Histories of International Law: dealing with Eurocentrism

my name's Susan marks and I'm delighted to welcome you this evening and to introduce our speaker professor Marty koshkin Yemi who's very kindly agreed to be with us for two weeks as visiting professor professor Coase Canyon II is Academy professor with the University of Helsinki he additionally holds or has held many distinguished visiting professorships including with the Hauser global law program at NYU and he's been the author good heart visiting professor at the University of Cambridge he served for many years as legal adviser at the finnish foreign ministry and he continues to be an influential protagonist in policy debates in that country he's held as well many important officers at international level including serving as a judge of the Asian Development Bank and as a member of the UN international law commission and has played leading roles in many non-governmental and professional organizations at international level including the Institute Atlanta Nacional but while all of that is of course tremendously impressive none of it really explains why so many of you have come to hear him today and nor does it explain why so many people come to hear him whenever and wherever he speaks there has to do of course with what he's written the extraordinarily insightful imaginative and influential body of scholarship that includes from apology to utopia his first english-language book published initially in 1989 and then reissued with a new epilogue by Cu P in 2005 the gentle civilizer of Nations also published by Cu P in 2002 and the many many wonderful seminal massively inspiring articles now happily brought together by Richard Hart in a volume entitled the politics of international law which appeared last year and is a corresponding volume that appeared with Pitt on in French as well I'm only mentioning of course some of his many writings these are writings that are in the rare category to which the label path-breaking truly belongs and of course once the path has been broken there's no return to the landscape of earlier times it's irrevocable altered indeed it takes considerable effort to reconstruct in one's mind how the field of international law seemed before these great works of theory and history had come along certainly if I can speak personally from them I can't conceive of working other than in relation to and in dialogue with Marty and his minis multitude of other interlocutors so it's an immense personal pleasure as well as a very great honor to welcome Marty to the LSC and now to give him the floor his title as you see is histories of international law dealing with Eurocentrism thank you so much Susan also I have to start by saying how exceedingly happy I am to be here in London I've spent a lot of time in England and to me England is a place with our only students graduate students and professors and a few Sainsbury's here and there I've gone through London a number of times never spent here more than two nights in a row so these two weeks will really be an experience that I look forward to so my title is histories of international law dealing with Eurocentrism let me start by reminding us that Muenster and osnabrück are small German towns in today's North North rhine-westphalia and Lower Saxony but they provide the setting for the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia of course in 1649 the single most important event in the history of international law Westphalia remains center central to the imagination of the profession it was then that international law emerged as a law of states understood as legal subjects or persons distinct from their ruling elites or dynasties those places have been followed by other locations Vienna Berlin Paris Geneva looking for the origins of the law among sovereigns we focus on Europe its towns its wars it's revolutions bowden Hobbes Rochas and so on the histories of us genteel of felt a wave of toward Iran are intensely European history they adopt a European vocabulary of progress and modernity the key distinctions between notions such as the political the economic secular religious as well as private and public are of course part of the European mindset even as colonialism has now become an increasingly important topic in the history and doctrine of international law it still remains the case that as the best Chakrabarty has put it Europe rules as the silent reference of historical knowledge this is true not only of the materials of the narrative but of the standards of historiography itself what kind of history of international law would it be that would not speak of the fall of the Roman Republic of the religious wars or of balance of power in Europe in the 19th century European stories and myths and metaphors continue to set the imagination of international lawyers when did this begin then professional international law started in the 1860s as part of the liberal entrenchment in Europe as the clouds of nationalism racism socialism were emerging it began as a project of practical men not out of philosophical contemplation what these men aimed at was to civilize the behavior of their nations but of other nations - including of course the colonies they included the Belgian professor and niece who eventually became the first historiography of the new profession miss had taught history and jurisprudence at the universe at the université libre the Brazell in the opening chapters of his loot want emotional lip rancid letter theory LF a miss recounted the history of international law as part of the expansion of europe in the world by 1904 he recounted 54 states in the international community of which 22 were european and 21 american the remaining ones were japan liberia and the independent state of the congo this accepted the division of humankind into civilized barbarian and savage peoples he read the 1885 act of berlin as a powerful illustration of the will of european powers to advance the well-being of the colonies in due course he would vigorously defend the practices of his king leopold ii of the congo against the accusations that he attributed to the commercial interests in manchester miss founded the origins of international law as he called them in the European Renaissance and its crystallization in the Peace of Westphalia three great ideas had dominated history he argued Progress freedom and the idea of humanity with progress this meant European modernity as he saw it around himself with freedom he meant liberation from the Catholic Church and with humanity the view of all human societies joined in a universal community resembling the Europe is all around himself according to nice it was huger gracias a Protestant who founded the science of national law by joining humanism and secularism with Roman law miss confessed himself an admirer of England's liberties that for him meant civilization secularization humanism and the universal freedom of trade together with the balance of power these he said would form the basis of international law later historians have of course extended this narrative to the present the log entries on