Professor Martti Koskenniemi:  'History of the Law of Nations: Sovereignty and Property'

“The recent surge of interest in the history of international law has been inspired by an effort to examine the field’s complex relationship to the expansion of European power—imperialist tool or an instrument of resistance? I welcome the view of the history of international law as a study of the establishment, maintenance and critique of international power. But, I argue, this will necessitate operating with a wider notion of ‘international law’ than has been usual. Instead of focusing exclusively on sovereign power—war and diplomacy—attention ought to be directed on the relations of sovereignty and property.

“The legal specificity of European power, I will argue, lies in the way it has always combined public law sovereignty with the powers of private ownership. Examples include the use of trading companies to carry out trade and colonial expansion but also ways in which sovereign power back home has been created out of allocating monopolies or offices to private actors. For a long time, theorists used the notion of dominium to cover both types of power. But also in practice, European power has constructed itself out of some combination of private rights and public sovereignty—though they have also frequently clashed against each other. But however their relations have been organised, only by considering both is it possible to have a realistic image of the role of law in the world of international power.”

Professor Martti Koskenniemi is Academy Professor and Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki, a Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School, and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has held visiting professorships at New York University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Utrecht, Columbia University, the University of São Paulo, the University of Toronto, and the universities of Paris I, II, X and XVI.

He was a member of the Finnish diplomatic service from 1978 to 1994 and of the International Law Commission (UN) from 2002 to 2006. His publications include From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument (1989), The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (2001), The Politics of International Law (2011), and The Cambridge Companion to International Law (2012, co-edited with Professor James Crawford). He is a graduate of the universities of Turku and Oxford, and holds the degree of Doctorate of Laws honoris causa from the universities of Uppsala and Frankfurt.

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