The argumentation led above had the purpose of demonstrating that the frontal assault of some rationalist authors on the traditional institution of CIL is erroneous, is based on wrong assumptions. Even inside the rationalist para-digm of economic analysis, it is possible to reconstruct and model how CIL operates – in a way that makes sense also under more traditional understand-ings of international law. CIL (if rightly modeled) is not a crude ideology, but a well-operating legal institution. CIL makes sense in coordination games with a repeated game character – and most problems of international relations are of that character. It is easily explainable that states have a mutual interest to agree on a series of coordinating rules even outside the formation of com-plex treaty regimes. The emergence of behavioral regularities is the first deci-sive factor of such gradual emergence of norms out of social practice – behav-ioral regularities that from a certain moment start to create legitimate expectations of other states. The expectation goes towards a calculus that a certain pattern of behavior will continue also in future. Such an expectation
96 See Trachtman (2008), 114.
97 See Mendelson (1998), 270–271, 284–291, as well as Byers (1999), 157–160.
facilitates enormously transactions between states, because it reduces insecu-rity about future behavior, and in the medium term also minimizes transaction costs. Such behavioral regularities only may be attributed legal significance if there is a shared meaning of such usages in a given social environment – but the international community in its diplomatic networks constitutes a relatively close-knit society with a strong degree of shared understanding. Entering into the described dynamic of evolutionary creation of regular patterns of behav-ior, linked shared meanings and – as a result – legitimate expectations is not as implausible as some critical rationalist authors have argued. Just to the con-trary, it is rather plausible under certain conditions of social dilemma situa-tions where productive coordination games are needed. If states accept the expectations raised by their practices and confirm them by relevant communi-cative acts, they inevitably become entangled in a web of mutual expectations that then transforms practice into legal obligations.
The paper has attempted to demonstrate the dynamics of such processes of building converging expectations and of hardening the mutual expectations to legal obligations. At the same time, it has tried to shed some light on decisive issues of the doctrine of CIL that have been left unresolved in traditional in-ternational legal doctrine. The author does not claim to know all the answers to the questions formulated. There is still a lot to do in order to understand the incentive structures that make CIL work. But such work is worthy of being done, since CIL is a relevant category, far from being epiphenomenal in inter-national relations. Our understanding of the operation of CIL could still profit a lot from further studies in terms of economic analysis.
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