Defending the rights of the investor was an impor­tant early fight for neoliberal intellectuals and one they engaged in with their partners from the 1920s of the ICC. Although their campaign was framed as one for the sanctity of property rights, it is more accurately a fight for the sanctity of capital mobility. They ­were fighting, not for the right to own and stay, but for the right to sell and leave. In the aftermath of the Second World War, as international law was being rethought to accommodate the prob­lem of the stateless and the refugee, international economic law was being formulated to protect the rights of what one con­temporary called "refugee money" and the ­human right of capital flight. If, as historians argue, nobody believed that the ­human rights of the 1940s should be enforceable at the cost of state sovereignty, it is notable that many believed that the private rights of capital should be enforceable in exactly that way.

Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, loc. 481