Writing in 1968 on the “relevance of international law,” Richard Falk described his efforts as part of the larger endeavor of “liberating the discipline of international law from a sense of its own futility.” In 1992 that task appears to have been accomplished. International legal rules, procedures and organizations are more visible and arguably more effective than at any time since 1945. If the United Nations cannot accomplish everything, it once again represents a significant repository of hopes for a better world. And even as its current failures are tabulated, from Yugoslavia to the early weeks and then months of the Somali famine, the almost-universal response is to find ways to strengthen it. The resurgence of rules and procedures in the service of an organized international order is the legacy of all wars, hot or cold.

In a regime of universal most-favored-nation treatment for the entry of goods, where a product originates makes very little difference, except for consumer preferences. Buyers may prefer perfumes made in France, watches from Switzerland, cheese from Holland, but cheese from France, perfumes from Switzerland, and watches from Holland will come into the United States, or Canada, or any other country that grants MFN treatment at the same rate of duty, and there is no incentive (for tariff purposes) for anyone to wrap a product made in Patria in the mantle of Xandia.

In this shrinking world, states are increasingly interdependent and interconnected, a development that has affected international law. Early international law dealt with bilateral relations between autonomous states. The principal subjects until well into this century were diplomatic relations, war, treaties and the law of the sea. One of the most significant developments in international law during the twentieth century has been the expanded role played by multilateral treaties addressed to the common concerns of states. Often they clarify and improve rules of international law through the process of rendering them in binding written agreements. These treaties also promote the coordination of uniform state behavior in a variety of areas. International organizations, themselves the creatures of multilateral treaties, have also assumed increasing prominence in the last half of this century. They contribute to the coordination and facilitation of contemporary international relations on the basis of legal principles.

On October 23, 1991, representatives of nineteen states participating in the Paris Conference on Cambodia signed a set of accords aimed at ending the twenty-year-old conflict in that country. The solemn ceremony at the Kleber Center in Paris marked the conclusion of over three years of intensive negotiations at a variety of levels, including interfactional, regional and international, to end one of the world’s most tragic regional disputes. It also signaled the beginning of an unprecedented role for the United Nations in the resolution of such conflicts.

It has now been two years since the end of the United Nations Security Council’s military enforcement action against Iraq, popularly known as “Operation Desert Storm.” The glow of military success suffused the American atmosphere, and its aftermath is clearly shaping international expectations about the United Nations, its legal authority, human rights, and more general issues of power, wealth and loyalties of peoples. Also shaping expectations is the end of the Cold War, which left the United States as the sole “superpower.” How well the international community and the American polity are adjusting to the absence of the Soviet Union as a major state and convenient enemy remains open to question. International law is thus challenged to regulate an international community suddenly transformed in many ways.

At this pivotal point in history, a fundamental and oft-raised issue is “international governance.” Means of effective governance are seen as necessary to more complex arrangements of world order. But achieving effective governance ultimately will mean the existence of institutions that legislate, that is, institutions that make decisions binding on the whole. As a general matter, states have been skeptical of, if not hostile toward and consequently unwilling to accept, such governance. The United Nations Security Council is a notable exception; in the sometimes broad, sometimes narrow, area of international peace and security, the Security Council has taken decisions in the name of, and binding upon, the entire international community.

Proportionality is a fundamental component of the law on the use of force and the law of armed conflict—the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello. In the former, it refers to a belligerent’s response to a grievance and, in the latter, to the balance to be struck between the achievement of a military goal and the cost in terms of lives. The legitimate resort to force under the United Nations system is regarded by most commentators as restricted to the use of force in self-defense under Article 51 and collective security action under chapter VII of the UN Charter. The resort to force in both these situations is limited by the customary law requirement that it be proportionate to the unlawful aggression that gave rise to the right. In the law of armed conflict, the notion of proportionality is based on the fundamental principle that belligerents do not enjoy an unlimited choice of means to inflict damage on the enemy. Since the entry into force of Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, proportionality has been both a conventional and a customary principle of the law of armed conflict.