Content area
Full Text
Koskenniemi, Martti. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 18701960. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001. Pp. xiv, 558. Index. $95, L65.
The Gentle Civilizer of Nations by Martti Koskenniemi is both impressive and elusiveelusive not because of any obscurity in the writing, but rather because of the complexity of the issues it addresses. Indeed, the book is not even entirely easy to categorize. It is certainly concerned with history, in that it comprises essays about international law and international lawyers in the period 1870-1960. But it is not concerned to investigate in any detail the evolution of specific doctrines of international law, or changes in the practices of states, or the rise and fall of international institutions of one kind or another, or, indeed, a host of other issues that might legitimately concern historians. Instead, the essays seem to me to address two basic questions. First is the invention of the profession of international lawyer. The second is the identification and analysis of the understandings within this profession as to what it was that its members were supposed to profess. And since certain forms of skepticism have cast doubt on the very possibility of regulating the conduct of international affairs, the essays end with a discussion of the possibility and merits of pursuing the ideal of the rule of law.
With respect to the first question, international law, eo nomine, did not exist before the nineteenth century. There was only the law of nature and the law of nations, categories derived from Roman law. More importantly, there were no international lawyers, in the sense of persons who conceived of themselves as forming a distinct profession of experts, linked together by their concern to expound, develop, and in some sense engage in making practical use of a body of knowledge that was thought to possess some kind of unity. Today, hordes of people, of uncertain number,1 describe themselves professionally as international lawyers, and whole forests are struck down to provide the raw material for the publication of their views. It is hard sometimes to grasp that there was a time, not so very long ago, when there existed no such people, any more than there were, in those unenlightened...