Preface

I was motivated to write this book by two contradictory trends beginning in the second half of the twentieth century. The first is the growing importance of the discourses of human rights, cosmopolitanism, global constitutionalism, and democracy, along with the proliferation of international covenants, United Nations (UN) resolutions and international courts focused on promoting and enforcing them. The second is the use of these discourses and institutions to legitimate (or spur) the development of novel forms of hegemonic international law, new imperial formations, global hierarchies, and transgressions of existing international law by the powerful. Since the early 1990s the Janus-faced nature of humanitarian and “democratic” interventions, transformative occupations, and increasingly activist, intrusive, legislative, and at times rights-violating resolutions of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in the “war on terror,” has become evident. The intervention in Kosovo and the American war in Iraq are the two most obvious early examples. These events triggered my interest in international political and legal theory along with my determination to decode the ideological discourses on both sides of the conundrum just described.

It is striking that irrespective of whether one’s focus is on the first or the second trend, many analysts of legal and political globalization assume that the rules of international law based on the principles of sovereign equality, non-intervention, self-determination, and domestic jurisdiction are anachronistic today, as is the frame of an international society of sovereign states. Indeed it is claimed that both the concept of sovereignty and the ideal of the sovereign state should be abandoned. The task today, apparently, is to constitutionalize or fight institutional expressions of global right depending on one’s diagnosis and point of view, not to defend rules and concepts that allegedly no longer fit the contemporary constellation.