An international civilization?

Empire, internationalism and the crisis of the

Two decades after Martin Wight’s untimely death, his fertile blend of history
and international relations still shaped the intellectual agenda of the School
of European Studies, and of the International Relations Subject Group, my
joint homes when I taught at the University of Sussex. The intimate
relationship between European history and our conceptions of international
order was underlined by Wight in his Power politics. As he writes there, the
system of international politics that emerged in Europe at the beginning of
modern times, by spreading over other continents, ‘still provides the political
framework of the world.’ Behind this system of states, in Wight’s view, lay
‘a common culture’ which formed the basis for the expansion and
consolidation of something called ‘international society’. Although this
concept was later analysed more exhaustively by others, Wight himself made
use of it on several occasions. Referring in particular to the crisis of the mid-
twentieth century, he stated in Power politics that ‘the unity of international
society is thrown into sharpest relief when it is riven by an international civil
war.’1 He seems thereby to imply, fi rstly, that international society was
essentially still European— the ideological civil war he was referring to,
after all, had originated there—and secondly, that the ‘gangsters’ who had
seized control of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany had not through their acts
removed their countries from its confi nes. In his 1940 application to his
local tribunal for conscientious objectors this view became even clearer. He
described the war as ‘the convulsion of a civilization that has forsaken its
Christian origins—a divine judgement upon European civilization for the
corporate Sin [in which all share without distinction of religion or nation]
which is the cause of the war.’2
In this article I seek to explore further this theme of the emergence of an
international system based around an idea of ‘European civilization’, and to
outline in particular how the great convulsion of the mid-twentieth century
crisis, which so marked Wight’s own thought and life, brought to an end one
way of thinking about the international system, and opened the door to
another. I wish to suggest that to understand more fully the story of the
global expansion of a European state-system we need to stand outside as

1
2
well as inside the values of its originators. The notion of civilization itself
was an intellectual construction riven with ambiguities. It was a claim to
power as well as a justifi cation for violence. It was a hypothetical basis for
global order in a world of hierarchy. And it was a fi tting irony of history that
while Europe may have bestowed the conceptual architecture of an
international order upon the world, it only managed this by tearing itself
apart in the process. What followed after 1945 may have had the formal
attributes of the old European state-system; but many of the cultural
assumptions that had underpinned it had vanished in the fog of war, leaving
Wight—and I think us too—in a very diff erent and fragmented world.
I
On 7 March 1934, an unusual event took place at Madison Square Garden in
New York. Twenty thousand people attended a meeting there to hear
speeches marking the Nazis’ fi rst year in power and denouncing the regime.
The rally was organized as a mock trial and was advertised in the press as the
‘Case of civilization against Hitler’, with indictment, witnesses and,
eventually, a judgement delivered by a Minister of the Community Church
of New York City. ‘Hitlerism denounced as a crime against civilization,’ ran
the headline in the New York Times the following day. Organized principally
by the American Jewish Congress, the meeting anticipated Nuremberg in its
consciousness of the power of what the scholar Louis Anthes calls ‘publicly
deliberative drama’. It looked forward too to the Cold War in its evocation of
a joint Judeo-Christian civilization ranged against the threat of
totalitarianism. But in its emphasis on that common ‘civilization’ it looked
backwards, to the concept that lay at the heart of the claim to world
leadership that Europeans had been advancing since at least the early
nineteenth century.3
It was really after the defeat of Napoleon that the concept of a European
civilization became fundamental to new understandings of international
order and new techniques of international rule. In France, Guizot abandoned
the Enlightenment project of fi tting Europe into a scheme of universal
history for the [Herderian] task of tracing the continent’s own cultural roots.
As he put it in his History of civilization in Europe: ‘civilization is a sort of
ocean, constituting the wealth of a people, and on whose bosom all the
elements of the life of that people, all the powers supporting its existence,
assemble and unite’. It was just possible, thought Guizot, to locate among the
various civilizations of the world a specifi cally European variant: ‘It is
evident,’ he wrote, ‘that there is a European civilization; that a certain unity
pervades the civilization of the various European states...’ 4 In Britain, John
3
4
Stuart Mill suggested by contrast that there was but a single model of
civilization; but this too—in his 1836 essay on ‘Civilization’—he located in
Europe since ‘all [the elements of civilization] exist in modern Europe, and
especially in Great Britain, in a more eminent degree… than at any other
place or time.’5 Whether one believed like Mill that civilization was singular
and hierarchical, or plural and historically relative—and as time went on
Mill would win out over Guizot—what came to be seen as self-evident was
civilization’s location in Europe.6
One fertile intellectual elaboration of this belief was—as we have learned
from the work of Martti Koskenniemi and Antony Anghie—the new
discipline of (mostly positivist) international law. As a generalization and
adaptation of the values of the Concert of Europe, international law was
designed as an aid to the preservation of order among sovereign states, and
its principles were explicitly stated as applying only to civilized states—
much as Mill saw his principles of liberty as applying solely to members of
‘a civilized community’. In 1845 the infl uential American international
lawyer Henry Wheaton had actually talked in terms of the ‘international law
of Christianity’ versus ‘the law used by Mohammedan Powers’; but within
twenty or thirty years, such pluralism had all but vanished. According to the
late nineteenth century legal commentator, W. E. Hall, international law ‘is a
product of the special civilization of modern Europe and forms a highly artifi
cial system of which the principles cannot be supposed to be understood or
recognized by countries diff erently civilized… Such states only can be
presumed to be subject to it as are inheritors of that civilization.’ 7
Thus conceived, international law faced the issue of the relationship between
a civilized Christendom and the non-civilized world. States could join the
magic circle through the doctrine of international recognition, which took
place when ‘a state is brought by increasing civilization within the realm of
law.’8 In the 1880s James Lorimer suggested there were three categories of
humanity—civilized, barbaric and savage, and thus three corresponding
grades of recognition (plenary political; partial political; natural, or mere
human). Most Victorian commentators believed that barbaric states might be
admitted gradually or in part. Westlake proposed, for instance, that: ‘Our
international society exercises the right of admitting outside states to parts of
its international law without necessarily admitting them to the whole of it.’

