Whether international law constitutes an independent legal domain endowed with sanctioning power with regard to its subjects is a question that has resurfaced in nearly every crisis that has emerged within the post Cold War new world order, and one that has most often been answered in the negative. Unsurprisingly, in a significant portion of such triggering events, the politically decisive yet legally immune subject has been the United States of America. The newly shaped aggressiveness in the field of international relations that began with Donald Trump’s second term, along with the singular acts resulting from this aggressiveness, has once again rendered this longstanding issue debatable in the eyes of legal scholars. The abduction of the Venezuelan president from his own country in a manner resembling a domestic criminal investigation, followed by the declaration that Venezuela would be “ruled”^[1] by the United States; the assertion that Greenland constitutes a strategic security issue for the United States and, accordingly, the announcement of the occupation of territories that in fact fall within the sovereign domain of another independent state^[2]; and finally, the emergence of the possibilty of a military intervention against yet another independent state, Iran^[3]… These developments have appeared as the most recent indicators of the crisis of international law.

Nevertheless, the crisis of international law is neither a new topic nor an exceptional one; rather, it is a recurring phenomenon in almost every dispute to which the United States is a party.^[4] With regard to the fragility of international law as an autonomous legal discipline, one particularly striking statement that merits reflection is the following declaration recently made by Donald Trump which says that he doesn´t need international law and the only constraint to his power as president of the US is “his own morality, his own mind”.^[5] This statement prompted me to reconsider Hegel’s conceptualization of international law.

II.

The mechanical conceptions of law and the state held by eighteenth-century rationalists also shaped the manner in which they conceptualized international law. Just as law emerges as the normative and necessary outcome of the historically continuous social relations of a particular group of people, the way out of the unpredictable ground of the primitive relations established among states was thought to lie in the construction of a coercive system called international law. This approach found its most final and refined form in the philosophy of law of the last great Enlightenment thinker, Immanuel Kant. According to Kant’s relatively anthropocentric approach, states, much like individuals, essentially experience a state of nature in which there is no guarantee that the minimal rights of each state will be recognized by others. As with individuals, the state of nature for states brings insecurity in its wake. For this reason, the path out of this insecure condition was conceived as the construction of a normative ground for states, just as the regulation of private-law relations secures individual freedom at a minimal level. Kant articulated this approach most clearly in two texts: Theory and Praxis^[6] and Perpetual Peace.^[7]

As a reaction to this mechanical and, in its imagination of an eternal state of peace, utopian approach, post-Kantian idealist philosophers and jurists influenced by post-Kantian philosophy worked on the theoretical construction of a new and more realistic concept of international law. The realist conceptualization of international law presented by Hegel in the final section of The Philosophy of Right is one of the most radical examples of such efforts. Hegel explicitly rejects the existence of a normative system that could exercise authority over states and direct them toward particular modes of conduct, and accordingly points to the impossibility of a utopian vision of perpetual peace.^[8] To assume that disputes among states could be resolved through a court and legal rules applied by such a court—analogous to the functioning of domestic law—amounts, for Hegel, to denying the very nature of states. Rather than an international law operating above states, Hegel maintains that matters between states are essentially resolved through power and, in this respect, through war.^[9] While many of his contemporaries referred to certain behavioral norms as international law, Hegel attributed to these norms the character of customary law and preferred to call them external state law. As for the question of whether a state’s actions can be regarded as justified in themselves, Hegel answers by stating that world history itself functions as a world court into which states are cast.^[10] In other words, the normativity envisioned as an ideal international legal order within mechanical state theories is, in Hegel, assigned to world history itself. The question of justification with respect to state actions is therefore a world-historical question.

Hegel’s realist yet deeply pessimistic approach to the nature of international law also found a certain reception among jurists. For instance, Friedrich Carl von Savigny—one of the most prominent jurists of the period and whose philosophical orientation was close to idealism—accepted, like Hegel, that international law could only be conceived as a deficient form of law due to its lack of coercive force.^[11] Similarly, August Wilhelm Heffter wrote a comprehensive treatise on international law upon the realist foundations laid by Hegel.^[12] This theory continues to find a certain degree of reception in progressive legal circles today.

