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International Law and the Populist Moment: A Comment on Martti Koskenniemi's Enchanted by the Tools? International Law and Enlightenment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2019

Anne Orford*
Affiliation:
Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, Michael D. Kirby Chair of International Law, and Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, Melbourne Law School.

Abstract

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Type
Twenty-First Annual Grotius Lecture
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by The American Society of International Law

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References

1 Martti Koskenniemi, Enchanted by the Tools? International Law and Enlightenment, 35 Am. U. Int'l L. Rev. __ (2019).

2 See, e.g., Craig Calhoun, Brexit Is a Mutiny Against the Cosmopolitan Elite, 33 New Persp. Q. 50 (2016); Philip Alston, The Populist Challenge to Human Rights, 9 J. Hum. Rts. Prac. 1 (2017); Eric Posner, Liberal Internationalism and the Populist Backlash 1 (Univ. Chi., Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper, No. 606, 2017); Francis Fukuyama & Robert Muggah, Populism Is Poisoning the Global Liberal Order, Globe & Mail, Jan. 29, 2018; House of Lords Select Committee on International Relations, UK Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, HL Paper 250 (Dec. 2018); Constance Duncombe & Tim Dunne, After Liberal World Order, 94 Int'l Aff. 25 (2018); James Crawford, The Current Political Discourse Concerning International Law, 81 Mod. L. Rev. 1 (2018); Laurence Burgorgue-Larsen, Populism and Human Rights: From Disenchantment to Democratic Riposte 1 (iCourts Working Paper Series, No. 156, 2019).

3 Felix Cohen, Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach, 35 Colum. L. Rev. 809, 822 (1935).

4 James Simpson, Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (2019).

5 Koskenniemi, supra note 1 (citing Thomas M. Franck, The Empowered Self: Law and Society in the Age of Individualism 39 (1999)).

6 See id. (Koskenniemi refers there to “the famous Hart-Devlin debate in the 1960s.”). See generally Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals (1965); H.L.A. Hart, Law, Liberty, Morality (1963) (The Hart-Devlin debate over the relation between law and morality took place in the context of Wolfenden Committee proposal to decriminalize male homosexual activity in private).

7 Id.

8 See Martti Koskenniemi, International Law and the Far Right: Reflections on Law and Cynicism, Annual T.M.C. Asser Lecture 2018 (Nov. 29, 2018), https://www.asser.nl/annual-lecture/annual-tmc-asser-lecture-2018; see also Joseph Weiler, The European Culture War 2003–2019, Herbert W. Vaughan Memorial Lecture, The Federalist Society, Harvard Law School (Feb. 6, 2019) (arguing similarly that the backlash against the European Union is a result of the “culture war” conducted by E.U. institutions in the name of human rights against Christian values, identity, and patriotism rather than by a concern with inequality or economic well-being); see Erick Trickey, Europe's Culture Crisis, Harv. L. Today (Feb. 13, 2019), https://today.law.harvard.edu/europes-culture-crisis (providing a report on this lecture).

9 Antonio R. Parra, The History of ICSID 25 (2012).

10 Heather L. Bray, Understanding Change: Evolution from International Claims Commissions to Investment Treaty Arbitration, in International Investment Law and History 102, 104, 118 (Stephan W. Schill, Christian J. Tams & Rainer Hofmann eds., 2018).

11 UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2018, at 91 (2018).

12 Id. at 95.

13 John H. Jackson, The Crumbling Institutions of the Liberal Trade System, 12 J. World Trade 93, 95 (1978).

14 Id.

15 Cosette D. Creamer, From the WTO's Crown Jewel to its Crown of Thorns, 113 AJIL Unbound 51 (2019).

16 Joseph H.H. Weiler, The Rule of Lawyers and the Ethos of Diplomats: Reflections on the Internal and External Legitimacy of WTO Dispute Settlement, 35 J. World Trade 191, 199 (2001).

17 See Robert Howse, Adjudicative Legitimacy and Treaty Interpretation in International Trade Law: The Early Years of WTO Jurisprudence, in The EU, the WTO, and the NAFTA: Towards a Common Law of International Trade 35 (Joseph H.H. Weiler ed., 2000).

18 Remarks of Lori Fisler Damrosch, Human Rights, Terrorism and Trade, 96 ASIL Proc. 128, 130 (2002).

19 See also Anne Orford, A Global Rule of Law, in The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law (Martin Loughlin & Jens Meierhenrich eds., forthcoming 2019).