5
6
7
8
Others disagreed: entry ‘into the circle of law-governed countries’ was a
formal matter, and ‘full recognition’ all but impossible. 9
The case of the Ottoman empire exemplifi ed this ambivalent process. Of
course European states had been making treaties with the sultans since the
sixteenth century. But following the Crimean War the empire was declared
as lying within the ‘Public law of Europe’—a move which some
commentators then and now saw as the moment when international law
ceased to apply only to Christian states but which is perhaps better viewed as
a warning to Russia to uphold the principles of collective consultation
henceforth rather than trying to dictate unilaterally to the Turks.
In fact, despite its internal administrative reforms, the empire was never
regarded in Europe as being fully civilized, the capitulations remained in
force, and throughout the nineteenth century the chief justifi cation of the
other Powers for supporting fi rst autonomy and then independence for new
Christian Balkan states was that removing them from Ottoman rule was the
best means of civilizing them. We can see this clearly in contemporary
attitudes towards the military occupation of Ottoman territory by European
armies. After the Franco-Prussian War, international lawyers had devised the
notion of belligerent occupation—a state of aff airs in which a military
occupant interfered as little as was compatible with military necessity in the
internal aff airs of the occupied country so as not to prejudice the rights of
the former ruler of that territory who was regarded as remaining sovereign
until a peace settlement might conclude otherwise. Belligerent occupation
was, in other words, a compact between so-called civilized states not to
unilaterally challenge each other’s legitimate right to rule. In the case of
Ottoman territory, the Powers felt no such inhibitions: the Russians in
Bulgaria in 1877, the Habsburgs in Bosnia the following year, and the
British in Egypt in 1882 all demonstrated through their extensive
rearrangement of provincial administrations, that although they would allow
the Ottoman sultan to retain a fi g-leaf of formal sovereignty, in fact the
theory of belligerent occupation did not apply in his lands. Thirty years later,
the Austrians [in 1908] and the British [in 1914] went further: on both
occasions they unilaterally declared Ottoman sovereignty over the territories
they were occupying at an end, suggesting that whatever had or had not been
agreed at Paris in 1856, by the early twentieth century, the Ottoman empire
was regarded once again as lying outside the circle of civilization. [The fact
that it was a Muslim power was certainly not irrelevant to this. In 1915,
when the French and Russians prepared a diplomatic protest at the mass
murder of Ottoman Armenians, their initial draft condemned the massacres
as ‘crimes against Christendom’. Only when the British mentioned that they

