Analysing Regionalism within International Law and Relations: The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation as a Grossraum?

Abstract

This article argues for a new way of addressing contemporary international law that is more adequate to both vital dynamic trends towards “regionalism” within international law, relations and politics, and the emergent possibility of a far more pluralistic “multipolar” legal order that—in both theory and practice—contrasts markedly with US-dominated hegemonic modes of regulation and high-handed unilateralism. To advance our argument, we draws upon classic Schmittian forms of Grossraum theory concerned to adapt traditional state-centric and purely horizontal conceptual types of international law interpretations to a form of international relations structured around regional ensembles, such as the European Union, NATO, the African Union, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). These historical trends are emerging out of an encompassing contemporary developmental tendency, including the decline in the traditional nation state posited as having equal status, and both the proliferation of new regional bodies and the strengthening of existing ones. Arguably, the emergence of the SCO from 2001 signals a new phase in multilateralism in the post-Cold War period that, when treated as a case study, allows us to “test out” the credibility of key aspects of Grossraum theory.