Acceso usuarios
Ebrahim Afsah
There are many ways of looking at the international system, but two dichotomies stand out: there are those who believe international behaviour is primarily motivated by systemic forces and those who believe that the internal composition of the individual units dramatically affects how they act internationally, and especially that democratic polities are more peaceful and law-abiding than others. Like many essentially untestable hypotheses, the debate between these two positions has resisted a clear resolution. One of the reasons the debate has been so vicious and largely unproductive lies in its implicit reliance on the other, even less testable dichotomy in international affairs, viz. the disputed nature of man as primarily good or primarily evil,1 which is closely linked to the legal debate about the sources of obedience to law.2 International law as a discipline usually does not engage in speculation about the nature of the international system. It does, nevertheless, rest on the strong, if implicit, assumption that law has a system-defining existence and that states will obey it. To be sure, this belief is not necessarily utopian but can be empirically verified as fairly accurate,3 for, as Henkin famously observed, �almost all nations observe almost all principles of international law and almost all of their obligations almost all of the time�.4 But what when they don�t? More damaging still, what if the law-breaker is doing so persistently, with alacrity and great intellectual, if not criminal, creativity and energy, all the while maintaining a professed reverence for legality?5 Such persistent violation under the legalistic cover of �plausible deniability� will negatively affect the integrity of international law, and the present book is the somewhat disillusioning account of that negative impact.
For those not familiar with the events, the sorry story is quickly told:6 worried about �
