Opening words

The parking lot next to a sports hall in the Herttoniemenranta area of Helsinki presents a puzzling sight. The lot has some forty demarcated parking places which, in itself, is no cause for surprise: this is what one would expect in a parking lot. What is cause for surprise, however, is that next to one of the parking spaces, there is a ‘no parking’ sign: a typical example of conflicting instructions. As an example of conflicting instructions, it is of course not all that uncommon: legislators, at whatever level of governance, may on occasion not realise that instruction A is incompatible with instruction B, or rule A is in conflict with rule B. What makes the case of the parking lot and the ‘no parking’ sign all the more curious, however, is that the norms do not exist merely in abstract form, as words on paper, but have alsomet with physical implementation: someone had to build the parking lot and paint the stripes demarcating one parking space from the next, and someone had to put up the ‘no parking’ sign.

This is not a book about parking signs, or conflicting norm-setting at the local level. It is, instead, a study of the topic of conflicting norms on the international level, where two of the elements characterising the parking problem are usually lacking: international norms do not result from a single norm-setting agency, and typically with international norms, they exist first and foremost as words on paper.