Introduction
Andrew Linklater’s book Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems Footnote 1 is an immense achievement in terms of the time span it covers and the depth with which it discusses the different harm conventions in the formation of the ‘Western’ states-system from Ancient Greece to the present. His primary aim is to tell the story of the relationship between violence and civilisation. He does this through exploring the change in harm conventions throughout the development of the ‘Western’ states-system. Two main questions guide the book. Firstly, to what extent the harm conventions of the present differ from those of earlier periods and secondly to what extent the different conceptualisations of self-restraint and harm conventions explain the differences between states systems.
Linklater traces the relationship between violence and civilisations and seeks answers to the above questions through employing of the concepts of ‘we-feeling’ and the ‘we-I balance’, which refers ‘to the solidarity between people that is most apparent in collective attachments to survival units such as kin-based associations, city-states’. These concepts are applied to the analysis of international relations whereby ‘we’ refers to international society and I to the individual states and the book focuses on ‘how far the dominant understandings of the we-I balance in the most recent phase of international society represent a significant break with earlier arrangements’.Footnote 2 The book despite its many achievements also demonstrates that the challenge of Eurocentrism of international relations continues.Footnote 3
Linklater’s account of the ‘global civilizing process’ as having ‘originated in Europe’Footnote 4 and being ‘Western-driven’Footnote 5 reproduces a Eurocentric system of knowledge through telling the story of International Relations from the visible side of the abyssal line. The article will firstly elaborate on how Linklater’s account reproduces a Eurocentric system of knowledge. The second and third sections will then focus on specific examples of how Eurocentrism was reproduced and how to write International Relations from the invisible side of the abyssal line. The second section will focus on how histories of Europe and colonialism are detached from each other. The third section will discuss where political and moral ‘progress’ is being located within the development of the ‘global civilizing process’.
Locating ‘Westernness’
Eurocentrism itself is a difficult concept to define.Footnote 6 One of the challenges with respect to defining Eurocentrism is that it has many ‘avatars’Footnote 7 and different ‘manifestations’ whether culturalist, historical and/or epistemic.Footnote 8 Eurocentrism as a system of knowledge makes a claim to universality and not only situates Europe at its centre but as the ‘origin’ of all developments. This system of knowledge continues to be reproduced through the naturalisation of what Bouventura de Sousa Santos calls ‘abyssal thinking’, which ‘consists of a system of visible and invisible distinctions, the invisible ones being the foundation of the visible ones’.Footnote 9 These invisible distinctions;
are established through radical lines that divide social reality into two realms, the realm of ‘this side of the line’ and the realm of ‘the other side of the line’. The division is such that ‘the other side of the line’ vanishes as reality, becomes non-existent, and is indeed produced as non-existent. Non-existent means not existing in any relevant or comprehensible way of being. Whatever is produced as non-existent is radically excluded because it lies beyond the realm of what the accepted conception of inclusion considers to be its other. What most fundamentally characterizes abyssal thinking is thus the impossibility of the co-presence of the two sides of the line. To the extent that it prevails, this side of the line only prevails by exhausting the field of relevant reality. Beyond it, there is only non-existence, invisibility, non-dialectical absence.Footnote 10
The way Linklater’s account produces a Eurocentric system of knowledge as such is through writing the story of international relations from the visible side of the abyssal line and locating ‘origins’, the main drivers for development and the sources of moral and political ‘progress’ in the West. This is done through three interrelated moves. Firstly, Linklater presents a linear progressive narrative and ascribes ‘Westernness’ to the origin and development of the story. Linklater’s narrative tells the story starting from Ancient Greece moving onto Latin Christendom, Italian city-states and the Italian Renaissance and into discussions of ‘court society’ and radical enlightenment thought.Footnote 11 Such a narrative works to reproduce a linear story of the ‘rise of the West’ with a ‘triumphalist teleology’.Footnote 12 For example, starting the story with Ancient Greece situates the ‘origins’ of the ‘Western’ state-system with the Hellenic civilisation. This situation of Ancient Greece as the beginning of ‘Europe’ without reference to other influences.Footnote 13
Secondly, Linklater’s narrative works to enact temporal and spatial divisions that are articulated through dualisms such as Europe/non-Europe, West/non-West, traditional/modern. The difference is constructed through designating a spatiality different from the ‘West’ or ‘Europe’ and a different temporality whereby the ‘other side’ is located in the ‘past’. This system of knowledge codifies the ‘other’ as always lacking or catching up.Footnote 14 The catching up occurs within the dualisms whereby the ‘traditional’ tries to catch up and become modern. This is evident in his discussion of the ‘expansion of the international system’ and how he characterises the ‘global civilizing process’ as being ‘Western-driven’.Footnote 15 Thirdly, Linklater’s account following from the bifurcation of the international detaches ‘Europe’s history from that of the history of colonialism. It is not that the story is being written without the inclusion of colonialism but rather that colonialism is included as the ‘dark chapter’Footnote 16 to the history being written. The next two sections will highlight the different ways in which these three dynamics present themselves in Linklater’s narrative of international relations. The first section will focus on how histories of colonialism are taken as separate events not connected to the developments in Europe and underline how the history of colonialism is bound with that of the formation of modernity.Footnote 17 The second section will discuss through the example of the Haitian Revolution where sources of moral and political progress are located. These two sections will demonstrate how international relations could be written from the invisible side of the abyssal line.
