Imperfect Cosmopolis. Georg Cavallar
Some authors explicitly or implicitly assume a totalizing ‘Western legal discourse’, especially Williams and Anghie. This theory, however, is an illusion, committing the fallacy of constructing a meta-narrative of modern history. What we really get is a complex picture: the small story that is being told here about Vitoria or Wolff is not necessarily part of a bigger one. The fallacy lies in assuming a false continuity and connectedness that is in fact the work of the interpreter’s mind. There are often several types of over-schematization involved: the cliché of a coherent ‘Europe’ or ‘Western civilization’ and a corresponding discourse, the sweeping reference to the category of ‘the other’ and misleading labels like ‘Western imperial project’ or ‘Enlightenment project’ (see also Chapter 1). The narrative itself is totalizing, essentialist and thus epistemologically unconvincing.
2. The construction of false continuities
For instance, Anghie makes fanciful connections between the sixteenth-century theologian Vitoria and the secularized discipline of nineteenth-century international law – when key concepts and approaches were civilization, race, sovereignty, state will and legal positivism, all of them rather alien to Vitoria’s natural-law thinking. There is a sweeping reference to ‘classical international law’ without an attempt to define this term. Bowden offers us some daring jumps: for example, from Allen (1939) to Wolff (1749), then to Hall (1890), with quotations from Ward (1795) in between.76 The complexity and pluralism of the discourses from various, and often very divergent, centuries get lost.
3. The influence of international legal theory is overestimated:
This is suggested by recent studies. McHugh and MacMillan stress the importance of the common law tradition for the English colonies, rather than the impact of international lawyers such as Vitoria, Suaréz, Gentili or Grotius. International legal theory and international legal practice did not always overlap, especially when theories had a philosophical bent. Fisch points out that law in general was indeed an instrument of colonialism, but adds several qualifications. Law ‘also set some limits to European intervention and manipulation’. He warns us not to overestimate the importance of legal mechanisms, let alone of legal writings. ‘One might suppose that, after all, legal policy was not of a decisive political importance: the end of European rule came in all areas within a short period regardless of the particular legal policy of the respective colonial power.’77 Often, indigenous law was used as a means of controlling the natives. It remains to be shown that European legal traditions by their very nature or essence lend themselves to be used as an instrument of oppression. The emancipatory, subversive potential of these traditions, for instance in terms of the concept of equality, should not be underestimated. Sometimes they turned against Europeans. There were unintentional effects, especially in the areas of legal equality and human rights.78
4. The ambiguity of texts
Vitoria’s lecture in particular is deeply ambiguous. It is definitely one-sided to present him as an unequivocal accomplice of European colonialism or imperialism. Even Vattel is a difficult case: texts are often multidimensional and open to divergent interpretations, and if Europeans and US-Americans used Vattel to justify colonialism (with the help of the agricultural argument), we should not forget that Commissioner Lin Tse-hsu quoted Vattel to criticize British pressure and impending intervention in the 1840s. When he took rigid measures to protect the health of China’s population and destroyed British chests of opium, he could have found support for that policy in the doctrines of several European natural lawyers. His scant knowledge of Vattel based on deficient translations apparently convinced him that his course of action was in agreement with norms of the European law of nations.79
At the end of the day, it is obvious that debunking Grotius and Vattel as accomplices of European expansion and colonialism is justified. However, we can also discover strong cosmopolitan traditions in some of the international lawyers. Vitoria’s moral cosmopolitanism is incomplete, but still an impressive feat, whereas Pufendorf’s and Wolff’s moral and legal cosmopolitanisms belong to the impressive intellectual achievements of modern European legal theory.
In his excellent book From Apology to Utopia, published some twenty years ago, Martti Koskenniemi simply did not mention the ‘colonial dimension’ when discussing international lawyers such as Grotius. In his more recent study The Gentle Civilizer of Nations, he devotes a whole chapter to late nineteenth-century European international legal theory and how it constructed the standard of civilization, ways of excluding non-Europeans and methods of justifiying imperialism.80 This indicates a significant shift of emphasis in contemporary scholarship, and one that should be welcomed.
3 • British Enlightenment: the Triumph of Commercial Cosmopolitanism
Introduction: a cosmopolitan Enlightenment?
The eighteenth century has usually been seen as a cosmopolitan age before the advent of nationalism in the wake of the French Revolution. In a recent publication, for instance, we find the claim that ‘the Enlightenment … was cosmopolitan in style and content’, and the Abbé de Saint-Pierre and Rousseau are cited as examples.1 This standard interpretation has to be qualified. I illustrate this claim with a few examples: Hume is often regarded as a cosmopolitan thinker, an assessment which is primarily based on his famous statement that ‘not only as a man, but as a BRITISH subject, I pray for the flourishing commerce of GERMANY, SPAIN, ITALY, and even FRANCE itself’.2 The context of the passage is decisive: Hume argues that jealousy of trade is largely unfounded. The ‘enlarged and benevolent sentiments’ of the cosmopolitan coincide with the self-interest of a particular state’s citizen. Presumably not all communities qualify as potential trading partners, although Hume takes for granted that poorer countries can undersell richer ones, as long as they are industrious and ambitious. At any rate, Hume mentions only European countries. In another famous passage, Hume is blatantly racist. He considers ‘negroes, and in general all the other species of men … to be naturally inferior to the whites’ and praises white civilization as the pinnacle of human evolution.3 Hume is apparently Eurocentric rather than cosmopolitan. If he endorsed cosmopolitanism, then it was its economic rather than its moral version. He was not a narrow-minded Scot (or Briton), but perhaps a narrow-minded European.
The Abbé de Saint-Pierre is another case in point. Often praised as one of the founding fathers of the United Nations, the Abbé in fact focused on European affairs, stating that the aim of his proposed league was to establish ‘everlasting peace amongst all the Christian states’. The designed European Union was supposed to fight the Turks and throw them out of Europe, Asia and Africa. Global peace was not intended.4
Voltaire does indeed refer to ‘the citizen of the world’, but he is in fact a moderate patriot who tolerates other nations and despises inter-state envy, rivalry and aggression. ‘The man who would want his homeland never to be larger, or smaller, or richer or poorer would be a citizen of the world.’ This is an extremely thin notion of moral cosmopolitanism. The main thrust of his article ‘La Patrie’ in the Dictionnaire Philosophique is that most people do not have anything they could legitimately call their ‘homeland’. Either they are suppressed by their leaders and priests, or they are greedy merchants who ‘have no country apart from their stock exchange and their ledgers’, or they are, for instance, ‘pleasure-loving’, narrowminded, arrogant and monolingual Parisians.5 Voltaire’s main focus is on a genuine form of patriotism, and cosmopolitan attitudes apparently serve to counterbalance national pride.
I hasten to add that some thinkers of the Enlightenment were cosmopolitan, but we should stay clear of sweeping generalizations.6 In particular, we should not overlook the category of Europeanism ‘in between’ patriotism and cosmopolitanisms. Another cliché is the assumption of harmless, unpolitical and cosmopolitan theories of patriotism in the eighteenth century, until ‘the fall’ into xenophobic and extreme nationalism triggered by the French Revolution. This assessment is apparently in need of qualification. Some authors, even in the