This chapter reflects on the institutional strength of the Security Council. It emphasises the fact that the Security Council forms part of the greater organisation of the United Nations, composed of 193 states. While it is obvious that the Security Council is a forum of power politics, the Council is not only composed of the powerful and the permanent. This chapter submits that the less powerful states do not necessarily need always to play a secondary role – especially if they team up. The chapter is also guided by the idea that less powerful states, in particular, have an interest in the rule of law guiding international relations as a means of constraining raw power politics. The chapter thus presents an institutionalist perspective. At its core, this perspective is about checks and balances, as well as the ability to take the interests of ‘the others’ into account (i.e., those that do not have a permanent seat at the Security Council). The chapter applies this perspective to examine the exercise of distinct Security Council powers pertaining to the use of force, UN sanctions, and counter-terrorism legislation, as well as to possible new work terrains for the Security Council.

The war launched in February 2022 by Russia against Ukraine has become a stress test for the role of the Security Council, and it confirms some findings of the three Trialogue authors. Congyan Cai, Larissa van den Herik, and Tiyanjana Maluwa have examined the manifestations of law and power in the Council, the substance and procedure of its workings, and the relationship between the Council as the centre and its periphery in the form of regional organisations. This concluding chapter revisits the three dichotomies in the light of the Russian invasion, asking: has power eclipsed law? Are empty ritualistic procedures unable to deliver substantive outcomes? And has the centre been disabled, so that peripheral actors dominate the scene? The chapter concludes that the Security Council remains important not only as a centre of power but also as a creature of law and as a law-producer. The Council’s action and inaction are highly dependent on legal procedures (as opposed to mere ‘politics’). Finally, the Council, also in its response to the Ukrainian war, is firmly embedded within a network of other international bodies and actors.

The authors begin by observing that most obligations of international law are still regarded as ‘based’ on State consent. There are good reasons for this, especially from a democratic legitimacy perspective. Still, the principle of State consent, even in its qualified version of ‘democratic State’ consent, suffers from important shortcomings that call for correctives. The chapter starts by accounting for the democratic value of State consent in International Organizations (hereafter IOs) before addressing some of its democratic deficits. It then articulates several institutional proposals to correct or, at least, complement the role of equal State consent in the institution, the operation and the control of IOs. The authors develop a non-ideal normative argument for the latter’s political re-institution. That re-institution has to start with the replacement of the principle of equal State consent by that of equal public participation in IOs: this does not only avoid reducing State consent in IOs to State veto or refusal rights, but it also extends the personal scope of those participatory rights to other non-State public institutions.

This chapter looks at legal aspects of the decisions of the Security Council. It addresses certain aspects of voting in the Security Council, before then considering when Council decisions are binding, who is bound by Security Council decisions, and whether binding decisions may be included in presidential statements.

In Chapter 1, the inherent limitations in the powers of the EU institutions to enact legislation in the field of direct taxes were discussed. The lack of Union competence in this area and the sensitivity of Member States to any attempts for harmonisation were identified as the main reasons for the scarce legislation. Chapter 1 also considered the historical background to some of the legislative proposals for the removal of tax obstacles in the cross-border movement of companies.Proposals for harmonisation were followed by proposals for coordination and ad hoc targeted measures. These led to piecemeal legislative solutions and soft law. It was explained how with the advent of the BEPS project, the Commission produced various legislative proposals, most of which were very protective of Member State tax bases. The soft law initiatives also proved very important, as they laid the ground for the creation of a common external fiscal policy, even in the absence of a common internal fiscal policy. This has proven to be a springboard for further developments, as shown from recent developments and the Brexit discourse.

This chapter explains the main tools used by private equity firms to mitigate the “agency costs” of delegation: contractual alignment of economic interests (especially through sophisticated pay/performance sensitivity), and closer oversight through board and reporting structures.

Institutional variation is not lacking in Latin America's separation of powers system when it comes to endowing legislatures and presidents with policy-making powers. We only witness lack of variation in terms of symmetry across chambers within bicameral systems. Founders never established two chambers and then gave one a significantly different role in the policy-making process than the other. Beyond that limitation, founders have designed an impressive array of policy-making processes across the region.

Here we examine the final steps the deputies elected to the Estates General of 1789 took to transform that traditional body into a national constituent assembly. We will examine three steps in detail, again relying on a broad array of sources to show how the decisions reached were shaped by the interplay between different developing political groups within the Assembly. First, as the summer of 1789 came to an end, the deputies sought to establish their power to craft France’s new constitution as they saw best, guided by the wishes of their constituents, not by the will of the king. By the middle of September, the king had yet to accept the August decrees or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. From 14 to 21 September, the deputies debated how to ensure that the king would accept the decrees without modification. As part of this discussion, the deputies broached the question of whether or not the king had the right to request changes to the constitution they were writing. They were careful not to cause unnecessary conflict between the king and the Assembly.

The next major question the deputies faced was that of how to balance the powers of the legislative and executive offices in the new constitution. There were no self-evident answers to the questions of how powerful the legislature ought to be in relation to the king, or what role the broader public would have in legislative affairs. When Clermont-Tonnerre presented a report summarizing the content of the cahiers on 27 July, speaking on behalf of the Constitutional Committee, he noted that all of the cahiers demanded the “regeneration of the French Empire [l’Empire français],” but that they disagreed as to whether this regeneration required a new constitution or a simple reform of a few abuses.1 This lack of uniformity meant that the deputies could not simply derive the constitution directly from the cahiers. They would have to decide what the new constitution would be like. In addition, they faced widespread popular violence, both in Paris and in the provinces.