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In the past 30 years, the end of the Cold War and the breakdown of the modernist frame of politics have promoted the historical turn of international law. A non-Eurocentric narrative of international law is needed not only to help it go beyond the geographical and conceptual self-justification, but also to open itself to other normative orders. This presents an intellectual and normative challenge to legal historians, who increasingly explore the normative dialogue and competition in interstitial areas, such as South and Southeast Asia in their existence between the Islamic, Sinocentric and European orders. It is this issue and this important era of globalisation that Clara Kemme’s book examines roughly over the period from 1500 to 1900, in particular how the key concepts of tribute and treaty were understood through diplomatic ideas and practices in South and SoutheastAsia, how the treaty system as a product of international law became global and why it prevailed over other systems of order (2). ...
During the drafting process from the 1920s to 1940s, the Weimar Constitution (WRV) played a decisive role in shaping Chinese social(-ist) con- stitutions, especially the part related to the social- economic issue. Through the lens of cultural trans- lation, this paper seeks to explain how the WRV was adapted, reinterpreted, and recontextualized throughout several rounds of constitution making in China. By focusing on the roles played by the translators, legislators, and interpreters, this paper discusses how the social rights created by the WRV were translated into the fundamental policy of the 1947 Constitution of the Republic of China. More- over, regarding »policy« as the legal instrument for regulating the social-economic life, and even broader fields, it triggers the modern transforma- tion of Chinese meritocracy and reinforces the national legal tradition depicted in its modern form. To some extent, this case study on cultural translation of constitutional law discloses the mechanism, both temporarily and spatially, for the intercultural communication of the normative information.
The 100th anniversary of the Weimar Constitution’s promulgation has brought a number of new stimuli to a historiography that has for a long time focused largely on the Weimar Republic’s failure. Two prominent recent publications – Udo Di Fabio’s study and a collective volume edited by Horst Dreier und Christian Waldhoff – are reviewed in this issue by the Brazilian constitutional historian Marcelo Neves. His review and the last months’ public debate on the merits and flaws of the Weimar Constitution in Germany, which was framed by current concerns about the state of Western democracies, show to what extent constitutional history is always also a conversation about the present. ...
