Liberal internationalism revisited: Grotius, Vattel, and the International order of states1

 I would like to thank Anthony Pagden, Carole Pateman, and Perry Anderson for their comments on an earlier draft. Any errors remain the sole responsibility of the author.

Abstract

This essay offers a philosophical critique of modern accounts of liberal internationalism in light of two early modern European formulations of international order developed by Hugo Grotius and Emmerich de Vattel. The major problem in theories of international relations has been the straightforward extension of principles of domestic order to relations between states to achieve a peaceful co-existence. Conventional theories see “international order” in terms either of a hierarchical order in which states pursue a common interest and interact strategically, or an anarchical order in which common purposes are lacking and warfare is paramount. Elements of both views are found in Grotius and Vattel and this allows us to understand the failure of modern accounts of liberal internationalism in order to grasp the global transformation of power between states that is underway at present.

Notes

 I would like to thank Anthony Pagden, Carole Pateman, and Perry Anderson for their comments on an earlier draft. Any errors remain the sole responsibility of the author.

 On the different notions of state sovereignty, see Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), esp. 9–25. Krasner distinguishes between four meanings of sovereignty; here I am concerned only with Westphalian sovereignty, which is defined in terms of domestic authority structures and non-intervening external actors. For the original differentiation between kinds of sovereignty, see Robert Keohane, “Political Authority after Intervention: Gradations in Sovereignty,” in Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal, and Political Dilemmas, ed. J. L. Holzgrefe and Robert Keohane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 279.

 For a detailed study of the relationship between internal socio-legal order of states and their external military–diplomatic sphere, see Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (New York: Knopf, 2002), where he unifies the inner and outer fields in the single system of a “constitutional order.”

 In regarding internationalism as an analytical as well as normative category for explaining inter-state conflict, Fred Halliday distinguishes three distinct types of internationalism—liberal, where autonomous individuals achieve peace and solidarity through cooperation; hegemonic, which regards world integration as essentially asymmetrical; and revolutionary internationalism, as embodied in the proletarian internationalism of Marxist theory. See Fred Halliday, “Three Concepts of Internationalism,” International Affairs (1988): 187–98. More recently, in a similar vein, Carsten Holbraad constructs a parallel analysis of both internationalism and nationalism by categorizing the two concepts into conservative, liberal, and socialist. See Carsten Holbraad, Internationalism and Nationalism in European Political Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

 The literature on the history of internationalism, both as a concept with its own history and as part of a larger theoretical framework within international relations, is simply overwhelming. It is safe to say that scholarship generally tends to regard internationalism as the intellectual counterpart of nationalism, and any consequent analysis of the term is generated out of the discourse on nationalism. For a succinct history of the origins of internationalism, see “The Roots of Internationalism” in Kjell Goldmann, The Logic of Internationalism: Coercion and Accommodation (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 5–14. For a periodization of the history of internationalism, see Micheline R. Ishay, Internationalism and Its Betrayal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), who argues that internationalism, although generally perceived to be opposed to nationalism, in fact preceded it. For the inter-relation between nationalism and internationalism, see Tom Nairn, “Internationalism: A Critique,” in Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London: Verso, 1997), 25–46. Nairn regards internationalism as part of the conceptual framework of nationalism (although internationalism as such is absurd for him), where the history of internationalism is the ideological manifestation of socialism. For a rather different view of internationalism as the proletarian struggle against the capitalist exploitation of the nation-state, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 49–52. Most recently, Perry Anderson maps out the history of internationalism against the “coordinates of nationalism,” and finds distinct phases in its history, each defined by a pair of “dominant” forms. See Perry Anderson, “Internationalism: A Breviary,” New Left Review 14 (March–April 2002).

 Tom Nairn's key distinction between “internationality” and “internationalism,” broadly parallel to his “nationality”–“nationalism” view, portrays internationalism as a “complex range of reactions to nationalism” and domestic structures. See Tom Nairn, “Internationalism and the Second Coming,” in Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 1996), 270.

