Between civilisation and barbarism: Creole interventions in international law

Abstract

This article argues that Latin American regionalism in international law is a direct consequence of a ‘creole legal consciousness’ meaning a shared basic assumption about the origins of law in the region (as coming from Europe through Roman law and Spanish law) as well as a belief in the uniqueness of an American (as in the continent) interpretation and development of that law. Those who participate of such a consciousness assume themselves as being part of the metropolitan centre (as descendants of Europeans), while at the same time challenging the centre with notions of their own regional uniqueness (as natives of America). Creole consciousness about international law was an instrument of nation and region building during the 19th century. This led to a discussion of the actual existence of a regional international law ‘[Latin] American international law’ (derecho internacional Americano) in the first half of the 20th century. The article concludes with a look at how a regional perspective was also inherent in the construction of a human rights regime in the second half of the twentieth century.

Acknowledgement

A revised version of Liliana Obregón, ‘Completing civilization: Creole consciousness and international law in nineteenth century Latin America’, due to appear in Anne Orford (ed), International Law and its Others, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming October 2006.

Notes

1 A Ardao, Génesis de la idea y el nombre de América Latina, Caracas: Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Romulo Gallegos, 1980; and M Rojas-Mix, Los cien nombres de América: eso que descubrió Colón, Barcelona: Lumen, 1991.

2 For the proposals for union, see F Bilbao, Iniciativa de la América: idea de un congreso federal de las repúblicas, Paris: Aubusson, 1856; JM Noboa, La unión americana, Guayaquil: Imp de Murillo por D Vergara, 1866; Colección de ensayos i documentos relativos a la union i confederación de los pueblos hispano-americanos publicada a espensas de la ‘sociedad de la Unión Americana de Chile’, Santiago: Imprenta chilena, 1862; and José María Torres Caicedo, Unión latino-americana, pensamiento de Bolívar para formar una liga americana. París: Rosa y Bouret, 1865.

3 MA de Souza Sá Vianna, De la non existence d'un droit international americain: dissertation présentée au Congres scientifique Latino-Américain, Rio de Janeiro: L Figueredo, 1912.

4 Alejandro Álvarez, ‘Origen y desarrollo del derecho internacional Americano’, in Tercer Congreso Científico Latino Americano, Rio de Janeiro, 1905; Álvarez, ‘Le droit international Américain, son origine et son évolution’, Revue Générale de Driot International Public, XIV, 1907; Álvarez, American Problems in International Law, New York: Baker, 1909; and Álvarez, Le droit international americain: son fondement, sa nature: d'après l'histoire diplomatique des états du nouveau monde et leur vie politique et économique, Paris: A Pedone, 1910.

5 Latin America has been traditionally identified by comparative legal scholars as a place where legal imports are borrowed and well received. See Jorge L Esquirol, ‘Excessive legalism, lawlessness and other stories about Latin American law’, Doctor of Juridical Science (sjd) dissertation, Harvard Law School, 2001; and Diego López-Medina, ‘Comparative jurisprudence: reception and misreading of transnational legal theory in Latin America, sjd dissertation, Harvard Law School, 2001 published as Teoría Impuradel Derecho, Bogota: Temis, 2004.

6 Henry Wheaton, History of the Law of Nations in Europe and America: From the Earliest Times to the Treaty of Washington, New York: Gould, 1845.

7 Onuma Yasuaki, ‘Japanese international law in the pre-war period—perspectives on the teaching and research of international law in prewar Japan, Japanese Annual of International Law, 43, 1986, p 29.

8 Depending on what countries are included in the geographical imaginary of Latin America, independence dates can range from as early as 1791 for Haiti to as late as 1898 for Cuba. If only the continental former Spanish colonies are included in the regional reference, these dates range roughly from 1810 to 1825.

9 See, for example, Joseph L Kunz, Latin American Philosophy of Law in the Twentieth Century, New York: Inter American Law Institute, 1950. For an analysis of the Latin American publicists as either positivists or naturalists, or both (eclectics), see HB Jacobini, A Study of the Philosophy of International Law as seen in the Works of Latin American Writers, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954.

