International Law And The Cold War

This is the first book to examine in detail the relationship between the Cold War and International Law.

This book follows the history of the international law of peace and armed conflict over the last 25 years. It highlights both the parameters that have remained the same over the years as well as the new challenges now facing international law. The articles analyze new developments concerning the prohibition of the use of force in international relations, self-determination of peoples, human rights and human security as well as international coordination of humanitarian assistance.

International law suffered a drastic loss of respect during the Cold War for being neither consistently observed nor enforced by the superpowers, especially when their vital interests were at stake. In this volume, authors from the United States and the former Soviet Union have worked in pairs on each of ten timely and important topics in international law, aiming toward genuinely collaborative scholarship to bridge and overcome Cold War divisions. The results make a significant and original contribution to a new generation of international legal scholarship.

In four short years the international landscape has been completely reorganized. The major political fault line of the Cold War has been for the most part erased, and the foundations have been laid for an entirely new era in international relations. Serious focused analysis is urgently needed to help facilitate the process of ending the Cold War'. This volume, the product of a Canada-Soviet bilateral conference of jurists and other scholars, specialized in International Law and International Organizatin, and International Conflicts-Resolution, held at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver in June 1990, attempts to provide such analysis. Written by a professionally and scientifically distinguished team of Canadian and Soviet experts, it deals with such issues as the winding up of the Nuclear and General Disarment process, the current main proposals on strengtening the United Nations and on reforming and modernizing its main arenas and institutions, new approaches to International Trade and Commerce on a multilateral basis, developing new norms of International Environmental Protection Law, and the Intrnational protection of Human Rights. It is characterized above all by a common emphasis, Soviet and Canadian, on pragmatism, and on a rigorously empirical, problem-oriented approach and offers not merely a description of international Law as it might now happen to exist. The result is a suprisingly far-ranging consensus, not merely on the major World Community problems that should be deemed ripe for present study, but also on their most desirable, practical and realizable solutions.

This book addresses the issue of the legality of the use of nuclear weapons under international law. It includes forwarding remarks by Robert S. McNamara, David W. Leebron, and Kosta Tsipis. Moxley analyzes the question in light of the July 1996 advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice, the law as articulated by the United States, and generally recognized facts as to the characteristics and effects of nuclear weapons. He concludes that the use of nuclear weapons is per se unlawful under the rules of international law and facts recognized by the United States. Nuclear Weapons and International Law in the Post Cold War World is an unprecedented exploration of the application of the necessity, proportionality and discrimination of principles of international law to nuclear weapons.

International law, sometimes called the law of nations, has evolved over the last 400 years. The three major sources of international law according to Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice are: international conventions or treaties; international customs; and the general principles of law as recognized by civilized nations. The Permanent Court of Arbitration was established by the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, and the Permanent Court of International Justice was set up in 1921 and succeeded in 1946 by the International Court of Justice. Since World War II international organizations such as the UN and its related bodies have contributed to the expansion and increased scope of international law to include political and strategic affairs, economic, social, communications, and environmental matters. By the 1990s international law had shown its durability and flexibility by expanding to cover new areas of world relations, and its efficacy through the machinery of the UN.

The book offers insights on whether international law can shape the politics of the Security Council and conversely, the extent to which the latter contribute to the development of international law. By providing a systematic analysis of the quantity and quality of international legal instruments referred to in the text of resolutions, the book reconstructs patterns of the Security Council’s behavioural regularities and assesses them against the provisions of the United Nations Charter, which establishes its mandate. The analysis is divided into three periods – the origins and Cold War period, post-Cold War period and the twenty-first century – and assesses the resolutions passed in each period by thematic category. The book argues that while international law plays an important role in shaping the politics of the Security Council, the Council’s resolutions do not contribute significantly to the development of international law.

Centering on the theme of 'progressiveness', this powerful volume offers important new perspectives on the history, theory and practice of international law. Covering topics of great contemporary relevance such as the use of force, human rights and sovereignty, this book is of essential interest to lawyers, historians and political scientists.