Transnationale Expertenfelder als schwache Felder. Der Entwurf des ersten Weltgerichtshofs und die Entstehung eines internationalen Expertentums

The article argues that transnational expert fields have a specific social and professional pattern (defined as constitutive of a “weak field”), one this is critical when it comes to understand the definitional power experts and expertise can have at the international level. Getting back to the League of Nations as the inaugural scene for the shaping of the power-knowledge nexus, the paper explores the drafting of the first World Court in 1920 as one critical formative moment of transnational expert fields. While the drafters agreed upon the creation of the first permanent court of law, they renounced to define who the permanent professionals of that law would have to be, therefore depriving the field of international law of any strong supranational unit of governance. The paper argues that this initial decoupling between the autonomy (of the court) and the heteronomy (of the judge) has shaped the enduring “weakness” of transnational expert fields.