10 On placing the Latin Americans of the 19th century as deriving from the Spanish Catholic tradition, see Manfred Lachs, The Teacher in International Law: Teachings and Teaching, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987, p 85.

11 For a reading of how the 19th century is remembered and forgotten during the 20th century, see David Kennedy, ‘International law and the nineteenth century: history of an illusion, Quinnipiac Law Review, 99, 1997, p 17. Other writers who have worked on alternative views of the 19th century with respect to international legal argument and its relation to liberal thought, colonisation, imperialism, etc. also generally refer to the end of the 19th century and do not include Latin America.

12 Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, Cambridge University Press, 2005; Annelise Riles, ‘The view from the international plane: perspective and scale in the architecture of colonial international law’, in Eve Darian Smith & Peter Fitzpatrick (eds), Laws of the Postcolonial: Law, Meaning, and Violence, Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

13 Postcolonial, anti-colonial or Third World approaches to international legal scholarship are generally understood as being produced by citizens of African or Asian decolonised countries of the 20th century. Even in the ‘Third world’ literature on international law published in English, Latin American scholarship is notoriously absent. See for example, Antony Anghie and others (eds) The Third World and International Order, Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2003.

14 Kennedy, ‘International law and the nineteenth century’; Koskenniemi, From apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument, Helsinki: Finish Lawyers Publishing Co, 1989; and Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civiliser of Nations: The rise and fall of International Law 1870–1960, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

15 I prefer to use the Spanish term ‘Criollo’ in order not to become confused with the usage and understanding of the English or French term ‘Creole’ in Louisiana and in the Caribbean. In both of these regions, where a black presence has been central to the emergence of public political culture, Creole means free people of African descent. In most of Spanish America, with the possible exception of Cuba, the term Criollo posed a presumption of cultural and physical ‘whiteness’. It is a deeply ambivalent and profoundly unstable social category, as it rested on assumptions of racial purity, despite the fact that by the 19th century Criollos were, in fact, largely misceginated. The original connotation was deliberately pejorative, as earlier versions of the term distinguished those slaves born in America from those born in Africa. For more on the characterisation of Criollos as a social class, see Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, ‘Ethnic and gender influences on “Spanish” Creole society in colonial Spanish America’, Colonial Latin American Review, 4 (1), 1995; and Bernard Lavalle, Las promesas ambiguas: ensayos sobre el criollismo colonial en los Andes, Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica, 1993.

16 For a recent collection of essays that explores the way in which the category of the Criollo was constituted during early colonial times, see José Antonio Mazzotti (ed), Agencias criollas: la ambigüedad ‘colonial’ en las letras hispanoamericanas, Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2000.

17 Precisely because ambiguity is characteristic of the Criollo, some scholars have suggested the term ‘agency’ rather than ‘subject’ as a marker of a certain political will within the public sphere. See the introduction to José Antonio Mazzotti's collection on different studies of Criollo agencies during the period of Spanish rule, in ibid.

18 On the importance of honour as a value for Criollos in general, and particularly for Criollo lawyers, see Victor M Uribe Urán, Honorable Lives: Lawyers, Family, and Politics in Colombia 1789 – 1850, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.

