The establishment of a Communist regime in several European countries as a result of the Soviet military occupation and political influence shortly before and after the end of World War II (Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Rumania and Yugoslavia) caused these countries, as a rule, to follow the Soviet pattern or imitate each other in the field of legislation.

On June 22, 1953, important amendments to the Netherlands Constitution concerning the administration of foreign affairs came into force. Among the most radical probably was the recognition by our Constitution of the primacy of international agreements and of decisions of international organizations over rules of municipal law. This spectacular innovation inspired the editors of the Chicago Daily Tribune, when announcing this event in their issue of December 12, 1952, to choose as a headline: “Less than a Nation.”

Namibia, a territory in southwest Africa adjacent in the west to South Africa and Botswana, derives its notoriety from the fact that its history is a major component of the history and oppression of South African apartheid. But for this fact, the current guerrilla warfare there would perhaps be dismissed as another obscure conflict in some distant land. Few persons on the outside would know about it in detail, and absent special circumstances overtly involving the superpowers or some spreading of the war, fewer still would care.

The phrase “ most-favored-nation ” first appeared in commercial treaties toward the close of the seventeenth century. The clause in which it was used had been invented earlier in the century to meet the exigencies of that great commercial expansion which had followed upon the restless activities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The growth of international trade in the eighteenth century called for the multiplication of commercial treaties, and with the treaties the necessity for using the new clause increased.

After the American revolution, a series of treaties were made in which the clause was given an expanded and modified form. Henceforth there appear both the unqualified and the qualified forms. During the nineteenth century, while international trade became world commerce, commercial treaties became so common that they now bind the trading nations in a fine-meshed web. In these treaties the clause of the most-favored-nation was inserted with so few exceptions as to warrant its characterization as the “ corner-stone of all modern commercial treaties.”

I. In the field of international law every subject generally acts in person, through its own organs, without resorting to cooperation with other subjects. However, international practice shows that members of the community of nations sometimes act on behalf of other members, with the legal effect that the transactions performed by the acting subject in the name and for the account of the other have for the latter the same legal consequences as if it had acted in person. This happens, for example, when a state, duly authorized, concludes through its own organs a treaty for another state: the latter is thus bound by the treaty exactly in the same way as if it had concluded the treaty itself, through its own organs. This legal phenomenon implies a split between the immediately acting international person and the person to whom the legal effects of these acts are imputed.

Although the development of international law has tended more and more to confine the operations of war to such as are directed against the armed forces of the belligerents and to relieve the peaceful population from their immediate effects, nevertheless a number of practices employed principally for the purpose of bringing economic pressure to bear upon the general mass of enemy non-combatants, still survive in full vigor and are well recognized as legitimate. One of the most important of this class of operations is blockade. The end of blockade is to cut off trade and intercourse with specified ports or with a specified coast line in possession of the enemy.

Gradually there has developed a system of treaty negotiation which eliminates all possibility of bad faith in contracting, unless the mala fides is both deliberate and long-lived. Modern treaty technique accounts for this, the stages of a treaty from negotiation to entry into force having been developed to serve th|s very end. When kings alone ruled in the brave days of old, only signatures, bolstered up on occasion by oaths, giving of hostages, etc., were employed to give faith to such documents.

The preamble of the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 between Great Britain (on behalf of Canada) and the United States declares its purpose to be:

Despite a widespread hope that in the United Nations mankind had created an organization which would eliminate warfare, events have unfortunately proved that international conflict, with all its attendant legal problems, is not yet a dead issue. Although the United Nations has not extirpated armed conflict, it has, by its very existence and by its actual and potential role as a participant in, and even as an originator of, military actions, altered, of necessity, the status both of Members and nonMembers in the course of such an action. This is a study of that status, together with a consideration of the necessary concomitant changes in the concept of neutrality in the modern world. The laws of neutrality will first be briefly considered; the effect of the League of Nations period will then be examined as background for a comparison with the current period; and the effect and influence of the United Nations will then be studied in greater detail.