Thread by @garvanwalshe

You can’t unilaterally amend an international treaty by changing domestic law. If you could there’d be no point in having treaties. It get to the heart of the difference between two ideas of Brexit.

Thread.

2/ One kind of brexit, let’s call it May’s Brexit, is about redefining the arrangements the UK has with the EU. Those different arrangements, agreed by the UK and EU would then be understood as binding on both parties.

3/ The other, let’s call it Mogg’s Brexit, doesn’t actually approve of binding international agreements at all. It may seem to its British proponents that this gives the UK maximum freedom to do as it likes, but it actually just puts the UK outside international law.

4/Disputes with the EU would then be decided by power politics, which might have worked when the British Empire dominated the globe, but now puts the much smaller UK at a huge disadvantage.

5/ Boris won the election with a type of May’s Brexit, but the #NIprotocol bill would convert it, in defiance of the election manifesto into Mogg’s Brexit.

The bill isn’t just immoral or illegal. It’s also dammed foolish.
ENDS

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6/ This, from the Bruges Group, is another example of the conceptual problem at the heart of Mogg-Brexit: its view of sovereignty is incompatible with the concept of a binding agreement.

https://twitter.com/BrugesGroup/status/1536384632136118274?s=20&t=f0beS5LR_y6sMfrSiJYZJA

7/ Even if absolute parliamentary sovereignty exists domestically, it can't exist with respect to foreign states. This was clear to the greatest English philosophers of the 17th century.

8/Locke called the power to make binding agreements with other sovereign states "federative" power, because he thought it different from domestic executive or legislative power

9/Hobbes considered a situation where agreements could be made and unmade at will equivalent to a state of nature.

10/ There is a view that international relations are (or were) a state of nature, but it's usually an argument in favour of establishing something more orderly, like international law, not an argument in favour of the state of nature.

11/Hobbes had famous words about the State of Nature, and that's why, from the Congress of Vienna on, European powers started to develop principles of international conduct, to try and resolve disputes between states that were nevertheless internally sovereign.

12/Respecting the internal sovereignty of other nations was not, to put it charitably, the policy of the UK (or France, btw), through out the nineteenth and early 20th centuries either.

13/It was only really after the world wars that serious attempts to regulate cross-border affairs got going, but got going they have and we call these arrangements international law (though they've an older heritage going back to the Holy Roman Empire, and the Church)

14/There's one country that never took this idea seriously (though they used it instrumentally) and that's Putin's Russia. There we see what happens when a medium sized country is stuck in the state of nature with a larger neighbour.

15/The way to avoid it is for countries to make binding international agreements (and sometimes make international institutions). Locke would have called this an exercise of "federative" power, and considered it entirely compatible with preserving sovereignty.