Two voices have been rumbled globally since the Venezuelan event: one questions the need for international law as such, with the negative answer implied in the question, and the other loudly decries its absence with feigned innocence.
The law is a process of contention and a framework assessed along a spectrum, not a fleeting event, however significant the event may be. Law will remain so long as there are states, and states will certainly remain. However, not seeking ideals and values that try to improve how states operate and to contain their wars is a debased form of realism. It goes against every noble idea in history under the pretext that these ideas are not realistic. That was the case for the principle of monotheism, and then with gender equality and the abolition of slavery...
This human pursuit of betterment has manifested itself in states and international relations since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which inaugurated an era that, among other things, called for religious tolerance, which was intertwined with states and their war and peace. Later on, Immanuel Kant came to be regarded as an early founder of legalism and opposition to war. In 1795, he wrote his famous essay “Perpetual Peace,” betting on treaties between sovereign states to achieve it and making recommendations that he believed states should rush to adopt in order to leave the “state of universal nature.” He thereby laid international law as a framework by which every state could enjoy freedom, allowing its inhabitants to lead their lives freely; accordingly, any state that dared to violate this formula would be violating its own existence as a state.
Kant stressed that perpetual peace was inevitable. Like all inevitabilities, it was always destined to disappoint. International law and its institutions are strained by major shifts, state competition over land and resources, and displays of raw power. With the League of Nations that was established in 1920, however, another conceptual shift came when negotiation, rather than force, came to be seen as the means for resolving conflict. However, the end of the First World War that had given rise to the League of Nations also produced the Treaty of Versailles, which, with its humiliation and impoverishment of Germany, carried the seeds of the Second World War.
In this constant push and pull, we can only value the efforts that led to the League of Nations and the United Nations, as well as those that called for complementing economic globalization with political and legislative globalization or that note how most of our world’s problems cannot be solved within a national framework; this applies to terrorism, the environment, and cybersecurity...
And when one speaks of “international law,” one is also referring to multilateral international treaties, institutions, organizations, and political alliances, as well as free trade and an opposition to major decisions being taken on whim- that is, the ABCs of modernity and progress.
Yet, many of the law’s defenders only defend it against the United States, brandishing international law, together with “national sovereignty,” to shield regimes and forces that do nothing but violate both. Calls for respecting the law cannot be taken seriously when they come from a regime founded on the seizure of an embassy it had dubbed a “den of spies” and whose ascendance was associated with bombing embassies, as seen in Beirut, or if they come from police states and non-state actors that have never questioned their equivalence of peace and “surrender,” through which they grant themselves the right to kill, smuggle weapons, manufacture drugs, and undermine the weakest nations’ sovereignty...
The question of the model branches out of the struggle over the law. Today, there is a party openly stating that it does not seek to be anyone’s model and that it is driven by the pursuit of absolute national security, which comes “first.” We also know that America stands out in prioritizing national law over international law.
The nationalist tradition that combines selfishness, a lack of empathy, and the naked pursuit of self-interest, found a “realist” founder in Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. He managed to push through a paradoxical state of affairs by preventing his country, through nationalist and isolationist slogans, from joining the League of Nations despite the fact that US President Woodrow Wilson (who had once taught Kant at Princeton) was the League’s godfather.
A model, however, requires two parties: one that offers it and another that receives it. Here, too, we hear melodramatic lamentations decrying the fact that the US does not offer the world a model, by the very same people who, for decades, had reduced the US and the West to colonialism and plunder. When John Kennedy was urging the Shah of Iran to implement agrarian reform, the forefathers of today’s mourners were pledging allegiance to a cleric in Qom who had rejected agrarian reform. Our visceral militant intellectuals want to affirm the illegality of Israeli actions (and they are indeed illegal) while continuing to celebrate October 7 as a “glorious” day.” Since Western colonial behavior is offered as a justification for rejecting its model, it is worth noting that the argument did not change after Eisenhower stood against colonialism and supported Nasser; rather, the latter and his followers chose to infuse their hostility toward Britain with hostility to the US.
These examples and many others speak to the depth of our cultural rejection of the Western model in principle, because our political culture has its own comprehensive self-sufficient model, one that arose solely to confront the Western model. Even in less radical environments, this sharp dichotomy resonates strongly, isolating that which is "suitable for us” in the West, material and technological progress, and what “does not suit us,” everything tied to cultural and social questions.
Between one party that is not offering a model and another that accepts no model, the world goes on inflicting its violence upon itself.
