Introduction

In International Organization and Industrial Change: Global Governance Since 1850, Craig Murphy offers a longue durée view of world institutions as emerging and evolving not from the changing phases of multilateralism – as mainstream social sciences and humanities tend to think – but from the changing scales of industrial capitalism and the impersonal pressure to improve the conditions of life on the margins of private property relations.Footnote ¹ From this perspective, international organizations (IOs) have not only been crucial to the integration of markets and infrastructures, but they have also ‘helped mitigate conflicts that go along with the expansion of the industrial systems [….] Their history is part of the dialectic between capitalism and alternative ways of organizing economic and political life’.Footnote ² Indeed, a historical materialist approach to IOs as evolving from the co-constitutive functioning of capitalism’s laws of motion and agents’ politics unfolds new pathways for understanding stability and change in the world order.

Unsurprisingly, the law’s place in capitalist social relations have been at the core of the Marxist literature in international law. Two main camps have emerged: the ‘form camp’ and the ‘content camp’. The former argues that liberal (international) law by form abstracts from historical social relations by treating groups in different relations to the means of production (in terms of ownership, access, and accumulation of surplus value) as juridically equal and as such enables the reproduction of the capitalist relations of production.Footnote ³ Those in the ‘content camp’ take issue not with the ‘form’ of law but with the ways in which the content of law comes to embed the interests of the capital and the ruling class.Footnote ⁴

While the literature produced within both camps has greatly contributed to the study of capitalist social relations, the discipline of international law would benefit from going beyond the narrow realm of ‘law’ and engaging with the broader landscape of production relations, and elements such as the structure of the world order, processes of capitalist expansion, and hegemony, amongst others. Most notably, international lawyers have historically viewed the capitalist state as a homogenous category, losing sight of different trajectories of Anglo-American capitalism (laissez-faire capitalism) and the mainland European, Asian, and African capitalism (state capitalism) and what such variations in socio-political ordering mean for the form and content of international law.

This chapter borrows from historical materialist International Relations (IR), and particularly the works of the Dutch IR scholar Kees van der Pijl, to argue that capitalist social relations reproduce on the ground through not only commodification but also socialization or mitigating the dislocating effects of the capitalist mode of production. Across territories, capitalism expands through the struggles between two modes of organizing production relations: laissez-faire and state capitalism. The history of IOs since the mid-nineteenth century should, indeed, be seen in the context of such struggles. More specifically, the organization of production relations by the market in laissez-faire capitalism tends to peripheralize non-capitalist territories leading to the organization of production relations by emerging ethno-national bureaucratic vanguards (state capitalism) and geared towards territorially confined accumulation. After discussing these premises, the piece empirically engages with them in the context of three historical developments in the post-1945 period, capturing the flow of manufactured commodities and raw materials as well as the machinery of such flows, i.e. marine logistics. The three histories are: liberalization of global telecommunications, the rise of open shipping registries in the transport of raw material, and the mass logging of tropical forests. The idea is not to offer full historical accounts, but rather to re-construct the three histories through the proposed framework.

Capitalism’s Laws of Motion and the Making of the International Relations

For IR historical materialism, the history of the modern international relations has been a history of political and impersonal struggles between two developmental variations of state/society complexes: Lockean and Hobbesian, as referring to two rather distinct political theories prescribing different modes of organization of production relations. The term ‘Lockean’ refers to John Locke’s Two Treatise of Government and ‘Hobbesian’ to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil.

As the famous story goes, modern international relations emerged at the end of the Early Modern times or the late seventeenth century, and was marked by a transition from kin-based papal-monarch authority-territory towards impersonal administrative-juridical state apparatus exercising exclusive authority over certain territory.Footnote ⁵ The rise of petty commodity production and the decline of feudal regimes of accumulation in England was followed by the 1688 Glorious Revolution, the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, and the maturing of a capitalist class out of the aristocracy who went on to invest in commercialized lands and domestic production. These material and social transformations gave birth to a Lockean state/society, marked by a small government, a self-regulating market, and an entrepreneurial individual.Footnote ⁶ In the Lockean mode, ‘production is organized organically and without interference from public authority’; state is subordinated to the bourgeoisie society, and its primary role is to protect ‘the independence of relations of production’.Footnote ⁷ Mass immigration from England and colonization of the New World extended the English historic bloc to other territories.Footnote ⁸ In parallel, British foreign policy moved away from territorial expansion towards maintaining a certain configuration of power in the pre-capitalist Europe to enable the creation of new spheres of production and exchange by English capitalism.

To tackle peripheralization caused by the de-territorializing nature of Lockean capitalism, a series of from-above or bourgeoisie revolutions gave birth to another form of state/civil society complex in contender states such as France in the aftermath of the 1789 French Revolution and throughout the 1800s. France transformed from a pre-capitalist agrarian society with disparate and overlapping territorial claims into an absolutist regime pursuing territorially confined capitalist accumulation, before the 1848 Revolution paved the way for a republic. Similar transformations materialized in Prussia/Germany, Japan, Russia/USSR, and China, amongst others.Footnote ⁹ In the Hobbesian state/society complex, a strong state is put in place, and it is the sovereign rather than the capital that commands the organization of production relations in line with ethno-nationalist objectives. Territorially confined accumulation in the Hobbesian periphery is intended to overcome the temporally delayed capitalist advancement while ensuring survival in a ‘transnational space dominated by the Anglo-Saxon ruling class’.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet, after the Second World War, mainland Europe underwent transformation again. As the US-led IOs such as the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation dismantled the Hobbesian mode of capitalism in mainland Europe in favour of laissez-faire capitalism, the rise of ethno-national states in Asia, Africa, South America and the rest of the developing world became the harbinger of a new wave of Hobbesian state/society complexes.Footnote ¹¹

While different in socio-political organization, Lockean and Hobbesian state/society complexes are both formed around centralized ownership and control of means of production and similar processes of capitalist advancement. How does capitalism develop?

Capitalism moves across time and space and transforms social relations around means of production through commodification and socialization. Commodification involves subjugating the use value of things to an exchange value, through a ‘constantly in the making’ social activity that detaches the thing from the natural and historical condition.Footnote ¹² Commodification and the dislocating effects it generates necessitates socialization (Vergesellschaftung). Socialization involves creating social coherence on the margins of the dominant mode of production, for example, by managing labour antagonism, ecological externalities of industrial production, and creating a shared image of production relations.Footnote ¹³ The need for socialization lies in the fact that ‘[u]nder the discipline of capital and the commodity form, the real subjects cannot execute the planning/normative function for themselves [which has] evolved into a special task of a special category of functionaries subordinate to the ruling class – the cadres’.Footnote ¹⁴ The post-1945 histories of liberalization of telecommunication networks and services, the rise of open shipping registries in the transport of raw materials, and the expansion of the global tropical timber trade are histories of not only continuous commodification and socialization but also broader struggles between the Lockean and Hobbesian state/society complexes, shaped by episodes of resistance against the de-territorializing nature of laissez-faire capitalism, followed by its ultimate victory.

Liberalization of the Global Telecommunications: The Defeat of the Hobbesian Mode

The post-World War II history of liberalization of the global telecommunication regime as developed in and beyond the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has been a history of the defeat of the statist telecommunication in mainland Europe and most of the developing world by the Lockean end-to-end telecommunications, where the laying of networks and delivery of services followed supply and demand and not national strategies set by the state. Liberalization of telecommunication networks and services in the last quarter of the twentieth century involved a decade-long process of commodification of what used to be characterized as ‘utilities’, followed by new rules and institutions to integrate nationally organized telecommunication sectors into the privatized global telecommunication regime, while also managing privatization anxieties amongst the masses in and beyond the developing world.Footnote ¹⁵

Since the mid-nineteenth century, when the first transboundary telegraph networks were laid, all the way through to the mid-twentieth century, telephone and telegraph services were delivered by state-owned telecommunication enterprises. The International Telegraph Union (IT), the predecessor of the ITU, was established by the initiative of the nephew of Napoleon, Bonaparte III of France, in 1865 to institutionalize the reign of national telecommunication administrations, and as part of the broader European project for a transition to industrial capitalism.Footnote ¹⁶ The Union was intended to act as an ‘international cartel of national telegraph agencies’.Footnote ¹⁷ For almost a century, the organization of networks was viewed as a sovereign choice, and under the ITU’s operational norms, members states were protected against competition by each other’s telecommunications administrations, equipment manufacturers, or operators based in their territories.Footnote ¹⁸ Crucial to nation-building, telecommunication infrastructures also became one of the first assets to be nationalized in post-colonial Asia and Africa.

While the ITU institutionalized the material capability of public-owned telecommunications in mainland Europe, the organization of telephony and telegraphy was different in the Lockean state/society complexes, most notably the United States and the United Kingdom. They relied on telephone monopolies at home (AT&T and British Telecom) while maintaining different models of international telephone services abroad. Due to the private ownership of their telegraph networks, neither of the two countries became founding members of the IT. The UK, however, joined the Union in 1868 when it nationalized its domestic telegraph, and to represent its interests in India.Footnote ¹⁹ The 1868 Convention adopted by the Vienna Plenipotentiary Conference also made it possible for companies to accede to the convention without being able to take part in standard setting.

The pace of technological advancement in the post-1945 US telecommunications, caused partly by the country’s recent war effort but also by the Cold War, introduced a new level of political and impersonal pressure against the Hobbesian global telecommunication order and the normative infrastructure underpinning it. To respond to companies’ telecommunication needs, the ITU’s 1949 Telephone and Telegraph Regulations allowed the lease of telegraph circuits to one company from another.Footnote ²⁰ However, inter-company resale of the telephone circuits remained prohibited. In a few years, the 1956 Recommendations allowed a ‘multiple-user lease’ by different private entities engaging in the same activity or in the same business. Yet, the Recommendation banned connection to public networks, imposed a surcharge on the leased traffic, and mandated that calls using leased circuits ‘must be concerned exclusively with the personal affairs of the subscribers or those of their firms’.Footnote ²¹

All these developments materialized as the newly independent states in Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s had begun to pose a challenge to the status quo in the ITU. They contested the historical position of the ITU as a mere forum for industrialized countries’ public telecommunications administrations or private telecommunications operators to compete for favourable rules and standards – what the US delegate once called ‘the old boys club’.Footnote ²² They called for restructuring the ITU to allow the development of an overarching telecommunications policy and a strong secretariat to assist the Global South in developing their national telecommunications sectors along the Hobbesian lines.Footnote ²³ In other words, they sought to tackle the threat of a Lockean global telecommunication order through intergovernmental intervention geared towards promoting and protecting statist telecommunication. The upcoming neoliberal turn in global telecommunications, however, soon rendered their visions of self-sufficiency obsolete.

