Asser Institute Lectures on International Law: The Political Conditions of International Law

Extract

The main thesis which I shall develop and defend this afternoon before, and perhaps sometimes against you, is that international law is a political phenomenon through and through. Not in the sense so cleverly dogmatized by Kelsen that only that which emanates from official, governmental power is law; nor in that made especially popular by Weber, according to whom law is defined by reference to at least some likelihood of political sanctions. After all, these represent but special cases of a much more general or broader notion of law resulting from, forming the embodiment of, or being determined by some particular configuration of what I shall call ‘power and interest’ among the members of some system. That is, it is such configurations of power and interests which determine both the law's emergence as a set of stated or implicit rules of conduct, and its eventual effectiveness in guiding or even controlling such conduct, as well as the social or political processes ensuing from it.