Study of Decision-making at the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea: From the Perspective of Luhmann’s Social System Theory

The “United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea” might be the biggest and longest international law codification conference so far. Its outcome, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, has also become a paradigm of the transnational decision-making. Many Scholars would rather choose the neo-realism theory to explain the decision-making process and believe “package deal” as a useful means to achieve collaborate decisions. This article argues those explanations may not be able to explain why those final acts sometimes against powerful states or big states groups. Furthermore, multiple actors’ phenomenon in present international politics, actor’s identity shifting by different issues, and restraining factors from states groups to states may also challenge the accountability of traditional international theories. In order to remove those doubts, this article has introduced an interdisciplinary approach using Luhmann’s social system theory to explain the decision-making process of the “United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea.” It mainly combs out from official documents of the “Conference of the Progressive Codification of International Law” through the “United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, I - III” for summing up three essential operable factors: 1. National claims and referential documents of the conference, 2. Rules of procedure, 3. Amounts of distinguished proposals. The author argues when the amounts of distinguished proposals could match the rules of procedure and the meaning reference of engaged proposals could also match the meaning frame caused by National claims and conference documents, especially the later one, would help the international conference to make its decision.