F. H. Hinsley on international law

International Law and Order Georg Schwarzenberger (Stevens e5.75) The Scientific Study of Foreign Policy James N. Rosenau (The Free Press New York Collier-Macmillan London)

These books are unlikely to be read beyond narrow circles — they are collections of reprinted articles on highly specialised topics — but they have a common purpose which deserves much wider attention. Both authors wish to protect the study of international relations against insidious academic trends.

For Professor Schwarzenberger, a no nonsense' international lawyer, the threat comes from those of his colleagues who discern advances in international law, or at least confidently expect them, in defiance of the tests of rational verification. The only binding norms in international law are the Rules of international law; these rules are Rules only if they have been created by the recognised law-creating processes and determined by the established law-determining agencies. These are some of the tests. Those who ignore them he dismisses as utopian — and as the tools of the governments and the other vested interests which exploit their subjective and capricious speculations.

Professor Rosenau is no less severe on his colleagues, that numerous band of scholars who have sought to turn the study of international relations into a social science. He is so on similar grounds. After mountainous efforts in data-gathering, quantitative measurement, systems analysis, elaborate computation, simulation and the other devices of the trade, they have brought forth a very small mouse. It is not surprising that their work "commands little respect among • those in positions to apply its concepts and findings to the actual conduct of world affairs." If they have established any findings, indeed, they are findings that "can be acquired just as easily by reading a good newspaper." And the reasons for their failure? Only the main one need be mentioned. Mistaking systematic for scientific inquiry, they have not been sufficiently scientific.

It is refreshing that these criticisms are at last being voiced from within the ranks. But we cannot hail this development as heralding a long-awaited retreat from idealism and scholasticism in the study of international relations because the critics proffer cures which are worse than the diseases they have so clearly diagnosed. This is especially true of Professor Rosenau, who insists that the subject should be treated not as a social science but as if it were one of the natural sciences. He is not content to define the difference between scientific inquiry and systematic inquiry—it lies " in the manner in which the data are used, not in the amount or the kind of data gathered" — and to plead that on this definition of it the truly scientific cast of mind can be applied as profitably to international relations as to any other subject. For him the distinction means that research, if it is to be scientific, must be raised, or reduced, to the level of laboratory experiments.

No study will be worth while unless it " specifies the independent and the dependent variables..., sets forth explicit hypotheses in which the relationship of the variables is posited, and . . . then generates data designed to test the hypotheses." In every study he makes the analyst must be speculating about how the hypothesis or the pattern yielded by his data would have been different if different events and trends had unfolded. We have only to read his injunctions to recognise the fallacy on which they are based. It is in the nature of the natural sciences that their experiments can be so conceived and controlled. They seek to uncover patterns, relations, interactions that are there before they are discovered — that only await discovery — and that are immune from the influence of events and trends. In international relations, as in any other field of social study, no pattern is thus laid down in advance of the inquiry. Nor even with a pattern that has already unfolded, and that is part of history, are the data so static, the variables so amenable to control, as those of the unknown into which the natural scientist penetrates.

One illustration of this difference is by now notorious. It is the gap between the natural scientist's ability to make the prediction — wrongly so-called — that the laws he has uncovered will always operate, given the conditions in which they apply, and his inability to foresee the social consequences of having uncovered them. Other illustrations of it abound in Professor Rosenau's book. In the attempt to apply his proposals he either makes inquiries which, though they are amenable to the control he requires, are for that reason not worth making, or invents concepts which seek to make control possible but which for that reason are artificial.

Thus the result of an inquiry into "the relative potency of individual and role variables in the behaviour of US Senators " is to show that it is predictable that American policy-makers will put aside their individual distaste for the downfall of

democratic regimes if a democratic regime

is overthrown in a country on which the US relies against Communist advance. As for the concepts, one of many examples must again suffice. Because decisionmaking is too narrow a process on which to build testable hypotheses — every decision being inseparable from a host of others — and because the pursuit of a policy is too broad — every policy encompasses a host of goals — he proposes that the object of study should be something in between: "the undertaking." But his attempts to define "the undertaking" are not helpful.

But if it is easy to convict Professor Rosenau of the same scholastic mania for nomenclature and classification which he criticises in his merely systematic colleagues, it is not necessary to be as defeatist as Professor Schwarzenberger. If he is to be believed there should not only be no further toleration for utopianism among international lawyers; there is no

ground even for expecting any good to come from the sober assessment of

developments in international law. Up to 1914 the international system was an unorganised system resting on a quasi order of power-politics. Since 1918 it has been a confederate or consensual system resting on a quasi-order of power-politics in disguise. So long as power-politics in disguise remains its basis — so long as there is no movement in the power structure from a confederacy to a federal

form of central authority with overriding power — the power structure will

dominate the character of law, and the prospects of legal development, let alone of world peace through law, must be remote. The prospects of any such movement are equally remote. These are the fundamental assumptions which, no less than his legal tests of rational verification, influence his pronouncements upon contemporary legal disagreements, But unlike them, they are too rigid, If history is any guide — and it remains to be proved that any better guide exists

— a monumental change in the character

of the international system culminated in the eighteenth century, not in 1918; and since 1918 another change in its character, no less monumental, has been imposing itself. Today's utopian international lawyers are a reflection of the acceleration of this second development since 1945, not a sign of the direction in which it is taking us; it is taking us not towards world peace through law but towards international order through changes in the criteria and scale of power. And if Professor Schwarzenberger also fails to see this, despite his recognition that, historically, changes of order have preceded develop ments in law, it is because he fails to see that changes in the character of the international order must be changes from one kind of international order to another kind of international order. It is both utopian and defeatist to insist that there can be no movement forward until the international order is transformed into a federal state.

Professor F. H. Hinsley is Chairman of the Faculty Board of History at the University of Cambridge.