Krzysztof Skubiszewski (1926-2010) was an influential figure of Polish international law and diplomacy. He shared his interests between the legal consequences of WWII and more general issues of international law. Professor at Poznań University and later at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw before 1989, Skubiszewski became the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Poland’s first non-communist government. He occupied this position for four years, shaping Polish thinking of foreign affairs based on universal obligations of international law, and co-determining the policy of seeking convergence with the West.
Skubiszewski was born on October 8, 1926 in Poznań, Western Poland. After the outbreak of WWII, the Skubiszewski family was deported by the German administration to central Poland, but later returned to the city. Skubiszewski graduated in law from the Poznań University in 1949. In 1950 he received his PhD, writing a dissertation about the United Nations. His supervisor was legal historian and specialist in public law Antoni Peretiatkowicz (1884-1956). The second, informal advisor was international lawyer Bohdan Winiarski (1884-1969) - founder of the Poznań School of International Law and judge at the International Court of Justice (1946-1967) - with whom Skubiszewski corresponded and consulted on his doctoral work. He advanced his academic career throughout the socialist period through research stays abroad, among other places, at Harvard Law School, Columbia University’s School of Public and International Affairs or Universities of Oxford and Geneva.
His intellectual trajectory seems linear and he solidified his approach, methodology and chosen subject matters already during the 1950s. He developed the tradition of literal and technical reading of law combined with defending state interests previously represented by Winiarski and co-determined this Poznań School’s path in the post-war years. In his more abstract and doctrinal works, he drew from American legal universalism represented by his teachers at Harvard and Columbia, and advocated for more international regulation in new spheres of life, and a broad understanding of law including its natural sources and customs.
The Poznań School during state socialism was engaged in the project of defending the post WWII territorial settlement, especially the validity of the border with Germany. A quote from Krzysztof Skubiszewski’s academic article in the journal Przegląd Zachodni perfectly captured the essence of this project. Commenting on the 1952 diplomatic note in which Western Allies claimed that the Potsdam Agreements did not finally determine German borders, he wrote “… a polemic with the theses of West German lawyers, demonstrating the groundlessness of the arguments they use, is an urgent, practical task of the Polish science of international law, which should be given more attention than before.”1
Skubiszewski’s 1969 book Zachodnia Granica Polski (Poland’s Western Border), a methodical, 600-pages long study of the issue since 1919 was such an intervention. Skubiszewski’s did not oppose German claims with geopolitical, cultural, ethnographic or even moral arguments, related to the destruction and genocide during WWII, but shifted the debate into the international legal realm. He interpreted, for example, the vague language of the Potsdam Agreements which spoke of the Polish “administration” of former German territory claiming it actually meant “sovereignty”.
Highlighting the role of international organizations and the primacy of international law over domestic one were present in Skubiszewski’s work as well. His writings in English language journals during the 1960s and 1970s postulated - instead of an overhaul of the international system - the strengthening of existing norms and institutions and rendering them even more international. Treaties between states were the main source of international legal obligations, Skubiszewski wrote in 1966, “international organizations, however, have initiated a trend which in time may gain in significance and change the present dominant position of contractual instruments”.2
Generally, a situation in which more laws were created by representatives acting not directly on the behalf on their respective states, but rather as officers of an international organization which would give them power and autonomy, would foster economic cooperation, understanding and peace, went Skubiszewski’s thinking. The conviction of international law’s primacy over domestic one was the consequence of his approach to Polish-German issues. He argued that the binding nature of the Polish-German border was based on an international treaty, and thus could not be changed by any national act of the German state. Subsequently, he contended that the Polish Constitution should also subordinated to international norms.
In September 1989, during the Polish transition to democracy, Krzysztof Skubiszewski was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. Continuing his life-long academic endeavour, he negotiated and signed, in November 1990, along German Minister of Foreign Affairs Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the new Polish-German border treaty. His other foreign policy priorities included the recognition of new post-Soviet nation states in Poland’s neighborhood (Belarus, Lithuania, Ukraine). Where potential conflicts with these new states emerged, Skubiszewski curbed cultural and historical confrontations, and attempted to build relations based on international law and in agreement with Western Europe. The Europeanization of Polish foreign policy was supposed to bring the country closer to the economic and political institutional structures of the West. After leaving the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs, Skubiszewski was president of the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal and served as an ad hoc judge of the International Court of Justice.
Jakub Szumski (Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena)
Bibliography
‘Enactment of Law by International Organizations’. British Yearbook of International Law 41 (1966 1965): 198–274
Zachodnia Granica Polski. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1969
‘Poland, Germany and Europe after 1989’. In Recht zwischen Umbruch und Bewahrung: Völkerrecht, Europarecht, Staatsrecht: Festschrift für Rudolf Bernhardt, edited by Rudolf Bernhardt and Ulrich Beyerlin. Beiträge zum ausländischen öffentlichen Recht und Völkerrecht, Bd. 120. Berlin ; New York: Springer, 1995
