ONUF World of Our Making

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in both its statist and cosmopolitan forms, has a distinct, if somewhat contingent, role to
play.
FRED HALLIDAY
World of Our Making. By NICHOLAS GREENWOOD ONUF. Columbia, South
Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1989. x + 341 pp. No price
stated.
International relations scholars are the primary audience of Nicholas Onuf's new study:
but it is one of the small but growing number of texts, sitting alongside the recent works of
David Kennedy, Martti Koskenniemi and Philip Allot, which no one concerned with the
theoretical development of international law can afford to ignore.
The task which Onuf sets himself is the reconstruction of the field of study or discipline of
international relations. As that description implies, he attempts this from a constructivist
standpoint, in which 'reality' is neither a datum passively apprehended by the individual nor
an order generated by some inner logic immanent in human consciousness. Seeking to over-
come the dualism of self and world, which he regards as one of many false dualities charac-
teristic of Western thought, Onuf argues that the individual actively participates in the
construction of his or her own social reality. This takes him into a subtle and complex dis-
cussion of the nature of rules.
Through the ordering of the social institution of language, rules both construct reality and
direct behaviour: they are both constitutive and regulative. Rules, in Onuf's scheme, are of
three kinds, whose types are derived from speech act theory:
, . . . all rules are either assertives of the form, I state that X counts as Y, or directives of
the form, I state that X person (should, must, may) do Y, or commissives of the form, I
state that I (can, will, should) do Y. While each is a distinctive category, all three play on
each other in the production of rules. People make assertions about each other's promises,
respond to assertives with directives, and so on.' (p. 90)
With this foundation Onuf proceeds to discuss the manner in which reasoning, in the sense
not simply of acquiring propositional knowledge but also of knowing how to use that know-
ledge, including knowledge of rules, is learned. In some of the most stimulating passages of
the book he charts the stages of the emergence of this skill in individuals, through a critique
of the work of Piaget, Kohlberg and others.
Onuf associates the three types of rule with three characteristic modes of reasoning,
according to what he calls the 'directional fit' of speech acts:
'In the case of assertives, one state of affairs is held to count for another. With directives,
the intent is to alter some circumscribed part of an initial, larger state of affairs. With com-
missives, the intent is to take a circumscribed state of affairs and have it alter a resulting,
larger state of affairs. Assertives relate wholes to wholes, whether spatially or temporally.
Directives relate wholes to parts, and commissive parts to wholes .... To proceed from a
whole to its parts is what one normally describes as deductive reasoning. To proceed from
parts to wholes is inductive. [C.S.] Pierces's abduction is a matter of leaping from one
whole to another without having to proceed down to the parts and up to the next whole'.
(pp. 98- 99)
Reflection on the relationship between modes of reasoning and the nature of rules, and on its
relevance to the processes by which, for instance, customary international law is constituted,
gives some sense of the richness and compass of Onuf's scheme.
From this point Onuf's argument advances rapidly into an account of the manner in which
concepts of order are constructed, and of the ways in which uses of rules are reinforced by
the roles of guilt, shame, sanctions and so on. Consideration of the critical process of the
internalization of rules leads him to a compelling defence of a proposition of immediate con-
cern to international lawyers: that the (often tacit) adoption of the State as the paradigm of
order in international society is wrong, and a distortion of the notion of what a State prop-
erly is. What is often taken for anarchy in the international arena is no more than the absence
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of one particular and a typical form of social ordering of which the sovereign State is the
clearest example. But there can be, and is, order without State structures. Onuf develops
this proposition into a critique of existing models of international relations, and presents his
own conception of the subject.
While the sections of the book defending the international order against charges of
anarchy are probably the most immediately accessible to international lawyers, in the longer
term Onuf's work on the nature of rules and reasoning may prove more influential. As a law-
yer operating at the edges of his known world, I cannot judge how original other social scien-
tists would find this work: but for me the richness of the insights which Onuf offers amply
repay the perseverance sometimes needed to follow the details of his argument.
Many of the casual references to the writings of other social scientists presuppose a know-
ledge of a body of literature unlikely to be familiar to international lawyers, who will prob-
ably share my feeling of exclusion from a clever and important conversation at various stages
in the work. Even those who can tell their Aron from their Foucault are likely to be defeated
by some of the more arcane allusions. But if international lawyers want to develop a coherent
account of international law as a normative system, they must be prepared to go at least half
way towards meeting other social scientists who share their concerns. This is a provocative,
stimulating text, and a most valuable contribution to the recent wave of writing on the theor-
etical underpinnings of international law. If its assimilation into the way international law-
yers traditionally think and teach requires some effort, that effort needs to be made for the
sake of the vitality of international law.
VAUGHAN LOWE
The Age of the Arctic. Hot Conflicts and Cold Realities. By GAIL OSHER-
ENKO and ORAN R. YOUNG. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989. xvi + 316 pp. [,37.50.
In recent years the Arctic has become an area of great military and strategic significance
and the scene of substantial economic activity as the region's rich natural resources (fish, oil
and gas, coal and minerals) are increasingly exploited. These uses of the Arctic cause friction
with its native peoples as well as posing threats to its delicate environment. It is these con-
flicts and their possible resolution which are the subject of this book. After a brief first part
setting the scene, Part II (entitled 'Players and Interests') examines successively the militari-
zation of the Arctic, its industrialization, the interests of native peoples and environmental
issues. The third part of the book ('Handling Arctic Conflicts') opens (in Chapter 6) with a
general review of the types of conflict in the Arctic and the various techniques available for
resolving them. The three remaining chapters focus on three particular conflict resolution
techniques. Chapter 7 examines private initiatives, looking in particular at two interesting,
but as yet not notably successful, Alternative Dispute Resolution techniques in the North
American Arctic, negotiation with the assistance of third parties and problem solving activi-
ties. Chapter 8 discusses public (i.e. government) initiatives, concentrating almost exclus-
ively on the position in the USA, while Chapter 9 examines international initiatives and the
prospects for the creation of international regimes in the Arctic.
The authors are concerned as much, if not more, with conflicts within States as with con-
flicts between States. Partly for this reason, and partly because the book is not writtenspeci-
fically for lawyers (although one of the authors is a lawyer) but rather for political scientists,
the book is of rather limited interest to international lawyers. Their main interest is likely to
be in some of the background material in Part I I and the discussion of international initiat-
ives in Chapter 9. Although the latter contains a good deal of interesting and sensible dis-
cussion about the prospects for international regimes in the Arctic-with the likeliest
candidates for such regimes being the interests of native peoples and environmental issues-
a weakness with this discussion (particularly with that concerning environmental issues) is
the failure to take into account (or even enumerate) the various specialized treaty regimes
that already apply to the Arctic (such as the 1973 Polar Bears Agreement and various bila-
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