452 Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1914– )a vigorous exposition of the mainstream positivist stance, stressing the cen-
trality of state sovereignty in international law. Th e other three schools of
thought retained their basic character. But within them, there were some
new departures and fresh twists.Solidarism and Consensus
Th e end of the Cold War era held out a promise of consensus on a truly
global scale. Its best- known prophet was the American po liti cal scientist
Francis Fukuyama, who welcomed the new era, in a memorable phrase
(borrowed from Hegel), as “the end of history.” By this was meant, of
course, not the end of historical events, but rather the end of clashes between
grand rival ideologies. Authoritarian socialist ideas had gone down to com-
prehensive defeat, leaving liberal capitalism in sole command of the fi eld. In
such an atmosphere, the ethos of the New Haven School, with its spirit of
consensus, might be expected especially to thrive. It could even be said that,
with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, its cam-
paign for the global promotion of human dignity had been triumphantly
vindicated.
To a s i g n i fi cant extent, this was so. Th e general spirit of the New Haven
School was evident in the work of Th omas Franck, of New York University.
Franck, whose writing was much more comprehensible than that of Lass-
well and McDougal, saw the end of the Cold War as “heralding a forthcom-
ing transformation in international law.” More generally, he looked with
approval upon the transformation of the world from “an anarchic rabble of
states” into what he called “a socialized community.” By this, he meant a
genuine global society in which an array of organizations (and even indi-
viduals) cooperated to achieve advances in such areas as environmental
protection, relief of poverty, and advancement of human rights.
Franck’s most distinctive contribution to the consensus way of thinking
was an insistence on what he called “fairness” as the critical feature of inter-
national law. Fairness, he explained, has two principal features. Th e fi rst is
procedural justice or legitimacy. Th e second is an allocation of resources
that is regarded as being, in some sense, at least minimally satisfactory. A
system that possesses these two features would be fair (in Franck’s mean-
ing) and, as such, would be accepted as legitimate by the states which are