International Law (POLS4501/5501) 01

hello and welcome this media recording accompanies the course political science 4501 and 5501 international law taught by dr. greg dixon of the University of West Georgia Department of Political Science and planning this media recording and all course materials are copyright 2014 by Gregory C Dixon and all rights are reserved students staff and faculty of the University of West Georgia have permission to copy transfer or otherwise use these recordings for non-profit educational purposes this is the first introductory lecture to a course on international law the course is designed to provide essentially a survey of international law and its principles it is a graduate undergraduate mixed course so the lectures are primarily oriented towards the junior and senior level of undergraduates the graduate students in the course are doing significant additional readings if you're watching this video or any of the other videos related to this class on YouTube there are a number of readings for the course that go along this is designed to supplement and to provide context for those readings the primary reading that is the foundation of this course is Malcolm Shaw's text international law by Cambridge University Press this first lecture is basically context it's split into two media recordings part 1 and part 2 the context here is to put international law into the study of international relations so these first two lectures are going to introduce the concept of international law to discuss how international law is different from domestic law and to talk about where international law fits in the discussion of international relations so in our academic discipline where do we place international law and one of the big things that we're going to get in these to lectures is a sense of the controversy and challenge that comes from our discussions of international law one of the things about international relations is that it is a very diverse discipline there are many different ways of looking at the same concepts and international law is going to be one of those concepts about which we have a great many different ways of thinking and sort of theoretical frameworks for apply so these first lectures are just to kind of get everything going to give context to start off with this is a course in international relations it is a political science course focused on the subfield of IR and looking at in general the study of relations between actors that cross national borders this is a very diverse subfield we talk about a lot of different stuff when we talk about actors this could be individual persons it can be multinational corporations it can be nongovernmental organizations intergovernmental organizations nation-states pretty much any organizational form that humans have created if it interacts across national borders we consider that to be this part of the study of IR so you can imagine that this pretty much includes almost everything there is to include in the modern globalized world of today I are thus includes a lot of different issue areas and includes an enormous array of diverse perspectives so there's no clear agreement on how to study relations between actors across borders and this is going to be somewhat frustrating particularly for anybody coming from the hard sciences like chemistry or physics where you study things where there's a mathematical equation or a series of relationships and there is some form of the equal sign at the end and then you get an answer in IR you can have 20 valid answers to the same basic question part of what makes the discipline fun is this diversity it's very interesting to see these different perspectives but in the modern era where students have been trained particularly in k-12 to think of the entire universe as being amenable to an ABCD answer or a formulaic answer IR is not like that and this course on international law we will repeatedly come across circumstances where really truly expert individuals disagree vehemently with each other about what exactly something means and how it should be interpreted even in areas that have been around as international law for hundreds of years international law is one way of solving collective problems internationally it fits into and is bound up in a whole series of other international actors and structures and one of the things we're going to talk about as this course goes on is how we fit international law into all of these other understandings it is a loose set of rules governing a wide range of behaviors we're going to talk about how international law is different from domestic law in a little bit but one of the biggest things that we want to remember is that international law has generally speaking a much looser framework than domestic law does because of the lack of a central enforcer so international law when we talk about a loose set of rules that doesn't mean that international laws may not be specific it just means that in comparison to domestic law the ability of those legal systems to enforce themselves and to actually function in the way that we expect domestic law to is highly varied so international law much looser than domestic law in most cases international law has expanded significantly in the 20th century one of the big differences between the twentieth century particularly the post-world War two period and prior centuries is that we are interconnected in a way that we have not been in the past in fact many many ways that we have not been in the past even in the late 1800s where the world was arguably about as globalized as it is today the speed of information and the penetration of that large-scale globalization at the local level was not as powerful as what we experienced today I would argue that economically and in terms of movement of persons and goods you can make the case that the colonial system of the late 1800s was as highly globalized as the world is today but I would make the case that today in a world of the internet and Twitter and social media and whatever new things are being invented as I'm recording this that the contemporary world while it has a material globalization that's on par with the colonial era is significantly different in terms of its social cultural and information oriented globalization I would also argue that the globalization