Troublesome decisions about international interventions are a conspicuous feature of diplomacy. Diplomatic practices have their roots in domestic polities of democracies that rely heavily on the Common Law principle of legitimising change on the basis of incremental accumulation of precedent. There are striking similarities in the manner in which the Common Law has developed in the 800 years since the Magna Carta. Multilateral diplomatic methods build on the legacies of the Magna Carta and that of collective security bequeathed by the Congress of Vienna and Versailles. Common Law contributed to the demolition of monarchial divine right. This process has lessons that are relevant to the current discourse on whether international interventions dilute state sovereignty and transfer it to supranational structures.
