Great Powers in the Changing International Order

摘要

This is an interesting study of the past, the present and the future of international order, and the changing definition and role of the great powers. Half of the volume is devoted to the same subject as Stanley Hoffman's doctoral thesis, Organisations Internationales et Pouvoirs Politiques des Etats, which was published in 1954 and compares three attempts at a multilateral European, and then global, order: the nineteenth-century European concert instituted by the Congress of Vienna (1815), the interwar League of Nations and the UN. He explains the success of the first and the failure of the other two through three factors, the first of which is the presence of a consensus on legitimacy and on an exclusive role of the great powers in managing the Vienna system. In the other two cases, the contradictory principles of equality between states and of great-power management are combined, and the system lacks a common legitimacy - and in the case of the League of Nations, is not inclusive.