concerted effort to correct supply chain issues. If there were a clearly superior single strategy, the private sector would likely already be employing it. Since that is not the case, we must be ready to tolerate failure and experimentation as we attempt to work with international allies and domestic companies alike to find a blended solution to the next generation’s international trade dilemmas.
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