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April 21, 2005
The Anarchical Society by Hedley Bull
Quotes from Hedley Bull's classic work on international relations:
Hedly Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (1977).
Chapter 4, "Order versus Justice in World Politics"
Consider, again, international law. It is not merely that international law sanctifies the status quo without providing for a legislative process whereby the law can be altered by consent and thus causes the pressures for change to consolidate behind demands that the law should be violated in the name of justice. It is also that when the law is violated, and a new situation is brought about by the triumph not necessarily of justice but of force, international law accepts this new situation as legitimate, and concurs in the means whereby it has been brought about. As Mazrui writes, international law condemns aggression, but once aggression has been successful it ceases to be condemned. The conflict between interational law and international justice is endemic because the situations from which the law takes it point of departure are a series of faits accomplis brought about by force and the threat of force, legitimised by the principle that treaties concluded under duress are valid.
Moreover, contrary to much superficial thinking on this subject, it is not as if this tendency of international law to accomodate itself to power politics were some unfortunate but remediable defect that is fit to be removed by the good work of some high-minded professor of international law or by some ingenious report of the International Law commission. There is every reason to think that this feature of international law, which sets it at loggerheads with elementary justice, is vital to its working; and that if international law ceased to have this feature, it would so lose contact with international reality as to be unable to play any role at all....There is no general incompatibility as between order in the abstract, in the sense in which it has been defined, and justice in any of the meanings that have been reviewed. We may imagine, in other words, a society in which there is pattern of activity that sustains elementary or primary goals of social life, and also provides for advanced or secondary goals of justice or equality, for states, for individuals and in terms of the world common good. There is no a priori reason for holding that such a society is unattainable, or that there is any inconsistency in pursuing both world order and world justice. There is, however, incompatibility as between the rules and institutions that now sustain order within the society of states, and demands for world justice, which imply the destruction of this society, demands for human justice, which it can accomodate only in a selective and partial way, and demands for interstate and international justice, to which it is not basically hostile, but to which also it can provide only limited satisfaction.
Posted by mrl at April 21, 2005 08:37 PM
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