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New Dimensions in International Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2013
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In the chilling atmosphere of the cold war, attention is more readily turned to the politics of power and to concepts of the national interest than to international law and the services it may perform. Indeed, two distinguished writers have recently warned us against what George Kennan calls “the legalisticmoralistic approach to international problems,” or “the belief that it should be possible to suppress the chaotic and dangerous aspirations of governments in the international field by the acceptance of some system of legal rules and restraints,” “some formal criteria of a juridical nature by which the permissible behavior of states could be defined,” instead of by dealing with “awkward conflicts of national interest … on their merits with a view to finding the solutions least unsettling to the stability of international life.” Instead of “making ourselves slaves of the concepts of international law and morality,” Kennan writes, we should “confine these concepts to the unobtrusive, almost feminine, function of the gentle civilizer of national self-interest in which they find their true value.”
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References
1 Kennan, George F., American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago, 1951), pp. 95–96Google Scholar. (Italics added.)
2 Ibid., p. 54.
3 Ibid., p. 100.
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5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., pp. 33 ff., 101 ff. Morgenthau has himself admitted that “mankind has at all times refused to forego ethical evaluation of political action” and that “political practice, in turn, takes ethical evaluation of political action for granted. The actors on the political scene, however they may be guided by considerations of expediency, must pay their tribute to these standards by justifying their actions in ethical terms” (Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, Chicago, 1946, pp. 176–177Google Scholar).
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In Europe, nineteen (excluding Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, and San Marino): Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Montenegro, The Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, Portugal, Roumania, Russia, Serbia, Spain, and Switzerland.
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15 The following states, existing in 1952, had emerged during the preceding fifty years: In the Western Hemisphere, two: Canada, Panama.
In Europe, ten: Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Poland, and Yugoslavia. (Austria-Hungary, Serbia, and Montenegro, exising in 1902, had disappeared; and Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania rose and fell as independent states between 1919 and 1940.)
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78 Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, p. 116.
79 Introduction to the Annual Report of the Secretary-General, 1950–1951, p. 5.
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