Intervention and the limits of international law

Anthony Carty

pp. 32-42

in: Ian Forbes, Mark Hoffman (eds), Political theory, international relations, and the ethics of intervention, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1993

Abstrakt

This discussion of intervention begins with the adoption of a reductionist view of international law. This suggests that international law can be reduced to what international lawyers understand by international law and how they apply it as international lawyers looking at international relations. International lawyers, unlike municipal lawyers, are quite a diverse and mobile group of individuals on the international scene. They may be professors in universities, but they also act as counsellors before the International Court of Justice. These same professors may even serve on the International Court of Justice itself. This international legal community provides the recruiting pool for the foreign offices of many countries. These foreign offices then tend to rely upon what the professors in the universities say, and governments in turn draw upon this advice. This results in a kind of self-referencing discourse about the nature of international society. It is a form of discourse that has historical roots in obscure and arcane political theorising about international relations and in particular about the state.