For much of the 20th century, the answer was: a glimpse of humanity’s political future. Long before the body’s creation, H. G. Wells imagined the eventual emergence of a world state, arguing that technological interdependence and the destructiveness of modern war would ultimately make the old system of competing sovereign states untenable. 

The advent of nuclear weapons made such predictions appear urgent. Albert Einstein became one of the most prominent postwar advocates of world government, warning that “there is no [other] possibility of control of the atomic bomb.” In his 1961 Inaugural Address, delivered a decade and a half after the United Nations was established, JFK described it as “our last best hope.” New Yorkers of a certain vintage will remember the UN flag flying next to Old Glory at their public schools.

The expectations made their way into midcentury popular culture: a powerful United Nations, with its own army, oversees interplanetary colonization in many of sci-fi master Philip K. Dick’s novels of the 1960s and ’70s; Star Trek likewise took it for granted that future politics would belong to a planetary federation.   

Whether utopia or nightmare, world government seemed inevitable, and the United Nations looked like its beginning. How things change. Today, the United Nations looks very different from the 20th century’s imagined world state. The annual General Assembly still draws world leaders, but midcentury-style “world government” seems like a distant dream.

But that’s not such a bad thing. When the United Nations tries to reach deep inside how individual sovereign states are governed — what’s implied by true “world government,” as imagined by barmy midcentury visionaries — resistance to its authority waxes, and the real-world outcomes are often disastrous. The better path is for the United Nations to embrace its current, more limited role as a symbolic forum for sovereign states.

The theater, in short, is precisely the point. While many once saw within the UN Charter an opportunity to transcend the nation-state, the body produces its best results when affirming the sovereignty of its member states, not superseding them.

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By Heather Penatzer

For years, the United Nations has been the subject of critiques from both ends of the political spectrum. On the Left, the core critique is that the organization is nothing more than a veil for American imperialism. As Noam Chomsky says, “the UN is considered favorably to the extent that it follows US orders.” From the Right, the United Nations is disparaged for being either all-powerful or politically impotent. After serving as Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, writing for the Heritage Foundation, claimed that the UN was “too bureaucratic, too remote, and too difficult to hold accountable, too involved in issues unrelated to our interests.”  

More recently, a February 2025 executive order from President Trump claimed that UN agencies have been “infiltrated by members of groups long designated … as foreign terrorist organizations,” and that UN employees “were involved in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel,” building upon a 2024 Israeli accusation (for which scant evidence has been provided).

So does the organization have a purpose in the year 2026, or should it be sent to join its short-lived predecessor, the League of Nations, in the graveyard of failed international projects?

Like the league, founded in the wake of the Great War, the United Nations was born from the devastation of a world war. The original wartime conception of the United Nations enshrined the four great Allied powers of World War II — Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China — as permanent members of what would become the UN Security Council, with France added postwar. With these five states holding veto power over the council’s resolutions, the United Nations was constrained by the rivalry of the Cold War.

As historian Mark Mazower notes, the United Nations did not emerge “like Aphrodite … from the Second World War, pure and uncontaminated by any significant association with that prewar failure, the League of Nations.” Those responsible for creating the body were not only heavily influenced by the league’s structure and mission, but also carried forward many of its institutional practices. The league’s mandates system, for example, provided an important precedent for the UN trusteeship system, which assumed responsibility for territories transferred from the defeated German and Ottoman empires. Indeed, many of the institutional arrangements through which the league had sought to manage and legitimize empire survived into the United Nations.

These imperial links create an interesting duality around these institutions. The United Nations was initially designed in ways that accommodated, and often protected, the interests of the existing colonial powers. Over the following decades, however, the same institutional machinery became an important vehicle through which anticolonial states challenged imperial rule and advanced the principle of national self-determination. The history of the UN trusteeship system thus illustrates a broader paradox: an organization built in significant part upon the institutional inheritance of empire became, over time, an important instrument in dismantling it.

Particularly striking is that the United Nations’ first armed peacekeeping force was created in an effort to uphold national sovereignty, not undermine it. After Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company in 1956, Israel invaded Egypt, and Britain and France quickly followed the Jewish state. The British government was the Canal Company’s largest single shareholder, while French investors held most of the remaining shares. Both governments regarded Nasser’s nationalization as a direct challenge to their economic and strategic position in the region. Their objectives went considerably beyond restoring access to the canal: British and French leaders hoped that military intervention would also bring about Nasser’s downfall.

