The Legalist Approach to International Relations

The Gospel According to Political Realism

A cardinal tenet of the "realist," or power politics, school of international political science is that international law and international organizations are irrelevant in conflicts between states over matters of vital national interest; that is, issues of high international politics concerning the very survival of nation-states, the international system, and the human race itself. According to the political realists, considerations of international law do not and should not intrude into such areas. If they do, it should be only to the extent that they serve as a source for the manufacture of ad hoc or ex post facto justifications for decisions taken on the basis of antinomial factors such as Machiavellian power politics and national interest. In the realist view of international relations, international law is devoid of any intrinsic significance within the utilitarian calculus of international political decision making.

According to the realists, international law, morality, ethics, ideology, and even knowledge itself are mere components in the power equation, devoid of noninstrumental significance or prescriptive worth, subject to compulsory service as tools of power when deemed necessary for the vital interests of the state. There are no barriers to the acquisitive nature of the nation-state beyond its own inherent limitations and those constraints imposed on it by the international political milieu. Consequently, the analysis of international relations must concentrate exclusively on the dynamics of power politics and national interest.

The reasons responsible for the realists' negative perception of international law and organizations are more the product of metaphysical speculation than solid empirical research. Realists suppose the nations of the world survive precariously in the Hobbesian state of nature, where the life of states is said to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." In this world there is no law or justice, no conception of right or wrong, no morality, but only a struggle for survival in a state of war by every state and against every state.

According to the realists, the acquisition of power and aggrandizement by one state at the expense of other states in a quest for unattainable absolute national security is the fundamental right, the fundamental law, and the fundamental fact of international politics. Sheer physical survival in a Machiavellian world of power politics, raison d'état, totalitarianism, and nuclear weapons must become the litmus test for the validity of humankind's political, philosophical, moral, and legal presuppositions. International law therefore becomes irrelevant to those matters which count for something in international relations; and it will not become relevant to international politics in the foreseeable or even the distant future.

According to this realist credo, statesmen who disobey the "iron law" of power politics at the behest of international law and organizations invite destruction at the hands of aggressors and thereby facilitate the destruction of third parties, which, in today's interdependent world, cannot realistically hope to remain neutral in a serious conflict between major powers. For historically, whenever statesmen have in good faith interjected determinative considerations of international law and organizations into attempted solutions for the monumental problems of international politics, the probability that violence, war, defeat, death, and destruction would ensue was supposedly increased. Realists' primary case in point is President Woodrow Wilson's approach to international relations after the outbreak of the First World War.

The Straw Man of LegalismMoralism

On January 8, 1918, President Wilson delivered an address to a joint session of Congress in which he set forth the war aims and peace terms of the U.S. government for ending the Great War. This is the speech that contains the fabled Fourteen Points, the last of which laid the cornerstone for the League of Nations, the ill-fated predecessor to the United Nations. In that speech and its successors Wilson emphatically decreed the death of Machiavellian power politics and all its essential accoutrements for the postwar world: the balance of power, secret diplomacy, trade barriers, armament races, the denial of national self-determination, etc.

This outmoded and dangerous set of interconnected principles for the conduct of international relations had created such cataclysmic consequences that it had to be replaced completely by an essentially different system based on antithetical operational dynamics: international law and organizations, collective security, open diplomacy, free trade, freedom of the seas, arms reduction and disarmament, and national self-determination. A new era of world history was to dawn with the League of Nations. The "Old World" of barbaric power politics was to be left behind as an evolutionary stage in the human condition to which, like Rousseau's state of nature, humankind would never return.

Unfortunately, the world of power politics returned just two decades later. The political realists laid the blame for the Second World War on the doorstep of Wilson and those Western statesmen who were said to have adopted his "legalist-moralist" approach to the conduct of international relations during the interwar period. According to the realists, these Western leaders had neglected, condemned, and repudiated the techniques of power politics in favor of an anti-power politics approach to international relations when the exact opposite should have been done.

For the Treaty of Versailles, and especially its first part, the Covenant of the League of Nations, were not really the perfect incarnations of truth, justice, peace, and righteousness they were said to be by the leaders of the Allied and Associated Powers. Rather, these were mere instrumentalities of power politics designed by the victorious nations of the First World War to secure and perpetuate the favorable political, economic, and military status quo after the armistices ending the Great War with the maximum possible degree of legal and institutional coercion and control. This treaty was imposed vi et armis in contravention of Wilson's express promises given to induce surrender in the Fourteen Points address and subsequent addresses. If the people of the world believed anything else, then they had been sorely deluded by the ideological rhetoric...