International Legal Evangelism: Intelligence, Reconnaissance & Missions

intellectual elites who stand up for the demands of global law even when less
elevated factions in the polity are howling for them to be repudiated. 57 This is not
just a matter of scholars versus political office-holders. In most countries,
chanceries, departments of state, ministries of foreign affairs are infested with
lawyers who are committed utterly and clear-headedly to the fulfilment of the
demands of international law. It is what they do for a living. They have made it a
vocation to find out what the law requires and advise their masters accordingly. In
order to get government lawyers to denigrate the demands of legality, you have to
actually import people like John Yoo from our law schools. No professional lawyer
in a career government post would ever adopt such an attitude.
12. Christian views of interest and order
What finally can a Christian add to this debate about rational choice? Two things.
First, we are likely to be quite suspicious of the assertion of any bright line
between self-interested behaviour and moral or idealistic behaviour. Awareness
of what is sometimes called original sin, or even just humility in the face of moral
vanity, necessarily leaves us open to the idea that there are important elements of
self-interest present even when one thinks of oneself as responding righteously to
the demands of law and justice. But this caution is by no means one-sided. For
equally, when humans are at their most cynical, hard-headed or avowedly selfish,
they often in spite of themselves pay tribute to strands of normativity and even
righteousness in their dealings with others: they do this in their hypocrisy, or in the
points about reputation that I mentioned a moment ago, or in the way their selfinterest
is conceived, or even just in the restraints they unthinkingly adopt when
they are at their most ferocious. These strands of normativity and legality
discernible in even the most distressing of human interactions—that is where
international law in a sense began. It was the mission of thinkers like Grotius and
Gentili to sift through the historical evidence of hard-headed war-mongering and
discern the elements of restraint that were there anyway—half-hearted, no doubt,
and often insincere; but that is how human legality enters the world.
That is a first Christian perspective on these points about realism and
rational choice. A second takes us in a different direction, and it is the last
observation I will make today, though it points us towards the discussion we will in
my second lecture next week have about nations and sovereignty.
I have said that a Christian approach to law at any level starts from the need
for order in the world. O’Donovan quotes St Paul to the Corinthians: “For God is
not a God of disorder, but of peace.” 58 There is to be order; there is to be justice
57 Cites: passage from Posner; passage from Niebuhr.
58 1 Corinthians 14: 33 -- quoted by O’Donovan at 227 (WJ?)
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