Review of International Studies (1999), 25, 411–434 Copyright © British International Studies Association

IR and the state of nature: the cultural origins

of a ruling ideology
B E AT E JA H N *

Abstract. This article argues that the modern concept of the state of nature as the defining
claim of IR theory was developed in the course of the intercultural/international encounter
between the Spaniards and the Amerindian peoples after the discovery of America. The
analysis of the Spanish debate at the time demonstrates that the concept of the state of nature
was itself the product of a highly charged moral discourse. Its continuous and unreflected use
in the discipline of International Relations, where it supposedly describes a precultural,
presocial, premoral condition between states, therefore hides the cultural, social and moral
meanings the concept carries with it and suppresses a normative discourse of International
Relations past and present.

States exist in a state of nature. This is the defining claim of IR theory, its very
raison d´ètre, for it implies that the relationship between states is presocial and
precultural, that society has not spread into the realm of interstate relations (yet).1
This claim is the basis for the distinction between inside and outside, between
national politics as ‘the realm of authority, of administration, and of law’ and inter-
national politics as ‘the realm of power, of struggle, and of accomodation’.2 The
assumption of a state of nature in its blank universality is experienced and cited as
the fundamental obstacle to either a sociological or a cultural or a normative
analysis of the relations between states. While political theory deals with the
‘authentic politics within’, IR deals with mere ‘relations between states’.3 So central
is this assumption of the existence of a state of nature between states that it is
shared by the two most influential schools of thought in IR, Liberalism and
Realism, who differ only with respect to the question of whether this state of nature
should be reformed and overcome or lived with.

* I would like to thank the referees of the Review of International Studies for their comments on this
article. Among other places, I have presented the argument at a colloquium of the University of Bremen.
My thanks to the members of this colloquium who have responded not only with a wonderfully lively
discussion but also with the most intelligent and encompassing critique and recognition for this
project. Last but not least, I am grateful to Justin Rosenberg for countless discussions on the subject.
1
Martin Wight, for example, holds that ‘at the heart of international theory itself’ we find ‘the
identification of international politics with the precontractual state of nature’ and the distinguishing
feature of this state of nature is taken to be the absence of government or that situation in which
‘men live without a common power to keep them all in awe’ as Wight relates quoting Hobbes (Martin
Wight, ‘Why is There no International Theory?’, in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds.),
Diplomatic Investigations (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966), pp. 30f). And it is this difference between
domestic and international politics which justifies International Relations as a discipline separate and
distinct from political theory.
2
Kenneth Waltz, ‘Anarchic Orders and Balances of Power’, in Robert O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism
and its Critics, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 111.
3
Rob Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), p. 20.

411
412 Beate Jahn

In this article I will demonstrate that both the cultural anonymity of the idea of
the state of nature and the idea that it describes a domain of human life untamed by
society are deceptive.4 For the idea of the state of nature as a concrete historical
condition of mankind was developed in the course of the intercultural encounter
between the Spaniards and the Amerindian peoples after the discovery of America.
In this modern sense, it should therefore be understood not as a condition which
existed before the emergence of those social and cultural bonds which are the basis
of moral discourse: rather it is itself the product of a particular historical event and,
hence, already highly charged with cultural, sociological, and ethical meanings
waiting to be deciphered. The analysis in the first part of the article will show that
the discovery of the Amerindian peoples was experienced as a major challenge to
the culturally specific world view of the Spaniards; and it describes the steps the
latter took to integrate this new phenomenon into their understanding of the world.
The postulate of a state of nature which the Amerindians supposedly represented
eventually seemed to solve the problem.5 The second part of this article will show
how this idea of a state of nature became the corner stone of the most pervasive and
culturally distinctive ideology of the modern world; for it subsequently underpinned
a universalist redefinition of political community in classical European political
theory which simultaneously naturalized the culturally peculiar path of Western
development based on private property and state-formation. Furthermore, the
distinction between inside and outside, between political theory and international
relations was also introduced as a result of this new concept of an authentic political
community, based on the state of nature and in accordance with natural law.6
Our understanding of political thought as an endogenous European development
which has not (yet) reached the international sphere has in fact become so pervasive
that even those authors who deplore this, who succeed in tracing its origins to early
modern Europe, and who call for the replacement of the term ‘international
relations’ by ‘world politics’—representing the possibility of meaningful social
action between political communities—so far have not searched for its origins
outside Europe.7 In this article I will argue that it was actually a ‘world politics’
event, the international/intercultural encounter between the Spaniards and the

4
The state of nature, as I will show in the following pages, is presented by classical political theorists
and contemporary IR theorists alike as culturally anonymous in two ways. On the one hand, it
supposedly describes or hypothesizes an original historical condition of mankind which was
precultural, i.e. in which human beings lived according to the laws of nature without yet having
developed culture(s) in the form of government, law, institutions etc. On the other hand, this state of
nature is presented as a universal starting point for all of humanity. Hence, the concept itself claims
to be culturally anonymous in the sense that it is precultural as well as in the sense that it applies
universally.
5
The concept of the state of nature itself was, of course, not a creation of the 16th century Spanish
authors but had in fact been a crucial element of European political thought throughout the Middle
Ages. Hence, it represents an important element of cultural continuity in European political thought
and could, indeed, only for this reason function as the basis for a Spanish consensus. I am not,
therefore, arguing that the Spaniards have invented this concept but rather that they have
reinterpreted it as a result of the necessary integration of the Amerindians into a European
Weltanschauung. In the course of this process, which stretched over half a century, the state of nature
was for the first time interpreted as a concrete historical condition characterizing actually existing
communities.
6
See the beginning of part 2 of this article for a discussion of the different conceptions of a state of
nature among classical European authors and the relevance (or irrelevance) of these differences for
the argument I am developing.
7
Walker, Inside/Outside, pp. 16, 20.
 IR and the state of nature: the cultural origins of a ruling ideology 413

Amerindians, which shaped the subsequent development of what we now know as

European political thought. The ideas which were imported from this international
conflict, and which developed into a theory of legitimate political community within
the state and the state of nature between states, were subsequently exported again
into the international sphere. There, ever since their original development they have
been used to rank all non-European societies according to their cultural achieve-
ments, and have established a realm in which—in contrast to the realm of the state—
‘might is right’. By returning to the real political struggle at the beginning of this
development and by providing a cultural analysis of these supposedly universal,
precultural forms, we can open up the possibility of a normative discourse of IR
which its representation of a state of nature has suppressed.

‘Discovering’ the state of nature

The existence of the Amerindians—which had never been mentioned in the authori-
tative texts of the Spaniards—implicitly was a challenge to the Spanish cultural
framework. It forced the Spaniards to grapple with an ontological rather than just a
political or legal question: What was the nature of these Amerindians; were they
human beings at all? 8
In a first attempt to establish the nature of the Amerindians the Spaniards tried
to apply Aristotle´s concept of natural slavery according to which peoples without
reason could not have dominium—that is power/property de facto and de jure—over
their own bodies, their fellow beings, or the material world.9 For Aristotle, people
with a body like other humans but without reason lacked the capability to live a
genuine human life—that is a life within the polis—and, therefore, were designed by
nature to be slaves who, under the guidance of real men, would be delivered from
their brute form of life and given the only chance to live as humane a life as was
possible for them.10 According to the Spanish belief, reason was the capability to
understand the laws of nature and to apply this knowledge in the way men dealt
with nature and with one another. Hence, the Spaniards tested whether the
Amerindians followed their ‘natural’ obligation to realize the ‘natural’ hierarchy
from inorganic matter through plants and animals to human beings on the highest
8
Bartolomé de Las Casas, History of the Indies (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 8, 68; Anthony
Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man. The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 32, 37; Anthony Pagden, European Encounters
With the New World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 52; Francisco de Vitoria, Political
Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 250ff; Lewis Hanke, All Mankind is
One. A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550
on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 1974), pp. 40, 125; Olive P. Dickason, ‘Old World Law, New World Peoples, and
Concepts of Sovereignty’, in Stanley H. Palmer and Dennis Reinhartz (eds.), Essays on the History of
North American Discovery and Exploration (Arlington: Texas A&M University Press, 1988), pp. 54ff;
Peter Mason, Deconstructing America—Representation of the Other (London: Routledge, 1990), pp.
130ff; Jean Pierre Sánchez, ‘Myths and Legends in the Old World and European Expansionism on
the American Continent’, in Wolfgang Haase and Reinhold Meyer (eds.), The Classical Tradition and
the Americas I: European Images of the Americas and the Classical Tradition (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1994), pp. 216f.
9
Vitoria, Political Writings, p. 239.
10
Hanke, All Mankind is One, p. 10.
414 Beate Jahn

