The Waning of the Sovereign State: Towards a New Paradigm for International-Law?*

Abstract

The concept of an international community made up of sovereign States is the basis of our intellectual framework for international law. A look at history, however, tells us that conceptions of world order have by no means always been shaped by the model of sovereign co-equal actors with a territorial basis. Although there are old historical precedents for relations between territorial communities on an equal footing, the imperial conceptions of Roman times and of the Middle Ages were based on entirely different ideas. They were strongly hierarchical and paralleled religious or secular concepts of subordination and dependence. Sixteen forty-eight, the year of the Peace of Westphalia, is usually given as the decisive date for the transition from the vertical imperial to the horizontal interState model.' Needless to say, in historical terms this is an oversimplification. The Empire existed until 1806 and the process towards sovereign equality was gradual. It culminated with the collapse in the early twentieth century of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and the displacement of the Concert of Europe as the most important international arena by an open global community of States. Colonialism was not really a deviation from this movement The existence of different forms of social organization in other parts of the world was a welcome excuse for European powers with colonial ambitions to deny statehood to these communities and to annex the territory inhabited by them. 2 Decolonization consisted basically of the extension of European political structures to these

The Individual and Structural Change in the International Legal System

“…54 A similar approach is advocated by Christoph Schreuer, who prefers to examine the relationship of entities to the international system by an examination of their functions. 55 These notions of capacities, participation and functions are conceptually useful because they suggest that what is significant is not the formal status of an entity, but its actual ability to engage in the international legal system in a given context. Whether an entity can act in the international legal system in a particular way is dependent not on its formal status, but rather on that entity's capacities and functions.…”

The Balkans: From balance of power to balance of human welfare

“…In this case secession would be understood in references of international law as internal dissolution of the Yugoslavia. 45 Also was not guarantee to Slovenia and Croatia that central government of Yugoslavia would undertakes measures of decentralisation, even if they discard their claim to secession.…”

The Development Of The Judiciary In The Context Of Globalization

“…Recognizing changes in the society structure, predicting the future movement of society towards "activity expansion without state boundaries" (Held & McGrew, 2003), the creation of a "network society" (Castells, 2010), scholars have identified trends towards the weakening of state sovereignty, and termination of its monopoly on the legal framing. The recognition of sovereignty as a "mistake, an illegitimate offspring", the identification of the tendency to "extinction of the state" (Schreurer, 1993) leads to radical changes in the legal sphere. A number of scholars raise the question of the emergence of a new concept of law: transnational, global, world.…”