Page:ELO 1(1), 6–25. European public law after empires.pdf/11

16   Signe Rehling Larsen Decolonisation led to a fundamental transformation of the former colonies, now termed the ‘developing world’. Over the past few decades, post-colonial scholarship in international law has examined the role played by international law in facilitating and reforming Western rule in the colonial world, as well as the Global South more broadly, both before and after decolonisation. However, empire was not merely an appendix that could be removed without significantly transforming Europe and the former metropoles as well. The end of empire dealt a blow to the legal, political, and economic foundations on which the European state system rested. This, however, remains under-researched; perhaps because the European strategy to deal publicly with the legacy of empire has, for the most part, been to ‘forget’ that it ever existed or to treat it as something that happened somewhere else, ‘overseas’.

A strategy of ‘forgetting’, however, could not provide a solution to the fundamental problem of ‘Europe’ that was posed with increasing urgency during the interwar period and after World War II. What were the implications for Europe when ‘non-European states and nations from all sides now took their place in the family or house of European nations and states?’ With the reconfiguration of the global order after the decline and eventual collapse of the global order anchored in European imperialism, what would happen to ‘Europe’ and the imperial metropoles? After the ‘humiliation’ of decolonisation when Europe lost its treasured symbols of economic, political, and moral superiority, how would ‘Europe’ as a political existence and identity survive?

After World War II, the spatial order and ideological orientation of European international law had been destroyed. In the new international legal order that emerged, ‘Europe’ did not have a privileged status in terms of European territory or in terms of European ‘consciousness’ or ‘civilisation’. Many intellectuals at the time, therefore, talked about a crisis of European spirit or consciousness. Shortly after World War II, Europe – the centre of the old world order of Droit Public de l’Europe – was effectively partitioned into the two spheres of influence of the United States and the Soviet Union. For centuries, through formal and informal practices of empire and colonialism, Europeans had determined the political fate of peoples and communities in much, if not most, of the rest of the world. Yet with the end of World War II, Europeans were no longer in charge of Europe’s own destiny. To add insult to injury, both these new imperial superpowers laid claim to being the political forces that would finally complete the project of the enlightenment that the Europeans had failed at. In that sense, they both claimed to be a better, more superior version, of ‘Europe’.

European integration emerged as an integral part of the answer to this question by carving out a new space for Europe in the world in tandem with decolonisation. In this way, European