International Law Making in Times of Competing Ideologies or Clashing Civilizations: Peaceful Coexistence and Soviet-Western Legal Dialogue in the Cold War Era

Abstract

Summary“Peaceful Coexistence,” a basic premise for minimum world public order during the Cold War, has re-emerged as a possible paradigm-model for world order in the present era of clashing or colliding civilizations. When the idea of codifying the general principles of peaceful coexistence was first advanced in the still-continuing Cold War, it was rejected by specialist legal bodies like the United Nations' International Law Commission and also the Institut de droit international as too “political” and thus incapable of being reduced to a scientific-legal foundation. The resulting intellectual-legal gap was promptly filled, however, by the non-governmental International Law Association (ILA), which established its own expert committee. Long-range fruits of this ILA initiative — apart from the all-important opening of a direct East-West legal dialogue — were the celebrated UN General Assembly Resolution 2625 of October 1970 and the acceptance of the pragmatic, empirical, problem-solving, step-by-step approach to resolving East-West conflicts in concrete cases — the ultimate road to détente on a deliberately nonideological case-by-case basis. The Canadian Branch of the ILA, with the support of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs' Legal Division, was a leader in the ILA's decision to take up that project and participated fully until its successful completion.