The International Law Commission’s draft guidelines on atmosphere protection as a symbol of a “westphalian” cosmopolitan rhetoric

Abstract

The approval of the Draft Guidelines for the Protection of the Atmosphere by the CDI in 2021 represented a timid step regarding this object of protection. The lack of doctrinal studies on the debates and the resulting text necessitated a careful analysis of the original expectations, the interstate frictions between drafts, and a result marked by a lack of ambition and the restrictive limits imposed on the work of the CDI. Studying this process helps to analyze the new ways of creating global norms, which are often vague, and the emergence of concepts such as global public interest as a driving force for International Law in a moment of retreat from multilateralism. However, an excessively soft cosmopolitanism, which focuses more on rhetoric than on legality, could lead, as might be this case, to international instruments that are necessary but incapable of conditioning state behavior. In this way, this text demonstrates the limits of an excessively soft cosmopolitanism, compared to a more ambitious one capable of creating new global norms.