Histories of colonialism
The story of international relations that Linklater presents focuses on the visible side of the abyssal line by locating historical developments in Europe and relegating the history of colonialism to the background of the story. Furthermore, the story works to focus on Europe and the ‘development of the Western states-system’ in a manner that concentrates on the ‘nation state’ rather than the ‘imperial state’.Footnote 18 This is not to claim that Linklater ignores histories of colonialism but rather it is about how he locates colonialism whereby it becomes a backdrop of the main story. The following sections will provide examples of how to write the expansion of the international system and the Holocaust by bringing in histories of colonialism demonstrating how to write international relations from invisible side of the abyssal line in a manner that underlines co-presences of both sides.
Expansion of the international system
Linklater’s narrative of the ‘expansion of the international system’ works to reproduce three interrelated Eurocentric narratives. Firstly, it situates the ‘expansion’ within a linear and progressive narrative that assumes a progression of the international society. Secondly, such a narrative also works to reproduce the spatial and temporal division of events that ‘originate’ or are ‘driven’ by Europe and then move onto other spaces that have then to ‘catch-up’. Thirdly, it detaches the history of colonialism from the history of Europe. Linklater presents an unproblematic narrative of the expansion of the ‘international society’ and its main tenets whereby ‘Western ideas of territorial sovereignty, non-intervention, diplomacy and international law were accepted by the overwhelming majority of the colonized territories that became full members of international society in the post-Second World War era’.Footnote 19 Furthermore, he states that ‘it is entirely valid to describe the expansion of international society of states that is governed by standards of self-restraint that can only be understood as direct offshoots of the European civilizing process’.Footnote 20 This framework continues in the classical English school traditionFootnote 21 of narrating the expansion of the international society in a manner that not only takes Europe as the ‘origin’ of developments, but also in a manner that forgets and/or silences the myriad of interactions that made the formation of the international society possible and the different conditions under which the ‘others’ joined the international society.Footnote 22 Moreover, such a narrative forgets the violence and force that occurred for ‘expansion of international society’ to happen where the story of ‘acceptance’ included rebellions, famines, uprisings, genocides, and independence struggles. It was the other side of the abyssal line and the efforts to understand the struggles of the colonised that actually produced one of the most important works on violence.Footnote 23
There have been a number of works in International Relations and the social sciences that have focused on writing beyond the abyssal line even if they were not named as such.Footnote 24 For example, Siba GrovoguiFootnote 25 discusses the work of Felix Eboué, Gabriel D’Arbussier, and Daniel Coulibaly who were the political elite in French West and Equatorial Africa and how they mediated issues of colonial governance underlining how Eboué ‘initiated the first specifically sanctioned networks; and set the tone for the actions and policies of the Free French Forces in the colonies before their duplication in the Metropole’.Footnote 26 What Grovogui does is expand upon the definition of France and analyse it not from the visible side of the French nation-state but from the invisible side of the French imperial state thus leading to the uncovering of a series of negotiations on the meaning of France. Thus, it is not that Linklater ignores colonialism but rather how he situates colonialism at the backdrop of the narratives that is the issue. As such, bringing in ‘colonialism’ into the story of international relations does not break through the abyssal line but rather brings colonialism in as an addition to the story. As the example demonstrates, taking colonialism as being constitutive of the story underlines the different connections that existed in the formation of the international system that did not necessarily originate in ‘Europe’ and underlines the co-presence and interactions of both sides of the abyssal line.