the history of international law in the 1962 birthday book the spell corrects prepared by the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg used the Peace of Westphalia as the definitive break between the ancient origins and the modern and the modern present the time of European international law as diverter book puts it the 19th century according to the vertigo was the time of the expansion of European international law in this account the standard account that all that we all have learnt European hegemony was broken only late in the 20th century above all with the establishment of the United Nations in the 1960s international law began to expand in the different humanitarian economic and technical fields this we now read lead from the political form of statehood into some form of universal existence perhaps globalization perhaps as wilhelm gravy the author of the most widely read textbook of the history of international or put it in the year 2000 into an uncertain auscultation between international community on the one side the single superpower on the other this familiar account of European modernity was first told by late 19th century European elites today we meet it at institutions of higher learning everywhere it's point is to inculcate in the members of the professional classes a certain manner of reflecting on the world and on our place in it cultural markers such as antique Uwe T the Renaissance and globalization are as much part of it as our technical terms such as cannon shot rule concept of Europe or humanitarian intervention all such notions bear the mark of their European origin but they still enable lawyers from all over the world to communicate with each other by invoking widely shared historical associations and a teleology in which an idealized Europe coded as nationhood capitalism modernity the rule of law marks the horizon of the professional imagination this formalized the practice of writing the history of international law as an account of European expand expansion to world dominance the non-european world appeared occasionally in the form of the infidel Turk or the Saracens interesting as as partners in war or trade or as the enigmatic world of China that refused to open its secrets to European diplomats late 19th century jurists were not uncritical admirers of Europe's colonial past however as Protestant liberals they attacked religious and imperial justifications for Europe's expansion but they were enthralled by what they called civilization and so to capture it within a narrative of secularization state formation and economic modernity what they witnessed at home that narrative allowed Europeans to make distinctions they needed that the distinctions between civilized and uncivilized without having to explain too much it was never a part of a grand theory after the great European war however that language the language of civilization was discredited and replaced slowly by the languages of progressive sociology modernization economic and technological development in the 1960s these languages were integrated into international law itself international law became a project of free trade third-world modernization human rights environmental protection fight against impunity and setting up international authorities to protect vulnerable populations 20th century lawyers have been more embarrassed to articulate the normative goal of international law the expression civilized nations appear still in the statute of the International Court of Justice where it was put in 1920 by the Belgian lawyer but on the account one of the defenders of King Leopold's practices in the Congo but that reference is now routinely exercised as an anachronism international law now appears as modernizing project a state building project a project of economic and technological development conserving natural resources and seeing to global security projects that appear functional factual and scientific with no bias in any direction at all the historical section of the late nino Casas has recent textbook notes that while the international rules and principles of the 19th century were a product of the Western civilization the composition of the world community he writes has now changed radically so that and I quote from Nino at least at the normative level the international community is becoming more integrated and what is more important such values as human rights and the need to promote development are increasingly permitting various sectors of international law this view is familiar and originates in Europe Europe is ubiquitous in today's international law and institutions progress is depicted by reference to an international community that international community being imagined as the various developmental stages that Europeans have projected on their own world viewing the shifts of vocabulary from the 16th century Spanish scholastics to good governance today Tony angee a colleague in the third world movement concluded that and I quote from him whatever the contrast and transitions in that period imperialism remains constant unquote in writing this he was making the old point about Europe always imagining its values as universal its knowledge its science has not only valid for itself but valid for all whatever generosity may be in involved the point is never about good intentions when Western speech becomes universal its native speakers the West will be running the show there are two ideal types of international legal history realist narratives that concentrate on state power and geopolitics idealist ones that focus on lawyers and philosophers legal principles institutions neither one of these we now know is sustainable alone without help from its counterpart they are best seen as presumptive positions or biases the one for grounding war and diplomacy as history's determining forces and the other privilege in laws institutions and doctrines in both however the non-european world is reduced to an object of either Europe's policy or Europe's thought as an example of the former is the classic Artemis Baum's concise history of the law of nations in from the 1950s that concentrates on diplomacy and treaty relations during the period from 1648 to 1815 we encounter the Ottoman Empire and what loss bomb refers to as countries outside Europe in only four pages devoted to treaty relations with Europe the 19th century in goosebumps book is addressed by reference to consular relations with Turkey the widening of international law in South America and the open door policy in China Nussbaum concludes those brief passages with the following note the widening of the Western law of nations to the Far East did not involve the fusion of European or Asiatic ideas even if the law had become universal it had not been rooted in non-european minds unquote Wilhelm Greivis widely read ultra-realistic ount of international law follows Carl Schmitt enormous their depth and finds a place for the non-european world as an object of European land taking Lance name the foundations of international legal community greater rights lies with what he calls the Occidental Christian