III.

The picture Hegel presents regarding the foundations of international law is directly connected to his theory of law and to the extent to which this theory diverges from contemporary natural-law approaches. Even in his early period, Hegel rejected legal theories grounded in an abstract social contract. In his Natural Law essay, written in 1803 and regarded as one of the strongest expressions of his political philosophy prior to the publication of The Philosophy of Right in 1820, Hegel already argues that the state does not arise from a hypothetical social contract, as natural-law theorists claim, but rather develops as a particular manifestation of the national identity of a people within its own historical continuity.^[13]Hegel refers to this stage of development as absolute ethical life or ethical totality, emphasizing that this process is not a mechanical social activity formed through the external actions of individuals but an organic progression through which peoples conciseness and form of state seem to be inseparable.^[14]

In The Philosophy of Right, published in 1820, we encounter a far more developed version of this approach. Hegel presents his entire philosophy of law as part of his system, following a determinate line of immanent development. According to him, law should be understood as a historical development progressing through three main categories: abstract right, morality, and ethical life. In the stage of abstract right, the individual realizes their freedom first through their relation to external objects—namely possession and property—and subsequently through their external relations with other similar individuals, that is, through contract. At this stage, the individual experiences their existence in isolation, such that everything external exists solely for their own being.^[15]

Only at the stage of morality does the individual truly encounter the existence of others and realize that their own activity must therefore be limited. The limits imposed at this stage are nothing other than the voluntary decisions of one’s own morality. Limits exist, yet they are acknowledged as having been set entirely by the individual themselves.^[16] It is precisely here that The Philosophy of Right departs from mechanical state theories. According to Hegel, it is not possible to speak of law in a genuine sense on the basis of purely internal limits self-imposed by individuals and a normative system arising from their generalization. This is because, at this stage of development, the individual still experiences themselves as abstract—separate, independent, and distinct from others, even though they recognize them. For Hegel, a more advanced moment of legal consciousness is required in order to speak of genuine law. He calls this moment ethical life and distinguishes it from morality.^[17]

At this stage of political development, individuals no longer regard the limits of their existence as boundaries determined solely by themselves; rather, these limits are apprehended as the foundations of shared practices of life of a greater whole to which they belong—the spirit of the people. Here, individuals mediate their own existence through the existence of others, and recognize in others the mediating power of their own activity. Consequently, they grasp that the limits previously experienced as arbitrary at the stage of morality are in fact the existential conditions of their own lives. This shared act of recognition constitutes, for Hegel, the foundation of a genuine legal order. The state—now designated as the ethical idea—is the place where the freedom of free individuals is realized in its most advanced form through such reciprocal immanent recognition.

IV.

Following this excursus into the system of Hegel’s doctrine of law and the state, let us return to his conceptualization of international law. What Hegel essentially argues is that the construction of a binding normative system through the relations established among individual ethical ideas, that is, states, is not possible. Each individual state follows, in Hegel’s design, a specific historical and organic developmental process as a result of the conscious political activity of the people living within it. The normativity of its domestic law is fundamentally a product of this historical continuity. By contrast, the activity of different states—between which no shared consciousness or common Geist can be imagined—is insufficient for the construction of a legal system within which they could recognize themselves as limited. For no state, no ethical idea, necessarily undergoes a historical development as a result of what Hegel considers external and thus inorganic relations with its counterparts. It is precisely this absence that renders the derivation of a genuinely legal international law impossible. Ultimately, what remains is an international order in which different historical and transpersonal developments enter into relations with similar entities for the sake of common interests, conflicts culminate in wars, and almost always the stronger ethical idea prevails over the others—an order not unlike the one we have today.

What is striking with regard to the statement by Donald Trump mentioned at the beginning of this essay is that, in the international order imagined by Hegel as filled with wars and interventions, the ethical idea has now been replaced by one’s own morality. A stage of development—subjective morality—from which even domestic law cannot be derived according to Hegel, now presents itself as both the subject and source of international law. This situation becomes even more peculiar when considered alongside Trump’s internal conflicts with the legal order of the United States. An excessively individualized morality, even while acting in open opposition to the ethical idea of which it is a part, has managed—through democratic legitimacy—to be elected as the representative of that ethical idea and subsequently to identify itself with it. A figure deemed “wrong” even within their own moral context, that is, unlawful under domestic law, has ultimately elevated their wrongness above that moral context and attributed normativity to it.