Soviet supreme leader Nikolai Bulganin quickly threatened to join the fray on the side of Egypt, warning that the Soviets were “full of determination to crush the aggressor and re-establish peace in the East by using force,” while also making a pointed comment about Britain’s inability to defend itself from “modern weapons.” The Americans also objected to the invasion. Then-Vice President Richard Nixon later summarized the contradiction facing Washington: “We couldn’t, on one hand, complain about the Soviets intervening in Hungary and, on the other hand, approve of the British and the French picking that particular time to intervene against Nasser.”

London and Paris both vetoed a Security Council resolution demanding that Israel withdraw its military on Oct. 30, then joined the invasion the following day. An emergency session of the General Assembly quickly convened and established the UN Emergency Force, composed of soldiers from countries outside the permanent members of the Security Council, which deployed to the Sinai with Egypt’s consent. 

Britain and France agreed to withdraw within weeks, while Israel took longer. The danger that Soviet intervention might transform the crisis into a much wider war was averted, and Egypt’s sovereignty over its territory was restored. When Nasser demanded the departure of UN forces in 1967, they left — as the consent-based character of the mission required. The episode was ultimately consistent with the principle articulated in Article 2 of the UN Charter: that the organization rested upon the “sovereign equality” of its members and that it wasn’t authorized to intervene in matters “essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”

In the following decades, however, something shifted. Rather than treating state sovereignty simply as a foundational principle of international order to be defended, the United Nations increasingly developed institutions and practices that allowed international authority to reach inside states. Sovereignty became conditional: only states who met the standards of “good government,” as enumerated by the United Nations, could expect territorial exclusivity. 

Governments that failed to meet emerging international standards of governance, human rights, or civilian protection could find their domestic authority challenged by international intervention. UN personnel were no longer just establishing ceasefires between states, but also administered elections, supervised police, rewrote institutions, governed territory, and used military force within states’ sovereign bounds. Steadily, the United Nations began to assume those functions that earlier advocates of supranational government had imagined would eventually migrate upward from states to international institutions.

Such interventions have led to a wide range of adverse outcomes, the costs of which have largely been borne by local populations rather than by the United Nations itself. The 1992-1993 UN Transitional Administration in Cambodia, which endowed its high commissioner with the extreme status of “final arbiter of Cambodian law,” has been linked to the spread of HIV in the wartorn country through peacekeepers’ exploitation of Cambodian women and the enormous expansion of the local sex industry that accompanied their arrival. Similarly, the United Nations has admitted its role in the 2010 outbreak of cholera in Haiti, introduced by peacekeepers and ultimately responsible for the deaths of thousands of Haitians and the infection of hundreds of thousands more. 

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By Michael Lind

When critics, Left and Right, assail the United Nations, it’s these “global-governance” failures — and many others of the kind — that they have in mind. There is another side of the United Nations, however, that is easy to dismiss because it can look unserious: its role as a stage. This seemingly superficial side is precisely where the institution shines.

Some of the most famous moments in the organization’s history are acts of political theater. Khrushchev banging the desk at the General Assembly and, according to the famous account, brandishing his shoe; Adlai Stevenson confronting Soviet Ambassador Valerian Zorin during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and the like. While such episodes may provoke a chuckle, the spectacle is itself part of diplomacy. The General Assembly and Security Council give states a forum in which to make claims, present evidence, denounce adversaries, rally coalitions, and communicate before a global audience. 

Stevenson’s confrontation with Zorin didn’t resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it did give Washington a venue in which to publicly establish its case against the Kremlin, while the actual resolution of the crisis remained a matter of negotiation between sovereign governments. What looks like the United Nations’ weakness — its dependence on argument, rather than enforcement — is also one of the things it was built to provide.

The United Nations is at its best when acting as a forum for states, rather than as a higher authority over them. Some of its most consequential achievements have come not from governing states, but from helping them negotiate rules governing their relations with one another. Nuclear nonproliferation provides an especially important example. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty created an international framework in which nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states accepted reciprocal obligations concerning proliferation, peaceful nuclear technology, and disarmament. The International Atomic Energy Agency, meanwhile, provided a mechanism through which states could submit to inspections and demonstrate compliance with safeguards. These arrangements didn’t eliminate sovereignty or place nuclear policy under a world government. They instead allowed sovereign states to make bargains that would have been considerably harder to sustain without common rules, monitoring, and institutions.

