No Peace Without Law
We are living through the collapse of an order many assumed was permanent. For nearly eighty years, the international system rested on a simple premise: power should be bound by law, not the reverse.
That premise was obviously not always respected in the last few decades, but right now it is under sustained assault. Donald Trump treats alliances as transactions and multilateral institutions as inconveniences. Vladimir Putin has gone further, launching a war of conquest
in open defiance of the UN Charter's most basic rule: the ban on aggression against another state's territory.
These are symptoms of a broader trend, in which authoritarian forces, from the Kremlin to Europe's own far right, increasingly treat international institutions as obstacles to be dismantled rather than safety nets to be respected. Peace is a political achievement that must be defended, renewed, and rebuilt. The question is no longer whether the liberal order is under threat, but whether Europe is actually prepared and committed to save it.
The Institutions We Cannot Afford to Lose
The first task is to defend what already exists. International law itself has not failed: the UN Charter still prohibits aggression, the International Criminal Court has indicted Putin for war crimes, and the European Court of Human Rights still binds forty-six states to common
standards of dignity and due process.
What is becoming increasingly ineffective is enforcement. Courts can condemn, but they cannot force states to comply with their decisions. That power was meant to sit with the UN Security Council, but its veto mechanism grants exactly those states most likely to break the law the power to block any attempts at enforcement.
Authoritarian regimes and anti-EU forces within Europe itself, exploit this gap between legal obligations and enforcement to discredit the entire edifice of international law. But the absence of a hammer does not prove that the rules are fictions.
Liberals must fight back against this narrative, defending the UN, the ICC, and the ECHR is an act of insistence that law, however imperfectly enforced, remains the only legitimate basis for order. Europe must fund these institutions, comply with their rulings even when inconvenient, and resist the domestic forces seeking to delegitimise them.
Building What We Lack
Defending institutions that exist is not enough on its own. Europe must now build the capacities that are missing from the post-war framework.
This means being prepared to deploy European troops, under a clear and lawful mandate, to secure any eventual peace agreement in Ukraine, rather than leaving security guarantees as promises with no mechanism behind them.
It means giving the EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs genuine power to act, rather than a title constrained by the unanimity rule that
has already let a single state block EU funding for Ukraine for two years. It means extending the EU's civilian and military missions abroad and building a European defence industry capable of acting independently.
Strategic autonomy, in this sense, is a liberal project, not a nationalist one. But reform cannot stop at the level of states and bureaucracies; it must reach citizens too. A Europe that asks its people to accept deeper integration must offer them a more direct stake in how decisions are made, for instance through citizens' assemblies of randomly selected Europeans empowered to advise the Parliament and Commission directly.
None of this is utopian. It is simply what a Europe serious about its own security must be willing to do
The People Must Demand It
These reforms will not arrive on their own. Treaties are not rewritten by technocratic consensus; they require political will and therefore public demand. It is time for a new European treaty, one that extends qualified majority voting to foreign and defence policy, gives institutional form to citizen participation, and closes the gap between what Europe says it wants to be and the powers it grants itself. But no treaty of this ambition will emerge from Brussels bueaucrats left to their own devices; it must be demanded from below.
This is the task now facing a generation of young Europeans who inherited a peace they did not have to fight for, and which is now very much at risk: to insist, loudly and persistently, on greater democracy, further transparency, and wider representation within the Union.
Peace through institutions will not happen automatically. It must be built, treaty by treaty, demand by demand. No one else will build it for us.
Author: Rares-Lucian MOCEANU
“This article was produced by a participant from the European Liberal Youth LYMEC with the financial support of the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe. The opinions expressed in this article are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the Council of Europe.”
Peace through Institutions - A Liberal Path for Global Stability