World Order – Essay 24/25

Resource Description

To what extent does the law encourage cooperation to achieve world order?

INTRO: International law is integral in achieving world order and does so by encouraging cooperation between nation states to ensure that global issues can be addressed with efficiency. World order refers to the activities and relationships between nation states as well as significant non-state actors that occur within legal, political and economic frameworks. Although legal mechanisms to promote cooperation do exist in the United Nations, international instruments and courts, they can be severely limited by nations exercising state sovereignty, acting in self interest and a lack of compliance.

The primary limitation to international law in promoting and enforcing cooperation is the principle of state sovereignty. State sovereignty is the right for a state to make and apply all the laws within the territories they govern and control internal affairs without the interference of other states. This concept of ‘political independence’ was first established in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and further reinforced in Article 2 (7) of the UN Charter allowing nation states to reject decisions of international legal measures effectively reducing these mechanisms to a system of compliance.

This has been a significant impediment to conflicts that involve non-compliant states, evidenced by regional conflict in the South China Sea. In 2013, the Philippines took China to the Permanent Court of Arbitration to dispute the territorial sovereignty and Exclusive
Economic Zone of its artificial islands under Article 80 of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), as well as the “Nine Dash Line” that encircles a significant portion of the regional water and overlapping with areas claimed by Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and Vietnam. Although the court ruled in favor of the Philippines, China itself did not participate in the arbitration and ignored the subsequent ruling. In this, state sovereignty was demonstrated to be a limitation to international cooperation, as nations who act in self interest are able to do so with impunity, knowing that they will not be held accountable within the scope of the law.