of today is at least in its potential this is another one of those areas that's highly controversial in IR but at least in the potential today the contemporary globalization lacks the material coercion of the colonial era a lot of other negative aspects of it but the material coercion where we literally put RVs of thousands upon thousands of people in your territory and kill you is something that we do not see as we did in the colonial era but again this is something that's also highly contentious a world systems theorists would argue that things are highly and highly coercive today but in the twentieth century one of the ways that we've tried to resolve the issues of previous periods in history is to create international also that there are clearly codified rules of how to behave across borders rules that states agree upon the other thing that we get is because information can be shared so readily and because globalization begins to touch many more people's lives the scope for international agreements has grown so what's interesting here is that we've seen international law expands significantly and the pace at which it expands appears to can be continuing on a process of acceleration as we move into the 21st century so early in the 20th century there were some expansions of international law we see big expansions coming in the post-world War two period and today we see more and more areas in which international law seems to be required to solve collective problems there are basically two broad types of international law the first is public international law and this is the international law that governs relations between states so when the United States and the United Kingdom the US and Great Britain are discussing a treaty or whether countries are coming together to discuss modifications to a treaty like the North Atlantic Treaty that is the foundation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization which is NATO when countries are coming together in those kind of discussions that's public international law relations between States private international law covers areas of conflict and relations between national laws and international actors this is a very broad and constantly changing and transforming area of international law but private international law is by far the larger in terms of the number of interaction it effects although you almost never unless you are in international business or if you're here at West Georgia in turn National Economic Affairs major you very rarely hear private international law discussed it's usually public international law that gets all the press public international law is in fact almost all of what you probably had as an idea of international law before you came into this class it has the longest formal history although private international law has existed as long as there have been political entities to have conflicts with individuals who have to operate in them the formal history in the Western tradition in particular of how law works globally it's public international law goes back to the age of kings signing legally binding treaties with each other looking to the Pope for validation if we break the treaty God will be mad at us worst case scenario you could be excommunicated and in the old days that meant that basically you were going to hell so these things were important even back into the medieval period most international relations scholarship in international law looks at public international law and in particular generally how it fits into either an institutional framework such as the work that I do in World Trade Organization disputes or in the transmission of norms and values in the international system such as work that deals with human rights and other types of sort of more individually oriented issues most of what we're going to talk about in this class is public international law the focus of most of what we're going to be looking at is this area because it is the area that has the most scholarship on it now if I had taught this class five years ago the entire course it would have been public international law because that's basically how courses were there have been a lot of really interesting developments and honestly I found a lot of really interesting stuff out there dealing with some of these questions of private international and so we're going to talk about towards the latter quarter of the course some private international law issues and solutions to various problems private international law covers areas dealing with the clash of international and domestic laws this is one of those things that's kind of interesting because it's hugely diverse this has a long history but IR has kind of tended to ignore it it's not really something that international relations scholars liked partly because it's really hard to get data it's really hard to actually find things to analyze in any kind of a quantitative way and in a qualitative way the problem is there's so much and it's so diverse it's hard to write works that can be generalized but what we talk about when we mean private international law is for instance a multinational corporation that has a headquarters in the United States let's say they're headquartered in Dallas Texas and they have operations in Brazil and Nigeria and Indonesia and Australia well private international law is what's going to really be a focus for that company because it has to operate in multiple jurisdictions most likely its corporate structure is going to be set up in such a way that it's going to use jurisdictions that it doesn't actually do anything in but that are useful for tax purposes or for the facilitation of money transfers between subsidiaries and so you could with just one company operating in four or five countries have as many as ten legal jurisdictions that you might have to be thinking about so how for instance do you enforce a contract if a Dallas based company signs a contract with a company in Indonesia and they disagree over the contract terms who decides how to conforte the contract and who ultimately enforces the contract do you use American law or Indonesian law if the company is a big powerful multi corporation and their dispute is with a small Indonesian company how does that Indonesian company guarantee fairness it might be that they want to use local courts to