The Grammar of the State
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others
Orwell
In the current historical period, there is increasing debate over what a nation-state is and what its functions are; in strategic and geopolitical contexts, hypocrisy and double standards have always characterized international relations, presenting themselves as constant historical factors rather than normative and legal exceptions. According to political doctrine and the Convention of Montevideo of 1933, a state must have three constituent elements: a people, a territory, and governmental sovereignty. A nation, on the other hand, is understood to be a group of people who, sharing a language, religion, origins, and history, possess a collective consciousness and cultural autonomy. Unrecognized territories are entities born out of conflicts with their parent states; they find themselves in a de jure situation (lacking official recognition) and a de facto condition (marked by ethnic and social conflicts and a lack of democratic safeguards), which leads the international community to recognize them only partially. Today, the UN officially counts 193 member states, although there are de facto state entities that exist without unequivocal recognition, thus underscoring the fragmentation of the legal order.
In the European Logos, the nation is presented as the locus of the state alongside the history that shapes it, bringing it to fulfillment in unity and securing recognition of its legitimacy and sovereignty through a baptismal act.
The international organization par excellence, the United Nations, aims to foster peaceful relations and promote sovereign equality among states: its bodies, such as the Security Council and the General Assembly, are tasked with formalizing the proclamation of a sovereign state. Based on the above, territories such as Palestine, Kosovo, and Taiwan have joined numerous international organizations but have not been recognized by some UN member states, nor by all EU member states.
Humanitarian Complexities and the Selective Rhetoric of Protection
Since the end of the Cold War, the UNHCR and many other humanitarian organizations have become involved in the creation of new states through interventions that are sometimes open to criticism, as they have had to deal with an ever-increasing number of complex humanitarian emergencies (CHE): instances of forced displacement of the civilian population that tend to determine whether a conflict justifies intervention. These crises have led to missions aimed at protecting people’s lives, but at a cost: impartiality, good faith, and neutrality have been significantly compromised by military interventions, reflecting the ambivalence of the international community.
As highlighted by experts in the field, military forces have rarely had a purely humanitarian agenda: since it is not neutral, humanitarianism tends to distinguish between victims and perpetrators, triggering a process of dependence on external governance that does not help to shorten conflicts but tends to erode local sovereignty. In this context, humanitarianism and its interventions have often been presented as a worldview in which there are poor, defenseless victims and perpetrators who must be stopped, rather than as the peaceful maintenance of a network of individuals and actors within a complex system of relationships. The plurality of interests makes sovereignty a subject of negotiation, raising the question of what is actually being protected.
The rhetoric of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and, more generally, of the “duty to intervene,” articulated in 2001 by the ICISS Commission, has sought to prioritize the protection of human rights over territorial integrity. The ability of this protection paradigm to translate into practice is seen merely as a pretext for interventions with other aims; postcolonial skeptics view interference for protective purposes as a form of neo-imperialism. Responses to these criticisms—which saw the paternalistic expansion of Western hegemony behind R2P—have argued that such interventions are not an exclusively Western approach, emphasizing regional organizations as key actors in conflict resolution. Academic studies have argued that international relations have become “more hierarchical, with stratified forms of sovereignty,” where some states acquire privileges while others lose fundamental rights. This selectivity has exposed double standards in the application of universal protection principles: the doctrine is invoked where strategic interests are at stake, while this responsibility has been ignored in numerous African crises.
The reluctance to provide consistent support highlights that humanitarian intervention is not firmly established and that the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention continue to operate, albeit without absolute primacy; consequently, states and armed groups defy established conventions. It is of the utmost importance to impose a clear legal limit on political power, granting independent jurisdiction as a safeguard regulated by constitutional constraints; in some cases, unrecognized states or territories—if they use sovereign power against the welfare of society and replace democratic forms with inappropriate laws for political purposes—risk becoming easily manipulated and, consequently, a threat to neighboring countries: this can be seen in Islamic radicalization in the Balkans and terrorist cells in Kosovo.
Flexible Legality and Pandora’s Box: From Interventionism to Self-Interest
During periods of regulatory transition, the international community has proven to be inconsistent, responding in diverse ways to crises such as those in Somalia, Rwanda, or Congo-Zaire. Global dynamics have changed, but diplomacy has failed to develop a shared framework. Although some argue that a norm of international law exists that permits intervention in the name of humanity, this norm has not been established with regard to the use of armed force, as it would contradict the requirement of generality.
