VOLUME V, CHAPTER 11, SECTION 3
Between Nations, Why There Is No Law
The last two sections walked the holding of the scarce thing inside two present-day nations. This section lifts the lens off the inside of any single nation and carries the whole line up to the space between nations. And there it finds one thing changed, one thing missing, that changes everything. Inside a nation, over the heads of the strong and the weak, there is still a lawmaker who can rule. Between nations, there is no highest lawmaker and no highest enforcer at all. This section opens that new line and closes Part Four.
Start with what holds inside a nation, so the missing thing shows plainly. Inside a nation, the strong write the law and hold the scarce thing, as this whole part has shown. But over the strong and the weak alike there still stands something, a state, a government, a lawmaker with the recognized power to set rules over everyone within and, however imperfectly, to enforce them. The weak inside a nation are pressed, and yet there is a floor, because there is a highest authority that can, when it will, rule between two parties and make the ruling stick. The whole of this volume so far, all thirty-two layers, assumed that floor, a lawmaker over the heads of the contending, however tilted toward the strong that lawmaker leans. Take that floor away and a wholly different space opens.
Between nations, that floor is gone. There is no highest lawmaker over the nations to write a law binding on them all. There is no highest enforcer over the nations to make a ruling stick against a nation that refuses it. What is called international law is real and matters, and it is not law in the sense this volume has used the word, because it lacks the one thing that made law law, a highest authority above the parties that can set the rule and enforce it. Between nations there are agreements, treaties, bodies, customs, and all of them finally rest on the consent of the nations themselves, and a nation strong enough can withhold that consent, break the agreement, ignore the body, and there is no higher power to compel it. So between nations there is no law in the full sense. There is the naked thing that law was built to govern, the struggle over the scarce thing, running now with no lawmaker over it. What holds between nations is not law. It is the balance of power, the same contention the law was invented to tame, here untamed because there is nothing above it to do the taming.
Huang Zongxi's line, which this volume has carried from the start, reaches its widest meaning here. The law of one household is not the law of all under Heaven. Inside a nation, the strong's law wears the robe of the law of all under Heaven while being, at bottom, the law of one household. Between nations, even that robe falls away. What is called international law is, plainly, the law of one household, or of a few households, the strongest nations, written to govern the rest, with no pretense of a lawmaker above them all, because there is none. The rules that run between nations are written, in the main, by the strongest, to secure the scarce thing for themselves, and the many weaker nations live under rules they had little hand in making, exactly as the weak inside a nation live under the strong's law, only now with no highest authority even in principle to appeal to. The line that named the tilt inside a nation names the whole structure between nations, and names it more nakedly, because between nations the tilt has nothing over it at all.
Here the volume holds its hardest discipline, and it must be said plainly. On the space between nations, this volume takes no side. It does not say which nation is right and which wrong, which is the aggressor and which the aggrieved, which order is just and which unjust. To take a side would be to do the very thing the whole volume refuses, to judge from one position and call it the truth. What the volume does instead is set the structure out, that between nations there is no highest lawmaker and no highest enforcer, that what runs there is the balance of power dressed, when it is dressed at all, as the law of a few households, and that the scarce thing is contended for there with no floor under the contention. Whether a given nation's conduct in that space is right or wrong, the reader judges, holding the one measure this volume carries, what you would not want done to yourself, and holding it to every nation alike, strong and weak, near and far, one's own and the others. The volume hands the measure. It does not hand a verdict, and above all it does not hand a verdict that flatters one nation and damns another.
See why this new line had to open exactly here, at the end of Part Four. This part asked why law exists and answered, because output falls short and the scarce thing must be contended for, and a lawmaker arises to govern the contention. Follow that answer to the space between nations and you find the contention over the scarce thing running on, unchanged in nature, but the lawmaker gone. So the space between nations is the purest case of this volume's whole thesis, the struggle over the scarce thing with the law stripped away, showing what the contention looks like when nothing governs it. Everything the earlier parts said about the strong writing law to hold the scarce thing appears here in its rawest form, because here the strong write the rules with no authority above them even pretending to check them. The line between nations is not a new subject bolted on. It is the same subject with its last restraint removed, and that is why the volume, having walked the scarce thing from the well-field through the eight modern tools, must end this part by lifting the lens to the one space where the scarce thing is fought over with no lawmaker at all.
So this section sets a thirty-fourth layer, and Part Four closes here. Between nations there is no highest lawmaker and no highest enforcer, so what is called international law is not law in the full sense but the balance of power, and what rules run there are written in the main by the strongest, the law of a few households wearing, when it wears anything, the robe of the law of all under Heaven. On this space the volume takes no side and hands no verdict, only the structure and the one measure held to every nation alike. Huang Zongxi's law of one household reaches its widest meaning here, where the tilt inside a nation appears between nations with nothing over it at all. This is the same struggle over the scarce thing the whole part has traced, shown in its rawest form, with the law stripped away.
Now set Part Four together. It asked the deepest question of the volume, why law exists, and answered that law is a tool grown from the ground under scarcity, not a justice fallen from the sky. It broke scarcity into four kinds, walked the line of land across three thousand years, opened the hidden scarcities of the examination, marriage, and learning, stood with the weak and his three roads, watched the reformer fail to change the frame, carried the whole line into eight modern tools across two nations, and lifted it at last to the space between nations where the contention runs with no lawmaker over it. From the twenty-sixth layer to the thirty-fourth, and at the bottom of all of them one dead knot, so long as output falls short, the scarcity stays, and no road inside the frame ends it. The volume sets that knot in plain view and does not untie it, leaving the untying to the volume on saving people.
The next part follows the new line the space between nations opened, and walks the struggle over the scarce thing among nations across its full depth, from the surface takings to the deepest kind, and asks what puts a nation in the position of the one who takes and what puts a nation in the position of the one taken from. Let the reader carry this layer, that between nations there is no law over the contention, into Part Five.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.