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Since 1989 an extremely rapid process of integration through the market has been taking place between the eu and Central and Eastern Europe. This operates through the three vehicles of integration: trade, foreign direct investment, and outward-processing trade, and has been encouraged by trade concessions and the process of legal approximation. In contrast, many of the political questions relating to enlargement in areas such as the Common Agricultural Policy, the Structural Funds, and Economic and Monetary Union still have not been resolved definitively. There remains a binomial asymmetry between the economic (market) and political aspects of integration.

To discuss the history of international economic law since theAmerican Journal of International Lawwas first published in 1907 requires the author to project categories common to the parlance of 2006 back to times when theywere unknown. So far as it appears, the term did not become current until after World War II. Its scope is controversial. According to one definition, it encompasses "the total range of norms (directly or indirectly based on treaties) of public international law with regard to transnational economic relations." A wide variety of international law rules have been said to have a financial impact somewhere. For practical purposes, in this essay I define international economic law as the international law regulating transborder transactions in goods, services, currency, investment, and intellectual property. I exclude from the inquiry issues of private international law, as well as of economic warfare.

In this essay I suggest a correlation between the integration level of an international institution and the public discourse about the lack of democracy and legitimacy in the institution's structure and functioning. This discourse includes ideas for remedial action at both the national and international levels; it also becomes inevitably intertwined with other reform proposals that may call for an incremental or—particularly in the case of a more integrated organization—a radical restructuring. Having originated in the highly integrated European Community, the debate on the "democracy-legitimacy deficit" has reached other institutions, particularly the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the international financial bodies, and has become one component of the backlash rhetoric against "globalization."

This volume is designed as a contribution to the synthesis of theory ineconomics and sociology. We believe that the degree of separation between these two disciplines separation emphasized by intellectualtraditions and present institutional arrangements arbitrarily concealsa degree of intrinsic intimacy between them which must be brought tothe attention of the respective professional groups.