2
temporary alliances, as vehicles for addressing the needs of international society?
2
In this
paper, I will not attempt to provide a fully general answer to this question. Instead, I will
try to answer it solely with respect to one need of international society in particular: the
punishment of war criminals and those guilty of crimes against humanity. With regard to
that task in particular, there is quite a lot of support for the notion that some kind of
special legitimacy automatically attaches to settled international institutions, as this
sentiment underlies both support for the establishment of the International Criminal Court
and the common belief that arrangements like those used for the Nuremberg Trials are
incapable of delivering anything beyond so-called “victors’ justice.” Then-U.N.
Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, commenting in 1993 on the creation of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (the first criminal court
established on a genuinely international basis), took as beyond questioning that increased
internationalism in this area necessarily means increased legitimacy, saying: “It is a
breakthrough. For the first time, a tribunal is created by the international community and
not by the country that won the war.”
3
But even limiting our focus just to the issue of international criminal adjudication,
it is still not immediately obvious why merely acting with the imprimatur of the world
community would, on its own, add any legitimacy. Whether or not the leaders of a
2
This may seem like the wrong way of framing the issue, since many of the arguments made in favor of U.N. -
involvement in the second Gulf War appealed to pragmatic considerations, rather than the notion that some kind of
special legitimacy automatically comes with U.N. approval. But those more pragmatic arguments were parasitic on the
idea that international institutions are special in some way. That is, the only reason to care about whether going ahead
without U.N. approval would undermine the U.N., or make international cooperation less likely in the future, is if we
are already convinced that the U.N. is an intrinsically important institution, or that international cooperation should
revolve around international institutions, rather than so-called “coalitions of the willing.”
3
Stanley Meisler, “U.N. Names South African Judge as Balkans War Crimes Prosecutor,” Los Angeles Times,
December 25, 1993, A5. Quoted in Richard J. Goldstone and Gary Jonathan Bass, “Lessons from the International
Criminal Tribunals,” in The United States and the International Criminal Court, ed. Sarah B. Sewall and Carl Kaysen
(New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000), p. 51.
Convention