What triggered privatization and deregulation of networks and services was the advent of the satellite and digital telecommunication technologies in the Lockean heartland, the growing pressure from the US administration for liberalization of global telecommunication, but also the de-territorializing nature of laissez-faire capitalism as travelling across networks and services. The commercial use of satellites for telecommunications was made possible by the positioning of satellite systems in the geostationary orbit (GEO). The first satellite to transmit voice signals was launched from the US in December 1958. With the establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration the same year, a series of projects to develop satellite technology started.Footnote ²⁴ The potential for mass commercial use created a strong incentive for the US administrations to shape the path. In 1962, the US Congress set up the Communication Satellite Corporation (COMSAT) as a private corporation. However, in 1962, the Kennedy administration turned COMSAT into an intergovernmental organization with weighted voting called INTELSAT. Seventy-four nations joined. Circumventing the one-nation-one-vote ITU, INTELSAT soon became an exclusive club of existing and rising satellite powers, where investment shares determined the voting power.Footnote ²⁵ The organization of the space regime around private capital had implications beyond space. It generated new geographies of accumulation for large firms and multinationals.

In parallel, the marriage of digital technologies with telecommunications, commercialized in the 1960s, became an important source of change.Footnote ²⁶ The change from ‘analogue’ to ‘digital’ transformed both switching and transmission in telecommunication networks, allowing cheaper operation of networks and growing user base in the long term. Scrambling for the vast opportunities generated by digitalization, large American firms and multinationals lobbied for liberal telecommunications networks on an end-to-end basis so they could access networks on their own terms but also circumvent the surcharge they paid to subsidize national telecommunications. Starting in the mid-1970s, some mainland European public telecommunications operators unsuccessfully sought to contain the pressure of liberalization by upgrading their networks.Footnote ²⁷

The first salvo against the ancien régime was finally fired by the US Federal Communications Commission in 1980, when it unilaterally extended the US’ rules on resale and sharing of networks with private firms to international services, in violation of the consensus built into the Recommendations of the Consultative Committee for International Telephony and Telegraphy (CCITT) for almost a century.Footnote ²⁸ The AT&T was also broken up into multiple firms by the US court, triggering a search for global markets by the US manufacturers and service providers.Footnote ²⁹ The UK followed suit and so did Japan and gradually mainland Europe. With changing material capability, ideas and institutions had to also change. The same year, the US requested the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Trade Committee to study trade barriers in services. The US Coalition of Service Industries, represented by Citibank, played a substantial role in the process.Footnote ³⁰ The final OECD report, as well as another study carried out by GATT, demonstrated good prospects for negotiation on liberalization of trade in services.Footnote ³¹ Four years later, twenty-five OECD member states expressed their resolve to include trade in services in the upcoming Uruguay Round and negotiate the expansion of such trade ‘under conditions of transparency and progressive liberalisation’,Footnote ³² against the wish of twenty-three developing countries.

This essentially meant a decline in relevance of the ITU and its Hobbesian logic, in favour of GATT and the Lockean end-to-end telecommunication order, underpinned by a de-territorializing entrepreneurism. To catch up with the pressure, the Union opted for change.Footnote ³³ The 1982 Plenipotentiary Conference in Nairobi reproduced a 1932 provision from the Union’s Constitution into the ITU Convention, requiring a change also in the operational rules such as Telephone and Telegraph Regulations and Recommendations. The ‘special arrangements’ clause had stipulated, ‘[t]he High Contracting Parties respectively reserve the right of making separately, between them, special arrangements of all kinds, on service points that are not of interest to the generality of States …’.Footnote ³⁴ As liberalization of telecommunications was being discussed by the GATT Uruguay Round, the 1988 ITU World Administrative Telegraph and Telephone Conference in Melbourne revised the International Telephone and Telegraph Regulations to recognize the right of the member states to retreat from the collective and open their networks to foreign capital, and providers to choose to deliver services to the public. The new regulations also made international rates ‘cost-based’.Footnote ³⁵

Breaking away from its century-old function to coordinate the work of national telecommunication administrations, the Union’s Secretariat also began not only to assist developing countries in revising their national laws to allow access and foreign direct investment (commodifying public-owned networks and services), but also to manage broader anxieties around liberalization of infrastructure by promoting narratives of entrepreneurship and competition as inducive to development.Footnote ³⁶

As ITU revised its rules in Melbourne, the Uruguay Round negotiations in Marrakech adopted the 1994 GATS Agreement along with an Annex on Telecommunications. The annex targeted value-added services such as data, image, and video. It committed Member States to give access to ‘any service supplier of any other Member’ for the ‘use of public telecommunications transport networks and services on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions’.Footnote ³⁷ Foreign service providers were given the right to ‘establish, construct, acquire, lease, operate, or supply telecommunications transport networks or services’ in a member state’s territory should they agree.Footnote ³⁸ Restrictions were allowed only to ensure the ‘technical integrity of network’, only if they were necessary and not just a disguise to influence the competition.Footnote ³⁹ Basic telecommunication, i.e. voice telephony, was kept out of the agreement. But not for long! The impersonal pressure of Lockean organization travelled across not only geographies but also technologies. The Marrakech meeting adopted a document titled ‘Decision on Negotiations on Basic Telecommunications’ with a timeline for negotiation of liberalization of telecommunications. In a sharp move, fifty-seven governments acceded to a reference paper that committed them to putting in place competitive safeguards and providing access to markets ‘with interconnection at any technically feasible point in the network’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Forty-seven of these countries also committed themselves to offering immediate access to their basic telecommunications.Footnote ⁴¹ On 15 February 1997, the WTO Agreement on Basic Telecommunications opened ‘the biggest chunk of the global market’, accounting for 93 per cent of the telecommunication networks across the globe.Footnote ⁴²

Rise of Open Shipping Registries: The Reign of the Lockean Mode

Unlike the global telecommunication regime, norms and processes of world shipping have emerged and evolved around laissez-faire capitalism since the rise of modern long-haul shipping in the nineteenth century. In the post-1945 era, open shipping registries in the transport of raw materials (bulk shipping) became a vivid manifestation of the organization of production relations by supply and demand, destabilizing what was historically known as national shipping. Although the system came to be challenged in the 1950s through to the 1970s by the proponents of the Hobbesian shipping order who favoured a national link between vessels and flags (and the crews and trade they carried), the 1980s neoliberal turn rendered aspirations for nationally organized marine logistics obsolete, culminating in the victory of open shipping registries.

The growth of the world shipping into a modern and rationalized industry in the nineteenth century (as opposed to the pre-modern shipping carried out by state-sponsored monopoly trading companies and dominated by piracy and mercantilist under-pricing) was the product of revolutionary technological developments in England.Footnote ⁴³ The construction of steam-powered vessels running on coal-generated steam engines and propellers enabled long-haul trips, followed by the adoption of standardized practices, tariffs, and rules within the European economic system. Although the normative foundation for ‘freedom of the sea and navigation’ was laid three centuries prior,Footnote ⁴⁴ the material infrastructure for a liberal shipping order, underpinned by self-regulation and rationalized norms and practices, was concretely laid following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the challenge of mercantilism in the Hobbesian mainland Europe. Britain’s naval hegemony between the mid-nineteenth century and the Second World War meant norms, institutions, and practices governing long-haul shipping formed around Lockean self-regulation, mostly in London insurance and indemnity clubs, and without much interference from states.Footnote ⁴⁵ One of the earliest maritime institutions, Comité Maritime International (CMI), was set up by European lawyers in 1897 to integrate commercial and maritime law to bring ‘stability and security in the relations between the men who commit themselves and their belongings to the capricious and indomitable sea’.Footnote ⁴⁶ CMI developed authoritative rules on bills of lading, liens, mortgages, and tort cases arising from collisions or stowaways – all forming the corpus of admiralty law – which were automatically accepted by governments.

In the post-WWII era, the transport of raw materials or ‘bulk shipping’ – as opposed to ‘cargo shipping’ concerned with carriage of packaged and manufactured commodities – became an emblem of organization of production relations by the market, competition, and comparative advantage. Bulk vessels carry unpackaged materials with low value to weight ratio (crude oil, refined oil, liquid natural gas, iron ore, timber, and grains, amongst others), shipped from a specific producer to specific buyers. While the cargo sector has historically been dominated by European shipping firms that formed cartels (shipping conferences), the sea transport of raw materials for most of the twentieth century materialized in a free market and was reigned over by American oil majors and other multinationals that integrated extraction, processing, transport, and marketing of raw materials. As marine wages and industry standards increased the costs of shipping in the Atlantic area, a large portion of the bulk vessels including oil tankers flagged out to Panama, Liberia, Honduras, and Costa Rica, amongst others.Footnote ⁴⁷ In times of good business, the cheapest tankers and crews and relaxed flags helped bulk firms gain an upper hand in the market, and in times of bad business (for example in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis), they became crucial to compensating the financial loss.Footnote ⁴⁸ Flags of convenience, however, became the object of contestation between, on the one hand, the US, American firms, and open registry states, and, on the other hand, traditional maritime states in Europe witnessing the decline of their national shipping and the new and developing world facing major hurdles in developing national maritime sectors to carry their trade.