level, i.e. to control the external as well as their internal nature; in other words, to
turn nature into culture. This test was applied to a whole range of Amerindian
societal institutions—food, sexuality, family, agriculture, manufacture, fine arts,
politics—and reveals that the Spanish problem was to come to terms with cultural
differences.
However, despite the fact that all discussants agreed on the validity of the test,
the standards of measurement to be applied, and even the ‘empirical facts’, this
‘objective’ approach failed because the Spaniards themselves interpreted the ‘facts’ in
contradictory ways. While, for instance, Sepúlveda and Vitoria interpreted human
sacrifice and cannibalism as ignorance about the fact that human beings could only
be ‘food’ for a higher species, namely God, Las Casas argued that these practices
just proved the potential reason of the Amerindians for they had obviously under-
stood that the greatest sacrifice one could give to God was human life. Not only did
the Bible and other ancient texts mention human sacrifice quite frequently, but
Christians, after all, celebrated the human sacrifice of Jesus every Sunday in mass
where they incidentally also—metaphorically—ate his flesh and drank his blood.11
And while Sepúlveda held that ‘rationally planned cities’, ‘non-hereditary kings who
are elected by popular suffrage’ and ‘commerce’ do not prove anything else but that
they are ‘neither bears nor monkeys’, Las Casas thought that the mechanical and
architectural capabilities of the Amerindians and their well ordered community life
proved that they were ‘endowed by nature with the three kinds of prudence . . .
which, according to Aristotle, make any republic self-sufficient and prosperous’.12
Whether it concerned the authority of men over women and children, the eating of
raw or cooked food, the sexual practices, the development of tools and crafts,
agriculture, scripture, fine arts, or politics, the observer, as two Spanish travellers put
it, found it ‘no easy task to exhibit a true picture of the customs and inclinations of
the Indians . . . for should he form his judgement from their first actions, he must
necessarily conclude them to be a people of the greatest penetration and vivacity.
But when he reflects on their rudeness, the absurdity of their opinions, and their
beastly manner of living, his ideas must take a different turn, and represent them in
a degree little above brutes’.13 Thus, instead of establishing the nature of the
Amerindians the debate had opened up a very serious moral, political and
theoretical division in Spanish society.
At this point the external encounter turned into an internal challenge not only
because it divided Spanish society politically and morally but also because when the
Spaniards tried to apply Aristotle’s concept of natural slavery in practice they found
it contradicting another crucial principle in their cultural framework, namely the
idea of the Christian oikumene. The Christians—believing in a common origin of
mankind and God’s will for the perfection of man and the natural world—had to
extend their oikumene over the whole world; it was to include all peoples in the
end.14 But if this was so, all peoples had to have sufficient reason to grasp the
11
Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Selection of His Writings (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), pp. 186ff;
Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, p. 88; Vitoria, Political Writings, p. 209; Hanke, All Mankind is
One, pp. 93f.
12
Juán Gines de Sepúlveda, ‘On the Indians’ in Englander, Norman, O’Day and Owens (eds.), Culture
and Belief in Europe 1450–1600. An Anthology of Sources (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 323; Las
Casas, Selection, p. 115.
13
Cf. Hanke, All Mankind is One, p. 139.
14
Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, pp. 16ff.
 IR and the state of nature: the cultural origins of a ruling ideology 415

Christian teachings—otherwise the obligation God had given to the Christians

would have been contradictory. Consequently, the debate about the nature of the
Indians was decided not according to the evidence found in their societies but
according to a theoretical dogma which lay at the heart of the Christian world view,
for as Vitoria stated, ‘'God and nature never fail in the things necessary' for the
majority of the species, and the chief attribute of man is reason’.15
However, this solution did not at all solve the problem of cultural difference but
rather posed it in new terms. For if God had given reason to all peoples how could it
be explained that its use led to such different kinds of development as in the
European and the Indian cases? If reason meant understanding and applying the—
by definition universal—laws of nature, it had surely to lead to universal norms,
institutions and material achievements. The Spaniards came up with two different
answers to this question both of which—as we shall see later—became foundational
for European thought in general and still represent the two dominant under-
standings of culture in IR theory today. Las Casas believed that:
The entire human race is one; all men are alike with respect to their creation and the things of
nature, and none is borne already taught. And so we all have the need, from the beginning, to
be guided and helped by those who have been borne earlier. Thus, when some very rustic
peoples are found in the world, they are like untilled land, which easily produces worthless
weeds and thorns, but has within itself so much natural power that when it is plowed and
cultivated it gives useful and wholesome fruits.16
For him, therefore, the Indians were men in the state of nature, with the potential of
reason but without cultivation, without history—they were born late. In this view
the Indian’s mind was a cultural vacuum which—because of its potential for
reason—would readily grasp and apply the teachings of the Spaniards.17 Vitoria, on
the other hand, did not see them without history—on the contrary:
Nor could it be their fault if they were so many thousands of years outside the state of
salvation, since they were born in sin but did not have the use of reason to prompt them to
seek baptism or the things necessary for salvation. Thus if they seem to us insensate and
slow-witted, I put it down mainly to their evil and barbarous education. Even amongst
ourselves we see many peasants (rustici) who are little different from brute animals.18
So, Vitoria, Sepúlveda and others saw their evil customs as a product of education,
of history, of thousands of years of socialization. Indeed, Vitoria expected that it
would take about six hundred years to undo this kind of education.19
For all their differences, these positions shared two crucial aspects: Firstly, both
construct a hierarchy between the Amerindians and the Spaniards. In the state-of-
nature approach this hierarchy rests on the assumption that the Spaniards do have
culture while the Amerindians don’t, while the false-culture approach, of course,
implies that the Spaniards have developed the right culture. Secondly, in both cases
the assimilation of the Amerindians to Spanish culture became the practical political
goal. They only differed with respect to the means necessary, for if the Amerindians
did not understand the true nature of the world, the exponents of the state-of-nature
15
Vitoria, Political Writings, p. 239; see also Las Casas, History, p. 5.
16
Las Casas, Selection, pp. 201f.
17
Las Casas, History, p. 278.
18
Vitoria, Political Writings, p. 250.
19
See Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, p. 100.
416 Beate Jahn

position held that it was ‘not because they lacked reason, but because they lacked
culture, not because they lacked the will to learn or a ready mind, but because they
had neither tutors nor teachers’.20 Hence, the Spaniards had to send tutors and
teachers. In contrast, those who believed that the minds of the Amerindians were
filled with false cultural values and customs held that ‘they will never abandon these
evils unless they are first punished and subjected by force and wars, and afterwards
preached to’.21
Having thus established a cultural hierarchy the Spaniards discussed the practical
terms under which they could intervene in the Amerindian societies, the striking
familiarity of which with contemporary debates on (humanitarian) intervention
rings in the ears of every IR scholar. Starting from the question whether the cultural
difference in itself would be sufficient grounds for intervention, Sepúlveda argued
that God and nature gave the Spaniards the right to establish their rule over peoples
who act against natural law—which did not only include human sacrifice but also
sodomy, prostitution, the non-systematic exploitation of natural resources like gold
etc.22 But in addition, Spanish rule could also be justified by the protection it
afforded to the innocent victims of Indian customs.23 Vitoria and Las Casas both
rejected the first argument, claiming that the Indian could not be punished ‘by the
Church, and much less by Christian rulers, for a crime or a superstition, no matter
how abominable . . . as long as he commits it . . . within the borders of the territory
of his own masters and his own unbelief’.24 For both held that the universal truth
and validity of natural law could not be proven.25 However, both Las Casas and
Vitoria agreed in principle with Sepúlveda’s second argument that there is an
obligation to protect the victims of practices contrary to the laws of nature. In
practice, however, they held differing views. Las Casas argued that as long as there is
consent between the people, their ministers and priests on the question of such
practices they act under an excusable ignorance for which only God can punish
them. Furthermore, one could not protect a few victims of human sacrifice by
making war against the whole people. This course of action would cost many more
lives than the Indian customs, and it would not convince the people of their error.26
Vitoria, for his part, posited that the obligation to love one’s neighbour overrides
other considerations even if natural laws cannot be proven. ‘It makes no difference
that all the barbarians consent to these kinds of rites and sacrifices, or that they
refuse to accept the Spaniards as their liberators in that matter’.27 Christian rulers
can lead a just war against the barbarians on the grounds that such practices
‘involve injustice (iniuria) to other men’.28
The public debate ended with a consensus based on Vitoria´s arguments. Since the
Indians were human beings they had to live according to the laws of nature, one of
which being that ‘amity (amiticia) between men is part of natural law, and that it is

