Economic Dimensions of International Regulation of Marriage

Abstract This Article examines how the regulation of, and legal argumentation about, transnational marriages fulfill economic functions. It takes as its point of departure contemporary legal frameworks governing marriages with a transnational element in Northwestern Europe, including private international law (conflicts of laws), migration law, and human rights law. It shows that lawmakers and judges largely conceptualize such marriages in the language of human rights, implying that universal standards of marriage exist, or ought to exist. This Article argues that this understanding of marriage was legally consolidated through the 1962 United Nations Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage, and Registration of Marriages. Prior to this, laws and legal discourse on transnational marriages in Northwestern Europe (former imperial metropoles) were dominated by relativist arguments that, in principle, treated Western and non-Western forms of marriage as distinct. Although this approach—described here as “marriage relativism”—may appear more flexible and cosmopolitan, it was largely shaped by the economic interests of colonial governance at the time. By the moment the UN Convention on Marriage was drafted and adopted, those economic interests had shifted, increasingly favoring the extension of marriage forms practiced in imperial metropoles to dependent territories that were, at the time, approaching independence. Drawing on political economy and postcolonial critique, this Article links the regulation of transnational marriages to changing economic priorities and shows how international marriage standards have been shaped by assumptions and preferences rooted in the legal and economic orders of former imperial powers and settler colonies.