‘The Lady Doth Protest Too Much’ Kosovo, and the Turn to Ethics in International Law
| Published date | 01 March 2002 |
| Date | 01 March 2002 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.00373 |
THE
MODERN LAW REVIEW
Volume 65 No 2March 2002
‘The Lady Doth Protest Too Much’
Kosovo, and the Turn to Ethics in International Law
Martti Koskenniemi*
Most international lawyers approved of the 1999 bombing of Serbia by the
members of the North Atlantic alliance. But most of them also felt that it was not
compatible with a strict reading of the UN Charter. The article describes the
argumentative techniques through which international lawyers tried to
accommodate their moral intuitions with their professional competence. The
urge to achieve this, the article argues, arose from a general turn to ethics in the
profession that has been evident since the end of the Cold War. This has often
involved a shallow and dangerous moralisation which, if generalised, transforms
international law into an uncritical instrument for the foreign policy choices of
those whom power and privilege has put into decision-making positions.
In a famous talk nearly forty years ago Professor Martin Wight of the London
School of Economics posed the question about why there was no international
theory. One of the reasons he found is the fact that it would have to be expressed in
the languages of political theory and law. But these were languages that had been
developed in the thinking about the state and about the control of social life in
normal conditions:
Political theory and law are maps of experience or systems of action within the realm of
normal relationships and calculable results. They are the theory of the good life.
International theory is the theory of survival. What for political theory is the extreme case
(as revolution or civil war) is for international theory the regular case.1
The distinction between the normal and the exceptional came to be part of the
Realist explanation for why international law was such a weak structure. In the
domestic context, situations are routine. Political normality by far outweighs the
incidence of the exception – that is, ultimately revolution. By contrast, the
international context was idiosyncratic, and involved ‘the ultimate experience of
life and death, national existence and national extinction’. It was not the realm of
the regularised search for happiness or avoidance of displeasure: it was struggle for
survival. Political theories would not apply and legal rules would not work because
the need for survival far outweighed the need for compliance.
Lawyers are not, of course, insensitive to the distinction between the normal and
the exceptional. ‘Hard cases make bad law’ we say. Few would fail to distinguish
ßThe Modern Law Review Limited 2002 (MLR 65:2, March). Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 159
* Department of Public Law, University of Helsinki, Finland.
1 M. Wight, ‘Why is There is no International Theory?’ in H. Butterfield and M. Wight (eds),
Diplomatic Investigations. Essays in the Theory of International Politics (London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1966) 33.
between the law regulating the provision of parking tickets to diplomats and the
law concerning the use of force. In the recent Nuclear Weapons case (1996) the
International Court of Justice came very close to admitting that no law could
govern the case of self-defence when the very existence of the State was at stake.2
During the Cold War, international lawyers largely gave up any attempt to
conceive of the balance of power in terms of legal rules or principles. The dark
passion of Great Power politics overwhelmed law’s rational calculations. Thus
many have understood the post-1989 transformation as a move from an exceptional
situation to a normality where the rules of civilised behaviour would come to
govern international life. The limitation of the scope of law during the Cold War
had been an anomaly; now it was possible to restart the project of organising the
administration of the international society by the Rule of Law in the image of the
liberal West. Collective enforcement under the UN Charter ‘would function in a
regular and non-selective manner each time that circumstances required it, thus
providing an institutional guarantee to the broad core of constitutional principles’.3
Sovereignty would lose its exceptional force as a barrier against the enforcement of
human rights, democracy or the requirements of the global market. The indictment
of Pinochet and Milosevic would imply a rejection of the ‘culture of impunity’ that
seemed such a violation of normal legal accountability.4The creation of the ad hoc
war crimes tribunals on the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the establishment
of the International Criminal Court in Rome in 1998 would augur a ‘new world
order based on the rule of international law’5and continue the constitutionalisation
of the international order, celebrated as a major implication of the new dispute-
settlement system under the World Trade Organisation.6
The completion of the international legal order by bringing ‘exceptional’ situa-
tions within its compass has taken place through an increasing deformalization,
accompanied by a turn to ethics in the profession. To illustrate this, I shall examine
the legal argument about the bombing of Serbia by the North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation (NATO) in 1999. This enables me to provide a focused genealogy of
modern international law as it moves, in a familiar succession of argumentative
steps, from formalism to ethics, in order to capture within law a great crisis that
under the old, ‘realistic’ view would have fallen beyond its scope. But it also
allows me to argue that the obsession to extend the law to such crises, while
understandable in historical perspective, enlists political energies to support causes
dictated by the hegemonic powers and is unresponsive to the violence and injustice
that sustain the global everyday. The ‘turn to ethics’ is profoundly conservative in
2 ICJ, Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, Advisory Opinion, Reports 1996, paras 90–97
and 105 E (dispositif).
3 G. Abi-Saab, ‘Whither the International Community’ 9 EJIL (1998) 264.
4 Out of the wealth of writings on the matter cf Jill M. Sears, ‘Confronting the ‘‘Culture of Impunity’’:
Immunity of Heads of State from Nuremberg to ex parte Pinochet’ 42 GYIL 1999 125–146.
5 A. Cassese, ‘On the Current Trend towards Criminal Prosecution and Punishment of Breaches of
International Humanitarian Law’ 9 EJIL (1998) 8. The establishment of war crimes tribunals as an
aspect of liberal legalism’s projection of domestic ideals at the international level is usefully discussed
in G.J. Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance. The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000) esp 16–36.
6 cf Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann, ‘The WTO Constitution and the Millennium Road’ in Marco Bronkers
and Reinhard Quick (eds), New Directions in International Economic Law. Essays in Honour of John
H. Jackson (The Hague: Kluwer, 2000) 111–133 and id. ‘Constitutionalism and International
Adjudication: How to Constitutionalize the UN Dispute Settlement System?’ 31 NY. Univ J. of Intl L
& Pol (1999) 753–790. Astonishingly, many international lawyers continue to interpret the UN
Charter as a ‘constitution of mankind’, eg Bruno Simma and Andreas Paulus, ‘The ‘‘International
Community’’ Facing the Challenge of Globalization’ 9 EJIL (1998) 274.
The Modern Law Review [Vol. 65
160 ßThe Modern Law Review Limited 2002
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