20
Cf. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, p. 92.
21
Cf. Hanke, All Mankind is One, pp. 125, 136.
22
Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination. Studies in European and Spanish-
American Social and Political Theory 1513–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 29.
23
Hanke, All Mankind is One, p. 86.
24
Las Casas cf. Hanke, All Mankind is One, p. 89; see also Vitoria, Political Writings, p. 274.
25
Vitoria, Political Writings, pp. 275, 217f; Hanke, All Mankind is One, pp. 93ff.
26
See Hanke, All Mankind is One, pp. 91f, 95.
27
Vitoria, Political Writings, p. 288.
28
Ibid., p. 225.
 IR and the state of nature: the cultural origins of a ruling ideology 417

against nature to shun the company of harmless men’.29 Thus, human beings had
the natural right to communication—which was realized in travel, in trade, in
settling wherever they wanted, and in missionizing. This natural right of the
Spaniards was accompanied by the natural obligation of the Indians to allow this
kind of communication.30 Furthermore, ’since all those peoples are not merely in a
state of sin, but presently in a state beyond salvation, it is the business of Christians
to correct and direct them. Indeed they are clearly obliged to do so’.31 Therefore, the
Spaniards did not only have the right but also the moral obligation to establish
communication with the Indians. If, on the other hand, the Indians denied the
Spaniards the right of communication the Spaniards could lead a just war against
them.32 Despite his own qualms—Vitoria believed that the Spaniards generally did
not obey the spirit of these rules but, at best, the letter—he had spelled out the
theoretical basis on which the Spanish Crown and the conquistadores could justify
their wars against the Indians.33 After almost fifty years of debate between con-
tending theoretical and political positions, it was the humanitarian obligation of the
Spaniards that justified the wars, the encomienda system, and Spanish rule.34

Applying the state of nature in European political thought

European political thought was strongly influenced by the encounter with the
Amerindians in broadly three different but interrelated ways. First of all, the
encounter of the Europeans with the Amerindians formed a key historical source of
that discourse of the state of nature which, as a secular basis for natural law, gave
rise to the modern universalist conception of society. Secondly, this view of the
Amerindians as living in the state of nature led to a redefinition of history along a
linear time scale providing a secular telos as the basis of the historical process. And,
finally, the same state of nature provided the European reformers with a basis from
which to criticize the particular development of their own societies and with the
means to theoretically reconstruct an alternative political community. Taken
together, these three levels—epistemological, ontological, and ethical—amount to a
total redefinition of an authentic and legitimate political community which, for
example, in the French Revolution and in the constitution of the North American
society became the guiding principle for political practice. At the same time,
however, the theoretical construction of a universal linear time scale and a political
community built on universal natural law inevitably led to a ranking of all human
societies on that linear scale. Thus, paradoxically the universalist conception of the
state of nature brought with it a world view based on a hierarchy of cultures which
served as the basis for a theory of unequal relations between political communities.
Since these claims as well as my approach to classical political theory are in many
ways unfamiliar and provide scope for misunderstandings it may help to clarify at
29
Ibid., pp. 278f.
30
Ibid., pp. 279–281.
31
Ibid., p. 284.
32
Ibid., pp. 283f.
33
Ibid., pp. 282, 284, 291, 331ff.
34
Las Casas, History, p. 127; Vitoria, Political Writings, pp. 225, 285f; Hanke, All Mankind is One,
pp. 121, 86.
418 Beate Jahn

the outset the precise status of the argument. There are three main points at which I
divert from conventional interpretations of classical political theory. Firstly, conven-
tional political theory tends to stress the fact that many—if by no means all—the
authors I will deal with in the following pages claim that the concept of the state of
nature is just hypothetical, a theoretical device, a logical deduction. I will argue,
however, that it is precisely the actual, concrete, historical quality of this concept
which is crucial for the development of International Relations in theory and prac-
tice, past and present. Secondly, conventional political theory generally insists that
the most important sources for the classical authors were Greek and Roman
writings, while I will argue that the discovery of America and the Amerindian
communities played a crucial role in the development of these theories. And finally,
conventional political theory highlights the European and/or domestic triggers for
the projects of the classical writers and downplays the relevance of these writings for
the international in general and for the relationship between European and non-
European peoples in particular. By contrast, I will argue that this interpretation
overlooks the fact that although the goal of these writings was undoubtedly
domestic or European, it was nevertheless built on a universal conception of the
state of nature identified with the Amerindian communities and, hence, always
implicitly and sometimes even explicitly of crucial importance for the conception of
the international.
For lack of space I will try to clarify these points by reference to David Boucher´s
interpretation of Hobbes as an example. First of all, Boucher quite rightly stresses
the point that Hobbes—but also Pufendorf, Rousseau and others—after elaborating
the characteristics of the state of nature did not believe that this ‘ideal type’ state of
nature—the war of every man against every man—has ever existed historically
throughout the world.35 However, in the same sentence in which Hobbes declares
that this state of nature has never really existed as a concrete historical condition, he
does point to the Amerindian communities as evidence for the plausibility of his
logical deduction of the state of nature:
It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this;
and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world: but there are many places, where
they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of
small Families, the concord whereof dependeth on naturall lust, have no government at all;
and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before.36
Boucher, an attentive reader with a special interest in the international dimensions
of classical political theory, picks up on this contradiction and suggests that there
are actually two different concepts of the state of nature to be found in Hobbes,
namely a ‘hypothetical, or logical, state of nature and the historical, pre-civil
condition’ which he also calls the ‘modified state of nature’.37 But why, Boucher
asks, does Hobbes feel the need to come up with this second, modified state of
nature, for which he can present historical evidence and of which he truly believed
that it had existed as a concrete historical condition ‘in pre-civil times’? 38 The

35
David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
p. 145; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) p. 89.
36
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 89.
37
Boucher, Political Theories, pp. 149, 157.
38
Ibid., p. 149.
 IR and the state of nature: the cultural origins of a ruling ideology 419

answer is an epistemological one, namely that history provides facts and these facts
are the evidence necessary not only for the natural but also for the social sciences.39
And Boucher goes on to argue that for Hobbes the ‘relations among states are not
very like relations among individuals in the mere state of nature. Instead relations
among states can more fruitfully be seen as analogous to a modified . . . stage of the
hypothetical state of nature, and the historical pre-civil condition’.40 In fact,
Boucher makes two points here which I will make with respect to all the classical
authors I am going to deal with in the following pages. Firstly, he maintains that
Hobbes’ understanding of the natural and social sciences necessitates material
evidence. Hence, the material evidence of the Amerindian communities to which
Hobbes points is crucially important for the plausibility of his logical deduction of a
hypothetical state of nature. Secondly, Boucher clearly argues that Hobbes’ analogy
for the state of nature between states, i.e. the international state of nature, is
precisely not the hypothetical state of nature but that real existing concrete historical
condition in pre-civil times for which the Amerindian communities are Hobbes´
contemporary example/evidence. If I, in dealing with classical political theory in the
following pages, stress the importance of the Amerindians I do not question at any
point the fact that many of the classical authors maintain that the state of nature is
just a theoretical device or a regulative idea. What I do argue instead, is that the
material evidence presented in all these cases is taken from the Amerindians and that
this evidence is crucially important precisely because the social sciences were
understood along the lines of the natural sciences. In addition, I am not suggesting
that all the authors I am going to mention share one and the same theoretical
understanding of the state of nature. Indeed, in most cases their writings were at
least partly motivated by their disagreements on this issue. 41 At one level, as I will
argue in the following pages, these differences are important, at another level,
however, it is precisely the common procedure to provide evidence taken from the
Amerindian societies which is decisive for my argument.
This leads us to the second point of contention, namely the claim that the most
important sources for the classical writers generally are the Greek and Roman
classics and in particular, that examples for the state of nature have been provided
by these writers of antiquity and are being used by authors like Hobbes implying
that the examples of the Amerindians were not only not particularly important but
could even have been dispensable. Again, Boucher can be used as an example since
he maintains that Hobbes in general ‘relies heavily upon Thucydides’,42 and in
providing evidence for that historical ‘pre-civil’ state in particular makes reference to
a number of communities such as ‘the Amazon women, Saxon and other German
families, the American Indians, and the paternal communities of Ancient Greece’.43
And, indeed, this list appears to suggest that the absence or presence of the
Amerindians in particular would not make any difference. However, I will argue in
the following pages that in terms of the theoretical and political implications there

