Comment by mytailorisrich
4 days ago
You and I are subject to the law. This is not voluntary and it will be enforced against us by the state.
On the other hand, countries are sovereign. They are not subject to "laws", and if they do it is on a voluntary basis. Ultimately it boils down to military and economic strength for a country to be able to stand its ground and do what it wants. We never left this behind, this has always been the case.
From the replies it seems that commenters believe that countries are subject to "laws" the same way that they are...
The goal of the rules based international order was to subject countries to laws, yes. Those laws could have been (and were various times in the past) enforced by larger organizations in the same way the state acts on citizens. Westphalian Sovereignty is not any more real than the rules based international order - clearly Venezuela's sovereignty did nothing for them here.
There was never any "larger organizations", only the larger, more powerful countries that enforced the "international order" that suited them.
There was a time when Germany thought just like that. In the aftermath we decided that maybe it's not such a good idea, this might-makes-right thing and we strove for a world where transitions are peaceful because we realized that our power to kill had grown to proportions unseen in our history and because some of us - rightly, in my view - felt that the human race itself was now in the balance.
If you toss that out you have to at least acknowledge all possible outcomes. People - even powerful people, and powerful countries too - should be subject to the law because no single person and no single country stands above all the others.
11 replies →