Joan Cocks’s excellent review of my book raises a host of questions that anyone interested in international justice should consider. One of Cocks's main worries is that I portray international institutions as antiseptic moral agents with no agendas of their own, which will take on humanitarian and law enforcement roles without getting mired in the dirty games of ordinary politics. If I have given this impression at all, it seems I need to work harder to dispel it. Chapter 5 called “Romanticizing Institutions” discusses extensively the shortcomings of existing international institutions, and how they develop bureaucratic cultures and interests that are at odds with their founding mission, how goal congestion can lead to internal conflict and inconsistency, and how they are slow to learn from past mistakes. In this sense, international institutions are not that different than domestic ones. Perhaps more worryingly, if international institutions are just as prone to failure as domestic ones, can they truly offer a way out of the dilemmas of state power that can be used both to protect and harm?
There is no cause for such profound skepticism. Awareness of institutional pathologies offers reasons to be cautious, learn from sound principles of institutional design, and implement a gradual program of institutional reform, with strong revisability options built in. Such awareness cannot undermine the rationale for building more effective and muscular international institutions. If it did, it would also undermine the rationale for creating domestic institutions, since any police force, courts, or legislatures are liable to mission creep, counterproductive cultures, corruption, and petty politics. I suspect most of those skeptical of the value of international institutions would not be willing to embrace this much more subversive conclusion. Diseases affecting political institutions are pervasive, and there are better and worse ways of treating them. In building international institutions we could learn from past experience while being appropriately modest in our aspirations of what they can achieve.
Caution and modesty about institutional design will not ensure that the tens of millions of people affected by wars, human trafficking, slavery, and exploitation will be delivered from their suffering. But no possible institutional system can cure these ills in the foreseeable future. To think otherwise is to make the best enemy of the good. We should promote the improvements that are feasible from where we are now. Saving hundreds of thousands of people or a few millions is better than nothing. Strengthening the International Criminal Court and changing the decision-making structure of the Security Council will get us some of the way there. It may not bring Syria back from the brink of hell, but it may prevent future Syrias from happening.
Divided Sovereignty is not primarily concerned with individual freedom, economic development, the right to vote, or human wellbeing. While these are important goals, their prerequisite is a world in which mass extermination, slavery, and destructive, long-lasting civil wars are greatly reduced in scope or made to disappear. International institutions to enforce minimal standards of physical safety and the protection of human life are needed because when states are left alone to guarantee the protection of their citizens, Syria, Rwanda, and North Korea happen. To create a world where they are less likely is to change our understanding about the relationship between states, international institutions, and the fundamental requirements of justice.