Holocaust and modernity
Linklater’s discussions on the Holocaust and modernity are also indicative of the way in which ‘European’ history and that of the colonies is bifurcated. The history of the Holocaust is separated from the history of colonialism and presented as an ‘exception’ to the global civilising process that ‘originated in Europe’Footnote 27 and was ‘Western-driven’.Footnote 28 Linklater argues that ‘not only was the Holocaust the greatest regression from ‘civilisation’ in twentieth-century Europe; it was a catastrophe for which ‘“civilised” Europeans were unprepared’.Footnote 29 As such, the Holocaust wasn’t a manifestation of the European civilising process but an exception and that the ‘barbarism’ of the Holocaust ‘occurred in the context of a profound economic and political crisis that bread widespread feelings of helplessness in a society where public support for enlightenment values had been limited’.Footnote 30 Linklater makes two interrelated arguments here. Firstly, that the Holocaust was an ‘exception’ to the civilising process of Enlightenment and secondly the ‘barbarism’ occurred because of feelings of helplessness and a lesser degree of support for Enlightenment. Had there been a bigger support for enlightenment values then the ‘barbarism’ would not have occurred. This perspective is a consequence of the Eurocentric manner of reading modernity and Enlightenment whereby it is thought of as developing separately from histories of colonialism, genocide, and barbarism.
If one reads modernity and Enlightenment not through the visible side of the abyssal line but its invisible side, the co-constitutiveness of coloniality and modernity become more apparent. According to this perspective, ‘1492’ is designated as the ‘birth of modernity’ and that birth of modernity had a darker side: ‘coloniality’.Footnote 31 Coloniality in this formulation is not coterminous with colonialism but rather ‘refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism … that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations’ and is ‘maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense’.Footnote 32 In his book Discourse on Colonialism, Aime CésaireFootnote 33 argues that, ‘Whether one likes it or not, at the end of the blind alley that is Europe, I mean the Europe of Adenauer, Schuman, Bidault, and a few others, there is Hitler. At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.’Footnote 34 As such, the surprise and the indignation towards Nazism is a result of hiding from the truth because ‘the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices’.Footnote 35 What Césaire underlines here is that the history of colonialism cannot be separated from the history of Europe. The events occurring in Europe, their potentialities and possibilities are connected with the colonial question. The colonial question as such is constitutive of Europe’s past, present, and future and cannot be thought of as being separate. It is the abyssal line in Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s formulation that makes the colonial question invisible to the story of Europe.Footnote 36 Detaching the history of colonialism from that of Europe’s history thus leads to for example the forgetting of the Shark Island Concentration Camp and the Herero and Nama genocide of 1904–8.Footnote 37 The Herero and Nama uprisings that started in 1904 in South West Africa ended with the death of tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people in the Shark Island concentration camps. Furthermore, prisoners were used as slave labour and their skulls were used in medical experimentations.Footnote 38 This is not to establish a causal link between the two events but to underline that ‘the causes, nature and effects of the Holocaust were closely related to the general European phenomena of imperialism, colonialism and genocide’.Footnote 39
Writing from the visible side of the abyssal line results in erasing/silencing the atrocities committed beyond the abyssal line. These atrocities then are relegated to another time and space and it is only atrocities committed within ‘Europe’ or the ‘West’ that become events to be reckoned with. As Césaire argued, ‘they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples’.Footnote 40 As such, people on the invisible side of the abyssal line are dehumanised and violences inflicted on them are erased/silenced. The next section of the article will focus on where humanity and sources of moral and progress is located because the dehumanisation of those on the invisible side of the abyssal line means that their contributions to ‘progress’ also becomes erased/silenced.
