Building Anew 407
Western majority) reacted sourly to this development. But there was little
that it could do, beyond condemning the three states for their “willful re-
fusal” to cooperate and denouncing them for being “callously indiff erent to
the sentiments of the world community.”
On other occasions, proposals to involve the World Court in Cold War
questions failed to receive support. One of these was an attempt by the Cu-
ban government, supported by the socialist countries, to overturn that
country’s exclusion from the Or ga ni za tion of American States (OAS), which
occurred in 1962. Th e Cuban government contended that the exclusion
amounted to “enforcement action” against it— and that this was illegal, since
the taking of enforcement action is reserved, by the UN Charter, to the UN
Security Council. In March 1962, a Cuban proposal that the Security
Council seek an advisory opinion from the Court on the question was de-
feated in the council in a vote on more or less straight Cold War lines.
New Legal Doctrines for the Cold War Era
In certain respects, the Cold War elicited a degree of legal creativity on the
doctrinal front. From both sides of the Iron Curtain came proposed modifi -
cations of traditional international- law doctrines, most notably regarding
the use of force. Th e socialist side produced the Brezhnev Doctrine, enunci-
ated in 1968. From the United States, in the 1980s, came the Reagan Doc-
trine. Th ese two doctrines bore an interesting resemblance to one another
in that both of them proposed important limitations on state sovereignty,
along with justifi cations for armed intervention.
Th e Brezhnev Doctrine (named for Soviet General Secretary Leonid
Brezhnev) was enunciated in an article in Pravda in 1968, written by a law-
yer named Sergei Kovalev (who is not to be confused with a prominent later
dissident of that same name). Th is was in the immediate wake of the Soviet
Union’s armed intervention in Czech o slo vak i a to keep that country fi rmly
within the Soviet sphere of infl uence. Th e intellectual roots of the doctrine
were laid earlier, however, in a post- 1945 revival of Korovin’s ideas, dating
from the interwar period, of a distinctive socialist international law, exist-
ing (somehow) alongside the traditional international law of the capitalist
states. Th e idea had fallen into disfavor in the 1930s. But the atmosphere
was now much more auspicious, since there were several socialist countries