TRANSCRIPT: Russophobia’s War Trap: How Europe’s Obsession is Pushing It to the Brink – Dr. Anthony Carty

And that came at a time just as the Berlin Wall came down and the world for a while decided it was in very good shape. But it has been brought out in a new reprint in 2019, and my editors want me to bring out a new edition again in 2025-2026.

My basic thesis is that the subject is not simply in decline, but it is thoroughly decayed and unworkable as a way of thinking about international society. And I have been trying to encourage colleagues with my “Philosophy of International Law” that they really need to rethink the very foundations and to turn it into a discursive reflection on the problems of international society from a normative perspective.

Historical Foundations of Modern International Law

I have provided a history of this subject, which is quite well known, and it is that the framework of international law that we have, and in the first two articles of the UN Charter purposes and principles, comes from a Swiss international lawyer of the eighteenth century, who at that time, Emile de Vattel, was a citizen or a subject of Frederick the Great.

Vattel constructed a liberal model of international society based upon the English empiricism primarily of John Locke. And it was that the world consisted of a natural community of equal nations and societies that did not have a world state or a world authority hanging over it. And this natural society was based upon certain basic, natural principles of freedom and equality and noninterference and mutual respect, very much the principles, the Bandung principles that the third world countries like India and China expounded in the 1950s.

However, this framework did not have an institutional foundation. There was no world state that had convened a world conference and agreed that these were legislative principles. These were constructions of an intellectual, of a thinker, but they were very attractively and excessively presented. And by the middle of the nineteenth century, throughout the hundred years after this book was written, it spread like wildfire, and every textbook on international law more or less repeated the wisdom of Vattel. But Vattel himself had a philosophical foundation in a kind of materialist individualism.

The Professionalization of International Law

By the mid and late nineteenth century, there took place what is now well known to be the professionalization of the so-called discipline of international law. University professors decided that all the basic principles of his work were now legal principles that had been accepted by the practice of states and that could be taught as legal principles. In other words, regurgitated, repeated in a robotic fashion by institutions, and any practice of countries that disregarded these principles of the equality and freedom of state was simply illegal and could be ignored.

And that has now astonishingly become the orthodoxy. I was in Berlin in the summer, and I checked through the big textbooks on international law that are available in German universities, all costing about sixty euros a volume, and they simply repeat these principles and cite a few cases of the International Court of Justice in which reference is made to them, and that’s it.

And so to my mind, this is a legal order which is accepted by the so-called profession of international lawyers who are university academics. They are not philosophers. They are not thinkers. So this is a static rigid system of knowledge, which is simply repeated on the basis of thick analysis of the United Nations charter.

The Germans have contributed a 1,200-page volume analyzing the UN charter as if it was the German civil code. And the French have done something similar, and the Americans have ignored it altogether. We can come to the Americans later in our discussion. They are somewhat maverick in this respect.

The Problem of Accusatory International Law

And my fundamental concern about this system of thinking is that it creates what the Germans call a mood of “Rechthaberei.” That’s to say, when countries engage in a sport of accusing one another of violating these principles, without going back to Vattel himself, who thought it was a fundamental principle of liberalism that each country could follow its own conscience and make its own subjective judgment about what it considered right and wrong.

And in a very pluralist fashion, he considered that if countries disagreed about it, there was no authority over them, and they could simply fight it out. But neither of them could claim to be on the just side of the argument because, in a liberal world order, everything is subjective. So he himself was a moderate and encouraged moderation.

But now we find the new foreign minister of the so-called European Union basically finger-wagging at Russia and China that they are aggressors violating international law. And like naughty schoolboys, they have to be punished by—I don’t know who she thinks will do the punishing. But this atmosphere poisons the whole framework of international society.

The Need for Philosophical Foundations

To my mind, the philosophy has to come in that one needs to really go back to Vattel, who is a reasonably intelligent person, and find out where we have gone wrong in regurgitating this stuff. It’s well known to people outside the profession. I mean, historians have done quite a good hatchet job on the so-called professionalization of international law into a discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

And I’ve taken part in these debates and discussions myself. But I would stress very much that the profession of international lawyers are an agnostic bunch of technicians who are actually quite comfortable with their little bits of knowledge. And you will find professors of international law like a colleague of mine in Brussels will write a 900-page book setting out the 900 occasions when the United States has violated international law by behaving aggressively towards other countries, and then he should go home and rest in peace that he has sorted out the problem.

