Abstract

Recent scholarship on the history of international law has challenged the idea that state socialist countries 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-siloed scholarship on domestic and international law, it argues that state socialist approaches to international law were intrinsically linked to the larger issue of what role law ought to play in the building of socialism and, later, in the maintenance of ‘developed socialism’. This deeper ideological issue of party-state doctrine invariably reflected on the thinking of state socialist legal experts about international law and their concepts of international order and the law governing it in a world changed by decolonization and the Cold War.