community after the late Middle Ages voice of Christianity was seized by the succession of French Spanish French and British Empire's the 20th century interwar Anglo American condom condominium and finally what gravy calls the global community dominated by the West gravy was an ironic agreement with post-colonial histories that have likewise read doctrinal writings as a soft glove over the Imperial feast as gravy wrote and I wrote from him the newly discovered continents were only an object of European political maneuvering they were not a self-reliant sphere of activity with its own centers of gravity unquote in such geopolitical histories large imperial centers radiate their influence all over the world and determine the nature of the global legal order many kinds of critiques can be made of them no Empire is ever homogeneous but is always split against itself split by uncertainty of where its interests lie and what should be done to realize them internal opposition's and sectoral interests clash and imperial agents in the colonies tend to act unpredictably the external world is never a passive receptacle but always place the center's factions against each other using imperial favor or opposition to advance its agendas realist history also fails to account for the conflicting regimes of knowledge and and interest that turn hegemonies into more or less stable foundations for policy it has no sense for the dependence of Imperial policy on epistemic and political frameworks and it is unclear finally whether histories of the crying Schmitt graven other realists have written our histories of law at all their tendency after all is to reduce normative languages to pale reflections of the forces of realpolitik in a way that fails to account for the shifting uses of law between hegemonic and non hegemonic actors law itself we now know is never the single norm but it's always the norm and the exception the principle and the counter principle the justification and the critique of hegemony ideal if history is concentrating on doctrines and institutions fair no better alberto Liddell's maitre dockland Eduardo John from 1950 includes only accounts of lives and writings of a few European men jurists diplomats legal thinkers the old session of a pair of red slobs history of the Ford grand plan sip great principles of international law the binding force of treaties the freedom of state equality and solidarity are viewed through a perspective of two thousand years of Western legal thought and policy a more recent work of a decade ago by Agnes labor which does focus on the universality of international law but limit itself to what European philosophers have said about that matter although this work puts intersubjectivity in its philosophical center no non-european voice is heard in it histories of cosmopolitan legal thought likewise invariably discussed the Western tradition assumed to begin with the Stoics always and peak in literal Brocius cont Wilson we know that narrative an additional in such works is the way they aim to carry out a timeless conversation on perennial problems of jurisprudence between the living and the dead as if legal rules institutions and vocabularies traveled unchanging to through time or then perhaps developed in their full maturity only in the present this of course is to commit the sin of anachronism legal concepts are parts part of the legal and political vocabularies of each period their meaning cannot be seized without a grasp of that vocabulary projecting an unchanging meaning for a notion such as rubber rubber head slaps for principles or labor dilemma of humanity of state and statehood is to have no sense of what these notions meant for those who spoke them or use them in earlier periods the meaning we now know of notions such as sovereignty use gentium property or indeed law is dependent on what one intends to use them for what one wants to achieve through them this is especially obvious for such polymers for such a political language as law through which we seek to support ourselves and our friends against those who stand as adversaries at conferences or perhaps university boardrooms it is true that it's not always clear what the right context or language is in which those notions should be inserted is it the is it the lawyers academic or professional context or the political or economic world where the post person operates is it a context of books or of guns exchanges of language or exchanges of money such disagreements highlight a larger point namely that histories of international law come to us through the historians own prejudices that underlined the political and rhetorical aspects of legal history itself but whether we focus on geopolitics or legal doctrines historiography of international law have been as Eurocentric as the world they describe nevertheless there is today some acknowledgement of international laws complicity in European expansion in France for example in her recent history of international laws welfarist ambitions Emin well draw an arrow points to the nonchalance with which European jurists dealt with colonization only five pages of em er David Elle's 900-page classic 1758 treatise on the law of nations were devoted to the matter Europe drawn a right is only interested in itself this applies today to most writing on the history of international legal thought is oriented towards classical themes of European political and legal theory an exception has been the Marxist school of Rennes whose most important representative today Monique shamea gone home and and has written her human her a book humanity a sovereign it there in order to discuss the colonial implications of Western law law but also Western legal rationality it includes wrong sections of West's discussions of Western domination and Western rationality and celebrates what she calls la razón flu of the colonized slim lag Manny's recent history of international law in Paris and Tunis juxtaposed is the Christian and the Islamic views on just war Europe and European jurists remain in the center nevertheless and European geopolitics rules lag manies anti-imperial voice still stands out in the profession it's not at all obvious how to correct the bias in the discipline early post-colonial works such as CH Alexandre wits those by CX and a general it's our pian and until Elias for example insist to examine also the practices of Asian and African communities before the entry of Europeans in those territories but their intention was usually to prove that they too had an international law in those far away territories this is why those narratives can be objective objected as once again projecting European categories as universal to argue that there was natural law in India - or diplomatic immunities in the Chinese real may finally turn out to support the universal nation nature of notions that are in irrelevance that sends still European at least determined from the inside of the European consciousness this is so especially if the argument is accompanied as it often is with the accusation of hypocracy that Europeans themselves did not follow European standards the