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International Lawyers: Handmaidens, Chefs, or Birth Attendants? A Response to Philip Alston
4 Conclusions
Even if disappointed by the `new world order' as it has emerged to date, I believe we need to guard against Cold War nostalgia - of presenting the current situation as one of doom and gloom and idealizing the past. I am not sure that equity - lamented by Alston as a value largely lost from the international agenda - ever played a prime role in determining which issues the West placed on its operational international agenda.
From my perspective the qualitative and quantitative expansion of international law has been integral to the increasing interconnectedness which is the very stuff of political globalization - of which increased economic integration is one form. The state is better conceptualized not as a victim, but a catalyst,15 of the increasingly globalized world order.
Meanwhile, the self-professed myopic handmaidens still busy themselves tidying up the detail of various ideological mergers while the masters/mistresses, having downsized their palaces and outsourced most of the maintenance, have moved on to fresh business.
15 Lind
argues that the state remains the central actor in world politics but that
what we are now seeing are `catalytic' rather than `integral' states.
Lind, `The Catalytic State', The National Interest (Spring 1992),
3.
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