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Between West and non-West: Latin American Contributions to International Thought

2012; Routledge; Volume: 34; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/07075332.2012.707980

1949-6540

Louise Fawcett,

International Relations in Latin America

Abstract This article seeks to highlight the significant contribution of Latin American scholarship to the further promotion and understanding of more ‘global’ approaches to International Relations. It focuses on the immediate post-independence period and explores the internationalist perspective of Andres Bello, an enormously influential continental scholar, publicist, and political figure, whose work is little known outside South America. It argues that his contribution to International Relations broadly conceived, part of a wider regional contribution, cannot be neatly accommodated within either accounts of the expansion of international society or revisionist post-colonial thought. As such it is neither fully ‘Western’ nor ‘non-Western’. Analysing his contribution under three interrelated headings - international law, the problem of order and international co-operation - it argues that Bello's work needs to be examined on its own terms. Above all it provides an illustration of why we need to take more seriously Latin American thought as part of a wider movement to internationalise International Relations. Keywords: Latin AmericaInternational RelationsHistory of International Thought Acknowledgements Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the colloquim: ‘Andrés Bello y la construction de républiques d'Amerique latine’, Centre des Archives diplomatiques, Paris, November 2010 and the International Relations Research Colloquium, University of Oxford, February 2012. I would like to thank the organizers and participants of these events, and the journal's referees, for their helpful comments and suggestions. Notes 1. H. Bull and A.Watson (eds), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford, 1984). 2. E. Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge, 2002). 3. Representative literature includes: B. Buzan and R. Little, International Systems in World History. Remaking the Study of International Relations (Oxford, 2000). 4. A. Acharya and B. Buzan (eds), Non-Western International Relations Theory (London, 2010); A. Tickner and O. Waever, International Relations Scholarship around the World (London, 2009). 5. A. Tickner, ‘Hearing Latin American Voices in IR Studies’, International Studies Perspectives (2003), 4/4 (2003), 325–350. 6. For the most important recent scholarship see I. Jaksic, Andrés Bello, Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth- Century Latin America (Cambridge, 2001) published in Spanish as Andrés Bello. La Pasion por el Orden, 3rd ed. (Santiago, 2010); also A. Bello, Selected Writings of Andrés Bello (hereafter SW), translated from the Spanish by F. M. López Morillas, edited with introduction and notes by I. Jaksic (Oxford, 1997). On Bello's contributions to International Law and his Americanism, see for example, F. Griffith Dawson, ‘The Influence of Andrés Bello on Latin-American Perceptions of Non-Intervention and State Responsibility’, British Yearbook of International Law, lvii (57/1 (1986), 253–315; F. Murillo Rubiera, ‘La solidaridad Americana y el pensamiento international de Andrés Bello’, Quinto Centenario, x, Editorial Universidad Complutense (Madrid, 1986); L. Obregón Tarazona, ‘Construyendo la región Americana. Andrés Bello y el derecho internacional’ in B. Gonzalez Stephan and J. Poblete (eds), Andrés Bello y los estudios latinoamericanos (Pittsburgh, 2009). 7. L. Obregon, Routledge Handbook of International Law (2009). 8. Acharya and Buzan, ‘Introduction’, 1; O. Waever, ‘The Sociology of a Not So International Discipline’, International Organization, lii no. 4 (1998), 687–727. 9. A. Bello, Obras Completas (hereafter OC) 26 vols. First edn. Caracas, 1954 (Second edn., Caracas, 1981). 10. The important exception is Andrés Bello, Selected Writings; see also A. Bello, Philosophy of the Understanding, translated by O. Carlos Stoetzer, with an introduction by Arturo Ardao (Washington, 1984). Biographical studies include Jaksic, Andrés Bello; J. Lynch (ed), Andrés Bello. The London Years (Richmond, 1982); R. Caldera, Andrés Bello, Philosopher, Poet, Philologist, Educator, Legislator, Statesman, trans. J. Street (London, 1977). 