mitigate against the power of the big company the big company may want to use American courts because it will disadvantage the other company involved there are a whole series of ways of solving these kinds of problems there are lots and lots of issues with this and I'm just I've given you one example there are thousands of these things it could be not a company having a disagreement with another company it could be a company having a disagreement with a country Argentina issued a ton of bonds in the late 90s that were explicitly denominated in dollars because Argentina at that time pegged its currency to the dollar and in those contracts in order to get a lower interest rate because interest rates basically are dependent on risk to reduce the risk for investors and get a lower interest rate Argentina agreed that the governing law for any disputes would be that of the state of New York in the United States and this has been a problem for Argentina because Argentina defaulted on those debts and imposed on borrowers a settlement they essentially said take this or leave it and that was pennies on the dollar well they're a handful of investors who held those Argentinian bonds said well we're not taking your deal because it's New York law that applies we're going to sue you in New York to get all of our money back and basically what that happened was they had to go to New York to go to court Argentina has said well we're not going to really be involved in this we're going to just kind of go with the deal that we've got most people took art took our deal and we're not going to deal with these people but they can the investors can use New York law to seek settlement and damages from Argentina and they can seek to block Argentina from doing any kind of transactions in United States that pay money to the people who took the deal at the expense of the people who didn't so you just really weird situation in which the country of Argentina has to fight private investors in a New York Court because of the structure of the contract that's private international law and it's a really complicated area but it has a huge practical impact and you can see why it's international business and scholars who focus on business issues that have really been the ones who are most interested in private international law you get lawyers who are also interested in it because all the people fighting back and forth on these things are ultimately going to be business lawyers and the practical impact in a globalized economy is huge because millions of companies in the world have to deal with these basic questions how do we enforce our contracts and one of the things when when we talk about international economic law we will talk about private international law in a big way so the last quarter or so of a course when we're looking at these sorts of questions one of the things that we'll talk about is this international economic law and sort of how that fits private international law the interesting thing now is that there's a growing part of international law private international law that is looking at legal agreements between private parties businesses in different countries are increasingly using third party countries laws for contracts let's say that you are in Indonesia and you want to do business with a country in Africa let's just say Uganda so you're a business in Indonesia you want to start selling your goods in Uganda you go to local Ugandan companies the problem is is and you know you're not real sure about Ugandan law and those companies in Uganda they're not really sure about Indonesian law and so what you get is companies see a big risk dealing with each other and so you might say let's to make this easier on everybody let's use the governing law of the United States or the governing law of Great Britain or the governing law it doesn't have to be the sort of big countries like that it might be any place that has a reputation for good rule of law you might say Australia wherever depending regionally on where these companies are they may pick some third country and say what we're going to do is we're going to write these disputes or excuse me these contracts in such a way that if we have a dispute we can go to this third party country's legal system and seek redress these are still relatively rare in dealing with sort of south-south contract development but we see this increasingly when we're looking at countries that are doing business in the North and South they look for third party countries because a lot of times you're not really going to necessarily trust in the rule of law in a country that doesn't have a good reputation for it dispute settlement outside of domestic legal frameworks also happens you have organizations that exist one of the biggest is the International Chamber of Commerce that actually has an arbitration system that has dealt with tens of thousands of cases in which companies have signed contracts with each other and rather than use the domestic legal system of any country in the world they go to these outside systems that are run by in the case of the International Chamber of Commerce a non-governmental organization to ultimately resolve the dispute so there's lots of different answers to these sorts of problems that potentially arise and in international law one of the challenges is how do you deal with this enormous variety that's out there well one of the key distinctions when things you absolutely have to keep in your mind especially if you are someone who wants to go to law school and is interested in these kind of things is that international law is not like domestic law international law is very different and the distinction is absolutely critical for understanding how international law works domestic law there are laws that exist as formal rules with some type of enforcement and this is legitimate third-party enforcement in the United States if I sign a contract let's just say it's my employment contract with the University of West Georgia and the University of West Georgia violates that contract or if I violate that contract we can go to a legitimate third party the United States government's court system and we can have our dispute adjudicated the legitimate element here is critical we accept that as entities and people in the United States myself as a person the University