Anti-Climacus

WELL: Dara, who has not yet figured out she could just make this into a post, says in the comments below:

"On a much less specified, intelligent, and knowledgeable note, I'd like to dispute your claim that international law is handicapped before it starts -- at least, I'd say, it's not more handicapped than regular law. Given that individuals, under the same principle, will try to get away with as much as they can, yet we still employ law within a city, state, nation, etc. to try to ensure that they get away with less of what we don't want them to get away with, why shouldn't the same principle apply at an international level? Certainly there are a lot of problems, but I don't see why it's fundamentally different."

My Hobbes and Kant are a little rusty, but the argument, I believe, goes something like this: any international regime is either going to be 1. ineffectual or 2. despotic. It will be ineffectual because it's incomplete, and there is no overarching apparatus capable of instilling order wherever it needs to be instilled, and because (as Kant pointed out) the interests of republican democracies and autocratic governments are, generally speaking, fundamentally opposed, and the last thing anyone should want to do is equalize power between them on the international level (this is, in short, the problem a lot of conservative-types have with the UN).

The second problem is that even if you had nothing but republican democracies, and they were able to agree on a super-national oversight apparatus that had real power to enforce its standards, it's definitionally going to be despotic: unlike national regimes, where one at least has the (however difficult) option of leaving for someplace else, the super-national apparatus' reach is everywhere--if it doesn't like you, you're in trouble. Throw that fact in with some less-crazy version of Lord Acton's dictum, and you have a recipe for disaster.

There's probably also an argument that you can make that this situation would be different because everyone would consent and so the dictates of the super-national apparatus would be tacitly approved of. The first counterargument to that is the old Hobbesean one: just because people consent to a state which fufills their minimal desires for what a state should do doesn't entail that the state is normatively desirable, even from the view of the people consenting, only that it's more desirable than the other available options. The other is that removing alternate options, as you'd have to do to create an actually effective super-national apparatus, falls into Montesquieu's old "if liberty has a price to the buyer, it is beyond all price to the seller" principle.