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The principal aim of this paper is to relate the normative structure of international law to the underlying patterns of political behavior that have characterized the modern state system. The political constraint upon the normative structure of the law is only one of many; there are also economic, social, and ethical constraints, among others. Nonetheless, it provides many insights into the changing substantive content of the law and also illustrates the way in which theory helps to provide an understanding of subject matter.A systematic study of the structure of the international society has been attempted elsewhere by one of the authors. Two different models of international systems delineated there have particular relevance to the present topic. These are the "balance of power" system, a model of the international politics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the "loose bipolar" system, a model of present-day international politics. The two models, though no doubt less complex than the actual patterns of action, suffice to demonstrate important differences in system structure and behavior that can be related to normative standards.

Recent decades have seen a vast increase of research in international relations, as in all fields of political and social science. We have more facts and many more expressions of opinion, and we are facing increasingly serious problems of reorientation. We know that much in the world of relations among nations has changed and is still changing, but what is the nature of this change? Is the world becoming more international? Is it turning into one world in which even the United States and the Soviet Union are influencing each other ever more, or at least into two worlds of two rival and ever more tightty integrated Communist and non-Communist blocs? Is the nation-state being superseded by the rise of new continent-wide or ocean-wide treaty organizations or federations?And what is happening within most of the old and new nation-states, as they enter upon these new arrangements? Are their governments becoming more stable or less? Are their political and administrative capabilities rising or declining? Are power and prestige within these states shifting toward the elites or toward the masses of their populations? Are political controls of economic life in the long run growing or receding? Are we moving toward a world of "garrison states" or toward a world of "open societies," or is the world moving in uncharted directions for which not even images have yet been found?Surely, these seem sweeping questions. Scholars and men of affairs might be tempted to put them aside, and to turn their attention to the immediate business at hand. They may prefer the study of some particular conflict between two countries, or of the interests of this or that state, or of the merits of this or that policy at some particular moment. All serious questions, it has been argued, are particular and perhaps unique, and any broader and more general answers might be neither warranted nor wanted.Such a retreat into the exclusive study of small-scale and short-range problems is based upon a fallacy. We cannot think about particular problems without making assumptions about the general context of the world in which they occur. Usually these assumptions are intuitive and vague. We form some indefinite conception of how states of a particular size and type of government and culture are expected to behave at particular times and places, and we feel surprised when some particular country departs strikingly from these half-formed expectations.