And one can’t argue with these people. If I go and say to them, “What are you doing? What are you talking about?” They say, “Well, you’re not an international lawyer. We can’t talk to you.” So this situation is quite grave.

DR. PASCAL LOTTAZ: This is highly fascinating. Just before we continue, can you—I can only see like part of your face. Could you lower the camera a little bit? Yeah, this is better because people are going to want to see you making these arguments.

But this is a very important question. And a lot of people also who watch this show here, they are very skeptical toward the whole notion of an international law. Some people, a lot of folks out there, they also think that international law is the law just like domestic law. At home, we have a law. If you break the law, then the policeman comes, right? And will arrest you and you will go to a judge.

And we have these institutions in the international sphere, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, and others, and we have arbitration courts and so on and so forth. And they all have the veneer of a local court as if international law was the same as local law. But I think you are very importantly pointing out that who does the arresting? I mean, who will do the punishing?

The whole problem is we don’t have the same equivalent on the international level, right? So when you criticize international lawyers for being too dogmatic about the letter of the law, is that where you think that they’re going astray, like putting too much effort into the minute detail, losing sight of the fact that we don’t have an international policeman?

The Illusion of International Judicial Authority

DR. ANTHONY CARTY: Well, I think that it’s a mixture of all of these things. It’s very difficult. I’m very much a fan of Erasmus and the notion that the world is inhabited by fools, except for myself, of course. One finds it exasperating to try to understand why people are happy with going along with a certain pattern of behavior.

I can’t really fathom it. I’m simply told, “Well, Carty, you are not an international lawyer. So, basically, you belong somewhere else, and we don’t talk with you.” I mean, that’s actually a very common attitude, and it’s quite often stated. One of my colleagues said to me, “Well, in fact, he thinks the international law is in a state of crisis. He seems to be the only person who thinks that. The rest of us are quite happy with it, and we are quite agnostic, and we see no need to look at philosophical foundations.”

But if you look closely, it is a matter of projection and fantasizing. The International Court of Justice is not a world court. It is the leading judicial organ of the United Nations, and that judicial organ of the United Nations has no compulsory jurisdiction over anything other than questions to do with the budget of the General Assembly and questions like that. And questions that are referred to it by the General Assembly of the United Nations for an advisory opinion, like the advisory opinion about the status of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, these have, in strict legal terms, no force. They are simply opinions.

And if you look closely at the court, it is elected by politicians, and the vast majority of the judges of the International Court of Justice are not international lawyers, and don’t know any more about it than anybody walking the street. So they will have a good, probably, a good general legal background.

The International Criminal Court, its jurisdiction is not accepted by any major power. China, the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, they don’t accept it. India, other great powers don’t accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court as a country jurisdiction, and they certainly don’t accept it.

The Problem of Defining Aggression

And this is actually very important for the rowing that’s going on at the moment in Ukraine. All five major powers of the so-called permanent members of the Security Council entered deliberations about the statute of the International Criminal Court and the definition of aggression. They all insisted that the concept of aggression is not a legal concept. In other words, it will always involve an immense medley of political and contextual and historical factors that make it unsuitable to subject to a legal judgment. This is perhaps in contradiction with the Nuremberg charter, which was quite clear that the Nazi regime was committing aggression.

But that is their position. And so if one wags the finger at Russia now, if European countries like Germany or France or Britain wag the finger at Russia and say that this is legally an aggressor, they are contradicting their own position as a matter of law when they refuse to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court over the issue of determination of when a country had committed aggression.

So it’s full of contradictions which really call for a totally different approach to the conflict and alien status of society. So I would say there is agreement. I meant very much a professor here. There is an agreement among academics. There’s been heavy studies done on this by the Max Planck Institute of International and Comparative Law of Heidelberg that there is not a professional international judiciary. This is also notoriously the case with the problems of international arbitration in commercial matters.

So it is a very, very uncertain and controversial area where many major powers do not accept the operation of these tribunals. The reasons a consensus at a global level is a matter of sociology of law. If you look at Humberto Unger and his theories about the nature, the necessity, the social necessities that have to underlie a judicial process, they don’t exist at the international level. There isn’t a consensus on basic values that judges can appeal to whenever they are trying to resolve contentious questions among states because legal documents are always a matter of interpretation. They can only have meaning in the context of a fairly stable, homogenous, ethnic, and ethical background.

So that is my answer. I would say that it is pure progression, and it is a form—I mean, I use the word decay.

