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How Far Is It from Münster and Osnabrück to Kampala? State Aggression, the Use of Force, and Statehood from a World Society Perspective

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Rethinking the Crime of Aggression

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Abstract

This chapter first reconstructs ongoing debates about the crime of state aggression as expressions of a seemingly never-ending exchange between the ideal types of power and law in international politics. Section 4.2 places these ideal types into the context of a historical-sociological perspective on systems of politics and law in world society. The aim is to provide a reading in terms of function and social evolution rather than in terms of normative argument. Thirdly, and against the background of this reading, a cautiously optimistic assessment of the developments around the crime of state aggression is advanced. Such an assessment is only possible, however, if world politics is viewed through a specific frame; as a realm characterized by the simultaneous presence of different forms of organizing political authority beyond the territorial State.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In terms of the philosophy of law, this remark draws on the insights of both Benjamin 2015 and Derrida 1990 as well as on the figure of sovereignty as ultimately a form of the dissolution of the paradoxicality that at some point there is no ‘ground’ below the ‘ground’, so to speak (see also Luhmann 1997).

  2. 2.

    Needless to say, the reference here is to the well-established caricature view in which ‘Westphalia’ simply stands as shorthand for a system of territorial states characterized by exclusive sovereignty, rather than to the historical Peace of Westphalia that primarily was about the order of the Empire.

  3. 3.

    Article 8bis (1) Rome Statute.

  4. 4.

    Lavers 2013, p. 504.

  5. 5.

    Koh 2015, p. 266 (second emphasis added).

  6. 6.

    Franck 1970.

  7. 7.

    Franck 2003, p. 607.

  8. 8.

    See further below, for the definition of aggression, the Kampala amendment refers to the definition laid down in the UN GA Resolution 3314 (XXIX) of 14 December 1974.

  9. 9.

    Simpson 2007, p. 83.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., p. 84.

  11. 11.

    Ibid., p. 151.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., p. 124.

  13. 13.

    Van Schaack 2011, p. 600.

  14. 14.

    Cowell and Magini 2017, p. 519.

  15. 15.

    See Brown 2014.

  16. 16.

    For a comprehensive commentary, see Kreß and Barriga 2017.

  17. 17.

    For an extensive discussion, see May 2008, pp. 273–318.

  18. 18.

    The ‘motive’ at play here is to see politics and law as strict opposites, as described by Shklar 1986.

  19. 19.

    This is the ‘caricature’ view of political realism that arguably has become rather ‘real’ through being the standard used in textbooks. The main works of political realism tend to be rather nuanced in their treatment of the role of international law (being written, as most notably the case with Hans Morgenthau, by lawyers themselves; see Morgenthau and Thompson 1985).

  20. 20.

    The ‘from-to’ figure of speech is actually used quite often in the specific literature on the crime of state aggression, see, for example, Trahan 2018.

  21. 21.

    Cf. Albert and Müller 2016.

  22. 22.

    It should be noted that this structural coupling refers to the dynamics of the mutual observation, perturbation, and linking between communicatively constituted social systems. These reflect ‘historical political struggles’, rather than constituting a sphere somehow ‘beyond’ social systems, cf. Kratochwil 2014, p. 22.

  23. 23.

    Kreß and Barriga 2017.

  24. 24.

    See, as but two examples, again Kreß and Barriga 2017; Sayapin 2004.

  25. 25.

    Kaul 2011, p. 12.

  26. 26.

    Wilson 2009, p. 3.

  27. 27.

    See Thornhill and Smirnova 2018.

  28. 28.

    Although in a long-term perspective such arguments could be made without implying a teleological account however, cf. Brunkhorst 2014; Elias 1997.

  29. 29.

    See Meyer et al. 1997.

  30. 30.

    Brunkhorst 2014, p. 282.

  31. 31.

    Kratochwil 2018.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., p. 309.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., p. 310.

  34. 34.

    Cf. Paulus 2010.

  35. 35.

    See the discussion in Brown 2014 and Cowell and Magini 2017.

  36. 36.

    Luhmann 1997, p. 478 (translation by MA).

  37. 37.

    Cf. Günther 1988.

  38. 38.

    See Wiener 2018.

  39. 39.

    Simpson 2007, p. 148.

  40. 40.

    Luhmann 1997, p. 582.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Bielefeld, Universitätsst. 25, 33615, Bielefeld, Germany

    Mathias Albert

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  1. Department of Law, Philipps University of Marburg, Marburg, Germany

    Stefanie Bock

  2. Department of History, Philipps University of Marburg, Marburg, Germany

    Eckart Conze

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Albert, M. (2022). How Far Is It from Münster and Osnabrück to Kampala? State Aggression, the Use of Force, and Statehood from a World Society Perspective. In: Bock, S., Conze, E. (eds) Rethinking the Crime of Aggression. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-467-9_4

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