The Tradition of International Law

Abstract

Considered in the broadest terms, the tradition of international law or the law of nations stands as a tradition of great antiquity, and with its origins lying in classical Greek-Roman civilization and with its subsequent evolution going on continuously throughout the Middle Ages. In the distinctively modern sense and meaning of international law, however, the tradition of international law is something that is generally presented as having come into being in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This period saw the overseas expansion of the European powers into Africa, the Americas and the Far East, together with the founding of the modern states system in Europe that, in the aftermath of the Renaissance and the Reformation, was to be established with the Peace of Westphalia which concluded the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48). The developments here referred to were to prove decisive factors in the emergence of the modern system of international law, and this is reflected in the crucial shift that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as to the understanding of the essential character of the law of nations. The shift in question was the one involving a move away from the pre-modern understanding of the law of nations, as something formed from laws that were recognized to be common among the different nations and peoples, and towards the modern understanding of the law of nations which is familiar from the as now existing order of international law. This in its fundamentals is the law of nations conceived of, and expounded, as comprising the body of laws that are recognized to govern, and as applying to, the external relations between independent states and political communities.