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The purpose of this essay is twofold. First, it proposes to undertake, in introductory form, one of the many tasks a historical sociology of international relations could perform: the comparative study of one of those relations which appear in almost any international system, i.e., international law. Secondly, this essay will try to present the rudimentary outlines of a theory of international law which might be called sociological or functional.International law is one of the aspects of international politics which reflect most sharply the essential differences between domestic and world affairs. Many traditional distinctions tend to disappear, owing to an "international civil war" which projects what are primarily domestic institutions (such as parliaments and pressure groups) into world politics, and injects world-wide ideological clashes into domestic affairs. International law, like its Siamese twin and enemy, war, remains a crystallization of all that keeps world politics sui generis. If theory is to be primarily concerned with the distinctive features of systems rather than wim the search for regularities, international law becomes a most useful approach to international politics.

Aus westeuropäischer Sicht

In the 21 years since the conclusion of the Second World War, a complicated, piecemeal framework of trading arrangements under various international organizations has been created. Now there is concern, internationally and domestically, as to whether this framework is a durable basis for expanded world trade.

Specialists in the field of international organization have noted with some alarm a decline of interest among students and foundations in the study of the United Nations system. There has been a shift toward the study of regionalism and the theory of integration. The former shift reflects one reality of postwar world politics—the division of a huge and heterogeneous international system into subsystems in which patterns of cooperation and ways of controlling conflicts are either more intense or less elusive than in the global system. The interest in integration reflects both the persistence and the transformation of the kind of idealism that originally pervaded, guided, and at times distorted the study of international organization. We have come to understand that integration, in the sense of a process that devalues sovereignty, gradually brings about the demise of the nation-state, and leads to the emergence of new foci of loyalty and authority, is only one, and by no means the most important, of the many functions performed by global international organizations. This has led only in part to a more sober and searching assessment of these functions. It has resulted primarily in a displacement of interest toward those geographically more restricted institutions (like the European Communities) whose main task seems to be to promote integration.