claim of hypocracy fires back as reinforcement of the original European notion of course a subsequent generation of critics have attacked this kind of conceptual Eurocentrism Tony ng whom I mentioned already and a group of scholars around him have argued that international law has from the outset operated as an instrument of European expansion for these historians international laws imperialist all the way down or to quote angry himself it is fundamentally animated by the civilizing mission that is an inherent aspect of imperial expansion which angey rights from time immemorial has presented itself as improving the lives of conquered peoples unquote but if that is so than any use of international law even a critical use will be Eurocentric and there is no reason of for pride if past indigenous institutions have resembled European ones those are corrupt institutions instruments of domination and illegitimate control instead what one needs to do is to attack those concepts and practices at their root by showing their historical and present uses as instruments of colonial oppression the rule of law would in such case not be an antidote to war an oppression but an incident of them but post-colonial critics such as anger do not go quite that far with good reason for this would be to commit the same mistake as realist accounts namely to reduce the law into a passive reflection of Imperial desire in a recent essay angee confesses to a certain bewilderment about the fact that although he has written on the Imperial origins he has also found international or often useful in the defense of third world interests Sun Jia Perugia in a recent book has discussed the hopes and disappointments experienced by the third world in relation to laws regarding decolonization and development formal independence turned out we know now disappointing nothing came of the new international economic order nevertheless she writes with good reason principles such as sovereignty and the vocabulary of self-determination have every now and then assisted the third world in opposing colonial hegemonic purposes strategic awareness is needed of course including awareness of the fact that meal alignment of the law with the interests of the third world elites is often insufficient very often one sees third word tourist slide from a sophisticated critique into an uncritical nationalist advocacy so how to go about using it using notions of European origin for non euro centric purposes let me sketch at the end four avenues for doing this one consists in the demonstration of the colonial origins of international legal rules and institutions it is not at all difficult to show the way in which such key notions as property and sovereignty have been formed in the context of the discovery and settlement of the new world hygge grossest and john locke possessed a theory of occupation that only accepted european forms of agriculture as capable of establishing property rights on land on the other hand their notion of political sovereignty did not include indigenous forms of communal life not obviously to the laws of war came to be defined in such a fashion as to encompass only European methods of killing much recent work on the history of the law of Development has been inspired by an objective to show how it has imposed Eurocentric ideas about modernity development and technical standards jennifer beard for example has shown how what she calls the inner logic of economic growth and technological advance has qualified large part of the world as an underdeveloped terrain whose populations were to be rapidly incorpor by enacting law for the protection of foreign investors in a similar seminar Wayne and offered has discussed humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect in view of classical political theory that creates a Nexus Nexus meeting between protection and obedience this she argues now provides the best frame for understanding the asymmetries of recent United Nations operations in the third world colonial domination today operates in the shadow of internationalization and through the instrumentally instrumentality of international institutions another way of dealing with Eurocentrism by focusing on the income is by dealing with error centrism by focusing on the encounter between Europe and the new world as an important or even crucial moment to the discipline of international law itself this could take place by laying out the rules and practices and by recounting the pure facts of the encounter the making of the first treaties for example building the settlements and the ant reports the endless warfare with the natives efforts at evangelization and so on many histories of this type have been written by political historians less so by lawyers at this point surprisingly no general work on the international law aspects of the moment of encounter or of colonization has yet been published beyond the ERG fish's work the oil repair sheiks Pantheon won't as well correct from 1984 fish a student of Reinhart goes Alex the father of McGriff's Kishida presented an extensive and nuanced account of the asymmetries and in Justices but also of the temporal and geographical variations of the colonial enterprise in legal terms he also gave room to occasional reciprocity and the very in hierarchies in which for example in the Chinese sphere Europeans sometimes found themselves in a subordinate position fish likewise gave and over 200-page account of the self interpretations of the Europeans of what they were doing at the time of the colonization itself that is to say a history of the development of European law of occupation by reference to the status of overseas territories against Carl Smith's famous doctrine of the numbers of the earth that pictured a massive European man taking in the colonies as the found as a foundation ex nihilo of European public law fish maintains that the overseas territories were never read slave around a legal vacuum this is a historical debate of great momentum I suggest and lies still unresolved but its protagonists agree that from early eighteenth century onwards the law between European sovereigns was constructed largely in opposition to the law that was applicable overseas to maintain that notion maintain that contrast Europe and overseas broad notions such as civilization Christianity modernity and development direct even universal international law today in a particular direction fish was among the first to detect the persistence of colonial relations in law even after the attainment of formal independence in the 1960s I want to stress this because his study is still the most complete work on the now fashionable theme of international law and Empire but it's not widely read owing to the disappointing angle centuries in international law today the centrality of the Spanish 16th century theologians for the discipline has long been known the Dominicans Francisco de Vitoria Bartolome de las casas have been traditionally seen as the great humanitarian Friends of the Indians a different view of them has emerged lately it is true critics say that the Dominicans disapproved