The Principle of Nonintervention, the United Nations, and the International System

In the last decade a number of scholars concerned with patterns of change in the international system have turned to international law for indications of systemic trends. They have assumed that key rules and principles of international law reflect broad characteristics of the system while controversies over and changes in their content and status reflect the rate, extent, and direction of change in the system. For example, Stanley Hoffmann in an early contribution illustrated the transition from the stable international system of the nineteenth century to the revolutionary system of today by reference to changes in the principle of sovereignty. Morton A. Kaplan and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach discussed the same transition—in their terms from a balance of power to a loose bipolar system—by reference to the principle of nonintervention. Somewhat later Wolfgang Friedmann treated the principles of sovereignty and nonintervention together in light of systemic trends over the last century, while Richard A. Falk associated the substantive law relating to civil war with the changing position of the principle of nonintervention. More systematically, an article by William D. Coplin ranged over several critical areas of international law in describing the evolution of the traditional international system to its present form. Finally, in recent but cursory essays, Andrew M. Scott and Oran R. Young have broadened the context in which the principle of nonintervention is related to systemic trends.