Law without Nations?: Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign States - Softcover

Rabkin, Jeremy A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691130558 ISBN 13: 9780691130552

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

What authority does international law really have for the United States? When and to what extent should the United States participate in the international legal system? This forcefully argued book by legal scholar Jeremy Rabkin provides an insightful new look at this important and much-debated question. Americans have long asked whether the United States should join forces with institutions such as the International Criminal Court and sign on to agreements like the Kyoto Protocol. Rabkin argues that the value of international agreements in such circumstances must be weighed against the threat they pose to liberties protected by strong national authority and institutions. He maintains that the protection of these liberties could be fatally weakened if we go too far in ceding authority to international institutions that might not be zealous in protecting the rights Americans deem important. Similarly, any cessation of authority might leave Americans far less attached to the resulting hybrid legal system than they now are to laws they can regard as their own. Law without Nations? traces the traditional American wariness of international law to the basic principles of American thought and the broader traditions of liberal political thought on which the American Founders drew: only a sovereign state can make and enforce law in a reliable way, so only a sovereign state can reliably protect the rights of its citizens. It then contrasts the American experience with that of the European Union, showing the difficulties that can arise from efforts to merge national legal systems with supranational schemes. In practice, international human rights law generates a cloud of rhetoric that does little to secure human rights, and in fact, is at odds with American principles, Rabkin concludes. A challenging and important contribution to the current debates about the meaning of multilateralism and international law, Law without Nations? will appeal to a broad cross-section of scholars in both the legal and political science arenas.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeremy A. Rabkin is Professor of Government at Cornell University, where he teaches courses on international law and American constitutional history.

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"Sovereign powers enable a state to provide essential services to its citizens, as for example: freedom to speak, choose, and elect, a lawful society, and national defense. But these sovereign powers of states have eroded in fact and in intellectual discourse. The time has long passed to push back. Dr. Rabkin does so in this important book."--George P. Shultz, Distinguished Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Secretary of State of the United States 1982-1989

"This timely book is a fine consideration of the principal conceptions of the new world order. Among its many virtues are that it etches clearly the content of both the pragmatic, unilateralist vision of the United States and the utopian and multilateralist vision of Europe. It then traces this conflict to fundamental differences in political philosophy and historical experience. A richly textured account, Law without Nations? is likely to have a broad audience of political scientists, international lawyers and diplomats."--John O. McGinnis, Northwestern University

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Law without Nations?

Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign StatesBy Jeremy A. Rabkin

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2005 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13055-2

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION: BY OUR OWN LIGHTS

FOR SOME MONTHS following the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, pundits affirmed that the event had irrevocably changed America and the world. Subsequent events proved that changes in America and changes in the world were far from symmetrical. Perhaps there was not even that much change.

Nations, like individuals, may respond in new ways when confronted with new challenges. But even new responses are shaped by old habits of thought and established patterns of conduct. American political ideals have often differed from those embraced by people in western Europe. Differing responses to the challenge of international terrorism simply highlighted the underlying divergence.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, "the world"-speaking through the United Nations (UN)-condemned the attacks. But what could the "international community" do to catch the perpetrators or to ensure that such attacks did not recur? The "international community" offered condolences. America then had to summon its own resources to defend itself.

Working with Afghan resistance forces, the United States mounted a counterattack on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, a principal host for the terror network that perpetrated the September 11 attacks. The Taliban regime was overthrown in less than four months. Hundreds of Islamist terrorists were captured and imprisoned. But the United States provided virtually all the outside military force to accomplish this result.

For most Americans, the experience offered a clear lesson: The nation must depend, in the end, on its own exertions for its own security. At home, police warn crime victims not to take the law into their own hands. The world as a whole, however, has no international policing capacity. When attacked, a nation must be able to take the law into its own hands because self-defense is the most basic right.

