Reason, Nonviolence, and Global Legal Change
The existing state of international disorder is often referred to as a state of global anarchy.  The time-honored human remedy for such a state of affairs is the establishment of the rule of law.  Thus the remedy for the existing situation is often held to be the creation of more and better international law along with the creation of the institutions customarily associated with the presence of law, i.e., institutions for making, interpreting, and enforcing law.  But there are many who arc not enthused by the proposal* They include those national elites who speak piously of "law and order" at home, but are definitely less reverent when it becomes a question of forms of law that might be less supportive of their (self-defined) "interests" than the legal structures that they are so anxious to see upheld.  They include the anarchists who insist that the current perversions in human behavior are not due to too little law, but to too much law, pointing out, for example, that it is governments that have authorized the great majority of the more brutal and massively destructive acts witnessed in this century.  And they include many "ordinary people" who are neither opposed to law in general nor especially privileged by the given arrangements, but who are apprehensive of law formulated at such a great distance from its potential points of application.  Even to those not inclined to rail against government wherever it occurs, "world government" or anything similar may seem a rather frightening remedy for what ails hun™ w H',r>d
Those, therefore, who advocate major change in the global legal arena are likely to find themselves confronted not only with the kinds of justificatory
tasks that are almost always imposed on those who advocate any kind of major
1) change,  but with the rather particular task of showing why change in the global
arena should take a legal form.  Granted that humankind taken as a whole is not
doing too well, why should we expect that changes in or the injection of legal

institutions will make any significant difference in its (or, more precisely, our) prospects?
2)
Global legal change, of course, nay be seen not as a means to a better world, but as an outcome which will perforce occur if the political changes for which there seems to be such evident need take place.  Those agents of change who hold this view tend to see law not primarily as an instrument for change, but as a reflection of more "basic" processes which they as agents of change attempt to bend in more progressive directions.  This point of view is not unreasonable and is responsive to those criticisms which have attacked the seeming formalism of the "world peace through world law" approach, a formalism that has manifested itself principally in either or both of two ways, i.e., as a naive belief in the desirability of law qua law and/or as a failure to focus on the social and political processes vrhich generally must precede the coming into being of effectiwc law,  The sociological point is important and can be expressed in a slightly different way.  Where political processes have not provided a firm social foundation for new law, that law is likely to be ineffective, though in varying degrees depending upon the related social circumstances.  At the domestic level the history of the civil rights laws, for example, provides a good illustration of the difficulties of implementing laws where an adequate social basis is lacking.
The first point has a weak and a strong interpretation.  The weak interpretation is that law, of course, can be good or bad depending on its substance and the good will of those who enforce it and that it is not enough to pursue law for its own sake.  The strong interpretation is in a sense more fundamental, however, since it puts in question the very desirability of any law, whether "good" or "bad," whether conceived as product or as generator of new social relations *  It is especially relevant to the questions surrounding the creation of law in the global arena, for some would question whether such a thing as "international law" exists at all and it is in any case evident that the processes vrhich tend to lead to the creation
2.