INTERVIEW: Dimitri VAN DEN MEERSSCHE & Pascal MESSER interview Martti KOSKENNIEMI on "International Law and the Far Right" (Opinio Iuris, 10 DEC 2018)

(image source: OpinioJuris)

Opinio Iuris has an extended interview with Martti Koskenniemi, following his lecture on 29 November 2018 in The Hague on "International Law and the Far Right."

First paragraph:

Last week in the Peace Palace, Prof. Martti Koskenniemi spoke about international law and the rise of the far right for the Hague-based T.M.C. Asser Instituut. “Economic reforms are of no concern to these protesters. And the more you try to reform, the more you will appear like a hopeless idiot.” An interview with Prof. Martti Koskenniemi on the backlash against globalism, fake expertise and the smoking gun in his historical work by Dimitri van den Meerssche & Pascal Messer. At the Fourth Asser Annual Lecture you spoke about the current ‘backlash’ against international law and its institutions and the rise of the extreme right. You seem to have your own analysis on the nature of this backlash and where it stems from. Yes. I am critical of this liberal understanding which tries to establish a sympathetic relationship with people who are assumed to have been, as the cliché goes, ‘left behind’, those lost somewhere in an ‘unavoidable process of globalisation’. This sociological and economic account looks at the way in which the economic benefits from globalisation have not reached a group of people. These people would be reacting to their relative deprivation, by being critical of elites and of life in the city. And by Brexit and by voting for Trump, and by kicking in the ass those people who they think are responsible for their deprivation and marginalisation.

Prof.  Koskenniemi's lecture was announced earlier on this blog.
(source: ESILHIL Blog)