At the risk of sounding as if I am fetishising the European East by likening it to the Berlin of the 1990s, let me say that visiting Vilnius earlier this month has made me feel as if travelling back in time. The party scene had little to do with it – though I did end up speaking to a DJ in a club that used to be a bank, complete with a former vault (in German: “Tresor”) functioning as the smoking area. Of course, this made me mull over Tresor (Berlin’s first Techno club) in its original location, a vault of a department store; hence the name. But apart from the fact that I would have had no idea what Berlin in the 1990s was like anyways, having experienced it only through the eyes of a zero- to three-year-old, the time travel feeling arose because Vilnius was conjuring up associations of a much more recent, but no less bygone Berlin. A Berlin, in which the yellow and blue flags I saw on a daily basis were not (just) the ones marking the entrance to the state library Unter den Linden. In Vilnius, displays of buses driving past would proclaim “Slava Ukraini” before switching to announce the next stop. Ukrainian flags were omnipresent. And in one bar, small green stickers of Putin’s head were strategically placed in the bowls of toilets – invitation to participatory performance art rather clear.
Maybe I am grandstanding, pondering questions of time when all I really seem to be talking about is attention. But time in international law is a weird thing. Think only of the length of the 24th February or the 7th October. Think about how history seemed to be repeating itself this month when, for the second time during his mandate, Karim Khan announced that he requested an arrest warrant for a sitting head of state. And then think about how history has most definitely not repeated itself, judging by the very different reactions these two arrest warrant applications elicited. Here again, I am writing at the risk of being misconstrued as likening one thing to another, which takes as little as mentioning that one thing and that other thing at the same time – or so the German Foreign Office seems to think.
But here is what I actually wonder: Is the time difference between Berlin and Vilnius really just one hour?
From a quantum physics perspective, we cannot even say with certainty that time passes. From a social scientific perspective, though, I will say that time matters. And that probably means that thinking about time is time well-spent, generally, but even more so this month as the Völkerrechtsblog turns ten. The Völkerrechtsblog’s anniversary means that we invited some of our authors – much less confused than myself, I promise – to do their own reflecting on time and what it has done to their past pieces. And so, while Robin Ramsahye looks back to 2016 and finds that not much has changed, Timothy William Waters looks back to 421 BC and finds the same. Felix Würkert contributes to the Blögiversary symposium, reflecting, in the newer present, on redressing wrongs that have become things of a slightly older past. In light not of the Völkerrechtsblog’s past ten years, but “25 years of confusion in the ECtHR’s case-law on extraterritorial jurisdiction and the extraterritorial reach of positive obligations”, Elena Abrusci, Maria Louiza Deftou, Vassilis Tzevelekos, Lea Raible, Mariana Ferolla Vallandro do Valle, and Rick Lawson review Vladislava Stoyanova’s book, before reading her reply.
But time matters in all kinds of ways. Time (zone) matters when putting together conference schedules if the ambition is to decentre Europe, really, as Jadé Botha, Raghavi Viswanath, and Jessica Wiseman point out. Time matters for the attraction Pierre Thielbörger’s secretary’s chocolate will emanate, and hence the frequency with which he can expect office visits from his growing children. Time matters, Anaïs Mattez says, directing our gaze to the when of the heritage restitution debate. Time is not the only thing that matters, Artur Simonyan says, because so does space. The time is now, Arne Bardelle says, calling on the Federal General Prosecutor to rethink his decision to suspend investigations into crimes against humanity in Belarus.
And now it’s time for me to conclude this editorial and for you to go read this month’s Völkerrechtsblog posts – wherever you may be, Berlin, Vilnius, or somewhere else entirely.
