Abstract
Martti Koskenniemi’s recent book can be described in many different ways and fills many different functions. It is history of ideas, history of science, lengthy and detailed biographies of a large number of (male) international lawyers but also quietly ‐ almost hidden ‐ a reformist agenda for the future of international law. It attempts answering the question of why international law came to be “depoliticized and marginalized, as graphically illustrated by its absence from the arenas of today’s globalization struggles, or turned into a technical instrument for the advancement of the agendas of powerful interests or actors in the world scene”. In the words of the author “this books examines the rather surprising hold that a small number of intellectual assumptions and emotional dispositions have had on international law”. 1 Those assumptions and dispositions are summarised as “a sensibility about matters international in the late nineteenth century as an inextricable part of the liberal and cosmopolitan movements of the day”. From this moment on, the word “liberal” appears in almost every page of at least all the most recently
Highlights
Martti Koskenniemi’s recent book can be described in many different ways and fills many different functions
The book consists of six chapters dealing with the founding of and the ideology behind the Institut de droit international and its role in legitimizing colonial imperialism; German legal traditions ranging from historicism to the formalism and science approach to law as represented by Kelsen; the French sociological school which based its internationalism and cosmopolitanism on a sense of “solidarity” without being able to surpass the references to “the idea”, and the idea was France; a whole chapter on Hersch Lauterpacht; and ending with chapter 6 on the impact of Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau and “the turn to ‘international relations’” mainly among American international lawyers
We can understand more about the “culture of formalism” by what is described as its opposite
Summary
Martti Koskenniemi (2002): The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960. Martti Koskenniemi’s recent book can be described in many different ways and fills many different functions It is history of ideas, history of science, lengthy and detailed biographies of a large number of (male) international lawyers and quietly – almost hidden – a reformist agenda for the future of international law. This “intuition” is qualified by the rather esoteric phrase “the international law that “rises” and “falls” in this book is, not a set of ideas – for many such ideas are astonishingly alive today – nor of practices, but a sensibility that connotes both ideas and practices and involves broader aspects of the political faith, image of self and society, as well as the structural constraints within which international law professionals live and work” Reading this phrase in the very second page of the book leaves one in a perplexed state so familiar to much of post-modern writing. While his From Apology to Utopia (1989) remained static – something admitted by the author in the introduction to his new book – but more importantly, failed giving us any guidance on how to transgress the pendulum between power legitimation and idealism, the new work suggests that there may be a way out
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