Watershed or Phoenix From the Ashes? – Speculations on the Future of International Law After the September 11 Attacks

Abstract

In the first place, I should like to stress that the emphasis of my rather ambitious-sounding subtitle is on ‘speculation’, and not on ‘the future of international law’; for one, it is, at least at the time of writing, entirely speculative to think about the mid- and long-term consequences of the September 11 attacks, since, so far, the announced response to the attacks by the United States, the ‘West’ and the ‘civilised world’, has not yet happened. We are in a strange state of limbo, where everything seems possible, from secret James Bond-type operations to outright military attack of Afghanistan by the US and NATO troops, from civil war in Pakistan to biological —or even nuclear-counterattacks by the terrorist fold, from ‘business as (almost) usual’ to ‘the world is out of joint’. At such times, to speculate is not only all one can do, but it is, I believe, positively encouraged for those who professionally and/or passionately deal with the structure and meaning of social reality, as, inter alia, international legal academics do. Secondly, the emphasis is also on speculation because, evidently, it would be quite preposterous to pretend to set out, in a very brief comment written ‘out of the moment’, what all this will come to mean for so richly textured an academic discourse as international law. Yet international law and international lawyers are in everyone's mouth at this moment, and so it seems precisely apt to ‘speculate’ —and no more—, in rough sketch, about the consequences the events of September 11 and their political-military aftermath could have on the theory and practice of the ‘law of nations’.