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In this paper I am going to argue a familiar but still controversial thesis about the relation between international ethics and international law, which I would sum up in the following list of propositions:First, international law is a source as well as an object of ethical judgements. The idea of legality or the rule of law is an ethical one, and international law has ethical significance because it gives institutional expression to the rule of law in international relations.Secondly, international law—or, more precisely, the idea of the rule of law in international relations—reflects a rule-oriented rather than outcome-oriented ethic of international affairs. By insisting on the priority of rules over outcomes, this ethic rejects consequentialism in all its forms.

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.

Much of the contemporary literature on the utility of international sanctions approaches the apparent riddle of why sanctions are embraced so eagerly when they are supposedly such an "ineffective" tool of statecraft by focusing on the instrumental and rational purposes of sanctions. As a result, one purpose that does not always lend itself to a rational means-end calculus—the purpose of punishment—tends to be overlooked or, more commonly, dismissed outright. This article explores punishment as both a useful and an effective purpose of international sanctions. It argues not only that sanctions should be distinguished from other forms of hurtful statecraft but also that they are a form of "international punishment" for wrongdoing, despite the difficulties of applying the term "punishment" in the context of international relations. The article then examines the purposes of punishment and reveals that only some are understandable when a model of means-end rationality is used, suggesting that the element of the nonrational also plays an important role in international sanctions. The argument is then applied to the case of U.S. sanctions imposed after the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan to demonstrate the different purposes of punishment at work in this case. The article concludes that just as we cannot understand punishment as a purposive human activity solely by reference to a rational model of a means to a clearly delineated end, so too we cannot entirely understand sanctions as a form of international punishment by an attachment to a rational model of policy behavior. However, some forms of punishment are exceedingly effective, and this may explain why sanctions continue to be a popular instrument of statecraft.

In a reeent work entitled The Psychology of Nations we are told that "International Law must be made intelligible to very young minds, and now that we are to have an international seat of congresses and courts, the interest must be made in its existence to give reality to the idea of internationalism." This admonition by a psychologist is illustrative of a widespread attitude toward international law; that it is a matter readily understood, for which there need be no specialized training, everyone being competent to pass judgment upon any subject about which international law is supposed to be concerned.

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.