of West Georgia as an entity we accept third party adjudication who enforces contracts within the United States the United States government now the thing about this is we just sort of take it as a given today that that's how it works the government enforces contracts it's just what the government does but ultimately we don't think about where that legitimate power comes from domestic law has a very long and very clear history and ultimately it reverts to the command of the sovereign backed by coercive sanction and the command of the sovereign means that whether it's a king or it's the three branches of government exercising power in our checks and balances system the government as constituted has the power to set and enforce the laws and to use force up to and including the right to kill you to make you comply with the law or to punish you if you break it so the ruler can make the laws and use force to coerce compliance and ultimately what this means is in the domestic legal context there is this powerful entity that will enforce the law on everybody and this is a big deal we don't like to think about this in the United States we don't have to because we accept everything is legitimate even in hugely important moments people accept the power of legitimate enforcement in 2000 Al Gore and George W Bush were competing for the presidency of the United States and it came down to Florida as hopefully everyone in this class knows we had a situation in which the votes in Florida were disputed the two candidates went through the court system and in going through the court system these two people eventually got to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said George Bush won now technically they decided the whole issue of the ballots in Florida Louis but but ultimately what they decided was that George W Bush was going to be President of the United States and Al Gore accepted that decision because he accepted the legitimacy of the Supreme Court now there were a lot of political activists who basically said ah the election was stolen and they ran around saying hey President Bush is not a legitimate president but none of them took up arms and marched on Washington to depose him so people complained a lot but nobody tried to break the legal structure in order to overturn the decision and my guess is it didn't really occur to very many people that they even had that as an option so one of the things that we see is in domestic law there is that ruler and if they if that ruler whether it's a king or whether it's instance set of institutions whether or not it's one of the other the ruler who has rules if they're seen as legitimate the vast majority of the population simply complies you don't have to use force but if you break the law ultimately force can be used against you and we used force routinely in fact in the United States the use of force is up dramatically in the last 20 years the paramilitary model of policing in the United States was non-existent thirty years ago and now even relatively small towns have paramilitary police forces if you look at the arms and equipment watch a cop show from the 60s and what you see is a bunch of guys with revolvers and shotguns and today you watch television and you look at sort of the tactical teams that they have and you know they look like they're an army they have armored personnel carriers they have military equipment we accept today the militarization of our police forces as part of compliance why do we need a paramilitary police force in the United States when it has been anathema to Americans really for almost all of our history well the answer to that question obviously is debatable but the answer that we're given is to enforce the law we need this kind of a force and ultimately that should remind everybody that force is what backs up domestic law international law does not work that way there is no sovereign in international law there is no legitimate enforcer this is a enormous difference because that third party legitimate enforcement with the legitimate power to coerce compliance and to punish offenders that doesn't exist therefore international law cannot function like domestic law force does not play the role in international law that it does in domestic law it can't there is no legitimately accepted enforcer so any country that uses force to enforce international law is always doing so in a way that is contentious because any individual country always is going to struggle because they are not a third party enforcer they're not going to be seen as universally legitimate so far far far far far more often than force we see other forms of sanction other ways of tackling these issues one of the big challenges then since force is very rarely used to enforce international law the vastly more common way of doing it is through reputational costs or economic cost things like that this means that international law is going to be particularly challenging in terms of international relations theory international relations theory is incredibly diverse if you have not had political science 3501 the introduction to international relations course some of these terms are going to be a little odd for you I would encourage you to either go back to the YouTube channel for the intro IR and listen to the relevant lectures or to do some quick research online or come talk to me and I can point you in the direction of some good sources for these but there are lots of different branches of international relations theory and I've put up a couple of the well five of the major subdivisions of theory they all disagree about international law and powerfully realists are your traditional power is what drives everything power is what matters everything has to be practical the term you most associate with them as realpolitik meaning you don't worry about what's right or what's wrong you worry about what is the most famous quote that we can sort of think of as realism in a nutshell is actually a quote from Thucydides thousands of years ago and that is that the strong do as they will and the weak suffer what they must the the immediate line before that in lucidity x' book on the Peloponnesian War is right as a matter of the relation of nations is a question for equals in power and so one of the things that we see with realists is they're very concerned with