Research Forum Theme

The co-existence of universality and regionalism in international law is not always easy or self-evident. Nowadays, international law is universal but regional and national differences in its perception and application can nevertheless be considerable. Eastern Europe and post-Soviet Eurasia are partly overlapping as regions. Post-Soviet Eurasia is itself smaller than the whole continent of Eurasia and we use the term ‘post-Soviet’ merely to narrow the geographic scope of the conference. Following the end of the Cold War, several East European countries became members of the Council of Europe and some of them also joined the European Union. However, where ‘Europe’ would end in Eastern Europe in political terms remained a contested issue, including in the context of the EU’s Eastern Partnership policy. For example, Belarus never joined the Council of Europe and the Russian Federation heavily criticized NATO’s enlargement to East European countries.

In 2015, the Eurasian Economic Union came into being – with Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia as founding members. They were later joined by Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. Several post-Soviet Eurasian countries are also members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The Russian Federation is the dominant country in these efforts at regional integration in post-Soviet Eurasia. In turn, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization symbolizes cooperation between Russia and post- Soviet Eurasia on the one hand and China on the other hand.

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2022 is a fundamental challenge to international law in the region. The Russian Federation is no longer a member of the Council of Europe and, as of September 2022, the European Convention on Human Rights will stop applying to Russia. The year 2022 has been a serious rupture but even several earlier events had indicated that the delimitation of geopolitical regions is ridden with conflicts: for example, the 2008 Russian-Georgian war, the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, the 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Russian-Ukrainian war in Donbas.

The main question for international law is whether the newly deepened geopolitical divisions in Eastern Europe have also brought (or been expressions of) different, competing understandings of international law in the region. These concepts may be primarily regional but may also be of universal and global relevance, especially concerning the UN. They may pertain to fundamental questions of international law such as the interrelationship between state sovereignty and human rights, ‘great powers’ and smaller states, historical rights and civilization(s), or modes of dispute resolution.