This is just a selection from an essay I'm doing, apologies if it's not 100% done seeming
The catastrophic failure of the League of Nations taught European policymakers a series of specific lessons: the need to keep the United States involved in European security, the need for positive Franco-Germanic relations, and more widely to disparage, avoid, and attack nationalism. But the League offers yet another parable about the legitimacy of law. From the start, the League was associated in the German, Soviet, and Fascist mind with the order of the Versailles treaty, that is, as something which was keeping Germans/the proletariat/etc down. Because of this, the League would never be seen as legitimate by the revisionist powers, and her dictates would be followed or disobeyed strictly according to power politics.
On the other hand, in associating the United Nations with a concept of Universal Human Rights, the makers of the new world order had performed an act of legal salvation. The late 19th century saw the creation of a school of Legal realism, that is, the realization that law is made rather than found (O’Brien 2011 pg69). Although this realization did much to end judicial legislation, it also tremendously limited the importance of law: it brought with it the cynical, Austinian view of law, that a law is merely a rule plus coercion (Franck 1990 pg28). This only gets at half of law: laws isn’t only enforced, but has moral authority as well, and a good law will possess both: without authority a law will never be followed, without enforcement a law will be casually broken.
So even though the League was imbued with the coercive power of two of the largest empires that the world has ever seen, it found its dictates rarely followed, not only because they were seen as products of a liberal order which benefited only the Western European nations (Armstrong 1996 pg35) (Perlmutter 1997 pgs58-59), but also because they were seen as mere legislation, representing principles which were not “made generally applicable but [were] confined almost entirely to the territories of the defeated powers.” (Franck 1990 pg159).
What changed after the Second World War was that none of the actors involved wanted another war to happen. Furthermore, the language of human rights created the new ‘myth’ which the post-War and (increasingly so) the post-Cold War order has oriented itself around. Rather than the Catholic hierarchy of Medievalism or the scientism of the Enlightenment and Industrial eras, the 20th and 21st century in Europe has been driven by differing perspectives towards emancipation and human rights. Human rights and anti-war norms gave international laws their authority in the postwar period, to the degree that the rules of the current international system “display authority in themselves, which is to say that they are obeyed despite the fact that the system has no sovereign” (ibid pg27).
Legal Realism was a correct assertion which ended with desolate horror: the discovery that laws re constructed led to a view of might makes right which terminated in the horrifying policies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Emancipation, and human rights, have an authority which acknowledges its own construction. While emancipation may not have the solid existential authority of God behind it, emancipation is a form of authority which can survive secularism or modernism: it is a post modern authority.
