ABSTRACT
International law establishes a dynamic legal order that has progressively developed from an order of peaceful coexistence to an order of cooperation of states and from an order concerned with narrowly construed state interests to an order that promotes the interests of the international community as a whole. This chapter shows that the notion of community interests was instrumental in the introduction of another concept, that of countermeasures taken by states other than the injured, Traditional international law as most recently referred to in legal writings is built on the notion of bilateralism and establishes a bipartite relation of multiple rights and obligations that together constitute ‘minimal law’ and are reciprocal in character. Bilateralism is therefore unable to adequately respond to the increasing need to protect certain collective principles and which, in turn, widen the circle of interested or affected actors in the international legal arena.
