Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia is the most significant late 20th century English language monograph in the field of international law, and it is terrific to see it re-issued. The book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of the doctrinal materials and intellectual history of the discipline. It became an instant classic in the analysis of law's rhetorical structures, and it could well turn out to have been the last great original treatise in the international law field. It both synthesized the materials and demonstrated the impossibility of their being synthesized in a stable and intellectually coherent fashion. The treat in this re-issued edition is Martti's new epilogue. In it, he reflects on what he was seeking to achieve in ways that will open the text to new readings while remaining, I think, true to the spirit of the initial project.

… fulfilment of my first ambition – to describe international law in a way that would resonate with practitioner experience – necessitated that I resist the pull of either excessive “formalism” or excessive policy-oriented “realism”. In the course of writing, however, I began to realise that this way of stating the problem also contained the seeds of its resolution … I needed to think about my own experience as far from idiosyncratic and to examine the contrast between “formalism” and “realism” as an incident of the standard experience of any international lawyer in the normal contexts of academy or practice.

With his book “The Gentle Civilizer of Nations”, the Finnish expert on international law Martti Koskenniemi, became the most widely read author in his field overnight. In the “Gentle Civilizer”, Koskenniemi presented a new history of international law between 1870 and 1960. The tremendous success of this book rested less on an amazing number of revealing observations, but rather on its new take on the history of this discipline. In Koskenniemi's interpretation, the scientific project of international law did not start off as an endeavour that was centred on the sovereignty of nation-states. Instead, the international lawyers of that era saw their subject in the light of the idealist political project of internationalism. When they were forced to give up their high hopes in the course of the 20th century — this is where the twist of the book lies — they not only abandoned their dreams, but also their craft as lawyers. They became mere engineers of international relations, pragmatists, and apologists of governmental power. In order to retrieve the craft of international law, Koskenniemi concludes, the discipline needs to handle legal forms in a politically reflective manner. Koskenniemi has labelled this squaring of the circle, in a much-cited expression, as the “Culture of Formalism.”

From Apology to Utopia is a disturbing reading experience. I first came across Martti Koskenniemi's book of 1989 during research for my thesis on Hans Kelsen. In his monograph “Das Problem der Souveränität”, published immediately after the First World War, Kelsen attempted to destroy the central doctrinal pillars of the nineteenth century German international law discourse by exposing the ideological nature of its central doctrines, such as the concept of the sovereign will of the state, autolimitation and consent. 70 years later, the analytical programme of From Apology to Utopia deconstructed international law by exposing the inherent “political” nature of international legal discourse, interpreted as an argumentative practice. Exposing the unstable discursive boundaries between politics and international law is the central objective of this monograph. Martti Koskenniemi portrays international legal doctrine as an inherently contradictory and repetitive argumentative routine that is incapable of producing meaningful “legal” results. International lawyers somewhat tragically feel compelled to engage in this Sisyphean routine in order to maintain their professional identity.

For some time, there has been something paradoxical about Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia (hereinafter FATU). FATU might very well have been the single most influential book of the last 15 years in the field of international legal theory. Virtually all of my colleagues have, at one point or another, engaged with it and used it to sustain their arguments in diverse areas of the law (including, amusingly enough, even in commercial arbitration). Yet, as is well known to most law library users, FATU has long been out of print, making it extremely difficult to find a copy, even more so when, as is periodically the case at my home university, the available copy goes missing. FATU, in other words, seemed to be everywhere, but nowhere to be found. The prophet had believers. His tables of the Law, however, seemed to have disappeared. The splendid republication of FATU comes as great news to all of us who have struggled to access, let alone to possess, this seminal book.

Few books have attained the influence and impact of Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia (FATU); fewer still could have made anything like such an impact with a publication run and consequent distribution as small as FATU's. Thus, as has undoubtedly been said before, and will undoubtedly be repeated subsequently, Cambridge University Press must be congratulated on their decision to publish a new edition, with a far larger print run, and wider distribution.

“International Law is what international lawyers make of it”. Thus ends the new epilogue to the second edition of Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia (hereinafter FATU), a seminal work on international law, originally published in 1989 and now republished in 2005. Shortly thereafter, he also notes the inherent situatedness of all international legal practice, citing Outi Korhonen, which has a decisive influence on how international lawyers practice their trade, whether they are formalists, antiformalists, positivists, pragmatists or naturalists. Finally, Koskenniemi notes that the main political point of FATU is an empirical one, that the system of international law has a structural bias, wherein it favors some outcomes or distributive choices over others, especially showing a bias against the South or the Third World.

As the last straw, a question: where does it (From Apology to Utopia) lead us to, what are we to make of and with it (international law)? The author himself hints at an answer in the very last sentence of the Epilogue, which marks the difference between the original and this new edition of From Apology to Utopia (FATU), by pointing to his second Hauptwerk, the seminal Gentle Civilizer of Nations and the story about international lawyers it tells. Indeed, the last paragraph of FATU thereby becomes a sort of epi-epilogue, an interpretive afterthought on Gentle Civilizer, written after the original FATU, within the afterthought of FATU's new edition, written after Gentle Civilizer. The latter is taken to illustrate the consequences of FATU for both individual practitioner and academic lawyers, notably the continuous double bind between law and politics inherent in the structure of international law. That double bind demands, according to Koskenniemi, at once coolness and passion, that is, as he concludes, “a full mastery of the grammar and a sensitivity to the uses to which it is put.” This, of course, alludes once again to the twofold intent that inspires FATU: to disinter with archeological precision the grammatical structure of international law and to thereby enable its critique, or, as the author puts it in the Epilogue, to join a descriptive with a normative project. The double-edged argument that has resulted from this combination has uniquely captured the letter and spirit of international legal practice and has mesmerized the international legal profession ever since it first appeared in 1989. Together with Gentle Civilizer, it has justly made its author into one of the iconic figures of international legal theory of the intellectual fin-de-siècle of the outgoing twentieth and the incoming twenty-first century. Yet, for all the echoes FATU has been occasioning in virtually all corners of the legal theoretical spectrum, the consequences that flow from it for legal theory and practice have remained somewhat under-explored.

From the preceding essays, but also from the general discussion around From Apology, two themes emerge as a constant source of puzzlement, not least to myself. How does the argument in that book affect – if at all – the way we do international law? And what does the claim to be “critical” really mean? These are, I suppose, aspects of one larger set of problems that permeate the whole of that work. “Oh yes, it does describe the argumentative patterns pretty well. But it does not really change anything, does it?” One might approach this sort of query in different ways. It might be thought of as an expression of the classical theme about the relations of theory and practice in the social sciences. How do academic works influence the social world to which they are addressed? Or one might be more interested in the specific relationship between (academic) doctrines and legal practice – the “outside” and the “inside” of the legal profession.

Harmonisation of the different rights of withdrawal, enshrined in legislation on doorstep selling, distance selling, timesharing, and in the near future consumer credit, is amongst the top issues of the EC agenda on European private law. Germany, following its tradition of a well-organised system of private law rules, has tried for some time to establish a harmonised system at the national level. At the same time, Germany appears to have created one of the most detailed set of rules on the right of withdrawal in Europe, in particular with a view to the consequences of the withdrawal from a contract, and it has tried to find the right balance between the interests of consumers and traders, a challenge that will also come up at EC level.