9
were worried over the possible impact of such a formulation on Indian
Muslim opinion was the wording changed to ‘crimes against humanity.’]
If the Ottoman empire was, as it were, semi-civilized, then sub-Saharan
Africa—site of the main European land-grab in the late nineteenth century—
was savage. European and American lawyers extended the notion of the
protectorate—originally employed for new European states such as Greece
—to the new colonial situation, ostensibly as a way of shielding vulnerable
non-European states from the depredations of other European Powers, but
more urgently, in order to avoid complications among the Powers which
might trigger off further confl ict. In the increasingly radicalized world-view
of late nineteenth century European imperialism, protectorates might be a
way of slowing down social transformation—in the interests of ‘native
customs’—as much as they were of introducing it. ‘Much interest attaches to
legislation for protectorates, in which the touch of civilization is cautiously
applied to matters barbaric,‘ wrote a commentator in the Journal of the
Society of Comparative Legislation in 1899. Yet the concept of civilization
remained vital. The treaty that followed Berlin Colonial Conference of
1884–85, which marked the attempt to diplomatically manage the Scramble
for Africa, talked of the need ‘to initiate the indigenous populations into the
advantages of civilization.’10
In this way, Victorian international law divided the world according to its
standard of civilization. Inside Europe—and in other areas of the world
colonized by Europeans—there was the sphere of civilized life: this meant—
roughly—the protection of property; the rule of law on the basis—usually—
of codes or constitutions; eff ective administration of its territory by a state;
warfare conducted by a regular army; and freedom of conscience. The
fundamental task of international law in this zone was to resolve confl icts
between sovereign states in the absence of an overarching sovereign. Outside
this sphere, the task was to defi ne terms upon which sovereignty—full or
partial—might be bestowed. It was thus in the non-European world that the
enormity of the task required in acquiring sovereignty could best be grasped.
There, too, the potential costs—in terms of legalized violence—of failing to
attain the standard of civilization were most evident.
The laws of war, codifi ed by the Great Powers at length at the end of the
nineteenth century, were designed to minimize the severity of confl icts
between civilized states. But where no reciprocity of civilized behaviour
could be expected, European armies were taught they need not observe them
—or indeed in some versions—any rules at all. Britain’s General J.F.C.
Fuller noted that ‘in small wars against uncivilized nations, the form of
warfare to be adopted must tone with the shade of culture existing in the

10.
land, by which I mean that, against people possessing a low civilization, war
must be more brutal in type.’ The 1914 British Manual of Military Law, too,
emphasized that ‘rules of International Law apply only to warfare between
civilized nations… They do not apply in wars with uncivilized states and
tribes.’ After all, savages were impressed only by force; fanaticism could be
stopped only through an awesome demonstration of technological
superiority. ‘A shell smashing into a putative inaccessible village stronghold
is an indication of the relentless energy and superior skill of the well-
equipped civilized foe. Instead of merely rousing his wrath, these acts are
much more likely to make [the fanatical savage] raise his hands in
surrender.’ These were the words of Colonel Elbridge Colby, an interwar US
advocate of air power in colonial insurgencies (and father of William Colby,
future director of the CIA and architect of the Advanced Pacifi cation
Campaign in Vietnam).11
Until well after the First World War, it was axiomatic that ‘international law
is a product of the special civilization of modern Europe itself.’ The United
States was, by the century’s end, regarded from this point of view as a
European power, if not of the fi rst rank. But Washington—which had stood
on the sidelines during the carve-up of Africa, had achieved a special
relationship to international law following the war with Spain. Through the
Roosevelt Corollary, it toughened up its reading of the Monroe Doctrine,
while at the same time encouraging the panAmerican codifi cation of
international law as a way of enshrining its own regional hegemony. Siam
was admitted to the Hague conferences as a mark of respect; but in China,
where the Boxer Rebellion was put down with enormous violence—on the
grounds that it was ‘an outrage against the comity of nations’—the unequal
treaties remained in force. It was only the Japanese who seriously challenged
the nineteenth century identifi cation of civilization with Christendom.
Having adhered to several international conventions, and revised their civil
and criminal codes, they managed to negotiate the repeal of the unequal
treaties from 1894 onwards, as well as to win back control over their tariff s,
and their victory over Russia in 1905 simply confi rmed their status as a
major Power. Not surprisingly, the Young Turks—desperate to repeal the
humiliating capitulations—could not hear enough of the Japanese success. 12
The Japanese achievement confi rmed that the standard of civilization being
off ered by the Powers was capable of being met by non-Christian, non-
European states. But the Japanese achievement was also unique. After the
ending of the Russo-Japanese war, the Second Hague Conference of 1907
talked of ‘the interests of humanity, and the ever progressive needs of

