Legal Framework for International Business

III. Processes

Liberals would explain the emergence of international legal norms and rules rather differently than realists. Instead of focusing on international legal norms as the outcome of power relations in the international system, they might focus on how norms and rules emerge in domestic contexts and then spread to the international sphere. Liberals, in contrast to realists, argue that states often comply with UN rules regarding the use of force and with international humanitarian law for reasons beyond simple self-interest. Rather, there may be a set of domestic actors and interest groups which promote rule-governed behavior: pressure groups, citizens, political parties, or the judiciary. As a corollary, some liberals have put forward the notion that liberal states based on the ‘rule of law’ domestically are more likely to comply with these obligations than non-liberal states which may be less constrained by judges or civil society.

Liberals also tend to focus on the functional role played by international law- understanding its emergence as a means for states to reach cooperation in areas in which they have common interests. International norms and rules create shared expectations, increased transparency, and the possibilities of iterated interaction- all of which help states to overcome problems of collective action. Liberals are therefore more likely than realists to focus on international regimes as important features of world politics. International regimes have been classically defined by Stephen Krasner (1983) as ‘principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue-area’. Notice that this definition might include, but is not confined to, international law. Furthermore, the definition does not explicitly refer to international law, legal norms or institutions, and nor, for the most part, does the body of IR literature on international regimes.
This is a key difference in the approach, language, and terminology of IR scholars that distinguishes it from international legal scholarship. It means that IR scholars interested in the use of force, humanitarianism, human rights, refugees, trade, and the environment will refer to the international regime that exists in each of these areas rather than referring to bodies of international human rights law or international environmental law as such. There are some exceptions to this, such as the growing international relations literature that explicitly examines the question of legalization in world politics. However, students of international relations can gain much from having an understanding of international legal scholarship on international human rights law, international refugee law, international trade law, or international environmental law as elaborating on key components of the IR literature on the international human rights regime, the international refugee regime, international trade regime, or international environmental regime.