Law Commons^™

This book review summarizes and critiques A New World Order, offering both an internal critique of the argument's consistency as well as an outside critique of the argument from the standpoint of the value of democratic sovereignty. The review locates Slaughter's argument within the debate over international relations realism and idealism, and further locates it within a continuum of seven idealized positions in the debate between global governance and sovereignty, with pure sovereignty at one extreme and world government at the other, with the most relevant positions of democratic sovereignty and liberal internationalism located in the middle. The article concludes …

Millennia come and millennia go, and the fact of war remains unchanged. People still fight for territory, the land of their fathers, Lebensraum, control of the seas, gold, silver and diamonds, oil, water, pillage and the spoils of war, resources of all kinds, the glorification of leaders, gods of many faiths, politics, ideology, conquest, the establishment, peace and stability of empires, the right to be left alone, and sometimes, so we are told, justice, resistance to aggression, and the preservation of peace. Measured in millennial time, very little about war has changed, and, further, nothing distinguished the passage from 1999 …