of the way the conquest had been carried out but the lawful titles that these men granted to the Spanish were easily compensated for their critique of the illegitimate ones both vitória and las Casas accepted the presence of Spain in the Indies for reasons of evangelization and never suggested they should depart they were apologist of Empire of course concerned over its legitimacy but not its ultimate purpose I wonder however to what extent this view renders the Dominicans as symbols something too symbols of something too uniform Spanish imperialism or European colonialism for example as vitória began his famous analysis of Spanish actions at Salamanca there was no clear view of where Spanish interests or Castilian interests more relevantly lay or what the position of the Catholic Church ought to be towards the inhabitants of the new world Vittorio's so-called universalism as it finally emerged from his relic Tiana's Theologica was so open-ended that it could be and would be used to defend the most different kinds of policies much of international law originates in those debates and we have much to learn from them but we have little reason to attack Vittoria las casas all the other Spaniards as either as apologists of Empire or for celebrating them as humanitarian Zero's the lesson they provide is the lesson of ambiguity love may be difficult to distinguish from a desire to dominate which is not to say that no distinction should be made between the two studies of the colonial encounter provide a sufficient amount of gruesome materials that might be used as Protestants have always used them in terms of the lagonda negra so as the shop so as to shock the reader into an anti-colonial consciousness but the many stories made equally well be used to distinguish between different moments and locations of the encounter and to bring the various uses of the legal vocabulary into light that sometimes follow the convenience of the Europeans but sometimes decidedly not these narratives might focus eye on the innumerable ways in which Europeans failed to understand often to their own disadvantage the cultures they came to contact with yet another theme under this technique might be to analyze the ships between formal and informal control through which European domination has has been created and insured it would for example be very important to study the role of the expansion of European origin private law rules over contracts and property and the use of cat's paw techniques with native allies to carry out dispossession or establish informal domination a third way to deal with Eurocentrism might add direct attention to the hybridization of legal concepts as they travel from the colonial metropolis into the peripheries and they're changing uses in the hands of the colonized this approach might for example examing particular actor actors in the colonies tourists politicians resistance fighters using European concepts but turning them support a particular project or preference of the colonized a good example of this would be Nathaniel Berman's discussion of the debates between the French colonial and anti colonial intelligentsia during the war of the reef in 1925 which was instrumentalized by the charismatic rebel leader a reader leader abdel karim for his anti colonial purposes all those narratives might focus on latin american creole elites use of international law in the 19th century in order to support local hegemony both visibly europeans as well as more backwards inhabitants of those territories latin american international law textbooks of the 19th century adopted a vocabulary and a style that was uniquely latin american and supported not at all passive assimilation to the reign of Europe but to assert Latin American distinctiveness from it such studies complicate the homogeneous idea of Europeanization by undermining the view that the surface adoption of European concepts would always have the same consequences or indeed that it would always operate in favor of something like Europe yet another fourth technique is to exercise or provincial eyes as deeper structure Banta would say Europe and European law in my own gentle civilizer of Nations I tried to give close anthropological attention to the contexts in which international law emerged as a cultural sensibility among a class of late 19th century European liberal Protestant elites instead of depicting it as a part of some universal metaphysic I described international law as a platform or a vocabulary for a political project of a small group of activists lawyers hoping to make it appear as an arrow and indeed exotic aspect of fantasy European culture such genealogies and there are others operate to pinpoint the particular that is hidden by the disciplines universal voice this I take also to be the point of recent studies that have interpreted early modern writers such as grocers and lock from the perspective of their activity as legal counsel counsel for the Dutch East India Company or a shareholder of the Virginia company showing the close connection between the doctrine of the freedom of cease and Dutch colonial interest in the 17th century contextualizes the relevant rules it does not firmly D legitimize them of course but it makes them visit but it makes visible the relations of power that they entail this also applies to accounts of the mandate system of the League of Nations or of the ideas of international executive authority within the United Nations that read them as reactions to the collapse of forms of imperial rule and efforts to maintain some some amount of control over the periphery again the point is to wait to make that which presents itself as timeless and universal as contextually bound to particle projects or interests Eurocentrism might then be destabilized with the realization that Europe itself is just a continent with its particular interests and new roses its violence and its stupidity rather like realizing that the choice for a French restaurant is also to opt for ethnic food I want to make a final point a standard way to deal with Eurocentrism has been to ask the question of whether or not non Europeans were included or excluded from international law this question I suggest is based on the Eurocentric assumption that being included is good because international law is good whereas exclusion needs to be condemned but this cannot be right the key question cannot be whether somebody is included or excluded but what inclusion and exclusion mean among the merits of angley's classic post-colonial analysis is the way the inclusion by the Spanish Dominicans of the American Indians in the Christian system of natural law and you scandium is shown to operate as a means to discipline the Indians in this case exclusion would have been a sign of respect it seems pointless to engage in a controversy about the morality of Vitoria the man however and important instead to stress the ambivalence of his options then as now it all depends the meaning and status of an encounter cannot be determined in abstraction from its meaning to its participants and these cannot be known independently of recourse