39
Ibid., p. 149.
40
Ibid., p. 149.
41
Rousseau, for example, launches a scathing critique of Hobbes’ understanding of the state of nature
in particular, but also of that of Locke and Pufendorf (see in particular the second part of the Essay
on the Origins of Inequality; Locke is one of the major targets in the footnotes to the Essay).
42
Boucher, Political Theories, p. 149.
43
Ibid., p. 157.
420 Beate Jahn

are wide-ranging differences between the communities mentioned in this list. The
crucially important difference is that the Amerindian communities mentioned were
contemporaries of Hobbes and other classical writers, while the Amazon women,
Saxon and other German families and the paternal communities of Ancient Greece
supposedly representing the state of nature or pre-civil state were at best the
predecessors of contemporary societies. Why is this distinction important? Because
the claim that these societies represent an earlier stage of human development is in
the case of paternal communities of Ancient Greece, for instance, at least in tem-
poral terms correct. This, however, is not the case with the claim that the con-
temporary Amerindian societies represented an earlier stage in human development.
In temporal terms they did not. The substantive philosophical point the classical
writers want to make is, therefore, dependent on the example of the Amerindian
societies. But not only theoretically but also politically this is an important dis-
tinction, at least from the point of view of constructing the international, for
politically it does not matter much how we define and judge societies which do not
exist any longer, while it matters crucially how we construct and define con-
temporary societies; legal rights and obligations, political practice and moral
justifications of the relationship between European and Amerindian communities
were based on the construction of these communities as representing a pre-civil state
of development, as I will demonstrate in the following pages.
What, then, is the status of the writers of antiquity and the examples for
communities in the state of nature taken from their writings? They are, I think,
extremely important, but not as the trigger of these newly developing ideas for, after
all, their writings had been known to the Europeans for quite some time without
motivating such an abundance of works on the state of nature. The discovery of the
Amerindian communities and the need to integrate this phenomenon theoretically
into the Christian Weltanschauung as well as the need to define the political and
moral framework within which to interact with these communities was the trigger
for this development amongst the Spanish authors from whom later European
authors have taken over this modern concept of the state of nature. The authors of
antiquity, however, played a crucial role in this theoretical development on the one
hand, because their authority was widely accepted and any supporting evidence one
could find in their writings gave some weight and acceptance to the new ideas; on
the other hand, the authors of antiquity as well as the Bible were widely reread and
reinterpreted in the light of the experiences in the New World.44 It is impossible
quantitatively to establish exactly how much influence which source had, although
Ronald Meek discussing this aspect very carefully, concludes that ‘the fact that most
of them (the classical writers, BJ) drew so heavily upon the American studies and
constantly emphasised their significance, however, seems to indicate that they may
well have played a rather special role, perhaps going beyond that of a catalyst and
approaching that of an independent primary source’.45 My argument does in no way
dispute the influence of Thucydides or other ancient writers on the classical authors

44
See, for example, Joseph Francois Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared with the
Customs of Primitive Times (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1977); Wolfgang Haase and Reinhold
Meyer (eds.), The Classical Tradition and the Americas (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994).
45
Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976),
p. 3.
 IR and the state of nature: the cultural origins of a ruling ideology 421

or their use of examples taken from the ancient texts; it also does not depend on
how important in quantitative terms the Amerindians were; rather, I will argue a
qualitative point peculiar to the international: the example of ancient communities
representing a state of nature does not set a precedent for the construction of the
realm of international relations, because, after all, one does not have to work out
practical policies towards societies that do not exist any longer; the Amerindians,
however coexisted with the European nations at the time when the classical authors
were writing and are, therefore, relevant for the construction of the international in a
qualitatively different way.
Thus, we eventually approach the last point at which my arguments might seem
unfamiliar and counterintuitive. This is the conventional claim that the motivations
of authors like Hobbes, Pufendorf, Rousseau etc. are to be seen in European and
domestic developments like the English Civil War, the Thirty Years War and the
Disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire etc. and that these occasions provided
the classical authors with the problems they attempted to solve in their theories.46
What is implied in these points is that the classical theories did actually not
deliberately attempt to provide a theory of international relations as such, and that
insofar as they did they mainly dealt with the relations among the European states
rather than with the relations between Europeans and non-European peoples. It
might therefore seem as if my interpretation of these authors exaggerates the
relevance of their writings for international relations and overlooks the issues they
attempted to deal with primarily. However, I am not arguing that the conception of
international relations in general or the relationship between European and non-
European peoples in particular were crucial issues in the writings of the classical
political theorists. On the contrary, what I am arguing is that these theories con-
centrate on the redefinition and redesign of a universally valid domestic political
organization (and, consequently, the relations between these organizations in the
case of the international lawyers) which, however, crucially is built on the concept of
the state of nature. This latter point has wide implications for, on the one hand, it
provides a basis for domestic political organization which itself was developed in the
course of the international encounter with the Amerindians and, hence, entails
certain assumptions about these non-European communities. Thus, having defined a
universally valid form of domestic political organization in relation to a different
and non-European form of political organization these theories implicitly define the
proper relations between these different forms of political organization, i.e. inter-
national relations. Hence, I am not taking issue with the claim that these theories are
motivated by particular European problems at the time, rather I am ‘teasing’ out the
role the international plays in the solutions offered as well as the implicit recon-
struction of the international on the basis of these new domestic solutions.
To summarize, then, what I am mainly concerned with in the following pages is
not a revision of conventional interpretations of classical political theory but an
‘excavation’ of the unreflected and certainly, in many cases, unintended but never-
theless crucial assumptions about non-European peoples as the basis of an implicit
construction of the international.

46
Boucher, Political Theories, pp. 224f.
422 Beate Jahn

(1) The state of nature as the basis for a new epistemology

Epistemologically, the unique significance of the Amerindians for European political

thought lay in the possibility to derive natural law—on which the Europeans tradi-
tionally based their societies—from a study of human nature itself. For, as Rousseau
explained, any attempt to define true natural law by analysing European societies
was prevented by the difficulty of distinguishing between the original and the
artificially created in human nature.47 But the Amerindian societies were, in
Montesquieu’s view, almost entirely governed by nature and climate and, according
to de Tocqueville, ‘exhibited none of those indistinct, incoherent notions of right
and wrong, none of that deep corruption of manners, which is usually joined with
ignorance and rudeness among nations who, after advancing to civilization, have
relapsed into a state of barbarism. The Indian was indebted to no one but himself;
his virtues, his vices, and his prejudices were his own work; he had grown up in the
wild independence of his nature.’ 48 As a result of this same assumption, Locke
concluded, that ‘the Woods and Forests, where the irrational untaught Inhabitants
keep right by following Nature, are fitter to give us Rules, than the Cities and
Palaces, where those that call themselves Civil and Rational, go out of their way, by
the Authority of Example’.49 In the light of a real existing state of nature the
interpretation of traditional scriptures could not claim any validity, as Locke in this
case held against Filmer. And even though the Greeks had been closer to the state of
nature than the contemporary European societies, as Raynal and Diderot held,50 ‘the
famous republics of antiquity never gave examples of more unshaken courage, more
haughty spirit, or more intractable love of independence than were hidden in former
times among the wild forests of the New World’.51 On the contrary, the Bible as well
as the Greek writings were now themselves reinterpreted in the light of the dis-
coveries.52 If the Amerindians, as Pufendorf argued, were in the ‘paradisical’ state of
nature while the Europeans found themselves in the world of sin it followed that the
Bible having derived from that early paradisical period was valid for that period
only. The natural law of the ‘paradisical’ period was, therefore, different from the
natural law applicable in the degenerate historical state of humankind. Con-
sequently, Pufendorf claimed that the science of natural law was totally different
from moral theology in its method and demanded its independent status on the
same grounds as medicine, mathematics, and the natural sciences.53 The reading and
interpretation of the scriptures dating from another period could not possibly
produce any insight into contemporary natural law. The latter could only be
47
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (London: J.M. Dent, 1993), p. 44.
48
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (London: Everyman’s Library, 1994), vol. I, p. 22;
Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 310.
49
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 182f.
50
Abbé Raynal, Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the
East and West Indies (New York: Negro University Press, 1969), vol. I, p. 7. Even though the text is
published under Raynal’s name only, I will speak of Raynal and Diderot in the text because Diderot
has edited and added major parts of the text; in particular the passages including a moral assessment
of the political history.
51
De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, p. 23.
52
Samuel von Pufendorf, De Officio Hominis et Civis Juxta Legem Naturalem Libri Duo (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1927), p. xf.
53
Pufendorf, De Officio Hominis et Civis, p. xi.
 IR and the state of nature: the cultural origins of a ruling ideology 423

analyzed by research into the essence of human beings and into the common
characteristics onto which their communal life is built and secured.54 Thus, the belief
that the Amerindians represented a concrete historical state of nature became the
basis for the development of social and political thought as a ‘natural science’.