power liberals or in modern era we usually refer to them as neo liberals or neoliberal institutionalists but basically they're it's the liberal school much more interested in institutions and incentives you're much more likely to see economic ideas brought into play when the Liberals are talking particularly the ideas of interdependence and how countries become mutually dependent on each other liberals are fine with international law in fact liberals will talk about how oftentimes international law simply codifies things that create a set of incentives to make cooperation possible and so on so liberals have a very different view of things social constructivists believe that we construct or constitute our understanding of the world through a shared set of language and discourse and that we shape the value of our institutions and so social constructivists frequently look at things like norm diffusion how values transfer and how we define different ideas and how this definitions then feed to how we respond to them and for them international law fits into that context it's a way of seeing what is and what is not acceptable to the community of nations and to individuals changes in international law contract changes in global norms Marxists and for people who in the United States who think that Marxists are all sort of leftovers from the Cold War when we talk about Marxists in IR theory there we're not talking about Soviets we're talking about the intellectual tradition that stems from Marx that looks at economic factors and exploitation in the international system it is a vibrant and still quite quite widespread international relations perspective you would not recognize most Marxist thought in international relations from the American sort of pop culture version of Marxism so anybody who sees this up here and says wow you know that's bold stuff that we don't have to worry about you definitely do have to worry about it it is an entirely legitimate area of thinking about international relations and there are quite a few people who have made very very powerful contributions to the study of IR from the Marxist tradition Marxists are folks who look predominantly at the economic factors and the division of the global the global system as an economic system a system of exploitation and there's incredible diversity in this but basically what we see with Marxists is that international law is often much more problematized it's not something that's nice and simple it can be liberating or it can be constraining it can be exploitative oft times you see Marxists to look at the existing framework of global governance and argue about how the international legal structure in the existing system is in fact an exploitative one oftentimes a holdover of colonialism critical theorists this is one of those things where we lumped them all together but they're an incredibly diverse crowd there's a lot of different ways of looking at the world from the perspective of critical theory but they have a whole range of approaches that look at international law from people who want to do discourse theory looking at the terminology the language and how that is used to frame and construct identity power relations and everything else one of the interesting things here is you can also find the international law as being both liberating and constraining in critical theory as well often times for undergraduates critical theory can be difficult for undergraduates to sort of get their heads around because it's a it they tend to be complicated they tend to question premises that you you may have held for a long time and asking people to do that often times can be challenging but one of the interesting things here is these are the five main schools and they widely disagree about international law and its application so one of the things that you'll see is if you're going to study international law the traditional ir theory and the traditional i our approaches are going to be very very diverse and offer you many many different perspectives on the issues ultimately there's kind of a core debate that wraps around these different theoretical perspectives and that gets bandied back-and-forth in a lot of different ways if you're a realist and you think that IR is all about power then you tend to say international law doesn't really matter and you'll find lots of examples to support your argument strong States ignore international law routinely now this can suggest that the realists are right IR is all about power the strong do what they will the weak suffer what they must but it might also mean that the Marxists are right IR is about power in an economic sense and strong States are used as tools of class exploitation and international international law is ignored routinely because international law is there to provide a veneer of legitimacy that is really masking what is basically exploitation and coercion so you can see lots of different ways of going through this rogue states flaunt international law without consequence as I'm recording this we've just had the invasion and annexation of Crimea by Russia we appear to have a second wave of actions that are taking place in eastern Ukraine who knows how those things are going to play out it's always dangerous to mention current events in these lectures because a year from now or two years from now this lecture could still be on the Internet and those situations may be totally resolved but the question when we see that is what are the consequences going to be Iran has successfully moved its nuclear program to the point where they could probably build the bomb within six months to a year if they chose to although they've kind of decided that they have no real reason to so they've kind of backed off that and you know North Korea it's the world's most horrible country and its leader wants to be the biggest fish in the world's most terrible pond and they violate international law left and right they proliferate nuclear and chemical biological weapons they proliferate ballistic missile technology they basically violate I think pretty much every international human rights norm that exists so you have rogue states that essentially violate international law but either they're powerful enough that nobody feels a strong desire to confront them like Russia or you have countries where you know