This more modest role is less dramatic than the world government imagined by Wells or Einstein. However, an institution needn’t govern the world to serve a purpose within it. The United Nations provides states with a place to negotiate, to establish common rules, to monitor agreements, to publicize violations, and to take appeals to the world public. Suez demonstrated what the organization could accomplish when international action reinforced, rather than supplanted, sovereign authority. Arms-control and nonproliferation agreements demonstrate the value of institutions that help states make and monitor bargains without pretending to replace them.

The United Nations may not be the beginning of the world state that Wells and Einstein and Dick imagined. Its more durable achievement may be precisely the opposite: making a world of sovereign states somewhat more capable of living with itself.

For a time, climate seemed to dominate. Terms such as Net Zero, carbon footprint and green transition became fixtures of national and global politics. More than that, they justified a sweeping range of measures, from carbon taxes to fuel levies, and helped fuel a new wave of climate activism personified by Greta Thunberg. But then, almost as quickly as it appeared, the climate crisis faded, overshadowed by more short-term emergencies.

The pandemic shifted the focus from “saving the planet” to “saving lives”. The war in Ukraine was about energy security, not decarbonization. The carnage in Gaza, trade wars and, most recently, the Iran conflict, further crowded out climate angst. Trump’s second withdrawal from the Agreement, upon taking office for his second term, barely even registered. And when COP30 closed in Brazil earlier this year, familiar calls to end fossil fuels were met with public indifference.

Ten years on, then, one cannot help but ask: did the Paris Agreement, and the broader UN Conference of the Parties (COP) process, actually achieve anything? The record is damning. Global fossil CO2 emissions are roughly 5% higher today than at the moment Paris was signed. The 2024 rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 was the largest ever recorded. Meanwhile, national emissions-reduction plans are projected to deliver only a 12% cut in global emissions by 2035, against the 60% reduction (relative to 2019 levels) that scientists say is needed to honor the Agreement’s targets.

There is one significant nuance: the rate of emissions growth has decelerated sharply. Climate advocates point to this as evidence that Paris produced a genuine change in direction. Yet as skeptics rightly note, the absolute level of emissions has continued to rise, while the deceleration owes at least as much to cheap renewables and structural economic shifts as to the Agreement itself. In a sense, both observations are true. But what’s not in dispute is the gap between ambition and outcome.

How one interprets this failure depends on your perspective. Climate activists see it as a tragedy — proof that we are sleepwalking into catastrophe precisely as political commitment to climate action wanes. Climate skeptics, on the other hand, see it as a non-issue: the “energy transition” is quietly being dropped from the political agenda, and good riddance. In truth, both positions are wrong, albeit for different reasons.

The activists, for their part, are wrong to maintain that civilization-ending consequences are locked in unless emissions reach net zero by 2030 — a claim that’s both scientifically dubious and politically counterproductive. Not only do rising temperatures not necessarily entail mass death, but, as Albert Hirschman observed in The Rhetoric of Reaction, doomsday narratives tend to induce fatalism rather than action. If disaster is inevitable, the rational response is to stop bothering. The climate movement’s relentless escalation of apocalyptic language has almost certainly accelerated its own decline.

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But the skeptics are wrong to dismiss the energy transition altogether. For countries that lack abundant domestic fossil fuel reserves, reducing dependence on imported hydrocarbons is not an act of idealism — it’s a matter of hard-nosed national interest. The current geopolitical turbulence has clearly driven this message home, with energy import dependence becoming an acute economic and strategic liability. Europe’s exposure to the Iran conflict, and the broader volatility of global energy markets in recent years, illustrates the cost of building an entire industrial model based around imported fossil fuels, especially ones hailing from halfway around the world.

The reason both sides misread the issue — and the reason the climate agenda largely failed — lies in how the entire debate was framed from the outset. Since its origins at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, COP has been defined by two inseparable characteristics: catastrophism and globalism.

The catastrophism has deep roots. The Limits to Growth, a 1972 report commissioned by an Italian nonprofit, introduced the idea that humanity itself must be restrained for the planet’s survival. The First Global Revolution, its 1991 sequel, made this agenda explicit. “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill… The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.” From that point on, environmentalism ceased to be a movement for the rational management of resources, becoming instead a project of planetary governance, one that treats humanity as both cause and culprit. Policies framed exclusively in terms of sacrifice — more expensive energy, higher taxes, restricted mobility — predictably alienated the very public whose buy-in was essential.

The globalism was equally damaging. By framing climate change as a planetary problem, one requiring planetary governance, COP foreclosed more practical, interest-based approaches to decarbonization rooted in national sovereignty. Any action taken by a single country was implicitly framed as futile; only coordinated global action counted. Moreover, the kind of state-directed industrial policies needed to actually build the infrastructure of decarbonization ran counter to the market-oriented neoliberal zeitgeist. This logic delegitimized countries such as China, which were actually investing in decarbonization through five-year plans, massive subsidies and deliberate manufacturing scale-up rather than multilateral consensus.

