History of International Law, since World War II

1 According to a widespread conclusion among diplomats and politicians in the 1940s, the inter-war political system had failed at least partly owing to its ‘legalism’, its apparently excessive faith in the power of legal rules, institutions, and processes to bring about peace and justice among nations. The structures of the League of Nations, it was widely held, had failed to integrate concerns of power and policy, epitomized above all in the absence of the Great Powers from its institutions at crucial moments, the break-down of its machinery of collective...