Although the self-regulatory underpinning of world shipping could pose structural hurdles to intergovernmental intervention, the range of international shipping bodies set up by allies to coordinate merchant shipping during the war years created an amicable atmosphere for the creation of an IO on the margins of the private shipping enterprise. More importantly, the US-led campaign for trans-nationalization of production and exchange and the explosive rise in marine traffic for that purpose required socialization and managing externalities such as oil pollution on the seas. Moore called this ‘maintaining a modicum of security and mopping up the mess around the enclaves of wealth extraction’.Footnote ⁴⁹ It was in this context that the Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization (IMCO) was set up with an altered mandate. Article 1 on ‘purposes of the organization’ carefully delineated the tasks of the IMCO on the margins of Lockean shipping. Paragraph (a) read ‘to provide machinery for co-operation among, Governments in the field of governmental regulation and practices relating to technical matters of all kinds affecting shipping engaged in international trade and to encourage the general adoption of the highest practicable standards in matters concerning maritime safety and efficiency of navigation’. As the oil spills such as the 1967 Torrey Canyon came to reshape the fate of the oceans in the Golden Age of Capitalism, the IMCO’s gained an even higher relevance in restoring social coherence to the oceans. The organization helped develop the 1973 International Convention for the Prevention of the Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) and the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, which set new safety standards for bulk shipping, without undermining its transnational modus operandi.Footnote ⁵⁰

Outside the IMCO, however, the very organization of open shipping registries came under attack by mainland European and later developing states in international courts and institutions, but also on the shores of the industrialized world by labour strikes.Footnote ⁵¹ The challenge was initially posed by a bloc of traditional maritime states such as the Netherlands and Norway but also the UK whose national shipping industry and labour were losing to the laissez-faire modus operandi of flags of convenience shipping. Earlier in the 1950s, the International Law Commission became a battleground for the definition of ‘genuine link between the vessel and flag’. The output was the 1958 UN Convention on the High Seas, which recognized the right of states to fix the conditions of their shipping registries on their own, but required ‘a genuine link between the State and the ship’ by way of effective exercise of jurisdiction and administrative control.Footnote ⁵² As the IMCO was beginning its work in 1959, another legal conflict arose: should states with open shipping registries be considered among the ‘largest ship-owning nations’ for the purpose of membership in one of the organization’s most important bodies, the Maritime Safety Committee. A request for advisory opinion was made to the International Court of Justice in 1960, in response to which the court stood by the laissez-faire spirit of freedom of navigation and the right of states to decide conditions of their shipping registries.Footnote ⁵³ By the end of 1960s, Liberian and Panamanian flagged vessels had grown from 15 million gross tonnage to 32 million.Footnote ⁵⁴ Soon enough, the recession of the late 1960s and oil crisis of 1973 resulted in rapid flight to the flags of convenience to save the profitability rate.Footnote ⁵⁵

While traditional maritime states in Europe were gradually moving in the direction of improving the operation of flags of convenience vessels as opposed to phasing them out, antagonism was growing amongst the new and developing countries.Footnote ⁵⁶ Although they accounted for 90 per cent of the raw materials carried by tankers in the post-1945 era, they owned only 6 per cent of the bulk market.Footnote ⁵⁷ To promote national shipping and a world shipping order in that direction, in the early months of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), a shipping committee was set up in a coup-like move by the Secretariat and developing countries, with a mandate to conduct studies on world shipping and potentially develop regulatory frameworks in support of the Global South’s national shipping.Footnote ⁵⁸ This was part of the broader efforts within UNCTAD to tackle laissez-faire capitalism underpinning the work of Bretton Woods institutions through promoting state developmentalism.Footnote ⁵⁹ From the late 1970s through to the early 1980s, the Group 77 in UNCTAD advocated for an international treaty that could phase out open registries in the bulk sector through a gradual transfer of ownership or employment of national crews. Yet, as the North–South negotiations over terms of global economy collapsed in the early 1980s, the efforts for an anti-flag of convenience treaty resulted in a feeble instrument that sufficed to improve the link between open shipping registries and flagged out vessels, while promoting the increasing share of the rest of the developing world in bulk transport.Footnote ⁶⁰ Titled the ‘1986 UN Convention on Conditions of Registry of Ships’, the convention sought to combine the right of states to decide the conditions of their shipping registries and neoliberal principles of efficiency in world shipping,Footnote ⁶¹ with interventionist measures such as the ‘strengthening the genuine link between a State and ships flying its flag’.Footnote ⁶² In that direction, the convention required the recruitment of a satisfactory portion of crews from the nationals of the flag states and increased ownership and management of bulk firms by nationals of the flag states, and as such the document came to accept the foundation of open shipping registries.Footnote ⁶³ By the time the convention was opened for ratification, the opposition from UNCTAD’s Secretariat and Global South governments to flags of convenience had declined, as open registries were becoming the norm in transport of raw materials and the Global South itself was being integrated into neoliberal narratives of entrepreneurism.Footnote ⁶⁴ The convention has yet to enter into force.Footnote ⁶⁵ The momentary Hobbesian challenge to the Lockean world of shipping and the efforts to restore national shipping failed to disrupt the centuries-old foundations of laissez-faire on the global ocean.

Mass Logging of Tropical Forests: The Rise of the Hobbesian Mode

Just as mainland Europe created the ITU to institutionalize the state’s control over infrastructures in the mid-nineteenth century, the creation of the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) from the mid-1960s through to the mid-1980s, amidst the rise of the global tropical timber trade, was the product of post-colonial states in the tropics seeking to institutionalize their reign over resources and encase mass extraction through aid and trade. As GATT, alongside other Bretton Woods institutions, came to promote the supremacy of the market and price in socio-political ordering, so UNCTAD and the international commodity agreements developed under its auspices and as part of the broader movement for a New International Economic Order were intended to tackle laissez-faire capitalism through state developmentalism. The struggle for ‘permanent sovereignty over natural resources’ and growth for that purpose were ultimately premised on commodification.Footnote ⁶⁶ Yet, while those gathering around the NIEO agenda opposed any retreat from economic growth and environmentalism without the reform of the international economic order in the 1970s and 1980s, the growing anxieties around tropical deforestation but also the ascent of neoliberalism in the 1990s came to render the Global South’s militancy against liberal environmentalism obsolete, making way for the ‘sustainable forest management’ in and beyond the ITTO and the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). But where did the ITTO come from?

Soon after its creation in 1964, UNCTAD occupied itself with the development of international commodity agreements in response to the ongoing fall of commodity prices and the deepening laissez-faire underpinning of the global economic ordering as organized by the Bretton Woods institutions. UNCTAD’s approach to the South’s commodity challenge was famously shaped by the theory of commodity prices developed separately by the Argentinian economist and the first executive director general of UNCTAD Raul Prebisch and the German economist and future UN staff Hans Singer.Footnote ⁶⁷ The theory argued that the price of commodities since the 1940s, and in general, tends to decline faster than the manufactured products; that specialization in primary commodities were not conducive to industrialization – as claimed by many industrialized countries in the broader global division of labour. The way to break free from the unequal exchange between the two worlds was to undergo an episode of state-assisted extractivism and intergovernmental intervention to finance import-substitution industrialization.Footnote ⁶⁸

In 1966, UNCTAD’s Integrated Programme for Commodities (IPC) was set up ‘with a view to improving the terms of trade of developing countries and … eliminate the economic imbalance between developed and developing countries’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The IPC was intended to increase the capacity of the developing world in producing and marketing their raw materials, increase the prices, and enable processing at home countries for that purpose. Timber was the last item on the 18-item agenda and was added at the request of Congo Basin countries, which had been unsuccessful in establishing timber industries at home. As the process was becoming slow, Japan – the biggest consumer of tropical timber – tabled a resolution at the UN General Assembly for an international tropical timber agreement in 1983.Footnote ⁷⁰ Two preparatory meetings were held in Geneva and the International Tropical Timber Agreement (ITTA) came into being.Footnote ⁷¹ Reflecting a vivid Hobbesian logic, Article 1 of the ITTA read, ‘for the benefit of both producing and consuming members and bearing in mind the sovereignty of producing members over their natural resources’. Reflecting a pure logic of commodification, Article 2 restricted the work of the organization to ‘tropical timber’ and ‘promoting the expansion and diversification of tropical timber trade’. The provision created a material and ideological structure whereby ‘forests’ could only be dealt with in the form of ‘extracted timber’ destined for global markets, and questions of forest ecologies or forest-dwelling communities were excluded. ITTO was established as a commodity organization with weighted voting, which meant the largest timber producing and consumer countries had the highest vote in deciding not only the terms of the global tropical timber trade but also the extent of sustainable production.Footnote ⁷² In Colchester’s words, ‘the more a country destroyed tropical forests, the more votes it got’.Footnote ⁷³

The ITTO’s early years revolved around tapping into new forests and lesser-known species, based on pre-project and project proposals developed by the producing countries or the Secretariat. Forty-two projects for promotion of tropical timber were already approved during the negotiations within UNCTAD. Sawmills were funded, wood villages were built, and loggers were trained in sawing difficult species and seasoning mixed species, amongst others.Footnote ⁷⁴ Headquartered in a business skyscraper in Yokohama, Japan, and directed by the former deputy director of Malaysian forest department Freezailah Che Yeom, the ITTO functioned as a hub for a diffusion of Japanese and Southeast Asian entrepreneurism and state developmentalism – embedding what Cumings called a ‘Bureaucratic Authoritarian Industrializing Regime’ – to tropical Africa and South America.Footnote ⁷⁵ The Secretariat embarked on a path of producing knowledge on marketable breeds, available timber reserves, and production capacity.

Yet, as the 1990s drew close, the commodification logic of the organization had to be accompanied with some degree of conservationism. Deforestation in Southeast Asia and South America, particularly the Amazon forests, and the impact of the ongoing debt of tropical countries on their forests had created global anxieties. Just in the 1980s, the global annual rate of logging had increased from 11 to 17 million hectares. To contain the fears, the ITTO began commissioning several expert reports on ways to manage the ecological externalities of logging without undermining the logic and scale of industrial logging,Footnote ⁷⁶ and as preparations for the 1992 UNCED took off the ground, the ITTO’s Council adopted a declaration that committed the organization in a non-binding manner to ensuring that ‘the total exports of tropical timber products should come from sustainably managed resources by the Year 2000’.Footnote ⁷⁷

UNCED became a battleground between developing countries, led by Malaysia and Brazil, insisting on old rhetorics of ‘permanent sovereignty over natural resources’ and proponents of liberal environmentalism in the North, calling for ‘sustainable forest management’ and an international treaty on tropical forests. The Bush administration, specifically, viewed a forest convention as a low hanging fruit to catch up with the pressure of environmentalism at home, while using tropical forest conservation as an alternative to carbon emission education.Footnote ⁷⁸ More specifically, the initiatives around UNCED reflected a shift from the 1970s narratives of ‘limits to growth’ towards ‘managing ecological crises’ on the margin of the market and without retreat from the growth. It was ultimately the spirit of free trade and the ongoing GATT Uruguay Round that set the limit to environmentalism. Instead of an international treaty, the summit finally opted for a weaker instrument titled the Non-Legally Binding Authoritative Statement of Principles for a Global Consensus on the Management, Conservation and Sustainable Development of All Types of Forests (known as Forest Principles), which blended tropical states’ extractivism with some degrees of liberal environmentalism in tropical forests. The adoption of the declaration was followed by renegotiation of the ITTA, the founding instrument of the ITTO, in 1994 to recognize ‘sustainable forest management’ and with the objective to ensure sustainability of globally traded timber, a lousy goal that the organization continued to grapple with in the years that followed.Footnote ⁷⁹

