382 Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1914– )of simply a collection of specifi c rules on which states happened to have
reached agreement.
Support for this conception of natural law was readily available in the
statute of the World Court. In identifying the law that the Court was to ap-
ply, the statute naturally identifi ed customary law and treaties. But it added
a third source: “general principles of law accepted by civilized nations.”
Th ese would be applied in situations, as envisaged by Brierly, in which there
was neither a treaty in force nor an applicable customary rule that could re-
solve a dispute. Among those who saw this provision as a reemergence of
natural law into juridical respectability— and welcomed it as such— was
Lauterpacht, who lauded this provision of the Court’s statute as “a death
blow to positivism.”
Th e proclaimed “death” of positivism, not surprisingly, turned out to be
something of an exaggeration. But these developments of the interwar pe-
riod indicated, if nothing else, that the opposition to it was obstinately re-
fusing to surrender. In fact, positivism was fi nding allies in some seemingly
unlikely places, such as revolutionary Rus sia.Th e Challenge of Socialism
Karl Marx, the leading fi gure in socialist thought, made no attempt to de-
vise a specifi cally socialist theory of international relations, although he did
not hesitate to voice a hearty contempt for liberal free trade doctrine. Th e
great moving force of history, in his view, was not confl ict between states,
but rather confl ict between economic classes. It was only aft er the Bolshevik
takeover in Rus sia in 1917 that a national government appeared on the scene
with a strong ideological commitment to Marxian socialism— and only then
that the need to think about interstate relations became imperative.
As in the case of the French Revolution, there were intimations, at the
beginning, of a radical break with the past. In November 1917, on the mor-
row of the revolution, a Decree on Peace was promulgated, which proclaimed
“the unconditional and immediate annulment” of various secret treaties
concluded by the previous regime— but only to the extent that such treaties
were aimed at “securing advantages and privileges for the Rus sian landown-
ers and capitalists” or the retention of annexations. Th e Bolshevik leader
Vladimir Lenin explained that the new government rejected “all clauses on