Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism, and Order in World Politics.

By Edward Keene. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 180p. $58.00 cloth, $21.00 paper.

The argument of Edward Keene's ambitious book is simple and, ultimately, compelling. He makes two broad claims. The first is that international relations theorists have consistently misread Hugo Grotius and, consequently, most subsequent accounts of the law of nations, as maintaining that sovereignty could only be one and indivisible. They have done this because they have assumed that the conception of the state that emerged during the seventeenth century, in which sovereignty was indeed, in Jean Bodin's phrase, “indivisible as a point in geometry,” applied as forcefully to the relationship between states as it did to relationships within states. But, Keene argues, Grotius did not hold that sovereignty was divisible. More startlingly, he maintained that in international law, individuals not only could hold private rights, the rights, most obviously, to property, but they might also, if they believed their security to be threatened, wage their own personal war. Grotius's view was widely shared until well into the nineteenth century. The great English jurist Henry Maine, for instance, declared in 1887 that “sovereignty has always been regarded as divisible in international law.” The same applies mutatis mutandis to individual rights, for although few today would go so far as to concede a private right to wage war, individual rights to property was, and has remained, inviolable in both local, civil, and international law.

That is Keene's first claim. The second, which follows from it, is that IR theorists, because of the “inadequacy of their conceptual apparatus and the narrowness of their historical vision” (p. 95), have tended to assume that the Westphalian model—as it has come to be called—of international relations, in which sovereignty was indivisible and the state was therefore the only player, applied not merely to the European signatories of the Treaty of Westphalia but to the entire world. On Keene's account, however, what followed from the Grotian assertion about private right and the divisibility of sovereignty was precisely a dual perception of how the world was to be governed under the law of nations. In Europe, what followed from Westphalia was a regime of “tolerance.” Sovereign states agreed to tolerate one another's divergences and peculiarities so long as these did not result in unacceptable territorial claims. Beyond Europe, however, a quite different order emerged. Here, sovereignty was seemingly infinite in its divisibility, and here, “tolerance” was replaced by the ambition to impose what Keene calls “civilization” upon the world. What IR theorists have consistently overlooked is that the modern world has been shaped not only by the post-Westphalian state system, with which they have (in Keene's view) been exclusively concerned, but also—and more markedly—by the evolution of the European system of world empires.

The modern European empires had grown out of ventures that were originally limited to trade, and they had grown up in regions where the Europeans had initially been but one set of interlopers among many. In such a situation, sovereignty could only ever be divided. From this there emerged a bewildering variety of ways of conceiving sovereignty. All of this resulted in what, from the point of view of any modern international lawyer, was a curious, hybrid beast. But diverse though it was, it had one single objective, beyond, that is, the immediate ambition to enrich the mother country. It existed to bring “civilization” to the non-European world. In so doing, in the tortured words of the jurist James Lorrimer in 1883, “it vindicates the ultimate will of the inferior race—the will, that is to say, at which the inferior race must arrive when it reaches the stage of civilization to which the higher race has attained” (p. 114). Offensive though this might have been to the “inferior races” concerned, it was only occasionally homicidal. But Lorrimer's use of “race” already indicates the beginning of the shift that in Nazi Germany would not only reverse the traditional order between civilization and barbarism—in that now the forces of “barbarism” were to be found within rather than without—but also put a violent end to the whole regime of “tolerance” in Europe established by Westphalia, and reestablished by the Congress of Vienna.

In Keene's view, this history has placed the postimperial world in a very difficult position. Because no one has been prepared to recognize that international law had always assumed the existence of divided sovereignty and of two distinct international regimes, the present attempt to harmonize the two—to introduce the notion of undivided sovereignty and a regime of toleration for all the nations of the world—has been generally disastrous. We now live in a world, in his view, “where we have a singular political and legal framework which is schizophrenically trying to realize two different purposes at the same time” (p. 122). The Charter of the United Nations, for instance, sets as its goal a series of objectives that, although no mention is made of civilization, are nonetheless, as Keene says, entirely in keeping “with how a nineteenth-century international lawyer or colonial administrator would have understood the concept” (p. 140). Yet at the same time, it insists that all member states are sovereign bodies with the right to develop whatever kind of political system they so chose.

To put it very simply: The present administration of the United States holds (or claims to hold) that the people of Iraq have an inalienable and indivisible sovereignty over their own territory, and that it respects the will of the people to exercise this sovereignty in any way it chooses. It also claims that the United States and Britain have invaded their country in order to establish democracy or, in other terms, “civilization.” Yet it is clear from what is rapidly unfolding that these objectives are incompatible. Either the sovereignty of Iraq must be respected, which in all probability ultimately means either a return to something like the status quo ante or the creation of a fundamentalist Muslim regime, or the Iraqis must, in Rousseau's celebrated phrase, “be forced to be free”—and democratic and civilized. What the present impasse points to is that what we so obviously lack (among many other things) is, in Keene's words, “some way of articulating the idea of a civilized world that is fully cognizant of the need to tolerate different peoples and cultures” (p. 144).

Keene makes no pretence to have found a solution to this dilemma. But he has gone a long way toward unraveling the historical obscurity that has hitherto cloaked our understanding of what its full implications now are. Beyond the Anarchical Society is an important and timely book and should be obligatory reading not only for all IR theorists but also for foreign policymakers everywhere.