At the present juncture, we are experiencing a period in which even Hegel’s realist and pessimistic vision of an international order grounded in wars, interventions, and destruction may be regarded as relatively utopian. International law—already inherently crisis-ridden even in its most ideal design—now risks transforming into an expression of excessive selfhood. If occupations and genocides have become normalized even in a world where ethical lives coexist side by side, the prospect of a just international order in a world where one’s own morality recognizes itself as the sole limit appears destined to vanish entirely.

Bugrahan Fertellioglu is a Ph.D. Candidate, Free University of Berlin, Law Faculty

Bibliography

Hefter, August Wilhelm. Das Europäische Völkerrecht der Gegenwart. 1. Aufl. Schroeder, 1844.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse. Herausgegeben von Eduard Gans und Hermann Klenner. Nach der Ausgabe von Eduard Gans herausgegeben und mit einem Anhang versehen von Hermann Klenner. Akademie-Verlag, 1981.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. „Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts, seine Stelle in der praktischen Philosophie und sein Verhältnis zu den positiven Rechtswissenschaften“. In Hegel Jenaer Schriften. Hegel Werke 2. Suhrkamp, 1986.

Kant, Immanuel. „Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis“. In Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis Zum ewigen Frieden Ein philosophischer Entwurf, herausgegeben von Heiner F. Klemme. Felix Meiner, 1992.

Kant, Immanuel. „Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf“. In Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis Zum ewigen Frieden Ein philosophischer Entwurf, herausgegeben von Heiner F. Klemme. Felix Meiner, 1992.

Savigny, Friedrich Carl von. System des heutigen Römischen Rechts, 1. Band. Bd. 1. Veit und Comp., 1840.

^[1] „Trump says US will ‘run’ Venezuela and ‘fix oil infrastructure’”: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd9enjeey3go

^[2] „Trump says US needs to ‘own’ Greenland to prevent Russia and China from taking it”: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78vj5n7jg3o

^[3] „Trump mulls ‘very strong’ military options as hundreds killed in Iran protests”: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czdqy3rmp78o

^[4] As CLT It has already been recently stated that „the crisis of international law is not merely epistemic – it is existential“.: Apostolos Tsiouvalas and Nikolaos Dimitrakopoulos, Rage Against the End of International Law: From Venezuela to the Global: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2026/01/06/rage-against-the-end-of-international-law-from-venezuela-to-the-global/

^[5] „‘I don’t need international law’: Trump says power constrained only by ‘my own morality’”: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/08/trump-power-international-law

^[6] Immanuel Kant, „Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis“, in Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis Zum ewigen Frieden Ein philosophischer Entwurf, ed. Heiner F. Klemme (Felix Meiner, 1992), 41.

^[7] Immanuel Kant, „Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf“, in Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis Zum ewigen Frieden Ein philosophischer Entwurf, ed. Heiner F. Klemme (Felix Meiner, 1992) 58.

^[8] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, ed. Eduard Gans und Hermann Klenner, Nach der Ausgabe von Eduard Gans herausgegeben und mit einem Anhang versehen von Hermann Klenner (Akademie-Verlag, 1981), 367 and 368.

^[9] Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, 376.

^[10] Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, 379.

^[11] Friedrich Carl von Savigny, System des heutigen Römischen Rechts, 1. Band (Veit and Comp., 1840), 1:33.

^[12] August Wilhelm Heffter, Das Europäische Völkerrecht der Gegenwart, 1. Ed.. (Schroeder, 1844).

^[13] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, „Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts, seine Stelle in der praktischen Philosophie und sein Verhältnis zu den positiven Rechtswissenschaften“, in Hegel Jenaer Schriften, Hegel Werke 2 (Suhrkamp, 1986), 439.

^[14] Hegel, „Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts, seine Stelle in der praktischen Philosophie und sein Verhältnis zu den positiven Rechtswissenschaften“, 522.

^[15] Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, 71.

^[16] Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, 135.

^[17] Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, 188.