It is a common impression shared by many international lawyers today that the brief ‘turn to democracy’ that occurred in some segments of international legal scholarship in the early to mid-1990s was, on the whole, little more than a detour of overly excitable imagination – not exactly a complete error of judgement or an outright frivolity, but certainly a lapse of conceptual clarity and professional rigour. Whatever changes may have occurred within the broader international legal system, the argument goes, they certainly did not amount to a ‘democratic revolution’, and any claims to the contrary were and are simply baseless. The kind of fundamental reorganization of the international legal system that was forecasted by scholars like Thomas Franck and Anne-Marie Slaughter never took place, and the main lesson one should learn from this whole episode is that international legal scholars should not give in to their utopian reflexes as quickly and as readily as the ‘pro-democracy enthusiasts’ did, but should rather exercise analytical restraint and professional judgement and attend much more carefully to matters of legal logic and technical legal reasoning. This, in a nutshell, is the received wisdom about the history behind international law’s ‘turn to democracy’, and the aim of this article is essentially to challenge it – in part by uncovering the latent theoretical fudging behind it, in part by exploring the general narrative structure that supports this received wisdom and the latter’s relationship to the broader ideology of international legal anti-utopianism.

中文翻译：

---

“来自失望之井”：国际民主法的奇事与国际法学研究的政治

当今许多国际律师的共同印象是，在 1990 年代初至中期，在国际法律学术的某些领域发生的短暂“转向民主”总体上只不过是对过度兴奋的想象的绕道。 - 不完全是判断错误或完全轻浮，但肯定是概念清晰度和专业严谨性的失误。无论在更广泛的国际法律体系中可能发生了什么变化，这种论点认为，它们肯定不等于“民主革命”，任何相反的说法过去都是而且根本没有根据。Thomas Franck 和 Anne-Marie Slaughter 等学者预测的国际法律体系的根本重组从未发生，从整个事件中我们应该学到的主要教训是，国际法律学者不应该像“亲民主的狂热分子”那样迅速和轻易地屈服于他们的乌托邦式反应，而应该保持分析克制和专业判断，并参加更仔细地处理法律逻辑和技术法律推理的问题。简而言之，这是关于国际法“转向民主”背后历史的公认智慧，本文的目的本质上是挑战它——部分是通过揭示其背后潜在的理论捏造，部分是通过探索支持这一公认智慧的一般叙事结构以及后者与更广泛的国际法律反乌托邦意识形态的关系。