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Chapter 1

INTERNATIONAL LAW IN GENERAL

81 Nature, Basis, Purpose

International Law and National Policy

Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger delivered an address on international law, world order, and human progress to the annual convention of the American Bar Association at Montreal on August 11, 1975. He emphasized the decisive influence of international law and the legal profession in the making of American foreign policy. An excerpt from his address follows:

The aspiration to harness the conflict of nations by standards of order and justice runs deep in the American tradition. In pioneering techniques of arbitration, conciliation, and adjudication, in developing international institutions and international economic practices, and in creating a body of scholarship sketching visions of world order, American legal thinking has reflected both American idealism and American pragmatic genius.

The problems of the contemporary world structure summon these skills and go beyond them. The rigid international structure of the cold war has disintegrated. We have entered an era of diffused economic power, proliferating nuclear weaponry, and multiple ideologies and centers of initiative. The challenge of our predecessors was to fashion stability from chaos. The challenge of our generation is to go from the building of national and regional institutions and the management of crises to the building of a new international order which offers a hope of peace, progress, well-being, and justice for the generations to

come.

Justice Holmes said of the common law that it ". . . is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi-sovereign that can be identified." But international politics recognizes no sovereign or even quasi-sovereign power beyond the nation-state.

Thus in international affairs the age-old struggle between order and anarchy has a political as well as a legal dimension. When competing national political aims are pressed to the point of unrestrained competition, the precept of laws proves fragile. The unrestrained quest for predominance brooks no legal restraints. In a democratic society law flourishes best amidst

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