The end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s have witnessed a considerable shift in managing trade relations on an interstate level. The first and most striking event is obviously the GATT Uruguay Round. The prolonged negotiations, culminating in the ‘Brussels breakdown’ in December 1990, have shown a large degree of disagreement among the trading powers as to the extent and content of substantive international trade rights and obligations.

This article analyzes the Iraq inquiry in The Netherlands as presented by the Davids Committee (Rapport Commissie van onderzoek besluitvorming Irak. Boom, Amsterdam, 2010). It discusses the so-called corpus theory that informed the Dutch position that the invasion in Iraq was in accordance with international law, and its deconstruction by the Davids Committee. However, this article also argues that the corpus theory was only part of the story. In the search for justifying its political support of the war, the corpus theory interacted with two other claims for legitimacy put forward by the Dutch government. These alternative strands of legitimacy moved beyond positive law to include extra-Charter values (notably with regard to state roguery in the New World Order) on the one hand, and to circumvent the politics within the Security Council (legitimacy through defiance), on the other hand. The analysis discloses how any legal argumentation and bids for legitimacy are based on a particular vision of the international society and how to safeguard law, peace, and freedom in the contemporary international order. Together this leads to a more nuanced view, which does not alter the conclusion that the Iraq war was illegal, but which does show that it can be deceptive to reduce international policy-making to a zero-sum choice between law and politics narrowly defined.

The war on Iraq has fuelled the debate about the nature and meaning of the international security system premised on the United Nations. This paper begins by examining the nature and subsequent modification of the UN collective security system. It focuses on the practice of Security Council authorisations to use force and the expanded notion of self-defence. It identifies as causes of such transformation the changing security environment, power asymmetries and the structural inability of the UN to adapt accordingly. The paper examines the failings of such a system and concludes by offering a framework for an international security system based on legitimacy interpreted as the congruence between processes, actors, claims and practices.