Many on the liberal Left in the West put great store on and give great reverence to ‘international courts’. The politicians in places like the United Kingdom say ‘oh we can’t do that it would be against international law’ when presented with conundrums such as the removal of unwanted and dangerous migrants or supposed ‘refugees’.
But what would happen if a nation said no thanks and put two fingers up at international law, its courts and those who idolise them? Well probably not that much really. Russia has done that, Zimbabwe has done that and Saddam Hussain’s Iraq did that. Also no real consequence would or could be imposed on Britain, the USA or China. If these nations decided to ignore ‘international law’ then barring some calamity they are really too big for international law to deal with.
There is, as Patrick Porter writing in The Critic magazine, said a problem with ‘international law’ and that problem is that there’s no overall agreement as to what it should be. Every government has its own internal political pressures and their own national interests and these will nearly always, at least in countries that care about their continuance, take precedent over international law.
Mr Porter said:
The problem here isn’t just that international courts lack a true international government or authority that will enforce their writ. The problem is also the lack of a moral and political consensus. To speak of the “international community” making bad actors into “pariahs” implies that the world is a kind of intimate medieval village that keeps order by laying down a consensus and acting more or less in unison, with an authoritative clergy who can cast offenders into outer darkness.
It simply doesn’t and can’t work like that. The world tends not to treat offensive regimes as pariahs because it is made up of many disparate countries and governments who have many citizens to look after, and serious interests to pursue, all of which is unbound by any single consensus or governance.
I agree with this. A nation is a ‘pariah’ only until it is advantageous for another nation to ignore the ‘pariah’ status of the nation in question because it is in their own interests to do so. As Mr Porter pointed out, Britain put aside any moral qualms about General Pinochet of Chile when Chilean intelligence was useful during the Falklands War and no member of Soviet forces has ever been brought to justice for the campaign of rape that they carried out in Germany during the closing days of World War II. Nations will ignore the not so nice foibles of states, even ones that the great and the good have declared to be pariahs, if not doing so will harm or disadvantage their nation or their way of life. Like it or not realpolitik is what rules, not the lofty ideals of the internationalist.