International law functions through collective action, not through inherent force. When states repeatedly test fundamental prohibitions against coercive territorial change and encounter minimal consequences, the law itself transforms—not formally, but practically. The precedent emerging from recent interventions in weaker states holds profound implications for all nations dependent on legal frameworks rather than raw power for security.
International norms survive through accumulated patterns of behavior, not through abstract principle. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter explicitly prohibits threat or use of force against territorial integrity or political independence, establishing what scholars identify as the foundational principle of the modern international system. Yet formal prohibition only constrains behavior if states collectively treat violations as serious transgressions demanding coordinated response.
When powerful states commit violations and face insignificant consequences, the meaning of the prohibition deteriorates. The rule remains textually identical while becoming practically negotiable. This erosion operates insidiously—not through explicit repudiation but through gradual normalization of breach. Each unpunished violation instructs potential future violators that the rule, while formally binding, permits extensive violation without expected penalty.
The process occurs through decreased acceptance and decreased compliance, where observers gradually reinterpret what constitutes violation and what constitutes acceptable state practice. Silence about violations becomes implicit acceptance. Absence of coordinated response implies absence of shared commitment to enforcement. The collective understanding shifts from “this is prohibited” toward “this is prohibited unless you are sufficiently powerful.”
The Substitution of Power for Law: When Security Depends on Cost Imposition
For smaller nations, the transition from rules-based to power-based international relations represents catastrophic strategic deterioration. Throughout the postwar period, international law constrained great power behavior by establishing shared commitments that smaller states could invoke as protection. A small nation could resist coercion not because it possessed equivalent military capacity but because the international community recognized aggression as violation of shared legal frameworks.
Power-based ordering eliminates this protection. In systems where might determines outcome, smaller nations face coercive pressure from which only military capacity or protective alliances provide defense. The transition particularly threatens nations without regional military superiority or powerful alliance partners. As legal restraint weakens, such nations become strategically vulnerable regardless of whether coercive action is contemplated—the mere credibility of potential threat becomes coercive.
The Canadian Case: Sovereignty at the Intersection of Great Power Competition
Canada occupies a strategically exposed position. The nation shares an extensive border with a significantly larger, more militarily capable state while maintaining control over Arctic territories increasingly valuable as climate change opens previously inaccessible resources. Historical friendliness and institutional integration has obscured underlying power asymmetries that become salient when legal frameworks cease constraining great power behavior.
The Arctic represents Canada’s greatest strategic vulnerability—approximately one-third of Arctic coastline falls within Canadian jurisdiction, along with resource-rich territories and critical shipping passages that increasing global competition will render strategically vital. Articulated interest in acquiring territories within Canadian Arctic sovereignty from external actors represents an explicit test of whether Canadian sovereignty constitutes binding legal right or merely tolerated possession subject to renegotiation.
Such tests operate as precedent-setting exercises. If external coercion can reconfigure territorial boundaries through assertion of “national security” justifications, the precedent weakens sovereignty protection for all nations. If territorial integrity can be negotiated through power rather than maintained through law, the foundational principle protecting smaller nations ceases functioning.
Language as Legal Preservation: How Speech Shapes Norm Persistence
The defense of legal norms operates through ordinary discourse. Law shapes expectations, and expectations shape state behavior—from this perspective, silence becomes tacit reinterpretation that permits quiet revision of rules. When political leaders, judges, journalists, and publics consistently articulate commitment to legal constraints, they strengthen norm internalization. When these constituencies remain silent about violations, they permit norm decay.
This dynamic explains why public opposition to violations carries strategic weight beyond immediate coercive effect. Articulated defense of legal principles establishes shared understanding about which behaviors remain intolerable. Conversely, treating violations as normal occurrences against which complaint lacks standing permits gradual normalization of coercion as legitimate state practice.
Canada’s response to sovereignty challenges requires sustained public and official articulation that territorial integrity constitutes non-negotiable legal right, not contingent privilege. This articulation must reject justifications framing coercion as legitimate “law enforcement” or “national security” action—the language that obscures violation through misleading framing.
Institutional Resilience as Prerequisite for Legal Defense
Defending sovereignty through law requires institutional capacity that generates confidence in legal defense. Nations dependent entirely on external protection or lacking domestic institutional coherence cannot credibly defend legal rights—capacity to enforce legal claims becomes prerequisite for law functioning as constraint. This requirement produces apparent paradox: defending law requires capacity that might otherwise appear unnecessary if law functioned perfectly.
Political cohesion, economic independence in critical sectors, cybersecurity capacity, and credible defense infrastructure do not constitute expressions of belligerence—they constitute necessary conditions for law functioning as binding constraint. A legal right that cannot be defended effectively invites reclassification as mere courtesy, extended only while convenient for more powerful actors.
For Canada, this implies investment in Arctic defense infrastructure, indigenous institutional strengthening, economic diversification reducing dependence on external markets, and political cohesion around core security questions. These investments do not substitute for law—rather, they provide the institutional foundation without which legal arguments lack credibility.
Consequence Imposition as Enforcement Mechanism
When formal legal enforcement mechanisms cannot function due to great power veto authority, alternative enforcement mechanisms become essential. Coordinated economic and diplomatic consequences can render violation “enormously costly” even absent military enforcement. The postwar system functioned not because violations never occurred but because breaking core rules carried “predictable high penalties.”
Defending sovereignty requires willingness to impose coordinated costs on violations. Condemnation alone proves insufficient—multilateral economic consequences, diplomatic isolation, institutional exclusion, and technology access restrictions must follow serious violations. The credibility of such consequences requires advance commitment to impose them regardless of whether violation occurs against one’s own territory or against other nations.
Conclusion: Law Survives Only Through Collective Insistence
Sovereignty will not persist because it is formally inscribed in international documents. It survives only because states collectively insist that power does not constitute permission and that violations entail consequences. When this collective insistence weakens or fragments, sovereignty transforms from binding legal right into conditional privilege extended only by sufficiently powerful actors.
For nations like Canada, the immediate question involves whether sovereignty can be defended through law or whether strategic vulnerability necessitates either accommodation to external power or dramatic institutional transformation enabling independent defense. The answer depends on whether the international community—particularly other vulnerable nations—commits to collective defense of legal principles or accepts that might determines right.
Original analysis inspired by Policy Options. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
