Reflection on the laws of war seldom fails to produce misgivings. On the one hand, it seems clear that practices as ugly as those of warfare must be regulated, if only to secure society against the emergence of unchecked brutality. Yet when the rules that have been devised toward this end are examined, doubt is cast upon even this cheerless justification by the extent of the violence and destruction with which they are compatible. The laws of war seem to condone the use of force in pursuit of indefensible policies, as well as to allow a degree of suffering by those affected by war that is often disproportionate to the apparent advantages to be had from fighting. Even the few restraints the laws do require are frequently ignored. The result is scepticism concerning every aspect of the laws of war: their effectiveness, their legal validity (and thus their very existence as rules of law) and their defensibility in terms of the requirements of morality from which they appear so often to deviate. Such scepticism is only strengthened by reflection on the vagaries of criminal enforcement and punishment, which at times are not only ineffective, but also introduce their own special injustices. It is a scepticism well expressed in the observation that if international law is at the vanishing point of law, then the laws of war are at the vanishing point of international law. The excesses of present-day warfare have given particular impetus to one aspect of this attitude toward the laws of war, that based upon doubts concerning their moral adequacy.

No Western legislature has devoted as much time to examining the political issues of economic relations with the U.S.S.R. than the United States Congress. The reason is in no wise to be found in the magnitude of those relations, but in their potential size and in their implications for confrontation or detente between the two super-powers of the globe. A remoter history has, however, played its part, for much United States technology and capital equipment and some entrepreneurship assisted Soviet economic development between the two world wars.

In November 1914 the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence produced a ‘Report on the Opening of the War’. In his notes towards this Report, Julian Corbett maintained that “our arrangements with the French Naval and Military Staff … fettered our freedom of action”, with the result that “our Army … became committed as an integral part of the allied line and we had to forego all the advantages of operating independently on a line of our own and at our own selected moment, in order to break into the German scheme after it had developed”.

The first principle adopted by the United Nations Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 (hereafter referred to as UNCHE) proclaimed that “Man has the fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of quality which permits a life of dignity and well-being and bears a solemn responsibility to protect and improve the environment for present and future generations”.

If international society sets as its objective the protection, preservation and even the enhancement of the existing global environment then the development of laws and standards ensuring the acceptance of the necessary obligations and their enforcement is the sine qua non of their achievement.

The problem of inflation has been a major preoccupation of Western governments in the 1970s. Has it affected their foreign policy? More particularly, has U.K. foreign policy been affected by the much faster than average rate of inflation prevalent in Britain?

When a number of economic and political problems co-exist, it is tempting to discern linkages between them and even, perhaps, to see these linkages as inevitable. Such diagnoses are sometimes correct; but as a rule they cannot be relied upon. This is true even when attention is confined to economic issues alone. The connection, for instance, between global inflation and the energy problem in the 1970s is complex and subtle, but not close.

The tendency of all debates is to exaggerate and to overkill, to claim and condemn too much. Then when the smoke has lifted and guns have been silenced, those who remain discover that the world is more complex and answers less certain than the debaters had led them to believe. It is as though worthy causes could not advance unless carried on the backs of overstatements. Think back in your lifetime to the progress which has been made toward desired ends: minority rights, women's liberation, the rights of the working man. Whenever movement has occurred, it has come in response to politics, propaganda and pressures. It has come because someone with a credible, sometimes noble cause planned and organized, but in their action almost always overdid at the price of generating reaction and counterattack. It may be stretching a point to compare thinking and political movements with wars and yet there is action and reaction, attack and counterattack in all three areas reminding us of Sir Herbert Butterfield's words:

Few reading this Journal would argue with the assertion that both the substance and the study of world politics are now characterized by a seemingly endless process of change. The proliferation of political issues, especially those labelled “post-industrial“, and the recognition of transnational phenomena, among other factors, have greatly increased the number of problems considered ‘legitimate‘ by the scholar and practitioner. Yet we have long been made aware of many of these problems by the remarkably prescient ‘functional’ writings of one man, David Mitrany. Whenever ‘functionalism’ is used in the context of world politics or regional integration the obligatory reference is to Mitrany's A Working Peace System and, until very recently, he continued to provide the intellectual force behind the approach. The books considered in this review offer description, application and criticism of functionalism from different perspectives and with different empirical references, but the central thread remains Mitrany's conceptualization of the approach.