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We Need to Cut Off the Head of the King: Past, Present, and Future Approaches to International Soft Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2012

MATTHIAS GOLDMANN
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Abstract

This article surveys contemporary approaches to international soft law, such as various types of legal positivism, legal realism, critical legal studies, and global administrative law. It scrutinizes to what extent the concept of law endorsed by each of these approaches is able to tackle two challenges caused by the spread of soft law as a means of governance: (1) the fact that international soft law is today often the functional equivalent of international treaties and (2) the contestations of the legitimacy of soft law. It concludes that discursive approaches that stress the public character of international law appear very promising, because they link broad concepts of law with considerations of legitimacy. However, since international institutions today exercise public authority not only through soft law or hard law, but also through non-legal instruments like information, the article argues that one ultimately needs to conceptually dissociate the concept of international law from the concept of public authority.

Keywords

discourse theorylegal positivismlegal theorypublic authoritysoft law
Type
SYMPOSIUM ON SOFT LAW
Information
Leiden Journal of International Law , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , June 2012 , pp. 335 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law 2012

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References

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44 A. Verdross, Die Verfassung der Völkerrechtsgemeinschaft (1926), 21; his criticism of Jellinek seems unjustified. Jellinek does not base the validity of international law solely on state consent, but rather on the objective purposes that each state pursues with the treaty and that he believes to bind the state; see M. Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument (2005), 129, footnote 251.

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51 See, e.g., H. Lauterpacht, The Function of Law in the International Community (1933), 51; on this, Koskenniemi, supra note 19, at 361.

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53 M. Virally, ‘La distinction entre textes internationaux de portée juridique et textes internationaux dépourvus de portée juridique: Rapport provisoire’, (1983) 60-I AIDI 116, at 245. This is not a feature common to all international treaties; see Klabbers, supra note 31, at 89.

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56 See, however, Virally, supra note 53, at 242.

57 Heusel, supra note 32, at 275, believes that the non-legal nature of soft law is a ‘trivial’ fact. Such a conclusion is only possible if one ignores the external point of view entirely. His conclusion is not trivial, but circular.

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62 Cf. the dispute between Athens and Mytilene in Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (translated by D. Grene) (1959).

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64 Groundbreaking: H. J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (1949); K. N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (1979), especially 102.

65 G. J. H. van Hoof, Rethinking the Sources of International Law (1983), 187, therefore calls this the ‘soft law approach’.

66 Fastenrath, supra note 18, at 84.

67 This presupposes that a distinction between sources of law and subsidiary means for their determination is theoretically possible, as Art. 38, para. 1(d) of the ICJ Statute suggests. Even those who disagree that such a distinction is possible might agree that sources and subsidiary means can be distinguished by the different roles they play in legal discourse.

68 See, inter alia, I. Detter, Law Making by International Organizations (1965), 207; Bothe, supra note 54; Seidl-Hohenveldern, I., ‘International Economic Soft Law’, (1979 (1980)) 163 Recueil des cours 165Google Scholar; Thürer, D., ‘Soft Law’, in Bernhardt, R. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Public International Law, 4th edn (2000), 452Google Scholar; on UN Declarations, see O. Y. Asamoah, The Legal Significance of the Declarations of the General Assembly of the United Nations (1966), 19, at 227; Virally, supra notes 52 and 53; Klabbers, supra note 31, at 188.

69 Such instruments are now widely recognized as proper sources of law; see J. D. Aston, Sekundärgesetzgebung internationaler Organisationen zwischen mitgliedstaatlicher Souveränität und Gemeinschaftsdisziplin (2005); Benzing, M., ‘International Organizations or Institutions, Secondary Law’, in Wolfrum, R. (ed.), Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law (2007)Google Scholar.

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86 Abi-Saab, supra note 81, at 36; see also Fastenrath, supra note 60, at 322. According to Fastenrath, supra note 18, at 88, Art. 38 of the ICJ Statute was originally intended to be enumerative.

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88 Van Hoof, supra note 65, at 187.

89 OECD Arrangement on Export Credits, TAD/PG(2011)4, 3 March 2011, para. 2.

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117 Hobbes, supra note 21, Chapter XIII; Hegel, supra note 20, para. 330.

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119 Ibid., at 85.

120 Ibid., at 185.

121 Ibid., at 84, 90.

122 Ibid., at 90.

123 R. M. Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement (1986), 2, at 5.

124 Ibid., at 8.

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126 Koskenniemi, supra note 14.

127 Koskenniemi, supra note 44, at 600. He calls this the ‘weak indeterminacy thesis’.

128 Ibid., at 606.

129 Ibid., at 616; Koskenniemi, supra note 19, at 494, especially at 500.

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137 Kammerhofer and d'Aspremont, supra note 133, at 8; d'Aspremont, Formalism and the Sources of International Law, supra note 134, at 186.

