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References
A.B. Brewster,The Hill Tribes of Fiji 38 (New York: Johnson Reprint Co., 1967 [1922]).
J. Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication”, in H. Foster, ed.,The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 129.
See, e.g., P. Rabinow,French Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1989) (interpreting French urban planning policies in colonial Algeria as “an urban parallel to Bentham'sPanopticon”); F. Cooper, and A.L. Stoler, “Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of Rule”,American Ethnologist 16 (1989), 609; T. Mitchell, “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order,” in N. Dirks, ed.,Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 289–317. So pervasive is the theme of colonial perspective that one recent work, again citing Foucault's image of the Panopticon, identifies the colonial interest in surveillance as one of twelve basic rhetorical modes which are said to form a repertoire for colonial discourse. D. Spurr,The Rhetoric of Empire (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).
For further elaboration of international law's implication in colonial expansion, see Antony Anghie, “‘The Heart of My Home’: Colonialism, Environmental Damage, and the Nauru Case”,Harvard International Law Journal 34/2 (1993), 445–506.
In this sense, the international lawyer's globalizing view mirrors the powerful globalism of a variety of rhetorics now critiqued by contemporary writers. Elspeth Probyn speaks for many critics, for example, when she notes “[t]he ways in which women's practices and experiences have been historically dismissed as local” and the way in which the epistemology of location works to “fix the subaltern outside the sanctified boundaries of knowledge, determining the knowledge of the subaltern as peripheral and inconsequential”: E. Probyn, “Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local”, in L.J. Nicholson, ed.,Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990), 178.
See “Report of Mssrs. Williamson and Carew, Land Commissioners, on ‘Emuri’, Together with the Testimony and Proceedings on the Hearing Before them”,American and British Claims Arbitration, Fiji Land Claims of George Rodney Burt, Benson Robert Henry, John B. Williams, Isaac M. Brower, Memorial of the United States in Support of the Claims (1914), Exhibit 26, at 199–204 [hereinafterU.S. Memorial].
See J.D. Legge,Britain in Fiji, 1858–1880 (London: Macmillan, 1958).
“Report of the Lands Commission”, quoted inPecuniary Claims Arbitration, George Rodney Burt, Answer of His Majesty's Government, Annex 4, at 46 (July 9, 1923) [hereinafterBritish Memorial, Rodney Burt].
See Mis. Doc. No. 173, 51st Cong., 1st Sess. (1890).
SeeU.S. Memorial, supra n.7, at 15.
Seeibid. at 16–17. The special agent, George H. Scidmore, was appointed in 1891 and filed his report with the Dept. of State on July 3, 1893 after a year of research in Fiji. See “Report of Mr. George H. Scidmore, special agent of the Department of State to investigate claims of American citizens to lands in Fiji”, S. Doc. No. 126, 54th Cong., 1st Sess. 2 (1896).
See generally, correspondence reprinted in S. Doc. No.140, 56th Cong., 2d Sess. (1901).
SeeMessage from the President of the United States, SD OC. NO. 126, 54th Cong., 1st Sess. 2 (1896).
The views of the publicist Thomas Lawrence exemplified the enthusiasm of the time: I have indicated my belief that the period of rapid development through which we are now passing may end, of those who stand for righteousness among the nations are at once sane in their aims and earnest in their endeav ours, in the establishment of an organized international society, with legislative, executive, and judicial organs. Were this once done, war would in time become as abnormal and infrequent as rebellion. T.J. Lawrence,The Principles of International Law (Boston: D.C. Heath & Co., 1910, 4th ed.), v.
See W.E. Hall,International Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1880), 5.
During this period, for example, the American Society for the Judicial Settlement of International Disputes was founded for the “promotion of the project to establish a judicial tribunal which will do for the civilized world what the ordinary courts of justice do for the individual and to encourage recourse to it when established”: “The American Society for Judicial Settlement of International Disputes”,Judicial Settlement of International Disputes 1910–12 (1910), 25.
See Agreement Between Great Britain and the United States for the Settlement of Pecuniary Claims, Aug. 18, 1910, 211 CTS 408.
Ibid.
Letter from E.J. Phelps to the Marquis of Salisbury, Head of the Foreign Office, Nov. 12, 1887.
Ibid.
Letter from J. Pauncefote to Colonial Office, appending a draft letter to the United States Minister, December 28, 1887.
Letter from John Bramston, Colonial Office, to Lord Salisbury, Foreign Office, December 9, 1887 (Collection of the National Archives of Fiji).
See Letter from John Sherman, U.S. Dept. of State, to John Hay, American Embassy, London (November 16, 1897) (printed in S. DOC. NO. 140, 56th Cong., 2d Sess. 10 (1901)).
British Memorial, Rodney Burt, supra n.9, Annex 4.
Ibid., Annex 4, at 41.
Letter from F.H. Villiers, British Foreign Office, to Mr. Carter, American Embassy, (March 18, 1897) (reprinted in Claims of B.R. Henry and Others, S.D OC. NO. 140, 56th Cong., 2d Sess. 5 (1901)).
See, e.g., Lawrence,Essays on Some Disputed Questions in Modern International Law (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell and Co., 1884), 57: The lawyers on the whole regard Sovereignty as the Sovereignty exercised by individuals, and the result was extremely important to international law, for the assumed individuality of sovereigns enabled its founders to regard states as moral beings bound by moral rules.
The British lawyers act out this subjectivity, this shared sense of scale with the persons “on the ground”, for example, as they correspond with and request advice from Gordon's successors in the Fijian colonial administration. See, e.g., letter from J.B. Thurston to Lord Knutsford, Dec. 21, 1888 (Collection of the National Archives of Fiji).
