| Description |
Here is the law, as Zeus established it for human beings; as for fish, and wild animals, and the flying birds, they feed on each other, since there is no idea of justice among them; but to men he gave justice, and she in the end is proved the best thing they have. The enduring quest of the peacemaker has been to substitute peaceful means of dispute resolution for violent self-help. The development of the common law - indeed the evolution of every major municipal system of law both secular and religious - has been in large part the history of this effort. During the past five centuries there has been a dramatic diminution of that area of activity in which violent self-help has been sanctioned by the common law. The same evolution occurred earlier within the civil law. While some forms of self-defense necessarily remain as an irreducible minimum of violent self-help which a system should sanction, the concept is increasingly delimited as a society matures. As a genuine community evolves, concern for the protection of its citizens leads to an increasing demand that the legally sanctioned application of violence be carefully controlled by the community. The international community has experienced this trend as those situations in which the law previously sanctioned a state's unilateral decision to use force have been gradually reduced. For example, older law which allowed a state to use force to collect its debts is now viewed as bad precedent. The use of force in international relations has not, however, necessarily decreased as a result of this trend, since there is an obvious and substantial gap between the demands of the law and the behavior of states. Whatever the comparative incidence of international violence today, however, the point is that legally sanctioned violence has been increasingly limited (the nature of modern weaponry alone has placed certain de facto restrictions upon the use of force by states). The horizontal and uncentralized nature of the international system has assured that this trend toward less legally sanctioned violence has been much less effective in international law than in municipal systems. There are few hierarchical, vertical, or centralizing factors in the international system to enforce its norms upon aberrant states. The international community is in fact barely deserving of the tide; its system of law is, when compared to mature municipal systems, weak and undeveloped. |
