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Stephan Schill's book, The Multilateralization of International Investment Law, stands apart from the rest of the literature on international investment law which has burgeoned in the past few years. In contrast to most publications on the market, this volume, adapted from the author's Ph.D. thesis, does not attempt to summarize and systematize the developments in arbitral practice. Instead, it reveals an important and previously unexplored dimension of the investment treaty phenomenon by presenting an original vision of the landscape formed by more than 3,000 international investment agreements (IIAs). The author advances and substantiates the seemingly counter-intuitive thesis that these predominantly bilateral instruments do not result in chaotic fragmentation but, taken together, �function analogously to a truly multilateral system� (at 15).
The book relies on the following main arguments to support this thesis (all reviewed in more detail below):
IIAs are largely uniform in their structure and content and have produced certain fundamental principles of international investment protection;
differences between individual IIAs of a particular country are in most cases levelled out by operation of the most-favoured-nation (MFN) treatment clauses;
the lax definition of �investor� in most IIAs allows natural and legal persons from unrelated (third) States to benefit from the IIA protection by means of corporate structuring;
the reasoning patterns of arbitral tribunals adjudicating investor�state disputes suggest that they see the multitude of IIAs as part of a uniform regime (e.g., their frequent reliance on previous decisions based on wholly unrelated IIAs).
The author's assessment of the formally bilateral system as effectively a multilateral one immediately gives rise to the question why genuine multilateral investment negotiations have continuously failed � first in the 1960s (OECD), then in the late 1990s (OECD), and, most recently, in the early 2000s (WTO). The author addresses this question head-on in chapter II.
