The Search for the “Social” in International law: Remarks on a Critical Theme
As I argued in my Gentle Civilizer of Nations (2001), modern international law arose in the last third of the 19th century. Its ideological centre lay in the concept of “civilization” that was soon equated with modern statehood.
This was challenged in the interwar period by streams of French and German legal thinking that focused instead on the operations of an “international society”. Nevertheless, as the vocabulary of “society” was captured by other disciplines – sociology and political economy in particular – only a rather formal notion of it remained with international law. In response to the disappointments with interwar “formalism”, US lawyers began in the 1950s and 1960s to employ social scientific methods to discuss the way the “system” of international politics underlay developments in international law.
In Europe, the view of international law as a law of an “international society” was supported by concentration on the UN and other international institutions. The talk will review some of these efforts and end up with some reflections about variants of social thought in present-day ideas about legal pluralism and “transnational law” as well the alleged “breakdown” of the “rule-based international system”.
SPEAKER
Martti Koskenniemi is Emeritus Professor of International Law at the University of Helsinki and Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights.
He was a member of the Finnish diplomatic service 1978-1994, Judge with the Administrative Tribunal of the Asian Development Bank (1997- 2002) member of the International Law Commission (UN) in 2002-2006. He has worked with several UN agencies and bodies and pleaded with the International Court of Justice. He has held lengthier visiting professorships in, among other places, NYU, Columbia University, University of Cambridge, London School of Economics, Melbourne University and Universities of Brussels, Paris, Sao Paulo and Utrecht.
He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has a doctorate h.c. from the Universities of Uppsala, Frankfurt and McGill. His main publications include From Apology to Utopia; The Structure of International Legal Argument (1989/2005), The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (2001) and The Politics of International Law (2011). His latest work on the (pre-)history of international law is To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power (2021)