20 See The Backlash Against Investment Arbitration: Perceptions and Reality (Michael Waibel, Asha Kaushal, Kyo-Hwa Chung & Claire Balchin eds., 2010).

21 See Fabio Costa Morosini & Michelle Sanchez Badin, Petrobras in Bolivia: Is There a Rule of Law in the “Primitive” World?, in Global Private International Law: Adjudication Without Frontiers 381 (Horatia Muir Watt, Lucia Bíziková, Agatha Brandão de Oliveira & Diego P. Fernández Arroyo eds., 2019) (providing a discussion of the context informing legal disputes over energy resources in Bolivia during that period).

22 See UNCTAD, supra note 11, at 88; see also UNCTAD, World Investment Report (2019) (showing that the number of terminations continued to rise to twenty-four in 2018, but countries entered into forty new investment agreements).

23 Manfred Elsig et al., Trump Is Fighting an Open War on Trade. His Stealth War on Trade May Be Even More Important, Wash. Post (Sept. 27, 2017); Gregory Shaffer, A Tragedy in the Making? The Decline of Law and the Return of Power in International Trade Relations, 44 Yale J. Int'l L. 1 (2019).

24 Sergio Puig, The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement: A Glimpse into the Geoeconomic World Order, 113 AJIL Unbound 56 (2019).

25 Shaffer, supra note 23, at 17.

26 Anne Orford, Food Security, Free Trade, and the Battle for the State, 11 J. Int'l L. & Int'l Rel. 1 (2015); Anne Orford, Law, Economics, and the History of Free Trade: A Response, 11 J. Int'l L. & Int'l Rel. 155 (2015).

27 See Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable 111 (2016) (noting that while industrial capitalism has met with resistance on every continent, in Asia this resistance was articulated by figures of great moral authority who pointed directly to the issue of the material limits of liberalism. Ghosh quotes the 1928 pronouncement of Mahatma Gandhi: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. If an entire nation of 300 millions took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”).

28 Koskenniemi, supra note 1.

29 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013).

30 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Afterword, 116 S. Atl. Q. 163, 166 (2017).

31 See Cihan Aksan & Jon Bailes, One Question Gilets Jaunes, St. Nature (June 6, 2019), https://stateofnatureblog.com/one-question-gilets-jaunes (providing a range of analyses of the Gilets Jaunes movement that address its relation to and significance for broader political struggles of working people); see also Étienne Balibar, Gilets Jaunes”: The Meaning of the Confrontation, Open Democracy (Dec. 20, 2018), https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/gilets-jaunes-meaning-of-confrontation (presenting an interpretation of the Gilets Jaunes as inventing a form of “counter-populism”).

32 See Gert Goeminne & Karen François, The Thing Called Environment: What It Is and How to Be Concerned with It, 32 Oxford Lit. Rev. 109 (2010); Julia Dehm, One Tonne of Carbon Dioxide Equivalent (1tCO 2e), in International Law's Objects 305 (Jessie Hohmann & Daniel Joyce eds., 2018).

33 See Mark Phythian, Intelligence Failure as a Mutually Reinforcing Politico-Intelligence Dynamic: The Chilcot Report and the Nature of the Iraq WMD Intelligence Failure, 87 Brit. Y.B. Int'l L. 196 (2018) (providing an analysis of the aspects of the Chilcot Report that address intelligence failure).

34 See Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (1998) (discussing the relation between facts and the broader system within which they are produced).

35 See, e.g., Martin Jay, Reason After Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (2016).

36 See Duncan Kennedy, The Hermeneutic of Suspicion in Contemporary American Legal Thought, 25 L. & Critique 91 (2014) (providing further discussion on the operation of the “hermeneutic of suspicion”).

37 S. M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (2016).

38 I thank James Der Derian for this formulation.

39 Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life 341 (1985).

40 I d.

41 See Anne Orford, Scientific Reason and the Discipline of International Law, 25 Eur. J. Int'l L. 369 (2014) (discussing the broader implications of this insight for international law).

42 See Judith N. Shklar, Political Theory and the Rule of Law, in Political Thought and Political Thinkers 25 (Stanley Hoffmann ed., 1998) (discussing this point in relation to the rule of law more broadly).

43 Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism 11 (2018).

44 Id.; see also Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right (2019).