# Russophobia’s War Trap: How Europe’s Obsession is Pushing It to the Brink

The Ethical Failure of International Law

DR. ANTHONY CARTY: This is a very strong word. I regard the profession of international lawyers as ethically and intellectually irresponsible because they will not engage in messy political questions. They will say our function is simply to interpret and analyze the deliberations of judicial tribunals, and we will wait till a judicial tribunal comes along and issue some kind of judgment, and then we’ll make a comment on it.

In other words, there is no intellectual responsibility on the part of the academic international lawyer. And most international lawyers who are professionally international lawyers are academics, public international lawyers. Private international lawyers can practice at the bar and earn a living. But most international lawyers are academics. They are approved by ministries of education.

The whole exercise rests upon this illusion that the subject was professionalized in the late nineteenth century from an intellectual discipline into a legal order. And so it’s fundamentally, how would I put it? I mean, decayed, I think, a question. Decayed mean that you have a thinking system where people have stopped thinking and are now just robotizing. And why do they do it?

Well, that is, there’s much written about how professional people escape responsibility. A great deal has been written about that since the nineteenth century.

DR. PASCAL LOTTAZ: I very much appreciate how clearly you are putting your thinking. On the other hand, there is to my mind a clear path of international law in terms of a development of new rules and regulations, norms, they’re even put into treaties, right, that then represent the will of a large majority of states, some of them universal, some of them not quite.

But one interesting development, for instance, is that before 1945, international law used to refer solemnly and exclusively to nation states, right? And then along come ideas like how about we make them applicable to people.

And on the one hand, you had the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Tokyo Tribunal, and you said like individuals are subject of international law, and you have the development of international human rights law, which over the past eighty years came very far from just a declaration all the way to actually accord and so on. I mean, an entire system was built around this. So on the one hand, I understand that one can argue that this is all built on illusions. On the other hand, the fact that it was built, isn’t that an interesting phenomenon of, let’s say, the international world?

Treaties as Disagreements in Writing

DR. ANTHONY CARTY: Well, that is a very big subject, and the point that you are making is valid.

And my own view is that it’s regarded as radical. However, I would consider—this may sound facetious, but one of my colleagues in Cambridge, my mentor to some extent said that “an international agreement, an international treaty is a disagreement among states put into writing.”

Now if you look closely at these international conventions, and you have mentioned conventions which I think are not integral to the system of international law, like human rights law. This human rights law is very largely unenforceable, and no major country submits to it, certainly not the United States or China or Russia. There is a European Court of Human Rights, but it’s mainly concerned with the issues of human rights that interest very advanced industrial societies and not the traditional issues to do with torture and mass murder and genocide and so on.

But if you come to the major treaties like the law of the sea convention, I think it’s a particularly important one. I have found I have come to these always in a humble spirit saying, well, this convention still has three hundred articles and runs through hundreds of pages. There must be something in it. But if you look at the convention closely, you will find this is a disagreement among states put into writing.

For instance, the crucial features of this convention concern economic zones and continental shelves, and they define what an economic zone and continental shelf is. But when it comes to defining the settling the boundaries between adjoining countries, which is where the trouble starts, the convention simply leaves it to the parties to reach agreement among themselves. In other words, the whole thing is not valid.

Contradictory Principles in International Law

If you take the fundamental principle, which is at the root of the problems in Ukraine and in Gaza, the fundamental problem is the right to self-determination of peoples. International law likes to run with totally contradictory principles. You have the principle of territorial integrity of states, and you have the principle of self-determination of peoples.

And you have no institutional structure for resolving this. And so if anybody is going to hold firmly to one principle or the other, there’s going to be conflict. And there’s going to be also a fundamental deterioration in international law, which is very crucial to the parts of the world that we’re both living in, is that international law rested upon the conclusion of general peace treaties among the great powers. So you had the system of the Utrecht and the Vienna and Versailles.

But for now, the conflict that took place between Japan and China and the United States, this conflict has not been left unresolved. And all of the territorial questions that concern East Asia were not resolved at the San Francisco conference, and they consist of a void. There is no regulation of the status of Taiwan or Okinawa. Though it’s claimed by Japan, but it was not, it is not Japanese. And, it was an independent country before it was seized by Japan in the late nineteenth century. And, of course, the South China Sea Islands.

And the whole issue, all of the territorial issues have to do with Korea, all the way from Korea to Indonesia. These are all unregulated because there is no peace treaty, which is legally valid or binding, on the parties. So Mearsheimer is very emphatic, so this is why this particular legal void is so fundamental and so important.

