The view of international law as a profession committed to the spread of liberal ideas emerged in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century.1 One of those ideas was the rule of law. Attempts to realize a global rule of law and attempts to constitute an international community have long been linked. For many international lawyers, this gave international law a sense of forward movement and a clear telos, with the caveat that the reality of unequal power relations meant that international law could never be measured directly against a model borrowed from domestic law and politics.