This framing, however, was not simply a strategic error; it was, in part, deliberate. COP took shape precisely as globalization was being institutionally embedded: the first Rio conference in 1992 coincided with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, which marked the birth of the European Union. Arguing that democratic decision-making had to give way to technocratic governance in the name of planetary salvation served to reinforce this broader supranational project.

This globalist orientation was compounded by the ideological makeup of the climate movement itself. Stemming predominantly from liberal internationalist and pseudo-Marxist traditions, most environmental activists and writers share those traditions’ hostility to the nation-state. In their view, national sovereignty is an obstacle to be overcome by international governance. Paul G. Harris, a prominent environmental expert, wrote for instance of the “cancer of Westphalia”, the state-centric system that privileges national interests over international ones. In Harris’s telling, this framework had to be replaced by a system of international governance, for the good of the planet if nothing else. The result was predictable: more conservative and nationally oriented politicians came to associate any energy transition policy with globalism and its discontents, ensuring that the issue became entangled in culture wars and depriving it of any positive, sovereignty-affirming interpretation.

The institutional architecture reinforced the dysfunction. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, established in 1992, created a permanent negotiation apparatus, a framework for consultation rather than action. Each year, thousands of diplomats, officials and NGO representatives convene to “assess progress”; the very structure of the system ensures inertia. A vast bureaucratic ecosystem — UN agencies, EU directorates, NGOs, consultancies and think tanks — grew up with a material interest in perpetuating the “climate emergency”. The goal of reducing emissions became secondary to preserving the system itself, alongside the political benefits that system conferred on the elites who managed it — including all manner of authoritarian fantasies.

These dynamics explain not only the Agreement’s failure on its own terms, but also the way in which globalist-framed “climate action” actively undermined the national interest of nation-states: including industrially advanced ones.

The European Union is the most instructive example. Over the past decade, Brussels led the global charge on climate and Net Zero. At the same time, the EU has expanded its renewable energy share: from 17% of gross final energy consumption in 2014 to around 25% today. But because this was driven by climate idealism rather than a coherent push for energy sovereignty, it proceeded alongside growing external fossil fuel dependency. North Sea production declined; nuclear capacity was phased out, most dramatically in Germany; natural gas was treated as the indispensable “bridging” fuel for an intermittent-renewables grid. The paradoxical result was that the EU’s overall energy import dependency actually increased — from around 54% of gross available energy in 2014 to 58% today, with a peak of 63% in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. All that despite a sharp drop in energy consumption, largely driven by stagnating economic conditions.

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Until 2022, however, Europe could at least rely on relatively cheap, and reliable, Russian gas. Since then, it has substituted it with far more expensive and volatile American LNG, on which it is now heavily dependent. The Iran conflict has exposed what this means in practice: Europe remains among the regions most exposed to energy-price spikes and supply-chain disruptions.

The energy transition has now largely disappeared from Europe’s political agenda: but not because climate idealism has been replaced by clear-eyed geopolitical thinking. Rather, it is because a policy so thoroughly divorced from Europe’s strategic interests has left the continent without the institutional capacity to think strategically at all. A return to genuine geopolitical realism would be welcome; indeed, it is the only context in which a rational energy transition could be pursued.

To understand what that would look like, it’s instructive to examine the country that has taken the most coherent alternative approach: China. In recent years, the People’s Republic’s investment in renewable energy has dwarfed that of every other country. In 2024, it spent over $800 billion on its energy transition, more than double any other economy and equivalent to 31% of the world’s total clean energy investment. Just that year, more wind turbines and solar panels were installed in China than in the rest of the world combined. It did so quietly, without grand proclamations and without tiresome moralizing. Crucially, it did all this not to “save the planet” but for reasons of hard national interest.

As Professor Warwick Powell from the Queensland University of Technology explains, the key analytical concept here is something called “Energy Return on Energy Invested” (EROEI): the ratio of energy produced to the energy required to produce it. High-EROEI systems generate surpluses that can be reinvested into the economy; low-EROEI systems drain it. Historically, fossil fuels offered EROEIs of 50:1, or even 100:1 in the early decades of Middle Eastern extraction. Those days are over. Shale oil and tar sands offer returns as low as 3:1 to 5:1 — barely above breakeven when system costs are included. Conversely, modern onshore wind can deliver EROEIs of up to 50:1; utility-scale solar now achieves 10:1 to 30:1 and falling. In short, the economic logic is increasingly stark.

