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reasons to support the effective establishment of a genuinely international court, but that
those reasons are not all purely pragmatic in nature. If these arguments are correct, then
we should think of such an institution as not only having the potential to be better at the
task of dealing with those guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity than less
internationalist methods, but as capable of doing so in a qualitatively different, and
intrinsically more legitimate, way.
This assessment differs from that usually provide even by scholars quite favorably
disposed toward increased internationalism, whose emphasis is typically only on the
ability of international institutions to more efficiently produce global public goods. A
recent paper by international law scholars Abram Chayes and Anne-Marie Slaughter on
the United States’ decision to opt out of the International Criminal Court is typical in this
regard. The authors condemn the U.S.’s decision, but do so specifically on the grounds
that its lack of participation in the ICC threatens to halt progress in those areas of the
international legal system in which the U.S. has an abiding interest.
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In the generally
pragmatic approach toward international institutions that pervades international relations
scholarship, it is not hard to detect the influence of Hobbes and (to a lesser extent) Locke.
The method employed in this paper – namely, to think about international politics
through the lenses of the analysis of anarchic conditions provided by celebrated theorists
of the modern state – is hardly novel. What perhaps is more novel is this paper’s focus
on political theorists for whom the prevailing issue in assessing the value of political
institutions is not simply how to achieve order in conditions of anarchy. Kant and Hegel
are united in their contention that institutions of collective authority establish a form of
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Abram Chayes and Anne-Marie Slaughter, “The ICC and the Future of Global Legal System,” in The United States
and the International Criminal Court, pp. 237-247.
Convention