19 Mazzotti, Agencias criollas. As Antony Anghie has argued, the Spanish jurist Francisco de Vitoria (1483 – 1546) addressed cultural difference to justify the impossibility of American Indian sovereignty, an argument that paved the legal path for Indians' subordinate status as subjects of the colonial state. See Antony Anghie, ‘Francisco de Vitoria and the colonial origins of international law’, Social and Legal Studies, 5 (3), 1996. The colonial system of castas (castes) ranked individuals hierarchically according to the amount of visible (skin colour), perceived (education, language, religion, culture) and acquired (through political or economic influence) European ‘blood’. Thus Castas in the context of colonial Spanish America have a very different origin and meaning from the caste systems of India, for example. See Robert H Jackson, Race, Caste, and Status: Indians in Colonial Spanish America, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1999; and Patricia Seed, ‘The social dimensions of race: Mexico City, 1753’, Hispanic American Historical Review (Duke University Press), 62 (4), 1982. It was only towards the end of the 16th century that mestizos (people of mixed race) emerged as a separate category in the Americas. After some debate legal scholars and colonial administrators agreed that mestizos (as well as other individuals of mixed races, all classified as castas) though handicapped (or restricted in some respects—such as the ability to carry weapons, own horses or enter most schools to obtain legal or theological training), were members of the Spanish Republic and enjoyed all the rights and obligations granted to white settlers. More important than race, however, the defining categories in the Latin American context for Criollos and castas were honour, legitimacy of birth, social status, economic and political power: differences that were legally, institutionally and socially enforced. Race was a determinant, however, for Indians and Blacks, who belonged to separate social and legal spheres. The French Code Noir (1685) and the Spanish Black Codes (1768 – 1842) throughout the Americas assured legal control over and punishment of Blacks, slaves and free. The Laws of the Indies and forms of rented or forced labour secured control over indigenous peoples.

20 The figure of the letrado or ‘lettered’ functionary (also meaning lawyer as well as someone cultivated in the humanities), was important during the colonial period and the 19th century. Ángel Rama in The Lettered City explains how the prestige of the written word in Latin America began with the foundational acts of Spanish colonisation. The territorial claims to land required written records as immediately as the first conquistadors arrived in the New World. Borrowing from Foucault, Rama says that in colonial Spanish America ‘writing consolidated the political order by giving it elaborated cultural expression’ and configured a future that erased the past, establishing ‘the first cultural model of modernity’. Ángel Rama, The Lettered City, trans John Charles Chasteen, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. The construction of this written model was done by a cadre of letrados or ‘lettered’ functionaries who were involved in transmitting and responding to imperial orders. Rama designates the literati as ‘intellectual producers who elaborate ideological messages, the designers of cultural models for public conformity … the restricted group of intellectual workers learned the mechanisms and vicissitudes of institutionalized power and learned, too, how to make irreplaceable institutions of themselves … their services in the manipulation of symbolic languages were indispensable … servants of power, in one sense, the letrados became masters of power, in another.’ Their power certainly extended into the independence era and the 19th century. Letrados performed public or civic roles in city councils as well as developing new institutions for social interaction (cafes, academies, tertulias, etc) and established a permanent press at the end of the 18th century. See Victor M Uribe Urán, ‘Colonial lawyers, republican lawyers and the administration of justice in Spanish America’, in Eduardo Zimmerman (ed), Judicial Institutions in Nineteenth Century Latin America, London: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, 1999, pp 34, 36. Deference continued to be shown to those with intellectual merits proven through extensive writings in law, but also to essayists, poets, journalists, novelist and grammarians. The letrado had to show a superb mastery of the Spanish language but was also necessarily educated in Latin, and often read and wrote in French and English. Moreover, until the more recent importance given to technocrats, intellectuals as political leaders were well accepted in Latin America. Rama, The Lettered City, p 22. Cristina Rojas, in her recent book, uses the term ‘literati’ instead of lettered men or letrados. See Cristina Rojas, Civilization and Violence: Regimes of Representation in Nineteenth-Century Colombia, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, Borderlines, 2001. For a bibliography on the figure of the letrado, see Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p 193ff.

21 Oidores were judges who were part of one of the Audiencias, ‘a governmental body with administrative and judicial functions, usually the highest level appellate body located in a geographic area governed by a viceroy or other royal official magistrates’. MC Mirow, ‘Latin American legal history: some essential Spanish terms’, La Raza Law Journal, 12 (1), p 12.

22 See David A Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State 1492 – 1867, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; and Anthony Pagden, ‘Identity formation in Spanish America’, in Padgen (ed), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

23 Duncan Kennedy, Rise and Fall of Classical Legal Thought, Cambridge, 1975 (manuscript) available at www.duncankennedy.net, p 33. For a similarly useful concept, see the notion of ‘legal habitus’ as explained in Pierre Bourdieu ‘The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field’Hastings Law Journal, 38, July 1987.

