The Justiciability of International Disputes

Extract

The appalling record of the past year and a half ought to make us, interested in international law, extremely modest. Professing that we expound international law as it is, we have been deluding ourselves and really setting forth international law as we believed that it ought to be. The universal bankruptcy of normal international relationships has shown to us how great a gap there is between that which we had conceived to be and that which really exists. Many of the foundations of international law we now see to have rested upon a conception of international society which did not really obtain. Perhaps, too, although professing contact with the actual, we have been living in an unreal world, a world wherein the ideal was given a much wider range and play than we were justified in believing. Any attempt to reconstruct the formal bases of international law—and such reconstruction must be made—must take account not only of the experiences of the present war, but of the long series of half-submerged elements which led to the present disaster almost with the inexorability of the forces of natural law. Shocked and benumbed as we are by the constant revelations of horror in these past months, there is also the awful realization that, after all, what has taken place has been largely the result of factors seemingly without immediate human direction.