A treaty is a promise between countries, not between parties. Your party might hate it. Your rivals might love it. But if your country signed, everyone who sits in your legislature now plays by its terms. That's the whole point, and it's what makes a treaty interesting: it's a rare place in Lawmaker where winning an election doesn't automatically let you change a law.
What a treaty is
A treaty has a name, an optional preamble in which the founder says what it's for, and between one and twenty treaty articles. Right now there's one kind of treaty article, and it's a good one: the law lock.
A law lock picks one law and names the options the treaty allows for it. Say a treaty locks Minimum Wage Policy to Basic minimum wage or High living wage. Every member country now has a floor under its wages, and the options that are ruled out, No minimum wage and the maximum wage cap, are closed to all of them. A lock has to forbid at least one option (otherwise it locks nothing), a treaty can lock each law only once, and once a treaty is founded its treaty articles can never be changed. If the terms need to change, someone has to found a new treaty.
Treaties cost nothing. There's no Political Power to spend, no cooldown, and no approval to wait for. The price is the promise itself.
Not to be confused with international blocs. Blocs are alliances of parties that share ideological goals. Treaties are agreements between countries, and they bind those countries' laws. The two features are independent.
Who signs for your country
Founding, joining, leaving, inviting and answering an invitation are all decided by whoever holds the constitutional power Ratify Foreign Treaties. It's one of the powers in your country's constitution, and it works a little differently from the others: it's always held by a single office. That might be a cabinet position, an elected office such as a presidency, or the monarchy. It can never be held by a legislature or by the bureaucrats.
In practice, that means one party decides: the party that holds the office. Everyone else in the country can see everything, and can help write a treaty, but the buttons stay greyed out for them with a note saying who decides. If the office changes hands, so does the decision. A monarch who holds the power can sign freely: treaty decisions cause no constitutional crisis and add nothing to anyone's autocracy score.
That makes the treaty power something worth bargaining for when you form a government or rewrite the constitution. A party that holds it decides your country's foreign commitments, and a party that doesn't has to persuade the one that does.
Founding a treaty
Treaties start as drafts in the treaty builder, which you'll find on your country's Treaties page. Any player with a party in the country, or the crown, can write one. A draft is either:
- Private, visible only to you while you work on it, or
- Public, visible to everyone with a party in your country, so a treaty can be worked up in the open and handed to whoever holds the power.
As you add treaty articles, a live "Would your country qualify?" panel tells you whether your own laws already satisfy the terms. They need to: a country has to meet its own treaty before it can found it, and it can't have an open bill that would break it.
Only the holder of the Ratify Treaty power can turn a draft into a treaty, and only from their own drafts. If someone else has written a good public draft, the holder can take it up: it's copied into their private drafts, credited to whoever wrote it, and they can edit their copy freely before creating the treaty. The original stays as it was.
Open or closed
Every treaty is one or the other, chosen when it's founded and fixed for good.
| Kind | How a country joins |
|---|---|
| Open | Any country whose laws already satisfy every treaty article can join on its own, straight away. No approval step. |
| Closed | A country joins only by accepting an invitation from the treaty's founder. |
The founder is the member country that runs the treaty. It starts out as the country that created it, and it's the only one that can send invitations (on open treaties as well as closed ones) and the only one that can dissolve the treaty. An invitation can carry a short message. The country you invite doesn't need to qualify yet: it can see exactly which laws it would have to change first. When its treaty power holder gets the invitation, they can accept it, but only while the country's laws comply, or decline it, with a reason if they like, which the inviter gets to read. An invitation left unanswered expires after 90 game days, and the founder can withdraw it at any time.
Pending invitations show on the receiving country's page in a Treaties card, and the holder gets a to-do item on their dashboard. Every treaty has its own page too, with the members, the treaty articles, a checklist showing whether your country complies and, if it doesn't, what you'd have to change. The world list of treaties has filters for treaties your country belongs to, treaties that are open to join and invitations waiting for an answer.
What a lock feels like
This is where treaties show up in everyday play. Once your country is a member, open the proposal builder for a law your treaty has locked. The forbidden options are still there, but they're disabled and labelled with the treaty that's responsible, with a note linking straight to it.
A bill that contains a forbidden option can't be saved or put to the vote. A draft you wrote before your country joined can still exist, but it can't be opened for a vote until you edit the locked option out. Across the game, a law under a lock carries a Treaty-locked badge, on your country's Laws page and in the International Laws Explorer, listing the treaties responsible. If a country belongs to several treaties that lock the same law, only the options every one of them allows stay open.
Leaving
The holder of the treaty power can leave any treaty at any time, with no cost, no cooldown and no vote. Every law the treaty locked is free again straight away. The Leave button lists which laws will unlock before you press it, so you know what you're setting loose.
When the founder goes
If the founder leaves, the longest-standing remaining member becomes the new founder, with every founder right: inviting, withdrawing invitations and dissolving. Its holder is told. The original founder stays on the treaty page for the record, and if it comes back later, it's an ordinary member.
A treaty ends when its founder dissolves it, at which point every member leaves at once and every lock lifts everywhere, or when the last member leaves. A dissolved treaty isn't deleted. It stays on record, with its former members and how each left, and you can find it with Show dissolved on the treaty list. Its name becomes free for a new treaty, which gets a fresh page.
When a court breaks a treaty
A locked law can't be changed by an ordinary bill, so how can a country ever break its treaty? Through the Supreme Court. If the court orders a law changed to an option a treaty forbids, the country is removed from that treaty the moment the ruling lands. There's no grace period and no "in breach" status. The country's holder and the treaty's founder are both told, the holder gets an email, and the press covers it. The country can rejoin as soon as its laws comply again. And if the country was the founder, the role passes on like any other departure.
So the court gives opponents of a treaty a way out that no vote can block, and supporters of one a reason to watch the docket.
A treaty binds the legislature. It doesn't bind the judges.
A treaty in play
Here's how it might go. The president of Broadlands holds the treaty power, and she's fed up with her neighbours undercutting wages. She founds an open treaty, the Living Wage Treaty, with a single treaty article locking Minimum Wage Policy to Basic minimum wage or High living wage. Broadlands already qualifies, so it becomes the first member and the founder.
Avalon's government has the same instinct, and its laws already fit, so it joins on its own the same afternoon. The treaty now has two members. Then a Broadlands opposition party opens a bill to abolish the minimum wage, and finds that the option is greyed out. It can't take the bill to the vote.
So it goes to court instead, arguing that the existing wage law is unconstitutional. It wins. The court orders the law changed to No minimum wage, and Broadlands is out of the Living Wage Treaty that very moment. The president is told, the papers run the story, and Avalon, the longest-standing remaining member, becomes the founder. The president has one route back in: restore the wage law, and Broadlands can rejoin.
Before you sign
- Read the whole checklist. A treaty binds your law-making for as long as you're a member. Look at every locked law and ask whether your party, or your rivals, will want to move it. Leaving is free, but only the holder of the treaty power can do it.
- Write it in public. A public draft lets other players in your country improve your terms before the holder commits, and the holder can take it up without losing the original.
- Own the power, own the treaties. The treaty power is one of the constitution's eighteen powers. It's worth bargaining for.
The full rules are in the wiki under International Treaties. To see what's already been signed, open International → International Treaties in the world menu, and look at your own country's Treaties page to see whether you're able to sign anything yourself.