The retreat from ‘absolute sovereignty’ was part of a broader neoliberal shift in the South’s politics within UNCTAD following the Eighth Conference in Cartagena, Colombia in February 1992. The Conference adopted the ‘New Partnership for Development’ which acknowledged the role of private enterprise and free market in the South’s economic growth,Footnote ⁸⁰ what Lemoine characterized as ‘the offering by the developing countries of the olive branch and its acceptance by the developed countries’.Footnote ⁸¹ UNCTAD’s move away from the NIEO militancy was followed by the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Jakarta in September 1992, where, in the shadow of the breakdown of Yugoslavia and the debt problem, a collective decision was made to move towards ‘a constructive North/South dialogue based on interdependence, mutual interest and shared responsibility’.Footnote ⁸² With juridification of global free trade in the 1990s, one can argue that both developing states’ demands for a New International Economic Order and the industrialized world’s compromised environmentalism were ultimately subsumed into neoliberal entrepreneurism and crisis management.Footnote ⁸³

Conclusion

While historical materialist approaches to international law have long unblackboxed the nature and function of ‘law’ in capitalist social relations and the ‘Rule of Law’ at the core of the liberal politics for that purpose, the ‘state’ as a socio-material structure has yet to become a central problematique in Marxist international law. IR historical materialism and historical sociology from the works of the proponents of the Uneven and Combined Development and the Amsterdam School on European integration to the neo-Gramscian IR all offer rich ways of reconceptualizing IOs and the international law by essentially reasoning from local relations of production up to the world order and IOs.Footnote ⁸⁴ This chapter sought to introduce, rather briefly, such ways of thinking into international institutional law by arguing that capitalism moves in times and space, transforming social relations around means of production through constant commodification and socialization. Beyond the ground-level, the world order and IOs for that purpose have been and continue to be shaped by struggles between two modes of capitalist social relations: one grounded in the organization of such relations by the market (and embedding a de-territorializing logic of advancement) and the other rooted in the organization of production relations by bureaucratic vanguards, along ethno-national lines and geared towards territorial regimes of accumulation.

I sought to demonstrate these dynamics by scrabbling around three histories from post-WWII regimes of flow of manufactured products, raw commodities, and marine logistics. I argued that liberalization of telecommunications, the rise of flags of convenience in world shipping, and the mass logging of tropical forests in the post-WWII era reflected not only the continuous oscillation between commodification and restoring social coherence through standard setting, but also the struggles between laissez-faire and state capitalism, ending in the gradual yet ultimate victory of the former as underpinned by the supremacy of the market in socio-political organization since the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Introduction

A recent Special Issue on resilience in the EU and international institutions observes that ‘[r]esilience is one of those terms that seems to have appeared out of nowhere to be present everywhere: from billboards advertising “resilient skincare” to think tank policy talks about the need for more resilient critical infrastructures, and environmentalist calls for resilient planetary eco-systems’.Footnote ¹ Indeed, resilience has become the buzzword or mantra of World Bank sustainable development policies; OECD recommendations for economic development and disaster management; international organisational approaches to supply chain governance; World Health Organization approaches to physical and mental health; the approaches to urban development of the International Committee of the Red Cross and United Nations; and development and disaster management strategies and national security policies in the UK, USA, EU, and elsewhere. This chapter begins from the premise that vocabularies matter in international law, as ‘ideologies’ in the ‘technical sense of reifying, making seem necessary or neutral something that is partial and contested’,Footnote ² and in international relations, as disciplinary mechanisms of control and often structurally biased means of governance.Footnote ³ Accepting the view that ‘resilience sits precisely at the crux of governmentality and political economy’,Footnote ⁴ it is possible to analyse ‘resilience talk’ as an essential element in the movement away from multilateral, institutional governance, towards the self-help system of self-regulating subjects under neoliberalism.Footnote ⁵ This chapter submits that resilience talk is often a hegemonic force that depoliticises and naturalises deep structural inequalities in the governance activities of international organisations and law. The language of resilience both instantiates and reflects the language, logic, and inherent crises of capitalism. By asking the critical political economy questions of ‘who gets what’ from resilience talk and just ‘whose resilience’ are we talking about, the chapter explores resilience as both an ideology and a material force in new constitutional governance.Footnote ⁶ The language of resilience has become the legal and governance common sense of the day, obscuring the underlying conflicting social forces created and advanced by new constitutionalism.

New constitutionalism differs in many ways from the old constitutionalism, but the most salient characteristic of contemporary new constitutional governance is the commitment of global leaders to the expansion of capitalism and the privileging of private, market-based means of capitalist appropriation as the grundnorms of global governance.Footnote ⁷ New constitutionalism, like the old or traditional understandings of constitutionalism, associated with the rule of law, limitations on governmental power, and equality before the law, is committed to the rule of law. However, this commitment is to law of a specific form: it is capital’s law that can blow both hot and cold, hard and soft, depending upon the needs of capital.Footnote ⁸ As a mechanism of new constitutional discipline, the language of resilience deepens global capitalism, both intensively and extensively, through the hegemony of neoliberalism, the privatisation and the individualisation of responsibility, and the preservation of hierarchies of power and domination as the common-sense foundations for law and good governance. The chapter makes the case for destabilising and disrupting this discourse and practice as a necessary move in revealing the class, gender, racial, and intersectional operations of resilience talk in order to humanise important institutions of global governance.

The chapter begins with a discussion of new constitutional governance, outlining the contours of a critical political economy approach to international organisations and law.Footnote ⁹ Analysis then shifts to document the various and multiple illustrations of the promotion of resilience by various actors, institutions, and legal texts engaged and implicated in global governance. The final section addresses what critical political economy has to offer to our understanding of the interests and purposes served by ‘resilience talk’ in global governance and makes the case for disrupting and challenging its hegemonic significance as ‘common sense’ by an appeal to transformative ‘good sense’.

Critical Political Economy and New Constitutionalism

Adopting a critical political economy approach, the relationship between law and capitalism is here analysed as a new constitutionalism that often operates by subordinating the public domain to the disciplines of the private sphere of transnational capital accumulation. By definition, new constitutionalism refers to a combination of processes involving: the emergence of a de facto constitutional governance structure for the world market; the neoliberal restructuring of states according to the juridical demands of market civilisation;Footnote ¹⁰ locking-in mechanisms, such as trade, investment, and financial laws, which support neoliberal accumulation; informality and flexibility in non-binding legal regulation; and the interpellation of the neoliberal subject in the development of the commodity form of law as the template of global governance.Footnote ¹¹ While each process will be addressed in turn, critical political economy asks ‘who gets what?’ and ‘whose interests and purposes are served?’ through law under a new constitutionalism that obscures and shields foreign and transnational corporations from accountability, while locking states into legal commitments that continue to advance private transnational capital accumulation.Footnote ¹²

As mentioned earlier, the new constitutionalism refers to the uneven emergence of a de facto constitutional structure for the global political economy. This development has largely coincided with the global expansion of capitalism since the 1980s and the pursuit over the past few decades by many states and associations of neoliberal policies and constitutional reforms, both domestically and globally. The new constitutionalism is further reflected in a proliferation of neoliberal trade and investment frameworks, such as the US, Mexico, Canada Free Trade Agreement, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the international investment regime, and in legal and institutional changes in macroeconomic policy, exemplified by politically independent central banks and currency boards. Changes in public service provision involving the privatisation of education, healthcare, and many other aspects of life are linked to neoliberal trade and investment frameworks and treaties, such as the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)Footnote ¹³ and the global intellectual property regime,Footnote ¹⁴ and are subordinated to the demands and regulatory power of transnational business corporations. The new constitutionalism increasingly informs bilateral and multilateral trade and investment agreements, and other economic, social, and environmental policy frameworks.Footnote ¹⁵ It is redefining politics and governance globally and, in the terminology of the World Bank, involves locking in states to neoliberal frameworks of capital accumulation.Footnote ¹⁶ Neoliberalism is a ‘theory of political economic practices proposing that human well-being can best be advanced by the maximisation of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterised by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade’.Footnote ¹⁷

The new constitutionalism is increasingly significant in shaping global public policy, in ways that may have long-term effects on the ontological and epistemological bases of constitutionalism, as well as more broadly on institutions of social reproduction associated with public services, care, and education.Footnote ¹⁸ In this regard, it provides the template for contemporary economic, social, and political regulation and entails the acceptance by society of the expansion of commodification through legal protection of private property rights as natural, rational, and common-sense modes of governance that serve the common interests of all, both the governors and governed.Footnote ¹⁹ Private appropriation becomes constitutionalised through law and state as a public good. Through new constitutionalism, the communal protection of private property rights becomes a natural and organic accompaniment of global production and exchange.Footnote ²⁰

The commodity form of law is central to new constitutional governance. Evgeni Pashukanis,Footnote ²¹ building upon Karl Marx’s critique of political economy, believed that law is inextricably linked to capitalism and is in fact itself a product of capitalism, functioning as an integral part of the commodity system: the commodity form of law is homologous with the commodity form of capitalism and mediates political interests.Footnote ²² The commodity form of law reinforces capital and is legitimated through the misrecognition of law as impartial, just, rational, and operating between juridically equal subjects. Law is therefore deeply imbricated in capitalism and its resulting relationships of power. To Pashukanis, this imbrication is predicated on the formation of the legal subject as the holder of legal rights as an abstract, impersonal, and, ultimately, juridical person. In fact, in recognising the juridical subject, capitalism assumes its legal character through the legitimation of exchanges of commodities as formally equal commodity owners: one party the owner of labour and the other the owner of surplus value, engaged in free exchange.Footnote ²³ But to Marx and Pashukanis, this assumption of juridical equality masks the profound inequality that inheres in the very fabric of capitalist relations between owners and producers. Importantly, it is the role of new constitutionalism to obscure this inequality and render it invisible in the formation of common sense.