(2) The state of nature and the meaning of history

By introducing the state of nature as a universal condition from which humankind

started its historical development the European authors introduced one linear time
scale into the history of humanity. And, furthermore, the explanations which the
European authors developed for the movement of humanity from one to the other
stage of development, justified and naturalized the particular European path of
development—state-building, private property, money. For if, as Locke held, the
Amerindians represented the ‘Pattern of the first Ages in Asia and Europe’, that is,
they represented the ‘Infancy’ of humankind, it followed that a single line had to be
drawn between this infant state of humankind and the developed European (and
Asian) societies.55 Accordingly, the Europeans developed a new philosophy of
history based on linear historical time.56 To be sure, they disagreed on the distin-
guishing features of the state of nature (as we will see in the next section); in
addition, some held the concept to be an ideal type 57 while others made no such
explicit distinction 58 and, finally, they disagreed on whether the Amerindian com-
munities actually represented, approximated, or had long passed this condition.59
Nevertheless, all these conceptions have two aspects in common. Firstly, it is the
Amerindian ‘material’ to which they all apply their reason in order to derive an
understanding of the state of nature. And secondly, in all cases the Amerindians are
placed in a different historical time from the Europeans despite the fact that they
were, of course, living at exactly the same time as the European observers. Thus, the
discovery and particular placement of the Amerindian communities on that time
scale provided the Europeans with a concrete second point beyond their own
societies. They could now draw a line between those two fixed points—the European
and the Amerindian—and extend this line into the future as well as into the past.
But drawing this historical line, of course, did not yet provide an explanation of
how and why people have moved from one point on this line to the other; and

54
Pufendorf, De Officio Hominis et Civis, p. 17; see also Christian Thomasius, ‘Vorrede von der Historie
des Rechts der Natur bis auf Grotium’, in Hugo Grotius, Vom Recht des Krieges und des Friedens
(Tübingen: Mohr, 1950), pp. 1f, 8f, 39. This is Thomasius’ introduction to the German translation of
Grotius.
55
Locke, Two Treatises, pp. 339f, 342.
56
The encounter with the Amerindians is, of course, not the only source for the concept of linear
historical time. However, the authors quoted here develop their philosophy of history expressis verbis
on the assumption of a state of nature directly linked to the Amerindians.
57
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and
Civill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), p. 85; Pufendorf, De Officio Hominis et Civis,
p. 90.
58
Immanuel Kant, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 99, 103;
Locke, Two Treatises.
59
Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, pp. 65, 90f.
424 Beate Jahn

without the knowledge about the moving force behind this development the line
could not be extended. The political thinkers developed various theories in order to
explain this historical development, all of which justified and naturalized the
particular European development—with the partial exception of Rousseau. Both
Hobbes and Kant interpret the state of nature as a state of war in which human life
is necessarily miserable and insecure. Reason and self-interest command that human
beings leave this miserable state by setting up government and the rule of law over
them, in short, by building states.60 However, the same command does not apply to
states because the latter are already the product of this reasonable freedom and,
thus, cannot be placed under the obligation to give it up and consent to another
law.61 For Kant and Hobbes, thus, it is the very ‘natural’ freedom of the human
being which is realized within states and therefore leads to a split between the
natural law applicable within states as opposed to the one applicable between states.
But since this theory locates the forces which drive people out of the state of nature
into the historical development of state building in the state of nature itself, it
cannot explain why the Amerindians—theoretically endowed with as much reason as
the Europeans—have not left the miserable state of nature while the Europeans have.
Even though for Raynal, Diderot, Rousseau, Locke and others the state of nature
is also characterized by the absence of law, government, private property etc., it is
not taken to constitute a state of war.62 These authors argue instead that if there is
no private property there is no robbery, and where there is no robbery one does not
need the law, the police and government in order to protect it.63 And the fairly
peaceful existence of the Amerindian communities without a European type govern-
ment led to the assumption that they were held together by natural compassion.64
Accordingly, Pufendorf comes to the conclusion that in the state of nature human
beings can enter into a societal contract without having to build states and he
believes that these societies were perfectly capable of satisfying the basic needs and
desires of their members.65 In this account the state of nature does not provide an
internal force which leads to any kind of development—it is a static condition
reproducing itself.
However, comparing the Amerindians with the English, Locke comes to the
conclusion that ‘a King of a large and fruitful Territory there feeds, lodges, and is
clad worse than a day Labourer in England’.66 This scarcity plays a crucial role in
the theories developed by these authors who generally assume that a widespread
increase in population led to a scarcity of food and land which in turn led to fights
over the scarce resources. These fights mark the end of a life according to natural
law. State building and the introduction of private property are depicted as the

60
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 85; Kant, Political Writings, p. 103.
61
Kant, Political Writings, p. 104; Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 149ff.
62
Raynal, History of the Indies, vol. III, p. 404.
63
Raynal, History of the Indies, vol. II, p. 361; Locke, Two Treatises, p. 302; Rousseau, The Social
Contract and Discourses, pp. 57f, 71ff, 90f.
64
Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p. 73; Raynal, History of the Indies, vol. III, p. 404;
Locke, Two Treatises, pp. 280f.
65
Pufendorf, De Officio Hominis et Civis, p. 103; Locke, Two Treatises, p. 299; see also Rousseau, The
Social Contract and Discourses, pp. 91f.
66
Locke, Two Treatises, pp. 296f; similarly Pufendorf, De Officio Hominis et Civis, pp. 17f; Raynal,
History of the Indies, vol. III, p. 404ff; vol. VI, pp. 138ff; Rousseau, The Social Contract and
Discourses, pp. 195f.
 IR and the state of nature: the cultural origins of a ruling ideology 425

solutions to this dilemma: setting up a superior power over the community ensured
peace between the members of the community; and the introduction of private
property in land and its guarantee by the laws not only put an end to the fight over
common resources but also provided the necessary conditions for intensive agri-
culture and, thus, raised production. Similarly the borders between states demarcate,
so to speak, the private property in land of the different communities and, thus,—
ideally—end the war between communities over common resources. Because state
building in this understanding leads to an increase in production and a decrease of
wars, it ensures the possibility to live according to natural law under the conditions
of an increase in the world’s population and is therefore justified.67 Locke, coming to
the same conclusion,68 adds the invention of money as a condition for state-building
because in his view the institution of private property is already present in the state
of nature when the labour the Indian bestows on the common property ‘makes the
Deer, that Indian’s who hath killed it’.69 But because ‘nothing was made by God for
Man to spoil or destroy’ this perishable kind of private property cannot be
accumulated and, therefore, does not lead to an increase in production.70 It is in this
sense that Locke came to the famous conclusion: ‘Thus in the beginning all the
World was America, and more so than that is now; for no such thing as Money was
any where known. Find out something that hath the Use and Value of Money
amongst his Neighbours, you shall see the same Man will begin presently to enlarge
his Possessions’.71 In this account, the assumption of an increase in population plays
a twofold role. It triggers the process of historical development, while at the same
time justifying it. Even though in this case the driving forces of historical develop-
ment are not located in the state of nature itself, these authors cannot explain the
emergence of the crucial assumption of the increase in population. For if the state
of nature indeed is static, just good enough for reproduction but not for growth of
any kind—then where is the basis for the increase of population so crucial to the
argument? Accordingly, Rousseau speculates about environmental circumstances as
the trigger of development,72 which in his view rather leads to the degradation of the
human species.73 Nonetheless, although Rousseau´s moral judgement is contrary to
those of the others, all these theories share the introduction of one linear time scale
into the history of humanity; all of them treat the Amerindian peoples—despite the
fact that they share the same actual time with the European observers—as
representatives of some earlier stage of human development; all of them justify the
peculiar European institution of the state as in accordance with universal natural
law; and, finally, all of them end up with two different kinds of natural law appli-
cable to different stages of development.

