In reviewing Vattel’s depiction of the world, centring his theory of popular will as the basis for sovereignty exposes a stratified range of actors that constitute his vi-sion of global order. As detailed above, there was the (counterfactual) European state-system where all sovereign polities great and small were formally equal enti-ties legitimized by popular will, there was the Ottoman Empire that stood out as the archetypal destroyer of popular will, and there were ‘primitive’ communities pre-cluded from claiming popular will. However, there was another actor that Vattel idolized as a guarantor of the independence of Europe’s small states who feared extinguishment by absolutist monarchies, especially France where the excesses of dynastic accumulation vastly expanded under the reign of King Louis XIV. Against
140 Ginzburg 2005, 674.
141 On this basis it cannot be said that the critique of colonialization existed outside the scope of Vattel’s pool of available intellectual resources.
this backdrop, Vattel placed a great deal of hope in Britain, for his ‘…significant claim with respect to the balance of power was that Britain was the only state capa-ble of playing the role of peacekeeper, aligning with other powers when necessary to combat France.’142
Contrary to any notion that placing hope in Britain embodied timeless truths re-garding ‘the international’ as a sphere of struggle beyond domestic political differ-ence, Vattel’s geopolitical formulations were deeply informed by the way Britain approached popular will. In Book I of The Law of Nations Britain is described as an exemplary model of domestic government. According to Vattel:
That illustrious nation distinguishes itself in a glorious manner by its application to everything that can render a state more flourishing. An admirable constitution there places every citizen in a position that ena-bles him to contribute to this great end, and everywhere diffuses the spirit of genuine patriotism which zealously asserts itself for the public welfare. We there see private citizens form considerable enterprises, in order to promote the glory and welfare of the nation. And while a bad prince would find his hands tied up, a wise and moderate king finds the most powerful aids to give success to his glorious designs. The nobles and the representatives of the people form a link of confidence between the monarch and the nation, and concurring with him in every thing that tends to promote the public welfare, partly ease him of the burdens of government, give stability to his power, and procure him an obedience the more perfect, as it is voluntary. Every good citizen sees that the strength of the state is really the advantage of all, and not that of a single person.143
142 Whatmore 2010, 100.
143 Vattel 1852 [1758], Book I, Chapter II, § 24.
While Vattel is clear that achieving this harmonious order historically ‘…cost rivers of blood’,144 and his overly sanguine view is difficult to reconcile with continued civil strife in Britain,145 a distinct set of interests motivated his faith.
From Vattel’s perspective, Britain constituted a system whose interests in foreign commerce provided it with little incentive to interfere in the governments of Eu-rope’s same small states, who often functioned as the type of commercial partner Britain desired.146 Moreover, it presented a Protestant counterweight to the practice of Catholic imperialism whereby kingdoms such as France viewed the authoritative powers of their monarchies as the proper inheritors of the universal church.147 As such, for Vattel, according to Richard Whatmore, ‘[t]he combination of the struc-ture of Britain’s government and its interest in commerce made it the kind of state that would fulfil its duties towards fellow states.’148
While Vattel was correct that Britain was a different kind of empire that was cer-tainly more conducive to the continued sovereign autonomy of Europe’s small com-merce-oriented states, this occurred largely because Britain’s endeavours primarily entailed colonising the non-European world. For Vattel, this could be viewed, not as undermining hypocrisy, but yet another example of British virtue. That is if we consider his advocacy of cultivating the world’s uncultivated spaces as a universal human good, even if this entailed dispossessing indigenous populations. This was strangely consistent with Vattel’s condemnation of those who conquer Europe’s small polities. Here the emerging view of ‘primitive’ populations was their lack of
144 Ibid.
145 According to one important early-twentieth century commentary on the Vattelian influence: ‘one has only to turn a dozen pages of the history of the reform movement in England to find how far [Vattel’s characterizations]…. were from describing the real state of things.’ Fenwick 1913, 400.
146 Whatmore 2010, 101.
147 On the centrality of Protestantism for Vattel, see Hunter 2010.
148 Whatmore 2010, 102.
productive land usage, judged by European standards, meant that their lands could not be ‘conquered’ in the strict sense because they never owned them in the first instance.149
Against this backdrop, various strands of Vattel’s theory reached their logical con-clusion within a group of English-speaking settlers on the continent of North Amer-ica. This population developed a conception of liberty based on dispossession and asserted their sovereign independence from a British metropole they charged with
‘insupportable tyranny', to use the Vattelian terminology150 As will be discussed in the next chapter, Vattel’s The Law of Nations was the ideal playbook for those seeking independence through the American Revolution. The result was the first new international legal subject where popular will would be validated through
‘facts on the ground’ in direct repudiation of dynastic legitimacy claims. Thus, Vat-tel’s work was invoked to validate a harmonious merger of three meta-phenomenon he personally venerated: settler colonialism, an Anglocentric conception of political legitimacy, and an international legal order premised on popular will as the basis for domestic authority. This began a process where Vattel’s counterfactual assertion of a world of sovereign states ultimately reached the status of near-universal con-sensus.
2.7. Conclusion
The foundational emergence of Vattel’s theory of the popular will-international law relationship demonstrates what is possible if we merge the insights of ‘juridical thinking’ with historical sociology. Juridical thinking is the ability to weave strands of meaning into an overarching abstract narrative that travels across time and space, and this is precisely what Vattel accomplished. This was demonstrated by the ab-sence of any need to account for actual material conditions in the process of lodging
149 Carty 1996, 6.
150 On Vattel’s theory of tyranny and popular uprising in this regard, see Part 2.3.3.
his critique of global consolidation as a fundamental demand of the natural law.
However, material context should in no way be excluded from the account of why Vattel presented his juridical fiction of a horizontal world of sovereign states where each member expressed the unique self-perfecting will of its underlying political community. Delineating the interests at play in this context is aided immensely by the way historical sociology de-fetishizes the modern sovereign nation-state through situating it as one contingent political formation amongst many. When con-sidering Vattel as the patriotic representative of a small Swiss Canton at the risk of annihilation by expanding land empires, we can observe his material interest in lodging the juridical assertion of a pluralist order of inviolable sovereign states as a demand of natural law. Thus, while a particular formulation of juridical thinking was the outcome, a distinct historical-sociological content motivated this assertion in the first place.
Despite its parochial origins, this juridical ontology of a world of formally-equal, popular will-based sovereign states bore consequences that Vattel himself would likely never have imagined. What made Vattel’s theory so useful for certain actors was its accommodation of a vast range of political possibilities for societies orga-nized around the ideal of the nation-state form, while simultaneously excluding those that did not adhere to this form. As the next chapter will show, this dynamic was exemplified through the American Revolution where Vattel’s treatise embold-ened a settler population seeking sovereign independence from an imperial metropole aligned with indigenous communities. Here, a particular historical soci-ological configuration gave rise to a juridical narrative profoundly supplemented by Vattel’s juridical narrative despite the fact that it arose an ocean away to explain very different material circumstances. However, while they may have manifested in unique ways, the differing contexts that shaped the formation of Vattel’s treatise and its pivotal influence elsewhere were very much a part of the same expanding order of global capitalism. Understanding this multi-faceted transformation of so-cial relations in the longue duree of Vattel’s reception is cruso-cial for telling the story of why popular will is today the sole basis for domestic authority under international law.