Most Europeans drew quite different conclusions. In the months after the Afghan war, the United States was scolded by the International Red Cross, by the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, and by many European leaders for refusing to accord prisoner of war status to captured Afghan terrorists. Their view was that even a justified war must be fought under international supervision, on terms acceptable to international authorities.

And on second thought, much of the world doubted that terror attacks could actually justify military responses. In April 2002, after hundreds of Israeli civilians had been killed by terrorist attacks on civilians in Israeli cities, the government of Israel sent troops into towns on the West Bank to seize terrorist leaders and dismantle the terrorist infrastructure. The United Nations issued fierce denunciations of Israeli "aggression" without making any reference to the terrorist attacks which provoked it. European leaders spoke of "massacres" and "war crimes"-on the evident assumption that even a conscript army of a democratic nation was quite capable of committing mass atrocities, unless constrained by international authority. The correct response to terror attacks, Europeans insisted, was to work with international authorities to defuse tensions and satisfy the grievances which provoke people into committing terrorist acts.

A year later, American and British troops invaded Iraq and overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein. The UN Security Council had demanded that Saddam's government demonstrate that it had dismantled all its programs for producing weapons of mass destruction. The same demand had been repeatedly reaffirmed since 1991, when it had been included in the truce terms ending that earlier Gulf War. In the previous war, a UN-authorized, American-led force had liberated Kuwait from Iraqi conquest but left Saddam in power in Iraq itself. By the spring of 2003, there was general agreement on the Security Council that Saddam was still not complying with disarmament obligations imposed in 1991. It was also widely understood that Saddam's government had developed friendly relations with international terror networks.

But the Security Council still would not authorize a second war to enforce its own demands. When the United States and Britain proceeded to war without formal authorization from the Security Council, the war provoked strong condemnation at UN Headquarters and in many capitals around the world. In Europe, the governments of France and Germany remained most adamant in their condemnations. Outside of Britain, European public opinion remained quite disapproving. American opinion generally supported the war.

For critics, the war showed that the United States was a dangerous "rogue nation," claiming the power to attack other countries on its own initiative. For most Americans, it was hard to imagine who else, if not the American government, could decide when and where American military forces would be ordered into action. The United States had, in fact, secured endorsements of the war from some forty countries, many of which offered some degree of direct assistance to the military campaign. To critics, the war remained "unilateral" or in any case "illegitimate" because it was not sanctioned by the United Nations.

For most Americans, it remained strange to think that American defense efforts required authorization from the United Nations. The United States had fought many wars, large and small, since the founding of the United Nations in 1945. It had rarely sought or received UN approval for these efforts. How could the UN limit American defense efforts, when the UN had no troops to provide an alternate means of security? Criticism of American actions presumed, on the contrary, that no country would be safe unless international institutions were acknowledged to be paramount to the impulses of individual states.

Even as the United States was gearing up a bolder defense strategy in the months after September 11, European governments rounded up endorsements for a project which embodied this alternate view. A treaty establishing an International Criminal Court (ICC) had been negotiated in the summer of 1998, but it took some time to get the required sixty ratifications to put the plan into effect. The United States had, from the outset, sought revisions in the design of the project. European governments resisted these pleas and pressed forward with their efforts to see the court set up and running on the original plan. In the spring of 2002, the Bush administration announced its unalterable opposition to the court as now constituted. This stance provoked intense criticism.

The extent of the divergence in underlying attitudes was perfectly reflected in the differing perspectives on this new international project. The court would have jurisdiction to indict American soldiers for "war crimes" and could accuse higher officials of "command responsibility" for such "crimes," even for abuses they had neither ordered nor known about. Ultimately, according to the original plan, the court would also have jurisdiction to indict American leaders for the general crime of "aggression." Was it really to be expected that a government of the United States could submit itself to the judgments of such a court?

Europeans seemed convinced that only arrogance and selfishness could explain American...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691130558
• ISBN 13: 9780691130552
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 360
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland