The juridical "great debate" of the Cold War era between jurists from the two rival political-military blocs, Soviet and Western, over the Soviet call for an immediate drafting and adoption of a Code of International Law Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, may have lessons to offer for other historical eras characterized by competing political-ideological systems or colliding civilizations. Its deliberate de-ideologising of the agenda and process of inter-bloc discussions and negotiations in favour of more consciously pragmatic, empirically-based and problem-oriented approaches sought to resolve concrete and immediate tension-issues between the two blocs.

The United Nations organisation as founded in 1945 was the creation of a numerically limited, special legal community, the members of the soon-to-be-victorious Wartime Alliance against Fascism. Tthe enemy States and also neutral States had been deliberately excluded, as also, of course, were the not yet decolonised overseas European territories in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Today the United Nations has expanded to just under 200 Member-States and is thus more nearly representative, in its main institutions and decision-making arenas and processes, of the plural, multi-cultural international society in which we all live today. The challenge for international lawyers today, in an historical era of competing ideologies and colliding civilisations, is to ensure that the corpus of Classical International Law— the historical legacy of the post-Westphalia Western Nation-States founded on the rise of commerce and on trade and territorial expansion overseas— is progressively developed and expanded, in accord with the UN Charter mandate, so as to more fully and more fairly reflect, in its substantive principles and rules, the new political reality of the new pluralism of the contemporary World Community.