Indeed, critical political economy offers important insights into the constitution of common-sense meanings. It recognises that capitalism does not simply reproduce itself of its own accord, but requires certain attitudes, institutions, and apparatuses to enable its continuing reproduction and expansion.Footnote ²⁴ Theories of the State recognise the analytical distinction between functions of accumulation and legitimation, recording the need of capitalist states for material, institutional, and normative or ideological reproduction. Robert Jessop, for example, differentiates between the ‘accumulation strategies’ of a state and its ‘hegemonic project’, suggesting that achieving the material conditions for capitalism is insufficient, for these conditions must be generally accepted by society.Footnote ²⁵ Jessop articulates understandings of hegemony inspired by Antonio Gramsci and the idea that the dominant class achieves dominance or ‘hegemony’ through the combined influence of coercion and consent. Gramsci believed that hegemony, the process by which the ruling class establishes the conditions necessary for achieving leadership, could not be secured solely through coercion, but required the ideological capture of popular support. This involves the acceptance and internalisation by the masses of the interests and values of the ruling class as their own. Indeed, as Adam Morton observes, ‘hegemony is the articulation and justification of a particular set of interests as general interests. It appears as an expression of broadly based consent, manifested in the acceptance of ideas and supported by material resources and institutions.’Footnote ²⁶

The acceptance by civil society of relations of dominance is thus a crucial dimension of hegemony. So too is the work of the ‘organic intellectuals’ who facilitate the internalisation of the interests of the ruling class as the common interest and, indeed, as the ‘common sense’ of the time. Antonio Gramsci observes that the acceptance by the masses of the dominant ethos as ‘common sense’ is not a result of ‘self-deception [malafede]’ but ‘the expression of profounder contrasts of a social historical order’ associated with its subjugation as a group.Footnote ²⁷ It is organic intellectuals of the day who are able to generate the acceptance by the masses of the interests of the ruling class as ‘common sense’. Moreover, law is the ‘instrument for this purpose’.Footnote ²⁸ Indeed, organic intellectuals are able to garner both the ‘spontaneous’ consent of the masses and the legal enforcement of coercive discipline. In this latter respect, Gramsci regarded the law and legal institutions as playing a particular role in producing common-sense understandings under-girding hegemony.Footnote ²⁹ Law becomes the mechanism for authorising the framing of private interests as public interests and as common sense. Although Gramsci wrote very little about law, his fragmentary analysis of law coupled with his understanding of hegemony inspires a praxis conception of law of great relevance to this analysis.Footnote ³⁰ This conception derives from Gramsci’s theorisation of Marxism as a philosophy of praxis: as a unity resulting from the dialectical development of contradictions between theoretical and practical activity. Gramsci contemplated this unity as ‘immanent’ in capitalist society and as realisable through practices informed by critical inquiry.Footnote ³¹ The role of the organic intellectual is linked to the processes of establishing the hegemony or leadership of the dominant social forces. The process of achieving hegemony and ‘colonising the internal world of the dominated classes’ involves three related developments in which organic intellectuals and law play leading roles: universalisation, naturalisation, and rationalisation.Footnote ³² Universalisation involves the representation by the dominant group of its private interests as common and public in nature, while naturalisation and rationalisation concern processes of reification that present the existing order as fully consistent with the natural and rational order of things. Law facilitates these processes by interpellating individuals as equal legal subjects, obscuring their actual subordination and inequality, and rationalising this appearance as part of the universal and natural order of things.Footnote ³³ These processes may be achieved through trasformismo, being the absorption of opposition into the dominant group,Footnote ³⁴ which involves the work of organic intellectuals who ‘perpetuate the existing way of life at the level of theory’ as the rational and natural order of things.Footnote ³⁵

Resilience talk and the experts who cultivate and advance it through the work of international organisations and law are the organic intellectuals who naturalise and rationalise resilience as the best practice in global governance. They facilitate the interpellation of the subjects of resilience planning as ‘neoliberal subjects’ and active participants in the reproduction of capitalism and many of the conditions causing severe crises in capitalism in the first place.Footnote ³⁶ In doing so, expert international lawyers are instrumental in the construction of hegemony, perhaps unwitting participants in the creation and maintenance of neoliberal hegemony. For example, international intellectual property lawyers who are advancing climate resistant seeds as the solution to climate change may be regarded as promoting the resilience paradigm and the common sense of adapting to, rather than resisting or trying to abate, the climate crisis. They are thus enabling climate capitalism to proceed as business as usual and possibly contributing to corporate concentration in the seed industry, which is threatening global food security.Footnote ³⁷ The discussion will turn to consider how resilience is becoming the common sense in global governance of the climate change crisis, sustainable development, and disaster and refugee management strategies. These crises and disruptions are all interlinked in various ways to a deeper crisis in the production and reproduction of global capitalism.

Resilience Talk in Global Governance

Notable common tendencies in each of the resilience strategies adopted by international organisations considered here are the trends toward the enhanced role of technical experts in global governance, the deformalisation of law through the predominance of ‘soft law’,Footnote ³⁸ and the management of crises in capitalism through the application of what Robert Cox refers to as ‘problem-solving theory’.Footnote ³⁹ Problem-solving theory is differentiated from ‘critical theory’ in that the former takes the world as it is with its existing power structures, while the latter seeks to transform the world and challenges existing hierarchies of power and authority. Resilience theory has its origins in multiple disciplines in the attempt to deal with risk management. It is ‘concerned fundamentally with how a system, community or individual can deal with disturbance, surprise and change’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Ecosystem stability, engineering infrastructure, psychology, the behavioural sciences, disaster reduction, supply chain regulation, and multilateral aid organisations are just some of the areas adopting resilience theory into their programming. The goal is to ‘ensure that shocks and stresses, whether individually or in combination, do not lead to a downturn in development progress’ and economic growth.Footnote ⁴¹ The focus on risk management and reduction and ensuring the continuity of economic expansion and growth is consistent with what Henk Overbeek refers to as the ‘reformist’ turn in global governance from a ‘transformist rallying cry’ in the late 1970s, to rule by technocratic experts and ‘the global rule of capital’ geared to ‘the management of neo-liberal globalisation’.Footnote ⁴² Today global governance is ‘increasingly informalised’, ‘based on self-regulation by private forces’ and ‘predicated on a constitutionally anchored legal basis’:Footnote ⁴³ the new constitutionalism. As we turn to examine examples of resilience governance it becomes apparent that they are connected in different ways to a deeper crisis of capitalism on a planetary scale.

Phillipe Bourbeau provides an excellent overview of the adoption in the social sciences of the resilience framework and notes that ‘[t]he United Nations, together with several international organisations and non-governmental organisations, has invoked resilience as a new organising principle’ to address human suffering and reduce the costs of emergency responses.Footnote ⁴⁴ The World Bank identifies building resilience as essential to achieving the goals of ‘ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity’ by integrating the risks of climate change and disaster relief into development initiatives.Footnote ⁴⁵ The World Health Organization similarly regards resilience building as at the ‘core’ of its Health 2020 vision, while resilience building is integrated as well in United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.Footnote ⁴⁶ In fact, adaptation to climate change,Footnote ⁴⁷ sustainable development,Footnote ⁴⁸ disaster relief,Footnote ⁴⁹ climate migration management,Footnote ⁵⁰ and the management of crisis-related supply chain disruptionsFootnote ⁵¹ provide the most notable and growing imbrications of resilience-oriented global governance strategies and mechanisms into the foundations of capitalism, in both local and global political economies. As Julian Reid observes, the ‘resilient subject is one which presupposes the disastrousness of the world, and likewise one which interpellates a subject that is permanently called upon to bear the disaster’.Footnote ⁵² The grafting of resilience strategies onto sustainable development policies by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)Footnote ⁵³ integrated neoliberal rationalities into sustainable development projects and was a complicated process that is beyond the scope of this chapter.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, the upshot of the process is the framing of sustainable development, not as a question relating to the security of the individual, but rather one relating to the adaptability of the individual. The resilient subject is thus ‘not a secure but an adaptive subject;’Footnote ⁵⁵ a subject that accommodates itself to the existing order and its existing power structures and ‘not a subject which can conceive of changing the world, its structure and conditions of possibility’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Indeed, the resilient subject is considered the ‘new ethic of responsibility’ for disaster management and championed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).Footnote ⁵⁷ But critics question the suitability of a theory developed in addressing natural systems to social systems and highlight how resilience theory, rooted as it is in neoliberal, market-based, technical managerialism, erases ‘the role that large scale social, economic and political processes play in shaping resilience’, depoliticises solutions, and ignores gendered and intersectional dimensions of existing power structures in the communities subject to resilience policies.Footnote ⁵⁸ In law, resilience talk forecloses the development of alternate possibilities. In the context of the climate resistant seeds discussed earlier, the resilience adaptation model forecloses legislation regulating corporate concentration in the seed industry or regulations limiting the sorts of seeds that can be patented and, ultimately, fails to address the underlying problems and risks to the environment and to global food security.Footnote ⁵⁹

Michael Mikulewicz illustrates how resilience-based development in Liberdade, a community on a small island in the Gulf of Guinea that is subject to impacts of climate change droughts, floods, and rising sea levels, is promoting resilience amongst the new leaseholder farmers. However, the resilience strategy developed by the UNDP rested upon the privatisation of agriculture and failed to provide the necessary agricultural support for the farmers as well as adequate investment in the project. As a result, there was complete failure to address the specific development needs of the people and the underlying structural inequalities relating to social, gender, and racial inequalities. As the state retreated from the countryside, the farmers were left to UNDP managers who excised these structural problems ‘from the resilience formula’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Stephanie Wakefield, in a study of efforts to address rising sea levels in Miami Beach, emphasises the conservative nature of climate change resilience policies in urban environments that ‘do not counter or transform existing social or economic urban relations. Instead, they attempt to extend and maintain existing relations into the future.’Footnote ⁶¹ They thereby ‘secure and manage an unchanging urban order’ dedicated to ‘maintaining Miami Beach’s current socio-economic order’ premised upon tourism, high-end real estate markets, and luxurious lifestyles.Footnote ⁶²

Margherita Pieraccini shows how resilient legal strategies, involving customary, property, and environmental laws enacted to protect the common property area of Regole d’Ampezzo, Italy, in fact obscure underlying gendered power relations.Footnote ⁶³ These laws sustained gender inequality by preventing women from inheriting rights and participating in management of the region, prompting the author to call for a politicised understanding of the legal regime.

The political economy dimension of resilience talk is vividly illustrated by its impact on climate migrants. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 2010 recognises mobility as an adaptive strategy for climate change and the Paris Agreement echoed this recognition and called for concrete recommendations. The result was the Guidance on Protecting People through Planned Relocations from Disasters and Environmental Changes and Operational Guidelines, both soft law initiatives developed by legal experts and representatives from international organisations and states to assist states and organisations in addressing displaced persons.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, the treatment of displaced persons through the adaptation and resilience framework has reconceptualised migration as a solution to the problems of disaster and climate change, rather than as a result and consequence of the failure to mitigate these very problems in the first place. This reconceptualisation shifts the terrain of legal discourse, lenses, and solutions from one concerning threats of harm that need to be addressed and solved in the context of mitigating climate change, to one of adaptation to and management of climate change. Indeed, this treatment reflects a ‘turn from a discourse of “climate refugees”, in which the organisations perceive migration as a failure of both mitigation and adaptation to climate change, to one of “climate migration”, in which organisations promote mitigation as a strategy of adaptation’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Moreover, ‘the growing mantra of resilience in climate policy and politics’ and ‘the more recent narrative on “migration as adaptation” appears to displace justice claims and inherent rights in favour of a depoliticised idea of adaptation that relies on the individual migrant’s ability to compete in and benefit from labour markets’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The concept of ‘climate refugee’ has been displaced by the concept of ‘climate migrant’, signalling the ascendance of neoliberal reconfigurations of the problems of climate change and disaster management.Footnote ⁶⁷ Once a refugee subject to the catastrophic effects of failures to mitigate climate change and possessing rights to security and (reparative) justice, the migrant is reconfigured as a resilient subject/worker with a duty to self-actualise the potential to manage and adapt to the crisis by integration as a migrant into the work force of the receiving state and contribute to the development of the home state by sending regular remittances home. The climate migrant is thus inserted into the global circuit of capital as a valuable source of remittance income through an expert policy discourse conducted in global governance circles.Footnote ⁶⁸

Indeed, international organisations have been very active in promoting the climate migrant/worker concept. The UNEP, the International Organisation of Migration, the United Nations University, and the Munich Re Foundation created an alliance – the Climate Change, Environment and Migration Alliance – in 2008 to ‘mainstream environmental and climate change initiatives into migration management policies and practices, and to bring migration issues into global environmental and climate change discourse’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In fact, the promotion of climate migration by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) is ‘a defining feature of this organisation’Footnote ⁷⁰ and a central site for the development of expert discourses on climate migration resilience.Footnote ⁷¹

The shift from climate refugee to climate migrant was accompanied by another subtle shift away from hard treaty law to soft laws and domestic policies. As Romain Felli observes, ‘[n]o longer should the environmental migrant be located conceptually within the realm of international law and legal categories, as he comes to be surrounded by an ensemble of deformalised norms, and practices, such as “soft laws”, advice, capacity-building practices, etc.’Footnote ⁷² In fact, international migration law is characterised by the predominance of soft law arrangements at the bilateral, regional, and international levels, although there are a few international treaties.Footnote ⁷³ Felli associates this shift to deformalised norms with a shift away from ‘the language of international law’ and ‘reparative justice’ to a language of ‘strategic individuals with an entrepreneurial ethos’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Felli also regards the shift as part of a deeper process of primitive accumulationFootnote ⁷⁵ that reconfigures the political economies of predominantly Southern states, dispossesses their climate migrants from the means of production, and subjects labour to precarious conditions of employment. It is important to note that this shift and these processes are instantiated through law and have profound legal consequences for those dispossessed through climate change.

In my view this shift is an example of the commodity form of law at work. Migrants are reconfigured and interpellated by soft law initiatives as resilient neoliberal subjects as they are injected into the global political economy of migrant labour. Indeed, the World Bank presents migration as adaptation through remittances of goods or money to a migrant worker’s home state as a positive consequence of climate migration, while the IOM promotes temporary, circular labour migration and ‘income diversification through remittances’.Footnote ⁷⁶ The World Bank estimates that global remittances for 2020 were US$651 billion,Footnote ⁷⁷ while the IOM 2020 Annual Report details the funding of over sixty-two countries in the development of migrant worker schemes.Footnote ⁷⁸ Problematically, circular labour migration introduces ‘extreme flexibilisation’ into migrant labour and as a consequence labour unions worldwide and even the International Labour Organization have denounced migrant worker schemes, which Felli argues ‘turns these migrants into an activity productive for the accumulation of capital. Climate change is thus harnessed toward the reconfiguration of social relations in a capitalist form.’Footnote ⁷⁹

Nicola Phillips identifies the promotion of migration as a development strategy and a form of accumulation by dispossession that inserts migrant workers from the South into transnational supply chains through the provision of labour. This strategy creates conflict between migrant workers and national workers by putting downward pressure on wages and leads to the extreme flexibilisation of labour.Footnote ⁸⁰ As noted by others, this form of migration management ‘is fundamentally about making migration economically beneficial, notably by connecting the supply of labour in the less-developed South with the migrant workers in the North’.Footnote ⁸¹ Felli calls for a reconsideration of how the conception of the climate migrant naturalises and depoliticises the politics of climate change, the dispossession it works, and the legal forms involved, to which attention turns.

Disrupting ‘Common Sense’ in Global Governance

Critics of resilience talk argue that resilience strategies are essentially reactive and function to shift development assistance responsibilities (as well as responsibilities for climate change mitigation, disaster relief, and so forth) away from states, international organisations, and business corporations and onto individuals, who are expected to achieve development as resilient neoliberal subjects. A study of the reception of Syrian refugees into Jordan and Lebanon under the guise of resilience frameworks reveals that very little development resulted for either the refugees or the host states and the framework is better regarded as a strategy to keep migrants out of the European Union.Footnote ⁸² Sarah Sharma notes that ‘resilience is a reactive neoliberal policy tool implemented by the World Bank in urban spaces of the global South in both the transition from the Washington and post-Washington Consensuses and the rise of the climate crisis on the international development agenda’.Footnote ⁸³ She further notes that ‘[r]esilience policies call for individuals to brace themselves, build up strength, and bounce-back from so-called exogenous shocks and stresses’.Footnote ⁸⁴

Resilience strategies are a form of neoliberal discipline and new constitutionalism. They deliver significant power and authority to technocratic experts and obscure underlying socio-political-economic causes of poverty, insecurity, and inequality. Attention is shifted away from providing solutions to the underlying causes of insecurity and inequality, such as the failure to achieve climate change mitigation, toward technocratic adaptation, management, acceptance, and normalisation of crises as something that requires adaptation. Resilience talk is, in the end, a form of post-politics that has evacuated the ‘political’ in favour of technical, economic, and managerial reason with profound implications for local and global political economies. Indeed, Mark Neocleous argues that resilience has colonised ‘the political imagination’: ‘resilience is by definition against resistance. Resilience wants acquiescence, not resistance. Not a passive acquiescence, for sure, in fact quite the opposite. But it does demand that we use our actions to accommodate ourselves to capital and the state, and the secure future of both, rather than to resist them.’Footnote ⁸⁵

How might we destabilise and dislodge resilience talk in global governance laws and institutions? The first step is to problematise the relationship between law and resilience thinking. Problematisation involves recognising that ‘[l]egal structures, principles, and processes, as well as core concepts of the rule of law, impinge on the capacity of societies to manage ecosystems, withstand environmental degradation as well as economic shocks’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The next steps involve ascertaining how law affects these systems and identifying its positive or negative effects.

I believe that scholars of international law and organisation have a particular role to play in problematising the resilience paradigm of governance, as what Antonio Gramsci would call the ‘organic intellectuals’ of global governance. International lawyers, as legal experts, give shape to the norms and practices that articulate and, indeed, constitute the ‘common-sense’ foundations of global governance. Located at the intersection of national and transnational capitalist systems, they function to represent their disciplinary consensus as ‘normal’, transmitting it through society, consensually, as ‘common sense’. But as David Kennedy has noted, in doing so they believe that they ‘advise, they interpret, but they do not rule’ and they ‘sustain their self-image [as neutral experts] by locating the “political” elsewhere’.Footnote ⁸⁷ As experts they are engaged in technical management, not governance. However, as Kennedy argues ‘we need to relativise our idea of “international governance” more radically’, because there is ‘very little’ in political life that is not better understood ‘as the work of experts and the product of expertise’.Footnote ⁸⁸

We might begin by contesting the work of legal experts of resilience talk by first recognising that ‘common sense’ is precisely that: common opinion as framed by legal expert opinion makers. It is not ‘good sense’ as Gramsci conceived of it in terms of understandings accompanying transformative political praxis. Governance through good sense contemplates self-reflexivity as well as conscious recognition of and moral and ethical engagement with contesting social forces. It begins, as Kennedy notes, with asking ‘who wins and who loses’ in resilience policies and programmes.Footnote ⁸⁹ This directs attention to the political economy of resilience, the ‘who gets what’ in resilience politics, and the class, gender, and intersectional power relations embedded in the legal norms and structures. It also involves delving into the ‘politics of consciousness’ by examining the underlying ‘shared assumptions’, ‘blind spots and biases’ of resilience experts.Footnote ⁹⁰ Contestation involves going beyond problem-solving theory in approaching crises, like those of climate change and climate refugee/migrants, to engage in critical theory by focusing on the purposes and interests served by resilience talk. Crucially, this involves a recognition that the politics of resilience does not lie elsewhere. The challenge is not about discovering cracks or openings in resilience talk, but recognising as critical theory reveals, that the cracks and openings are always already there, because dominant understandings require continuous articulation in order to remain dominant and there is always opening for contestation in this process.

Hegemony is a process and one that requires continuous reinforcement, justification, and legitimation. International lawyers must acknowledge their crucial role in the construction of hegemony and not acquiesce in assumptions that are taken for granted as the legal common sense of the day. The challenge is to critically examine the assumptions upon which law operates; to interrogate the relationships between law, capitalism, and humanity. They/we cannot, and, indeed, must not, seek shelter behind distinctions between law and politics, public and private, here and there. The investigation must interrogate the political, economic, and social consequences of the dominant legal forms of our time.

Introduction: Or Else What?

