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The New Sovereignty: Compliance with International Regulatory Agreements, by Abram Chayes and Antonia Handler Chayes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Pp. 285. $49.95 (hardcover) . I. INTRODUCTION
Just after the end of the second World War, and at the dawn of the modern age of technological innovation, the future prime minister of the United Kingdom, Sir Anthony Eden, told the House of Commons that "[e]very succeeding scientific discovery makes greater nonsense of old-time conceptions of sovereignty."1 Five decades later, despite the sustained assault mounted not only by science but by the dissolution, association, and recombination of what used to be thought of as indisputably sovereign states, and by the expanding importance of intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, international lawyers have been slow to discard those conceptions. Sovereignty is still seen as a defining criterion of international legal personality, rendering more difficult questions regarding the juridical status of such entities as the European Union, the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and insurgent forces exercising government authority in such places as Liberia, Bosnia, Burma, and Sri Lanka.2 Despite both its title and the need for a scholarly yet provocative book on the evolution of the concept of sovereignty at the end of the twentieth century, this is not the set of issues to which Abram and Antonia Chayes turn their attention in The New Sovereignty: Compliance with International Regulatory Agreements.3 Rather than a theory of sovereignty, new or otherwise, they present a theory of international behavior modification. More accurately, it is a theory of getting states to do what they should do, either because they accepted obligations voluntarily, as in the case of treaties and other agreements, or because obligations were imposed on them by other international legal processes, such as the maturation of custom into binding law.
The book's principal thesis is that noncompliance with norms is usually the result, not of deliberate contumacy, but of a lack of capacity, sluggishness brought on by domestic political paralysis, or, occasionally, ambiguity in the rule itself.4 Compliance, therefore, is most efficiently secured not by coercive measures, or even by threatened or actual withdrawal of membership rights in international organizations, but by interactive, cooperative efforts and transparency.5 Such efforts result not...