Where One Sovereignty Ends and Order Begins
“Between equals, there is no judge.” The maxim, formulated by Hugo Grotius in the seventeenth century, cuts to the heart of a vexing problem: how do you resolve disputes when no higher authority exists to impose a solution? International law is humanity’s answer to this puzzle—a system assembled over centuries from treaties, customs, and institutions that function, more or less, because states and commercial actors have concluded that rules beat chaos.
Hedley Bull, the theorist of international relations, described the world as an “anarchical society”—a space without central authority, yet one in which norms are respected by most actors most of the time. For the entrepreneur operating across borders, this anarchy wears a concrete face: different legal systems, different courts, different methods of enforcing judgments. What is self-evident in Warsaw may be unrecognizable in Dubai.
Hans Morgenthau, the father of political realism, argued that in international relations what matters above all is interest and power. But power in commercial dealings is not tanks and aircraft carriers. It is the capacity to enforce your rights, to compel performance of a contract, to defend yourself against a dishonest partner on the other side of the planet.
Private international law and arbitration supply that power—to those who know how to wield it.
When Thomas Hobbes wrote of the state of nature as a “war of all against all,” he proposed the sovereign as remedy: a single authority to impose order. In international commerce, no such authority exists. What exists instead is arbitration—a system in which the parties themselves select their judges and the rules by which they will be judged.
Arbitration has become, in effect, a private justice system for the global economy. A dispute between a Polish exporter and an Arab importer, between a European investor and an African government, between an Asian manufacturer and an American distributor—each can be brought before an arbitral tribunal whose award will be recognized in more than a hundred and seventy countries.
The New York Convention of 1958—one of the most successful treaties ever drafted—has made arbitral awards often easier to enforce abroad than the judgments of national courts. It is a paradox that defines international commercial law: private justice, in practice, frequently outperforms the public kind.
There exists a foreign court judgment. It says your counterparty owes you money. Or that you owe him. That judgment, until it is recognized in your home jurisdiction, is a piece of paper. Recognition and enforcement is the moment when a foreign ruling becomes part of domestic legal reality—with all that implies.
Jeremy Bentham, who coined the term “international law,” believed in a rational system of norms transcending borders. But even Bentham understood that law without enforcement is a pious wish. This is why the procedures for recognizing foreign judgments matter so much—and why they are so intricate.
International conventions, European Union regulations, bilateral treaties—each pathway has its requirements, its deadlines, its traps. A judgment that seems obvious in one jurisdiction may encounter, in another, an objection on grounds of public policy. Knowing these pathways is the difference between law on paper and law in the world.
Geert Hofstede spent decades studying cultural differences in business. His dimensions—power distance, individualism, uncertainty avoidance—demonstrate that people from different cultures understand the same words differently. A contract that, to a common-law lawyer, represents a closed and binding whole may be, to a partner in Asia, merely the opening of a relationship subject to continuous renegotiation.
Edward T. Hall drew a distinction between high-context and low-context cultures. In low-context cultures—German, Scandinavian, American—communication is literal; everything is in the text. In high-context cultures—Japanese, Arab, Chinese—what goes unsaid sometimes weighs more than what is written down.
For the lawyer operating across borders, this is not anthropological trivia. It is a working tool. Understanding how a partner interprets obligation, how he approaches conflict, what he actually expects from arbitration—this often determines the outcome of a case more decisively than the letter of the contract.
Since 2006, Skarbiec Law Firm has supported clients in matters of international dimension—in arbitration proceedings, in procedures for recognizing foreign judgments, in cross-border analysis. Our experience spans European, Middle Eastern, and Asian jurisdictions, and an awareness that each demands a different approach.
We understand that an international dispute is not simply a domestic dispute writ large. It is a game played on a different board, by different rules, often for higher stakes. Our task is to ensure that clients play on that board with a command of its rules—and a chance to win.
“The law of nations is the law of nature applied to nations,” Emerich de Vattel wrote in the eighteenth century. Three centuries later, the thought endures: international law is an attempt to extend the principles of justice beyond the borders of states. Our task is to help clients make use of that justice in practice.