Where can one find the United Nations (UN) and its sister international institutions? As an international organisation (IO) with a ‘universal’ reach,Footnote ² the UN – just like international law – seems to be both ‘everywhere’ and ‘nowhere’.Footnote ³ Elsewhere in this volume, I have tried to answer this question by highlighting that IOs always have to function somewhere – and, as such, issued a plea for the study of their geographically situated and materially embedded sites in international institutional law.Footnote ⁴ Departing from this premise, in what follows I want to take this a step further to think about the entanglements of these institutions with what, following Du Bois, one could call the ‘global colour line’.Footnote ⁵ With this, I make reference to the ways in which the institutions of international order pivoted on notions of racial hierarchy and white supremacy, including some peoples (while excluding others) within the bounds of the ‘international community’.Footnote ⁶ As Obregón and others have shown, the quest of international order has long been haunted by the echoes of a nineteenth-century conception of ‘civilised peoples’ that has served to exclude and constrain non-European participation in the ‘family of nations’.Footnote ⁷

Indeed, given that the UN and its sister institutions were forged in the ideological crucible of what Hobsbawm has called the ‘Age of Empire’,Footnote ⁸ it would be easy to assume that they were unable to play a role in challenging the global colour line. And yet, as Mazower has shown, the fact that the UN had been created in the image and likeness of ‘imperial internationalism’ did not prevent a cast of generations of non-European and racialised international lawyers to flock to its hall to attempt to create a post-colonial international order from within the very belly of Empire.Footnote ⁹ This is what Sayward has called the UN’s ‘Nehruvian moment’;Footnote ¹⁰ or what Moyn has understood as the ‘high tide of anticolonial legalism’.Footnote ¹¹ For some readers, the label of the first generation of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL I) lawyer-diplomats might a be more familiar monicker.Footnote ¹² What matters is that, in all of these attempts to rethink and challenge the global colour line, the UN played a salient role: either as an actor to ally with, as a source of (material and ideological) resources, or as a forum to dispute in.Footnote ¹³

In this chapter, I show this by focusing on the relations between the polity of Ethiopia and the institutions of international ordering – the UN and its predecessor, the League of Nations (‘the League’), chief among them.Footnote ¹⁴ For, if we look closely at one of the sites where the UN fashioned a shell for itself in the city of Addis Ababa,Footnote ¹⁵ we can see that the Ethiopian elites understood that the UN (with all of its flaws) had to play a protagonist role in the struggles to come. Let us turn, then, to the central panel of the stained-glass tryptic The Total Liberation of Africa, of 1959 (Figure 15.1).

Figure 15.1 A White Knight in Shining Armour?Footnote ¹⁶

Designed by the Ethiopian artist Afewerk Tekle after winning a competition and under the supervision of Emperor Haile Selassie I, this three-part stained-glass window constituted the central artwork of the new building ‘Africa Hall’.Footnote ¹⁷ As the edifice was erected to host the new UN Economic Commission for Africa and to provide the continent with a proper site for high-level diplomatic encounters, its design and construction was carefully supervised by the Ethiopian establishment with the purpose of dazzling local, regional, and international audiences alike. Here, tucked in the corner of the panel, we can find the UN. But the portrayal is quite particular: this IO appears as a white knight, clad in European armour and a daunting longsword. All the other figures are dark-skinned and ‘wear traditional Ethiopian costumes, because it is felt by the Artist that Ethiopia should occupy this leading place’ in the decolonisation of Africa.Footnote ¹⁸ But the White Knight, the sole European of the composition, with the UN’s blue emblem in his chest, appears as a symbol ‘of what the United Nations stands for and of Africa believing and appreciating its justice and willing[ness] to cooperate in the support of its ideals and aspirations’.Footnote ¹⁹

This chapter traces the lofty promises, and resounding disappointments, that the UN (as a proverbial White, and male, Knight) offered the racialised peoples of the world – and Ethiopia, in particular – in their attempt to challenge the global colour line. The result is neither a blind celebration of the UN’s anticolonial potential, nor a resolute condemnation of its imperial lineage.Footnote ²⁰ Instead, I want to embrace the ambiguities offered by the metaphor of this racialised and gendered saviour trope – especially in relation to the racialised savage non-European other.Footnote ²¹ For in any attempt to overturn the global colour line, the UN will prove to be both utterly indispensable and insufficient. To argue this, I show how the Ethiopian polity engaged with the treacherous figure of the White Knight of international ordering, (2) from the pre-modern era all the way to the so-called (3) interwar period, and (4) the post-war age of the UN. This allows me to (5) conclude with some remarks on the limits of taking Ethiopia as a representative polity of the racialised peoples of the world.

In Lewis Carroll’s rendition of this trope, Alice finds herself hostage to an unwanted session of poetry-reading by a towering White Knight.Footnote ²² After he appears to rescue her from (another equally unwanted) Red Knight, Alice falls under his ‘protection’ until she is ready to emerge as an independent queen – that is, a ‘sovereign’.Footnote ²³ In the meantime, she is exposed to his technological inventions and mavericks – including a poem that is ‘very, very, beautiful’.Footnote ²⁴ The White Knight proudly claims that ‘[e]verybody that hears me sing it – either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else’.Footnote ²⁵ ‘Or else what?’ retorts Alice. ‘Or else it doesn’t, you know’ replies the Knight.Footnote ²⁶ Either way, Alice was about to hear it! The Ethiopian polity, like Alice, quickly realised that once one falls under the White Knight’s ‘protection’, one might as well enjoy his poetry – what else? But like Alice, Ethiopia did not remain passive through its encounter with the White Knight. She remained always with one eye fixed towards the imaginary border that separated her from her sovereign crown.Footnote ²⁷ With this metaphor in mind, we now turn to the story of Ethiopia’s encounter with the ‘World of White Knights’ and their international institutions.Footnote ²⁸

The Kingdom of ‘Prester John’: Early Modern Fluidity in Interpolity Ordering

‘Before the West’, as Zarakol reminds us, notions of interpolity order looked quite different.Footnote ²⁹ During the Early Modern era, the self-identification of the elites of the Ethiopian Solomonic Empire as ‘an isle of Christians surrounded by a sea of pagans’ made religion, rather than race, the key marker of their approach to foreign affairs.Footnote ³⁰ As early as the thirteenth century, Ethiopian pilgrims and merchants have found their way to the courts of the leading European polities, especially those with ports on the Mediterranean sea.Footnote ³¹ The first properly documented diplomatic visit sent by an Ethiopian emperor to the Venetian court happened in 1402, opening the door to the ‘first age of Ethiopian-European diplomacy’.Footnote ³² Animated by the myth of a remote eastern kingdom that had been created by a lost Christian Priest-judge (‘Prester John’), the Early Modern Europeans were generally friendly towards the Ethiopian overtures and treated them as ‘peers’.Footnote ³³ Indeed, they both shared an ‘interest in military alliance against Muslim powers’ and an ecumenical desire for religious dialogue.Footnote ³⁴ By the sixteenth century, this reproachment reached its climax as Portuguese forces intervened in favour of the Ethiopian sovereigns in its war against Adalite and Ottoman Muslim forces – leading to a period of sharp Jesuit influence in the region.Footnote ³⁵

What matters for the purposes of this chapter is that, before the ‘modern’ era, Ethiopians were not seen as beyond the pale of the European family of nations, but rather as long-lost Christian cousins awaiting to be brought back into its fold.Footnote ³⁶ Records of the arrival of an Ethiopian delegation in Lisbon in 1514 show that their hosts asked a slew of questions related to their ‘written laws, law courts and magistrates […] written history, […] taxes […] and proper styles of clothing and social distinction’ as the Europeans sought to make sense of the shared practices of their Christian equals.Footnote ³⁷ But as Pagden has shown, the ‘discovery’ and conquest of the Americas increasingly complicated (and racialised) the terms of encounter between Europe and its others.Footnote ³⁸ As Salvadore notes in relation to the story of an Ethiopian noble who sought refuge and was welcomed in the highest echelons of European secular and religious society in the seventeenth century, ‘race defined him in death, but not in life’.Footnote ³⁹ With this, he makes reference that it was only later (in tandem to the introduction of racialised African slavery in the Americas) that an increasingly fixed notion of race began to trump Christian brotherhood in the European imagination.Footnote ⁴⁰ By the late Renaissance, Korhonen notes that the proverb ‘to wash an Ethiopian white is to labour in vain’ was ‘repeated so frequently […] that it was understandable even when either half of the sentence was omitted’.Footnote ⁴¹ Indeed, on the eve of the Age of Revolutions and ‘Modernity proper’, the ‘rather exceptional European attitude toward slavery […] – specifically, its association with the concept of race’ had now fully consolidated.Footnote ⁴²

This had important consequences for interpolity diplomatic relations. As Sluga has shown, the ‘invention’ of international order that occurred in 1815 (in the wake of the post-Napoleonic restoration) tended to ossify conceptual borders – at least in comparison to a ‘relatively diverse aristocratic cosmopolitan brotherhood’.Footnote ⁴³ While the Ethiopian establishment continued to pursue diplomatic relations abroad across the Mediterranean, this was ‘only grudgingly conceded by Europe [… and this same right] was denied to powerful African states of the time like the Asanthi and the Zulu’.Footnote ⁴⁴ By the late nineteenth century, Ethiopia had gone from Christian peer polity to a potentially conquerable ‘savage’ entity – and it increasingly found itself ‘between the jaws of hyenas’ of its former Christian cousins.Footnote ⁴⁵ Shortly after the European great powers formalised the rules for the partition of Africa,Footnote ⁴⁶ the Ethiopian polity inflicted a resounding blow on the encroaching Italian colonial army at the battle of Adwa of 1896.Footnote ⁴⁷ Like the rising Japanese Empire (which, in turn, defeated the Russian Empire militarily in 1905), the Ethiopian elites understood that to be a ‘sovereign’ in the Modern era military and industrial might were indispensable.Footnote ⁴⁸ While Ethiopia could have been recognised as an equal, even if ‘black’, Knight in the fifteenth century because of its common faith, on the eve of the Great War in the twentieth century it was clear unless it was ready to brandish its sword it would fall under European ‘protection’. The nineteenth century, in this sense, constitutes a turning point in the relations between Europe and the Christian, but non-European, world.Footnote ⁴⁹ The same, as the secondary literature has shown, was true of the Ottoman Empire and other polities that suddenly found themselves to be ‘quasi-sovereign’ after centuries of (at least nominal) equality with European rulers.Footnote ⁵⁰

The Great(er) War: Ethiopia and the League of Nations

Indeed, as an Ethiopian ‘quasi-sovereign’, Lij Iyasu was an unlikely victim of the upheavals of the Great War of 1914.Footnote ⁵¹ The prefix Lij is used in Ethiopian Amharic to denote a child of royal blood, which was fitting because Iyasu was never crowned, as such, due to his young age. He had been appointed as successor to Menelik II (the emperor who had defeated the Italians at Adwa) in 1909, and in that capacity attempted to rule amidst the palace wars of the period. But the declaration of an actual war in Europe, kilometres away, eventually led to the coup that deposed the young Iyasu in 1916. Given that he had been trained by a German tutor and was widely rumoured to sympathise with the Central Powers, a pro-Allied faction of local notables deposed him (arguing that it was a just a matter of time until the Crown Prince converted to Islam as an apostate and joined the Central Powers in their war effort).Footnote ⁵² He was replaced by an ambitious Crown Prince, who would eventually be crowned in 1930 as the Emperor Haile Selassie I.Footnote ⁵³ Given that his rise to power was directly related to interpolity intrigues, it is not surprising that the new emperor would ‘concentrate on Addis Abeba [his capital …] and foreign affairs, around which he would build his authority’.Footnote ⁵⁴ This led him to undertake a European ‘grand tour’ in 1924, which culminated with the troubled accession of his polity to the new IO created in the wake of the war and international law’s move to institutions: the League.Footnote ⁵⁵