11. Acharya and Buzan, ‘Introduction’, 18–19; Tickner, ‘Hearing Latin American Voices’, 325. 12. Acharya and Buzan, ‘Introduction’, 17. 13. For example, M. Palacios, ed., Las independencias hispanoamericanas. Interpretaciones 200 años después (Bogota, 2009). 14. Understood as the American colonies of Spain and thus excluding North America. See the explanatory editorial note in Selected Writings xxvi. The term Latin America was not introduced until the second half of the nineteenth century. This article focuses on Hispanic America and excludes Brazil. On the distinctive experience of Brazil, see further L. Bethell, ‘Brazil and “Latin America”’, Journal of Latin American Studies, xl, no. 3 (2010), 457–485. 15. See the argument of A. Watson, ‘New States in the Americas’ in H. Bull and A. Watson, The Expansion of International Society (Oxford, 1984), 127–41. 16. See further J. Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826 (London, 1986), 17–21. 17. Cited in D. von Vacano, The Color of Citizenship. Race Modernity and Latin American/Hispanic Political Thought (Oxford, 2012), 60, 1–40. 18. S. Huntington ‘Clash of Civilisations’, Foreign Affairs, lxxii, no. 3 (1993), 24–5. 19. L. Obregón, ‘Between Civilization and Barbarism: Creole Interventions in International Law’, Third World Quarterly, xxvii, no. 5 (2006), 815–32. 20. Obregon, ‘Between Civilisation and Barbarism’, 816. 21. J.L. Brierly, The Law of Nations. An Introduction to the International Law of Peace, 6th ed. (Oxford, 1963), 41. 22. On this point see B. Gonzalez Stephan ‘Historiography of Liberal Romanticism: Andrés Bello and the Decolonization of Historical Studies’, Neohelicon, xviii, no. 2 (1991), 353–67. 23. S. Seth, ‘Historical Sociology and Postcolonial Theory: Two Strategies for Challenging Eurocentrism’, International Political Sociology, iii, no. 3 (2009), 335. 24. D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2008), 16. 25. OC IV, 11; SW, 101, Caldera, Bello, 93. 26. Lynch, Spanish American Revolutions, 1. 27. OC XIV. 28. OC: 31; SW, 241. [Note: where an English translation of the citation is available in Selected Writings (SW) both references are given. Other translations are provided by the author.] 29. Jaksic, Andrés Bello, 195. 30. Studies on ‘Third World’ contributions to international law tend to ignore Latin America, even though the term Third World is widely used in reference to non-European states and societies emerging from colonialism, including Latin America. See further A. Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, 2004), 2–3. 31. D. Snidal and A. Wendt, ‘Why there is International Theory now’, International Theory, i, no. 1 (2009), 1–4. 32. See A. Alvarez, ‘The New International Law’, Transactions of the Grotius Society, xv (1930), 35–8; L. Obregon, ‘The Colluding Worlds of the Lawyer, the Scholar and the Policy Maker: A View of International Law from Latin America’, Wisconsin International Law Journal, xxiii, no. 1 (2005), 151–2. 33. For the classical statement on the inadequacy of the ‘first image’ or that of human behaviour in studying IR, see K. Waltz, Man, the State and War (New York, 2001); on the neglect of the Third World in IR theory generally, see S. Neuman, International Relations and the Third World (London, 1998); A. Tickner, ‘Hearing Latin American Voices in International Relations Studies’, International Studies Perspectives, iv (2003), 325–50. 34. Seth, ‘Historical Sociology and Postcolonial Theory’. 35. Caldera, Bello, 19–45; Jaksic, Andrés Bello, especially chapters 1 and 2, which cover his education, early life in Caracas and his London years. 36. OC III: xvii. 37. For a general survey of history of the period see D. Bushnell and N. Macaulay, The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1994). 38. See ‘Prologue to the first edition’, Derecho Internacional, in OC X, 6. 39. See the excellent selection of essays in Lynch (ed), The London Years. 40. Gregorio Weinberg, ‘Andrés Bello’, Prospects: The Quarterly Review of Comparative Education, xxiii, no. 1–2 (1993), 71–83. 41. K. Racine, Francisco de Miranda. A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution (Wilmington, 2003), 255. 42. OC, III: xxv–xxvi; J. R. Dinwiddy, ‘Liberal and Benthamite Circles in London, 1810–1829’, in Lynch, London Years, 119–36. 43. See Jaksic, Andrés Bello, 43. 44. Rafael Caldera, ‘Bello in London: The Incomprehensible Sojourn’, in Lynch, London Years, 3. 45. Jaksic, Andrés Bello, 99. 