they're horrible but it's not worth doing anything about it like North Korea the funny thing though is in these big arguments about whether or not international law matters and one of the big critiques of realists who say that international international law is totally irrelevant is that States really seem to care about international law states take time to justify their actions the United States arguably violated international law in the 2003 invasion of Iraq now arguably in this case really it does mean you can make argument multiple ways you have to make a case for it and the United States spent time making its case in fact a lot of the things that were used in making the case were things that were based on intelligence that later turned out to be wrong which is one of the reasons why people then came back and said oh well George Bush was lying and all this of stuff he wasn't lying what he was doing was he was taking the information they had which turned out to be wrong and making the case for why what they were doing fit international law why the United States a big powerful country who could have invaded Iraq on our own went to the trouble of justifying its actions is a sign of the respect that America has for international law when Human Rights Watch argued that the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay violated international law the Justice Department the State Department and the White House national security team went to great lengths to draft legal decisions and to write reports to argue that the Human Rights Watch report was wrong Human Rights Watch is a little non-governmental organization that has no power at all but a lot of money and time was spent responding to them because international law matters states spend enormous amounts of money negotiating international rules with each other the trans-pacific partnership which is currently being negotiated and once the 2014 election cycle is over those negotiations might move ahead again but it's been negotiated for the better part of almost eight years now and a huge amount of money has been spent shuttling people around the world basically hiring teams to go work on this to create this structure of international rules so states clearly care about this when you see strategic public diplomacy where states are standing up and trying to justify what they have done and what they plan to do to the public to gain public support or at least public acquiescence strategic public diplomacy uses the concept of legality all the time even rogue states like Iran and Russia argue in legal terms when Russia invaded the Crimea and occupied it they did so using the NATO intervention in Kosovo as an example oh there were lots of people being killed in Kosovo so Natick NATO came in and oh you know there's all these people being killed in Ukraine so Russia is coming in and this is not really a good comparison but the fact that Russia who could just basically do what they've been doing on the ground walk in and take over is taking the time to try to make a legal argument for it regardless of what you think of the legitimacy of the argument it matters the Kosovo intervention is also an important one because it turned out after the fact there was very little actual butchery going on compared to what we'd seen in the rest of Yugoslavia now obviously a little bit of butchery is still bad but when the justification on the argument for intervention was made it was very much oversold and so the idea that the West sort of pitched this as an excuse to go in and pry Kosovo away from Serbia that is not as ridiculous a comparison to what the Russians are doing in the Crimea as it might first sound because in principle in principle there are comparisons and so that legal framework creates a precedent that other countries can use later one of the interesting things too is we see that popular domestic policies are changed in order to comply with international law the United States rewrote sections of the Clean Air Act to comply with a World Trade Organization ruling so the problem for us as students of international relations looking at international law is theories disagree enormous Lee about how valuable international law is but there are lots of different examples that we can use to in frame to frame and inform how we see international law but it's very difficult for us to come to a specific agreement on what international law is so this is one of the challenges in the course we're going to look at this over and over and ever again we're going to try to cope with this kind of core problem how do we look and how do we understand how do we look at and understand international law where does it fit what does it mean how do we enforce it how does the fact that we don't enforce it the same way in every issue area or in every organization and in every moment in time impact how we think about it how does the fact that international business law is much more developed in its sophistication and its innovation than is public international law in private international law has an incredible diversity and complexity and incredible innovation is taking place all the time in public international law there's some of that particularly in places like the African Union where people are trying to take concepts that have worked elsewhere such as Europe and apply them to their own circumstances we have all these things but then how does it all fit and this is the kind of stuff we're going to talk about in the class so we will not be short of discussion material we will probably actually have a fair number of current events that impact us during this time frame but this is what we're going to be talking about and we're going to pick up with some of these we're going to pick up with some of the framing and context stuff in part 2 of this introductory lecture series so as always at the end of these lectures I thank you very much for listening and if you have any questions related to any of this material please ask me in class or send me an email or come by office hours thank you very much bye-bye

Channel: Greg Dixon

Views: 66,859

Rating: 4.8814816 out of 5

Keywords: International Law (Field Of Study), College (TV Genre), International Relations (Field Of Study), POLS4501, POLS5501

Id: G6PMzBFtCww

Length: 45min 50sec (2750 seconds)

Published: Fri May 02 2014