ABSTRACT
Almost coincidentally with the outbreak of the Second World War, the distinguished British historian and political scientist, Edward Hallett Carr, published his landmark analysis of the international system between the wars. In 1941, when the shadows of war looked darkest for the British people, Georg Schwarzenberger published the first edition of his celebrated Power Politics. The most effective official critique of interwar diplomatic dissembling and of the near fatal consequences of fascist aggression was to be found in the Atlantic Charter of August 1941. Political sovereignty in effect supervenes the principles of the United Nations Charter, undermines general international obligations, and minimises the requirements of good faith. Western democracies have largely condemned the practice of power politics as international illegality, and some even infer that it constitutes quasi-criminality. In practice international law is only able to offer an alternative set of behavioural standards applicable to sovereign States on a slightly higher plane than that of power politics.
