Abstract

[Uchronia, History and Possibility in International Law] The history of international law is inevitably written from the standpoint of a world that international law itself has helped to shape. States, borders, international organisations, processes of decolonisation and legal categories are reconstructed retrospectively along trajectories that, since they ultimately prevailed, tend to appear more linear and more necessary than they did to those who lived through them. This article explores uchronia as a way of unsettling that retrospective sense of necessity, taking Enrico Brizzi’s L’inattesa piega degli eventi as its starting point. In the novel, the survival of the Italian Fascist regime after the Second World War produces alternative configurations of Europe and Africa, in which territories, political affiliations and relations familiar to the reader are rearranged through a different sequence of events. This uchronian experiment allows for counterfactual narratives to recover the contingency of institutions and categories that retrospective reconstruction tends to naturalise. Brizzi’s novel, therefore, provides a narrative vantage point from which to revisit the history of international law: which developments appear inevitable only because their outcome is known? To what extent do concepts such as sovereignty, territory, self-determination and decolonisation bear the imprint of historical trajectories that might have unfolded otherwise? The article treats alternative histories of international law as a critical mode of inquiry and uses uchronia to suspend, temporarily, the historian’s retrospective privilege, restoring to the past something of the plurality of futures it once contained. Through L’inattesa piega degli eventi, the international legal system appears as a historically produced configuration, the familiarity of which should not be confused with necessity.