This chapter provides an overview of the global humanitarian system. This overview shows that the changing nature of world affairs has contributed to the ICRC moving in certain policy directions. Such factors as competition with many other humanitarian actors, plus the desires of donors and beneficiaries and partners, has helped push the ICRC into a broader range of activities. Such factors as the end of the Cold War, the rise of many protracted conflicts or forever wars, a more active United Nations, and other changes have indeed affected ICRC policy choices. The critics of the ICRC are thus placed in broad context. The spread ICRC activity is thus noted, while leaving a full evaluation of what is desirable and what should be reviewed to later chapters.

This chapter centres on the economic and political climate of the period in which the selected countries concluded their first investment treaties. This period coincides with the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, when, as a result of the end of the Cold War, states across the globe adopted trade and investment liberalisation policies, increased property protections, and promoted liberal legal internationalism. It does so through four country snapshots. It then discusses the political debate regarding IIAs at the highest political level – in national parliaments – and in the media. When it comes to the debates in national parliaments, four themes emerged: (1) general lack of substantive parliamentary engagement; (2) belief that foreign investment was sufficiently protected under national laws; (3) substantive engagement on issues related to free transfers; and (4) more pronounced discussion when the investment connected with trade liberalisation, such was the case of Mexico. Regarding the media debate, the period of the conclusion of the first international investment agreements (IIAs) shows an almost total absence of reporting and media engagement.

This chapter recounts Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision for the post-Cold War world order, focusing in particular on the disarmament negotiations and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. The chapter argues that Gorbachev’s foreign policy was underpinned by the ambition to recapture moral leadership in the world (which, for the Soviet leader, was closely linked to the legitimacy of the Soviet project, and indeed to his own political legitimacy). This ambition was clearly discernible in his approach to disarmament. The vision of a nuclear-free world (as presented by the General Secretary in 1986) was instrumental to the broader agenda of global leadership, which, Gorbachev felt, the Soviet Union had long abandoned. The same agenda animated his approach to the war in Afghanistan: Leaving Afghanistan was important for moral reasons, as a practical manifestation of the new spirit Gorbachev purported to represent. The exit was delayed, however, when the Soviet leader realized that quitting the war carried its own implications for Moscow’s global standing, and, in particular, undercut Soviet credibility in the third world. By recentering the Cold War endgame on Gorbachev’s global ambitions, the paper seeks to contextualize the General Secretary’s approach to foreign policy within the broader tradition of Soviet political leadership during and after the Cold War.