Home and the world: the legal imagination of Martti Koskenniemi
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221132945 |
| Author | David Armitage |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Review Article |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221132945
International Relations
2023, Vol. 37(4) 654 –672
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00471178221132945
journals.sagepub.com/home/ire
Home and the world:
the legal imagination of
Martti Koskenniemi
David Armitage
Harvard University
Abstract
The Finnish lawyer-historian Martti Koskenniemi’s new book, To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth:
Legal Imagination and International Power, 1300–1870 (2021), is the culmination of a 30-year-long
project to deconstruct and historicise the reigning assumptions of the profession of international
law. This article evaluates To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth in the context of Koskenniemi’s larger
critical project as well as within the historiography of international law from the late 19th century
to the present. It argues that Koskenniemi’s genealogical method is revealing and frustrating in
equal measure: frustrating in its diffuseness and lack of overarching argument but revealing in
its scope, in its erudition and in its ambitions to disrupt traditional teleologies, to reveal the
constraining force of legal language and to expose European dialogues between ‘domestic’ and
international law over more than 500 years.
Keywords
genealogy, historiography, international law, law of nations
Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro (1786) never appears in studies of international relations
or international law. Perhaps it should. In both Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto and
Beaumarchais’s underlying play, the drama’s controlling figure, Count Almaviva, shapes
the law and speaks its language in domestic and foreign contexts alike. At home, he uses
aristocratic authority to abolish the ius primae noctis or droit de seigneur, the mythic
feudal right to rape his female tenants on the eve of their wedding. Yet when the Count
falls for Susanna, his valet Figaro’s fiancée, he hatches a plan to evade the change of law
Corresponding author:
David Armitage, Department of History, Harvard University, Robinson Hall, 35 Quincy Street, Cambridge,
MA 02138, USA.
Email: armitage@fas.harvard.edu
1132945IRE0010.1177/00471178221132945International RelationsArmitage
research-article2022
Review Article
Armitage 655
by going abroad. As the nefarious Count tells his two servants, they – and they alone –
must travel with him to a faraway posting, where local customary law would no longer
apply. The Spanish king has appointed Almaviva envoy to London where, Figaro sur-
mises in alarm, he will be but a messenger (corriero) for the minister (ministro) and
Susanna will become the Count’s secret ‘ministress’ (segreta ambasciatrice) and mis-
tress. Subject to diplomatic immunity under the law of nations, Almaviva would be dan-
gerously beyond the reach of both English and Spanish domestic law.
Mozart’s Count cloaks himself in the language of natural law and justice, but his
immoral designs are all too clear. The opera’s plot reveals the complex effort to under-
mine his extralegal scheme to rape Susanna. Many machinations later, with Susanna
protected and the Count ashamed, he joins the final chorus of celebration: Ah! Tutti con-
tenti / saremo così (‘All happy, we’ll be like this’) the entire cast sing together in their
frail humanity.1 The Countess is forgiving and the Count forgiven; by keeping Susanna
at home, they conform at last to local law. Almaviva knows how pliable the legal imagi-
nation can be even if, in the end, his legal skill fails him: he does not persuade, his
manipulation fumbles, and he does not attain his libertine goal – though hardly for lack
of trying. There will be no escape into an international realm where the strong do what
they can and their subordinates suffer what they must. Outside the bounds of the opera’s
imagined world, maybe Almaviva does go to London as envoy and there claims immu-
nity for some crime. Even if he did, Susanna would not be his victim.
Mozart and The Marriage of Figaro do not figure in the thousand pages of Martti
Koskenniemi’s massive, magisterial new study, To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth:
Legal Imagination and International Power, 1300–1870.2 Yet they might have done. At
first blush, opera buffa might seem a world away from the magna opera Koskenniemi
concerns himself with: academic treatises, law codes, diplomatic handbooks, legal pro-
ceedings and tracts of political theory. Yet before the Count’s legal language was Da
Ponte’s or Mozart’s, it was Beaumarchais’. Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, to
give him his full name, was not just a dramatist and musician but a spy and a diplomat
prominent in French support for the rebellious colonists during the American War of
Independence.3 He was also learned in the law. ‘Lawsuits were meat and drink to him—
he was in his element there’, remarked Goethe: the rape plot in The Marriage of Figaro
depended on the playwright’s knowledge of customary law, the law of nations and the
difference between them.4 Koskenniemi surveys just this terrain, the realm of what he
calls ‘the legal imagination’: that is, the field of possibilities the language of law defines
but does not quite confine; the contexts where persuasion reigns over proof; the arena
where rhetorical actors manipulate norms; and, above all, the space in which feats of
legal virtuosity can bridge the gap between the domestic and the foreign, the municipal
and the international. Count Almaviva is a creature of this legal imagination and a prac-
titioner of it, the product of both his creator’s experience of the droit des gens and his
critical representation of ancien régime law.5 Like Koskenniemi’s own rich cast of char-
acters, he knows how fluid the boundary between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘international’
is and how readily it might be manipulated.
The lawyer-scholar Martti Koskenniemi might be called the Mozart of international
law. Prodigiously prolific and unceasingly creative, he spans genres, periods and per-
spectives con brio, with an enviable ability to combine complexity with clarity. All these
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