 For Kant, “it can be shown that this idea of [pacific] federalism, extending gradually to encompass all states and thus leading to perpetual peace, is practicable and has objective reality. For if by good fortune one powerful and enlightened nation can form a republic (which is by its nature inclined to seek perpetual peace), this will provide a focal point for federal association among other states. These will join up with the first one, thus securing the freedom of each state in accordance with the idea of international right, and the whole will gradually spread further and further by a series of alliances of this kind.” See I. Kant, Perpetual Peace, in H. S. Reiss, Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 104.

For the distinction between a “system of action” and a “process” in international relations, see “Systems of Action” and “On Processes” in Morton A. Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1957), 3–146.

It is hardly surprising that the height of the Cold War witnessed a surge in the literature on liberal internationalism. See the works of Michael Doyle and, more recently, Ann Marie Slaughter, among others.

For a discussion of the domestic–international dichotomy as the basic dilemma of international politics, where universalism and pluralism provide two possible solutions, see “The Dilemmas of International Political Thought” in R. B. J. Walker, “World Politics and Western Reason: Universalism, Pluralism, Hegemony,” in Culture, Ideology, and World Order, ed. R. B. J. Walker (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), 182–216.

There is a broad range of discernable “classical” traditions in international relations theories, all of which identify intellectual “categories,” generally grouped according to either a normative or a descriptive principle. For a succinct history of the taxonomy of traditions in international relations theories as well as a critical review of such approaches in contemporary theory, see Ian Clark, “Traditions of Thought and Classical Theories of International Relations,” in Classical Theories of International Relations, ed. Ian Clark and Iver B. Neumann (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 1–19. For a historically inflected analysis of the major traditions of thinking about international relations, see Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel, eds, Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). What I here refer to as “classical” treatment of the subject is Martin Wight's tripartite division of these traditions into Realist, Rationalist, and Revolutionist and the particular viewpoints associated with each. See Martin Wight, “An Anatomy of International Thought,” Review of International Studies 13(3) (July 1987); and, Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991).

The three main traditions of international relations theories do not conform to the same understanding of “international society”: the “Realist” tradition, identified most prominently with the early modern figure of Hobbes, equates the domain of international affairs with the pre-social “state of nature” and thus denies the existence of any form of international society as such; in the “Rationalist” tradition, states cooperate because they all share a common interest which already creates a form of international society, albeit normatively weak and institutionally deficient; the “Revolutionist” tradition, finally, regards human beings, rather than states, as the members of “international society,” where each individual is committed to one universal moral order.

The genealogy of the term goes back to the publication of Pufendorf 's tract De Systematibus Civitatum (1675). Hedley Bull provides the most common definition of a “system of states” as the condition when “two or more states have sufficient contact between them, and have sufficient impact on one another's decisions, to cause them to behave—at least in some measure—as parts of a whole.” See Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 9–10. What is essential in this classic definition is that two or more states may perfectly coexist without necessarily forming an international states system.

Here I implicitly distinguish between “international” and “world” order, where the former makes a claim about the structural relation of states to one another in their capacity of sovereign political entities, whereas the latter signifies the social relation of individuals qua human beings. For Bull, this distinction enables him to make the claim that the expansion of the European states system around the globe brought about the emergence of world order (see Ibid., 8–22). For an economic interpretation of this distinction, see Ian Clark, “From International to World Order?” in The Hierarchy of States: Reform and Resistance in the International Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 36–42.

Kenneth Waltz has developed the concept of “political structure” as applied to national and international politics, and has thus freed international relations theory from the elusiveness of vague and imprecise notions that had been customarily used before him. See “Political Structures” in Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Addison-Wesley, 1979), 79–101.

The origin of the concept of an “international states system,” as Edward Keene argues, is European by birth since it refers to the particular way in which Europeans in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries conceived of the modern world as a system of mutually independent and sovereign states. See Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 14–29. Keene's critique of established accounts of the history of international states systems (most prominently the English School and Martin Wight's classic Systems of States) focuses on their failure to accommodate the theory with the extension of sovereignty to non-European states during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the European states system extended beyond the boundaries of the Old Continent. For a similar account, see “The European System Becomes Worldwide” in Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis (London: Routledge, 1992), 265–76.

