Signs of inadequacy and crisis in general international law as to the economic ownership interests of aliens have been numerous since World War II. The pages o f the J ournal have recorded and analyzed a number of situations in which the existing legal order is not working well: ineffectual resorts to international adjudication; unilateral disregard of arbitral commitments; national decisions made in the name of international law but of dubious international acceptability; professional frustrations so intense as to have directed prime attention to happenstantial “salvage” operations. In a phase now apparently ended, groups in capital exporting countries have tried time after time to put forward normative formulations of investment codes as new positive law, only to have their efforts ignored in developing countries. Now we seem to be in a new phase, one in which direct investment-receiving, or host, countries, organized into groups or regional arrangements, compact among themselves that a comprehensive normative system shall prevail in each of them as to the legal relationships between foreign investors and each of those countries. Although foreign investment codes for particular states, including systems of prior restraints on entry in some developed countries, are not new, the Andean Foreign Investment Code is, indeed, a new juristic phenomenon. The Editors of the Journal have wished, therefore, to record and analyze preliminarily this new development in transnational investment law, one whose text has been carried in International Legal Materials and considered as to its possible impact in Research Panels organized by the American Society of International Law.
