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A trope of international law scholarship is that the United States is an “exceptionalist” nation, one that takes a distinctive (frequently hostile, unilateralist, or hypocritical) stance toward international law. However, all major powers are similarly “exceptionalist,” in the sense that they take distinctive approaches to international law that reflect their values and interests. We illustrate these arguments with discussions of China, the European Union, and the United States. Charges of international-law exceptionalism betray an undefended assumption that one particular view of international law (for scholars, usually the European view) is universally valid.

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In recent years, scholars have devoted considerable attention to transnational networks of financial regulators and their efforts to develop uniform standards and best practices. These networks, however, coexist with an emerging trend toward regional and bilateral mutual recognition arrangements. This Article proposes a theoretical account of mutual recognition that identifies its potential benefits, the cooperation problems it raises, and the resulting institutional frameworks in multilateral and bilateral settings. The multilateral model adopted in Europe relies on extensive delegation to supranational institutions, crossissue linkages, and political checks on delegation. An alternative bilateral model, illustrated by the recent arrangement between the SEC and Australia, relies on selective membership, bilateral enforcement, and limited duration and renegotiation clauses. The multilateral model is unlikely to be effective without strong, preexisting supranational institutions—in other words, outside Europe. Therefore, international efforts at mutual recognition are more likely to resemble the SEC’s program. This bilateral model, however, is most likely to succeed between jurisdictions with developed financial markets as well as similar regulatory objectives and resources. It also requires sufficient private demand and enhanced cross-border supervision and enforcement agreements. Finally, it is less likely to be effective where one country seeks to improve regulatory standards in the other. These insights are relevant for other contemporary mutual recognition initiatives, such as between Europe and third countries and within ASEAN.

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Last June’s European Parliament (“EP”) election was widely considered a failure. Turnout was low across Europe, and, as has been the case in every EP election since they were introduced in 1979, voters responded exclusively to domestic cues in deciding how to fill the European Union’s only directly elected body. Campaigns were waged entirely on domestic issues outside of the purview of the EP, and the popularity of domestic prime ministers, who were not on the ballot, was the most important factor in determining the results. The EP is supposed to provide a popular check on the other legislative bodies in the European Union (“EU”), which are either appointed or directly controlled by member state governments, and thereby reduce the EU’s “democratic deficit.” Instead, the failure of EP elections to generate popular feedback on EU policy allows the deficit to fester and undermines the separation of powers inside the EU.

This paper argues that the problems of EP elections are much like the problems in a variety of American state and local elections. Election laws ensure that national parties are on the ballot, and both legal limitations and strategic considerations make it difficult for these national parties to develop separate localized identities, or in the case of EP elections, Europeanized ones. Rationally ignorant voters who know little about the individual figures in these European bodies rely on the party heuristic that is available on the ballot, as it is the only relevant information that they have. Moreover, they do so even though it is unclear how closely preferences on European or local policies track preferences about national issues. The result is that national party preference ends up being reflected in these elections, despite the fact that the winners will decide policies at another level of government. Put another way, there is a “mismatch” between the institutional role the EP is asked to play in the EU’s separation of powers—the voice of European citizens about EU policies—and the level of party competition at which EP elections are contested.

Mismatch problems are endemic in federal systems and are generated by constitutional structures that ask more of voters than they are capable of providing. However, they can be solved or at least mitigated with election law tools. Following a procedure used in a variety of developing countries, the EU could pass a law that the EP will only seat members from those parties that both won seats from a given EU country and received a certain percentage of the vote in a quarter of EU member states. This would force the coalitions formed in the EP—the so-called “Euro-parties”—onto EP ballots, as parties would need to contest elections across Europe. Voters thus would have access to a European rather than national heuristic on the EP ballot, which would better allow them to use these elections to express preferences about EU policy.

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