46. See for example his ‘Commentary on “Investigations on the Social Influence of the Spanish Conquest and Colonial Regime in Chile”’ by José Victorino Lastarria (1844) SW: 154–68; see also Jaksic, Selected Writings, xl. 47. González Stephan, ‘Historiography of Liberal Romanticism’, 356. 48. OC XXV, 114. 49. See for example his Alocución a la poesía. Fragmentos de un poema titulado ‘América’ (1823), in OC I: 43–64; SW: 7–28. 50. Lynch, Spanish American Revolutions, 33. 51. Bushnell and Macaulay, Latin America, 115–16. 52. Jaksic, Andrés Bello, 104. 53. M. Luis Amunátegui, Vida de Don Andrés Bello (Santiago, 1882). 54. See ‘General Introduction’, OC I: x–xi. 55. Jaksic, Andrés Bello, xv. 56. SW: li. 57. In his prologue to the first volume of Bello's Principios de Derecho Internacional Eduardo Plaza writes that this work is properly described as ‘his fundamental work as an internationalist’, OC X. 58. See OC X–XIV. 59. OC X: cxci. 60. Two major central sections deal with the state of peace and state of war respectively, two shorter ‘preliminary’ and concluding sections, deal with definitions and diplomatic questions. 61. F. Murillo, Andrés Bello y el Derecho Latinoamericano (Caracas, 1987), 23. 62. OC X: 25–8, SW: 238–40. 63. OC X: xxviii. 64. OC X: clxv; F. Murillo, Andrés Bello. Historia de una vida y una obra (Caracas, 1986), 385. 65. OC X: xv, xx. 66. Jaksic, Andrés Bello, 197. 67. OC X: xvi, clxvi. 68. See Principios, OC X, Part I, particularly Chapter 2. 69. Dawson, ‘Influence of Andrés Bello’, 264–5. 70. Brierley, Law of Nations, 38. 71. C. Calvo, Le Droit International. Théorique et Pratique, 5th ed. (Paris, 1896), 109. 72. OC X: 27; SW: 240. 73. OC X: 35; SW: 243. 74. Ibid. 75. OC X: 36; SW: 244 76. OC X: 36–7; SW: 244. 77. H. Suganami, ‘Grotius and International Equality’ in H. Bull, B. Kingsbury and A. Roberts, Grotius and International Relations (Oxford, 1992), 229. 78. Quoted in Brierly, Law of Nations, 37. 79. See A. Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, 2004), 1–8. 80. Anghie, Imperialism, 5. 81. SW: 241 82. OC X: 31. 83. OC X, Part I, chapters 2–11; also Dawson, ‘Influence of Andrés Bello’. 84. OC X: 86–7. 85. OC X: 82. 86. From C. de Martens, Le Guide Diplomatique (Paris, 1851), cited in OC X: 48; SW: 253. 87. C. Calvo, Le Droit International. Théorique et Pratique (First edn. Paris, 1868). An earlier Spanish edition was published in 1863. 88. See G. Gong, ‘China's Entry into International Society’ in Bull and Watson, Expansion of International Society, 171–83. 89. Obregon, ‘Between Civilisation and Barbarism’, 823. 90. I. Jaksic, ‘Andrés Bello: Race and National Political Culture’ in J. Gracia (ed), Forging People. Race Ethnicity, and Nationality in Hispanic American and Latino Thought (Indiana, 2011), 94–5. 91. P. Katzenstein, ‘A World of Plural and Pluralist Civilisations’ in P. Katzenstein, Civilisations in World Politics (London, 2010). 92. Bushnell and Macaulay, Latin America, 18–19, Jaksic, Andrés Bello, 106. 93. J. Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine (New York, 2011), 10–11. 94. See M. Fabry, Recognising States. International Society and the Establishment of New States Since 1776 (Oxford, 2010), 49. 95. Sexton, Monroe Doctrine, 78–9. 96. A. Watson, The Evolution of International Society (New York, 1992), 267. 97. OC X: 39; SW: 246 98. OC X: 39; SW: 247 99. OC X: 41; SW: 248 100. OC X: 44; SW: 251. 101. OC: X, 194–6. 102. Jaksic, Andrés Bello, 102; Bushnell and Macaulay, Latin America, 112–14. 103. OC X: 511. 104. OC X: 514–15. 105. Cf Alejandro Alvarez (1905). 106. Murillo, Andrés Bello, 50–1. 107. A. Alvarez, ‘Latin America and International Law’, American Journal of International Law, iii, no. 2 (1909), 269. 108. Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society, 145–6; M.C. Williams, ‘Hobbes and International Relations: A Reconsideration’, International Organisation, l (1996), 213–36. 109. OC X: 193. 110. See A. Hurrell, On Global Order. Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society (Oxford, 2007), 2; H. Bull, The Anarchical Society. A Study of Order in World Politics (London, 1977), 13–16. 111. F. Murillo Rubiera, Andrés Bello. Historia de una vida y de una obra (Caracas, 1986), 16. 112. Jaksic, Andrés Bello. La pasión por el orden. 113. SW: 129. 114. First published in 1857, there were twenty-five subsequent editions, the last in 1949. See OC XVI: lxiii–lxv. The timing here might need to be specified. Several drafts were published in the 1840s and 1850s. The first full draft, presented to the congress, dates 1855. Bello made final revisions in 1856, and the Code became the law of the land on 1 January 1857. 