to assumptions about what they must have thought that is what seems right to us the four techniques that I briefly sketched trying to avoid taking the meaning of any encounter as a given and look instead for interpretive imagination and the agency of everyone concerned Europeanisation is a complex phenomenon it may serve different agendas at different moments it remains important for post Eurocentric research in the history of international law that the mere employment of a particular vocabulary of intervention for instance natural law positivism Christianity or jihad is not taken alone as informative of how we should assess the speaker of those languages or the relations of power addressed by it different actors use such languages for different purposes and everything will depend again on the context the definition of which will be disputed for example the application of formal sovereignty and you and membership in the colonies since the 1960's has done little to abolish factual inequality in the world but it may have made that inequality slightly more invisible and that's slightly less politically vulnerable whether it has done this however is a matter of research still undertaken and not the application of dogma now what could be expected of non euro centric histories keeping an eye on past imperialism and its traces in today's world of course this cannot be a plea for a fully objective history history me as I Genting evasions I that sort of knowledge is not opened to us there is no point from which to view history that would not be a particular standpoint to the contrary new histories must highlight the contested and political nature of any readings of the past in recent years there's been a massive increase in histories of international law some of this is an effect of the rising post-colonial consciousness in the profession much is also inspired I think by a sense of history's importance for understanding and coming to grips with the ambivalence of the set of phenomena that is layer that is broadly labeled modernity globalization and so on old histories where progress narratives they projected European modernity as the telus as the objective of history this is no longer believable but nor can the opposite view of law as a mere apology of European or Western power business if grant history is over this means the end of his stories of linear progress and linear decline history becomes then perhaps once again stories that illuminate the ambivalence and reality of the choices we make and have to make it would not be McGee's trivita in the sense of providing ready-made lessons or blueprints or a storehouse of narrative but a storehouse of narratives of wisdom and stupidity political courage and moral corruption in a complex world this is a kind of teleological history nevertheless I want to suggest for it course on the historian to judge the present in view of her preferred futures positive isn't too is dead you see we are always in some frame writing our histories and understandings from an always already committed standpoint historical vocabularies are to use Paul demands familiar image mechanisms of blindness and mechanisms of insight a shift of vocabulary enables us to see things that were previously hidden but they also inevitably throw some things into the dark the point would not be to write global history in which everything would be visible that's of course impossible but to diminish the power of blindness so as to see better thank professor Coase Kaname has purple forest a compelling history of the tenacious euro centricity of international legal history writing and some indications of how we might now get beyond it he's graciously agreed to respond to questions and comments and we have some time for that so who would like to start the discussion um thank you for this lecture I mean throughout the lecture I was listening to you and I know that it's about the history of international and perhaps the u.s. or the United States American doctrine of international doesn't have much place in the history of international law but at least recently trap many works which I think it would just continue on your narrative that international law is used instrumentally so the writings by scholars such as Jack Goldsmith or Eric Posner are intended to show that Europe is using international instrumentally to tame the power of the United States but we haven't mentioned the American scholarship on international at all so does it fit your story somewhat or why didn't I do that well I did mention American scholarship and as much as I mentioned after news balms concise history of international law it's true that that there are professors of law at American universities nowadays who write on something they call international law very little of it I hardly recognize that and I don't think of it as a significant intellectual series of events or writings maybe there is a moment to engage with it sometimes in the future now I just have no interest in it thank you very much for a very interesting presentation I just have a question about a legal anthropology because many of the early anthropologists of the colonial encounter were lawyers and many of them post-colonialism have felt a lot of guilt about the legal categories imposed on the non West and also the ways in which Western non-western legal laws were effectively constructed as the opposite of Western laws by Western anthropologists and so there's been at least fifty years worth of of material in legal anthropology that covers exactly the four strategies that you mention so I know you're speaking more about international law and perhaps anthropology is focused a lot on domestic law but it has focused quite substantive Lee on the imposition of Western legal categories and I wondered why I haven't made reference to that discipline to any great degree it's true there's there's no more tormented part of the legal profession than the the part of legal anthropologists so the self examinations there are painful reading and one wonders what's going to come of legal anthropology and and topologists wonder about this as well legal anthropologists now my my sense of what international law is the profession of internationalism is a very narrow one I think of people politically oriented at international institutions instrumentally using most of the time international law for various international projects of their own I look at that group of people who in a suave manner move between diplomatic positions and legal positions it's a very small and in itself insignificant and often intellectually not a very powerful group of people so these are people who wouldn't read much anthropology more than to have a five-minute conversation at the guests at the dinner table but nevertheless this is a group of people which has some political it's not an academically oriented group of the it says a consciousness that I've identified as a late 19th century consciousness that consciousness to me seems now to be breaking up and and the so okay legal anthropologists are tormented about the ethics of what they do international lawyers are