ABSTRACT
For international law in 1989, the significance of the collapse of state socialism might initially have been imagined to be indifferent or trivial. International law had no ‘position’ to take on what ultimately was a series of individual domestic crises in a dozen European (Eurasian) states, remarkable only for their relative simultaneity. For international law, at least initially, 1989 betokened nothing more than an unusual temporal concatenation of succession and recognition issues, to be managed as they traditionally had been: case by case, with a fig leaf of doctrine to cover the obligatory political accommodation of regime change. As things proceeded, ‘1989’ (using the year as a kind of shorthand for the
collapse of state socialism in Eastern and Central Europe and, after a further two years, in the USSR itself and the ensuing transformation of the geopolitical landscape; that is, the ‘world-historical’ 1989 rather than the calendrical 1989) rapidly assumed the dimensions of an epochal event, a demarcation and boundary which had the effect of definitively ‘periodizing’ the post-war international legal order, or ‘Postwar’ (Judt 2006), dividing it from an ostensible successor international legal order – the ‘new world order’, or globalization. This event 1989 for international law, the implications of which are
elaborated in the next section below, cannot well be analyzed in isolation from the aforementioned domestic crises which precipitated it, cumulatively now known as the ‘transition’. Indeed the connection between the force of event in international law and événement in the classic Badiouvian sense of a mass mobilization or uprising is particularly tight for 1989, since the fall of the Wall, quite literally a result of direct popular action (brick by brick), and seemingly an event par excellence, set in motion (or at least carried forward) the train of events which brought in the new world order. The elusive and loaded nature of this domestic transition is explored in the concluding section. While both the 1989 new world order and the 1989 transition possess the trappings of a Badouvian event, a supervenient and transformative rupture, upon closer inspection they each more closely resemble what one might venture to call a ‘pseudo-event’, staged or managed
(or co-opted) by an existing configuration of power or authority, rather than spontaneously generating any new such configuration on the basis of new revolutionary subjectivities: full of sound and fury, but signifying a consolidation rather than a transformation. The new world order turned out to be an updated version of an old hegemony and the transition more of an assimilation.
