#InternationalLaw#InternationalRelations#Diplomacy: "To conclude: on any realistic assessment, international law is neither truthfully international nor genuinely law. That, however, does not mean it is not a force to be reckoned with. It is a major one. But its reality is as Austin described it: what in the vocabulary which he inherited from Hobbes he termed opinion, and today we would call ideology. There, as an ideological force in the world at the service of the hegemon and its allies, it is a formidable instrument of power. For Hobbes, opinion was the key to the political stability or instability of a kingdom. As he wrote: ‘The actions of men proceed from their opinions, and in the well governing of opinions consisteth the well governing of men’s actions’—thus ‘the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people’. It was seditious opinions, he believed, that triggered the Civil War in England, and it was to instill correct opinions that he wrote Leviathan, which he hoped would be taught in the universities that were ‘the fountains of civil and moral doctrine’, to bring ‘public tranquility’ back to the land. We do not have to share the extent of Hobbes’s respect for the power of opinion, or indeed his preferences among the opinions of his day, to acknowledge the validity of the importance he attached to them. International law may be a mystification. It is not a trifle."