115. OC XIV: xiii. 116. The code was taken up by Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador, and Uruguay, while it also influenced more or less directly the Venezuelan, Brazilian, and Argentine codes that emerged after independence. Caldera, Bello, 121–4. 117. S. Collier, Chile: The Making of a Republic 1830–1865 (Cambridge, 2003), 22, 146–7. 118. OC X: 424. 119. I. Kant, Perpetual Peace, trans. M. Cambell Smith, 3rd ed. (London, 1917), 119; See also D. Archibungi. ‘Immanuel Kant, Cosmopolitan Law and Peace’ European Journal of International Relations, I, no. 4 (1995), 430. 120. OC X: 195. Cf Kant: ‘A state of peace among men who live side by side is not the natural state … a state of peace must be established’, Perpetual Peace, 117–18. 121. See R. Cohen, ‘Pacific Unions; a reappraisal of the theory that democracies do not go to war with each other’, Review of International Studies, xx, no. 3 (1994), 207–23. 122. OC XXV Epistolario: 114–15; SW: 190. 123. OC: XIV: xiii; SW: 194. 124. See I. Jaksic and E. Posada Carbó (eds), Liberalismo y poder, Latinoamérica en el siglo XIX (Santiago, 2011). 125. Murillo, Bello, 14. 126. Mohammed Ayoob, ‘Inequality and Theorising in International Relations. The Case for Subaltern Realism’, International Studies Review, iv, no. 3 (2002): 27–48. 127. OC X: 15–16. 128. OC X: 15–16; SW: 231. 129. See G. Connell-Smith, The Inter-American System (Oxford, 1966), 56. 130. OC I: p. xi. 131. See generally, L. Fawcett and A. Hurrell (eds), Regionalism in World Politics. Regional Organization and International Order (Oxford, 1995). 132. Von Vacano, Color of Citizenship, 80. 133. S. Krasner, Structural Power. The Third World against Global Liberalism (Berkeley, 1985). 134. OC X: 637–8. 135. Lynch, The London Years, iii–iv. 136. ‘Alocución a la poesía’, OC I: 43–64; SW: 7–28; ‘La agricultura de la zona tórrida’, OC I: 65–74; SW: 29–37. 137. Caldera, Bello, 93. 138. OC IV: xii; see also ‘Introduction’, SW: xxxvii. 139. See L. Fawcett, ‘The Origins and Development of the Regional Idea in the Americas’ in L. Fawcett and M. Serrano (eds), Regionalism and Governance in the Americas, (London, 2005), 25–48. 140. OC X: 641. 141. OC X: 642; SW: 214. 142. OC X: 644–5; SW: 216. 143. OCX: 644; SW: 215 144. Ibid. 145. Ibid. 146. OC X: 659–61; SW: 225n. 147. C. Calvo, Le droit international, i. 109–10. 148. Caldera, Bello, 152. 149. Dawson, ‘Influence of Andrés Bello’, 312. 150. For example the colloquium, ‘Andrés Bello et la construction des republiques d’Amerique latine’ (Paris, 2010). 151. Jaksic, Andrés Bello, xvii. 152. Dawson,‘Influence of Andrés Bello’, 12. 153. United Nations Organization, Homage to Andrés Bello in the UN Organization, (Caracas, 1981). 154. M. Craven, The Decolonization of International Law (Oxford, 2007), 19. 155. See R. I. Rotberg, When States Fail, Causes and Consequences (Princeton, 2003). 156. M. Ayoob, The Third World Security Predicament. State-Making, Regional Conflict and the International System (Boulder, 1995). 157. S. D. Krasner, Sovereignty. Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, 1999). 158. E. Mansfield and J. Snyder, ‘Democratic Transitions, Institutional Strength and War’, International Organization, lvi, no. 2 (2002), 297–337. 159. See L. Whitehead, ‘Democratization and Human Rights in the Americas’ in L. Fawcett and M. Serrano, Regionalism and Governance in the Americas, (London, 2005), 165–6. 160. See ‘Introduction’, SW: 53. 161. E.g., I. Geiss, The Pan-African movement (London, 1974). 162. A. Acharya and B. Buzan ‘Why is there no non-Western International Relations Theory?’, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, vii, no. 3 (2007), 287–312. 163. On this point see ‘The Third World’ in J.D.B. Miller and R.J. Vincent (eds) Order and Violence, Hedley Bull and International Relations (Oxford, 1990), 65–6. 164. See for example, J. Conrad, Nostromo (Oxford, 2007) which contains rich depictions of anarchy in his tale of a Latin American seaboard country in the late nineteenth century. 165. For this argument as applied to Asia see A. Acharya and B. Buzan, ‘Why is there no non-Western IR Theory’ in Acharya and Buzan, Non-Western IR Theory, 11–12. 166. C. Altamirano, ‘Introducción general’, Historia de los intelectuales en América Latina, in J. Myers (ed), La Ciudad Letrada, de la conquista al modernismo (Buenos Aires, 2008), i. 15–16. 167. Caldera, Bello, 152.