Vitoria’s theorisation of Spanish-Amerindian relations allows the juridical response to initial European colonial encounter to lay the groundwork for the creation of a novel ontological position, the modern colonial subject. The Amerindian served as the prototype for the subsequent colonial subjects that would emerge within and against European modernity. By the colonised subject, I specifically refer to an ontological category produced specifically through and in oppositional relation to European colonialism. Fanon takes us to the heart of the subjective identity in his mediation of the condition of blackness when he determines that ‘to understand the being of the black man… not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.’124 While Fanon himself focuses on the condition of
blackness, he declares that his analysis can be expanded to all colonised peoples, to ‘every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality.’125 Fanon illustrates that the connection between different colonial identities is their ontological position in relation to European modernity. The category of the Black or the Negro is a product of occidental misrecognition, the same dynamic that had produced the Amerindian, the Oriental and other colonised subjectivities.126
The colonised subject exists under and is structured by what Fanon terms as an ‘atmosphere of violence’, referring to a mode of existence that is at all moments open
124 Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, (New York: Pluto Press, 2008), p.83.
125 Ibid., p.9. ‘I will broaden the field of this description and through the Negro of the Antilles include every colonized man.’
126 For further discussion on the production of the oriental, see Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 2003).
being impacted upon by the force of the law.127 The violence serves an ordering
function for the international community. Vitoria schema recognises importance of wrestling with law’s responsibility to effect a bringing together and once unpacked, offers a glimpse of the force that generates community in international law. Reading Vitoria alongside Girard points towards a violence upon the colonised subject from which the model for the liberal, humanitarian international legal order that would be recovered in the twentieth-century derives its unity. The narrative of the birth of the international community through the European colonial project is incompatible with contemporary international law’s universalist self-image. The violence upon the colonised must be recalibrated, misrecognised as legitimate in the manner of Vitoria’s innovative reworking of Spanish-Amerindian relations. The unpacking of this historical misrecognition, as performed in this chapter, is necessary in order expose the mechanism of sacrifice lying underneath the liberal humanitarianism acclaimed by international law.128
3.5 Conclusion
In reading Vitoria’s works alongside Girard and his notion of social orders being produced through a sacrificial mechanism, I have attempted to show how Vitoria’s humanistic critique prefiguring an ultimate validation of the conquista provides an illustrative starting point through which to perceive the international legal order as being generated through violence upon the colonised subject. After clarifying the reasons for undertaking this engagement with history, I reviewed the current literature on Vitoria by taking account of the on-going contestation over his legacy. Appreciating how the model of the sacrificial mechanism maps onto the Vitorian schema helps to understand the concerns that informed both a recovery of Vitoria in the crisis of international order in the early twentieth century and the continuing relevance of his ideas for international legal scholarship today. My reading worked to reconcile the contemporary scholarly debate over whether Vitoria is a liberal humanitarian or a colonial apologist by illustrating how liberal humanism within Euro-modernity has itself been the result of and dependent upon a sacrificial relation to those held to traverse the boundaries of humanity. This is particularly important for
127 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p.70. 128 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p.10.
the trajectory of thesis as the ultimate focus of my engagement with Vitoria is not so much placed on his influence on early modern jurisprudence but on how his jurisprudence was recovered to guide international law and, in particular, a distinctly Americanised notion of liberal humanism in the twentieth century. Therefore, this chapter placed a focus on the historical antecedents for what I argue as a ‘sacrificial internationalism’ in contemporary international law, bringing together Vitoria’s image as a secular modernist with his biography as a trained and committed theologian in order to reveal the theological inheritance of our current international law. The impulse behind these claims has been to clarify the intellectual context that would ultimately produce the War on Drugs, before I offer a focused study of this particularly instantiation of a ‘sacrificial’ international law.
In the next section of the thesis, I will show how, in the shadow of rivalry within the international order, a resurrection of interest in Vitoria occurred amongst jurists seeking to facilitate in new order of universal peace.129 An idealised Vitoria emerged as an intellectual forefather for international law, at a time in which the universal order of peace required regeneration, particularly by major jurists from the U.S.A. A major figure I will draw on inn this section is leading American international legal theorist, Dr. James Brown Scott, who carried forward this recovery of Vitoria, as a generation of forthright American internationalists sought to reshape international law for the twentieth century. Moreover, Part B of this thesis will illustrate how, emerging conterminously with the recovery of Vitoria, and being propelled by the same group of early twentieth century American internationalists, movement for international law to universally prohibit drugs was born. Moral reformers and Christian missionaries, whose anti-vice campaigning was largely dismissed as a fringe movement at the start of the twentieth century, found that their arguments for first anti-opium and then wider anti-drugs legislation aligned with the political and economic objectives as well as the general theoretical orientation of the founding generation of American international lawyers as the U.S.A emerged as a new major world power. In short, over the course of Part B of this thesis, I will show how the drug prohibitionist movement, in both its religious origins and construction of colonised and racial subaltern peoples as the included/excluded subject within a universal order, can be read to not only historically coincide with the recovery of
Vitoria for American international law but also theoretically to carry more than a faint echo of Vitoria’s ‘sacrificial’ legal framework as has been discussed in this chapter.