11
civilization.’ But could civilization (with a capital C) really ever be
universalized, and how far could it be extended?
Many had their doubts. German and Italian jurists essentially ruled out any
nonEuropean power receiving full recognition; the prominent Russian jurist
de Martens was equally emphatic. As for the empire-builders, in Africa, in
particular, as well as in the Pacifi c, many liberals and Gladstonians came to
terms with imperialism at century’s end—as Saul Dubow has recently
reminded us—because they thought in terms of a kind of an imperial
cosmopolitanism or commonwealth, in which individual peoples might
preserve their own distinctive cultures. Where necessary, of course, civilized
powers had to rule others to ensure this.13
The idea of trusteeship, which was—with a slightly diff erent coloration—to
become the lynchpin of the League of Nations system of colonial rule,
expressed a similar caution about the exportability of (European)
civilization. Unilaterally abrogating Ottoman sovereignty in Egypt in
December 1914, the Britis proclaimed that they regarded themselves as
‘trustees for the inhabitants’ of the country. Their unilateralism was only one
sign of the death of the old Concert and its values. Blazing a trail that others
would follow in the wars of the coming century, they tore up one of the
fundamental axioms of the late-nineteenth century European order—that the
basic legitimacy of the sovereign ruler would always be respected—and
replaced it with a new understanding in which sovereignty inhered, not in the
head of state, but in the people or nation. What Nehal Bhuta has recently—in
the case of Iraq—called the doctrine of ‘transformative occupation’ thus
makes its appearance.12
II
The League of Nations, established at Versailles after the First World War,
transformed the idea of international civilization. A permanent international
organization whose members included Abyssinia, Siam, Iran and Turkey was
already something with a very diff erent global reach to the old European
conference. That this was so was chiefl y thanks to the Americans, not the
British whose schemes for an improved version of the old Concert of Europe
were shot down by the heavier fi repower of messianic Wilsonian liberalism;
at the end of the war, Whitehall’s idea for an international organization run
by a small group of select powers lost out to Wilson’s vision of ‘a general
association of nations.’
Sovereignty was henceforth explicitly shaped by the doctrine of national
self-determination in its most anti-autocratic and optimistic guise so that the
task for the civilized nations became that of guiding the less, or uncivilized,
into the way of national self-realization. ‘Imperialism’ was suddenly once
12
more a term of rebuke, and trusteeship and mandates became—in the minds
at least of some idealistic or self-deluded British civil servants—something
entirely different from prewar empire-building. Ponder, for instance, the
revealing conversation that took place between Balfour and Lord Robert
Cecil, in December 1918, on the subject of how to dispose of former German
colonies: Balfour: ‘The French and Italians… are not in the least out for self-
determination. They are out for getting whatever they can.’ Cecil: ‘They are
imperialists.’ Balfour: ‘Exactly’. A few months later, Whitehall lost patience
with the Italians because the latter were still pressing all kinds of secret deals
over the question of Angola, and would not recognize that—in the words of
a Colonial Offi ce offi cial—‘imperialism was dead.’ 13
Yet Woodrow Wilson’s general association—the new Society of Nations in
Geneva—still depended on the same civilizational hierarchies that had
underpinned so much pre-1914 liberal thought. The postwar peace settlement
made this crystal clear. Curzon was simply being more honest than his
colleagues when he remarked that the British were supporting the doctrine of
self-determination because they believed they would benefi t more from it
than anyone else. The contrasting treatment of eastern Europe and the
formerly Ottoman Middle East bore this out.
In eastern Europe, a territorial settlement was crafted through the offi ces of
the New States Committee. Guided by its advice, the victors at Versailles
bestowed sovereignty upon new European nations [unlike in the Middle
East, this appeared to suit their strategic concerns], but insisted upon
instituting League oversight of their protection of the rights of their national
minorities. Should the new minorities rights regime be imposed on
established defeated states such as Germany? That was not deemed
necessary, still less to universalize it to apply to Britain, France or the United
States. Minority rights were, in other words, a badge of the new states’
secondary status, manifesting their need for tutelage in the exercise of their
own sovereignty.
This was bad enough for East European politicians, but it was considerably
less humiliating than the fate assigned to those outside Europe. In Egypt,
which was not of course a mandate, the British imprisoned the leading
Egyptian nationalists and made it clear that Wilson’s new dawn did not
apply to them. Not surprisingly, what one historian calls ‘the Wilsonian
moment’ was greeted with demonstrations and protests from north Africa to
China. Even Japanese diplomats felt rebuff ed, when their proposed racial
equality clause was summarily dismissed by the British and the Americans. 14

