During his visit to Berlin, the first American President to give a speech on the eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate proclaimed Germany to be a special partner for his country. President Clinton demanded an extended role, i.e. more responsibilities in international politics, for the Federal Republic.

International law, traditional scholars of international politics tell us, is a useless fiction. Statesmen either do not follow legal stipulations or they do so only when it is in their interest to do it. International law plays no independent role in world politics since it can always be reduced to the more fundamental considerations of power politics. National interests simply do not bow to legal requirements.

Taken together, these four volumes comprise the Conflict Series, and represent the fruits of work completed by John Burton, with others, in the last years of his formal academic career in the United States, at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, and at the Center for Conflict Resolution at George Mason University in Virginia. Burton has now ‘retired’ (though he still writes vigorously) to his native Australia, and that event, together with the appearance of these works, prompts this synoptic evaluation of them in the context of Burton's life and previous work. What makes this particularly interesting in the case of John Burton is that his career has been less than singular; first a civil servant, then a diplomat, then an academic, he moved from Australia, then to the United Kingdom and thence to the United States, with various stops along the way. Though he has written a great deal—books, articles and conference papers—and was a key participant in the organization of the peace research movement in the 1960s, especially the International Peace Research Association and the Conflict Research Society in the United Kingdom (and is described on the back cover of CRP as ‘the founder of the field of conflict resolution’), he was never a professor during his extended residence i n the United Kingdom at, first, University College, London, and then at the University of Kent, achieving that status only later, at George Mason University.

Towards the end of the First World War, when allied leaders were considering the future structure of what was to become the League of Nations, Jan Christian Smuts of South Africa wrote:

The animosities and rivalries among the independent Balkan States in the past, which kept that pot boiling, and occasionally boiling over, will serve to remind us that there is the risk of a similar state of affairs on a much larger scale in the New Europe, covered as it will be with small independent States. In the past the Empires kept the peace among the rival nationalities; the League will have to keep the peace among the new States formed from these nationalities. This will impose a task of constant and vigilant supervision on it.

With characteristic insight, intelligence, and good humour, the eighteenth-century Scottish poet, Robert Burns, once remarked that ‘the best-laid schemes o'mice an men gang aft agley’. Written primarily as a commonsense observation on success and unintentional failure experienced during life's travails, Burns’ witticism does ironically account for much in the world of politics as it functions both within societies and between nation-states. For in international politics, established patterns of action and reaction are often poor guides to resolving complex disputes, whereas innovative, original, and flexible policies, assisted by a good measure of paradox and luck, can sometimes settle the most intractable of problems. Not surprisingly, therefore, political pundits like to stress: ‘Be careful of asking the wrong question, because you may just get the right answer.’

Raymond Cohen ends his ‘reappraisal’ of the democratic-peace proposition by calling it ‘a formula that looks to be the product of both conceptual imprecision and wishful thinking’. Fortunately for the proposition, however, Professor Cohen's glass house is too fragile for him to be safe in throwing stones. Although he raises important issues, the substance of his critique violates some elementary rules of evidence and logic required for any scholarly endeavour, whether historical or social scientific. Specifically, those rules are: (1) Define your terms clearly and consistently; (2) Know your data base—in this case, know your history; (3) Look for probabilities (not mere existence or non-existence) where probabilities are specified theoretically; (4) Observe the other principles of logic.

Living in the shadow of the United Nations and paralysed by the superpowers for much of the post-World War II period, few regional organizations have lived a celebrated life. Few issues proved as divisive and contentious at the drafting of the United Nations Charter as the UN's future relationship to regional organizations. If some at San Francisco believed that the future global organization might be assisted by several regional pillars, the ‘Wilsonian tendency to identify regionalism with war-breeding competitive alliances survived’, and most who were present at the creation were determined to ensure that the future global organization had seniority and superiority over any present or future regional organization. Although Chapter VIII of the UN Charter did stake out a potential role for regional organizations, including the possibility that they might prevent conflicts from being referred to the Security Council, the language adopted reflected the contentious and unresolved nature of the proceedings: ‘The Security Council shall encourage the development of pacific settlements of local disputes through such regional arrangements or by such regional agencies either on the initiative of the states concerned or by reference from the Security Council.’ The subsequent forty-five years suggests that the UN found only limited use for regional organizations.

The aim of this paper is to consider the way the main political groups of states, as well as important individual states, promote their interests in the Security Council and, where relevant, the General Assembly. It examines the composition, cohesion, interests and voting behaviour of these states and groups of states (and the way they have changed) between 1980 and 1994. It also discusses how they have used their political assets to increase their power overall within the whole system and how this has affected the development of both the Security Council and the General Assembly as well as their interrelationship.