Hierarchy here is not employed simply as an analytical tool for understanding the specificity of state interaction; it is used primarily to articulate a “structural” ordering principle imbedded in the international states system. See “Anarchy and Hierarchy” in Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 114–6. Against Waltz's view—and a much looser conception of “hierarchy,” with an emphasis on the decision making capacity of states—see Ian Clark, The Hierarchy of States: Reform and Resistance in International Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

The transition from the merely theoretical idea of a universal international society of mankind as contained in early modern European doctrines of natural law to an actual international states system in the nineteenth century emerged “only as European states and the various independent political communities with which they were involved in a common international system came to perceive common interests in a structure of coexistence and co-operation, and tacitly or explicitly to consent to common rules and institutions.” See Hedley Bull, “The Emergence of a Universal International Society,” in The Expansion of International Society, ed. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 120.

Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 122. The concept of strategy, as it is loosely applied here, emphasizes that there is a common interest that states share and willingly cooperate for its fulfillment; it is, however, to be distinguished from the deterrence theories with their strong emphasis on the use of force in preemptive strikes and preventive wars as the main arbiter of international affairs. On this opposing view, see Jack Levy, “Declining Power and the Preventive Motivation for War,” World Politics 40(1) (October 1987): 82–107.

On the anarchical view, Alexander Wendt has argued that from a systemic perspective (where international politics takes place in an asocial system), international anarchy is actually existing; from a social perspective (where international politics takes place in an institutionalized society), international anarchy is a man-made construction. See Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46 (1992): 392–425.

On the relation between these two underlying propositions of the anarchical view, namely that there is no automatic harmony among states and that war is the inevitable outcome, see Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), Ch. 7.

The notion of a universal society of mankind has a long genealogy whose roots can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Stoic “cosmopolitanism” has acquired various meanings in its development relative to the conception of justice attributed to it. For the earliest roots of cosmopolitanism, see “Cosmopolis: Ancient and Medieval Foundations” in Georg Cavallar, The Rights of Strangers: Theories of International Hospitality, the Global Community, and Political Justice since Vitoria (Ashgate, 2002), 59–71. For an argument of the distinctively European roots of cosmopolitanism, see Anthony Pagden, “Stoicism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Legacy of European Imperialism,” Constellations 7(1) (2000): 3–21.

This view is most pronounced in the international theory of the English School. For a critique of the “societas gentium”-based argument of the English School, see Barry Buzan, “From International System to International Society: Structural Realism and Regime Theory Meet the English School,” International Organization 47(3) (Summer 1993): 327–52.

The “Grotian tradition” of international theory, adopted most prominently by the English School, establishes that the concept of order in world politics can be explained only within the framework of an international society of independent sovereign states. Drawing on Gierke's theory of the need of a “society of nations” to ensure the validity of jus gentium, the English School identified distinct traditions where each had a specific conception of international society. See Wight, International Theory. For a broad overview of the English school, see Timothy Dunne, Inventing International Society: A History of the English School (London: Macmillan, 1998).

On regarding the international domain as the arena where the basic principles of rights-bearing agents were being played out, see Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Grotius follows a tendency of assuming an analogous relationship between natural persons and international states that had already been established in the writings of the Salamanca theorists—Fernando Vasquez de Menchaca, Controversiarum Illustrium (Venice, 1564); Ayala, De Jure et Officiis Bellicis et Disciplina Militari (Douay, 1582). For Vasquez's influence on Grotius, see Annabel Brett, “Fernando Vasquez de Menchaca,” in Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 165–204; and Peter Borschberg, Hugo Grotius: Commentarius in Theses XI: An Early Treatise on Sovereignty, the Just War, and the Legitimacy of the Dutch Revolt (Bern, 1994), 73–101. In England, the then Oxford professor of civil law, Alberico Gentili (1552–1608), proved a great influence on Grotius. See Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace, 105.

Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, II, ix, 3, I.

Plane autem corpora haec artificialia instar habent corporis naturalis (These artificial bodies, however, have clearly an analogy with natural bodies). See Ibid.

Hobbes revives medieval theory of natural law and the state of nature in constructing the analogy. See Hobbes, De Cive, XIII.7, and Leviathan, Part II, Ch. 30.

Samuel Rachel (1628–91), De Jure Naturae et Gentium Dissertationes (1676); Johann Wolfgang Textor (1638–1701), Synopsis Juris Gentium (1680); and Thomas Rutherforth (1712–71), Institutiones Jus Naturalis: De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1754) further developed the notion of consent in the formation of the positive character of international law.

For an interpretation of the moral character of states, see Noel Malcolm's “Hobbes's Theory of International Relations,” in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 432–56. For Malcolm, a straightforward transference of logic about individual behavior of natural man to reasoning about inter-state relations is overly simplified and un-Hobbesian. Malcolm's attack here is a literal reading of Hobbes, particularly Charles Beitz's Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

Here I am in agreement with Noel Malcolm's position, who argues that Hobbes’ account of law and morality is highly complex: “Moral terms, on the other hand, relate to a system of values that applies to all human beings: pride, humility, equity, iniquity, and other terms for virtuous or vicious actions and dispositions are of universal application, and can be neither subjective not arbitrary” (Malcolm, “Hobbes's Theory of International Relations,” 436).

Chief among them is the right to self-preservation, generally, and self-defense from malicious attack, specifically. Richard Tuck has argued that “the principle of self-preservation … interpreted as a fundamental moral right with a set of consequential rights” was a natural response to the claims of the Skeptics about the possibility of a universal ethical conduct. See “Hugo Grotius” in Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 154–201.

For a brief account of the context of Grotius’ writings, see Richard Tuck, “Grotius and Selden,” in Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 499–522.

On the development of the concept of individual autonomy in Grotius’ writings, see J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 73–81.

For the relation of humanist discourse to natural rights theorists, see Chapter One, “Humanism” in Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace, 16–50. On the different accounts of the content of the laws of nature in De Iure Praedae and De Iure Belli ac Pacis, see Richard Tuck, “The ‘Modern’ Theory of Natural Law,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 99–119.

This argument could be further extended to make the claim that the transformation from natural condition to civil state did not necessarily entail a dramatic change in property relations.

Grotius, De Iure Praedae (1609), 91. The meaning of jus gladii in this context should be regarded as “chastisement” or “vengeance” rather than the intentional infliction of force.

Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, III, viii, I.

Ibid., III, viii, I & II; my emphasis.

The implications and influence of Grotius’ use of the analogy are far reaching in later theories of international law, including the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Nations. See Edwin DeWitt Dickinson, “The Analogy between Natural Persons and International Persons in the Law of Nations,” Yale Law Journal 26(7) (1917).

Richard Tuck has described Grotius’ position in the history of natural law theories. See Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 58–81.

For Pufendorf's treatment of Grotius, see De Jure Naturae et Gentium Libri Octo (1688) and Hugonis Grotii De Jure Belli ac Pacis. On Pufendorf 's critique of Grotius regarding his views of sociability, property, and punishment, see Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace, 140–65.

On the influence of Grotius on the moral theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment, see Istvan Hont, “The Language of Sociability and Commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the Theoretical Foundations of the ‘Four-Stages Theory’,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pagden, 253–76.

Jean Barbeyrac (1674–1744) translated Pufendorf 's Of the Law of Nature and Nations from Latin into English (London, 1729) to which he added numerous notes of his own, both within the original text and at the end of his translation. For Barbeyrac's use and appropriation of Pufendorf, see Petter Korkman, “Voluntarism and Moral Obligation: Barbeyrac's Defence of Pufendorf Revisited,” in Early Modern Natural Law Theories: Contexts and Strategies in the Early Enlightenment, ed. T. J. Hochstrasser and P. Schroder (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003).

