Martti Koskenniemi: Powers of Sovereignty - Powers of Paradox

Event on November 6, 2023
Prof. Martti Koskenniemi is a distinguished international practitioner and scholar and one of the world’s leading theorists of international law.  His many highly acclaimed books include From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument and The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1879-1960.  As a member of the United Nations’ International Law Commission (2002-2006), he led its famous Report on the Fragmentation of International Law. Koskenniemi is currently William D. Zabel `61 Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Harvard Law School; he is Professor Emeritus of International Law at the University of Helsinki, and has held numerous visiting professorships across the world, and has received honorary doctorates from the universities of Uppsala, McGill, Frankfurt, Tartu and the European University Institute.
His talk addressed the variable content that “sovereignty” has received in legal and political history as it has been invoked in order to defend or attack particular arrangements of power. The purpose was to examine sovereignty as a polemical concept. Its special power as such depends on the way it invokes the registers of both description and prescription. As a descriptive notion, it can be used to characterize both the power of a political entity living in complete isolation from others (“sovereignty” as autarky) as well of an entity completely tied in a web of social relations (“sovereignty” as integration). As a prescriptive notion, it may be made to appear as a summary of all the rights, powers and privileges that a particular status entails (sovereignty as “law”), or as a source from which all legal rights, powers and privileges emanate but which stands itself outside them (sovereignty as “political”, or “sociological” notion).

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Two questions: why is the host wearing a mask?! Secondly, shouldn't Martti make reference to deliberate and willing relinquishing of sovereignty by Finland (especially since he made a comment in context of paradox when his country joined the EU) when it decided to join NATO with concsequential catastrophic loss of independence and exposure to a war. Why did the country willingly accept to became a part of the new American colony. The same phenomenon obviously applies to other, confusingly most powerful European nations like Germany whose leaders effectively and willingly abandoned the fundamental concept of sovereignty and made a number of decisions that are destroying their nations in the context of economy and national security. German leadership for example, are openly and explicitly saying that they would not take German people's interests into account when making most important decisions regarding the war in Ukraine. How would Marttii explain this extraordinary and most recent development in the context of sovereignty?