International Law

New Imperial Order or (Hegemonic) International Law?

When, on the event of the Gulf War (1990-1991), the Soviet Union determined to cooperate with the United States within the Security Council (SC), President George Bush said that he shared with Mijail Gorbachov the imaginative and prescient of “a world where the rule of law supplants the guideline of the jungle, a world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice, and international in which the sturdy appreciate the rights of the vulnerable.”

Twelve years afterward, this vision has disappeared because the USA has assumed an imperial tendency, rightly outlined using professor Zemanek in his introductory essay, principally whilst the proper wing Republicans who already had the Congress’s manipulate (1996) conquered the Presidency via courts (2000). It suffices to examine the announcement of principles of the New American Century Project (June 1997) and to take account of its signatories to recognize that the Iraq intervention became part of American planned regulations shaped by humans that constitute the center of the present-day Administration, even before the S-11 crimes supplied the event of setting them in exercise.

Law

Although earlier than this date, the United States foreign policy confirmed signs of unilateralism, afterward, the Bush Administration has decided to impose a New World Order that turns across American protection. This is primarily based on American military supremacy and its readiness to use force. Diplomacy and global institutions specifically work for intervention and warfare rather than for peaceful dispute agreement and cooperation. The outcome is profoundly regressive.

Leadership, Hegemony, Empire

Nobody questions that the arena desires leadership and that only the United States can provide it. However, the George W. Bush Administration no longer bet on management but hegemony, even on the consecration of an Imperial order that denies sovereignty and sovereign equality with all its results. We have to be “unashamed, unapologetic, uncompromising American constitutional hegemonists,” wrote John Bolton.

Among the signs and symptoms that suggest a transition to the one (the vacancy or manipulation of norms in pressure by way of the cause of hegemonic practices) or the other (a New Imperial Order), you can mention the modern-day opinion that denies that treaties are resources of legal obligations, that continuously rejects their direct effect or that subordinates their direct effect to domestic guidelines; the exclusion of judicial evaluate of government acts beyond the American territory; the efforts to convey to impasse the Draft Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, accepted via the ILC; the reality that Congress Acts are put above the UN Charter and the denial that handiest the UN Charter can legitimate the usage of pressure, except for the right of self-defense; or the confirmation that there may be no UN competence to review the USA decisions on foreign coverage and national safety.

The growing manifestations of legislative and judicial imperialism are also symptomatic: Acts that authorize using pressure overseas to arrest-even to annul if important it’s-humans that are asked with the aid of federal justice or which are considered terrorists; the substitute of diplomacy by way of systematic use of retorsion and (armed) reprisals; the impossible to resist the tendency to replace norms and institutions using non-felony (political) compromises; the invocation of religious freedom to introduce using pressure a manipulating and reactionary idea and so on.

Besides, the United States gathers too many noes to multilateral cooperation that their closest European allies have now not best supported however sponsored. The US has stated no to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, no to the Verification Protocol to The Biological Weapons Convention, no to the Land Mines Convention, no to the Kyoto Protocol; no to the ICC Statute (this is, in addition, a goal in their adversarial activity) and many others. As noted via Zemanek, this could seem to other States as “a manifestation of negative network spirit” with “ominous implications” on the overall system of global regulation-making and the achievement of the purposes of the law.

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