alain wijffels Non-Western civilisations have also used the conceptual dichotomy of central and peripheral polities – for instance the self-styled “Empire of the Middle”, as China used to be referred to. But in the Western tradition, especially since eighteenth-century rationalism, the distinction between what is defined as central and, in contrast, what may be in different degrees peripheral, has been a fundamental feature of bringing a strict hierarchy in our whole thinking, a principle of structuring the human mind and projecting that structure from there on to the whole outside world. Only over the past few decades has that rationalist way of thinking and structuring our reality partly been challenged and jettisoned.2 The dichotomy between central and peripheral is therefore not simply an issue of territorial or geographic structures, such as the famous or infamous, but still common, world maps following the old Mercator twodimensional projection and putting the diminutive European continent right in the centre, causing all sorts of distortions in representing territories relegated to the far northern, southern, eastern or western fringes of themap.3 Legal theory, to take an example which may appeal to jurists, both in the common law and in the civil law traditions, was until a few decades ago strongly determined by, and therefore centred on, concepts and principles developed around private law. In many countries, until a generation or two ago, the curriculum in law schools was therefore overwhelmingly focused on private law subjects. Concepts and principles of private law could readily, or so one thought, be transposed to areas of public law, which were often regarded as not being founded on the same consistent legal-scientific theoretical basis as what had been achieved by Roman law scholarship (on the Continent) or common law judges (in England) – and in both cases, viz. Roman legal scholarship and common law doctrines, private law took central stage.4 2 Changes of paradigms in corporate governance have strongly influenced the departure from the hierarchical model in a great variety of areas. In legal thinking, the shift has been aptly analysed; see Ost, François – Van de Kerchove, Michel 2002. 3 Again, such a political and cultural strategy of map-making should not be attributed to Europeans only: for the famous case of the recently “rediscovered” map of the Chinese sea, see Batchelor, Robert 2014; Brook, Timothy 2013; http://seldenmap.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/. (Last accessed 1May 2017.) 4 That more or less explicit or conscious focus on private law spread well beyond legal theory. 33
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