The Spirit of Law
§1. Every human community strives toward happiness, that is, peace and prosperity shared in a spirit of brotherhood and justice. However, various hindrances prevent love to reign and flow within the social body. They can only be removed by justice, delivered by legitimate public institutions. Pax opus iustitiae: peace is the work of justice.
The international community is such a community. It strives toward a peaceful and wealthy world, where the nations would freely cooperate for the greatest good of mankind and the glory of God. Given the present state of the world, plagued with misery and rivalries, only justice delivered on a global scale could save the situation. But there exist no legitimate global political institutions and God Himself, the supreme King of Justice, seems asleep and His voice unheard amidst the tumultuous cacophony of the modern world.
International law could fulfill this role. But is has long been devoid or any real authority, as only stipulating some minimum requirements for diplomatic relations and setting formal standards for the redaction of treatises; the treatises themselves being external and provisory agreements expressing a fragile and temporary compromise between antagonistic interests. As John Dryden wrote: “Such subtle covenants shall be made, till peace itself is war in masquerade.”
However, under the influence of the Spirit of Law, international law began to evolve. The idea of a political unification of mankind grew stronger with time, from the Stoics to Kant. In spite of those progresses, law still lays at the periphery of the international system:
1) The Nation States are still the primary subjects and only real source of international law (voluntarism). The transition from a ‘law of coexistence’ between the states to a ‘law of cooperation’, advocated by Wolfgang Friedmann, is long and chaotic, and George Adi Saab even pointed out that post-Cold war globalization, with its ‘global law’ and ‘transnational law’ fostering purely private interests, implies a regression to the law of coexistence . The emergence of supranational organizations having the juridical personality (e.g. the European Union recently) also raises concerns of legitimacy, both from the secular and the religious viewpoint.
2) There exists no legitimate institution which would enforce the law at the global scale by repressive means (Bentham) . Instead, self regulation is allowed, like various kinds of sanctions and counter-measures (Rupture de Charge Case, 1978), or UN-backed wars which sometimes promote particular interests – George Adi Saab spoke of a ‘shocking selectivity on the level of collective action.’
3) There exist many different private law systems: Common Law, Civil Law, Islamic Law, etc. The La Haye Conference (1893, 1955), the Montevideo conferences and NAFTA tried to unify private international law . But this unification is far from being complete and is often ignored by national jurisdictions.
4) In modern Common and Civil Law, the spiritual dimension of law is totally absent, introducing a discrepancy with Islamic or Jewish Law. This is problematic since it expels religion from the public sphere, whereas the first act of justice, according to Thomas Aquinas, is to give God the cult He deserves .
The prevailing international system in its present state thus seems inadequate and powerless to enforce a divinely inspired global peace. We have then 1) to really understand what Law is 2) to posit the ideal of a unification of mankind 3) to consider its realization in an eschatological perspective.