The De Facto Existence of States

But I would stress, I think the most important issue is the issue of the status of states. I mean, there’s a great deal of talk about the right of Israel to exist, for instance. I wrote an article about this myself. But in fact, international law treats the existence of states as purely de facto.

I mean, if you can beat your way into existence and hold on to existence, the International Court of Justice decided in an advisory opinion, I think, in the Kosovo case that, the coming into existence of a country is a question of facts and doesn’t raise any legal issues, doesn’t have any legal resolution.

So the court actually in 2009, 2010 listened to submissions from over a hundred countries about the right of self-determination of peoples and whether it applied to the people of Kosovo and how it related to the right of self-determination of the people of Serbia and came to the conclusion that there was no international law on this subject.

And whether or not a state existed was a matter of fact left to the recognition of other countries. Now I’m not being completely anarchistic in saying that there are no rules, but the rules that exist are very piecemeal and very partial, and they do require a willingness on the part of international lawyers to use their intelligence and to use their moral and philosophical capacity to reflect and to conceive of new imaginative ways of resolving difficulties. So that formally, that is my position. In practice, then I try to develop this in relation to lots of particular situations. And it is immensely exciting and complex area, but it’s not one that international lawyers have anything very useful to say.

And I can go on indefinitely about that problem.

The Historical Trajectory of International Law

DR. PASCAL LOTTAZ: I find, you know, I find to talk to lawyers in general and international lawyers even more particularly, usually fascinating because they tend to be very precise minds in the sense that they can take arguments seriously and dissect them quite a bit.

The question to me in the grand scheme of things is, if we look at, first of all, international law is about roughly around four hundred years old. I mean, we usually tend to start with Hugo Grotius, right, as in saying like, okay, this is the moment when we started getting it.

Of course, we have treaties and so on that are much older. And of course, Hugo Grotius himself was building on a lot of people. But when we started talking about that, would be around four hundred years. And in a sense, I keep thinking that we are part of a longer trajectory of humanity trying to create something that would actually be proper law, but we are definitely not there yet. Would you say that we shouldn’t even try, that we should completely reconceptualize the exercise?

Natural Law and the Foundations of International Law

DR. ANTHONY CARTY: I started off, and there’s a lot of controversy about when it started off. And so when I went to do my PhD in Cambridge and I said I wanted to study Grotius, my supervisor said, no. The conceptual framework that we are operating with begins with Vattel.

But, there are those and I would join that company. There are those who believe that it began in its modern form with the Spanish classics in the sixteenth century who developed a whole theoretical framework for condemning the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

And that didn’t lead to the Spaniards leaving the Americas, but it did provide a framework which from which we have built further. I mean, I’m not at all a nihilist. This is a tradition which goes back to ancient Rome and Greece of a concept of law. I mean, itself, a three letter word, usually capital L. The concept of law is itself a spiritual and an intellectual and an ethical concept.

Law is defined by the Roman jurists as a just relation among peoples. It inevitably is a part of a natural understanding of how human beings relate to one another individually and through communities. And the way of thinking of the time of Grotius, I would say, from Victoria and maybe Gentile in the sixteenth century down to Vattel, and then to the early nineteenth century, this was understood as a kind of natural law, human beings reflecting on what is fair or reasonable in their relations with one another. And what is fair or reasonable is what they have to do because that’s the way they respond to their nature. Their nature imposes a natural obligation to behave in a fair and reasonable way.

And that is a tradition which has become ossified in the agnostic technical professionalization, which is now left to the judiciary of professional jurors, but essentially politicians to resolve. And that’s why the topic dries up, and that’s why I insist on the concept of decay. So it is a tradition which I am trying to revive with my philosophy of international law.

The first chapters engage with the nature of the medieval natural law tradition, the role of legal doctrine, and I end up at the end of that first chapter thinking of ways that can be revived. And I have published a book with Chinese colleagues.

I’ve been in China. You didn’t mention, I was professor of international law at the University of Hong Kong from 2009 to 2016, and then in Tsinghua from 2015 to 2017, and then I went on to Beihang. And I have written, edited together a four hundred page book exploring concepts of just and reasonable behavior as a basis for relations among communities in the ancient Chinese tradition of Laozi and Confucius and contrasting that with the medieval scholastic and Grotian concepts of reason.

And I think that these are the basic concepts which make sense to the whole of the human race. I insist in my philosophy of international law on a very nicely put expression of a French philosopher of law who’s not an international lawyer, though she’s written a book called the philosophy of international law, Agnes Leibowitz, that the fundamental principle of international society is that all human beings are alike and are capable of recognizing one another as being alike.

