Beyond Confrontation: International Law for the Post-Cold War Era

the possibilities of using law as a control over government action, and to the role for scholars in contributing to policy debate. These differences are too well known to be belabored here. The advent of glasnost' opened the door to a greater degree of debate concerning past, present, and future governmental policies than had ever been the case before. We embarked on our study at a time when glasnost' was in full flower and Soviet literature carried critical discussion to an unprecedented degree.

Criticizing governmental policy is practically second nature for U.S. lawyers. Similar critical attitudes have already emerged in Russia, and there is every reason to expect them to continue. Influencing policy is another matter. International lawyers have not always done their best to make their influence felt, so that international law could become a more effective element in planning and decisionmaking rather than merely a source of argumentation and appraisal after the fact. The causes for this phenomenon are multifaceted and warrant full exploration in both the United States and the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. Surely the cultivation of respect for law in general cannot be overemphasized:

Beyond doubt a State in which democracy and legality predominate and respect for human rights is ensured can be expected to respect international law in the international arena more than a State in which arbitrariness predominates. Therefore, the existence of the greatest possible number of rule-of-law States which can set the tone of international life is an important prerequisite for the primacy of international law in politics.¹³

But much more must be done, even in states that have long accepted the principle of the supremacy of law over politics, to ensure that international law is consistently observed and enforced. Policymakers have too often perceived international law as outdated, naive, or irrelevant to their concerns. We offer this experiment in cooperative research in the spirit of attempting to enhance the influence of international law.

Lori Fisler Damrosch

Gennady M. Danilenko

New York, Moscow

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