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Jan Klabbers
Mark Mazower. No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations.Princeton University Press, 2010, Pp. 236. $24.95. ISBN: 9780691135212.
International lawyers have long held international organizations in high esteem. Paul Reinsch, arguably the first author to write comprehensively on the law of international organizations about a century ago and largely responsible for laying the foundations for the functionalist approach to international organizations, already welcomed them as working for the common global good. The sentiment culminated in Nagendra Singh's classic statement that organizations serve the �salvation of mankind�. States were considered bad; organizations, by contrast, were considered inherently good.
This picture has met with some revision over the last decade or two. Anecdotal evidence emerging during the 1980s suggested that organizations can be highly dysfunctional; the breakdown of the International Tin Council suggested that organizations can create financial difficulties, and NATO's bombing of Belgrade even suggested that organizations can end up killing people. The latest book by the renowned historian Mark Mazower further confirms this more realistic picture. International organizations are not the angelic creatures, somehow hovering above politics, they were once thought to be; instead, concentrating on the birth of the UN, he argues that they are themselves the results of political concerns, and not just the politics of striving for global peace and justice, but the rawer power politics of imperialism.
Many international lawyers have adhered to the thought that the US was the driving force behind the emergence of the UN, in much the same way as it had been the auctor intellectualis of the League of Nations. And in doing so, the �
