The Road to Utopia is Paved with Contradictions: Theoretical Understanding of the Principle of Equality

Abstract

In modern international law the idea of sovereign equality is the basis for its functioning and further argumentation in reasoning about the violation of law and its effectiveness. It is reflected in the main legal acts, but in fact under the screen of equality the strong states influence the weak ones, imposing their will. The research methodology is based on the study of the nomos of equality, that is, the ordering of norms that exists in the legal imagination. Nomos is shaped through contexts and structures. By placing the nomos in a historical perspective, it is possible to see how it has changed and where it originates. The origins of the idea of equality go deep into history to pagan communities where two global visions of order took shape: a pluralistic cosmos and a hierarchical universe. Christian narratives proclaimed universal equality and unity, but they also adopted a vision of order of the universe that constructed a hierarchy that excluded the “other”. Gradually there was a paradigm shift and reason became the basis of knowledge of the world. With reason came the idea of progress and civilization. Civilization promised the advent of equality, because people with the help of reason could achieve the benefits of the European world and compare with them. But it also established inequality and discrimination. But in the twentieth century, the global narrative describing all law began to disappear from speech and from law. At the same time, many new narratives emerged, deconstructing the idea of a global order. As a result, the nomos of equality is filled with contradictions and is used only as an instrument of influence, because in the nomos of equality itself there is inequality and discrimination due to the perception of order as a universe. As a result, the concept of sovereign equality is rendered meaningless. The longstanding crisis of science and law is resolved by cultural change and the denial of the order of the universe; the metamodernist vision of the world assumes the possibility of reordering the legal order on the basis of the cosmos and the emergence of homogeneous pluralist regimes, each based on its own system of values. The Russian project of equality can be based on the ideas of religious philosophy and the concept of oneness. Such a remote project of utopia fills the insubstantial notion of equality with certain values and ideas.