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The 2030 UN Sustainable Development Agenda defines its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in terms of human rights, rule of law and multilevel governance of related public goods. Global governance failures challenge the 'embedded liberalism' and rule-of-law principles underlying UN and WTO law. WTO rules promoting non-discriminatory 'regulatory competition' among neo-liberal Anglo-Saxon countries, China's totalitarian state capitalism, Europe's multilevel constitutionalism and 'third world conceptions' of international law are disrupted by geopolitical rivalries. This contribution explains why the SDGs cannot be realized without multilevel legal and judicial restraints on 'market failures' (like environmental pollution) and 'governance failures' (like hegemonic trade wars, US disruption of the WTO dispute settlement system). As long as international law is conceived as power politics privileging domestic interest groups, the cosmopolitan SDGs risk being undermined. Protecting human rights and de-carbonizing economies require democratic struggles for holding governments more accountable, as illustrated by citizen-driven environmental litigation in Europe and by disregard for SDGs by authoritarian and populist governments.

Abstract
This contribution uses the examples of Great Britain's withdrawal from the EU (Brexit) and US withdrawal from multilateral trade and environmental agreements for exploring political, economic, environmental, social, and legal reasons driving the backlash against economic integration agreements. In both examples, populist battle-cries for 'taking back control' and for lowering regulatory standards were followed by governmental attempts at evading parliamentary control over executive foreign policy powers to violate, or withdraw from, multilateral agreements. Anglo-Saxon neo-liberalism, President Trump's mercantilist power politics, authoritarian state-capitalism (e.g. in China), and European ordo-liberalism reflect systemic divergences that may justify broad interpretations of WTO 'exceptions' (e.g. for WTO trade remedies and climate change mitigation). Europe's multilevel, democratic constitutionalism protecting 'social market economies' was comparatively more effective in limiting protectionism and carbon emissions inside Europe's common market. The EU's 'new green deal' for a carbon-neutral 'green economy' was made possible by stronger, social, and democratic support based on 'constitutional interpretations' of Europe's ordo-liberalism assisting adversely affected workers, producers, traders, investors, and other citizens to adjust economic and environmental activities to climate change mitigation. EU leadership for WTO-consistent climate change rules requires 'greening embedded liberalism' by interpreting the WTO 'sustainable development' objectives in conformity with the 2015 Paris Agreement, the UN 'sustainable development goals', and human rights (e.g. as legal basis for climate change litigation in Europe).

This contribution begins with an overview of the historical evolution of international trade leading to, today, five competing conceptions of international economic regulation (section I). The more some areas of trade regulation (like trade remedies, subsidies, internet services, intellectual property rights, appellate review) became dominated by business-driven, neo-liberal interest-group politics (section II), or are circumvented by non-transparent practices of state-capitalism and state-owned enterprises (section III), the less successful have the 'regulatory functions' of the World Trade Organization (WTO) become. From the entry into force of the WTO Agreement in 1995 up to 2020, the more than 420 WTO panel, appellate and arbitration findings – similar to the, by now, more than 1,020 publicly known investor-state arbitration (ISA) cases and related national court decisions (e.g. enforcing ISA awards) – protected higher degrees of transnational rule-of-law in worldwide trade and investment relations than in any previous period (section IV). Compared with rule-of-law among the 30 member states of the European Economic Area, however, ordo-liberal European economic constitutionalism has limited market failures, governance failures and rule-of-law deficits through more comprehensive judicial remedies and 'constitutional methods' than in neo-liberal and state-capitalist economies (section V). Since 2017, the hegemonic US assault on the WTO legal and dispute settlement system has disrupted WTO appellate review by re-introducing power politics (section VI). Similar to the criticism of neoliberal 'investor biases' in commercial ISA, some WTO Appellate Body judges from the USA revealed political biases in support of neo-liberal, US trade policies (section VII). Justice, democratic constitutionalism and rule-of-law require protecting impartial WTO third-party adjudication as a precondition for rules-based, multilevel governance protecting global public goods like 'sustainable development', climate change mitigation, poverty reduction and public health for the benefit of citizens and their human rights, yet with due respect for legitimately diverse 'constitutional pluralism' (section VIII).

Why were procedural and substantive trade rules – but not investment agreements – transformed into multilateral treaties following World War II? Why do state-capitalist conceptions of international economic law (e.g. in China's bilateral Belt and Road Cooperation), neo-liberal conceptions (e.g. in US trade agreements) and ordo-liberal conceptions (e.g. in European free trade agreements) result in such different legal and institutional designs of trade and investment agreements? The ten sections of this paper discuss ten lessons from institutional economics for the legal design of multilateral trade and investment institutions, with due regard to the increasing geopolitical rivalries among Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism, European ordo-liberalism and authoritarian state-capitalism (e.g. in China and Russia). It concludes that maintaining the worldwide legal and dispute settlement system of the World Trade Organization (WTO) - and interpreting its regional and national exception clauses broadly in order to reconcile diverse, national and regional institutions of economic integration and of 'embedded liberalism' - remains in the interest of all WTO member states. Multilevel trade and investment adjudication are of constitutional importance also for the transformation of the global division of labor into a carbon-free economy mitigating climate change. Yet, its institutional design is increasingly challenged not only from neo-liberal and state-capitalist, but also from ordo-liberal constitutional perspectives.

Arbitration and adjudication aim at protecting rule-of-law, which was a life-long concern for Prof. Giorgio Bernini. The United Nations (UN) have defined 'rule of law at national and international levels' as 'a principle of governance in which all persons, institutions and entities, including the State itself, are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced and independently adjudicated, and which are consistent with internationally recognized human rights'. Such 'rule of law' has emerged in worldwide trade and investment law only since the 1990s with the 'judicialization' of GATT/WTO law and investor-state arbitration (ISA). Both the World Trade Organization (WTO) adjudication and ISA are today challenged: The power-oriented blockage of Appellate Body (AB) nominations by the USA has rendered the WTO AB dysfunctional; it re-introduced power-politics into the WTO dispute settlement system, limited by voluntary 'interim appellate arbitration'. ISA is rejected by some developing countries and inside the European Union as a threat to democratic constitutionalism. This contribution discusses these dialectic developments, i.e. ISA reforms aimed at strengthening 'public law adjudication' inside and beyond the European Union; the WTO appellate court system being transformed into voluntary arbitration in response to alleged 'judicial overreach'; and multilevel judicial cooperation inside the EU, where the German Constitutional Court has - for the first time since the beginning of European economic integration in the 1950s - refused complying with a judgment of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) on the ground that the CJEU and the European Central Bank exceeded their limited powers 'arbitrarily' due to their insufficient 'proportionality justification' of encroachment on national economic and fiscal policy powers. How can rule-of-law, constitutional and 'deliberative democracy' and judicial comity be protected in multilevel, judicial cooperation among national and international courts?