13
14
The other former Ottoman lands were brought under the control of the
League whose tripartite system of mandates classifi ed non-European
societies on the basis of their likely proximity to ‘existence as independent
nations’. The Arab provinces of the Middle East became Class A mandates
—to the fury of their inhabitants, while former German colonial possessions
in central Africa and elsewhere were placed in Classes B and C, to be
administered as ‘a sacred trust for civilization’ until such time as, in the
long-distance future, they might be fi t to govern themselves. Smuts, a
powerful infl uence on the mandate system as a whole, and keen to see the
Dominions allowed to acquire colonial possessions themselves, thought the
time could safely be indefi nitely postponed: Classes B and C colonies were
‘inhabited by barbarians, who not only cannot possibly govern themselves
but to whom it would be impracticable to apply any ideas of political self-
determination in the European sense.’15
General Smuts’ view did not win the day, however— it was too
uncompromising to fi t the aspirations of League supporters—and the
architects of the League congratulated themselves on a new model of
international organization whose disinterested universalism, while taking
account of diff erences in governing capability between peoples,
nevertheless marked a step forward from the selfcentred imperialism of the
previous century. Yet if the League represented—in their minds—the
nucleus of a new world community, that was not how it appeared to some of
those who stood outside it. For the leaders of the new Soviet Union, for
instance, the League was obviously a continuation of older imperial trends,
not a repudiation of them. Proof, if any were needed, was the League’s own
marked hostility to the USSR itself. The League’s anti-Bolshevism was a
reality of course, and it is not surprising that in the 1920s, the Bolshevik
leadership denounced it as an expression of the struggle among capitalist
states and one of the forms in which imperialism was carried on.
The Soviet response is important because it underscored the rift that had
opened up as a result of profound ideological diff erences between the
former members of the old Concert of Europe. To the League’s liberal
utopianism, Russia’s Bolsheviks counter-posed their own rival universal
vision of a proletarian brotherhood, in which empires would be overthrown
through popular revolution, and national states inside and outside Europe
would forget their diff erences in defence of the common class struggle. In
fact, this rift was not as unbridgeable as seemed in the 1920s since within a
decade it was clear that both the League and the USSR stood for preservation
of the post-1918 status quo inside Europe. As a result of Hitler’s rise to
power, Stalin brought the USSR into the League and by 1935 Molotov was

