Straight to the point

Everyone of a certain age who passed through British secondary education will have spent a few months learning about the League of Nations, which, to my knowledge, is not a subject of academic study anywhere else. Created by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the League was a global quasi-government with an expansive brief to abolish war and poverty worldwide. To read about its history is to follow it from one bruising failure to the next as it sought, inter alia, to outlaw the weapons of offensive war, set international standards of safety in the workplace, and constrain Mussolini on the world stage. 

Here was the essential problem: even with the best will in the world, the League had no power to enforce any of its edicts. For this it had to rely on Britain and France, who were notorious flakes. The United States never even joined. And so it went on. The General Secretariat would pronounce, the Permanent Court of International Justice would rule, the levers would be pulled, nothing would happen. None of their high ideals were able to survive first contact with reality — that is to say, state expediency and national egoism. Whenever it counted the powers would look to their own alliances, their own security. Mussolini was left to annex Abyssinia in 1936 despite the League’s protests, because Britain and France were trying to court him as an ally; Japan was allowed to overrun Manchuria for similar reasons. It all seemed to carry a brute lesson: whatever the merits of internationalism and international law, the facts of life ran against them. 

Why does English schooling fixate so much on the League, this odd sideshow? A corrective to teen idealism, maybe. These events, as told, seemed to be a mini fable in how the high ideas can’t compete against ordinary selfishness. It certainly had its appeal for teenage me: a smirker, an online troll.

But as a story this was over-keen and over-cynical. Too cynical, because it always underpriced the power of these ideas. “Why can’t we all just get along”, or, latterly, “global problems require global solutions” — these are powerful notions, at least among the very powerful. The armies that conquered Europe in the middle of the Forties were technically those of the United Nations, marching under its own banner of war: the “Honour Flag” — this just 10 years after the League of Nations was pronounced a dead letter. Had F.D.R. lived a little longer, something approaching a world state under the aegis of the UN would have resulted, with the planet governed as a kind of American-Soviet condominium — even Wendall Wilkie, his Republican rival, called for such a course. A lunatic idea, but not one that school-of-hard-knocks international realism can really assimilate. 

Too cynical then, and too cynical now. Over the past 10 years almost everyone has again been announcing the decline of liberal international norms and the return of the nation state. Terrorism, strongmanism, populism, migration, and global diseases would force some collision with reality, the old niceties would be forgotten, and we would then revert to a harder and simpler form of rule under sovereign nations. What would this entail? Nearly every literary or political weekly at one point carried the front piece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan as its cover. Even the vogue for the term “geopolitics” spoke to the new mood: a politics founded in expediency and the facts of life, not liberal ideas.

But nothing of the sort has happened. Whatever factors might be making the case for the nation state anew, the real story of the past decade has been a huge growth in the scope and depth of international law and obligation. These are advancing over the developed world much faster than they’re receding elsewhere.

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For all the foam of the past 10 years, it’s hard to think of any period in diplomatic history that’s been less defined by expediency, national egoism, or the cold accounting of interests. A classic example is the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which, unlike the old League of Nations, doesn’t require a sponsor power. In 2015, a British exit from the ECHR was Cameronite boilerplate. Now it is deemed radical and eccentric. Giorgia Meloni heads up a party that can claim lineal descent from Italy’s National Fascists. Emmanuel Macron was billed as a statesman of Jupiterian standing, a liberal answer to the age of the strongman. For all this neither can bring themselves to face down the court in Strasbourg, or even the Dublin Convention. France has now been reduced to paying the ECHR an out-of-pocket charge for each deportation. 

So too with the climate. 10 years ago climate agreements like the Kyoto Protocol were a byword for the well-meaning dead letter. These have since grown teeth. Switzerland, grand doyen of the international system, was in April ruled against by the Strasbourg court for insufficient zeal on Net Zero. The Swiss government is now drawing up a list of climate measures which it hopes will appease the court.

The same is true for technology. All the world powers have now accepted global AI regulation, even though the first to defect from these rules would surely reap huge commercial advantages for itself. So much for the new egoism.

In this sense many jumped too soon. In the 2010s, a number of political leaders and factions bet on the revival of the Westphalian system and took the national plunge, only to end up disappointed. Though China has been menacing Japan in the Spratly Islands for over a decade, this has not been enough to force a revision of Article 9 of the Constitution — which forbids Japan from waging aggressive war. Some of the more slapdash Brexiteers took it as a given that, during talks with the EU27, national interest or even the needs of European exporters would prevail, and that things like the integrity of the EEA were in fact wink-nudge negotiating positions. Wrong. The process ended up turning almost entirely on legalese such as the Good Friday Agreement — never on trade or even grand strategy. They had counted on a new smirking Bismarckianism that never actually materialised. 

Subsequent events only underline the point. Two years after this bruising course of negotiations, the United Kingdom decided to commit huge resources to defending the EU27’s eastern flank. The UK is also backing Ukraine’s accession to the EU: now a closed market to British goods. Even for a relative tearaway like Brexit Britain, the international principle is still unanswerable. Under similar circumstances, any 18th-century British cabinet would probably be concluding a treaty with Russia. 

Liberal internationalism has been challenged only to come out stronger. That’s not to say it’s come through unchanged. In the 2020s, global institutions no longer justify themselves with anything so sensible as, say, cheap imports and just-in-time supply chains — these were all torched in the name of “global action” against Coronavirus four years ago. The only argument now really made for these things is that any alternative to them is morally unconscionable. Britain can’t exit the ECHR to exercise ordinary border controls because that would put it in the same company as Belarus, and would be an aid and comfort to bad men everywhere. 

Border control. Great power politics. National rearmament. A liberal course on AI. These are not bankrupt ideas. History will probably vindicate them. But their proponents can’t count on some inevitable global crack-up to accomplish their work for them. So far, the only successful reassertions of the nation state have come not from “wider forces”, but from small, organised conspiracies like Vote Leave and Boris-Cummings that were willing to act in the face of events and force the issue. Nationalism and internationalism are moral premises. Events cannot prove or disprove them. More than anything else, what the last 10 years have shown is that these ideas are more powerful than realism, expediency, and the so-called facts of life. Those who oppose these reigning ideas shouldn’t count on reality intruding in on them.

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