International Legal Evangelism: Intelligence, Reconnaissance & Missions

occasional enforcers, custom-generators, and sponsors of international courts and
other institutions.
Some say we live in a ‘post-sovereignty’ world. The reality of national
sovereignty is undermined to a considerable extent by global developments, by
regional political organization, by international institutions (to a certain extent) as
well as by the growing disparity of power among nation-states themselves. Maybe
this means sovereignty no longer exists. Robin Lovin said in a memo to our
working group:
If the economic requirements of a global market or established practices of
international intervention create inherent limits on the exercise of sovereign
power, does this mean that sovereignty no longer exists? Or only that the
scope of sovereign power has changed? 100
I am not sure how to answer Robin’s question. But I am sure that not every move
away from sovereignty enhances the prospects for international order. Some make
order and justice less likely as global markets replace whatever shreds of
conscience a convention of empowered sovereigns might once have possessed.
9. Strong but self-limiting sovereignty
Whether we like it or not, the situation is that, at best, we are stuck with
O’Donovan’s vision of law, at the international level, without state at the
international level. “The appropriate unifying element in international order is law
rather than government.” 101 For the time being, it is the responsibility of nationstates—jointly
and severally—to make international law and to make it work; and
to create international institutions and to make them work.
So: can the responsibility for global order be discharged by nations, acting
together, if a little willfully and in a prickly way that is jealous of their
sovereignty? Can it be done under the auspices of a strong doctrine of sovereignty?
I think it can, provided that the prickly foot-stamping mantra of sovereign
independence—“We’re not going to be bound unless we say so!”—is matched by a
studied awareness of the point that unless we, the nations of the earth, voluntarily
take responsibility for doing this, it probably won’t be done.
100 To: CTI WORKING GROUP ON INTERNATIONAL LAW From: 11/10/2008
101 The Desire of the Nations, p. 72. See also ibid., 236: “Law holds equal and independent subjects together
without allowing one to master the other. The last and greatest of the accomplishments of Christendom was the
conception that there exists, not merely as an ideal but in fact, an international law, dependent on no regime … but
on the Natural Law implanted in human minds by God and given effect by international custom and convention.”
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