24 Some of these new approaches are included in Carlos Aguirre et al (eds), Crime and Punishment in Latin America, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001; and Zimmerman, Judicial Institutions in Nineteenth Century Latin America.

25 Kennedy, ‘Rise and Fall’.

26 These codes or compilations are the Ordenamiento de Alcalá (1348), restated in the Leyes de Toro (1505), the Nueva Recopilación de Castilla (1567) and the Novísima Recopilación de Castilla (1805).

27 Charles Cutter, ‘The legal culture of Spanish America on the eve of independence’, in Zimmerman, Judicial Institutions in Nineteenth Century Latin America, p 9.

28 Ibid, p 11.

29 I have taken these categories as conveniently simplified by ibid, pp 12 – 13.

30 Carlos Aguirre & Ricardo D Salvatore, ‘Introduction’, in Aguirre et al, Crime and Punishment in Latin America, p 3.

31 Cutter, ‘The legal culture of Spanish America on the eve of independence’, p 14.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid, p 24.

34 See, for example, Osvaldo Barreneche, ‘Criminal justice and state formation in early nineteenth-century Buenos Aires’, in Crime and Punishment in Latin America, p 1.

35 A few contemporary studies of international law have made the connection between the civilising discourse and the discipline's parallel expansion; however, they have studied the concept of civilisation as being more influential towards the end of the 19th century in the European colonisation of Africa, Asia and the Pacific. See Anghie, ‘Creating the nation state’; Gerrit W Gong, The Standard of Civilisation in International Society, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984; and Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civiliser of Nations.

36 The word ‘civilisation’ originates from the use of the French word civilité (civility) and poli (polished, refined, courteous, to emit prudent laws). For more about the etymology of the word, see Philippe Beneton, Histoire de mots: culture et civilisation, Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Travaux et Recherches de Science Politique, 1975; Lucien Febvre et al, Civilisation, le mot et l'idée, Paris: Renaissance du livre, Première semaine internationale de synthèse, 1930; Reuel Anson Lochore, History of the Idea of Civilisation in France (1830 – 70), Bonn: L Röhrscheid, 1935; and Jean Starobinski, ‘The word civilisation’, in Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise, or, The Morality of Evil, Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

37 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, State Formation and Civilisation, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, p 41.

38 Of course, this aspect of their consciousness was also ambivalent. Not all Criollos assumed European civilisation as perfected or as the ideal model. To give one example, Servando Teresa de Mier (1763 – 1827), one of the intellectual leaders of Mexican independence initiated in 1794 a life-long effort of furthering traditional themes of Criollo patriotism into the foundations of Mexican nationalism. De Mier's writings reversed European narratives, which presented themselves as civilised and Americans as barbaric. Through this strategy he sought to provide arguments for Mexican and American sovereignty. He invoked an autonomous American religiosity, by affirming that the religion professed by the Aztecs and, in general, all the ancient American peoples, shared a similarity of doctrines that pointed to a common Christian origin and did not need to look to Europe for that tradition. In order to challenge the barbarism and racial inferiority supposedly proven by the ‘scientific’ arguments of the Enlightenment, such as those found in the widely read entry on America (Amerique) in the Encyclopédie Française, De Mier wrote about the barbarism and racial characteristics of the peoples he encountered throughout his travels in Europe. He described the unhealthy climate in Europe, the poverty and bad living conditions, the dark skin colour, the deformed bodies, and the violent and cannibalistic tendencies and incorrect ways in which Europeans spoke Latin languages. De Mier wrote in one of his diaries: ‘As for the cities, there are none in Europe that can compare to those of our America or of the United States. All of the former appear to have been founded by a people inimical to straight lines … Everyone journeys like a barbarian through a land of barbarians.’ In Marseilles ‘both the men and women have the same complexion as our Indians’. ‘When entering Naples it is as though one was entering an Indian pueblo, for the people are the same color.’ In Italy ‘the common folk … are very talkative, rude, dirty and so cruel that when following the first invasion of the French in the days of the Republic … [they] took the decapitated body of each noble and deposited it in front of his residence, shouting for bread to be thrown out to them to eat with the corpse which they proceeded to devour.’ In Spain De Mier reflects: ‘I fancied that Madrid was a town full of people with hernias, but it is merely a town peopled by a degenerate race, for native-born Madrileños look like dwarfs … It is commonly said that the natives of Madrid are big-headed, runts, gabblers, broad in the beam, founders of rosary processions and second-generation jailbirds.’ Mier, The Memoirs of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, ed Susana Rotker, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

