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.

Among India's foreign policy crises since independence the most intense were in the military-security issue-area. Some, like the concentration of Indian and Pakistani forces on the Kashmir and Punjab borders in July 1951, de-escalated without war. Others, like the disputed claims over the Rann of Kutch in the early months of 1965, led to limited military hostilities followed by stalemate. Still others culminated in war with India's principal neighbours - with Pakistan in 1947–9, 1965 and 1971, and with China in 1962. All of these conform to the definition of a crisis along the peace-war continuum:

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.

THERE are several reasons why we understand so much less about social processes and conditions at the global level than we do about comparable processes and conditions at lower levels of aggregation. One is, of course, that we are dealing with a larger empirical domain and one that is apparently more heterogeneous and complex. Another might be that the behaviour of nations – the key actors at this level of aggregation – has been shrouded more in mystery and taboo than the behaviour of other classes of social entity. By keeping diplomacy and military strategy in the category of the arcane, elites have inhibited serious inquiry, even if there were those unpatriotic enough to ask. A third and related factor may be the extent to which the national state has been the major source of material and psychic sustenance for the world's people over the past century or so and thus not an agency whose external behaviour will be questioned or examined closely. Others might be added to our list, but one that surely merits closer attention may be the way in which we conceptualize world affairs.

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”.

Over the past twenty years there has been a dramatic increase in the practice of banks located in one country accepting deposits denominated in the currency of another country. Initially, the banks involved were mainly located in western Europe and hence they were often referred to as “eurobanks” and the network which they comprised was called the Eurocurrency System. It is estimated today that the assets available to the System exceed †200 billion. Originally, the U.S. dollar was the main currency involved, but deposits denominated in deutsche Marks and other European currencies are also becoming important. In addition, the prefix “euro” is now somewhat misleading, since many of the banks engaging in this practice are located in the Bahamas, Singapore, Bahrain and other non-European countries. However, the bulk of activity does involve financial institutions in western Europe, so for convenience I shall continue to refer to the system as the Eurocurrency System.

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 demands of the less developed countries (LDCs) for a fundamental reform of the economic, commercial and financial relationships between themselves and the rich, developed economies have dominated international affairs for the past three years. In April–May 1974, the sixth Special Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations called for the establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) and similar appeals have been made on a large number of occasions since then. 1976 was marked by UNGTAD IV meeting in Nairobi, Kenya in May and the commencement of the deliberations of the Conference on International Economic Co-operation (the so-called North-South Conference) meeting in Paris, originally scheduled to end in December 1976, but reconvened for a final session at the end of May 1977

In the last three years or so the Nine have been more active in promoting consultation, co-ordination and occasionally common action in the realm of the external relations of the European Community than in fostering the integration process within the Community. However, a good deal of this activity has been procedural in nature rather than substantive and at times such modest progress as has been achieved has been extolled beyond its due, if only to conceal the lack of progress on the internal side. Moreover, it is as well to remember that each of the Nine member governments continues to rely mainly upon its nexus of bilateral relations for promoting its own particular interests with the outside world. Thus to focus on the external relations of the Community per se is to highlight only part - and not necessarily the most significant part - of the spectrum of the external relations of individual members. Nevertheless, the inauguration of a new European Commission on the 6 January 1977 provides a convenient moment to assess the state of the Community's external relations1 and, in particular, to try and separate the achievements of substance from those of a more shadowy or procedural nature.

Although our theorizing about the making of foreign policy is meant to be of general application, it is based predominantly upon Western, often only United States practices. The purpose of this paper is to look in some depth into a case study of foreign policy-making in Japan in order to ascertain to what extent the analytical categories evolved in the West apply and what peculiarities of the Japanese political system need to be considered. More specifically, I shall test the simple hypothesis that in all ‘democratic’ systems1 the substance of the domestic processes shows great similarities while their forms greatly differ.

When it became Britain's turn on 1 January 1977 to fill the presidency of the European Community for six months, it should have been the moment she had been waiting for, so long had been the struggle to join the Common Market in the first place. Much depended on how Britain filled the role. How much might be implicit at the end of this discussion of the state of the world economy as it approaches the 1980s. The world economy is in a serious malaise, but the malaise in the European Community has been of longer duration.

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:

When French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr in January 1923, ostensibly as a result of Germany falling behind schedule in the reparation deliveries of timber and telegraph poles, “something as far reaching in its effects as the declaration of war in 1914 or the conclusion of the armistice in 1918” had occurred. The often acrimonious Anglo-French debate over the interpretation of the Treaty of Versailles and the role of Germany in post-war Europe had reached a decisive stage. The British government, by not participating in the occupation, at last acted on its belief that an economic restoration of Germany was of paramount importance to the revival of the European and indeed world economies, while France grimly persisted in implementing the Treaty of Versailles by securing the Ruhr as a productive pledge. The ultimate French failure to enforce her will on Germany marked the end of French hegemony in Europe and the reemergence of Germany as a great power and a “central support” of the European economic system.

In recent years, the use of systems terminology has become widespread in international relations literature. This development has precipitated both confusion and controversy – confusion about what exactly is meant by a systems approach and controversy about whether the approach provides any new insights for the international relations specialist. The confusion and controversy spreads across the methodological divide which exists in the discipline; both traditionalists and behaviouralists are in disagreement about the nature of a systems approach and its potential utility.

The title of the article is intended to focus the attention of Western writers on international relations theory upon two aspects of this rapidly growing research area. Rather than meeting with an incomprehensible neglect it is our argument that the aspects referred to might well be accorded one of the key places. Failure to do so, it our contention, when transferred from considerations of theoretical efficiency into the no less precarious realm of practical policy, might well have proportionately hazardous implications. We would beg forbearance, however, if within the necessarily limited scope of this article only a very perfunctory and sketchy outline of the meaning and implications of the omissions can be given. The sole purpose of this article is to provoke interest in these particular areas rather than to supply the deficiencies – a task which clearly could only be undertaken in the expanded context of a major work.

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.