67
Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations or Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct
and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns (Philadelphia: Johnson & Co., 1863), pp. 97f; Pufendorf, De
Officio Hominis et Civis, p. 19.
68
Locke, Two Treatises, pp. 302, 299.
69
Ibid., pp. 287ff.
70
Ibid., p. 290.
71
Ibid., p. 301.
72
Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, pp. 92f, 95f, 98f.
73
Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p. 92.
426 Beate Jahn

(3) The state of nature as the basis for political utopia

The European authors, despite having thus justified state building and private
property as in accordance with natural law, did not overlook the shortcomings of
their own societies. Having finally discovered or rediscovered the true natural law
they set out to conceive an ideal and universally valid society based on human
nature. In contrast to earlier conceptions this was a secular society which could be
realized by human effort in time. ‘The Indians’, said de Tocqueville, ‘although they
are ignorant and poor, are equal and free’.74 And if equality and freedom were
natural qualities of man, then these had to be realized in any society which claimed
to be organized according to natural law. It was the example of the Amerindian
peoples which left Locke in no doubt whatsoever, that ‘Men are naturally free, and
the Examples of History shewing, that the Governments of the World . . . had their
beginning laid on that foundation, and were made by the Consent of the People’
which was the ‘Right’, the ‘Opinion’ and the ‘Practice of Mankind, about the first
erecting of Governments’.75 In Locke´s account the development of despotic or
absolute power—a terrible deviation from natural law—can only be set right if the
legislature is placed in ‘collective Bodies of Men, call them Senate, Parliament, or
what you please’.76 Thus, the Amerindian communities and their particular form of
government—as perceived by Locke—provides him with a concrete value which has
been lost in the course of historical development. On its basis the European
reformers attacked absolutism and despotic government which they now held to
violate freedom as a natural right of human beings. The natural right of freedom
was, of course, based on the assumption of a natural equality of human beings
which was also conspicuously absent from European societies. Though in the state of
nature human beings were born in equality, Montesquieu argued, in society they lost
this equality and only regained it through the laws.77 Thus, equality before the law
became one of the crucial goals of the reformers. ‘If the men of our time should be
convinced, by attentive observation and sincere reflection, that the gradual and
progressive development of social equality is at once the past and the future of their
history, this discovery alone would confer upon the change the sacred character of a
divine decree’.78 The major elements of the new philosophy of history are apparent
in this statement by de Tocqueville, for if equality is the universal past of human-
kind then it also has to be the universal future of humankind—the ontological
universality has to be realized. The means by which one arrives at this knowledge are
‘attentive observation’ and ’sincere reflection’—and in no way either the interpret-
ation of the scriptures or the ‘authority of historical examples’ because they only
reflect historically outdated values on the one hand or particular historical develop-
ments which had deviated from the universally valid natural law on the other. And,
finally, the politics leading to the realization of social equality is sanctified through

74
De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, p. 23.
75
Locke, Two Treatises, p. 336.
76
Ibid., pp. 329f.
77
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, p. 114; see also Locke, Two Treatises, p. 271; Raynal, History of
the Indies, vol. III, p. 404; Pufendorf, De Officio Hominis et Civis, ch. 7, § 1; Rousseau, The Social
Contract and Discourses, p. 80.
78
De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, p. 7.
 IR and the state of nature: the cultural origins of a ruling ideology 427

the ‘discovery’ of its historical roots—the goal is ethical and therefore justifies the
means.
But if the European authors interpret the Amerindian communities as repre-
senting certain natural law values which have to be taken up and realized in a
universally valid society this does not mean that they want to return to a state of
nature. Having established that states are in accordance with natural law at this
particular stage in historical development they distinguish between natural and civil
liberty. The former, being ‘common to man with beasts and other creatures’, is
‘inconsistent with authority’ and in time ‘makes men grow more evil and . . . worse
than brute beasts’, while the latter can only be found in the ‘moral law and the
politic covenants and constitutions among men themselves’ and ‘it is a liberty to that
only which is good, just, and honest’.79 Similarly, since natural equality was based
on common property but the laws, those ‘politic covenants and constitutions’, are
based on private property, civil equality is essentially different from the original
natural one.80 Therefore, Raynal and Diderot argue, the ideal society has to be built
on private property the basis of which must be the equal distribution of land; and de
Tocqueville identifies the abundance of land in the US as the very basis of
democracy because the social equality of the Americans depends on it.81 Unlike in
America, in Europe the attempt to realize this ideal society proved to be much more
difficult and disruptive since it continuously encountered traditional forces, as, for
example, the French Revolution demonstrated.82 However, just as the European
authors split the supposedly universal natural law in the course of the development
of their new philosophy of history, in practice the universal values of equality and
freedom only applied to those members of society whose ‘nature’ was reasonable
enough to comprehend them. Women, children, madmen, and slaves (on the basis of
their race) were excluded because nature had not (yet) furnished them with enough
reason; and civil slaves were excluded because they could not own property and,
hence, could not be expected to consent to laws based on property.83
The discovery of the Amerindian societies was crucial for this new concept of a
universally valid society based on natural law because despite the fact that in their
interpretation of the Amerindian societies the Europeans were strongly led by their
own cultural values—the idea that the state of nature is based on common property
is, for example, an integral part of traditional Christian belief—no other contem-
porary society could have substantiated this belief. Equality and freedom were
clearly not distinguishing features of Chinese, Muslim, or Indian societies. And the
fact that the historical scriptures including the Bible described societies characterized
by common property, a nomadic life style, and government by some kind of political
consensus did not prove anything else but that all societies possibly had their begin-
ning there but all of them also seemed to have moved out of this developmental

79
De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, p. 42.
80
Locke, Two Treatises, pp. 350f; Raynal, History of the Indies, vol. III, pp. 411ff; Montesquieu, The
Spirit of the Laws, p. 510.
81
De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, pp. 290f; see also Rousseau, The Social Contract and
Discourses, p. 240; Raynal, History of the Indies, vol. VI, p. 113.
82
De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, pp. 291f.
83
Locke, Two Treatises, pp. 304f, 307f, 332f, 174; Pufendorf, De Officio Hominis et Civis, p. 97; Hobbes,
Leviathan, pp. 261f; de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, pp. 379f; vol. II, pp. 211f;
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, pp. 264f.
428 Beate Jahn

stage. The fact that the Amerindians lived like that today challenged the belief that
the development of social inequality and despotic government was natural and
inevitable and led the Europeans to reinterpret the ancient writers in the light of this
new discovery.84 And, finally, the gap between the naked and savage Indians without
tools, religious and political institutions, roaming the woods, and the Europeans
with their sophisticated dress code, their ordered political and religious institutions,
and their advanced material way of life was so big that there seemed to be no limit
to human progress.85 In the course of this theoretical development, stretching over
three centuries, the Golden Age which previously had been located in the past, in
antiquity, gradually came to be placed in the future, the Christian telos of salvation
replaced by a secular telos of human development.86

(4) Consequence: a world divided into a hierarchy of cultures

The philosophy of history which the Europeans had developed, together with their
new concept of a legitimate political community based on natural law, inevitably led
to a Weltanschauung based on a hierarchy of cultures. Though natural law by
definition was supposed to be universal we have already seen that the Europeans had
ended up with two different kinds of natural law—one applying to the original state
of nature, the other to the developed historical stage of mankind. And not only that,
but in the developed historical stage of mankind it was the state with its domestic
laws which ensured and embodied the developed natural law while between the
states the rules of the original natural law still more or less applied.87 Over time this
analogy of the state of nature between individuals and the state of nature between
states was increasingly questioned.88 Vattel, therefore, distinguished between the
necessary and the voluntary international law—the necessary international law being
the original natural law and the voluntary international law being the positive law
which civilized states have agreed upon.89 On this basis the rights and responsibilities
of the voluntary international law were not extended to ‘wild’ and ‘barbaric’ peoples.
The Amerindians, because they had not yet built states and introduced private
property, did not conform to the law of nature which applied in this historical phase.
Locke uses these cultural distinctions, for example, when he argues that in the state
of nature land which is common can be appropriated and enclosed by anyone, while