tormented about what it is that what we have been doing and whether we still have business in the world or whether other whether the world is governed no longer buy all kinds of institution but other kinds of institution I am interested in my to try to intervene in the debate among those people those politically oriented institutional lawyers in the UN and in public international institutions to say hey you can think about your profession in a wider fashion by reading some stuff by understanding your own projects by reference to how predecessors that we're doing something like you were doing how they went about it how they failed how they where they succeeded I'm constantly struck by the very very strong boundaries high walls between the various legal specialisms I don't think public international lawyers really read legal anthropology also I don't really think legal anthropologist read too much public international law I'm not sure what's a good thing to tear that wall down or not that's not part of my project Joe Americans from the law department um I understand your analysis or your criticism of the histories of international law especially when you say but I want to ask you whether you would extend your critique of international law to universal human rights for example do you see human rights also as an expansion oh sorry as part of the imperial expansion and as an outgrowth of empire and oppression or would you apply a different kind of critique to human rights you see something truly Universal for example about human rights or is it all relative human rights is a technical vocabulary that grew out as Sam wine has pointed pointed out in the 60s and 70s from some struggles that were waged in that's one story about them human rights have branched out of the language of law at various moments sometimes those branches have died and led to nothing's at some other points they had have led to some things I I don't think so the all of these legal languages these legal idioms whether they be human rights idiom criminal law idiom private law idioms medium of the contract they would all of them had have have had their powerful moments when they've been drawing ambitious people to talk in them to to appropriate those languages and to do things through them just as often as there have been moments when those languages have big have lost their power have become dead languages I see human rights at this moment slowly becoming a dead language people wanted to achieve the kinds of things the kinds of moderately left things that I want to achieve in the world no longer feel that well Human Rights can perhaps no longer do that we have to invent some other way of doing that so I feel uncomfortable with the with the ever-recurring jurisprudential debate concerning universal and particular I've never seen a universal thing come to me I've just heard people speak in particular languages and I feel well I can understand those language I can analyze how those languages operate where they're active I can look at moments when they were attractive and moments when they no longer are attractive but as to questions of whether they address something Universal or whether they are merely particular or merely utterances of particular desire that's a debate in which also I have no interest and thank you very much your argument about international law I feel is one that slightly following on from that question could almost be extended to any of the social sciences and indeed is being extended across the social sciences and my question is really that we don't see the same thing in the Natural Sciences and I'm just interested in their comparison Darwinism Isaac Newton Einstein the core figures in the Natural Sciences are very Eurocentric it is a and historically the Natural Sciences have been equally bound up in oppressive political regimes of imperialism Darwinism especially I'm wondering why why you feel that the social sciences attracts this form of critique so much more why we don't feel the need to extend it across effectively all of our fields of inquiry well the question contains its own answer Natural Sciences have this hardness about it when we speak the language of Natural Sciences we feel that we are really inside the thing itself that it's not that it's the thing that speaks and not are we just choosing a vocabulary so I suppose one can say that social scientists are more used to relativizing their own position it's not as particular strength of Darwinists to relativize their Darwinism I'm more interested in economics which sort of straddles social between social scientists social sciences and Natural Sciences and and my present project is to is to try to relativize the way we talk of in international economic matters by historic izing the concepts and the vocabularies that emerged together with modern international law in the 18th in the 17th and 18th century and let's see what happens where the economists will put out the light yes Thank You professor you've said that one of your goals is to illuminate practitioners in the field which makes sense given that you were one and I'm just curious as to whether you think that really curiosity on the part of the practitioners is really the problem given the fact that uro centricity was developed with interest at heart and whether those practitioners actually have an interest in sustaining the current system and and and whether you feel that there's actually any point beyond the absurd and in trying to engage in that conversation that's a huge question but and it addresses the cynical consciousness of professionalism in general now I think that some parts of the professions are more embedded in their cynical consciousness others are more open to self examinations those that are more embedded are typically those for whom it goes well who are in control so economists but for those who are no longer in control whose salaries have been going down and who see themselves well there are more women in those professions and all these signs of their being unimportant there is an existential crisis about aspects of the legal profession including I think public international law which makes them more open to look at themselves from the perspective of their own histories their past their vulnerability so I do believe that that people versus oh I have a very long experience in the UN in various UN context and I'm often surprised by the openness to which what to outsiders often and to myself too when I enter this institution seem like completely closed bureaucratic contexts in which no idea can permit but it's not like that it's not like that the human rights expertise for instance has changed into rather a reflective and open-ended series of professional activities in which I think so I'm optimistic I'm not optimistic in the sense that these people will be empowered in five minutes against some other people but I am optimistic in as much as there is an intellectual interest out there to understand unfortunately that interest is triggered by the sense that we are losing we are losing control and also including ourselves in our vocabularies the