Between 1991 and 2020, Western countries undertook more than a dozen large-scale extraterritorial military interventions, often outside or at the limits of an explicit UN mandate. A prime example of this selectivity can be seen in the Balkans: the intervention in Kosovo, justified as a response to the degrading treatment suffered by the population at the hands of its own government, turned into an action undertaken without the Security Council’s approval, thereby violating Article 2 of the UN Charter. Despite the illegality of the bombings, the Security Council subsequently recognized the results achieved, setting a precedent of flexible legality: once a group of powerful states realized it could evade the restrictions of international law and resort to force without restraint, a Pandora’s box was opened.
Today, the international order is undergoing significant redefinitions regarding interventionist paradigms: while countries such as Russia have justified their interventions through structured doctrines, on the other hand, we can observe various strategic approaches—such as that of President Trump—which have enshrined the centrality of the national interest at the expense of claims to universality.
The Responsibility to Protect has always functioned as a hierarchical pyramid, allowing powerful state actors to interpret the norms to their own advantage and interest: the major difference is that in recent years, it has not been deemed necessary to focus on exculpatory rhetoric; while the interventions against the Serbs in 1999 and the interventions in Libya in 2011 were presented as a defense of multilateralism and human protection—despite the utilitarian evaluative criterion—today we have shifted to a selective realism based on force and the direct decapitation of the adversary as a bargaining chip.
Geopolitical analysts, in fact, emphasize how the Trump administration played a central role in ushering in this approach: the classic “humanitarian justification” has given way to a direct and blunt application of national interest. Interventionism no longer required moral veils, confirming an interpretation of law as an instrument subordinate to power.
Self-determination, sovereignty, and new interpretations
Over the centuries, sovereignty has become increasingly diffuse, shifting from the sovereign individual to the people and the legal system, demonstrating that governing requires the construction of new models of democracy. Representative forms of organization will replace the exclusive role of sovereign states: external sovereignty is expressed through international organizations, establishing a global order and removing the use of force from the purview of individual states. The sense of national belonging, despite human rights, is in constant transformation; it changes but is not erased, reemerging in different forms. Expansive visions, such as the European Union, offer an advantage in terms of pluralism: as a member of a particular nation, one also enjoys a broader citizenship. Self-determination is the principle whereby every people has the right to establish its own political system independently of external influences; it is rooted in Rousseau and was first articulated in Wilson’s 14 Points.
Under international law, it can be exercised only by peoples subject to colonial rule or whose territory has been conquered by force; it should therefore not be invoked by communities seeking to establish a new political regime. There is a difference between internal and external self-determination: the former protects the rights of minorities within a nation, as a state allows minorities to speak their own language and participate in political life; the latter, on the other hand, refers to the formation of new states, the division of existing ones, the alteration of borders, and the pursuit of international recognition; external self-determination is generally discouraged because it leads to violence and is implemented only in extreme cases: in the Reference re Secession of Québec ruling, the Supreme Court of Canada held that self-proclamation is permissible only in extreme and meticulously defined cases, such as instances of colonialism, foreign occupation, or discriminatory regimes that deny fundamental rights.
In a selective reading of international law, we can observe how the invocation of humanitarianism to circumvent sovereignty can be invoked depending on national interests. It is important to consider that it is not only Western powers that have veiled their self-interest under the guise of interventionism, but that Russia, too, has developed its own model of humanitarian doctrine; starting from the principle of “Russkiy Mir,” the Kremlin has, in its own way, used tools of soft power and proxy war to pursue its interests: first and foremost, the spread of its culture and guarantees for national security; and secondly, it has sought, with ever-greater consistency, to interpret the R2P to intervene in areas of influence it considers its own in order to impose its own value-based hegemony (through invoking the self-determination of peoples in Crimea or the Donbas, intervention at the request of Syria, the invocation of the armed forces for the protection and defense of its citizens abroad, etc.)
Given the history of selective applications of these interventionist doctrines, it is clear that there are no obstacles preventing major states from manipulating international law as they see fit. In an increasingly complex international system with its competitive dynamics, it is important to recall the developments that have led actors, such as the United Nations or the European Union, to make progress toward societal prosperity. If interventions continue to be justified by bending the law to serve immediate interests, the system will collapse under the weight of its own double standards; this is why international organizations must return to following the fundamental rules that made them great, reestablishing a framework of international law and returning to their founding principles.
