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Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 June 2018
Why all this interest in the history of international law today? A partial explanation can surely be found from the end of the 20-year period of liberal-internationalist ascendancy (1989–2008) and the perplexity that has followed its demise. Mark Zuckerberg put it succinctly in a manifesto on Building Global Community in Facebook in February 2017. When his company started, he noted, it was to ‘bring . . . us closer together and build . . . a global community’. ‘[T]his idea’, he suggested, ‘was not controversial’. But suddenly there has emerged a ‘movement for withdrawing from global connection’. Nor have international law scholars rested silent. Eric Posner has termed the present moment – with glee – as the ‘backlash’ against ‘liberal cosmopolitanism’. More soberly, perhaps, Philip Alston has noted the rise of ‘challenges [to] the human rights movement’ that are ‘fundamentally different from much of what has gone before’ while James Crawford has warned against ‘large-scale retreat into nativism and unilateralism’. What used to be a clear and broadly shared objective – building of a global community – is no longer so clearly visible. So, the temptation might be to look backwards instead and ask, ‘how did we get here?’.
Professor of International Law, University of Helsinki [martti.koskenniemi@helsinki.fi].
1 Posner, E., ‘Liberal Internationalism and the Populist Backlash’, U Chicago Public Law Working Paper, No. 606 (2017)Google Scholar; Alston, P., ‘The Populist Challenge to Human Rights’ (2017) 9 Journal of Human Rights Practice 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crawford, J., ‘The Current Political Discourse Concerning International Law’ (2018) 81 The Modern Law Review 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 I have elaborated this point, e.g., in ‘What Should International Legal History Become?’, in S. Kadelbach, T. Kleinlein and D. Roith-Isigkleit (eds.), System, Order and International Law. The Early History of International Legal Thought from Machiavelli to Hegel (2017), 381.
3 See M. Koskenniemi, W. Rech and M. Fonseca (eds.), International Law and Empire: Historical Explorations (2016); M. Koskenniemi, M. Garcia-Salmones and P. Amorosa (eds.), International Law and Religion: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2017).
4 My use of ‘legal imagination’ resembles Duncan Kennedy's ‘legal consciousness’ (‘a vocabulary of concepts and typical arguments’ or a ‘langue’ plus the specific utterances produced in that vocabulary) but is larger because even as legal imagination usually operates within a certain legal consciousness, it also may sometimes transcend its boundaries. See Kennedy, D., ‘Three Globalizations of Law and Legal Thought’, in Trubek, D.M. and Santos, A. (eds.), The New Law and Economic Development (2006), 23Google Scholar.
5 A parallel design is visible behind another collective work, namely the volume by F. Johns, R. Joyce and S. Pahuja (eds.), Events: The Force of International Law (2011).
6 Here the works of Lauren Benton have been of great significance. See, e.g., A Search for Sovereignty. Law and Geography in European Empire 1400-1900 (2010).
7 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth of Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, available at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf.
