The USSR believed in the World Revolution and the abolition of states (as a bourgeois phenomenon), which represented a Marxist version of

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The USSR believed in the World Revolution and the abolition of states (as a bourgeois phenomenon), which represented a Marxist version of globalization and proletarian internationalism. Hitler proclaimed a “Thousand-Year Reich” with the planetary dominance of Germany itself and the “Aryan race.” No sovereignty was envisioned for anyone except world National Socialism. And only the bourgeois-capitalist West—essentially purely Anglo-Saxon—maintained continuity with the Westphalian system, calculating a future transition to liberal internationalism and, again, to a World Government. In fact, the League of Nations, which formally persisted though it was non-functional, was at that time a vestige of the old globalism and a prototype for the future one.

In any case, international law was “suspended”—essentially abolished. A transitional era began where everything was decided solely by the nexus of ideology and force, which remained to be proven on the battlefield. Thus we approached World War II as the culmination of this confrontation of force-ideologies. International law was no more.

The concrete result of the power-ideological confrontation between liberalism, fascism, and communism led to the abolition of one of the poles—European National Socialism. The bourgeois West and the anti-bourgeois socialist East created the anti-Hitler coalition and jointly (with the greater share belonging to the USSR) destroyed fascism in Europe.

In 1945, the United Nations was created as the foundation of a new system of international law. To some extent, this was a revival of the League of Nations, but the sharp rise in the influence of the USSR, which established total ideological and political control over Eastern Europe (and Western Prussia—the German Democratic Republic), introduced a pronounced ideological trait into the system of national sovereignties. The true bearer of sovereignty was the socialist camp, whose states were united by the Warsaw Pact and, economically, by COMECON [Council for Mutual Economic Assistance]. No one in this camp was sovereign except Moscow and, accordingly, the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union].

On the bourgeois-capitalist pole, essentially symmetric processes occurred. The USA became the core of the sovereign liberal West. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the center and periphery swapped places—leadership passed from Great Britain to Washington. The countries of Western Europe and, more broadly, the capitalist camp, found themselves in the position of vassals to America. This was solidified by the creation of NATO and the transformation of the dollar into the world’s reserve currency.

Thus, the UN also anchored a system of international law—formally based on the recognition of sovereignty, but in fact on the balance of power between the victors of World War II. Only Washington and Moscow were truly sovereign. Consequently, the post-war model maintained a connection to ideology, having abolished National Socialism but significantly strengthened the socialist camp.

This is the bipolar world, which projected its influence onto all other regions of the planet. Any state—including the newly liberated colonies of the Global South—faced a choice: which (of the two!) ideological models to adopt. If they chose capitalism, they transferred sovereignty to Washington and NATO. If socialism, then to Moscow. The Non-Aligned Movement attempted to establish a third pole, but it lacked both the ideological and the power resources to do so.

The post-war era established a system of international law based on the real correlation of forces between two ideological camps. Formally, national sovereignty was recognized; in practice, it was not. The Westphalian principle was maintained nominally. In reality, everything was decided through the balance of power between the USSR and the USA and their satellites.

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