Students of international relations are concerned with the description, prediction, and control of the external behavior of states, particularly of their more violent types of behavior such as intervention, hostilities, and war. It is clear that mere description of a diplomatic or military event has little meaning by itself and that such an event can neither be predicted nor controlled unless account is taken of the circumstances which preceded it within each of the states involved. Among the internal circumstances which have been studied are the correspondence of statesmen, the declarations of legislatures, executives, foreign offices, and political parties, the prescriptions of constitutional law and procedure, the traditional policies manifested by the history of the state, and the understandings of treaty and international law accepted by the community of nations at the time and presumably by the states involved.
On the afternoon of October 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg sentenced twelve of the twenty-two Nazi defendants to death by hanging and seven to imprisonment for terms ranging from ten years to life. Three were acquitted. Three of the six accused organizations were found to be criminal. The reading of these sentences was preceded by the reading, through the whole of September 30, of the general opinion of the Tribunal on the four counts of the indictment and, on the morning of October 1, of the opinion on the charges against each defendant.1 The Control Council for Germany considered applications for clemency for most of those convicted but did not grant them and carried out the executions of those sentenced to death on October16 with the exception of Martin Bormann who had not been found and Hermann Goering who had succeeded in committing suicide a few hours earlier. Thus came to an end what President Truman described as “ the first international criminal assize in history.” “ I have no hesitancy in declaring,” continued the President, “ that the historic precedent set at Nuremberg abundantly justifies the expenditure of effort, prodigious though it was. This precedent becomes basic in the international law of the future. The principles established and the results achieved place International Law on the side of peace as against aggressive warfare.” 2
“Realism” and “idealism” are both terms which have been used in differing, sometimes opposite, senses in the history of philosophy. They must therefore be employed with great caution. Dr. John H. Herz, in his recent study of the application of these terms to politics, seeks to define the sense in which he uses them. He writes in his preface that the book was in the main finished when the last war was ended and that little which had happened since required modification of his conclusions. To the reviewer it seems that further thought on the concepts employed in a perspective more removed from the disturbing influences of the war period would have been desirable.
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