EDITED BY DETLEV VAGTS

Recueil des Cours de l'Académie de Droit International de La Haye, 1983 . 5 vols.
(Vols. 179, 180, 181, 182 and 183 of the collection.) The Hague,
Boston, London; Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff
Publishers. Vol. I, 1984 : pp. 412; vol. II, 1984 : pp. 411; vol. III, 1984 :
pp. 409; vol. IV, 1984 : pp. 469; vol. V, 1985 : pp. 382.

The general course in 1983 was given by Professor Michel Virally (Uni-
versity of Law, Economy and Social Sciences of Paris). It constitutes the
entire volume V (vol. 183 of the collection) and is titled Panorama du droit
international contemporain.

Virally defines international law as a legal order, comparable to municipal
legal orders, governing international society. He sees contemporary inter-
national law as differing from classical international law by replacing the
older emphasis on political manipulation and the rigidity of obligations,
particularly contained in treaties, with a bias toward change in directions
determined ideologically. Three major contributors to channeling the ideo-
logical trends into conceptions of law are the Soviet Revolution of 1917, the
decolonization of political groups seeking to justify their recent history and
ambitions in terms of collective "peoples' " rights (droits des peuples), as
distinguished from individual rights (droits des hommes), and the emergence
of international public opinion as a major influence on state behavior.

Nonetheless, Virally holds the state still to be the key conception of the
international legal and political orders. He defines the state by its effects
rather than by natural law characteristics. It is the unit, however composed,
that governs itself in the society of other such units; the fundamental con-
ception is structured authority based on control of territory ("un pouvoir
institutionnalisé . . . [qui] se présente donc fondamentalement comme un
pouvoir territorial, dépendant de la maîtrise du territoire") (p. 48). It is cre-
ated by the processes of history and politics in fact, but is brought into the
international legal order by recognition. Virally characterizes recognition as
unilateral by the recognizing state, juridical in that it has legal consequences
desired by that state and totally discretionary (pp. 52-53). His overall con-
ception thus seems to be mainstream modern positivism.

Troubles arise, however, in considering whether the "droit des peuples"
to independence and self-governance has in recent years created a legal
right to "recognition" as a state, at least when the facts that would justify
such acceptation exist; whether "recognition" is legally as discretionary as
first stated. Virally concludes his very clear and learned analysis of this point
by finding that the rights of "peoples" involve rights of states under the
existing international legal order, including the right to determine their

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