International relations and the critical history of International Law
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117817726227 |
| Author | Jennifer Pitts |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117817726227
International Relations
2017, Vol. 31(3) 282 –298
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117817726227
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International relations and
the critical history of
International Law
Jennifer Pitts
The University of Chicago
Abstract
Just as the contemporary global structure is a product of nineteenth-century economic and
political developments, namely, industrial capitalism and global empires dominated by European
metropoles, a misleading conception of the international system as composed of formally equal
sovereign states is a product of the same period, as Vattel’s conception of states as equal moral
persons was taken up and transformed in the early nineteenth century, especially in imperial
Britain. This model continues to shape interpretations of global politics in International Relations
(IR), despite the persistence of the imperial legacy in the form of a stratified globe. Historical
work informed by postcolonial studies and recent scholarship in International Law can give IR
greater analytical and critical purchase on the current global order.
Keywords
contextualism, historical turn, imperialism, international order, International Relations,
Westphalian myth
For the second half of the twentieth century, the discipline of International Relations (IR)
operated largely in isolation from the other academic specialties that once shared its orbit
– international law, political theory, intellectual history, and the history of political
thought. IR has relied on stylized histories, of its traditions (realist, solidarist/pluralist,
and liberal), of a series of founding fathers, and of watershed moments, above all 1648.
In European and British scholarship, the long separation from political thought – what
David Armitage called the ‘fifty years’ rift’ – has begun to narrow, although American IR
Corresponding author:
Jennifer Pitts, Department of Political Science, The University of Chicago, 5828 S. University Ave, Room 401,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
Email: jpitts@uchicago.edu
726227IRE0010.1177/0047117817726227International RelationsPitts
research-article2017
Article
Pitts 283
has remained aloof.1 Contextual history has been central to these developments, as schol-
ars have revisited the thought of those who serve as the founding figures in IR’s origin
narratives – Machiavelli, Grotius, Hobbes, Kant, and others – to recapture a more
nuanced understanding of their own preoccupations, which had little to do with the
shadow boxing they have been made to do in IR debates over realist or liberal ‘tradi-
tions’.2 Efforts have similarly been made toward a rapprochement between International
Relations and International Law (again, mostly outside the United States), though the
disciplines are conducted as largely separate conversations.3 The roots of IR are in
International Law – both in their shared ‘founders’ such as Grotius and Hobbes, and in
the early twentieth-century origins of the professional discipline of IR.4 But while the
two disciplines of IR and International Law have grown apart, they share a number of
features that stem from their shared nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history.
These include aspirations to the status of science, a dependence on stylized histories
populated by founding fathers and origin myths, a reliance on sovereignty as a founda-
tional principle, a tendency to regard empires and imperialism as historically superseded
and also ‘incidental to the discipline proper’, and a blindness to their own participation
in structures and discourses of racialized hierarchy.5 It is not clear that the recent efforts
to bring the fields together fully address the disciplines’ shared problems of Eurocentricity
and lack of a critical orientation toward their own history. Even if Waltzian realism’s
archetypal articulation of the conception is considered superseded, more recent bodies of
literature continue to theorize international relations as if conducted among formally
equal sovereign units, including some bodies of IR that are in dialogue with International
Law, such as rational design liberalism.6
During this same period, however, International Law itself has taken a historical turn
from which IR has much to learn. This scholarship in the critical history of international
law has radically challenged the dominant strain in which the history of international law
had been written.7 The older mode had presented the history of international law as a
story of progress toward an ever more rational and humane global order, with law as the
‘gentle civiliser of nations’, in the nineteenth-century phrase made famous by Martti
Koskenniemi, the most prolific and influential of the new historians. In the older story,
international law was a unique achievement of European civilization, made possible by
the legacy of Roman law, with its conception of the universal applicability of ius gentium
and its conception of the rule of law, and the diplomatic interactions of diverse and rela-
tively small European states, forced by their proximity to one another to work out means
of mutual toleration and rules for the preservation of peace and the conduct of war.8
Historians of international law once shared with IR the view of 1648 as the originary
moment of the modern international order, though the notion was discredited in interna-
tional law even before the recent spate of works exposing the ‘myth of 1648’.9 And yet
within IR, the myth remains robust because it usefully crystallizes the foundational idea
that the international realm is one of sovereign states without a common superior that are
formally equal, even if they clearly differ in material power. As Tarak Barkawi has writ-
ten in an exhaustive and revealing review of the continuing dominance within much
‘disciplinary IR’ (across rival paradigms of realism, constructivism, and liberalism) of
the idea that formally equal sovereign, territorial nation-states are the basic units of inter-
national relations: ‘security studies and IR lack a coherent and developed body of inquiry
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