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Rh international law that the EU is contrasted with, where the default option is that political communities on a global scale are recognised as sovereign states, only came into existence as a consequence of the collapse of the global legal order of European empires. Moreover, as Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper have demonstrated, the adoption of the nation-state as the alternative to empire was by no means a foregone conclusion. Within the academic study of EU law, however, this is widely ignored or forgotten, and the EU is compared to a world where the ‘normal’ situation is assumed to be sovereign nation-states that precede international law.

3. Empire and European international law

International law is in its origins Eurocentric. For centuries, ‘European’ international law was a constitutive part of the public law order of European empires: Droit Public de l’Europe or Jus Publicum Europaeum. Described as the ‘external’ aspects of the European public law order, European international law regulated the relationship between ‘civilised’ European states. This public law order of European empires, founded on land appropriation in the new world and consolidated and formalised in the nineteenth century, was one of the casualties of World War II. The foundations of Droit Public de l’Europe, however, were already undermined with World War I that destroyed the European land empires, exposed the weakness of the British Empire, while revealing the strength of the United States. Nevertheless, the old European international legal order was not replaced by a new international legal order in the interwar period. Until the demise of the European maritime empires, European international law regulated the relationships between the European states, as well as their relationships with the ‘uncivilised’ world outside Europe.

Within the legal order of Droit Public de l’Europe, ‘Europe’ had a special status as the community of civilised, and hence, sovereign and equal nations. Only the civilised nations in Europe, and later former white settler colonies ruled by people of European descent, were included in the community of ‘civilised nations’ that could be considered sovereign. The ‘civilised’ world