1er mai

In Noam Chomsky’s account, May Day—May 1—becomes a pointed contrast between the United States’ public celebration of law and its refusal to accept an international court’s judgment over Nicaragua. The date is presented not simply as a national observance but as a moment when competing meanings of law and solidarity are made visible.

Reagan’s Law Day

Chomsky recalls that Ronald Reagan designated May 1 as “Law Day” in 1984, celebrating what he called the “two-hundred-year alliance between law and liberty” and warning that without laws there would be “chaos and disorder.” The ceremony’s language of lawful order stood beside a foreign-policy decision that Chomsky describes as its contradiction.

The Nicaragua judgment

On the eve of that observance, Reagan announced that the United States would disregard the International Court of Justice’s forthcoming conclusions. The court would condemn the administration for “illegal use of force” and treaty violations in its attack on Nicaragua. Rather than comply with the court’s order to end what Chomsky calls international terrorist crimes, the United States immediately intensified its actions. The proximity of the announcement to Law Day gives the episode its force: the date’s official celebration of law coincided with an explicit rejection of an international legal ruling.

A competing meaning

Chomsky contrasts the U.S. “Law Day” with May 1 outside the United States, where the date marks solidarity with the struggles of American workers. The shift in meaning exposes the difference between a state’s ceremonial invocation of law and a transnational observance centered on solidarity. In the Nicaragua episode, May Day thus anchors a broader criticism of selective obedience to legal principles: the United States invoked law as a civic ideal while refusing its application to its own conduct.