International Legal Evangelism: Intelligence, Reconnaissance & Missions

granted and other things—like torture or the use of death squads—can become
unthinkable. That is what it is for rights to order the world. Certainly it is
important that we do something about violations of these norms; but the urgency of
that is not in itself the urgency of establishing human rights law. Moreover, if, in
this field of human rights, international law is identified solely with humanitarian
intervention and the punishment of violators by ad hoc tribunals or by the ICC,
then we will have to admit that it presents a sorry spectacle of limitation and
failure. But its deeper and more pervasive contribution—prior to dealing with
miscreants—is the articulation of shared standards that then normalize themselves
in legal and constitutional practice—ordering the world, not racing around like a
fire-fighter to put out conflagrations.
So: that is part of what I meant when I said that the tasks of international law
are modest and mundane. They are modest and mundane in two other respects as
well.
One is a point that, in my view, cannot bear repeating enough. Though we
all love talking about the exciting topics—humanitarian intervention, war crimes
trials, and so on—we should remember that international law does much of its
most important work in simply framing and providing for dense networks of
ordinary economic cooperation and other forms of cooperation in the world, in
areas like trade, travel, migration, and communications. International law includes
exciting things like the ius cogens condemnation of torture. But it also includes
civil aviation conventions and navigation standards, postal conventions,
arrangements for intercontinental cables and satellites, rules about passports, rules
about sea lanes, canals and railroad bridges, transnational banking arrangements,
weights and measures, time zones, and international trade and tariffs.
We should not underestimate the importance of this mundane but
indispensable dimension of international order—what I have called elsewhere “the
dense thicket of rules that sustain our life together … not just in any particular
society but generally on the face of the earth.” 46 We should not underestimate it,
first, because it enables us to see how international law operates affirmatively to
promote public goods as well as responding to great evils. And secondly, we
should not underestimate this aspect of business as usual, because it may make us a
little more optimistic the prospects for international law. Countries like the United
States, which may seem to have put themselves beyond the pale in regard to some
provisions about water-boarding, may nevertheless disclose themselves as
international law’s most faithful adherents when it comes to the thousands of legal
obligations that they discharge in the world every day, without fuss, in every aspect
of global life.
46 Jeremy Waldron, “Cosmopolitan Norms,” in Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, pp. 83-4.
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