ABSTRACT
States are not all alike. The international legitimacy of the day and the rules and institutions of our international society postulate that juridically they are all equal. We say that they are all members of international society and of bodies like the United Nations, which implies that they are much more like each other than they really are. Inis Claude calls the tendency to think of all states as if they were roughly the same kind of entity ‘the myth of peas in the pod’.1 The assertion that states are equal suggests that they are very much the same’, he says. In fact they differ in size, far more than any dwarf differs from any giant: in our present system the largest have some 10,000 times the population of the smallest. They also differ in internal structure: forms of government, levels of economic and social development. And they function differently in the system. To say that juridically states are equal does not alter the reality of these differences. The concept that states are sufficiently alike to be treated as members of the same set is more than a fallacy. It is a myth which influences our concept of international reality and distorts our judgement.
