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Ces mutations se font, pour l’essentiel, dans le cadre du système onusien et d’organisations internationales à vocation universelle, et il n’est pas simple d’y déceler la part prise par l’Europe, d’autant que cette dernière reste constituée, en matière de politique étrangère, d’États souverains qui ont souvent bien du mal à adopter des positions communes – comme l’a bien illustré l’action militaire menée par les États-Unis contre l’Irak en 2003, jugée illégale au regard du droit international par un certain nombre de pays européens, dont la France et l’Allemagne, et légitime par d’autres, qui n’étaient pas loin de réhabiliter alors la vieille notion médiévale de guerre juste pour justifier, au nom de la démocratie, la lutte contre le régime dictatorial de Saddam Hussein.
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The evolution of international law after 1945, and even more so after the end of the Cold War, consecrated the disappearance of the Westphalian interstate model, a process which had already begun at the beginning of the century. The increase in international actors, from NGOs to simple individuals, along with the expansion of the field to many new areas, has led to the development of specific legal orders (human rights, environmental law, labour law, etc.), which answer to specific logics, and present an increasingly fragmented international law. For the most part, these transformations took place within the framework of the UN or international organizations with a universal mission, and it is not easy to detect the role played by Europe, especially considering that with regard to foreign policy, it is still made up of sovereign states which often have difficulty adopting common positions. This was amply clear during the US military intervention against Iraq in 2003, which a certain number of European countries, including France and Germany, deemed illegal under international law, while others deemed it legitimate, and were not far from rehabilitating the old medieval notion of a just war, in order to justify the fight against the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein in the name of democracy. Nevertheless, the European Union built itself from the beginning through law, and bases a large part of its power on its ability to impose norms. It has defended human rights for a long time, and more recently its hobby horse of environmental rights, thereby marking its attachment to an international legal order based on values which are also its own. It is to be hoped that in this area more than any other nationalist reflexes and economic considerations do not lead it to renounce its commitments.
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