39 While US independence was a model for the Criollos during the first half of the 19th century, the success of the slave revolution that had taken place on the island of Saint Domingue in 1791 was a dreaded event that instilled the fear of similar slave uprisings on their haciendas. This fear was further disturbed by the Haitian declaration of independence in 1804. The blackness of the new nation did not fit notions of civilisation and statehood; it was not eligible for recognition of sovereignty by the community of the self-denominated ‘civilised nations’. The revolution and its political implications were dismissed or, as one Haitian scholar notes, deemed a ‘non-event’. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘An unthinkable history: the Haitian revolution as a non-event’, in Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995. An interesting counterpoint was provided by Rev James Theodore Holly, a US black nationalist who argued that Haiti's de facto sovereignty was the opportunity to prove ‘the capacity of the Negro race for self-government and civilised progress’. Holly was convinced that ‘if one powerful and civilised negro sovereignty can be developed to the summit of national grandeur in the West Indies, where the keys to the commerce of both hemispheres can be held; this fact will solve all the questions respecting the negro, whether they be those of slavery, prejudice or proscription’. Holly was a delegate to the first National Emigration Convention in 1854 and travelled to Haiti in 1855 to negotiate an emigration treaty. Holly himself emigrated to Haiti in 1861 and remained there until his death. See Rev James Theodore Holly, A Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race for Self-Government and Civilised Progress as Demonstrated by the Historical Events of the Haytian Revolution and the Subsequent Acts of that People since their National Independence, New Haven, CT: African-American Printing Co, 1857.

40 Emphasis added. In 1823, while in England, Andrés Bello described his general project of ‘completing civilisation’ through a magazine in which he published selected texts for distribution as the basis for a foundational American literature. The purpose of his project was ‘to examine different ways in which to make the arts and sciences progress in the new world, and the means to complete its civilisation; to make useful inventions known so that they may be adopted in new places, so that their industry, commerce and navigation may be perfected, so that new channels of communication may open, and they may broaden and facilitate the previous ones; to facilitate the seed of liberty in order to destroy the shameless worries with which it was fed since birth; to establish, through the indestructible basis of education, the cultivation of morality; to conserve the names and actions of those who appear in our history giving them a rightful place in the memory of time; that is the noble task, vast and difficult that the love for our patria has imposed on us … we shall thus adapt everything that, in our opinion, may be useful; and we shall speak the language of truth’. Cited in Barry L Velleman, Andrés Bello y sus libros, ed Fundación La Casa de Bello, Caracas: La Casa de Bello, 1995, pp 19 – 20.

41 See Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civiliser of Nations. Indeed, European expansion in the 19th century increased from the domination of 35% of the Earth's surface in 1800 to 84% of it in 1914.

42 The original and complete title is Civilización i barbarie, Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga. I aspecto físico, costumbres, i abitos de la República Arjentina, Santiago, Impr del Progreso, 1845. Several editions followed the original one of 1845. There was also a French translation published in 1853 and an English version in 1868.