138 D'Aspremont calls this the ‘normative character’ of law; cf. Formalism, supra note 134, at 29.

139 D'Aspremont, supra note 136, at 435.

140 F. Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions (1989); Onuf, supra note 113.

141 Kratochwil, supra note 140, at 205.

142 Ibid., at 200.

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145 Ibid., at 209.

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147 Onuf, supra note 113, at 397.

148 Ibid., at 406.

149 See, already, Gottlieb, G., ‘The Nature of International Law: Toward a Second Concept of Law’, in Black, C. E. and Falk, R. A. (eds.), The Future of the International Legal Order, Vol. 4: The Structure of the International Environment (1972), 331Google Scholar.

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151 Habermas, supra note 8, at 45.

152 Luhmann supra note 111.

153 Luhmann supra note 8, at 38.

154 Ibid., at 98.

155 Ibid., at 440.

156 G. Teubner and A. Fischer-Lescano, Regime-Kollisionen (2006), 37.

157 Ibid., at 25.

158 Ibid., at 55 (‘autoconstitutional regimes’).

159 Teubner, G., ‘“Global Bukowina”: Legal Pluralism in the World Society’, in Teubner, G. (ed.), Global Law without a State (1997) 3, at 22Google Scholar.

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164 L. L. Fuller, The Morality of Law (1964), 33. Those criteria are generality, promulgation, limited retroactivity, clarity, absence of contradictions, not requiring the impossible, constancy through time, and congruence between official action and declared rule.

165 Brunnée and Toope, supra note 163, at 53–4, 350–2.

166 Dyzenhaus, supra note 163, at 1.

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169 Ibid., at 117.

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173 Ibid., at 32.

174 Ibid., at 41.

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176 Kingsbury, B., ‘Omnilateralism and Partial International Communities: Contributions of the Emerging Global Administrative Law’, (2005) 104 Journal of International Law and Diplomacy 98Google Scholar, at 110; cf. H. Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, Book 3 (1625, reprinted 1738), Chapter I.

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178 Klabbers, supra note 168, at 122.

179 M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922, 1972 edn), 468, Part 2, Chapter VII, para. 5.

180 Grotius, supra note 46, Book 1, Chapters I, XII.

181 Somek, supra note 171, at 991.

182 Kingsbury, supra note 170, passim.

183 See also N. Krisch, Beyond Constitutionalism: The Pluralist Structure of Postnational Law (2011), Chapter 7.

184 Besson, S., ‘Theorizing the Sources of International Law’, in Besson, S. and Tasioulas, J. (eds.), The Philosophy of International Law (2010), 163, at 173Google Scholar; see Besson, , ‘The Authority of International Law: Lifting the State Veil’, (2010) 31 Syd. LR 343Google Scholar, at 352.

185 J. Raz, The Authority of Law (1979), 5.

186 J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom (1988), 22, at 53, 69.

187 Besson, S., ‘Institutionalising Global Demoi-Cracy’, in Meyer, L. H. (ed.), Legitimacy, Justice and Public International Law (2009), 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Besson, ‘Theorizing the Sources’, supra note 184, at 178.

188 Besson does not specify why she prefers deliberative mechanisms. I think that she acknowledges that deliberative institutions and procedures are promising avenues for reaching fair decisions in pluralistic societies.

189 Besson, ‘Theorizing the Sources of International Law’, supra note 184, at 171.

190 Ibid., at 174.

191 Günther, K., ‘Legal Pluralism or Uniform Concept of Law? Globalisation as a Problem of Legal Theory’, (2008) 5 No Foundations: Journal of Extreme Legal Positivism 5, at 16Google Scholar.

192 Ibid., at 18.

193 Ibid., at 17.

194 K. E. Davis, B. Kingsbury, and S. E. Merry, ‘Indicators as a Technology of Global Governance’, Institute for International Law and Justice Working Papers (2010). On PISA, see Bogdandy and Goldmann, supra note 7.

195 Cf. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1998), 88.

196 We outline the contours of such a concept in A. v. Bogdandy, P. Dann, and M. Goldmann, ‘Developing the Publicness of International Public Law: Towards a Legal Framework for Global Governance Activities’, (2008) 9 German Law Journal 1375.

197 M. Goldmann, ‘Inside Relative Normativity: From Sources to Standard Instruments for the Exercise of International Public Authority’, (2008) 9 German Law Journal 1865.

198 This qualifies what I wrote in Goldmann, supra note 197, at 1907, which has been criticized by Klabbers, supra note 168, at 102. I do not think that the distinction between binding and non-binding law is elusive as a criterion for a theoretically sound distinction between different forms of authority, alongside other criteria. But the criterion of bindingness should not be equalled with the distinction between authoritative and non-authoritative acts.