‘Europe Reconstructed’ Public seminar with Prof. Anne Orford

In her lecture, Orford will explore the ideological struggle that took place in relation to planning for the reconstruction of post-war Europe during the 1940s, and compares it to the way in which the state has subsequently been reconstructed through the project of European market integration. Long before the Second World War had come to an end, many of Europe’s most innovative thinkers (amongst them Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, Dag Hammarskjöld, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, Friedrich Hayek and Jean Monnet) had gone to work on the task of envisaging what the post-war project of European reconstruction should entail. For many if not most scholars and policy-makers at the time, the reconstruction of Europe was synonymous with its integration. Where they differed was in their response to the question that had been central to political thought for centuries  what was the proper role of the state in relation to the economy and society? Orford suggests that while social democrats largely won the ideological battle of the 1940s and 50s, a Hayekian vision that champions a minimalist state has since been realised through the emergence of the EU model of regulation through litigation.

Anne Orford is the holder of the Michael D Kirby Chair of International Law and Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at Melbourne Law School. She researches in the fields of international law, international legal theory, international law and security, international economic law, international law and development, and histories of international law and empire. Her publications include International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (CUP, 2011), the edited collection International Law and its Others (CUP, 2006), and Reading Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Force in International Law (CUP, 2003). Orford was awarded a research-only Australian Professorial Fellowship by the Australian Research Council to undertake a project on Cosmopolitanism and the Future of International Law from 2007 to 2011, and has been awarded a research-only Future Fellowship by the Australian Research Council to undertake a project on From Famine to Food Security: The Role of International Law from 2012 to 2015.

Orford is the Torgny Segerstedt Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg (2011-12), and has been a Visiting Professor at Lund University (2011, 2007, 2005), a core faculty member of the Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy Workshop (2011), a senior Emile Noël Research Fellow at New York University (2003), and has lectured in the Cornell Law and Humanities Colloquium (2008), the NYU Institute for International Law and Justice Colloquium (2005), the Helsinki Summer Seminar on International Law (2004) and the Academy of European Law at the European University Institute (1998). She is a researcher in the project on Justice and International Law in a Global World at the University of Paris 1. With Professor Dino Kritsiotis (Nottingham) and Professor Joseph Weiler (NYU), she will convene the Annual Junior Faculty Forum in International Law from 2012.

The seminar is organised by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) and the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation.

Download the invitation (pdf)