Treaties and Alliances of the World has been published regularly since 1968 and has been previously reviewed in these columns, the last edition being covered just five years ago (RR 2003/122). It is divided into chapters, some encompassing the world in general on a subject basis (The United Nations system; International Economic Organizations and Agreements; Commodities and Fisheries; The Environment; Arms Control and Disarmament; and NATO) and others covering organizations and agreements confined to one of the various regions of the world.
For every organization or treaty will be found contact details and web sites (if applicable), a list of signatories, and the history and objectives of the organization or treaty. The entries are in proportion to the importance of the organization covered; thus there are 56 pages on the United Nations (not counting its agencies) but half a page on the Andean Development Corporation. In the case of international organizations, most of the descriptive text is perforce similar to what would be found in several competing publications. Only in the most important cases is a treaty quoted in extensor; more usually, only a selection of the more significant clauses is quoted. This restriction is inevitable when one considers, for instance, the length of treaties governing the European Union. Thus, only a minority of the book actually comprises the texts of treaties; in some cases it is not easy to discover where a full text might be seen. This edition is updated to the beginning of 2007.
A particularly useful feature of the book is that it takes a liberal view of what it should cover. So it mentions treaties of great age which are still relevant (such as the Declaration of Paris of 1856, regulating aspects of naval warfare); it notes agreements which in practice did not come into force (such as the Doha Round of world trade talks), those which are supposed to have come into force by now, but which have not (such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas), and those which have been signed, but have not yet entered into force (such as the Convention on Confiscating the Proceeds of Crime); and it includes international arrangements which exist without a formal treaty (such as the G‐8) and situations which might one day become the subject of an agreement but have not yet done so (such as the negotiations over Iranian nuclear capacity).
There is no bibliography; the editors must have thought it unnecessary. The index, which is mainly devoted to the names of persons, countries, organizations, and treaties, was criticised by the reviewers of the previous edition for its lack of attention to subject coverage, and this still appears to be the case. Thus, for instance, under the heading Prisoners of War, one finds a reference to the Geneva Convention of 1949, but none to the efforts of the United States Government to assert that the prisoners captured in the “War on Terror” are not subject to it, although this issue is indexed under Guantanamo Bay. In a work of such all‐embracing scope, it is probably inevitable that there may be a few omissions, and so (parochial as this may be) I may observe that I was surprised not to find any reference to the St Andrews Agreement, so significant to peace in Northern Ireland.
Though careful readers of the book must be impressed by the extent of international cooperation revealed in its pages, they will also note the limitations of that co‐operation in practice. Perhaps the supreme example must have been the Briand‐Kellogg Pact of 1928, in which the world's leading powers solemnly renounced war, 11 years before fighting the greatest war in human history. Nearer to our times, it is salutary to be reminded that negotiations to resolve world environmental problems began as early as 1972 but that little has been accomplished. And the statement that in 2007, OPEC was concerned at the prospect of an oil glut, and had pledged to defend a price of $60 a barrel, reads like a satire today when the price is approaching $150. There are still too many world problems, which we may hope will be successfully addressed by treaties to be listed in later editions of this comprehensive work.