So Hobbes is wrong. I have developed from the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, a critique of Hobbesian amoralism. Lethal contractualism is based on the idea that you cannot reason from the nature of human beings to what is just in their relationship with one another. You can only rely upon what they have agreed by will in contract. That is the Hobbesian contractarianism.

I oppose that with the phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur that one can recognize in the humanity of other people what is a reasonable foundation for regulation relations among them. And the basis for developing this can only be what the Chinese diplomacy tirelessly calls for endless negotiation, endless dialogue and reflection.

In a horizontal international community, it’s illusory to look for some wise judges that everybody can trust that can actually stand over as individuals the fate of hundreds of millions of people and decide how they are to be resolved. I mean, I do have a philosophy there, which is set out in my “Moral Responsibility of Rulers.” It’s the book comparing Chinese and European notions of justice.

And then my “Philosophy of International Law,” which has gone through two editions, traces the collapse of this natural law tradition in Europe since the late nineteenth century and the need to revive it. I mean, natural law as a way of philosophizing about world society is acutely out of fashion in an age of Wittgensteinian language games and logical positivism and emotive theories of value.

I also introduced into my philosophy of international law a new concept of personality of the country. International law at the moment works with a kind of global federalism, which defines the state as a corporation that has certain powers like a company attributed to it by an imaginary world organization, an imaginary world hierarchy.

Philosophical Foundations of International Law

DR. ANTHONY CARTY: I replace that with a recognition that the world community consists of a hundred and eighty or a hundred and ninety different national communities with histories which are very torturous and very complex. These need to be understood contextually in their relations with one another and also have to be understood psychoanalytically because as collective entities, they are frequently pathological in their relations with one another and in their treatment of one another.

So basically, I am very far from being nihilistic here. I simply feel that one has to go back to the genius of Vittoria, Vittel—though I think he was a lightweight compared to Vittoria and Grotius. This system of thinking won the authority and prestige of rulers of Europe because it appealed to their intelligence. Gustaf of Sweden is famous for having carried around the book of Grotius because he admired him and thought him intelligent and reasonable and worth reading. That’s basically how I’m very much following the role of the international lawyer as intellectual.

The notion of law is not a purely contractual notion produced by democratic legislatures. It’s an ontological foundation for good relations among peoples. So I’m very far from being legalistic myself. But that has to be resurrected from a dedicated professionalism, which I regard as decadent because it’s really quite lazy.

These German textbooks that cost sixty euro are simply repetitions of what they were taught by their professors and what they were taught by their professors before them. There is really nothing intelligent to be said or nothing civil or polite to be said about this exercise. My professor used to joke with me about it in Cambridge. He would joke about how these ideas come from the mouth of the lecturer who doesn’t understand them, and they go into the ears of the student who doesn’t understand them. But they’re quite happy with that.

The Negotiated Nature of International Order

DR. PASCAL LOTTAZ: But, you know, this is one of the things that we are battling with because the way that we perceive the world—and by we, I mean, in general, the public—as we grow up, as children, we get this idea that everything is set in stone. For everything, there’s rules, that there’s a system, and everything is in place, and everything is top down. And as we grow up, we understand, oh, no. It’s not like that.

It is very much negotiable, but certain things are still set in stone. We have created a system, a world with the United Nations, before that, the League of Nations. We also create the appearance of a world government, of treaties and of agreements, and the world has its rules. But, ultimately, what you’re saying is, of course, correct. It’s a process of negotiation and renegotiation of how we live with each other because we are ultimately an eight billion people planet that has to self-organize. And this organization naturally has to somehow adapt to new circumstances.

How do you think this will continue, especially now that the world is more pluralistic in this multipolar setup where we now have a much more important China than before, with the political weight that it has in world affairs, and Russia that again established its weight in world affairs, and Southeast Asia that is establishing its weight in the economy? How do you see the system itself progress?

Human Rights and Western Dominance

DR. ANTHONY CARTY: I would come back just a moment to the so-called progress that has been made. The West, which has dominated international society after 1945, has pushed the idea of individual human rights. There’s been a whole series of conventions on human rights, but they’re all of them not impossible. They serve a kind of ideological function, and the meaning of them is very ambiguous and contested. This is a course of considerable conflict at the moment between Russia and the European community. Russia has been expelled from the Council of Europe.

But I would say that there is definitely a very serious problem here. There is a concept in international law which is called Jus Cogens, and Jus Cogens is a kind of belief that there are certain fundamental principles which cannot be derogated from and which are absolutely obvious and fundamental.