In De Iure Naturae et Gentium, in his discussion on the political model of federation in the German Empire, Pufendorf provides a more flexible account of sovereignty that distinguishes him both from Grotius and Hobbes. The generally pacific attitude of the Prussian tradition towards the nature of international affairs in the early eighteenth century can be located within Prussia's numerous alliances with other European states and hence its desire for peaceful cooperation and mitigation. The English and Dutch traditions, on the other hand, with their expansionist pursuits in that same period, emphasized the intrinsically violent nature of state interaction.

Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625 edition reprinted in Classics of International Law), 44.

David Kennedy has argued that although international theorists up until the Treaty of Westphalia are generally treated as belonging to a “discipline” of international legal scholarship, as if they all worked within the same analytical framework, it is the case that they were not necessarily responding to the same issues, despite the seeming overall coherence of their projects. In grouping Suarez and Vitoria, on the one hand, and Gentili and Grotius, on the other, Kennedy juxtaposes these two “primitive” legal schools on the basis of their deflation or conflation, respectively, of jurisdiction and autonomy. See David Kennedy, “Primitive Legal Scholarship,” Harvard International Law Journal 27(1) (1986).

Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature, 189–90.

Although Grotius secularizes the Thomist tradition of natural law, he does not reject the essentials of Aquinas’ teaching on the division of law into natural, human, divine and revealed, and indeed relies on this distinction to describe the content of natural law. See De Jure Belli ac Pacis, paras 48–50 in Prolegomena.

For the use of Aquinas in the jus naturalis theories of the “second scholastics,” see Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature, 88–122.

Francisco de Vitoria, for instance, in his lecture on the “First Just Title, of Natural Partnership and Communication” comments that “But even on the occasions when it [ius gentium] is not derived from natural law, the consent of the greater part of the world is enough to make it binding, especially when it is for the common good of all men. If, after the dawn of creation or after the refashioning of the world following the Flood, the majority of men decided that the safety of ambassadors should everywhere be inviolable, that the sea should be common property, that prisoners of war should be enslaved, and likewise that it would be inexpedient to drive strangers out of one's land, then all these things certainly have the force of law, even if a minority disagree.” See Vitoria, “On the American Indians,” in Vitoria: Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 281.

Here I implicitly distinguish between the idea of a natural society of states and any claims to a universal dominium. On the former point, where Christianity proved a major intellectual force in the development of international legal order, see Heinhard Steiger, “From the International Law of Christianity to the International Law of the World Citizen: Reflections on the Formation of the Epochs of the History of International Law,” Journal of the History of International Law (3) (2001): 180–93. On the latter point, where Christianity was used as a means of attaining legitimacy, see Chapter Two, “Monarchia Universalis” in Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 29–62.

For a general background of seventeenth-century Aristotelianism, see Christina Mercer, “The Seventeenth-Century Debate between the Moderns and Aristotelians,” Studia Leibnitiana, Supplement 27 (1991): 18–29. German Aristotelians were staunch defenders of the Aristotelian principle that it is within the confines of the small polis that man finds his fulfillment and happiness.

Aristotle's argument of consecrating the state as the highest good and denying the existence of a universal society of mankind was used differently, depending on one's commitment to religious authority, in the period between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. See Cornelius Murphy, “The Grotian Vision of World Order,” The American Journal of International Law 76 (1982): 477–98.

The role of consensus as a moving force in natural law theories had already been acknowledged by the “second scholastics.”

The religiously motivated strife between Arminian and Calvinist factions in Holland was the immediate context for Grotius.

The first theological work of Grotius, Meletius, sive, De iis quae inter Christianos Conveniunt Epistola, critical edition with translation, commentary and introduction by Guillaume H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1988), published for the first time as late as in 1988.

For Grotius’ reception of Erasmus, see J. Trapman, “Grotius and Erasmus,” in Hugo Grotius, Theologian: Essays in Honour of G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes, ed. Henk J. M. Nellen and Edwin Rabbie (Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1994); and Mark W. Janis, “Religion and Literature of International Law: Some Standard Texts,” in The Influence of Religion on the Development of International Law, ed. Mark W. Janis (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1991), 61–84.