84
See, for example, Joseph Francois Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared With the
Customs of Primitive Times (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1977).
85
Frank Lestringant, ‘The Euhemerist Tradition and the European Perception and Description of the
American Indians’, in Wolfgang Haase and Reinhold Meyer (eds.), The Classical Tradition and the
Americas I: European Images of the Americas and the Classical Tradition (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1994), p. 174.
86
Stelio Cro, ‘Classical Antiquity, America and the Myth of the Noble Savage, in Wolfgang Haase and
Reinhold Meyer (eds.), The Classical Tradition and the Americas I: European Images of the Americas
and the Classical Tradition (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994), pp. 388f; Pagden, European Encounters,
pp. 93, 111, 115.
87
Locke, Two Treatises, p. 357; Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 85f; Kant, Political Writings, p. 102; Rousseau,
The Social Contract and Discourses, pp. 99f.
88
Vattel, The Law of Nations, pp. xiiif.
89
Ibid., pp. 381ff; see also Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli Ac Pacis Libri Tres (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1925), pp. 393f, 42ff.
 IR and the state of nature: the cultural origins of a ruling ideology 429

‘Land that is common in England, or any other Country, where there is Plenty of
People under Government, who have Money and Commerce’ cannot be enclosed or
appropriated by outsiders because, ‘though it be Common in respect of some Men,
it is not so to all Mankind; but is the joint property of this Country’.90 Vattel even
argues that every political community is free to choose its internal constitution as it
likes and, thus, can introduce common property as described in Campanella´s City
of the Sun. Outsiders have to respect the land which is held in common property as
the private property of that political community.91 But crucially this general
universal rule does not apply to other cultures on a different level of historical
development. In his discussion of the expropriation of the Amerindian communities
of North America, Vattel applies the original natural law which obliges everyone to
support the species in general. Since the European states are overpopulated, he
argues, nomadic peoples like the Amerindians of North America or the Beduins of
the Arabic desert can be forced to live on a smaller piece of land where they have to
practice intensive agriculture and, thereby, make the rest of their land available for
the needy European populations. Though the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru
is considered illegal because those were ‘well ordered states’ and the Spanish
brutalities are generally criticized vehemently by the other European authors, they
all justify the expropriation of the nomadic Amerindians on these grounds.92
Similarly with respect to the laws of war Vattel holds that barbaric peoples have to
be considered enemies of mankind and every state has a right to fight wars against
them, even if it has not been harmed by them at all.93 Indeed, not only the jus ad
bellum but also the jus in bello differs significantly. Thus, if an army in the course of
war has to cross the territory of another civilized state it has to surrender its arms
while the latter would not only be unnecessary but even irresponsible if it crossed the
territory of a wild people; similarly, one may not destroy the country of a civilized
enemy in war but the destruction of the country of a barbaric nation is not only
allowed but even a positive goal because it provides an opportunity to punish the
barbarians; and while one has to distinguish between combatants and non-
combatants and officers and soldiers in war with a civilized nation, one may catch
and punish any member of a barbaric nation who are all guilty by definition—these
strict measures are supposed to force them to acknowledge the humanitarian law.94
However, not only in international law but also in political theory genocidal
practices were justified on the basis of this new philosophy of history. De
Tocqueville, for example, recognizes the treatment of the Amerindian peoples (and
the slaves) in North America in its brutal reality, when he says, ‘if we reason from
what passes in the world, we should almost say that the European is to other races
of mankind what man himself is to the lower animals: he makes them subservient to
his use, and when he cannot subdue he destroys them’.95 But while the Spaniards
despite all their atrocities have never quite managed to deprive the Amerindians of
their rights or to ‘exterminate the Indian race’ the ‘Americans of the United States

90
Locke, Two Treatises, p. 292.
91
Vattel, The Law of Nations, pp. 163f.
92
Ibid., pp. 35f, 155, 163f, 170f; Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 252; Locke, Two Treatises, pp. 291f.
93
Ibid., pp. 304f.
94
Ibid., pp. 342f, 367f, 348.
95
De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, p. 332.
430 Beate Jahn

have accomplished this twofold purpose with singular felicity, tranquilly, legally,
philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single great
principle of morality in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with
more respect for the laws of humanity’.96 Although de Tocqueville analyses this
process and explicitly names the actors and the deliberate policies by which they
achieve their ends—and he clearly deplores the fate of the Amerindians—it is
described by him as tragic but inevitable.97 And the reason for this inevitability is
precisely that philosophy of history and the laws, domestic and international, that
go with it. Because despite the fact that North America was inhabited by countless
Indian tribes when the Europeans got there,
. . . it may justly be said . . . to have formed one great desert. The Indians occupied without
possessing it. It is by agricultural labour that man appropriates the soil, and the early
inhabitants of North America lived by the produce of the chase. . . . They seem to have been
placed by Providence amid the riches of the New World only to enjoy them for a season; they
were there merely to wait till others came. Those coasts so admirably adapted for commerce
and industry; those wide and deep rivers; that inexhaustible valley of the Mississippi; the
whole continent, in short, seemed prepared to be the abode of a great nation yet unborn. In
that land the great experiment of the attempt to construct society upon a new basis was to be
made by civilized man; and it was there, for the first time, that theories hitherto unknown, or
deemed impracticable, were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared
by the history of the past.98
The universal validity of what de Tocqueville called the ‘triumphal march of civiliz-
ation across the desert’ is not at all put into question by the necessary extinction of
the Amerindian communities because in the last analysis it is their own
backwardness which does not allow them to assimilate fast enough in order to fit
into the new society. Therefore, ‘they perish if they continue to wander from waste
to waste, and if they attempt to settle they still must perish’.99
But not only the peoples who were still thought to be in or very close to the state
of nature had to occupy their appropriate place on that linear time scale of history.
Once that scale existed all the cultures had to be located on it. Since it was incon-
ceivable that development could take place in a way different from the European
one, the Enlightenment authors concluded that the Spanish reports on the cultural
achievements of the Mexicans—who had actually set up a ‘well ordered state’ and
were not taken to be in the state of nature—must simply be false. Mexican culture
had to be young, had in fact barely left the state of nature and was for this reason
characterized by the most incredible despotism and superstition, i.e. violation of
natural law.100 The tremendous age of Indian culture, on the other hand, could not
be doubted. Hence, Indian culture was—for reasons of climate and the caste
system—considered stagnant, its laws, manners, life style, clothes were supposed to
be the same today as they were a thousand years ago.101 The Indians, although they
were an old culture, were like children and so were the Mexicans as a new culture.
Accordingly, argue Raynal and Diderot, the wild peoples ‘want’ to be guided by

96
Ibid., vol. I, pp. 354f.
97
Ibid., vol. I, pp. 350f.
98
Ibid., vol. I, p. 25.
99
Ibid., vol. I, p. 354.
100
Raynal, History of the Indies, vol. II, pp. 397ff.
101
Raynal, History of the Indies, vol. I, pp. 38ff; Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, p. 235.
 IR and the state of nature: the cultural origins of a ruling ideology 431

gentleness and held back by force. Since they are incapable of governing themselves
their government has to be enlightened and they have to be guided by violence till
they reach the age of insight. Therefore barbaric peoples live quite ‘naturally’ under
despotism until the progress of society has taught them to be guided by their own
interest.102

Reproducing the state of nature in IR theory

In conclusion we can say that the European philosophy of history which developed
as a result of the discovery of the Amerindian peoples posits three broad stages of
development: first is the state of nature which is characterized by universality and in
most accounts either total stagnation or cyclical reproduction; the second stage
witnesses the development of a varity of cultures, i.e. states in various stages of
deviation from natural law; finally, after the discovery of the true natural law, there
is envisaged the perfect society of the future, a universally valid social order which
marks the end of history—the latter understood as a struggle for power between
different cultures.103
The Liberal IR theory of today classically reproduces the assumption of the state
of nature and its theoretical and historical consequences as laid out by the
Enlightenment authors. Liberals stress that humanity is essentially one and in-
divisible, consisting of individuals defined by the capacity for reason. International
relations and international morality, therefore, ‘is cosmopolitan in the sense that it is
concerned with the moral relations of members of a universal community in which
state boundaries have a merely derivative significance’.104 Thus, it is the universal
state of nature in which people have not yet set up government that is the starting
point of liberal IR theory. Consequently, the institution of the state and the pursuit
of national interests can only be justified and respected ‘to the extent that they are
derived from the interests of persons’, that is, only in so far as the state embodies
and realizes natural law derived from the state of nature.105 Just like the Enlighten-
ment writers, Liberals come to the conclusion that a state or a government ‘is
legitimate if it would be consented to by rational persons subject to its rule’.106 The

