Conclusion

Abstract

With the close of the twentieth century, the most ambitious of international experiments, the effort to subordinate the use of force to the rule of law, also came to an end—the victim of a breakdown in the consensus among member states concerning the most basic of issues: the scope of state sovereignty. Never a true legalist order, the use-of-force regime of the UN Charter Finally succumbes to massive global disagreement pitting North against South and East against West over when armed intervention in states’ internal affairs was permissible.