But if you look at the United Nations International Law Commission—I have spent my life with these people—and its definition of Jus Cogens, you will find that it simply says Jus Cogens principles such as self-determination of peoples or maybe also the principle of prohibition of genocide. These principles rest upon the consent of states. They are principles that states have decided they are going to treat as Jus Cogens. And so there isn’t an intellectual foundation.

We have to, as Europeans, and you’re European as I am, recognize that European culture is increasingly nihilistic in its very foundation, right across the board from Nietzsche to Heidegger and to the contemporary scene in Europe. There is no agreement among Europeans about values, and they simply assume that values are matters about which there is a consensus.

I have many times challenged the judges of the European Court of Human Rights in public debate to tell me how they reach decisions about what the European Convention of Human Rights means, and they tell me that they are simply a matter of whatever public opinion, whatever the consensus or the majority consensus of public opinion happens to be.

In fact, European international lawyers and to some extent American international lawyers are not taken up with these great geopolitical questions which interest you and which interest me. They are very much concerned with very private and personal rights to do with gender debates and discrimination debates. And underlying them, I think, are nihilistic trends.

China as a Stabilizing Force

Now to come back to your question, I do see hope outside Europe in Asia, which is why I’m here and why I’m teaching in Peking University, which is a matter of choice. I do see China as a major stabilizing power in international society, building careful partnerships. It’s very careful to exclude the notion of NATO-style alliance with Russia, with the Shanghai Security Corporation Council, bringing building up relations with India, with the Middle Eastern countries, with Iran and Saudi Arabia, and building up relations with Southeast Asia, with the BRICS, with Brazil, with the Latin American and African countries.

It is trying to build up a consensus around the principles of mutual respect and patient negotiation, and resolving differences through mutual understanding. And it’s very interesting from an international law point of view that the agreements that China makes usually have a clause in them. They’re drafted to look like treaties, but they have a clause in them that international law will not apply. They are quite emphatic to avoid the classical positivist European concept of how to provide certainty in relationships.

Certainty in relationship, and this comes back to my own view about the nature of legal personality and what students in university should be studying when they’re studying the question of what is a state or what is a community. Relationships depend upon mutual confidence and continued cooperation. And that is a fundamental underlying principle of Chinese diplomacy, which is, I think, very well developed, but comes across in Europe and America as very anodyne.

Foreign minister Wang Yi repeated these principles at the Munich Security Conference a week or two ago, but they received no comment or interest at all. So I am quite confident that there is a growing alternative study of how international society should be constituted. And my Chinese friends and colleagues tell me that the difficulties to do with Europe and America are something that are better not confronted directly, simply through an attempt to provide evidence of an alternative way of development. In other words, instead of throwing mud at those you disagree with, behave the way you feel you would like others to behave and then hope that they would imitate you. I think that’s the underlying philosophy of China.

Pathologies in Western International Relations

If we come to Europe and America, I think one is dealing with two entities which in different ways are quite pathological. Europe because it is fundamentally legalistic in its values, and the United States because it doesn’t accept any notion of the equality of states in the international community. That’s quite a complex statement following on Trump because I think Trump does have a very brutal concept of equality. But, certainly, the neoconservative dominant foreign policy tradition in America is that America is an exceptional country which has responsibility for the running of the world as a whole.

I do believe that it’s part of the moral responsibility of the international lawyers and intellectuals who engage with really concrete problems like Gaza, Ukraine, and many others, and not to simply wait until some tribunal issues a judgment about this and then comments on the judgment. I do feel there is some movement among my colleagues given the sheer intensity of the conflicts that have been occurring recently in Ukraine and Gaza. I’ve been back in Europe in the summer, and I was surprised to find that some colleagues who very much like to sit on the fence feel that that’s not an option given just how serious the Middle East conflict has become.

Beyond Judgment: Alternative Approaches to Conflict Resolution

DR. PASCAL LOTTAZ: One of my main problems with the European mindset, and I think that extends also partly to North America, is that it is very self-centered and very self-focused, which is why it’s so difficult to wrap your mind around another conception of how things can work.

One of the fundamental beliefs or core motivations of international law, the way that we know it, is that you create a situation in which you are able to pass a judgment. You create a situation with arbitration tribunals where in the end, you say, “Okay, fine. We accept the fact that we have disagreements. And when we do, we take them to a court, to a third party, and then we get a judgment based upon logical, reasonable reasoning, based upon certain principles and ideas of how stuff works.” And then in the end, one party or both parties might end up unhappy, but at least we have a resolution of the conflict.