102
Raynal, History of the Indies, vol. VI, p. 110; see also Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, pp. 234f.
103
Yet again, I would like to stress that my citing various liberal or realist authors as contributors to one
tradition I do not wish to overlook the differences between them. For my argument, however, it is not
important whether Morgenthau stresses the individual human nature (see, for example, Morgenthau,
Politics Among Nations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), pp. 15f) and Waltz the state of nature
between states (see, for example, Waltz, Man, the State, and War, p. 184); the state of nature is here,
by the way, clearly based on the assumption of a ‘savage’ state of nature, based, mainly—and, I think,
falsely—on the writings of Rousseau). Insofar as they both use the concept of the state of nature
they both end up concealing the fact that the ‘nature’ of the individual as well as the ‘nature’ of the
state or the state system is not nature at all: they are the products of culture, of the morally and
legally justified practices of interaction between different cultures. And as contributors to one of
these cultures—historically in the last 500 years the hegemonic one in the international sphere—I
must quote them interchangeably if this culture is the object of my enquiry.
104
Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1979), p. 182.
105
Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, p. 64.
106
Ibid., pp. 80f, see also p. 88. First emphasis in the original, second emphasis added.
432 Beate Jahn

state or government a rational person would consent to is characterized by equality

and liberty taken from the state of nature and now realized through the civil
institutions of private property and democracy.
In short, the liberal state and its ideology come to be identified as the necessary
historical development for overcoming divisions and conflicts in the world. But since
humanity has not developed evenly towards the realization of these values through
liberal states, ‘protecting “native rights” from “native oppressors”, and protecting
universal rights of property and settlement from local transgressions, introduced
especially liberal motives for imperial rule’.107 However, the end of imperial rule
does not signify the end of this dilemma; for ‘respecting a nonliberal state’s state
rights to noninterference requires ignoring the violations of rights they inflict on
their own population. Addressing the rights of individuals in the Third World
requires ignoring the rights of states to be free of foreign intervention’.108 The
attempt to realize the truly universal individual principles by intervening in non-
liberal states has not only led to the destabilization of indigenous political authority
and created violent conflicts but also to the ‘oppression of “native” liberals’.109
Nevertheless, the fact that liberal states have been quite successful at establishing and
preserving peace amongst themselves is taken to be proof of the universal validity of
these principles.110 If they have utterly failed in keeping peace with non-liberal states,
in the last analysis, this is due to the backwardness and obstinate resistance of states
in which people ‘are forced to live in unrepresentative political systems’, in societies
where liberalism is incomplete.111 But just as the extinction of the Amerindian
communities for de Tocqueville eventually was due to their own backwardness and
did not relativize the universal claim of ‘the triumphal march of civilization’, so for
Fukuyama it is not necessary ‘that all societies become successful liberal societies,
merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and
higher forms of human society’.112 From a liberal point of view History, therefore,
can be interpreted as the period of conflicts between different kinds of ideologies, or
rather as ‘mankind’s ideological evolution’ in which the ‘universalization of Western
liberal democracy’ after the end of the Cold War marks ‘the final form of human
government’ and therefore the ‘end of history’.113 The world is thus divided into a
post-historical part—the liberal states—and a part that is still in history—the
nonliberal states: a zone of peace and a zone of war.114 And conflicts are inevitable
in the historical phase of humankind which is characterized by cultural difference,
by ‘pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society’. How-
ever, IR does not have to concern itself with
every crackpot messiah around the world, but only (with) those that are embodied in
important social or political forces and movements, and which are therefore part of world
history. For our purposes it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in

107
Michael W. Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs’, in Philosophy and Public Affairs,
3 and 4 (1983), p. 331.
108
Doyle, ‘Kant’, p. 330.
109
Ibid., p. 332.
110
Ibid., p. 111.
111
Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, in The National Interest, 2 (1989), p. 15.
112
Ibid., p. 13.
113
Ibid., p. 4.
114
Ibid., p. 18.
 IR and the state of nature: the cultural origins of a ruling ideology 433

Albania or Burkina Faso, for we are interested in what one could in some sense call the
common ideological heritage of mankind.115
Hence, so long as other cultures do not have the power to seriously threaten the
dominant position of the liberal states in the world we can assume that the latter
truly represent universal natural law. In the end, the liberal ideology which in the
Enlightenment set out to replace might by right thus justifies its right through might.
The state of nature plays just as crucial a role for realist thought as it does for
liberal thought in that Realism takes the state to be the one institution that is
justified by and in accordance with natural law. Culture is taken to play a major role
in the constitution of the state and this cultural unity is the basis on which common
principles of justice are developed.116 But unlike Liberals for whom the state is a
legitimate institution only insofar as it is built on and embodies certain values taken
from the state of nature, Realists hold that ‘the state is not the artificial creation of a
constitutional convention, conceived in the image of some abstract principles of
government and superimposed upon whatever society might exist. On the contrary,
the state is part of the society from which it has sprung’.117 It is the institution of the
state as such, irrespective of the values it embodies, which Realists hold to be in
accordance with natural law and therefore universally valid. Since, as Vattel,
Pufendorf and others argued, states become the answer to the state of war amongst
humanity by providing peace and the basis of material development among its
members, ‘international anarchy is the one manifestation of the state of nature that
is not intolerable’, for the rational calculation of balances of power will ensure the
survival of states and, thus, to a certain extent peace and prosperity for the whole
world.118 Thus, it is not only acceptable but a moral obligation to contain consider-
ations of culture, values, law, and justice in the domestic sphere and to treat relations
between states as the ‘realm of power, of struggle, and of accommodation’.119 How-
ever, there are two problems with this concept. First of all, historically the European
states were confronted with communities that had not developed states. Therefore,
despite their attack on the ‘utopianism’ of the Liberals the Realists ended up
imposing the ‘utopian’ ideal of state building on other societies and excluded the
possibility of a moral critique of these policies by defining the state of nature
between states as a sphere out of the reach of morality. Secondly, the Realists are
confronted with states who do not behave according to this prescription of keeping
the passions in the domestic sphere and applying reason to the international; for, as
Morgenthau acknowledged, the cultural identity, the ‘national character’ can drive
states towards ‘nationalistic universalisms’ which cause violent conflicts.120 And since
this is the reality, ‘the hope that reason may one day gain greater control over
passions’, which according to Gilpin ‘constitutes the essence of realism and unites
realists of every generation’, is another ‘utopian’ prescription.121 Meanwhile, if the
115
Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, p. 9.
116
Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations. The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1985), pp. 527, 529.
117
Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, pp. 532f.
118
Martin Wight, ‘Why is There No International Theory?’, in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight
(eds.), Diplomatical Investigations (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966), p. 31.
119
Waltz, ‘Anarchic Orders’, p. 111.
120
Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, pp. 147ff, 349ff.
121
Robert G. Gilpin, ‘The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism’, in Robert O. Keohane (ed.),
Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 321.
434 Beate Jahn

power of non-Western civilizational blocs, as Huntington argues, is rising and

threatening the dominant position of the Western states in international relations,
the West is perfectly justified in defending its position of economic and military
superiority by all means—including the aggravation of conflicts between, in this
case, Confucian and Islamic states and intervening in the internal affairs of these
states by supporting those groups who are sympathetic to Western values.122 Just as
in the liberal conception, therefore, the Realists end up justifying the violent
domination of non-Western by Western states; and like the former they justify and
practice interference in other states for the express purpose of spreading the values
derived from a universal state of nature. In the last analysis, just as in the liberal
case, the victims of this kind of interference only have to blame themselves because
they have not kept their passions within their domestic sphere but challenged the
universal validity of the Western concept of the state. The state of nature between
states, thus, functions as a veil behind which the West can uphold its dominant
position without being exposed to moral criticism. And again, despite the fact that
culture—when, against the rules, it spills over into the international sphere—is
considered to be the cause of violent conflict, it does not have to be analysed by the
discipline of International Relations since the latter is defined by the secular telos of
a cultureless state of nature. In both approaches, thus, the intellectual analysis of
international relations is conflated with the normative prescriptions for future
development derived from a concept of the state of nature. And an ideology of
dominance which stretches back 500 years to the destruction of the Amerindian
communities in the opening thrust of European expansion is perpetuated.

122
Samuel Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, in Foreign Affairs, 3 (1993), pp. 48f.