A socialist legal universalism: Cold War struggles over international law

Recent scholarship on the history of international law has challenged the idea that state socialist countries have stifled the development of international law until the end of the Cold War. This chapter traces the evolution of state socialist approaches to international law emanating from the Soviet Union since the October Revolution and their reception, adoption, and rejection across the socialist world. Against the often-separate scholarship on domestic and international law, it argues that state socialist approaches to international law were always intrinsically linked to the larger issue of what role law ought to play in the building of socialism and later for the maintenance of “developed socialism”. This deeper ideological issue of party-state doctrine always reflected on state socialist legal experts’ thinking about international law and their concepts of international order and the law governing it in a world changed by decolonisation and the Cold War.