International Law: Torn between Coexistence, Cooperation and Globalization 1 In my dream, W.F. began by asking me whether anything fundamental had changed since that afternoon when he left us all, near Central Park3. He was particularly concerned to know how much the political evolution of international relations over these past ten or 15 years had affected the nature of international law. In my wish to come straight to the point, I gave him a rapid summary of the changes that had taken place in the structure of international society since the disappearance of the socialist bloc. W.F. was interested to hear that today we normally refer to this transformation as the `end of the Cold War', whereas for him, as history in fact would seem to confirm, the Cold War had actually ended in late 1962 after the Cuba crisis, which ushered in the period known as `peaceful coexistence'. The fact that we no longer use this expression today is presumably not entirely a coincidence. It indicates a wish to gloss over a paradoxical period, a time when the normative creativity of the United Nations was able to deal with their divisions.4 I then described to him that brief period of euphoria associated with the Gulf War, when for a moment people believed that the initial design of the United Nations Charter had finally been realized. I told him of the particularly dynamic way that the Security Council, at long last reconciled, had at one point decided to extend the interpretation of `threat to peace'. I indicated to him, in other words, how the Council had interpreted its powers at the start of this decade, seeking to adapt measures under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter to the evolution of armed conflict, including non-international conflict. Following my descriptions, W. F. noted that this dynamic practice by the Council was a tangible realization of the link already existing in the Charter between the promotion of peace and protection of the human person, albeit in periods of armed conflict. 3 The reference here is to the tragic circumstances of Wolfgang Friedmann's death. 4 This period was characterized by the common will of the socialist and liberal countries to overcome their respective ideological and economic differences in order to achieve some common goals.
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