Abstract
The socialist states of the 20th century have influenced the public international law with their interpretation and practice of the legal principles. Adopting case study, academic resource and legal development history analysis methods, the dissertation, firstly, is to verify the fact that the socialist influence of the general principles of law, specifically the right of people to self-determination as the sole scope of the research, can still be traced, even in the world today where the capitalist school and bourgeois political entities proclaim the “actually existing Marxism” had vanished. Secondly, the thesis is to prove that, after the 1917 Proletarian Revolution and decolonization, the “civilized nations” recognizing the sources of international law do means the legal subjects more than the Western nations of Christianity and Rationalism. Thirdly, the dissertation is to analyze the Bolshevik perspectives on the right to self-determination and its constant, yet setting-back interpretation of the principle in the post-colonial period. Last but not the least, the thesis is to induce the ICJ Advisory Opinion on the terms and limits of self-determination in re Kosovo’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence, and to provide the critical review of the Marxist-Leninist explanation on secession and self-determination.