Speaking

V. Answer the questions, using the information from the text

1. What would it lead to if you don’t understand that the features of the world community are unique?

2. What is the first salient feature of international law?

3. What are the goals of the states?

4. What are the principal legal subjects within states?

5. What are the secondary subjects within states?

6. Why is the protection of a state so important for the international community?

7. What legal subjects do national systems encompass?

8. Why are states paramount?

9. What does it mean that states possess full legal capacity?

10. All states are equal, aren’t they?

11. Who are insurgents?

12. How do they assert themselves?

13. What does it mean that the existence of insurgents is provisional?

14. What is a distinct feature of modern international law?

15. What is the difference between states and relatively “new” subjects such as international organizations, individuals and national liberation movements?

Read the texts “ Insurgents” and “National liberation movements”.

Insurgents

Insurgency has occurred frequently since the inception of the international community. Civil strife raged in North America between 1774 and 1783: the fight between American settlers and the British colonial power (which today would be styled a ‘war of national liberation’, although the rebels were white, like the colonial power) lasted a long time and wrought havoc; it ended with the victory of the rebels. Between 1810 and 1824 other rebellions broke out on the same continent, against Spanish and Portuguese rule in Latin America. Once again, the insurgents got the upper hand. In the nineteenth century a number of internal armed conflicts also erupted in Europe, yet the most important civil war of all took place in the USA between 1861 and 1865, and was attended by such appalling devastation and cruelty that the contestants regarded it as no different from a war proper, and consequently applied to it the bulk of the rules governing armed conflict between States. In the twentieth century internal conflicts were particularly serious, protracted, and destructive. The Spanish Civil War 1936-9 stands out for its magnitude and far-reaching repercussions. After the Second World War, conflicts broke out in some Western and socialist countries: in Greece (1946-9), in Hungary (1956), in Czechoslovakia (1968), in Turkey (1983 to the present), in the former Yugoslavia (1991-5 and 1998-9) and in Chechnya (1991-6 and 1999-2001). However, most major insurrections in modern times have tended to take place in developing countries.

National liberation movements

The emergence of organized groups fighting on behalf of a whole 'people' against colonial powers is a characteristic feature of the aftermath of the Second World War. Liberation movements arose first in Africa, then in Asia; they then mushroomed in Latin America and - to a lesser extent - in Europe. Africa, however, has been the principal home of liberation movements. Along with the gradual expansion of the liberation phenomenon from Africa to other continents, the movements also broadened their objectives, invoking new goals, in addition to anti-colonialism, namely struggles against racist regimes and alien domination. Struggles of this type were_; prevalent from the 1960s until the 1980s. At present they seem to be on the wane. Consequently, this class of international subjects is dwindling.