International Law

International law is the body of rules — treaties, customs, and recognised principles — that governs relations between sovereign states. Conservatives approach it with a distinction rather than a slogan: law that nations freely agree to and can enforce among themselves is a legitimate tool of statecraft, while law that claims authority over a nation’s internal affairs without the consent of its people threatens self-government. The question is not whether international law should exist, but whether it sits above or beneath the sovereign nation.

That distinction runs through the conservative tradition from Burke to the present. It treats the nation-state as the largest community capable of genuine loyalty and democratic accountability, and it regards any legal order that dissolves the state into a supranational authority as a loss of the very self-rule that law is meant to protect.

Key Takeaways

• International law rests on two main sources: treaties that states consent to, and customary practice they accept as binding.
• Conservatives distinguish sharply between voluntary agreements among sovereigns and supranational bodies that claim to override domestic democratic decisions.
• The modern states system dates from the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and the founding texts of Grotius and Vattel.
• Conservative jurists warn against courts importing foreign or international law into national constitutions, bypassing elected legislatures.
• Supporters counter that international law restrains aggression and atrocity, and that a rules-based order serves every nation’s long-term interest.

History And Context

The intellectual origins of international law lie in the seventeenth century. The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, in De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625), argued that relations between states could be governed by discoverable principles of natural law even in the absence of a common ruler. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648, ending the Thirty Years’ War, is conventionally taken as the birth of the modern order of sovereign, territorially defined states — the Westphalian system that conservatives still treat as the baseline of international life.

A century later the Swiss theorist Emmerich de Vattel published The Law of Nations (1758), which shaped the thinking of the American founders. Vattel grounded international obligation in the equality and independence of states, a framework congenial to a young republic jealous of its sovereignty. The twentieth century brought institutions to embody the idea: the Permanent Court of International Justice under the League of Nations, and after 1945 the International Court of Justice, seated at the Peace Palace in The Hague. These bodies extended the reach of international adjudication, and with it the argument over how far such law should bind self-governing peoples.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives hold that legitimate international law flows from the consent of nations and stops at the water’s edge of domestic self-government. Treaties negotiated by accountable governments and ratified by elected bodies are the proper form: they bind because a free people agreed to be bound. What conservatives resist is the transformation of international law into a self-generating authority — courts, tribunals, and treaty bodies that expand their own jurisdiction and issue rulings no electorate approved.

The American legal scholar Jeremy Rabkin argued that constitutional self-government requires sovereign states, and that submerging national law beneath international authority erodes the accountability that makes law answerable to citizens. Robert Bork made a parallel case against what he called the worldwide rule of judges, warning that transnational legal elites use international norms to impose policies they cannot win at the ballot box. The concern is democratic as much as national: a rule that no voter can change and no legislature enacted is hard to reconcile with government by consent.

This position is not isolationist. Conservatives accept that piracy, aggression, and the treatment of diplomats are proper subjects of international law, and that clear, enforceable rules serve national interests. Their objection is to open-ended law — vague human-rights instruments, evolving customary norms, ambitious tribunals — that transfers decisions from national communities to unaccountable international ones.

Differing Positions

Advocates of a stronger international legal order answer that sovereignty has to be qualified in a world of shared dangers. The Grotian tradition holds that even sovereign states owe duties to one another and to their own citizens, and that law is the alternative to force. In this view the twentieth century’s catastrophes — aggressive war, genocide, the collapse of the League — proved that unchecked sovereignty is not a safeguard but a hazard, and that binding international rules on the use of force and the treatment of civilians protect the weak against the strong.

Liberal internationalists add that a rules-based order lowers the cost of trade, travel, and diplomacy, and that a great power gains more from a predictable system than it loses in formal autonomy. Immanuel Kant’s argument for a lawful peace among republics stands behind much of this case. Conservatives and internationalists therefore divide less over whether international law should exist than over its supremacy: whether, when international norms and national self-government collide, the nation or the tribunal has the last word.

References

1. Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625).
2. Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations (1758).
3. Jeremy A. Rabkin, Law Without Nations? Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign States (Princeton University Press, 2005).
4. Robert H. Bork, Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges (AEI Press, 2003).