ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Maximilian Bertamini asks to which extent sovereignty-based arguments in Security Council negotiations can be qualified as authoritarian. Despite the fact that authoritarian-ruled countries, such as Syria, Russia, and China, in their contributions to Security Council debates attempt to take the high moral ground, they often ruthlessly follow their elites’ interests. International legal scholars played a central role in the founding of International Relations (IR) as a discipline as well as in establishing first the League of Nations and later the United Nations. The pluralist rationale corresponds to three different functions that the nonintervention norm has fulfilled. The rationale of the nonintervention norm, therefore, reflects the experience of diverse moments in the history of international politics since the sixteenth century. When early modern states began to arise in Europe out of the ashes of the religious wars, they needed international law to limit war, acknowledge each other, and arrange their affairs.
