Introduction

It is often remarked that understanding the past is difficult enough without then attempting the near-impossible task of trying to predict the future. Nonetheless, a reasonably intelligent analyst back in the mid-1980s could be forgiven for making at least two predictions with some degree of confidence: one, that the USSR would remain in its essentials the same – that is, economically inefficient, politically repressive, globally challenging, but strategically incapable or unwilling to give up its increasingly costly possessions in Eastern and Central Europe; and two, that even if China could look forward to better times in a post-Mao age – difficult to imagine otherwise – it would take generations before it could ever become a serious actor on the world stage. Few back then could have imagined, and none as far as we know did, that the Soviet system of power would implode in little under ten years; or that backward, communist-led China would have become the second-largest economy in the world in just over 20 years. China was of course beginning to change by the late 1980s. Incomes were rising. Foreign investors were beginning to take note. Growth was on the up. The country was clearly on the move – so much so that The Economist talked in November 1992 of ‘one of the biggest improvements in human welfare anywhere at any time’, and six months later, Business Week of ‘breathtaking changes’. Still, all this was taking place in a country where hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese were poor, where China's overall weight in the international economy remained pathetically low, where an inefficient state sector remained dominant, and where all manner of obstacles still stood in the way of further economic reform.

For all these reasons, and no doubt a few more besides, most experts would more likely have put their money on Russia succeeding than China. With its vast energy wealth, educated work force, proximity to Europe, and emerging democratic polity, Russia's future looked decidedly more rosy than that of China with its limited resources, ageing population, sclerotic party leadership, and huge rural hinterland.

When Clinton left office he was replaced by a very different kind of politician in the shape of George W. Bush, a conservative of limited intellect but from a very powerful Republican dynasty whose rise to the White House – via a Supreme Court decision following a long dispute as to what really happened in Florida during the 2000 election – was bizarre by any standards. As a Brookings report was later moved to observe, ‘no work of fiction could have plausibly captured’ the many ‘twists and turns’ which finally led to Bush becoming president. Nor of course could anybody have anticipated what happened a few months later when on September 11 four planes acting as flying bombs not only killed close to three thousand people but completely changed the direction of US foreign policy. Though initially inclined to view the world in classically realist terms in which states were the primary actors, with the attack launched by a non-state actor espousing an ideology inspired by a particular reading of Islam, everything changed. It also allowed those around Bush (known in popular parlance as ‘neo-cons’) to articulate a decidedly expansive – even ‘imperial’ – strategy to deal with what they believed was the profound crisis facing the Middle East. America, they insisted had been a long liberal ‘holiday from history’, and if nothing else 9/11 was a stark reminder that the world was a very hostile place harbouring all sorts of very dangerous people and states. Certainly, sitting back and waiting was no longer an option. As the late Donald Rumsfeld put it, using an American footballing analogy, in a world of unknown unknowns ‘the best, and in some cases the only, defence is a good offence’. To see how this offensive translated into action, I focus in the two chapters which follow on the links between 9/11 and the Iraq War and explain how the Bush team exploited the crisis occasioned by the ‘Fall of the Towers’ in order to pursue a more ‘imperial’ foreign policy, and why this strategy was more likely to end in failure than success.

As we argued at the beginning of this volume, 30 years before Joe Biden became President of the United States, the international system stood on the cusp of something quite extraordinary and quite unexpected too: namely, a world in which America appeared to be facing neither serious opposition to its values nor to its power. As we indicated, there were several reasons why even the least sanguine American may have felt confident back then. The Soviet Union had just retreated from Eastern Europe. A year or two on, it collapsed. Then around the world, as socialism retreated in Europe, a number of leaders – even those who had once proclaimed the virtues of planning – began singing the praises of the market. Meantime, the term ‘globalization’, which was a concept that had hardly been used before 1990, began to gain traction among policy elites and would soon go on to define the new international economy of the post-Cold War era. One American writer even coined a term to describe this transition from one age marked by division and war to another where the liberal sun would forever shine: the ‘end of history’. We were not just witnessing the end of one bloody century, according to Fukuyama: a new door was opening through which we could glimpse a bright future in which liberal democracy would become the ideal to which every country would aspire. Even that least visionary of US presidents, George Bush Snr, sensed that something was in the air, and indeed was moved to announce in early 1991 the possibility of building a ‘new world order’ in which all the ‘nations of the world, East and West, North and South’ could ‘prosper and live in harmony’. The fact that Bush proclaimed his new order on the eve of a devastatingly successful military operation against Iraq led by Washington only confirmed what many now thought was self-evident: that there had never been anything quite so impressive as the United States in international affairs.

It is worth recalling all this if only to get some sense of how far the world has changed since those heady days when anything and everything seemed possible for the United States.

