International law has never been so frightening to states as domestic law is to individuals. This is, of course, because international law attempts to be a supernational force in a world of nations. With no power, international law is essentially a collection of well-meaning ideas and ideals that people or states will throw around to show how the world is improving even though no one can actually enforce international law. Instead, it is hoped that shared interest or some sort of honor agreement will keep nations from breaching international law. It does not. But, in its current state, I firmly believe that it is for the best that international law continues to be relegated to lip service. This is not to say that I do not believe in building moral international shared norms and values –– I do –– but modern international law cannot successfully come to a non-contradictory legal consensus on the simplest of international conflicts. For any enforceable implementation of international law to ever be considered, the foundational contradictions of the legal status quo must be resolved.
There is real promise in the idea of international law in regard to international disputes. Territorial disputes between nations, conflicts over Exclusive Economic Zones (marine areas in which nations have exclusive economics rights), and other interstate conflicts are all resolvable through international law, perhaps through the application of international law or through the ruling of an international court. Either way, international law can act as a shared legal guideline for all parties involved, and international courts can be an arbitrating party with relatively little bias for the most part. Even to date, while international law has no enforcement mechanism, nations regularly follow the rulings of international courts. Now, of course, not all decisions made using international courts or justified under international law are followed by state actors, but the fact that “losing” parties would still follow international law despite there being no force that implements them shows real promise for what could come out of international law.
However, as useful as international law is in disputes between nations, it is difficult to reconcile Westphalian conceptions of state sovereignty with international law that is meant to regulate how states treat their own citizens. How can we say that what a state does within its borders is no business of any other state and simultaneously regulate what that state does through international law? There are obvious actions that states should not be allowed to take against their citizens, and the moral rationale behind the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” all the “Covenants on Human Rights,” and other similar treaties is very clear, but the first major inconsistency in international law comes here: if nations all agree that the internal issues of every state are their own and every state is allowed to have sovereignty, then by that logic international law should not seek to regulate states. The fact of the matter is that the Westphalian principles and system of international relations are completely inconsistent with international law that seeks to limit the power of states within their own borders. But I don’t think this is a reason to abandon international law as a concept. Instead, Westphalian principles must either be altered to reflect the basic shared norms and values of our increasingly globalized world or be thrown out entirely in favor of a new system of international relations, one in which international law has a greater role.
But the worst contradiction of all in international law is that of the right to self-determination versus the Westphalian idea of sovereignty. To briefly explain, the right to self-determination states very vaguely that all peoples have a right to pursue their own “destiny” without outside interference. Whether this means that people have a right to independence, autonomy, or something else entirely is unclear. This first sort of indeterminacy has serious implications for groups like the Kurds, who have tried to invoke their right to self-determination across Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran repeatedly in the hopes of gaining a state of their own. Often, if the response is not an immediate crackdown on the Kurds, regional autonomy is the most granted. If international law really wants to protect the rights and desires of groups, there has to be less ambiguity in precisely what the right to self-determination offers to groups who invoke it. Worse than this, the first contradiction is that international law explicitly supports groups in sovereign states in their struggles for self-determination and permits states to do whatever they feel is necessary to maintain their territorial integrity. Not only does this mean that states like Turkey can oppress the desire of the Kurds for their own state, but there are significant international relations consequences as well. Effectively, the Israel-Palestine debate, the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh debate, and the Russo-Ukrainian Donbas debate are all impossible for international law to arbitrate on because international law supports both sides. Both the state which rules as sovereign and the peoples invoking their right to self-determination have legitimacy under the status quo, and international law has not made clear which right supersedes the other, if one supersedes the others only at times, or if it is case-dependent.
International law cannot be seriously considered as a legal framework that deserves an enforcement mechanism until it can sort out its foundational contradictions. So much better can be done than what is set up right now, and a properly set out system for international law would be hugely impactful. If international law were to say that the right to self-determination can mean the right to independence and that sometimes the right to self-determination could supersede that of the right to sovereignty, how many people might receive clear international legal support for their struggles? Making better laws is the first step to making enforceable laws, and I look forward to the day when I can say that international law is something more than international grandstanding. One day, I would like to see international law be that final, monumental stepping stone to freedom and statehood.
