422 Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1914– )And if critics of positivism were being sought out for attack, then Lauter-
pacht certainly did present all too apt a target.
Even if there was no specifi cally socialist version of general international
law— apart from an especially rigid adherence to positivism— socialist writ-
ers did place a strong emphasis on certain legal principles. Perhaps most
conspicuously, there was a forceful and consistent denunciation of imperial-
ism and colonialism in all its forms. Its most striking manifestation was an
explicit neo- just- war thesis that was sometimes called the “Vyshinsky Doc-
trine,” named aft er Stalin’s leading legal minister— and chief prosecutor in
the notorious purge trials of the 1930s— who propounded it in the UN Gen-
eral Assembly in 1950. (Th e label was applied by American opponents of the
doctrine, not by the Soviets themselves.) Th e thesis was that the UN Char-
ter’s general ban on the use of armed force does not apply to one important
category of confl ict: anticolonial struggles. “A just war,” in the words of the
Institute of State and Law textbook, “is a non- predatory, liberatory war,”
which includes “wars of national liberation” by colonial peoples against
their imperialist overlords. Western governments, not surprisingly,
fi ercely rejected this doctrine.
Liberalism
Liberalism remained broadly true to its nineteenth- century and interwar
roots. Quincy Wright provided as apt a summation of it as can be found, es-
sentially defi ning liberal doctrine as favoring “the adaptation of interna-
tional law to international justice.” More specifi cally, liberalism had two
principal features. One, inherited from the interwar period, was support for
collective security and the UN— and, by extension, for multilateralist ap-
proaches to international problems in general. Th e other, dating back to the
nineteenth century, was support for human rights. Th e outstanding trend in
post– World War II liberalism was the sharply higher profi le of human-
rights concerns.
In terms of personnel in the liberal cause, there was a strong element of
continuity from the interwar period, since two of its foremost champions—
Wright and Lauterpacht— were still highly active. Lauterpacht even as-
cended the bench of the World Court in 1955. Th ere was something of a di-
vision of labor involved, with Wright chiefl y interested in collective- security