The Power of Principles

For those who believe that might should not make right, the world today seems to offer little hope. Russia is still trying to seize territory from Ukraine in its illegal war of conquest, and U.S. support for Kyiv appears to be waning. China is asserting ownership of international waters. In the Middle East, Hamas murdered some 1,200 people in its October 7 attack on Israel, and Israel’s response has destroyed hospitals and killed tens of thousands of civilians. In South America, Venezuela is laying claim to more than half the territory of Guyana, its much smaller neighbor. Across the global South, countries are calling on richer states to compensate them for the damage of climate change caused by centuries of industrialization in the North, but their requests have mostly been ignored.

In the age-old battle between power and principle, it would be easy to look at these examples and conclude that a much-vaunted constraint in international relations barely exists anymore: norms. International norms are guidelines that tell states which actions are and are not appropriate and provide metrics against which to judge others’ conduct. For decades, especially after the Cold War, many—especially in the West—believed that governments should and would abide by such principles. But today, that view feels quaint. It often seems as if norms are simply a function of power. The strong do what they want.

Yet beneath the surface, norms in fact work as a powerful motivator and constraint. They lie at the heart of the biggest foreign policy debates in Washington. Whether to support Ukraine, what to do about China, how to handle Israel—plenty of the most contested questions are, at base, arguments over whether to promote certain principles. The idea that norms are purely a function of power, moreover, is mistaken. Why else, for example, would the United Kingdom send money to Kenya to make amends for colonial-era misdeeds? Sometimes, countries take costly steps that are arguably against their own interests, even though no superior power has pressured them to do so.

Norms are not entirely divorced from strength, of course. They are often launched with the support of powerful countries, and they require maintenance from those states. And yet time and again, norms have taken on a life of their own, exerting a powerful pull.

ROUGH IDEAS

Norms have existed since ancient times. In The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides reported that the Melians appealed to principles of fairness and justice in an effort to persuade the invading Athenians not to conquer their island and to respect their neutrality. In the Middle Ages, European royal families had a norm of holding each other’s members hostage, treating them as guarantors to ensure compliance with interfamilial agreements. One family, for example, might take another family’s daughter and hold her until they had passed safely through the other family’s territory. During China’s Ming and Qing dynasties, foreign envoys followed a norm of paying tribute to the royal court. And for centuries, European countries believed they had an obligation to “civilize” other races through colonization.

For most of this time, the effect of ideas on international relations went unexamined. Only in the early twentieth century did it become a serious subject for researchers. At that time, the field was dominated by lawyers who believed that rules were important and who thought they could use rules to constrain states’ behavior. Thinkers such as the historian James Shotwell, the philosopher John Dewey, and the lawyer Salmon Levinson worked to construct the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, in which over 60 countries (including the United States) condemned and renounced war “as an instrument of national policy.” The pact, Shotwell argued, would eliminate violence. “The old predatory world of conquest and violence is no longer an ideal of governments,” he declared.

Even before World War II proved such optimism misplaced, idealists were derided by realists, who argued that the world was shaped by power alone. Writing in 1939, before the outbreak of war, the British historian E. H. Carr criticized “the science of international politics” as “markedly and frankly utopian,” arguing that “no political utopia will achieve even the most limited success unless it grows out of political reality.” Black international relations scholars such as Merze Tate, who understood all too well the role of power in global politics, were similarly critical. As Tate wrote in The Disarmament Illusion in 1942, “The limitation of armaments is not a matter of mathematics nor of morals but of politics.”

But when it came to policy, norms continued to shape history. Shaken by the horrors of World War II, states again embraced norms as a way to curtail conflict and protect populations. Dozens of countries, including the Soviet Union and the United States, agreed to rules that oblige occupying powers to protect civilian populations. In the late 1940s, Eleanor Roosevelt chaired a group of lawyers, representatives from nongovernmental organizations, and state bureaucrats from around the world who produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: the foundation for today’s human rights regime. Activists, lawyers, and politicians made a renewed push to establish a norm against territorial conquest.

Powerful actors can bend norms in their favor, but that doesn’t mean they are immune from norms.

These efforts, however, were largely ignored by mainstream international relations scholars. By the end of the 1970s, the field was dominated by debates between neorealists such as Kenneth Waltz and neoliberals such as Robert Keohane, both of whom constructed theories of global politics that left little room for the role of ideas. But norms did not disappear entirely from the discipline. Hedley Bull published The Anarchical Society in 1977, which argued that modern states “conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with each other, and share in the working of common institutions.” In 1980, John Meyer pioneered “world-systems theory,” arguing that global social forces, especially economic modernization, made states resemble one another. Three years later, John Ruggie argued that, unlike the overlapping sovereignties of the feudal system that preceded it, the modern state system rested on notions of private property and exclusive jurisdiction.