International organizations perform activities in areas in which states can no longer operate effectively in isolation, and in which there is a common interest in cooperation within a permanent international framework. This chapter will examine international organizations primarily from a legal perspective. The chapter aims to present a general overview of the law of international organizations. It discusses the legal status, privileges, and immunities of international organizations. The chapter further deals with membership issues, powers, and institutional structures. The chapter also looks at decisions of international organizations: the way in which they are taken and the different types of decisions. The chapter will briefly examine the finances of international organizations. There has been an exponential increase in activities of international organizations over the years. Not all of these activities have been successful, however, and there have been failures and wrongdoings. In recent years, a much-debated issue is the extent to which international organizations and/or their members may be held responsible for such failures and wrongdoings.

International economic law is a field of public international law that regulates crossborder transactions in goods, services, and capital, as well as monetary relations between states. This chapter focuses on the branches of international economic law that govern international trade, international investment, and international monetary law. It sets out the historical background, fundamental rules, and dispute settlement systems in the areas of international trade law and international investment law, and it concludes by introducing international monetary law. International trade and international investment law share some fundamental principles, such as non-discrimination, although most favored nation treatment and national treatment take somewhat different forms in the two bodies of law. This chapter covers the Bretton Woods institutions, namely the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as the World Trade Organization (WTO).

This chapter critically discusses the proceduralisation of due diligence obligations. The chapter defines proceduralisation as a process gradually eroding the ‘reasonable’ standard traditionally linked to due diligence and substituting it with specific legal parameters. Through proceduralisation, the content of due diligence obligations is ‘spelled out’ into a series of sub-duties, tecnical standards and direct obligations (including procedural ones) whose fulfilment is required for assessing compliance with the standard of due diligece of the ‘principal’ obligation. The first part of this chapter critically explores this phenomenon, arguing that proceduralisation through interpretative practice raises challenges and comes close to creating new legal rules. The second part illustrates proceduralisation through two case studies taken from international environmental protection and due diligence obligations in international human rights law. The chapter argues that the proceduralisation of due diligence obligations fundamentally tests their dogmatic structure by affecting their nature and content.

This chapter begins by elaborating on the concept of a dispute, before providing a historical perspective on the evolution of the requirement to settle disputes peacefully. The chapter then explores diplomatic as well as legal methods of dispute settlement. Diplomatic forms of dispute settlement (also known as political or non-legal forms of dispute settlement) include negotiation, mediation, inquiry, and conciliation. Legal forms of dispute settlement include arbitration and adjudication. Resort by states to dispute settlement procedures, and in particular legal methods of dispute settlement, has grown exponentially in the last decades. Since the 1990s, the International Court of Justice has had an increasingly active docket of cases, and, in addition, the Permanent Court of Arbitration has undergone a sort of renaissance. The focus of this chapter will be on the settlement of inter-state disputes, as opposed to disputes between states and non-state actors or between non-state actors.

This chapter asks to which international obligations the concept of due diligence applies and argues that clarifying the nature of these obligations is crucial for understanding the type of conduct expected of a state and for making considerations in terms of international responsibility. In order to situate due diligence within the theory of public international law obligations, the chapter begins by critically illustrating the distinction between obligations of conduct and obligations of result and retraces the history of this taxonomy in the ILC work on state responsibility. The chapter then explores the nature of due diligence obligations, arguing that these are obligations of conduct, linked to the concept of risk and characterised by a degree of flexibility. Through a deductive approach, the chapter maps out the array of primary rules that are typically construed as due diligence duties. it is argued that these rules typically include obligations aimed at avoiding a risk from arising (obligations to prevent; obligations to protect); obligations aimed at ensuring the realisation of particular goals; and other primary rules like duties to negotiate or cooperate.

This chapter shows how the architects of International Relations (IR) assumed non-academic roles and tried to influence international politics during the 1920s and early 1930s. By focusing on their lives and political interests, it argues that IR came of age not in isolated research laboratories but in the diplomatic milieu of European capitals. The chapter begins with Alfred Zimmern’s Geneva summer schools, a popular annual event for students and practitioners of international politics which became a fixture in the Geneva calendar. The second section surveys a range of public events that IR scholars organised to advance their ideas and to build a disciplinary community. The third section shows how James Shotwell tried to engineer international treaties, specifically the 1924 Geneva Protocol and the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact. The fourth section introduces the International Studies Conference (ISC) which provided a permanent platform for exchange between academics and practitioners at annual meetings from 1928 to 1939. The final section illustrates how the 1931 and 1932 ISC sessions on economic policy and free trade sparked public controversy.

This is a general presentation of the book. The central thesis of the book is that the law of neutrality remains relevant in contemporary international law because of in an armed conflict, third non-participating States do not remain unaffected. There is a presentation of the basic argument in each chapter.