Katia N’s Reviews > The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty > Status Update

Modern int law (1918) had often figured the colonial world as extralegal space: unsovereign or semisovereign, legally unpossessed, even unoccupied. Some (though clearly not all) European jurists imagined it a zone devoid of valid legal actors or relations, a domain where the rules of “civilized” states did not apply, paving the way not only for colonial domination but also for unrestrained warfare and violence.

The logical necessity of international order for legal validity of any state: ‘it had to be above but also before and after the state. Only this sort of all-encompassing international legal order, existing prior to the consent of states, could transform the creation and demise of states from a matter of fact to one of law because such events now unfolded inside a (higher) legal order, not beyond it.’

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Only recourse to an international legal order that rises above states or constitutions standing next to each other territorially as much as following each other temporally” resolved the problem, Kelsen wrote. Only that could “thrust the bridge of law over the abyss that revolution has laid between two constitutions.”

1/2 The postwar crisis had left the Viennese jurists staring blankly into that vacuum. With their new theory of the primacy of international law, they could seal over that void. The price was sovereignty’s supremacy.

Law, was a science of abstractions. To analyze something legally was not to try to grasp the “thing in itself,” an object existing independently of us in the concrete world, but rather to grasp solely the abstract legal significance humans had assigned to it. “Justice and injustice are never predicates attached to things themselves; they are not qualities, but relationships.”