No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2016
All law," as Professor Gregory Tunkin, the former Principal Legal Adviser to the Soviet Foreign Ministry, has remarked, "is a species of coexistence." I take it that Dr. Tunkin means by that that legal norms, if they are to be really meaningful as law-in-action in any community, must proceed on a basis of the reconciliation of the competing claims advanced by the main social interestgroups in that community. The international law of the era of the Soviet-Western détente, that hopefully has succeeded to the erstwhile Cold War conflicts, is based on just such a species of intersystems accommodations and compromises, highlighted of course by the Moscow Test Ban Treaty of August 1963 but represented also in a series of lesser agreements and adjustments of fundamental interests-conflicts. The essence of international law-making under these circumstances, if it is to yield a viable system of norms that actually will operate as law-in-action in the contemporary World Community, becomes one of looking for genuine mutuality and reciprocity of interest as between the main political-ideological groupings in the World Community.