The Complex History of International Law

This panel was convened at 2:15 pm, Friday, April 5, by its moderator, Steve Chamovitz of George Washington University Law School, who introduced the panelists: Kinji Akashi of Keio University; Umut Ozsu of the University of Manitoba; Ileana Porras of the University of Miami; and Iain Scobbie of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. THE POLITICS OF MULTIPOLARITY By Umut Ozsu * It has become fashionable in recent years to argue that non-Western states have exerted considerable influence over the creation and application of law's most fundamental rules and principles. Equally fashionable are arguments to the effect that sustained growth in emerging markets is on the verge of destabilizing Euro-American dominance in the legal and economic order. These claims tend to resonate with critics of Eurocentrism and American exceptionalism, who rely upon notions of multipolarity to develop inclusive accounts of law's formation and operation. Rather than conceptualizing as a system with a clearly discernible core and periphery, such scholars typically regard legal relations as fueled by contributions from a multitude of states, corporations, organizations, and other actors. The argument I will sketch today runs counter to much--though certainly not all--of this scholarship. I will argue that it is neither descriptively nor explanatorily inadequate to maintain that the architecture of what we now characterize as international law has for centuries been shaped to a significant degree by fundamentally European and American developments. Acknowledging the critical importance of Euro-American developments to the construction and transformation of the modern world economy, and the legal order with which it has always been dialectically intertwined, neither warrants nor mandates the conclusion that non-Western experiences are unimportant or merely derivative. It simply forces us to confront the reality that the legal order is inseparable from a global capitalist system with a largely Euro-American infrastructure, compelling us to craft socio-historically contextualized accounts of how non-Western elites have engaged with a view to negotiating prevailing configurations of power. Indeed, I will suggest, uncritical celebration of multipolarity of the liberal-internationalist variety mystifies the actual sources and relations of power, blinding us to the fact that much of continues to be organized around dominant classes, most of which continue to identify with predominantly Western interests. In order to concretize this argument, I will consider ideological formations that have proven to be influential as modes of conceiving what might broadly be termed states: the late nineteenth-century attribution of semi-civilized status to certain extra-European states; the reliance by many Cold War jurists upon the notion of a socialist Second World and largely non-aligned Third World; and the current preoccupation, as legal as it is political and economic, with so-called emerging markets. (1) It will be my contention that each of these constructs was internalized, or at least * instrumentalized, by semi-peripheral elites, which have nearly always understood themselves to operate in an interstate order characterized by highly uneven distributions of legal authority, not to mention extra-legal power. Let me begin with James Lorimer's tripartite division of which offers a classic illustration of the nineteenth-century notion of semi-civilized states. Influential during a time of rapid codification and professional organization, Lorimer regarded humanity as a general category, capable of being disaggregated into three concentric zones or spheres. (2) In the first such zone--the innermost core of humanity, as it were--Lorimer placed the fully civilized European state, indirectly if not directly associated with high levels of legal formalization. …

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