The Power-Legitimacy Syndrome in International Law (The Threat of Territorial Annexation as a Mechanism for the Reproduction of Legal Norms)

Abstract

Since its modern inception, international law has been structured around a persistent structural tension between its normative claim to restrain the use of force and to regulate international relations on the basis of sovereign equality, and the reality of power asymmetries that effectively govern international practice. International law does not eliminate the logic of power; rather, it reintegrates it within a legal framework that delineates spheres of prohibition and authorization, thereby allowing legal rules to be reinterpreted in light of prevailing power configurations. In this context, the practices of great powers acquire particular significance, insofar as they actively contribute to redefining the substantive content of legal norms and the limits of their binding force, not only through explicit violations, but also through the normalization of threatening discourse and its incorporation into what becomes legally tolerable. The statement by former U.S. President Donald Trump regarding the annexation of Greenland constitutes a revealing illustration of this shift: its significance lies not merely in the potential infringement of territorial integrity, but primarily in the instrumentalization of the threat of force as a means of implicitly renegotiating the legal norm itself. Tolerance of such practices leads to the erosion of compliance and the undermining of sovereign equality, resulting in a transformation of legitimacy from a normative, rule-based conception to a factual legitimacy grounded in the imposition of faits accomplis. Consequently, international law continues to operate not as an effective constraint on power, but as a discursive framework that enables its justification and the reproduction of dominance within a system that nonetheless claims legal authority.