Now you’re going a different way, I think. If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that’s not the way that international society and humans themselves work. So if we wouldn’t get resolution through judgments or through reasoning, if we get them through another mechanism, what would be the way to structure the international system so that we can get away from using mass violence as a solving mechanism and use something a little bit more civil?

The Limits of Judicial Resolution

DR. ANTHONY CARTY: That is a fundamental question, and my answer can’t possibly be satisfactory because I don’t think such judgments can be forthcoming unless they are dealing with quite superficial issues. It’s perfectly possible for nations to submit issues to an international tribunal, and they do so very regularly. The International Court of Justice has quite a list of cases. It’s heavily worked, and it’s very busy.

And there are arbitrations like the commercial investment arbitrations. But they are always dealing with issues that are not regarded as the vital interests of countries. Now I think the answer to your question has to be unsatisfactory because I think that most conflicts among countries are beyond the countries themselves’ capacity to understand.

If you take the hostility that Europeans feel towards Russia—there are many thick books written about this. What is the foundation for Russophobia? Russophobia is behind the whole conflict in Ukraine. And how does one unravel that? Well, the answer is there isn’t going to be any magic, Solomon-like tribunal that can resolve these questions. One simply has to engage in the kind of intellectual work that I’m calling for. That is being done to some extent by some type of normative international relations scholars, some types of normative historian. I’m not saying it’s not done at all. It is done by some people. It’s not done by international lawyers.

Collective Pathology in International Relations

One can work at these issues. But I think fundamentally, there are profound issues. One area where I’ve had a surprising resonance in my discussions, particularly in China, is when I introduced my concept of the collective personality. I have relied upon a French psychoanalyst and philosopher, phenomenological philosopher and psychoanalyst called Cynthia Fleury. She’s a professor at some university in Paris, and she’s also a clinical psychoanalyst, who writes about the nature of collective pathology and understanding the role of resentment and the resentment against the failure of recognition and a failure of respect and how that produces intense conflict in international relations.

And of course, she’s thinking in the context of Africa and Nigeria and Algeria, and she draws a lot on Franz Fanon, “The Wretched of the Earth” and so on, who was also a psychoanalyst as well as a philosopher in Paris in the 1950s. And of course, relations between France—I live in Paris and Berlin when I’m in Europe. Paris, Berlin, and London. The relations have completely broken down between France and Algeria, and France and most of its former colonies in Africa, particularly the Arab and Muslim countries. These are pathologies.

# Russophobia’s War Trap: How Europe’s Obsession is Pushing It to the Brink

The Pathology of International Relations

DR. ANTHONY CARTY: When I have introduced them into debates with international lawyers, it’s funny how they put aside their cap of international law and say, “Oh, this is interesting. This resonates.” And maybe you could give me the reference to this woman. I have now written an article published in the Beijing Foreign Ministry International Law Forum and also in the Moscow State University. Both of these institutions have embraced this idea that countries are pathological entities that have had such bad relationships with one another that they simply hardly understand why they’re in such deep conflict with one another.

The process of getting to the bottom of this is something that takes time and patience to try to unravel. And that is where one of my former Chinese students and colleagues has written an interesting article on why states do not want to resolve their differences through third party adjudication. They can’t because they don’t understand what the nature of their differences are.

If you ask the Japanese why they are so concerned about China, they won’t mention that they think the Chinese want revenge for Nanjing and various other atrocities. It goes much deeper than that. It goes back into centuries of anxiety about being overwhelmed by this enormous neighbor and so on.

The Limitations of International Law

Basically, the issues are as Morgenthau saw them. Morgenthau was one of the persons who saw off and demolished the credibility of international law as an academic discipline in the United States. And he’s not taken sufficiently seriously. Hans Morgenthau did a law degree in Frankfurt, a master’s degree in Frankfurt in law, his PhD under Kelsen in international law in Geneva, and I have read these theses in French and German. They are a detailed explanation as to why life is too complicated for international lawyers to understand.

He was a kind of pop psychoanalyst, a pop Freudian, and so he thought pathological lust for power was much more important than understanding the dynamics of collectives. So I’m afraid we are stuck with this orphan view of the world. I mean, we can have a religious conviction that God made the world and we can try to understand what God’s will is, but we cannot find some kind of global daddy figure who can resolve our differences for us. And if we try to, we end up with hegemons like America. Americans, I think, sincerely believe that without them, the world will simply go to pot because there will be nobody to give it overall direction.

