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This chapter analyzes the ways that anticolonial nationalists responded to an intensified postcolonial predicament with their most ambitious project of worldmaking—the New International Economic Order (NIEO). The NIEO constituted a welfare world that sought to enhance the bargaining power of postcolonial states, democratize decision-making, and achieve international redistribution. At the center of this welfare world was a radical recasting of sovereign equality as a demand for an equitable share of the world's wealth. The NIEO envisioned this expansive account of sovereign equality as the economic component of international nondomination. The view that sovereign equality had material implications marked anticolonial nationalists' biggest departure from the postwar international legal order and was quickly rejected and displaced in the neoliberal counterrevolution of the 1970s.

This chapter analyses one of the core norms of international law under the two-pillar standard of thin justice—the sovereign equality of states, the somewhat mystical legal construct that makes states juridically equal, one said by many scholars to be either illegitimate morally or belied by reality. Following a brief description of the rules on the recognition of new states, it examines three of sovereign equality's key features: the right of states to participate in lawmaking on an equal legal footing, the duty of all states to comply with legal obligations on an equal legal basis, and the immunity of states from the jurisdiction of other states for certain official acts of the state. It considers proposals for the law to treat states even more as legal equals as well as critiques of state equality as anti-cosmopolitan or anti-democratic. With respect to the immunity of states and officials, an issue made famous in the saga of Augusto Pinochet in London, full immunity has negative consequences for victims of human rights abuses seeking justice, and the chapter looks at proposals to reduce immunity for international crimes.

This chapter examines some of the conceptions of order and justice that are present in the Islamic world. It argues that many Islamic states have been willing to accommodate themselves to an international society based on the idea of sovereign equality. However, one of the impacts of globalization has been to shift the allegiances of some members of these states from territorially based political communities to those based on religious or cultural identity. Some of the radical Islamist groupings that have emerged in recent years and have voiced a range of grievances are seeking nothing less than the overturning of prevailing international and domestic orders. Although the outcome of this complex challenge is impossible to predict, one consequence is that it has created space for the emergence of a new and possibly transformational Islamic civil society, which directs its attention principally to the reform of Muslim societies themselves.

Begins by giving an outline of the idea of trusteeship as presented by P. H. Kerr, and then as viewed against a background of the opposite idea—that of liberty, as considered by J. S. Mill. It states the purpose of the book is to interrogate the character of trusteeship as an idea of international society, to investigate the assumptions, claims, and justifications that render it intelligible as a recognized and settled mode of human conduct in international life. It contends that the character of trusteeship is discernible in full relief at the intersection of two dispositions of human conduct: the good of assisting persons in need, and the good of respecting human autonomy. The first part of the chapter is a general discussion of the idea of trusteeship in contemporary international society, and it ends by commenting that, since the 11 September attacks, there is very little about the Bush administration's claims that would be out of place in the age of empire—an age in which trusteeship was the most obvious outward manifestation of a similarly righteous mission to propagate the virtue of civilization and to eradicate its enemies. The remaining three sections of the chapter discuss the idiom of Oakeshottian conversation in which the book is written, the international society/English School theoretical tradition in which the book is situated, and the character of trusteeship, which is intelligible in a particular relation of virtue, inequality, and tutelage.

This chapter casts the challenge of international cooperation in the framework of customary international law. It explains how custom is developed and sustained, and why it cannot address all international cooperation problems on its own, i.e., why treaties are also needed. Custom has been particularly important in establishing property rights, such as the Exclusive Economic Zone. The chapter illustrates these ideas by explaining the role that custom played in addressing pollution of the Rhine.

This chapter begins with a brief description of the primary goal of the book, which is to examine how the international response to the Yugoslav constitutional crisis in 1991 impacted the development of the elusive principle of people's right to self-determination and its relationship to sovereignty. It then discusses the evolution of the legal meaning and practice of the principle of sovereign equality and the principle of self-determination.

This chapter articulates a defense of the sovereign equality regime's pluralism on the basis of the need for a global order to accommodate endemic moral disagreement. It argues that the pursuit of peace is, on the whole, well served by an international legal framework that, rather than embracing a particular vision of a just public order, embodies a respectful accommodation among conflicting visions. That accommodation includes elements of overlapping moral consensus, but that consensus should not be overestimated. The affirmation of the legitimacy of moral diversity in the international arena is not, as some would charge, a surrender to moral skepticism or relativism. It is, rather, a sound application of the most essential liberal premises about morality, in light of a sober recognition of the limitations of moral absolutes in international politics.

This chapter assesses the current practice of states (“consensus”) as another factor affecting the margin of appreciation. It is controversial amongst commentators, some of whom regard it as a distraction when selecting standards. However, the consensus factor is justified on the basis of state consent, the sovereign equality of states, and the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, particularly Article 31(3)(b). Since human rights treaties have a special status (they provide standards of protection to individuals) interpretation based on state practice can only be relevant as an indicator of where differing standards might be appropriate. The “consensus” factor need not be measured with precision. The chapter considers the role of interpretative concepts such as “evolutive interpretation”, “autonomous meanings”, and “conventionality control”. It discusses deference to other international norms (e.g., customary international law, jus cogens, obligations erga omnes), institutions and organisations (e.g., the UN Security Council, the European Community).

