Concept Today
Today, the concept of "the national interest" is often associated with political Realists who wish to differentiate their policies from "idealistic" policies that seek either to inject morality into foreign policy or promote solutions that rely on multilateral institutions which might weaken the independence of the state.
As considerable disagreement exists in every country over what is or is not in "the national interest," the term is as often invoked to justify isolationist and pacifistic policies as to justify interventionist or warlike policies.
The majority of the jurists consider that the "national interest" is incompatible with the "rule of law". Regarding this, Antonino Troianiello has said that national interest and a state subject to the rule of law are not absolutely incompatible: “While the notion of state reason comes first as a theme of study in political science, it is a very vague concept in law and has never been an object of systematic study. This obvious lack of interest is due to a deliberate epistemological choice - a form of positivism applied to legal science; and as a result legal science affirms its autonomy regarding other social sciences while constituting with exactness its own object - law - in order to describe it. In doing so it implies deterministic causes which have an influence on its descriptive function. This method which puts aside state reason is not without any consequence: the fact that state reason is not taken into account by legal science is to be integrated within a global rejection of a description of law as presented in political science. A fundamental dynamic in modern constitutionalism, "the seizure of the political phenomenon by law" is all the more remarkable when it claims a scientific value, thus a neutrality aiming at preventing all objection. This convergence of legal science and constitutionalism has the tautological character of a rhetorical discourse in which law is simultaneously the subject and the object of the discourse on law. Having as a basis state reason, it allows a reflexion on the legitimacy of power and authority of modern Western societies; this in connexion with the representations which make it and which it makes “state reason and public law”. (Troianiello, p. 690)
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