15
defending it as a bastion against ‘belligerent, aggressive elements’, a vital
element in the struggle to save the Soviet Union from another war.
Far more than Soviet communism, it was the rise of National Socialism in
Germany which overshadowed the League and undermined its civilizational
claims. Between these two it seemed that there could be no compromise:
either the League or Hitler would prevail, and this struggle extended beyond
the territorial issue to the very conception of international law. The Nazis
challenged the idea of universality, casting doubt on the claim that ‘the
international society or family of nations is as broad as civilization.’ They,
too, saw themselves as defenders of civilization, but their conception of
civilization was sharply bounded by territory, history and blood. In the
thought of Carl Schmitt and the geo-politicians, the boundaries were
regional: the Third Reich should follow where the US—through the Monroe
Doctrine—had led, and establish its own hegemony over Europe. According
to Schmitt, the League had generated an undesirable expansion of
international legal norms—what he caustically called a Normeninfl ation; but
all of this was really a cloak for its sponsors’ territorial appetites and greed.
In reality all universal claims hid claims to power; ‘spatial international
law’—in other words regional hegemony—was simply a more honest
expression of existing power relations.16
The expression of this vision of global order established through regional
statessystems each under the leadership of a hegemon was to be found in
Germany’s 1940 Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan. This was perhaps the
high-point of international regionalism. ‘The governments of Germany, Italy
and Japan,’ opens the treaty, ‘considering it as a condition precedent of any
lasting peace that all nations of the world be given each its own proper place
have decided to … co-operate with one another … to establish and maintain
a new order of things.’ A similar logic underpinned Japanese thinking on the
establishment of a new East Asian order. There too, the League’s
universalistic pretensions seemed a threadbare cover for European
imperialism, and a challenge to the Japanese to provide leadership in an anti-
imperialist counterweight. In the words of Tokyo University political
scientist, Royama Masamichi: ‘as a world organization, the League of
Nations is only half true and the other half is no more than an institution for
protecting the Versailles system of western European countries like England
and France.’17
Even more important as the war went on for German policy than Schmitt’s
vision of regional hierarchies was the idea of international order through the
racialized purifi cation of conquered territory, or Lebensraum. Race was the

16
17
Nazis’ true universal: it underpinned everything, shaped international
relations, and explained why there could be no universal family of nations or
commonly applicable rules and norms. SS legal expert, Obergruppenfuehrer
Werner Best, Heydrich’s deputy in the RSHA, put it bluntly in 1939: ‘the
relations between states, hitherto called international law, cannot be called
“law”.’ Insofar as Europe represented a community, it was because it was ‘to
a certain extent composed of racially similar peoples with similar cultural
experiences.’ What that would mean for the Slavs and the Jews, among
others, would soon become clear enough.18
Of course the Nazis did observe some existing international legal norms,
especially where West European prisoners of war were concerned. On the
other hand, their indiff erence to law in the East was evident from the
invasion of Poland in September 1939 when, after a brief but intense
discussion, it was made clear to the Army High Command that they were not
to regard themselves as occupying Poland since this would have implied
Poland’s continued juridical existence. Germany would take no notice of
Poland’s government in exile. Rather, Poland was to disappear entirely from
the map under the impact of annexation and partition. Once that precedent
had been established, one legal norm after another could be fl outed, or
rather discarded for failing to match up to the racial needs of the conqueror
by a regime whose ruler had a low opinion of international law and lawyers
in general.19
From one point of view, the Nazis were tearing down the whole edifi ce of
nineteenth century international law. But from another, they were only
behaving diff erently from other European imperialists by ignoring the
assumption that there was a civilizational fault-line which divided European
peoples from those beyond. In the British-dominated Raj, for instance, a civil
servant had dismissed the protests of an Indian princely state in 1873 on the
grounds that ‘the maxims of international law’ only regulated ‘the relations
of independent and co-equal European States’. In eff ect, Central Europe was
now Germany’s India. By proclaiming the Protectorate (of Bohemia-
Moravia) in March 1939, they implied that the colonial model of relations
between civilizationally advanced and backward peoples which had been
developed by the British and French, might now shape relations among
nations on the continent of Europe itself. Wiping out the independent states
of Czechoslovakia and Poland, the Nazis were also throwing into reverse the
progressivist assumption that sovereignty once gained could not, as an aspect
of civilized life, be abolished or whittled down. 20