The Possibility of Global Consensus

DR. PASCAL LOTTAZ: I’ll ask my last question because I find this highly fascinating. If, hypothetically, if tomorrow, eight billion people on this planet, all eight billion, everyone, woke up with the same belief in the same, let’s say, one thousand page of law, of international law, if everybody shared the same belief about law and as a belief, almost like a religious belief, would that solve the problem? Or would the problem just—or would the structure of the system, the way we interact, still prevent us from getting to resolution?

DR. ANTHONY CARTY: Well, I would give a positive answer to that in terms of a study. It’s just a random study. There are hundreds of such studies. But an Indian think tank has produced a study which is very easy to find on the Internet called “Hyper Imperialism.” And it contrasts the gradual militarization of international relations by NATO with the Chinese initiatives, through Friends of the United Nations, through BRICS, through Belt and Road, and other organizations such as I’ve already mentioned.

I think that—and my hope is—that China is attempting to encourage this kind of mutual respect and confidence among peoples around the world, which could gradually produce a stable consensus.

I was at a conference of the military academies in Beijing in September where a Mexican delegate said that we can look to China—to some extent, Wang Yi was saying the same thing at the Munich conference—for a kind of emotionally mature stabilizing influence in which people can settle down and reach some kind of consensus.

Now what institutional form that would take, there is—I have no theoretical objection to the condition for having a world state. According to Humberto Ungo, the Brazilian legal philosopher in Harvard, the conditions are that there is a relative homogeneity in the international community about basic values, which philosophically, since I think we’re all much the same, there is no theoretical objection to this developing. And when it has developed, then there would be no theoretical objection to having a consensus international judiciary that could play a role in working out in concrete cases what this general consensus required in difficult situations.

Hope for the Future

That is a goal which if we can get through the present turmoil, and, of course, the main danger of it is the nuclear arms race among a small number of superpowers, then we can work for that. We will both be passed away long before this happens, but in the hope that over the next thousand years, why can’t things develop radically? They have developed radically in the last two to three hundred years as the world has become globalized.

I would say, looking at it positively, we are in the kind of birth pangs of a possible world order, which I think is growing up out of East Asia and which will gradually, hopefully, produce a settling influence in Europe and eventually in America. America, we haven’t talked about very much. I do think there are positive aspects to the recent developments in America. They’re not entirely negative.

DR. PASCAL LOTTAZ: I think so too. Unfortunately, we are running out of time because we are nearing the hour, and I try to keep that in that core set. But I would like to thank you very much, Dr. Carty. If people want to read more from you, where is the best place to follow you and your writing?

DR. ANTHONY CARTY: Well, I don’t have a blog, which I suppose I should have. But I would say that “The Philosophy of International Law,” both editions, “Decay of International Law” do deal with the problems that we’ve been discussing because for me, the issue that I have to confront is to convince people there is a problem. I mean, my colleagues simply say, “Well, what problem?” And they joke, “Carty’s decadent, obviously. Carty is in a crisis, but the rest of us are quite happy.”

So for me, intellectually, I’m trying to cope with convincing people that there is a problem to address. And so those books are quite enough. But I do publish a lot of articles, and people can have my web page or can have my email and get in touch. I mean, I’m scribbling all the time. And I suppose I should have them all up on some kind of—I’m a member of Academia.edu, this American citation index, and many of my articles appear on that.

DR. PASCAL LOTTAZ: Everybody, if you’re interested in Dr. Carty’s works, just also Google him, and you will find a lot under his name, and you’ll find a lot on Academia.edu. And feel free to reach out to him or to me if you want to read more. Dr. Carty, I agree with you. There is a problem, and my gut feeling is that a majority of my viewership here on YouTube will agree with you. There is a problem. So I’m looking forward to continue working on solving the problem and defining the problem.

DR. ANTHONY CARTY: Well, thank you for addressing me and allowing me to have my shots, and I’ve enjoyed it very much. I hope it’s been of some use.

DR. PASCAL LOTTAZ: Thank you. See you again next time. Bye.

Related Posts

• Transcript: Trump-Mamdani Meeting And Q&A At Oval Office
• Transcript: I Know Why Epstein Refused to Expose Trump: Michael Wolff on Inside Trump’s Head
• Transcript: WHY Wage Their War For Them? Trump Strikes Venezuela Boats – Piers Morgan Uncensored
• Transcript: Israel First Meltdown and the Future of the America First Movement: Tucker Carlson
• Transcript: Trump’s Address at Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day