The broader point is that China’s focus on renewables is not merely about electrification; it is electrification in the service of energy sovereignty. By increasing the share of domestically produced, high-EROEI energy into its supply mix, Beijing reduces its dependence on volatile foreign supply chains, insulates itself from outside shocks in oil and gas markets, and bolsters its net energy surplus per unit of investment. The results are clear: despite massively increasing its energy consumption over the past decade, China’s overall energy import dependency has held stable at around 20% — and the disruption caused by the conflict in Iran has left it largely unscathed.

In conclusion, the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement should be neither an occasion for mourning nor for celebration, but for clear analysis. The Agreement failed on its own terms, largely because it was structured to fail: it was embedded in a globalist institutional architecture opposed to national-interest reasoning and was promoted through apocalyptic narratives that generated fatalism instead of action. What it leaves behind is not a legacy of climate governance but an object lesson in how not to organize.

All the same, the energy transition is far from over — and it need not be driven by climate idealism to be worth pursuing. For any country serious about sovereignty, security and long-term economic resilience, the case for reducing fossil fuel import dependence remains a strong and entirely self-interested one. The question now is whether Western governments can shed the ideological baggage of the COP era and embrace a national-interest approach to the energy transition, one that simultaneously draws on renewables, domestic resources, nuclear energy and the most rational import sources available. So far, the signs are not encouraging.

In recent years, the Court has increasingly come into conflict with elected governments — most notably over questions of migration and deportation. Its critics, particularly in Britain, argue that the Convention has expanded far beyond its original remit, interfering in areas that go to the heart of democratic sovereignty: border control, national security and the prerogative of parliaments to set the law. When nine European leaders signed a joint letter in May this year, questioning whether the ECtHR had overstepped its mandate on migration, the Council of Europe’s Secretary General, Alain Berset, dismissed their concerns outright. “No judicial body should be subject to political pressure,” he declared. The implication was clear: the ECtHR sits above democratic scrutiny; its authority, derived from moral principle rather than electoral consent, is to be accepted without debate.

A key turning point came in 2023, when the ECtHR intervened, via Rule 39, to block the UK’s so-called “Rwanda plan”, which would send certain asylum seekers and illegal migrants to Africa for processing. Just hours before the first flight was due to depart, a single judge in Strasbourg issued an emergency injunction that grounded it. Whatever one’s opinion of the policy, the episode raised a profound constitutional question: should an unelected foreign judge have the power to overturn a decision approved by a sovereign parliament?

The debate has only intensified since. Both the Conservatives and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK have pledged to withdraw from the Convention. Even Keir Starmer, while rejecting outright withdrawal, has suggested the Government will review how international human rights law, including the ECHR, is interpreted by British courts — particularly to stop unsuccessful asylum seekers from blocking deportation.

Leaving the Convention would not, by itself, solve the complex problem of illegal migration. But across Europe, elected governments — in Poland, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands and elsewhere — have often found themselves constrained when trying to respond to growing public concern over the phenomenon which has become one of the defining political issues of our time. What we are witnessing is not simply a technical legal dispute, but a clash between democracy and a transnational judiciary that increasingly sees itself as a moral authority above politics.

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The European Court of Human Rights has, over the past two decades, engineered what can be described as a “quiet power grab”. Through a series of legal innovations and doctrinal reinterpretations, the Court has progressively widened its jurisdiction, often beyond what member states ever agreed to.

One of the Court’s controversial doctrines is that of extraterritorial jurisdiction — the idea that the ECHR applies even outside a state’s borders. This instrument has allowed the Court to extend its reach into foreign territory and even international waters. In the case of Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy, for instance, the Court ruled in 2012 that Italy could not intercept migrants in the Mediterranean and return them to Libya, despite the operation taking place outside Italian territory. The result was a de facto outlawing of “pushbacks”, which is a core component of border enforcement. In practice, the judgment meant that states could no longer prevent illegal entrants from reaching their shores to lodge asylum claims, no matter the operational or humanitarian cost.

Another key development concerns the doctrine of non-refoulement — the prohibition on returning individuals to countries where they may face serious harm. Though not explicitly mentioned in the Convention, the ECtHR has expanded this principle far beyond its original postwar intent. In several cases, the Court has ruled that even transfers to other EU countries may be unlawful if conditions there are deemed inadequate. It has also insisted that each deportation must be subject to an “individualized assessment” of risk — an administrative nightmare that renders mass removals practically impossible. National security considerations are given almost no weight: even individuals deemed dangerous cannot be expelled if they might face mistreatment abroad.