These theories continued to be tested in the real world. Moscow and Washington routinely intervened in the affairs of sovereign states, for example. Realists, accordingly, sidelined thinkers who highlighted the role of ideas. But the end of the Cold War—in which the Soviet Union collapsed without being defeated by the U.S. military (an outcome unpredicted by realism)—breathed new life into scholarship on norms. John Mueller argued that great-power war, like aristocratic dueling, had gone the way of the dodo. In The Culture of National Security, a group of scholars further demonstrated that states often behave in ways contrary to what realists predict. Richard Price, for example, illustrated that a stigma against chemical weapons was a necessary condition for states to refrain from using them in World War II. Similarly, Nina Tannenwald argued that a taboo against the first use of nuclear weapons helped explain why Washington never went nuclear in Vietnam.

Today, norms are a central part of international relations theory. Experts have examined how global social and legal norms in favor of racial equality helped topple South Africa’s apartheid system. They have explored how international humanitarian norms have led rebel groups to produce manuals on the laws of war. Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink have even given the word “norm” a canonical definition: “a standard of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity.” Since then, scholars have focused not just on whether norms successfully constrain state behavior but also on the strength, substance, and cycles of norms. Norms, they argue, are about more than whether a state follows a specific rule. They are also about how states engage with that rule—including how they react when other states violate it, and how they behave when they themselves are running afoul of it.

This nuance has given the field a clearer idea of how norms shape international behavior. Consider the United States’ covert interventions in countries such as Chile and Iran during the Cold War. In some ways, it might have been more effective for Washington to outright invade these countries and impose friendly regimes by force. But doing so would have violated norms of sovereignty. Partially as a result, it decided to operate covertly.

MIGHT AND RIGHT

Not all norms are based on how states interact. Some have to do with how countries should treat their own citizens (such as not disappearing people), and others with how corporations should interact with society (such as not using child labor). But one of the most consistent scholarly findings is that norms are most powerful when they align with the interests of governments rather than those of nonstate actors. There are many wartime norms that states observe, including offering medical care to enemy prisoners of war. But this norm does not constrain governments from detaining and torturing members of rebel groups. International humanitarian norms have been established in part by treaties, in which, historically, states are both the primary negotiators and the signatories. As Bridget Coggins has argued, even the norm of states being the primary actors in the international system—and related rules governing which polities are recognized as states—is a function of power. The state is a remarkably strong institution, one that won out over alternative forms of political organization, and today’s states limit who can join their ranks. The unrecognized country of Somaliland, for example, has a much more effective government than Somalia (from which it has functionally seceded). But it is the latter that holds the seat at the UN, in part because many UN members have a vested interest in discouraging secessionism.

Norms have long served the interests of powerful countries. The rule against forcibly taking territory from other governments was conveniently championed by the United States after, not before, it had completed its westward expansion. The nuclear taboo serves powerful states just as it serves weaker ones, because it protects them, too, from annihilation.

Yet the fact that powerful actors can bend norms in their favor doesn’t mean they are immune from norms. The norm against territorial conquest didn’t stop Russia from invading Ukraine, but it does help explain why Moscow is paying such a high price for its land grab. The United States and its allies placed costly sanctions on the Russian economy, and many of these countries have provided lethal aid to Kyiv. So flagrant was Russia’s violation of the norm that even countries it has close relationships with, such as China and India, have avoided expressing public support for the invasion. Indeed, public statements by Chinese officials on the war generally mention the importance of territorial integrity.

Norms reflect power, but they are not just reflections of power. The emergence and acceptance of a norm generally requires at least the assent of powerful states, but it does not always further those states’ immediate desires. China, for example, would certainly prefer not to be constrained by norms against territorial conquest when it comes to Taiwan. But on balance, Beijing benefits from the norm because it does not want other countries infringing on its own land. Countries will exercise self-restraint, accepting normative constraints to protect their greater interests.

States will sometimes be aggressive in the name of norms, championing such principles in an effort to expand their power. There are times when might makes right, but right can sometimes make might. When Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein tried to annex Kuwait, the United States headed a broad international coalition that forced him to withdraw, which increased Washington’s global influence. By the same token, right can undermine might. The unprovoked invasion of Iraq by the United States 13 years later drew few partners and seriously damaged the country’s reputation.

