Insights
Discover why some rules succeed only under trust, and what happens when people begin testing the limits of compliance, authority, and systems.
The postwar international order was built on a paradox that its architects understood but rarely stated plainly: it required the voluntary cooperation of great powers who had the capacity to defect from it at any time, and its rules had no enforcement mechanism that did not ultimately depend on the willingness of those same powers to enforce them.
The United Nations Security Council — the institution designed to be the primary enforcer of international peace and security — gave permanent veto rights to the five powers most capable of threatening that peace and security. The arrangement was not a design flaw. It was a deliberate acknowledgement that an international order not acceptable to the major powers would be a dead letter from the start, and that the choice was therefore between imperfect rules that the powerful would sometimes observe and no rules at all.
Whether this bargain has held, and whether it can continue to hold in the twenty-first century, is the central question of contemporary international relations.
The legal philosopher Hans Kelsen, writing in the 1940s and 1950s, argued that international law was genuine law — not merely a collection of political commitments dressed in legal language — but that its effectiveness depended on the development of centralised enforcement mechanisms analogous to those of domestic legal systems.
Without enforcement, legal norms remain aspirational rather than obligatory, and the distinction between law and politics collapses into the Thucydidean observation that the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. Kelsen’s project — a world legal order with genuine compulsory jurisdiction and centralised sanctions — was, and remains, utopian in the precise sense: it describes a destination that the direction of travel has never consistently approached.
The political scientist John Mearsheimer pressed the realist critique of international institutions to its logical conclusion. International institutions, Mearsheimer argued, do not cause peace — they reflect the distribution of power among states and the interests of dominant powers at particular historical moments.
When that distribution shifts or those interests change, institutions either adapt to the new reality or become irrelevant. The relative stability of the postwar order reflected not the authority of international law but the bipolar structure of the Cold War and, after 1991, the overwhelming material preponderance of the United States and its willingness to underwrite the rules-based order from which it disproportionately benefited. As that preponderance erodes and as the interests of rising powers diverge from the rules they did not design, the institutions built on that foundation face a structural crisis that no amount of diplomatic skill or normative commitment can resolve.
The international lawyer Martti Koskenniemi offered a more nuanced diagnosis. The failure of international law to constrain great power behaviour, Koskenniemi argued, is not evidence that international law is merely politics in disguise — it is evidence that all law operates at the intersection of normative aspiration and political reality, and that the gap between them is a permanent feature of legal systems rather than a temporary deficiency to be overcome by better institutional design.
International law matters not because it compels compliance from the powerful but because it provides a shared vocabulary of justification through which political actors must explain and defend their actions — a vocabulary that shapes the available options, creates reputational costs for certain kinds of behaviour, and provides resources for resistance to those who invoke it. The constraining effect is real but indirect, operating through discourse and reputation rather than through sanction.
The political theorist Hedley Bull described the international order as a society of states — an anarchical society, as he called it — in which sovereign states are also members of a community that shares certain institutions, norms, and understandings about the limits of acceptable behaviour. Bull’s framework captures something that both pure realism and pure legalism miss: the international order is neither a system of sovereign states with no common norms nor a nascent world government.
It is a community of mutual recognition in which sovereignty is both claimed and constrained — in which states acknowledge each other’s right to exist and to be treated according to shared norms, while maintaining the ultimate right to act on their own judgement in extremis. The stability of this order depends not on enforcement but on the shared interest in maintaining the framework of mutual recognition that makes predictable interaction possible.
The rise of China as a revisionist power — not in the sense of seeking to overturn the international order entirely but in the sense of seeking to reshape its rules and institutions to better reflect Chinese interests and values — poses the most serious structural challenge to the postwar order since the Soviet collapse.
The challenge is more complex than Cold War bipolarity because China is simultaneously deeply integrated into the economic institutions of the existing order and politically opposed to the normative framework — the liberal democratic consensus — that underpins its legitimacy claims. This combination of economic integration and normative contestation has no clear historical precedent and no established playbook for management.
The human rights dimension adds a further layer of complexity. The postwar human rights regime — from the Universal Declaration of 1948 through the covenants, conventions, and treaty bodies of subsequent decades — was built on the premise that states’ treatment of their own citizens is a legitimate concern of the international community, and that sovereignty does not confer immunity from international scrutiny of human rights violations.
This premise has always been selectively applied: powerful states have consistently invoked it against adversaries and deflected it from allies. But the norm itself — that there are limits to what states may do to their own citizens — has proved more durable than its selective application might suggest, surviving as a standard against which behaviour can be measured and a language in which demands can be made.
The question that the current period poses for international order is therefore not whether the rules-based international order is worth defending — it clearly is — but whether the conditions that made it possible: a dominant power willing to underwrite it, a sufficient convergence of great power interests, and a shared normative framework with some claim to universality, can be recreated or sustained in conditions of genuine multipolarity. The honest answer is that no one knows, and the stakes of getting it wrong are high enough that the uncertainty itself is a reason for care rather than for confidence.