Finally, there is Article 8 of the Convention — the “right to respect for private and family life”. Once a narrowly defined protection of home and correspondence, it has become a catch-all provision invoked to prevent deportations of convicted criminals and illegal immigrants. The Court has repeatedly ruled that deportations must be halted if an offender has established a family life in the host country, however tenuous. This has led to an avalanche of cases in which serious offenders — from violent criminals to drug traffickers — have successfully appealed against removal on Article 8 grounds. British tabloids have gleefully reported cases where criminals were able to avoid deportation because their child liked chicken nuggets or questioned their gender. But behind the tabloid absurdity lies a serious constitutional reality: an international court has assumed the authority to decide who may remain within a nation’s borders.

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The Court’s defenders insist that it merely applies the principles that states themselves agreed to uphold. Yet this is no longer credible. The ECtHR has, by its own admission, embraced the doctrine of the Convention as a “living instrument” — meaning that its provisions must be interpreted in light of “present-day conditions”. In practice, this gives judges carte blanche to reinterpret and expand the meaning of rights according to contemporary political sensibilities. What began as a limited postwar charter has become an evolving moral code enforced by an unelected elite with a de facto veto power over national law.

The ECHR, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. The Court operates within a wider ecosystem of judicial and technocratic power that extends far beyond Strasbourg. Its rulings are cited by the European Court of Justice, domestic supreme courts and international bodies, and often transcribed into national law. National judges, NGOs and human-rights lobbies use its jurisprudence to influence policymaking. An entire regime of judicialized governance has emerged — what legal scholar Ran Hirschl has called juristocracy: rule by judges.

Over the past half-century, vast areas of public life once decided through political debate — from migration and security to macroeconomic policy — have been transferred from parliaments to courts, tribunals and independent authorities. This process of depoliticization was a deliberate response by political elites to the growing assertiveness of mass democracy. As voting rights expanded in the late 19th and 20th centuries, Europe’s ruling classes feared that popular majorities might use their new power to challenge the economic and social order. The solution was to create institutional checks — constitutional courts, independent central banks, and supranational treaties and institutions — that insulated key areas of governance from democratic contestation.

In the postwar decades, this model spread rapidly. Germany, Italy, France and Austria all established constitutional courts with the power to strike down legislation. Internationally, new bodies such as the ECtHR and the European Court of Justice emerged as guardians of a liberal order that placed “rights” and markets above popular sovereignty. Even Westminster-style systems like Britain eventually succumbed. In the Seventies and Eighties, political elites across the Anglosphere embraced judicialization as a means of enforcing policies that might otherwise have faced public resistance.

Examples include the creation of independent monetary and pricing bodies, and the extensive use of quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations (quangos) to implement policy at arm’s length from parliamentary control. The 1998 Human Rights Act, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, epitomizes the judicialization trend. As Hirschl observed, “deference to the judiciary” served elite interests well: for example, it allowed governments to pursue controversial neoliberal economic and labor reforms while blaming unelected judges or independent bodies for their consequences.

The result is the system we inhabit today: a “constrained democracy” in which the forms of representation remain, but the substance of political choice has been hollowed out. Immigration policy, once the preserve of parliaments, has become the domain of judges interpreting “rights”. Economic and social policies are now dictated by international treaties and constitutional doctrines.

To criticize the ECtHR is not to oppose human rights, but to ask who defines them and by what authority. When “rights” are expanded indefinitely without democratic consent, they cease to be instruments of liberty and become tools of control. Governments, meanwhile, though nominally constrained by such courts, often welcome their interference, which allows them to outsource politically costly decisions to unelected judges — to pursue or preserve policies they privately support but dare not defend — or simply to evade responsibility for problems they are incapable of solving. This is why politicians’ condemnations of the ECHR, especially coming from the Conservative camp that so spectacularly betrayed the Brexit mandate while in power, ring so hollow.

The British public appears to sense this contradiction. While many citizens would probably agree that the ECHR’s authority has gone too far, polls suggest that a majority do not favor outright withdrawal from the Convention. Perhaps they intuitively understand that leaving the ECHR would make sense only as part of a broader project of political renewal — a re-democratization of governance that restores the primacy of parliament and popular sovereignty. But such a project would require a political class that actually believes in democracy — something in short supply, in Britain and across Europe.