344 Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1914– )Th e states of the world became a drastically more diverse lot than had
been the case in the age of the Hague Peace Conferences. Th e collapse of
four great multinational empires in 1917– 18 brought a swarm of new states
into existence— with an array of legal challenges to accompany them. Th ese
were hugely reinforced aft er World War II when decolonization brought an
even more dizzying enlargement in the number (and variety) of sovereign
states, ranging in size from India and Indonesia at one end of the scale to
Nauru and Dominica at the other. And all were sovereign and equal— or at
least vociferously insisted that they were. Growth did not stop there. A fur-
ther infl ux of new states accompanied the breakup of the Soviet Union in
the 1990s, at the conclusion of the Cold War.
In some important respects, these changes reinforced old ways of thinking
rather than challenging them. Socialist countries, along with newly in de pen-
dent ex- colonies, proved to be devoted to mainstream positivist ways
in international law. In addition, though, two of the three heterodoxical ap-
proaches from the nineteenth century— liberalism and solidarism— came
fully into their own in the modern era. In the case of liberalism, this was
most obvious in the advance of human rights to a prominent position in
international law, even if actual observance of this law was less than
wholehearted on the part of many governments. Solidarism was not so much
a unifi ed school of thought as a general seedbed from which a diverse bou-
quet of exotic blossoms emerged.
It cannot be said that these developments brought universal plea sure. Many
people regarded them with misgivings— some with better reasons than oth-
ers. German and Japa nese po liti cal and military leaders who were responsible
for the ghastly atrocities of the Second World War, for example, cannot have
been pleased to see important advances in the enforceability of interna-
tional law. Nor could the leaders of North Korea in 1950– 53 or Iraq in 1990–
- Nor were they alone. As international law grew in strength, it intruded
into more and more areas that had been the exclusive preserve of states—
and it correspondingly roused increasing misgivings and opposition. Inter-
national law has never had an easy time— and it certainly did not in the
century aft er 1914.