Building Anew 425Two of the foremost solidarist writers from the interwar era were still pres-
ent and active aft er 1945: Scelle and Álvarez. Th e remarkable length of Álva-
rez’s career has been noted, but if the messenger was long- lived, the message
remained much the same. Álvarez was now able, however, to issue his pro-
nouncements from the loft y perch of the World Court bench— though only as
individual opinions and not as judgments of the Court itself. In a dissenting
opinion in 1950, he set out the basic credo of solidarism with admirable suc-
cinctness and clarity: the idea that the international community is not merely
an aggregation of wholly in de pen dent states, but rather a true society— with
“an existence and a personality distinct from those of its members.”
Th e result, insisted Álvarez in another dissenting opinion that same
year, was the emergence of “a new universal international conscience,”
which in turn was pointing the way to “a new international law.” Th is
new law was rooted in the dense interdependence of states that had arisen
in the nineteenth century. As a consequence, “the notion of absolute sover-
eignty has had its day.” Th e stress should now be on the duties of states
rather than on their rights. International legal doctrine must not be seen as
a closed, self- referential corpus of abstract norms, but instead as a refl ec-
tion of the concrete po liti cal and social realities of the world in which it
functions. Because of the dynamism of international life, he maintained,
“the po liti cal aspect of questions is tending to have pre ce dence over the ju-
ridical aspect.” In the law of treaties specifi cally (the subject area under
consideration in the case), that meant a treaty should be interpreted in the
light of the purposes that it was designed to serve, rather than in terms of its
literal text.
Th ere were also some new fi gures on the solidarist scene. One was Julius
Stone, originally British but based in Australia, who doubled as a scholar of
jurisprudence (in the manner of Wolfgang Friedmann in the United States).
Another was C. Wilfrid Jenks, a British lawyer who worked for many years
at the International Labor Organization— an appropriate place for anyone
of the solidarist temperament. (Scelle also worked for the ILO.) He looked
forward to the time when the idea of the welfare state would be expanded
into the concept of a “welfare world,” bolstered by an appropriate array of
international institutions. Where peace and order had previously been the
principal goals of international law, now prosperity, progress, and the pro-
motion of human rights should be the urgent priorities.