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The prevailing scholarly understanding of geopolitical agency in the formation of international law still seems to echo the logic of Hegelian historiography. A benchmark for this narrative was set in 1824 by Leopold von Ranke, who claimed that the Slavic and Byzantine-Islamic East did not belong to the West. Its peoples, he famously wrote, never exercised any independent influence; they only appear either subservient or antagonistic. With Western Europe proclaimed l’Europe européenne, the line drawn around this central and privileged position came to define the civilised and capitalist West in opposition to its politically, economically, and culturally inferior Other. This entity was presumed incapable of theorising or structurally and normatively shaping the international legal order. European international lawyers from beyond the borders of the Latino-Germanic West often feel compelled to perform rhetorical autos-da-fé as acts of symbolic self-sacrifice and purification, in which their own perspectives are disavowed in order to align with a civilisational script authored elsewhere and promising progress and emancipation. Part of this gesture involves the complete substitution of Europe’s inherited geopolitical divisions with alignments based on epistemic, ethical, and ideo-political affinities. This kind of positioning tends to arise within discursive contexts that assert continuity with a Western tradition, often framing local perspectives as having never departed from its presumed universality. However, this may amount to the epistemic self-erasure of what Hans-Georg Gadamer called one’s own horizon of a historically and spatially situated vantage point, continually reshaped by shifting existential conditions. This seemingly subliminal act of repression manifests in the unsettling and paradoxical practice of writing about international law from a Central and Eastern European perspective offering only the faintest articulation of its contextual standpoint. Marxist-informed critiques of international law might read this not as a neutral scholarly gesture, but as a submission to inherited historical conditions, what Marx described as making history not as they please, but under circumstances already passed down.
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DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2580115
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