The Hard Road to World Order, Foreign Affairs, April 1974.Richard N. Gardner - Council on Foreign Relations

Richard N. Gardner, Foreign policy specialist

The contents of Foreign Affairs are from the 1974 Council on Foreign Relations

"The hope for the foreseeable [future] lies, not in building up a few ambitious central institutions of universal membership and general jurisdiction as was envisaged at the end of the last war, but rather in the much more decentralized, disorderly and pragmatic process of inventing or adapting institutions of limited jurisdiction and selected membership to deal with specific problems on a case-by-case basis ... In short, the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great 'booming, buzzing confusion,' to use William James' famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault."

-- Richard N. Gardner, "The Hard Road to World Order", Foreign Affairs, April 1974