Rule of Law — The Empty Chair

A 2025 reflection on the long unravelling of international legality — and why restoring it is not idealism, but survival.

Updated 12 November 2025 | Location: The Hague | Sources: UN Charter; ICJ; UNGA Archives; Santayana (1905)

1. The Long Forgetting (1945–2025)

When George Santayana wrote those words, he could not have foreseen how precisely they would describe the 20th and 21st centuries. After the First World War, the League of Nations was born from a single conviction: that war could be restrained through dialogue, law, and shared conscience. It failed, but its failure left a scar that became the seed of something stronger.

Out of the ruins of a second, more terrible conflict, the United Nations was created — not as an idealistic experiment, but as an act of collective self-preservation. Its Charter was a solemn promise: that never again would the world allow aggression, genocide, or occupation to go unchallenged. The rule of law was to be the world’s shield, its memory made permanent through institutions.

Yet eighty years later, with that Charter still intact, we find ourselves once again drifting toward confrontation among major powers — armed with the lessons of history, yet behaving as if we had learned none. The rule of law, conceived as humanity’s safety mechanism, is now treated as optional precisely because the memory of its necessity has faded.

We remember the institutions, but not the reasons they were built.

2. The Unravelling by Decades

The decay of international legality did not happen in one dramatic collapse. It unfolded slowly — a long erosion through tolerated contradictions, forgotten lessons, and selective enforcement. Every generation adjusted to slightly lower standards, until the extraordinary became ordinary.

Each exception created the moral permission for the next. The slow corrosion of principle became the architecture of cynicism.

3. When the Rules Became Optional

There was a time when “international law” was not just a phrase, but a shared language of restraint — an agreement among states that power must answer to principle. By 2025, that language has almost fallen silent. Great powers act with impunity; smaller ones imitate them. The institutions built to uphold law stand by, muted, as missiles and narratives compete to define reality.

When the rule of law becomes optional, justice becomes theatre — and the world becomes a stage where outrage replaces accountability.

4. Why It Matters

The rule of international law is not an academic ornament. It is humanity’s seatbelt. You do not wear it because you expect an accident — you wear it because you remember what happens when no one does.

• Without law, the strong dictate and the weak imitate.
• Without accountability, outrage turns into performance.
• Without memory, the promise of “never again” becomes a hollow phrase at commemorations.

5. The Myth of Strategic Exception

The 21st century perfected a dangerous rhetorical trick: breaking rules while claiming to defend them. It is called “strategic exception” — or, more plainly, cheating with a press release.

Every time law is bent for “special circumstances,” the structure bends a little more. And once it bends too far, it does not return.

Strategic exceptions do not preserve order — they delete the operating system of the rules-based world we inherited. They are the quiet assassins of legality.

6. The Case for Return

To call for a return to a rules-based order is not to romanticize the past. It is to recognize that civilization itself depends on restraint. When violations are sanctioned and accountability restored:

• The powerful must explain, not dictate.
• Victims gain justice, not hashtags.
• Small states can exist without arming for survival.

True multilateralism does not depend on who breaks the rule — only on whether someone still cares to uphold it.

7. The Return Clause

1. Apply law without exception. Flags grant duty, not immunity.
2. Reject strategic ambiguity. It is moral evasion in diplomatic form.
3. Rebuild institutions that can outlast political moods and national tantrums.
4. Sanction all transgressions. Even — and especially — the uncomfortable ones.
5. Relearn why the law was written. Because memory, not power, is what prevents repetition.

8. Epilogue: The Empty Chair

In The Hague stands a chair meant for accountability. It is not empty because no crimes have been committed — it is empty because too many have agreed to look away.

The chair waits.
So does the idea of justice that built the United Nations itself.

The rule of law is not utopia.
It is the minimum condition for decency in a dangerous world.