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This quotation lends a title to the third chapter, "But the Alternative is Despair", that in some ways captures the core compulsion of Nathaniel Berman's book, Passion and Ambivalence. Colonialism, Nationalism and International Law.
Warding off despair through a ground clearing operation for a more imaginative and hopeful future seems to fuel Berman's own passions in the series of dazzling readings of international legal history that make up this book. It is a book that runs against the grain of dominant approaches to internationalism and its historical role. Berman seeks to wrest international law from the sterility of formalism and interest calculation on the one hand, and, on the other, the contortions that emerge from formalism and pragmatism's discursive acrobatics in denying and advancing passions. Instead, Berman centres internation - alism's fantasies and fears (represented here by nationalism, there by colonialism), even as he seeks to de-centre the discipline's own self-conception. From Jerusalem to Kosovo, Berman holds international legal projects most innovative, vital, and resourceful when passion is not expelled from the internationalist terrain, but where internationalism's ambivalent relationship to its passions is fore-grounded, mined, and negotiated.