Story of ‘progress’
The second aspect of Eurocentrism as a system of knowledge that Linklater reproduces is where he locates the source of moral and political progress and whose humanity is being redeemed in the narrative. When discussing the campaigns against slave trade and slavery he locates the efforts to abolish slavery predominantly in Europe and within the Enlightenment. Thus, he argues that it was ‘enlightenment cosmopolitanism’ that ‘underpinned the assault on colonialism and slavery and it informed the critique of civilization that condemned the cruelty and unrestrained lives of ‘savages’.Footnote 41 As such, the abolition of slave trade becomes an example of the ‘moral progress’ achieved by the civilising process. The section moves through the abyssal line and focuses on two aspects of the Haitian Revolution.Footnote 42 The first will be the centrality of the colonial question in the developments with respect to the debates about the abolition of slavery. The second will be about locating the sources of the Haitian Revolution not just as an extension of developments in France but as rooted in the colonies themselves.Footnote 43
French Revolution and the colonial question
In 1788 when Louis XVI called for the election of representatives for the Estates General, it was taken as an opportunity by the Societé des Amis des Noirs, which aimed to bring attention to the slave trade. The society’s efforts were countered by French planters who worked for the establishment of a colonial assembly for Saint-Domingue. Although this suggestion was declined, planters organised and elected deputies. Even if they were not invited they demanded the right to attend and argued that if they were not present then ‘France would have to resolve the problem of the “colonial representation” with “arms in its hands”’.Footnote 44 As Dubois states, ‘it was the beginning of the French Revolution, and nine of the Saint-Domingue delegates … were there’.Footnote 45 These deputies were present when the Estate General met at Versailles in June 1789. The discussion in the National Assembly ended when a compromise was reached giving Saint Dominigue six seats. This was not the end of the debates though.
In October 1789, Julien Raimond and Vincent Ogé lead a delegation of free men of colour and presented a petition to the National Assembly. They demanded the right to vote for free men of colour. Raimond and Ogé joined the efforts of a group of free coloured activists called the Societe des Colons Americans. Despite the more favourable opinion towards their efforts, these attempts were also defeated. In March 1790 National Assembly formed the Colonial Committee, which included four planters and two merchants with property in Saint-Domingue. The law they proposed stipulated that the constitution of France would not apply to the colonies but rather each colony would draft a constitution taking their ‘internal regimes’ into consideration. In July Vincent Ogé left France and after purchasing arms arrived in Saint-Domingue in October 1790, which was later crushed.Footnote 46
Underlining the centrality of the colonial question to the French Revolution means moving beyond the visible and established categories through which we think. Extending France ‘to include also the colonial possessions of France’Footnote 47 leads to seeing the different dynamics, connections and co-presences at work in the debates and decisions of the time. Including the colonial question also underscores how ‘creole autonomism, free colored activism and slave resistance’ had ‘complex pre-histories independent of the revolution in France’ and that the ‘Constituent’s colonial legislation came largely as a response to events in the Caribbean’.Footnote 48
The Boukman CeremonyFootnote 49
Religious ceremonies were important avenues for the meeting up of slaves before the insurrection. As Dubois discusses ‘religious ceremonies provided ritual solace, dance and music, but most importantly a community that extended beyond the plantation’, which opened up space for ‘religious practices that celebrated and reflected the human struggles of those who participated in them’ and was instrumental in laying the ‘foundations for the revolt that ultimately brought complete freedom to the slaves’.Footnote 50
In August 1791, which is taken to be the beginning of the Haitian Revolution, two meetings took place between slaves where mass insurrection was discussed. The first meeting was on 14 August 1791 by slave-drivers and coachmen at the Lenormand de Mezy estate. It was at this meeting that the decision to rebel was taken. The Lenormand estate was a common ground of meeting and it needs to be underlined that the slaves did meet regularly through Sunday markets and weekend festivities. This decision was then communicated to a larger group of slaves at Bois Caiman on the night of 21 August 1791 under the leadership of Boukman Dutty, Jean Francois, and Georges Biaussou. According to the predominantly accepted story, Boukman and a female high priestess (some sources identify her as Cecile Fatiman) oversaw a ceremony that included the killing of a pig and the offering of its blood to the participants as the slaves were urged to rebel.Footnote 51
According to C. L. R. James, Boukman made the following speech:
The god created the sun which gives us light, who rouses the waves and rules the storm, though hidden in the clouds he watches us. He sees all that the white man does. The god of the white man inspires him with crime, but our god calls upon us to do good works. Our god who is good to us orders us to revenge our wrongs. He will direct our arms and aid us. Throw away the symbol of the god of the whites who has so often caused us to weep, and listen to the voice of liberty, which speaks in the hearts of us all.Footnote 52
David Geggus challenges the idea that the speech as quoted by C. L. R. James could have been made based on the evidence yet he does agree that a speech would have been made and a ceremony did take place even though the specifics of the ceremony are not known.Footnote 53 The underlying point though is that the slaves did have means of organisation and alternative references for organisation and that the main referents of the insurrection cannot be solely taken as being the ‘ideas and ideals’ of the French Revolution. As Geggus himself argues the ‘ceremony at Bois Caiman directly communicated, to a perhaps predominantly African group of field slaves, in a religious setting calculated to mobilise support’Footnote 54 and it ‘was the slaves that rebelled in this last month of the Constituent Assembly who would bring not only racial equality and slave emancipation to the French empire but also colonial secession and, in 1804, its first independent state’.Footnote 55
Conclusion
Eurocentrism as a system of knowledge continues to reproduce these abyssal lines that naturalise the temporal and spatial divisions and silence and forget the existence of the ‘other side’. The article focused on two examples through which the invisible side of the abyssal line is left out of the story and how that influences our understanding of international relations. The first example was how histories of colonialism are taken as being separate from the story of development in Europe or the ‘West’ and the second is where the sources of moral and political progress are located. As such, writing beyond the abyssal line means taking the events that occurred on the invisible side as being constitutive rather than as peripheral. The first section focused on how histories of colonialism are taken as being separate through two examples. The first was the expansion of the international system. The section discussed how the expansion of the international system cannot be thought of as being separate from colonialism and that focusing on the colonies can reveal different connections and interactions that might otherwise become unnoticeable. The second example was the Holocaust and the discussion underlined how the Holocaust should be considered together with the practices of colonialism rather than as being separate and unrelated to them. The second section discussed where sources of moral and political progress are located and whose humanity is being redeemed in the stories of International Relations. This section focused on two instances of the Haitian Revolution in order to underline firstly that taking France as an empire and including the colonial question demonstrates the presence of actors beyond the abyssal line. Secondly, the section discussed how to locate the sources of the revolution in the colonies themselves. As such writing beyond the abyssal line does not solely mean for example writing of modernity whereby colonialism is included in the narrative, but writing of coloniality/modernity and asking the question whose humanity the narrative is aiming to redeem and where is moral and political ‘progress’ located.
The article has thus discussed that the story of the international system and the relationship between violence and civilisation that Linklater tells remains on the visible side of the abyssal line. Abyssal thinking refers to the distinctions created between visible and invisible realms and it is Eurocentrism as a system of knowledge that sustains and reproduces this abyssal line. The colonial/modern system of knowledge bifurcates understandings of the international both spatially and temporally. Spatially the divisions work to reproduce the geopolitics of knowledge as one side of the spatial duality (Western/non-Western) becomes assigned as the location from where ‘progress’ occurs. Temporally, the divisions then situate one side of the duality to the past and assign it the ‘responsibility’ to catch up to the political and moral ‘progress’ achieved by the other side (traditional/modern). These divisions are what constitute the abyssal line that Boaventura de Sousa Santos refers to and the difference between ‘emancipation’ and ‘liberation’ that Walter Mignolo discusses.Footnote 56 Emancipation means leaving one side of the duality and moving into the other whereby an agent becomes Western, European, and modern. This idea works to reproduce the abyssal line whereby the linear progressive conceptualisation of history and the system of dualisms with its implicit hierarchies become normalised. Liberation would involve not moving from one side of the duality into the other, but rather in moving beyond the abyssal line and beyond the dualisms through which Eurocentrism continues to reproduce itself. Moving beyond the abyssal line necessitates writing of international relations that take into account the invisible side of the abyssal line and underline the co-presence, connectivities, and interactions of both sides.
