Lord Morrow (DUP)

My Lords, there has been lot of talk about the rules-based international order in recent years, largely in response to the concern that the reality to which it testifies looks considerably less certain in the context of the development of what some scholars are now calling Cold War II. The truth, however, is that international relations has never been a strictly rule-based order, in the sense that it has approximated life in the domestic context. On the other hand, informed by social conventions that testify to the common humanity of all the people of the earth, international relations has never approximated to international anarchy. There have always been rules, and yet they have been different from the domestic sense because of the absence of a world state with all the sanctions of domestic government. In this context, those rules have to accommodate considerations of power in a way that we do not see domestically. Sound thinking about international relations has never been just about rules abstracted from considerations of power any more than it has been about power abstracted from rules. We can get into real difficulty if we lose sight of questions of power. One critical way in which international relations has conventionally had regard for questions of power arises from the point at which a new sovereign state, whether arising from the break-up of an existing state, decolonisation, or some other kind of reconfiguration of territorial integrity, is recognised by other sovereign states. This act of recognition conveys on the state sovereignty as the international personality. It involves those states saying that they recognise the right of the other state to exist, with its territorial integrity, and the right of that state to make the laws to which it is subject in relation to that territorial integrity. This process is mutual in the sense that if state A will not recognise state B, then state B usually will not recognise state A until state A recognises it. One of the critical questions facing a sovereign state in determining whether it recognises another state is whether it recognises its full territorial integrity and right to make the laws of that territorial integrity, together with an assessment of its physical capacity to govern that territorial integrity.