ABSTRACT
For much of the last century, the ‘realists’ among the political scientists argued that international politics is determined by the struggle for power and peace. They acknowledged that international law could be instrumental to the exercise or the preservation of power. But they claimed it had no significant impact on the politics among nations in what they considered an essentially anarchical world. However, already in the late 1960s, critics observed that international relations were changing. Institutionalists argued that states were likely to pool or surrender parts of their sovereignty if they believed that transferring authority to more or less formalized regimes would reduce the costs for the management of increasingly complex cross-border interdependencies. The English School linked the emergence of normative structures and institutions to the historic development of the international society that conditioned interactions within the international states system. Constructivists showed that norms and rules shaped the behaviour and the identity of political actors.