18
19
20
Contemporaries were struck by the Near Eastern and African parallels.
Several cited the example of the French protectorate treaty with Tunis; there
was also, of course, the example of Britain in Egypt. A certain racism was
evident almost as much in the note of anti- Nazi outrage as in Nazi policy.
‘No nation belonging to the white race has ever before had such conditions
forced upon it,’ wrote Eugene Erdely. ‘It constituted the fi rst German
colonial statute in modern history for a white and civilized nation.’ 21

III
For some years before this, the expansion of the League and the ideological
fragmentation of the European state system had made it less and less
straightforward to use the old Eurocentric language of ‘international
civilization’. In 1929 Sir John Fischer Williams confessed that ‘the concept
of “civilized society” as a community of nations or States distinct from the
rest of the world no longer corresponds with the main facts of contemporary
life.’ According to a French jurist in 1930: ‘The family of nations is the
totality of states [civilized and uncivilized] and other subjects of
international public law.’ Writing in The Listener, Prof. H.A. Smith of
London University drew attention to some of the consequences: ‘In practice,
we no longer insist that States shall conform to any common standards of
justice, religious toleration and internal government. Whatever atrocities
may be committed in foreign countries, we now say that they are no concern
of ours… This means in eff ect that we have now abandoned the old
distinction between civilized and uncivilized States.’ 22
The old Gladstonian certainty that had once underpinned that distinction was
gone. For the interwar crisis of parliamentary democracy in Europe was also
making liberals conscious how far their own values required extensive
revaluation—replacing the old bourgeois stress on protection under the law
with a new recognition of the lower classes’ social and economic needs—if
they were to compete in the modern world against the temptations of Left
and Right. To be civilized, in the old liberal sense, was thus not necessarily
to be modern; on the contrary, to embrace modernity might require
abandoning some of the older assumptions of ‘civilized society.’ It was at
just this time that Arnold Toynbee issued his prophetic warning against ‘the
misconception of the unity of culture’. His book, A study of history (Oxford
University Press, 1934), which made such an impression on the young
Martin Wight, off ered a typology of ‘civilizations’, as if to set the decay of
the European version in its historical context. As Wight noted, in his

21
22
obituary of his friend and mentor, Toynbee was ‘the historian who was to
teach the English-speaking world that there are other civilizations beside the
Western’.23
One way of countering the Nazi claim that the League’s universalism was all
a cover for the old imperialism was to take universalism more seriously.
Indeed for many in the late 1930s, the League experience, failure though it
was, suggested a community of nations slowly coming into being that was
actually—or potentially—global. But what was this new kind of world
community, and could it serve as the basis for a reconstruction of
international order? Did it have anything more than a merely rhetorical
existence? In 1938, the Spanish philosopher Salvador de Madariaga boldly
asserted that ‘there exists a world community’, only to admit almost
immediately that ‘we moderns have not only immediately guessed or felt the
world community, but begun actually to assert, create and manifest it, though
we do not know yet what the world community is, what are its laws, what are
its principles, nor how it is going to be built in our minds.’ 24
The implications for international law were particularly acute since the very
foundations of the old system had been thrown into question. ‘European
civilization has shaped modern International Law,’ noted a London
University professor in 1938. ‘But is European civilization still what it was,
and if not, how do the changes aff ect international law?’ 25 Many
commentators believed that events had shown up the fragility of the entire
discipline. ‘International law is seriously discredited and on the defensive,’
commented another. Cordell Hull, the US Secretary of State, warned, in an
address of June 1938, of a ‘world growing internationally more and more
disordered and chaotic’. One of his assistants, Francis Sayre, followed a few
days later: ‘The supreme question which we and all the world face today is
whether or not we are to live henceforth in a world of law or a world of
international anarchy.’28
As we know, a new permanent international organization was eventually
established by the United Nations in their struggle against Hitler as their
response to this predicament. The United Nations Organization was heralded
as a vast improvement on its unfortunate predecessor, but if this was really
true it was not for the reasons commonly advanced at the time. In
internationalizing still further the old society of nations, the UN quickly
banished what was left of the old imperial vocabulary of international
civilization. As early as December 1944, feeling the cold wind from
Washington, Attlee had recommended replacing the concept of ‘trusteeship’

