Law and politics in the age of globalization

Abstract

The volume under review contains a collection of contributions dealing with the role of law in international politics. In the process of globalization, law is torn between resistance to and the embrace of political change. This volume explores this situation in challenging, sometimes provocative articles. Three themes stand out: the relationship between legal and political theory, the search for legal regulation of globalization and the role of the Security Council. In all of these areas, international lawyers should not be blind to the political environment of international law, but nevertheless insist on legal accountability as a precondition for the legitimacy of the exercise of political power. Confronted with revolutionary political change, there may be a tendency for law to either resist change, which all too often condemns it to irrelevance and pure moralism, or there may be a drive to embrace change, with the risk of collapsing into an apologism of brute power. The volume reviewed in this essay 1 constitutes one of the most complete and thorough explorations of the relationship between international law and international relations in the age of globalization. It is the outcome of a conference of the British branch of the International Law Association, held in Oxford in 1998, on 'The Role of Law in International Politics'. 2 The editor, Michael Byers, does not fail to note in his introduction that 24 March 1999, with its twofold significance of marking the beginning of the NATO air campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in an attempt to protect the human rights of the people of Kosovo and the judgment by the House of Lords in the Pinochet affair, has brought to the fore the double-edged nature of this relationship. While some have heralded these