Person:

Kennedy, David

Martti Koskenniemi’s From Apology to Utopia is the most significant late 20th century English language monograph in the field of international law, and it is terrific to see it re-issued. The book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of the doctrinal materials and intellectual history of the discipline. It became an instant classic in the analysis of law’s rhetorical structures, and it could well turn out to have been the last great original treatise in the international law field. It both synthesized the materials and demonstrated the impossibility of their being synthesized in a stable and intellectually coherent fashion. The treat in this re-issued edition is Martti’s new epilogue. In it, he reflects on what he was seeking to achieve in ways that will open the text to new readings while remaining, I think, true to the spirit of the initial project.

I felt very close to Martti’s original project. My own International Legal Structures pursued similar themes and Martti has been very kind in his acknowledgement of its influence. I was also trying to map the rhetorical patterns and argumentative structures in the field’s doctrinal corpus. From Apology to Utopia was also Martti’s dissertation and one of the most pleasurable intellectual conversations I have ever had took place in Turku on April 1, 1989 when I served as “opponent” to his promotion at the Turku Faculty of Law. It was thrilling to have a go at the details of his doctrinal history and hear his response. Did Vattel really mean that? Do the periods really break this way, or is there more continuity here, more discontinuity there? We argued about what he called “objectivism” and “indeterminacy” and about their significance. When From Apology to Utopia came out, I published a review that seems, in retrospect, to have failed to capture the book’s singular importance for me as a fellow-traveler in the project of rethinking the international law tradition. Simply put, it was...

In my Julius Stone Memorial Address, I explored the hypothesis that everyday decisions made by the professionals who manage norms and institutions which seem to lie in the background of global politics may be more important to global wealth and poverty than what we customarily think of as the big political and economic decisions made by parliaments and presidents or brought about by war and peace. If you have the energy to protest, criticise and change the distribution of wealth and status in our newly globalised world, it can be hard to locate points at which allocative decisions can be politically contested. The urgent political disputes that become international front-page news can seem peripheral to the decisions responsible for the distribution of things in the world. Although meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the G–7 (Group of Seven) provide useful backdrops for street protest and media attention, it is not clear that the decisions being taken inside those meeting rooms are either meaningfully responsible for global distributions of wealth and power or contestable in conventional political terms. Although it is easy to think of international affairs as a rolling sea of politics over which we have managed to throw but a thin net of legal rules, in truth the situation today is more the reverse. There is law at every turn — and only the most marginal opportunities for engaged political contestation. The footprint of national rules and national adjudication extends far beyond their nominal territorial jurisdiction. Private ordering, standards bodies, financial institutions and payment systems, tax systems, trade regimes — all are managed by legal expertise. Indeed, to say the world is covered in law is also to say we are increasingly governed by experts — legal experts. Even the story of the war in Iraq is overwhelmingly one of law, of military force mobilised, coordinated and legitimated by law. The difficulty is to understand more adequately what these experts do, the nature and limits of their vocabulary, and the possibilities for translating their work into politically contestable terms — or promoting the experience of responsible human freedom among the experts who govern our world.

The interpenetration of global political and economic life has placed questions of ‘political economy’ on the scholarly agenda across the social sciences. The author argues that international law could contribute to understanding and transforming centre–periphery patterns of dynamic inequality in global political economic life. The core elements of both economic and political activity – capital, labour, credit, and money, as well as public or private power and right – are legal institutions. Law is the link binding centres and peripheries to one another and structuring their interaction. It is also the vernacular through which power and wealth justify their exercise and shroud their authority. The author proposes rethinking international law as a terrain for political and economic struggle rather than as a normative or technical substitute for political choice, itself indifferent to natural flows of economic activity.