A retrospective

I have always found writing a messy affair. It has never proceeded according to plan. Starting on a text, I seldom possess more than the roughest skeleton of an outline for the argument I wish to make or the sections through which it might enfold. Reconstruction of what I now think From Apology to Utopia is about, cannot, therefore, hope to bring to light any very sharply defined programme I had when I wrote it in 1989. That programme developed in twists and turns during the work and my own view of it has not been unaffected by the passage of time. But it now seems right to say – although I would probably not have put it in this way at the time – that the book was conceived in order to articulate and examine two types of unease I had about the state of international law as a professional practice and an academic discipline. First, existing reflection on the field had failed to capture the experience I had gained from it through practice within Finland's Ministry for Foreign Affairs, especially in various United Nations contexts. In particular, I felt that none of the standard academic treatments really captured or transmitted the simultaneous sense of rigorous formalism and substantive or political open-endedness of argument about international law that seemed so striking to me.