For the Stoic influence on Grotius’ ideas on consensus, see Jeremy Thomas, “The Intertwining of Law and Theology in the Writings of Grotius,” Journal of the History of International Law 1 (1999): 61–100.

Grotius, De Veritate Religionis Christianae [On the Truth of the Christian Religion] (1639).

This parallel is perhaps the clearest example of Grotius’ incorporation of theological thinking in his legal writing. On the influence of canon law on the development of international law, see James Muldoon, Canon Law, The Expansion of Europe, and World Order (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).

Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Book One, Ch. One, para. 12.

In his commentary on Aquinas’ “Treatise on Natural Law” in his Summa Theologiae, the Spanish Francisco de Vitoria, following Aristotle's reasoning in Posterior Analytics, argues that just as in the theoretical sciences there are propositions “self-evident in themselves, but recognized only by the wise, not to all men irrespective of their knowledge,” so in “ethical conduct [practica]” some principles are not universally acknowledged by all, but only by the wisest. See Vitoria, “Lectures on St. Thomas Aquinas,” Summa Theologiae I–II, Q. 94, Article 2, in Vitoria: Political Writings, ed. Pagden and Lawrence, 170.

On the use of the idea of “civilization” in international legal discourse as an analytical tool for conceptualizing inter-state interaction, see Gerrit Gong, The Standard of “Civilization” in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

Samuel Pufendorf is first among Grotius’ critics to point out Grotius’ reversion to Aristotelian views and unanswered skeptical challenges—see Pufendorf 's 1662–63 correspondence with Baron Johan Christian von Boineburg, Leibniz's patron and a minister of the elector of Mainz (1650–64), in Hont, “The Language of Sociability and Commerce,” 258–9. For a detailed discussion of the Boineburg correspondence, see Timothy Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 47–60.

Martin Wight, System of States (Leicester University Press, 1977), 128. For a consideration of his idea of international society, see “Theory of International Society” in Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1992), 30–48.

This sense of a shared worldview has led, for example, Adam Watson of the English School to construct an evolutionary theory of international society around the concept of civilization. See Watson, The Evolution of International Society, where he argues that besides the modern sovereign state system, there have been other international societies including classical Greek city-states, the Islamic world, the Chinese tributary state system, and the Indian international order.

Martin Wight, “Western Values in International Relations,” in Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics, ed. Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 96–7.

This perspective has generated the “constructivist” discourse in international relations theories. For an overview of constructivism, see Alexander Wendt, “Collective Identity Formation and the International State,” American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 384–97; for a critique of constructivist theories, see John Ruggie, “What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-Utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge,” International Organization 52 (1998): 855–85.

Michael Doyle, among others, has argued that pacification among liberal states forms the backbone of liberal internationalism. See Michael Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science Review 80(4) (1986).

Samuel Pufendorf, “De Origine et Progressu Disciplinae Iurus Naturalis,” in Eris Scandica, qua Adversus Libros de Iure Naturali et Gentium Obiecta Diluuntur (1686), 167, my emphasis, quoted in Hont, “The Language of Sociability and Commerce,” 258.

Benedict Anderson, “The Origins of National Consciousness,” in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 37–46.

David Hume, “Of National Characters” (1748) in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 197–215.

For a general overview of the challenges to international legal theories posed by the rise of nations, see Robert Beck and Thomas Ambrosio, eds, International Law and the Rise of Nations: The State System and the Challenge of Ethnic Groups (New York: Chatham House, 2002).

Emmerich de Vattel, Le Droit des Gens ou Principes de la Loi Naturelle: Appliqués à la Conduite & aux Affaires des Nations & des Souverains [The Law of Nations; or, Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns] (Leiden, 1758), Preface, para. 4 [henceforth Le Droit des Gens].

Ibid., Preliminaries, para. 20 [emphasis in original].

Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment, 181.

Jeremy Rabkin has argued that Grotius’ system of law of nations does not require that a sovereign state be composed “only of one distinct people or that any sizeable people will necessarily have its own independent state” whereas Vattel's system does insist that independent sovereign states be conceived as national states. See J. Rabkin, “Grotius, Vattel, and Locke—An Older View of Liberalism and Nationality,” The Review of Politics 59(2) (Spring 1997): 293–322.

Reinhold Neibhur, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), 45.

Ibid., 91.

In his seminal work on international politics Hans Morgenthau laid the groundwork for much of the development of realist theories today: “The main signpost that helps political realism to find its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of [national] interest defined in terms of power.” See Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1948), 5.

Vattel, Le Droit des Gens, Book I, Ch. IV, para. 54.

Voltaire, Histoire de L’empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand [History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great] (1760).

For a brief account on the history, identity, and approaches to the question of Europe, see J. G. A. Pocock, “Some Europes in Their History,” in The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 55–71.

Andrew Fletcher, An Account of a Conversation Concerning a Right Regulation of Governments for the Common Good of Mankind (Edinburgh, 1704), in John Robertson, ed., Andrew Fletcher: Political Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 176–215.

Istvan Hont has developed Fletcher's argument in “Free Trade and the Economic Limits to National Politics: Neo-Machiavellian Political Economy Reconsidered,” in The Economic Limits to Modern Politics, ed. John Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 41–120, where he contends that the economic limits to modern nations emerged with the development of commercial societies in eighteenth-century Europe.

Anthony Pagden has emphasized the place of doux commerce and its civilizing effect in Vattel's argument. See Pagden, “Stoicism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Legacy of European Imperialism” and Constellations 7(1) (2000): 3–22.

Vattel, Le Droit des Gens, Book I, Ch. VIII, para. 94.

Ibid., Book II, Ch. 12, para. 163.

Ibid., Book II, Ch. 15, para. 220.

Here Vattel emphasizes that volition of states is the single foundation for legally “binding” rules in international relations whose strength proceeds from consent previously agreed upon—a practice that has become the cornerstone of positivist approaches to modern international law.

By the time of Vattel the balance of power had come to be viewed analogously to the Newtonian solar system—as a state grew more powerful relative to other states, so their policies would turn away from the rising power by tending toward each other in preventing any one single state from setting the rules of the game. On seventeenth-century mathematical and scientific influence on the development of internationalism, see Ishay, Internationalism and Its Betrayal, 13–4.

Vattel, Le Droit des Gens, Book II, Ch. 7 (my emphasis).

The argument on the balance of political power goes back to the Italian Renaissance (Gentili, Paruta, Botero) through the seventeenth century (Bacon, Rohan) until the mid-eighteenth century (Defoe, Bolingbroke, Hume).

Vattel's understanding of Europe's “large family” of nations is drastically different from his predecessor Christian Wolff 's civitas maxima, which, in Vattel's view, is a political illusion that cannot be sustained in a world of competing state interests. See Nicholas Onuf, “Civitas Maxima: Wolff, Vattel and the Fate of Republicanism,” American Journal of International Law 88(2) (April 1994): 280–303.

“Since, therefore, nature has thus formed mankind, it is a convincing proof of her intention that they should communicate with, and mutually aid and assist each other. Hence is deduced the establishment of natural society among men … The universal society of the human race being an institution of nature herself, that is to say, a necessary consequence of the nature of man, all men, in whatever stations they are placed, are bound to cultivate it, and to discharge its duties.” Vattel, Le Droit des Gens, Preliminaries (emphasis in original).

For a liberal interpretation of international legal theories, see Andrew Moravcsik, William Burke-White and Anne-Marie Slaughter, A Liberal Theory of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver, eds, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994).

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1992).

Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

One scholar, for example, has contended that “internationalism remained an empty illusion, an idea condemned to the life of abstraction, a dream betrayed by even its staunchest defenders.” See Ishay, Internationalism and Its Betrayal, 129.