Progress

Obstacles to Progress

Lassa Oppenheim, in the book entitled The Future of International Law, about Obstacles to Progress, wrote in 1921: 77. Favourable as the auspices are for continuous progress, there are not wanting, on the other hand, influences and circumstances opposed to progress. In the first place, there is national chauvinism, to which the existence of a law of nations is hateful, and which represents unlimited national self-seeking. Where it obtains the upper hand, international conflicts are unavoidable, and cannot be composed by a judicial sentence. In the second place, there is the fact that the political equilibrium, on which the whole law of nations rests, presents itself as a system liable to gradual as well as to sudden alteration. Were the earth’s surface permanently divided between equally great and equally powerful states, the political equilibrium would be stable, but it is rooted in the nature of things that this equilibrium can only be unstable. The reason is that individual states are subject to a perpetual process of evolution, and thereby to perpetual change. This evolution is for one state upwards, for another downwards. No state is permanently assured against break-up, and it is the break-up of existing states and the rise of new states that threaten the permanent organization of the international community of states with danger. There is also another factor demanding attention, and that is the opposition between West and East, although the glorious example of Japan shows that the nations of the East are indeed capable of putting themselves on the plane of Western civilization, and of taking a place in the sun in the international community of states. However this may be, we must move onward, putting our trust in the power of goodness, which in the course of history leads mankind under its propitious guidance to ever higher degrees of perfection.