43 In his book De la barbarie a la imaginación (From Barbarism to Imagination) Moreno Durán emphasises that ‘the “civilisation or barbarism” debate … is implicit and current in all of the Latin American cultural discussion … but the terms of the debate were never questioned … no one asked if … it responded to what are typically Latin American needs, and therefore, if it was legitimate to appropriate its tenants’. Rafael Humberto Moreno-Durán, De la barbarie a la imaginación: la experiencia leída, Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1988, pp 24 – 25. For a study of the dichotomy of civilisation – barbarism in Latin America, see, among others, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Calibán y otros ensayos: nuestra América y el mundo, Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1979; Darcy Ribeiro et al, The Americas and Civilization, London: Allen and Unwin, 1971; and Julio César Salas, Civilización y barbarie: estudios sociológicos americanos, Caracas: Fundación Julio C Salas, 1998.

44 Fernando de Trazegnies, a contemporary Peruvian academic and politician, says that the main preoccupation of the Criollo elite was to ‘liberate the individual without the excesses of equality, to facilitate modernization without altering the pseudo-aristocratic bases of power in society’. That is, modern Criollos wanted to take advantage of social transformation without losing control over the traditional sites of power. Fernando de Trazegnies Granda, La idea de derecho en el Perú republicano del siglo XIX, Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1992, p 221.

45 Julio Hoenigsberg, Santander, el clero y Bentham; en el primer centenario de la muerte del héroe, Bogotá: ABC, 1940; Luis Horacio López D, Obra educativa—la querella Benthamista, 1748 – 1832, Santafé de Bogotá: Fundación para la Conmemoración del Bicentenario del Natalicio y el Sesquicentenario de la Muerte del General Francisco de Paula Santander, 1993; Germán Marquinez Argote, Benthamismo y antibenthamismo en Colombia, Bogotá: Editorial El Buho, Colección Pensamiento colombiano, 1983; Ricardo Motta Vargas, Jeremías Bentham en el origen del conservatismo y liberalismo: la polémica del siglo XIX—utilitarismo inglés y catolicismo en la formación del bipartidismo colombiano, Santafé de Bogotá: Ecoe Ediciones, 1996.

46 See Hugo Hanisch Espíndola, Andrés Bello y su obra en derecho romano, Santiago: Ediciones del Consejo de Rectores de las Universidades Chilenas, 1983; and Sergio Martínez Baeza, Bello, Infante y la enseñanza del derecho romano: una polémica histórica, 1834, Bogotá: Secretaria Ejecutiva Permanente del Convenio Andrés Bello, 1981.

47 Rojas, Civilization and Violence.

48 The French term ‘civilisation’ appears with the intention of expressing the idea of progress and the perfectibility of humanity as a ‘universal fact’ and, with it, the trust that law and institutions will be able to mould the character of all men. Therefore civilisation was also understood as a unit of the human race, while at the same time the plural notion of civilisations signified the existence of other social groups in development but whose unity and perfection was synthesised only in European civilisation. The idea of civilisation as progress had Europe as its frame of reference; and barbarism, its opposing definer, was outside of Europe.

49 For example, Mariano Ospina Rodríguez, a Colombian president of the 19th century gave the following definition in an essay entitled ‘La barbarie’ of 1875: ‘Civilisation is the degree of morality, knowledge and well being that a people enjoy; and being that barbarism is the reverse of civilisation, we can define it by saying that it is the degree of corruption, ignorance and misery in which the people are submersed. Civilisation and barbarism are always relative terms. Adam in paradise is the ideal of the civilised man. The savage, stupid antropófago is the type of the barbarian. Civilisation is affirmative, positive. Barbarism is negative.’ Mariano Ospina Rodríguez, ‘La barbarie’, La Sociedad, 1875.

50 See Riles, ‘The view from the international plane’.

51 For an analysis of the debates and their relationship to Latin America's intellectual history, see A Becker Lorca, ‘Mestizo international law’, unpublished sjd dissertation, Harvard Law School, 2005, pp 83 – 91.

52 A Becker Lorca, ‘International law in Latin America or Latin American international law? Rise, fall, and retrieval of a tradition of legal thinking and political imagination, Harvard International Law Journal, 47 (1), 2006, pp 283 – 305.

53 For more on Alvarez see the special issue dedicated to his work in volume 19(29) 2006 of the Leiden Journal of International Law.