underneath a set of legal “rules of the international game.”19 Unlike Frost, however, Boyd-Judson concludes with the assertion that the GCS and the SOSS do not define what is licit or illicit, and that diplomats must rather presuppose that all norms can be justified morally through reference to different moral universes.20 Practically speaking, Boyd-Judson disagrees with Frost’s position that international ethical norms can be used to settle diplomatic disputes, because political conflicts themselves are usually the result of equally legitimate, yet conflicting norms.21 She cites the example of the Bosnian war, in which Serbians and Croatians claimed their legitimate right to self-determination in Bosnia, whereas Bosnians asserted that their human rights were being violated.22 Thus, in resolving diplomatic crises, the diplomat must move beyond the realm of categorisation between licit and illicit actions, and seek to negotiate over specific points of differentiation between distinct moral universes.23
VV
IV. COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS: LEGITIMACY, JUS COGENS
AND RITUALIZATION
VVFrost is accurate in his account of the existence of a global normative framework through which diplomatic actions can be judged to be moral or immoral. With the widespread recognition of the Charter of the United Nations, the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, and the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, it is simply not true that a state can reasonably expect to exist within its own moral universe—set apart from others—regardless of whether its policies can be theoretically justified as licit using tenets of moral psychology. According to former Ambassador Wilfried Bolewski: “The aim of diplomacy is twofold: to protect and guide the individual interests of states and to promote global norms and values characterizing the growing
8819. Frost, Global Ethics: Anarchy, Freedom, and International Relations, p. 27.
8820. Boyd-Judson, Strategic Moral Diplomacy: Understanding the Enemy’s Moral Universe, p. 27.
8821. Ibid., p. 26.
8822. ibid.
8823. Ibid., p. 27.
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