La Sovranità Internazionale ed i suoi agenti politici

In 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development along with a set of new global goals (SDGs). One of them (Goal 16) places a certain emphasis on developing effective, accountable and transparent institutions, as well as ensuring responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels. Tellingly, matters of governance were not mentioned in the previous Millennium Development Goals. The addition reveals growing attention for an essential truth: to achieve ambitious policy objectives, process matters. The EU has long been making pioneering efforts on this track, the latest of which in 2016 with its Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy that includes a priority on reforming multilateral for a of global governance, particularly the UN Security Council and the International Financial Institutions. Recent events in world economic affairs have emphasized the urgency of the matter for the World Trade Organization. The purpose of the thesis is to provide a legal contribution to such developments, by means of an interdisciplinary study of the interplay between state sovereignty and international institutions. The diplomatic function is analyzed both from the perspective of classic international law and in light of emerging theories, such as the doctrine of Global Administrative Law and a constructivist approach to international relations. Diplomatic activity is further examined in the context of European integration vis-à-vis domestic standpoints of Member States: on the one hand, institutional norms in the EU Treaties providing for concerted international action represent a critical step forward with a view to a coherent European foreign policy. On the other hand, however, little progress has been made at the national and international levels to adapt the legal foundations and institutional framework upon which that common action should be based, as constitutional documents and charters of multilateral institutions ––drawn up before the post-war “globalization unbundlings”–– implicitly subsume international governance under the agency of the executive branch of government, without due provisions to address the profound changes and challenges underway. The role assigned to international secretariats and the European civil service, along with the participation of nongovernmental actors, is one such aspect. The new practice of public diplomacy is another. These and other issues are considered while proposing an evolutionary understanding of States’ external sovereignty as ‘inter-dependence’.