DISEÑO E IMPLANTACIÓN DEL PLAN. SEGUIMIENTO

Chapter I provides an overview of the doctrinal and policy issues raised by ques-tions of popular will in contemporary international law. Here I account for the ‘ef-fective control doctrine’ within the UN Charter and its subsequent manifestation against the backdrop of the Cold War and decolonization. From here, I assess post-Cold War challenges to the effective control doctrine in the realms of state creation

146 Ibid. 16 (notes omitted).

and governmental legitimacy. It was through these projects that international law’s traditional tolerance of varied domestic political orders was subject to critique on the basis that liberal democracy represented the only true measures of popular will.

Given the failure of these projects to succeed on their own terms, the effective con-trol doctrine remains a highly relevant feature of international law applicable to domestic political conflicts/contestations the world over.

In locating where the component elements of the effective control doctrine first emerged, Chapter II argues that the great turning point was the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel’s 1758 treatise The Law of Nations. Here I examine earlier classical pub-licists (in particular Francisco de Vitoria) to show how our modern conception of popular will did not exist in the earliest international legal sources that are generally viewed as authoritative within the field. I thus showcase Vattel’s responsibility for this rupture, through a reading of his domestic political theory in conjunction with his theory of international order. This textual engagement is then coupled with a contextual analysis of Vattel’s position in world history. Here, I show how ‘popular will’ as the unifying rubric of Vattel’s theory explains how his designation of the various classes of actors was informed by his immediate context as it related to the European states system, the Ottoman Empire, indigenous peoples in the non-Euro-pean world, and Britain/the British Empire.

While Chapter II is undoubtedly rooted in history, Chapter III begins the main world-historical narrative by accounting for the rise of colonial capitalism and the modern nation-state form. Following engagements with the debates on the rise of Britain as the first modern state in global context, I account for the emergence of the US as the first new international legal subject where popular will evidenced by

‘facts on the ground’ sufficiently repudiated a parent state’s claims of dynastic le-gitimacy. Here I examine how the impetus to raise the justification of popular will in this context was taken from numerous features of British thought that where spe-cially adapted to the material context of a slave-holding ‘settler empire’ that exem-plified capitalist political economy both materially and ideologically. Here Vattel’s The Law of Nations functioned as the ultimate guide to legitimizing the American

Revolution under the law of nations, especially when it came to appealing to out-siders in a universalistic capacity.

Chapter IV examines the transformation of ‘Ancien Regime’ in Europe between the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and the 1815 Congress of Vienna. This entails an exam-ination of the rise of rationalised territorial administration under consolidation of absolutism that generated profound contradictions regarding the legitimate author-ity and ultimately resulted in the French Revolution. Here I examine the various international legal innovations that arose in the crucible of the Revolution as they relate to nationalist and republication challenges to dynastic legitimacy expressed under the banner of popular will. In this capacity, I discuss the enduring impact of this ‘popular will’ concept that remained even after the defeat of Napoleon when victorious anti-Revolutionary forces sought to restore order.

Chapter V then analyses the Concert of Europe system that arose from the Congress of Vienna in the early-nineteenth century whereby post-Napoleonic reconstruction was subject to hegemonic control by great powers. Here I focus on the ideological and geopolitical tensions between liberal Britain and the reactionary-dynastic Holy Alliance of Russia, Prussia, and Austria with each bloc harbouring very different visions of what ‘restoring order’ meant. Managing these tensions lead to core inter-national legal developments including modern sovereign equality, the replacement of territorial conquest by belligerent occupation, and an entirely new generation of treaty-making. Furthermore, I show how this process was facilitated by understand-ings of popular will that arose as critiques of Revolutionary liberalism/universalism and asserted formulations of racial hierarchy and ethno-nationalist particularity that facilitated expansion of colonial capitalism.

In Chapter VI, I turn to the phenomenon of peripheral popular will through an ex-ploration of the independence of Latin American states. Here, the region’s for-mation through feudal dynastic colonization was very different from the British settlement of North America. Against this socio-historical backdrop, I examine how commitments by Europe’s dynastic powers to deny recognition to Latin American independence leaders led the British and US Americans to articulate popular

will-based arguments that de facto authority constitutes international legal standing over a parent state’s objection. This process further enmeshed Latin America deeply within the structures of global capitalism. The resulting pressures led to robust ar-guments concerning sovereign equality, nonintervention, and absolute independ-ence as a necessary to protecting the popular will of weak/marginalized states hop-ing to improve through ‘development.’

Finally, in Chapter VII, I return to the context of the formation of the United Na-tions that gives rise to the ‘effective control doctrine’ by virtue of its entrenchment of commitments to sovereign equality, non-intervention, and ideological pluralism.

In rereading this transformative event in light of the historical analysis presented in this thesis, it is my argument that following countless projects to limit or qualify sovereign autonomy through various colonial rationales, by 1945 such efforts could no longer be justified. After all, fascism had demonstrated the genocidal (and spa-tially uncontainable) potentiality of racialized colonial violence, while Soviet and anticolonial challenges to the legal architecture of Western empires were now una-voidable forces in world politics. Thus, while colonialism still existed throughout the world, the UN Charter provided the seeds of a vision where popular will was applicable on a global scale and every human being should be a member of a sov-ereign political community. This development mobilized numerous lineages of the Enlightenment revolutions amongst a diverse array of actors who navigated the in-herited structures of popular will, international law, and the nation-state as both vessels of hope and sources of constraint. In the Conclusion, I return to the forma-tive vision presented in Vattel’s The Law of Nations and restate how this thesis has exposed the process through which an abstract theory produced by a peripheral ac-tor ultimately shaped the identity of every person on earth.

CHAPTER I

The Contemporary International Law of Popular Will: The