(image source: Helsinki University)
The Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights and the Graduate School Law in a Changing World are pleased to invite you to a workshop “A new world order? Internationalism and legal imagination in inter-war Europe”. The event takes place on December 17, 2015, at Unioninkatu Festive Halls (Unioninkatu 33).
The cataclysm of the Great War, the birth of democratic nation-states upon the ruins of monarchic empires, and efforts to found the League of Nations challenged contemporary legal theorists to restate, re-frame – or indeed to found anew – the principles of European internationalism. The urgent agendas of this extraordinarily intense period of legal innovation included attempts to think beyond unlimited state sovereignty, articulations of the legal and institutional tools for an organized system of internationalism, and reformulations of natural law or positivism to support these efforts. The seminar explores the transformations and innovations in the political and legal discourses of the time, as well as their embeddedness in the substantive and methodological frameworks of the tradition. A particular focus is on mapping the state of art in the inter-war history of European legal thought, including possibilities for a trans-national approach, and on its echoes in our own times.
Program:
1. Nathaniel Berman, Brown University, "Whose Imagination? A Cacophonous Period and the Impossibility of Legal History"
2. Georgios Varouxakis, Queen Mary University of London, "Continuities and discontinuities in Inter-War British internationalism"
3. Kaius Tuori, University of Helsinki, “Tradition and renewal: Refugee scholars and the revisiting of the foundations of European legal culture as a counter-reaction to interwar totalitarianism"
4. Balasz Trencsenyi, Central European University, "Dominance, Crisis, and Renewal: The Faces of Liberalism in Interwar East Central Europe
5. Katharina Rietzler, University of Cambridge, “German and Indian critics of British imperialism”
6. Taina Tuori, University of Helsinki, “From League of Nations Mandates to Decolonization: A History of Rights”
7. Timo Miettinen, University of Helsinki, “The idea of internationalism and universalism in the phenomenological tradition in Germany”
8. Panu Minkkinen, ”The Political Constitution: Law and Politics in Weimar”
9. Liisi Keedus, University of Helsinki, "'The New World' of Karl Barth: On Political Theologies"
10. Rotem Giladi, University of Helsinki/University of Jerusalem, "Blending the Universal with the Particular: Jewish Engagements with International Law in the Interwar Period"
More information on the website of the Erik Castrén Institute.
