{"id":1662,"date":"2005-07-01T08:54:07","date_gmt":"2005-07-01T12:54:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/site\/?p=1662"},"modified":"2011-03-20T11:00:35","modified_gmt":"2011-03-20T15:00:35","slug":"issue_46-2_mieville","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/2005\/07\/issue_46-2_mieville\/","title":{"rendered":"Anxiety and the Sidekick State"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Abstract:<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>In a quirk of parallel evolution, the annual <\/em><em>United Kingdom Materials on International Law <\/em><em>(\u201cUKMIL\u201d)  is organized according to Marx\u2019s methodology, \u201crising from the abstract  to the concrete.\u201d For twenty years, however, for all the reams of  material the government put out, nothing of substance could be found to  fill the first section, the broadest philosophical category on the  \u201cnature, basis, [and] purpose\u201d of \u201cinternational law in general.\u201d\u00a0 Then,  in 2003, the UKMIL found its jurisprudential voice.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw waxed descriptive and transformative, in a burst of middlebrow messianism:<\/em><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Events  since September 11 . . . raise very large questions about the  underlying assumptions of international relations . . . since the Peace  of Westphalia . . . that the best guarantor of peace and security was to  respect the territorial integrity of sovereign states . . . [W]e have  to begin a discussion about how those principles are revisited in the  modern environment because of threats posed other than by normally  functioning sovereign states, posed by rogue states, posed by  international terrorism, posed by others who are acting in an extremely  oppressive way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>A<em>lmost simultaneously with Straw\u2019s statement, sixteen scholars of international law signed a letter in <\/em>The Guardian<em> expressing grave reservations about the soon-to-be-launched Iraq War.  This then led to the writing of \u201cWe Are Teachers of International Law,\u201d  an extraordinary piece of critical self-examination by four of the  original scholars.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>In its ten and a half pages, the authors ask  sixty-five questions, none of which they answer; indeed, they conclude  by asking whether the most important questions are those that should go  unanswered. In its critical precision, and in its very angst, this  article is perhaps the key document for the understanding of  contemporary British thinking in international law, particularly when  considered in conjunction with the government\u2019s enthusiastic if lumpen  analysis, as represented by Straw\u2019s speech.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>In the United  Kingdom, public interest in international law has soared. Paradigmatic  of this moment is the tension between the passionate evocation of a  \u201cnew\u201d international law by perpetrators of a war widely denounced as  illegal and the deep anxieties about the law expressed by scholars of  the field. In what follows, I attempt to map the recent moves of British  international law, into a putatively new paradigm and back out again,  and to the center of political debate. Illustrating how we got where we  are might suggest which of the current approaches to the field are the  most fruitful and, hopefully, where we might go next.<\/em><strong><br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the United Kingdom, public interest in international law has soared. In what follows, I attempt to map the recent moves of British international law, into a putatively new paradigm and back out again, and to the center of political debate. Illustrating how we got where we are might suggest which of the current approaches to the field are the most fruitful and, hopefully, where we might go next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[123],"tags":[40,62],"class_list":["post-1662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-print-archives","tag-adr","tag-europe"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peZu3S-qO","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1662\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}