The affinity between person and state, and the transformation it engenders, is the subject of much discussion by the publicists of the time. For example, William Hall writes that “States have a moral nature identical with that of individuals, and that with respect to one another they are in the same relation as that in which individuals stand to each other who are subject to law”: W. E. Hall,International Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1880), 13.
See, e.g., Letter from E.J. Phelps to the Marquis of Salisbury, Head of the Foreign Office, Nov. 12, 1887.
“Probably it is best to say with Oppenheim that persons, like territory, are objects of International Law, and reserve the term subjects for those artificial persons who are either sovereign states, or communities closely akin to them through the possession of some of the distinguishing marks of statehood”: Lawrence,The Principles of International Law, supra n.15, at 73. (
Craig Owens quotes Heidegger's observation that the fact that the world becomes a picture at all is “what distinguishes the essence of the modern age”: Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism”, in H. Foster, ed.,The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 66. Note that whether this “transcendental perspective” represents an accurate reflection of the philosophical position found in the canonical Enlightenment texts is not at issue here. What I describe is a popular or institutional view of the Enlightenment project from the vantage point of the nineteenth century international lawyer that, whether well-founded in the writings of Kant and others or not, provided the moral zeal for the international lawyer's task.
Cf. S. Toumlin,Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 128.
M. Strathern,After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 7.
Ibid. at 8 (emphasis in original).
M. Strathern,Partial Connections (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), xiv.
Ibid. at xv.
Ibid. at xxiv.
Following Foucault, for example, Paul Rabinow argues that the administrative discourses he documents inFrench Modern coalesce only momentarily before they dissolve into contradiction. See Rabinow,supra n.3.
From Albert Einstein's theory of relativity to Mauss and Durkheim's relativization of systems of classification and Nietzche's “perspectivism”, the intellectual climate was replete with the notion that space and distance was a matter of perspective, that no inherent spatial reality existed outside of the many heterogeneous perspectives of the viewer: Stephen Kern,The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983, 132–138. Kern follows the trend into the arts, where he notes the innovations of painters such as Cézanne in introducing “truly heterogeneous space in a single canvas with multiple perspectives of the same subject,”ibid. at 141, and the cinema, where directors experimented with camera angles juxtaposed in rapid succession in a way that violated the singular transcendental perspective of past cinematography.
See, e.g., J. Baudrillard,America, trans. C. Turner (London: Verso, 1988); F. Jameson,Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Kern notes, for example, the film critic Remy de Gourmont's celebration of the possibilities to “tour the world” in a single film, and Hugo Münsterberg's observation that in cinema, “[e]vents which are far distant from one another so that we could not be physically present at all of them at the same time are fusing in our field of vision, just as they are brought together in our own consciousness ... Our mind is split and can be here and there apparently in one mental act”: Kern,supra n.42, at 219.
See, e.g., D. Kennedy, “Autumn Weekends: An Essay on Law and Everyday Life”, in A. Sarat and T.R. Kearns, eds.,Law and Everyday Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1993), 191–235.
See, e.g., C. Geertz,Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
Guattari, for example, celebrates the “paradox” of the global which evidences “a multiplication of anthropological approaches, a planetary intermixing of cultures, paradoxically accompanied by a rising tide of particularisms, racisms, and nationalisms ...”: F. Guattari, “Regimes, Pathways, Subjects”, in J. Crary and S. Kwinter, eds.,Incorporations (New York: Zone, 1992), 16.
William Connolly, for example, begins with the normative problem of how to bridge subjectivity — how to take seriously the difference of the other — and surprisingly ends on the topic of “global politics”. See W. Connolly, “Identity and Difference in Global Politics”, in J. Der Darien and M.J. Shapiro, eds.,International/Intertextual Relations (Lexington, Mass: D.C. Heath, 1989), 333.
See Baudrillard,supra n.2, at 128.
I borrow the term from Vincente Rafael's recent study of the translation of Christian idioms into Tagalog. Rafael notes that “Listening-as-fishing and remembering-as-haunting both entail the appropriation of what comes before one self (in both temporal and spatial senses). They are ways, therefore, of localizing what is outside of one”: Vincente L. Rafael,Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 12.
See, e.g., H.K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation”, inNation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 4–5 (describing a new global space as “thisinter national dimension both within the margins of the nation-space and in the boundariesin-between nations and peoples ... [and] the problematic unity of the nation to the articulation of cultural difference in the construction of aninter national per spective”) (emphasis in original).
I am thinking here of the affinity between theories that focus oncategories and theboundaries that delineate them, theories that map outnetworks of relationships, and theories that emphasize the relationship betweenperspectives on a subject. In the domain of critical international law, for example, Ashley and Walker's study of sovereignty integrates a “suspicion of all assertions of sovereign privilege ... a voice beyond politics and beyond doubt, a voice of interpretation and judgment from which truth and power are thought to emanate as one” with a critique of attempts to delineate and defend disciplinary and territorial boundaries. See R. K. Ashley, and R.B.J. Walker, “Reading Dissidence/Writing the Discipline: Crisis and the Question of Sovereignty in International Studies”,International. Studies Quarterly 34 (1990), 367.
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I owe special thanks to Peter Fitzpatrick, David Kennedy, Angelia Means, Adam Reed, and Marilyn Strathern for conversation and detailed comments that substantially shaped the direction of this piece. I am also indebted for useful criticism to the Law and Social Theory seminar group at the University of Kent at Canterbury and to the “Anthropological Methods in the Realm of the International” discussion at the 1994 Law and Society Annual Meeting, as well as to the Ford Foundation for financial support.
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Riles, A. The view from the international plane: Perspective and scale in the architecture of colonial international law. Law Critique 6, 39–54 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01128500
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01128500