4.1 HISTORICAL PRECINCTS

I spent time in Brisbane some years ago (at a conference on the history of international society) and noticed that it had a cultural precinct.^[136] There were signs everywhere announcing the position of the visitor or resident in relation to culture (e.g., ‘you are three kilometres from the cultural centre', or ‘veer left for the cultural precinct').

This all reminded me of Rem Koolhaas's generic city, a contemporary city (no longer situated in history) that re-creates its own historical district (Vancouver's ‘Gastown', say); Koolhaas calls this place ‘Lipservice'.^[137] For a long time, international law, too, had its historical district: the place — most often the chapter of a book - a reader went to do, or acquire, some history, a chapter often, usefully, titled ‘History of International Law'. Doctoral students, in imitation of this, would wonder if their dissertations ought to have ‘a history chapter'. This chapter might then act as an overture to the main body of the thesis. Except, very often, it wasn't an overture because the motifs did not reappear. What followed, instead, was an ostensibly historyless present. At various points in its history, then, international law has occupied this history­less present, a moment where either there is no discernible encounter with history (not even ‘a memory of a memory' (Koolhaas, again)) or where the history recounted is so attenuated as to constitute a form of historylessness or where the historical periods referred to are stripped of ‘everything that makes them different; so that they all look more or less like our own'.^[138]

In recent years, though, the history of international law has come in from the cold and become a vibrant field of multidisciplinary scholarship.^[139] This (re) turn to history has been hotly pursued by a serious sensitivity to method or a newish historiographical self-awareness.

Whatever happens now must happen in the wake of this period of methodological restlessness. Why this material in this way from this position with this attitude and this method? Why this writer? Of course, there is no guarantee that some international legal histories won't trundle on in blissful ignorance or innocence in the same way that popular history seems immune from the methodological preoccupations of academic historians or historians of political thought. History as ‘one damned thing after another' will continue to be written just as international law as ‘one damned rule after another' will continue to be practised.^[142]

In this chapter, I want to argue that this moment of self-consciousness (an extended moment dating back to the early work of some people featured in this collection) offers an opportunity for international lawyers to maintain or consolidate a sensibility about the world that I want to think of as literary rather than technical.^[143] And this split between the literary and the technical partly reflects the experience of reading the literature on intellectual inter­national history or international intellectual history (the diction is David Armitage's)^[144] or historical method.

To put this more concretely, when we are acquainting ourselves with a prospective new friend, we would not ask ‘What form of the novel do you prefer?' but instead the more common (and less pretentious): ‘What novels do you read?'. So that asking which methods produce the most invigorating or politically radical or truthful histories of international law might be like asking someone what forms of the novel she admires instead of noticing the book she carries in her handbag.^[146] I would not want to push this too far. Clearly, we all have powerful aesthetic preference for certain methods of novel writing. No one can prefer Camus, Joyce and Woolf, or Roberto Bolano and Tom McCarthy without admitting that plot and character might be peripheral to what is necessary to the success of a novel.

My hunch is that we might understand the relationship between historians of international political thought (I am just going to call them ‘historians' from now on) and international lawyers in terms of both method and writerly ethic; and that what unites some of us might be a shared aesthetic around inter­national law in history, whatever might be the specifics of the methodologies that divide us.

I will devote part of the chapter to a discussion of some of the special problems (related to time, context and ‘greatness') lawyers face when they face history (and here, taking my cue from Jennifer Pitts's idea of conceptual frames, I want to think about the sorts of historical worlds international lawyers inhabit and reproduce as a result of their predispositions).^[147] All of this will lead to a plea for a post-method in which these worlds can be opened up to acts of contestation and reimagination.