Every year, the United States Department of State publishes a list of treaties and international agreements to which the United States is a party. The most recent publication is 489 pages in length.1 These are the treaties and international agreements entered into by one state, albeit a powerful one, with another state or group of states. The list ranges from multilateral treaties of enormous significance, such as the United Nations Charter and the World Trade Organization Agreements, to bilateral treaties of limited scope. The list obviously increases if the exercise is extended beyond the United States. Many of these treaties have to do with economic relations and international trade. Historian Eric Hobsbawm tells us “the major fact about the nineteenth century is the creation of a single global economy, progressively reaching into the most remote corners of the world, an increasingly dense web of economic transactions, communications and movements of goods, money and people linking the developed countries with each other and with the underdeveloped world.”2 Globalisation persists into the 21st century, but with a pervasive multilateral institutional architecture added to an ever more intricate bilateral and regional one. This architecture includes hundreds of nongovernmental organisations with real power over global governance. While the most sophisticated and developed of these institutions are still at the level of the state,3 the sovereignty of states is ever becoming a quaint and outdated idea. Every international lawyer knows that state sovereignty is massively eroded by the “dense web” of treaty commitments, some of which have even produced bureaucracies surpassing those of some states in terms of size, budget and authority.