Within our own generation no less than 70 countries have attained political independence and joined the international community of nation states. Third World countries now command a preponderant majority in the United Nations and other world bodies, yet it is trite knowledge that the attainment of political independence and the proliferation of nation states in the Third World have had little impact on the world economic power structure. Access to the corridors of the United Nations and other international bodies has not necessarily assured effective participation in the shaping and restructuring of the world economic system. After the first flush of exhilaration over political independence, developing countries have now grasped the sobering fact that sovereignty is not synonymous with economic self-sufficiency or development and that the rich industrialized countries still substantially control the production and distribution of the world’s resources. An analysis of European direct investment in Africa shows that by the end of 1967 the former metropolitan powers still dominated investments in their former colonies. (The percentage of the total foreign investments in these African countries held by the former imperial powers is illustrated in table 1.)

In domestic legal systems procedures exist for taking account of the interests of others when unilateral decisions affecting them are made. These procedures take such forms as the granting of injunctive relief and the requirement for impact statements. International law lacks comparable mechanisms. If governments consider the effects of their proposed decisions on other countries, they generally do so as a result of relatively unstructured intergovernmental consultations. The utility of such consultations has been recognized by decisionmakers of high rank, and a few studies of consultative practices in specialized fields have recently appeared. The present study examines the practice of prior consultation in a setting in which one might expect it to thrive, if it ever does: that of a political-military alliance among states with widely shared values and with a common (though not necessarily uniform) apprehension about a possible external threat to those values.

The Vienna Convention on Succession of States in Respect of Treaties (the Convention), adopted on August 23, 1978, by the United Nations Conference on Succession of States in Respect of Treaties, contains five articles, numbered 41 to 45, forming part VI of the Convention, entitled “Settlement of Disputes.” As this title implies, those articles set forth methods and procedures to be applied for settling disputes relating to the interpretation and application of the Convention. They are complemented by an annex to the Convention, which specifies the modalities of a conciliation procedure that is the subject of Article 42.

Although it is not yet clear whether the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) will succeed in its task of adopting a “convention dealing with all matters relating to the law of the sea,” the drafters of the Informal Composite Negotiating Text (ICNT) produced at the conference’s sixth session decided to incorporate proposals on the final clauses of a future convention in the ICNT. Indeed, even if the conference were to reach consensus overnight on all outstanding substantive issues, problems relating to these final clauses could easily delay—or even jeopardize—the adoption of a new convention: they involve, after all, very complex political and legal questions. It is therefore only right that the conference agreed not to leave these problems to the very end of the negotiating process.

The technological advances of the space age have opened the door toward the increasing utilization of the so-called “geostationary orbit” by satellites for telecommunication, broadcasting, and meteorological and other services. More recently, the possible utilization of the geostationary orbit by satellites to transmit solar energy to the earth has been seriously considered. The growing importance of the geostationary orbit reflected in these actual and potential uses, coupled with recent claims of sovereignty advanced by equatorial countries with respect to segments of the orbit, calls for an analysis of its international legal status and for a review of some of the U.S. policy issues.

The material in this section is arranged according to the system employed in the annual Digest of United States Practice in International Law, published by the Department of State.