Governments understand this dynamic. That is why they rarely admit to violating norms, even when the transgression is utterly transparent. The United States claimed it needed to invade Iraq to protect the norm against using weapons of mass destruction. Putin has justified his invasion of Ukraine by denying that it had ever achieved “real statehood,” casting it instead as a temporarily detached part of Russia that therefore had no sovereignty to violate. China makes a similar argument about Taiwan, claiming that the island is a renegade province. By invading Taiwan, according to this logic, China would not be violating norms but upholding them, with a long-overdue crackdown on a secessionist entity.

Beijing’s claims about Taiwan illustrate that norms are often open to interpretation and abuse. They are not always codified in or coterminous with international law. There is no international norm against detaining migrants, for example, even though the Global Compact for Migration, which calls for states to avoid the practice, carries some international legal power as a resolution of the UN General Assembly. Too many countries lock up migrants to build a global consensus that detention is unacceptable.

DOUBLE STANDARDS

Norms can have intrinsic strength. States abide by norms even when it is not in their immediate interest, and they are penalized when they violate those norms. But the power of norms is never guaranteed, and the world’s current normative architecture is under threat. Some of the challenges are direct, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Others are oblique, such as China’s attempt to expand its territorial reach by building artificial islands in the South China Sea.

The global South can be used as a bellwether to assess the effects of these transgressions. Developing countries played a much smaller role in constructing the world’s current normative architecture than richer powers did, so their behavior is a good indicator of whether the system of norms still holds. And unfortunately, their responses suggest that the challenges to current norms may succeed. Some developing countries have strongly condemned what Martin Kimani, Kenya’s UN ambassador, called Moscow’s “irredentism and expansionism.” But the global South has not been uniformly critical. A consistent bloc of about 40 countries—all outside the West—has either abstained from or voted against UN resolutions condemning Russia’s invasion.

These votes are partly a result of Moscow’s politicking in the global South, but they are also the product of Western hypocrisy. People in developing countries have understandably wondered why Ukraine has received so much more U.S. humanitarian support than Congo, Honduras, and Sudan. They have questioned why Ukrainians fleeing conflict receive refuge in Western states when Syrians and Yemenis generally do not. And they have asked what the difference is between the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The technical answer to that last question is that Russia is demanding Ukrainian territory rather than just regime change. But to people in the global South, who have suffered from decades of weak governance, corruption, and civil war (which are not clearly prohibited by current norms)—as well as interventions by major powers—that distinction seems rather thin. It suggests, again, that norms matter only when powerful countries say so.

Not all critics of today’s norms are malicious, or even wrong.

Key international norms are on life support, and the potential demise of these norms should alarm U.S. policymakers. They should be concerned, in part, for human rights reasons. By preventing invasions, limiting war crimes, and constraining aggressive behavior, norms help protect hundreds of millions of people. But Washington should also be concerned for geopolitical reasons. The United States has benefited immensely from the system it helped build. The current normative architecture, for example, has helped the U.S. economy flourish by creating an international system conducive to trade. Washington could therefore lose influence if this system falls apart, giving China an opening to promote an alternative normative order that would be far less liberal.

To save the system, Washington must be proactive. Norms need maintenance—they must be cultivated, enforced, and sometimes adjusted—and maintenance requires long-term thinking and accepting some short-term costs. The United States, for example, could push to expand the number of permanent members on the UN Security Council to include representatives from Africa and Latin America. Doing so might dilute Washington’s voice but would also earn it more support from the global South and prevent the council from sliding into irrelevance. The United States could also provide more financing to compensate poorer states for the damages wrought by climate change, a move that would cost money now but create buy-in for climate mitigation later.

It won’t be easy for the United States to revive international norms, and it will be impossible to do so alone. The country badly damaged the norms regarding wartime conduct through its actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its support for Israel’s war on Hamas is further undermining norms meant to protect civilians. And political polarization has made it hard for the United States to convey strong support for even the most basic norms, such as the one against conquering entire states, without fierce partisan debate. With the Republican Party captured by former President Donald Trump, Washington appears to be at odds with itself: torn between people who believe current global norms are worth defending and those who do not.

Not all critics of today’s norms are malicious, or even wrong. In a world in flux, it is worth asking what given international principles are good for, such as norms affecting trade that impose few constraints on multinational corporations—even if they may benefit the United States. But if the foundational norms of the post-1945 order erode, it will not be the result of a careful cost-benefit analysis. It will be because American politicians gave up on these ideals in a fit of pique. The result will be a world in which everyone is worse off.