This chapter highlights the ways in which self-determination affects the scheme of sovereign equality. It explores the legal significance of the self-determination right in the international system, the methods used to discern the free will of the designated ‘people’ regarding its political status and its representation in the international community, the application of the self-determination right against independent local ruling apparatuses in Rhodesia and South Africa, and the implications of that application for the question of popular sovereignty.

This chapter argues that as against practicable alternatives, sovereign equality, however seemingly outmoded, still has much to recommend it as a foundational principle of international public order. In particular, it answers moral objections associated with efforts to substitute a liberal-democratic for a pluralist international approach to internal public order, and to substitute “an end to impunity” and “no safe havens” for interstate peace and respectful accommodation as public international law's preeminent theme. It contends that insofar as human rights advocates reject the global pluralism with which this book is concerned, they figure to empower what they themselves should identify as the wrong interests and values. It reminds those advocates of insights from the not-so-distant past that have tended to be neglected or forgotten, as international moralism's reach has come to exceed its grasp.

Chapter 6 concentrates on the role of Saavedra Lamas at the Seventh Pan-American Conference held in Montevideo (1933), the impact of his Anti-War Treaty, and the rise of a multilateral Inter-American System by 1933 with the institutionalization of the principles of nonintervention and sovereign equality and autonomy. It also analyzes the crisis of the American Institute of International Law (AIIL) in 1933, the interruption of its activities for several years in the 1930s, and the final dissolution of the organization in the early 1940s. It was no coincidence that an organization such as the AIIL with a US-led imperial and missionary legal project of civilizing Latin America through the promotion of the international rule of law was dissolved when the principles of non-intervention and sovereign equality were institutionalized under a new multilateral Inter-American System and the Platt Amendment finally derogated in Cuba.

During the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States periods, China displayed some balance-of-power characteristics similar to those seen in the later European state system. However, the warring states lacked what scholars identified as a “commitment to legacy” and a system of “shared values,” and their concept of self seems to have been less that of emergent, permanent separate nations than that of rival contenders in a winner-take-all struggle for imperial supremacy. The cardinal principle of the Chinese states system thus crystallized as one of resisting hegemony by anyone else and, in effect, seeking it without help. Better even than mere hegemony, moreover, was the geopolitical Holy Grail of achieving outright unification under a state's own banner. Hence, the underlying ethos of the Chinese system during the Warring States period was universalist, and this precluded the development of an explicitly international conception of legitimate political order. Furthermore, because of its marked isolation during its formative years, China viewed itself as “the only civilized society” and considered those beyond its borders as mere barbarians, who should be “rejected as animals.” This form of racism provided an additional set of reasons why relations of formal equality with barbarian rulers were simply out of the question.

This chapter examines the historical development of State immunity, from the absolute to the restrictive doctrine that distinguishes between acts jure imperii and jure gestionis. The provenance of the law on the jurisdictional immunity of States is widely held to be the case of Schooner Exchange. Although Schooner Exchange is, generally but not quite accurately, regarded as the authoritative anchor for the classical doctrine of absolute State immunity, Chief Justice Marshall saw immunity as an exception to the absolute jurisdiction of a State within its own territory. The chapter also examines the rationale of State immunity, which is based on the three major attributes of statehood: independence, sovereign equality, and dignity. The sovereignty of a State encompasses its jurisdiction over people and property within its territory. State immunity is a derogation of that jurisdiction. A major justification for State immunity is facilitation of international relations in conformity with international law.

The task of Chapter 9 is to outline the vista beyond the Vattelian imaginary of sovereign equality. Instead of embracing one of its already existing alternatives, this chapter confronts the wagers, the assumptions, and the commitments that separate the most influential, but thus far mutually indifferent, five; but also a set of more basic images that they continue to share with the Vattelian imaginary even as they insist they have left it behind. One of the important tasks of these images, as this chapter hopes to show, is reconciliation—between infinite responsiveness and bounded power, between asymptotic orientation and situational equilibrium, between spatial scale and temporal pace, between the stability of structures and the dignity of transformations. To move beyond in this context is to ask: Can those pairs be reconciled differently? And more importantly: what for?

This chapter considers one particularly important aspect of participation based on sovereign equality, namely the practices of international institutions. Those entities and the states in them seem to have interpreted sovereign equality as not preventing them from treating states very differently in terms of organizational membership and decisionmaking. It first looks at the admissions policies of several key organizations, including the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and major European regional institutions, to determine whether they are just and fair. Turning to internal decisionmaking, it focuses on two institutions whose unequal treatment of states, combined with their massive influence on all states, has elicited great criticism: the United Nations Security Council, including the veto power of the five permanent members (and its contrast with the egalitarian General Assembly); and the International Monetary Fund, with its voting weighted based on member states' financial contributions.

As much as the United Nations (UN) provided an institutional context for decolonization, decolonization itself effected a profound transformation in the legal structures and powers of the UN. This chapter argues that that transformation was understood as necessary for the construction of modern states in the decolonized world—but that the meaning and expression of modern statehood was intensely contested throughout the period of decolonization. The chapter traces a series of interconnected struggles in the early UN over the form and functions of the nation-state, each of which resulted in innovations in the institutional framework and powers of the UN. In particular, it focuses on three axes of struggle, over the meaning of self-government, the values and practices of modern government, and the import of sovereign equality.