issue and I end with this the issue of fragmentation the development of increasingly technical legal idioms that no longer speak to the to the moral ambitions of the profession that's that's a big issue professor what would you say to the claim with to the claim dealing with your centrism whether critical affirmative is to be stuck in the past because insofar as the world is now only a world of sovereign states and europe Universalist project is complete there is no longer any such thing as your centrism well that's a nice point yes but I wonder about the power of the point there is a so the world as I far as far as I can see it is a disaster and we can deal with that disaster we have various techniques and vocabularies through which we address the world now we can of course say that everything is fine because you're a century's miss the world now but and in some intellectual sense that's as far as it goes so that's a good answer but it doesn't help and I so it's so there is this big problem that I see in discussions in international relations in the profession of in IR in international law in social sciences which deals with this question of universality we speak of empty universals and how does how do particular become Universal set cetera and I find that a very unproductive series of discourses things the universal the particular are an existential predicament I'd like to say now let's get on with it and let's work with vocabularies that we have and so whether it's your eccentric or non your eccentric in some metaphysical way you're right is unimportant the important thing is that if we understand if from our understanding that something has a certain generality that the way we've come here is through certain series of maneuvers gives us the ability to operate in today's world in a better way that is to say to deal with the disaster damage then that should be done but not as a philosophical exercise about universal or particular or eccentric or non Eurocentric I think it was an ad though I would actually slightly disagree with my predecessor in the sense that we can completely depart from the Eurocentrism and my question actually sort of points towards that point because still as you said a lot of international institutions like the United Nations World Bank International Monetary Fund have are based on the European or at least anglo-saxon class European concepts and even it is even clearly affected in their voting powers in those institutions and the fact that you know you we only exchange American for an American as a president of the World Bank or European as it for a European as a president of the IMF and my question is that I sense that in the West now there is a debate because of course the economic power is shifting the political power is shifting East and there is a debate do we actually still try to hold on to those bastions of power like the IMF and the World Bank as Europeans and Americans or do we try to invite China India Brazil other developing nations to get more more power but also therefore more responsibility in those institutions and my question is do I think that there is a role appetite say in countries like India Brazil China to take the global role and if there is this appetite do you believe that if we do not let them in now they will try to create a competing world order or if we do let them in do you believe that the Eurocentric heritage of those oceans will make it difficult more difficult or maybe more enriching for them to actually act through those forums to me you're a century is about all the dominance of a certain language and thereby a certain consciousness anybody can enter that language can be a user of that language and can inhabit that consciousness the Chinese can and they do the Indians can and they do it's I have to say completely irrelevant for me whether the World Bank is headed by an Indian American Finnish British whatever language Peter of the language that is spoken in the World Bank today the ships the future ships in the power between places between Beijing or Hong Kong or Tokyo whatever places even though those are uninteresting from the perspective of my question which would be well but okay so that's those are the people who speak but what is it that they speak and I tend to hear a language in which where people like or John Locke and Google growth Hills and said that I would be completely at home and that's my work that it's not what the color of skin or the background of the speaker is I need to liberate forensic ischemia in a minute but perhaps I might just conclude by asking a final very simple and probably obvious question which is this you said at one point that histories in international law whereas Eurocentric as the world they described well if euro centricity was once a symptom of something else something larger mustn't we assume it continues to be stowed and if that's the case then however valuable and helpful these four techniques are that you've outlined what basis do we have for thinking that they'll actually change anything presumably they were available to people in the past to why our conditions and this comes back in a sense to the question that was posed by the gentleman in the middle at the back what basis do we have for being more optimistic today that we can overcome this tenacious euro centricity that you wonderfully traced well Susan that would be your kind of a question wouldn't it an ever hate it's damn hard so as a historian as a historian one of course can always hide behind just saying well I just recount the past what can I say about what these stories are able to achieve today I think there is a so but I think we have to realize that the world isn't the same this the role of these stories to the world of exchanges of power and money is different today than it than it once was as I said earlier that I think the world is a disaster and that we have all these techniques and languages through which we make it possible for us not to see that the disaster my thing is just a an old-fashioned enlightenment thing it is to just let's look at this thing as a disaster let's let's imagine that international legal work can be a critique of ideology and let's assume that after the work of ideology critique has has finished people can look in the world realize that the disaster that is there and take action in order to improve what they can I'm this is not my I find myself completely naked or let's say mute in terms of the languages of progress that would then have to be employed once enlightenment has taken over so please join me in thanking professor Costigan

Channel: LSE

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Keywords: LSE, London, School, of, Economics, and, Political, Science, London School of Economics, University, College, Public, Lecture, Event, podcast, Seminar, Talk, Speech, Professor, Martti, Koskenniemi, Martti Koskenniemi, Histories, International, Law, International Law, dealing, with, Eurocentrism, legal, Europe, euro, eurozone, history, academic

Id: jOZ2kM1_HcQ

Length: 78min 32sec (4712 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 09 2012