1. The Myth of Global Governance
There is a widespread misconception that the world is governed by something called "international law." The popular imagination casts the UN as a kind of world parliament, the International Criminal Court as a global judiciary, and treaties as legislation binding on all. This is a fantasy. No world Leviathan exists. Sovereignty remains lodged in states, and it stops at the border. What we call "international law" is not law in the domestic sense, but etiquette elevated into rhetoric.
2. Anarchy Defined
Anarchy is too often conflated with chaos. Properly understood, it means the absence of a sovereign authority above the parties involved. By this definition, the international system is anarchic to its core. States may form treaties, submit disputes to tribunals, or gather in the halls of the UN, but they do so voluntarily. No higher authority compels them. The only real constraint is the threat posed by other sovereigns.
3. Domestic Law vs. International Law
The contrast with domestic law is clarifying:
Domestic law rests on institutions of enforcement. Police, courts, and prisons ensure a standing deterrent. Murder statutes do not eliminate murder, but they reliably raise its expected cost.
International law lacks any such machinery. It possesses no global police force, no prisons, no monopoly of violence. Enforcement is contingent, improvised, and political. Small states may be punished for violations. Great powers can ignore judgments with impunity unless another sovereign chooses to intervene.
4. Power as the Real Regulator
Events illustrate this reality with brutal clarity. Israel’s strikes in Yemen, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, America’s invasion of Iraq—all proceeded despite being cast as violations of international law. The law did not prevent them. The only question was whether other states possessed both the will and the capacity to respond. That is not the rule of law; it is the balance of power dressed in legal language.
5. The Order That Exists
To say this is not to deny that international norms matter. They do. Treaties stabilize trade, diplomatic conventions smooth communication, and most states comply most of the time because predictability has value. This web of conventions is real. But it arises from mutual interest, not subordination. It is coordination mistaken for sovereignty — the etiquette of anarchy, not the commands of a higher authority.
6. The Key Insight
We already live in global anarchy. The world has no sovereign above the state, no binding parliament, no supreme court with a police force at its disposal. What exists instead is a lattice of norms, agreements, and institutions, sustained by reciprocity and shadowed by power. Recognizing this does not mean dismissing order as illusion. It means understanding order for what it is: fragile coordination without coercive hierarchy, sovereignty all the way down.