23
24
25
with ‘partnership’ as ‘a term which is felt to interpret more correctly the
outlook of the colonial peoples themselves towards the present phase of their
political evolution within the British Commonwealth of Nations.’ As
decolonization swelled the number of its members, the UN General
Assembly passed a resolution declaring that independence should not be
delayed in former colonies because of a purported lack of ‘civilization’; the
International Law Commission also agreed to ‘refrain from using the
expression “civilized countries”.’26
At the same time as it emphasized its modernity by focusing upon
socioeconomic development, welfare and population issues, the UN as an
institution moved away from the grand supranational aspirations that the
‘men of 1919’ [in Martti Koskenniemi’s term for the reforming jurists of the
interwar era] had once had for international law. Veto-wielding Great
Powers enjoyed an infl uence that they had lacked at Geneva—the price for
both Soviet and US participation. Despite the noble talk of human rights, and
real advances in refugee law, in many other areas—the law of war, minority
rights—law was diminished rather than expanded. At least that was how it
struck many of those most closely involved. As one commentator noted
during the Cold War: ‘the division on fundamentals encourages trends away
from universal law.’ Civilian populations were expelled on a large scale;
wars were increasingly waged without being declared. In fact, the world of
the UN turned out to be as Hobbesian as that which had preceded it. Wight
had understood this from the start. As he noted so presciently in Power
politics, the growth of an international system did not necessitate the growth
of internationalism; far more important a force in world aff airs remained the
states’ pursuit of their individual interests. The Great Powers had returned. 27
Making the distinction in 1938 between legal conceptions of society and
community, the jurist George Schwarzenberger suggested that ‘whereas the
members of a community are united in spite of their individual existence, the
members of a society are isolated in spite of their association.’ That suggests
that we need to be careful when we encounter—as we do increasingly in the
postwar era—the use of the terminology of ‘community’, not to mistake the
wish for the deed. When in 1899 the Convention for the Peaceful Adjustment
of International Diff erences spoke of ‘the solidarity which unites the
members of the society of civilized nations/ desirous of extending the empire
of law’, the interests that bound that ‘society’ together were specifi c and
delimited: the interest in minimizing and regulating inter-state confl ict. By
the mid-twentieth century, such specifi city had been lost, both of goals and
of actors. Specifi city and coherence had been too closely linked to empire

26
27
and a very temporary phase of European hegemony to survive Europe’s own
blood-letting. The ‘international community’ which all invoked after the war
was a rhetorical device, an empty box which successive generations fi lled
with new content—from human rights in the 1940s, civil society in the
1990s. Between these two points, generations of political scientists laboured
to fi nd the common bonds which might knit its members together now that
the concept of a single civilization had been banished. In the 1950s there was
the UNESCO experts’ statement on racism, in the early 1960s the work of
the Committee for the Study of Mankind; in the 1970s the search for
positivist global values (of human dignity). But none of these, in my opinion,
amounted to very much: they told one more about the latest fashion among
Anglophone social scientists than they did about the world.
It was perhaps an irony of history that just as the old imperial Euro-centrism
was being jettisoned, so in Europe itself, chastened by the experience of
occupation and ideological civil war, something close to what we might call
a common legal civilization was emerging at exactly this time, a product of
the moves towards political and economic integration, alongside the creation
of a binding human rights regime. Paradoxically, the common experience of
Nazi occupation—which had discredited nineteenth century civilizational
monism—led European states to reaffi rm the value of law as a check on the
unfettered executive power over the individual subject and citizen. As Brian
Simpson has so fully analysed, the 1950 European Convention on Human
Rights emerged out of the crisis of the war and the postwar struggle for
decolonization as the expression of an unprecedented voluntary surrender of
sovereignty by member states of the Council of Europe. One should not
exaggerate the impact of this, and related, developments, not least since the
Cold War intensifi ed countervailing forces of state repression and
restrictions on individual freedoms. Nevertheless, by the end of the century,
the emergence of a number of new common institutions meant that Europe
was on the way to establishing its own rule-bound international community
in an entirely new sense. The durability of this achievement has come into
question in an era of new challenges to the power of law. But its meaning
will not be fully understood unless we are willing to trace the relationship
between this new European order and that older society of nations which
formed the object of Wight’s lifelong concern.28

28