Breaking with the Past 251but rather the “negative” one of settling or forestalling disputes. In a plural-
istic world of in de pen dent states, with no sovereign, it is inevitable that con-
fl icts of opinion and interest will occur, even in a system that is broadly har-
monious overall. Th e task of international law, to a positivist, is to resolve
those disputes by recourse to the rule of law instead of “the dice of Mars.”
Th is may seem an excessively narrow and limited understanding of the mis-
sion of international law. But it must be admitted that, if it were successfully
carried through, then the benefi t to the world would be enormous.
International Law as a Historical— and European— Artifact
From the basic rejection of natural law, combined with the image of interna-
tional law as a consensual system based on the will of states, it was the short-
est of logical steps to conclude that international law can only be understood
as a product of history. Only a study of the actual experiences of states can
reveal what agreements states have actually concluded at any given time.
Here too, the affi nity between the positivists and the historical school of law
is clear. Furthermore, it became apparent, when such a close study was duly
carried out, that one par tic u lar group of states had been responsible for
agreeing on the corpus of rules known as international law. Th ese were the
countries of Western Eu rope, together with their overseas off shoots in the
Western Hemi sphere.
So long as international law was seen as an off shoot of natural law, it was
diffi cult— or even impossible— to place the Eu ro pe an states in a privileged
position. It will be recalled, in this connection, that Innocent IV, in the thir-
teenth century, had insisted that basic principles of entitlement to exercise
sovereignty were global in their application and not confi ned to Christian
powers. With the discarding of natural law, however, that broad cosmo-
politan outlook lost its principal support. If international law was strictly a
network of agreements between states, then it naturally followed that only
states that were actually parties to those agreements were bound by interna-
tional law.
But this rigorously logical conclusion was not a comfortable one. For one
thing, it seemed to cut directly against the core positivist principle of the
sovereign equality of states. Th ere could readily enough be equality of states
within any given historical or cultural group (such as the Eu ro pe an countries