Naturrecht – Völkerrecht – Weltrecht – Der Code des Hugo Grotius

The questions raised and answers provided by Hugo Grotius have remained unaffected by the passage of the centuries. On the contrary, there is hardly another piece of legal philosophy as topical and fresh as the big script on The Rights of War and Peace. This holds true, firstly and perhaps most obviously, in light to the increasing importance of international law. As the problems of humankind have clearly turned out to be of global nature, there is a need to translate them into a worldwide legal code. The article aims to show that Grotius has contributed cutting-edge analyses of a broad range of pivotal issues of international law such as the law of armed conflict, the legal implications of civil war and military interference, sovereignty and the right of resistance, refugee and migration law and others. Grotius addresses these issues in a compelling way of isolating and correlating international and natural law and referring them to the overarching idea of a translocal and transtemporal global legal code. He offers a surprisingly modern dynamic approach to sovereignty, conceiving limitation of sovereignty as an enabling condition for new forms of intergovernmental cooperation and he anticipates the emergence of a supra-national structure like the European Union. The internal features of sovereignty are given complex treatment, in trying to figure out the tension between governmental volition and the will of the people. Moreover, the author of The Rights of War and Peace is contemporary in pointing out that rule of law and freedom do not serve simply as majestic principles mirroring themselves, but have to be comprehended in their functional relevance for human well-being. And finally and maybe most interestingly from a foundational approach, he elaborates a theory of natural law and natural rights apart from a compact and unanalyzed concept of rational law, but resting upon social and communicative capabilities and the binding forces of linguistic interaction and performance.