7.3 CONCLUSION

We inhabit a world that is still in an important respect like Vattel's: in which the dominant image of the international sphere as a legally egalitarian world of nation-states, one we inherited from him, exists alongside imperial structures of power and law that are hard to acknowledge and come to grips with in the terms provided by that image.

As in Vattel's thought, aspirational models continue to obscure abuses by the powerful, Rawls's Law of Peoples being an influential recent example. Rawls acknowledged that no existing states (especially not the global ‘liberal' hegemon, the United States) satisfy the criteria for liberal peoples in his account. But the structure of his theory includes no conceptual space for injustices perpetrated by so-called liberal states and the global economic and political order they dominate, for liberal polities are considered under the rubric of ideal theory, and non-ideal theory considers only injustices by ‘outlaw' states and in ‘burdened societies' implicitly located outside the community of liberal industrialized states.^{^[500]} Beyond Rawls, international law's identity as an emancipatory project with an essentially European genealogy continues to shape the liberal frameworks dominant in the global justice literature, theories of humanitarian intervention, and the liberal strand of international relations scholarship. Such perspectives overlook or elide the deep substantive inequalities that are inscribed in formally equal legal principles, as well as the profound legal asymmetries imposed on post-colonial states during decolonization and that continue to structure the global order. The literatures on contemporary cosmopolitanism and humanitarian intervention have tended to ask how liberal states and societies should respond to the pathologies they encounter out there, and how they might intervene to relieve poverty and promote democracy, rather than understanding the prosperous and relatively stable societies of the global north and the impoverished and too often authoritarian states of the global south as products of the same long history of asymmetrical interaction, mutual constitution, and exploitation for profit.

While supporters of the Responsibility to Protect, commonly known as R2P, acknowledge, as older debates around humanitarian intervention often did not, the conditions of global hierarchy that contribute to humanitarian crises, the universalistic conceptual frame of the R2P principle - that all sovereignty is conditional on a state's ability to protect its population - obscures the fact that the principle is only ever invoked in cases in the global south.^{^[501]} As the President of the UN General Assembly, the Nicaraguan diplomat Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, argued in a 2009 debate on the responsibility to protect, the history of abuse of humanitarian arguments for the use of force by colonial powers and powerful states in the post-colonial period has led to profound distrust of R2P as simply the latest iteration of that history. Given the ‘lack of trust in developing countries when it comes to the use of force for humanitarian reasons', he argued, we ‘first need to create a more just and equal world order, including in the economic and social sense, as well as a Security Council that does not create a differential system of international law geared towards the strong protecting, or not protecting, whomever they wish'.^{^[502]}

The legacies of imperial history - of phenomena ranging from the global slave trade and the appropriation of vast agricultural land in the western hemisphere, to wars of decolonization, and the myriad proxy and covert wars of the post-World War II period - include both acute ongoing consequences

for formerly colonized societies and the more often overlooked but likewise transformative effects on metropolitan states, their economies, their militaries, and their politics.^{^[503]} Since the nineteenth century, these have been consistently racialized patterns, since, as Anghie has written, ‘Race, transmuted into the more comprehensive notion of “civilization,” is central to the very definition of international law.'^{^[504]} Unequal international standing has routinely been the fate of non-white states, from the ‘burdened' membership of states such as Ethiopia and Liberia in the League of Nations to the constraints on sovereign prerogatives imposed on post-colonial states.^{^[505]}

Conventional narratives of a progressive international law saw it emerging among Western European nation-states and gradually expanding outward to encompass the globe, both spreading sovereignty and taming state violence as it went.

The recognition by critical histories of international law that the aspirations for universal justice it articulated have been repeatedly intertwined with hierarchy and domination make possible the chastened hope that international law may yet be mobilized in more emancipatory ways. Perhaps, as Burke, Alexandrowicz, and the British critics of the Opium War believed in relation to the forms of imperial domination they faced, Vattel's twin commitments to the autonomy of political communities and the duty of universal concern remain valuable critical resources for our own dilemmas.

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Source: Brett Annabel, Donaldson Megan. History, Politics, Law: Thinking through the International Cambridge University Press,2021. — 450 p.. 2021

7.3 CONCLUSION

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