While there has been general agreement among writers on international law and polities that the recent rapid increase in the number of independent states is significant for the international system, debate about the actual and potential consequences of that increase for the contemporary international legal order continues. Since that debate, which focuses on the attitude of the “new states” toward the existing international legal order, the reasons for that attitude, and the extent to which changes in that order are consequently inevitable, likely or desirable, has so far been conducted primarily on the basis of impressionistic generalities, it appears essential to investigate more closely and empirically the attitudes and behavior of the new states. Egypt has been selected as an important case study because of its leadership in the Arab world, its strategic position in the Afro-Asian world, and its active rôle in the anti-colonial and non-alignment movements, as well as because of its particular yet representative problems and goals.