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Book Review
| Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvii + 356. $100 (ISBN 0-521-82892-9).
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| In Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, Antony Anghie powerfully argues through a series of chapters from the sixteenth-century Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria to globalization and the war on terrorism that imperialism and the colonial encounter are embedded in the very DNA of international law and its doctrines. In this historical progression he argues that Vitoria provides a skillful legal structure to allow for incessant warfare against the indigenous of the American continent; nineteenth-century positivism created a sovereign/non-sovereign divide between European and non-European societies but needed to incorporate treaties with non-Europeans that economically mattered; the mandate system of the League of Nations rather than becoming the training ground for independence focused more through developing administrative techniques on the economic value of the mandate to the mandatory state; the postwar system undermined the non-European state's sovereignty over its own natural resources; the Bretton Woods' institutions' "good governance" mandate of accountability, transparency, and democracy represents a new version of the "civilizing mission" that is to a significant extent economically driven; and that the Bush administration's war on terrorism in a number of key elements is the natural heir to this tradition. |
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Perhaps Anghie's most dramatically argued chapter is that devoted to Francisco de Vitoria. He provides a reading of Vitoria's lectures, De Indis Noviter Inventis and De Jure Bellis Hispanorum in Barbaros. Vitoria, Anghie tells us, makes a decision, against other voices, to argue the rationality of the Indians, and for Vitoria the "universal system of divine law administered by the Pope is replaced by the universal law system of jus gentium whose rules may be ascertained by the use of reason" (20). Having established a formal equivalence between the Spanish and the Indians, Vitoria goes through a rather tortured justification for the Spanish war on the Indians, starting with Vitoria's assertion that "ambassadors are by the law of nations inviolable and the Spaniards are the ambassadors of the Christian peoples. Therefore, the native Indians are bound to give them, at least, a friendly hearing and not to repel them." As a result of this "astonishing metamorphosis of rules," Anghie tells us "Indian resistance to Spanish presence is a violation of the law of nations, which would justify sanctions, Spanish war against the Indians is inevitable and endless" (24). And much of Anghie's analysis focuses on the complicated differences in sovereignty between European states and non-European societies, and as Anghie argues, Vitoria did not adopt a sovereignty theory already in place: "Rather, for Vitoria, sovereignty doctrine emerges through his attempts to address the problem of cultural difference" (16). |
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Anghie's analysis is more subtle than my quick summary, but it raises a number of questions. He opens his Vitoria chapter by stating that "[w]hile Hugo Grotius is generally regarded as the principal forerunner of modern international law, historians of the discipline trace its primitive origins to the works of Francisco de Vitoria..." (13). Of the two figures he cites, one is James Brown Scott, who had a special affinity for Vitoria, and then Anghie refers to Vitoria's being placed in the Classics of International Law series without stating that the series editor was, again, James Brown Scott. And reading Anghie's analysis one does not have a sense of the Dominican theologian at the University of Salamanca, whose lectures are full of Biblical citations and references to Thomas Aquinas, who gave direct legal advice to Charles V, and who had students as missionaries in the Western hemisphere. If Anghie had further historically anchored Vitoria, he may, for example, have explained why Vitoria rejected various positions, including that of the papacy, which already provided arguments for the exploitation of the American continent and its inhabitants. Why, for example, did Vitoria structure his lecture as a criticism of a list of Spanish "titles" to turn then to the "titles" that have merit? And despite the special character of the colonial encounter, Vitoria's lecture has many more references to Spanish/French or French/Burgundian analogies than Anghie's treatment would suggest. |
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Similarly, in Anghie's treatment of the nineteenth century and its adoption of positivism, one might wonder whether the discipline had become quite as dominated by positivism as Anghie suggests. And as with his chapter on Vitoria, we might ask why a move to positivism was required if there were doctrines already in place that had abetted a colonial relationship. If the core of Anghie's treatment of the nineteenth century is the Conference of Berlin of 1884–85 and creating a legal framework for further colonial expansion, his argument could benefit from working through why the major international legal texts seemed focused on the search for peace and more ordered warfare among the states within the Western system rather than interaction with the non-Western world and then reconnect that analysis with his line of argument. |
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Anghie's book lays out an excellent argument for the colonial background of international law and its institutions, and it does so with numerous fresh insights and clear command of a wide range of materials. The book might have been stronger still if Anghie had attempted to address further the discordant parts of the picture and bring them into his analytical fold. |
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| Carl Landauer
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| San Francisco, California |
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