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Delbrück, Jost (ed.), Allocation of Law Enforcement Authority in the International System. Proceedings of an International Symposium of the Kiel Institute of International Law. March 23-25, 1994. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995. Pp. 198.

The very topic of this Kiel Symposium presupposes a `from the top to the bottom' view of international law - a centralized international law distributing enforcement competences rather than a weak international order built by consensual arrangements and customs. In such a view of the international system, the United Nations embodies the `organized world community'. The contributions to this volume accordingly focus on the law of the UN Charter, its `allocation' of competences among the Security Council (Chapter VII), `regional arrangements' (Chapter VIII) and collective self-defence (Art. 51). Professor Paul Szasz advocates a strong Security Council, without the limiting effects of checks and balances being imposed by a body such as an International Court of Justice reviewing its decisions. Professor Fred Morrison sees regional organizations as `significant actors', but supports the Security Council remaining in charge of military interventions. In contrast, Professor Klaus Dicke believes in the larger capacities of regional organizations. In a thoughtful article, Professor Torsten Stein analyses the role of the state in such a system as being between an agent of the system as decentralized law enforcer and a self-interested defender of individual interests. Professor Delbrück argues - in a way which he himself refers to as reaching `the borderline between sober analysis and "imaginative' daydreaming"'- that `global threats to the survival of "Space Ship Earth"' were transforming international law into `World Internal Law (Weltinnenrecht)'. Not surprisingly, not all of the participants at the Symposium, escpecially those from the United States, shared his optimism. As Professor Mary Ellen O'Connell put it: `[T]he ability or the chance of having a truly progressive, community-oriented response to violations of the most important rule of international law, Article 2 (4) of the UN Charter, has not changed as much for states as might have been, at one time, hoped.'

Andreas L. Paulus

Harvard Law School

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