And yet, Ethiopia’s membership of the League was always tenuous – Getachew understands this as a ‘burdened and racialised’ membership.Footnote ⁵⁶ Famously, the Japanese had been unsuccessful in their attempt to enshrine a racial equality provision in the Versailles peace settlement, with important consequences for the institutions created there.Footnote ⁵⁷ As I have noted elsewhere reviewing some of the literature on non-European participation in the family of nations, ‘territorial statehood is always precarious and unstable, constrained to the fulfilment of imperial standards of race; civilization; development; alien/human rights’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In this particular context, it imposed a series of institutional obligations on Ethiopia vis-à-vis the League in relation to slavery and the slave trade.Footnote ⁵⁹ With the establishment of the League in 1919, one of its tasks had been to supervise the management of conquered colonial territories, which were given as ‘mandates’ to the victorious allies.Footnote ⁶⁰ Due to Ethiopia’s racialised membership, its situation was almost closer to the non-self-governing mandates than to its peers among the European and Latin American polities, as the system offered ‘little more than colonialism by another name’.Footnote ⁶¹ Most famously, Ethiopia’s member status did not prevent its brutal invasion by another ‘peer’ (Italy) in 1935 – an event that, for Du Bois, proved that despite the League’s lofty promises, the world was run by those who pinned ‘their faith on European civilization, the Christian religion and the superiority of the white race’.Footnote ⁶²

And yet, the institutional set-up of the League (both for the mandates and for Ethiopia as a quasi-sovereign member) offered opportunities for those who sought to challenge racial hierarchy in international order through international order. Du Bois, who had participated in the League’s first General Assembly in 1920, believed that it could play a central role for anti-racist activism on behalf of both African-Unitedstateseans and colonised Africans.Footnote ⁶³ Indeed, even Haile Selassie I never lost his faith in the League. As the Italian armies encroached his homeland, he departed towards exile in the UK. But not before he went to Geneva to personally address the League in 1936.Footnote ⁶⁴ While he was ultimately unsuccessful,Footnote ⁶⁵ the League ‘provided a formal stage’ where the emperor performed the dances of (quasi)sovereignty.Footnote ⁶⁶ Even if the White Knight’s ‘protection’ was but a fig leaf, the League offered a place where its treacherous ways could be called to account. Indeed, when he reconquered the capital city of Addis Ababa at the helm of his ‘Gideon Force’ in 1941 with the support of his British allies as part of the UN military alliance against Fascism, Haile Selassie I (as many in his generation) drew from the experience of the League’s ‘failure’ lessons for the new post-war order.Footnote ⁶⁷

The First ‘Ally’: Ethiopia and International Order in WWII

Like Alice in Wonderland, Ethiopia was rescued by the White Knight during WWII. And yet, it would soon discover that the ‘protection’ of the ‘White’ UN was not too dissimilar from the occupation of the ‘Black(shirt) Knight’. The wake of the Ethiopian Liberation campaign of 1941 had left the country as a thinly veiled British protectorate,Footnote ⁶⁸ in which the emperor’s patriots were but ‘grudgingly recognised as allies’.Footnote ⁶⁹ At first, key imperial policymakers sought to treat Ethiopia as a conquered Italian possession – some even aspired to create a united British East African colony as a post-war trusteeship territory ruled from Nairobi.Footnote ⁷⁰ Even after some autonomy was devolved to the emperor’s quasi-sovereign government, the British held on to the Somali-inhabited area of the Ogaden and the former Italian colony of Eritrea was war conquests. Moreover, the rump state was forced to use the East African shilling as its national currency (until 1945) and almost all the Italian industrial infrastructure was duly looted by its British ‘allies’.Footnote ⁷¹ The emperor remained ‘aware that his country was as much occupied as liberated’ and ‘remained doubtful of British intentions’.Footnote ⁷² Indeed, with friends like these, who needs enemies?

The emperor, who had neither forgotten (nor perhaps forgiven) Geneva, turned to the promise of a new international order to fight for his polity’s sovereignty. Like many peoples of the colonised and occupied world – both seen as racialised by either the Allied imperial or Axis war machines – the promises issued by the Atlantic Charter in 1941 and the Declaration of the United Nations in 1942 offered a glimpse of hope.Footnote ⁷³ If all people had, pursuant to the clause three of the Charter, ‘a right to self-determination’, this had to be true both for the polities militarily occupied by the Fascist powers (say Poland and Ethiopia), and perhaps even for the whole colonised world. This expectation gained even more momentum when, in 1945, the military alliance of the UN was formally institutionalised into a new ‘universal’ IO – and one, moreover, that enshrined equal rights and self-determination of peoples as one of its cardinal values.Footnote ⁷⁴

In this spirit, as soon as he retook the capital, Haile Selassie I wrote to the US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) arguing that Ethiopia should be seen as the first liberated polity of the UN alliance.Footnote ⁷⁵ FDR reciprocated by inviting the emperor to meet him personally aboard the USS Quincy near Cairo, where he would stop after the Yalta conference of 1945.Footnote ⁷⁶ From then onwards, the US became a key supporter of Ethiopian independence. Ethiopia, in turn, committed fully to the UN (being, with Egypt and Liberia, the only three independent African countries that participated in the San Francisco Conference of 1945) and to the idea of the US-led international order.Footnote ⁷⁷ Translating words into deeds, the Ethiopian army answered the military call of the UN by sending its forces to peacekeeping operations in Korea (1950) and the Congo (1960).Footnote ⁷⁸ This gambit paid off, as it was untenable for the British to colonise a (nominally) equal ally and fellow UN member. As a British colonial officer noted, ‘the fact that we surround [Ethiopia] and could in the old days have squeezed [it] flat with very little difficulty, is of course irrelevant in the age of Lake Something’.Footnote ⁷⁹ This is a reference to ‘Lake Success’ – where, as we saw in my earlier chapter in this volume, the UN had its interim headquarters during this period.Footnote ⁸⁰ The ambiguities of the White Knight, here, appear in their full colours.

Of course, this change in the nature of the liberal international order had more to do with the vanquished than with the victors. Given that the Axis powers had made racial superiority a central banner of their war effort, the allies included an ‘equality of race’ provision in their post-war settlement.Footnote ⁸¹ The inclusion of this, however, was not without frictions. Indeed, as I noted elsewhere, the Soviet Union ‘rarely lost an opportunity to embarrass its erstwhile allies by highlighting the persistence of racial discrimination in the US to critique the use of the trope of “civilization” by European empires’.Footnote ⁸² Indeed, colonial powers frequently invoked the cover of sovereignty to shield themselves from UN criticism over entrenched racial hierarchies – with, of course, South Africa being the most obvious example.Footnote ⁸³ Immigration policy was – and continues to be – a thorny issue in our allegedly post-racial world.

And yet, at the same time that the UN’s notion of sovereignty provided cover for racialised hierarchies, it also created opportunities for those who wanted to challenge the global colour line. The General Assembly, in particular, became a key site of struggle – especially as the increasing tempo of decolonisation added more and more formerly colonised peoples to its ranks.Footnote ⁸⁴ In time, this IO – and its family of institutions, UNESCO in particular – has developed a series of mechanisms and procedures to highlight the persistence of racial discrimination and the unfulfilled promises of the post-war settlement.Footnote ⁸⁵ Ethiopia, in particular, became a fervent supporter of the institution’s work in general – and, in particular, became the host of its Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).

In fact, it was in UNECA’s building (‘Africa Hall’, as we saw earlier), that the UN’s Security Council met in 1972 for the first time on African soil.Footnote ⁸⁶ After an extensive diplomatic campaign coordinated with other African member states (and with the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) – created in the wake of a summit held in that same building in 1963), Haile Selassie I managed to convince the UN to discuss African problems within the continent itself. A US diplomat, anonymously quoted in the New York Times, candidly confessed that this was ‘a silly idea, but if you object to it you’re a racist, so naturally we didn’t’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The agenda was dominated by the thorny issues of Zimbabwe/Rhodesia, South Africa, and the Portuguese colonies that remained on the African continent. Unsurprisingly, the session ended in disappointment after the UK vetoed any resolution that threatened white supremacy in their former colonial holdings. Be that as it may, Haile Selassie I and his African allies saw the Council meeting as a triumph. Somalia and Sudan rotated the Council’s Presidency, and in that capacity, they invited Haile Selassie I to address the international community – ultimately, for the last time. For the ageing emperor, the Council session’s highlight was the ceremony held in his palace where the UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim awarded him the ‘Peace Medal for his contributions to international peace and justice’.Footnote ⁸⁸ A fitting end for a monarch who had invested many of his early years in convincing his polity, perhaps somewhat naively, to believe in the promises of a so-called post-racial liberal rules-based international order.

Concluding Remarks: The Star of Ethiopia

The Star of Ethiopia: A Pageant, of 1911, was Du Bois’ debut as a playwriter.Footnote ⁸⁹ While it had been presented to audiences before, its presentation in Philadelphia in 1916 (to commemorate the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution) represented its theatrical climax.Footnote ⁹⁰ The plot was simple: merely ‘the history and development of the black race from prehistoric times to the present’.Footnote ⁹¹ The involved cast mirrored the play’s ambitions, with at least 1,000 actors involved in different capacities. The result, in Du Bois’ mind, was a pedagogical tour de force that would teach ‘on the one hand the colored people themselves the meaning of their history and their rich emotional life through a new theatre, and on the other, to reveal the Negro to the white world as a human, feeling thing’.Footnote ⁹² Ethiopia, in this perspective, appeared as ‘the mother of men’: a polity that could claim to be the true cradle not only of humankind as a whole but of the coloured peoples of the world in particular. In this same vein, the anthem of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (led by the famous Afro-Jamaican thinker Marcus Garvey) adopted as its anthem the song ‘Ethiopia, Thou Land of Our Fathers’.Footnote ⁹³

Indeed, for Du Bois and many other anti-racist and pan-African thinkers, Ethiopia remained a ‘northern star’ in their struggle.Footnote ⁹⁴ The Italian war of aggression against this polity in the interwar years, in particular, became a galvanising call to arms for future generations of anticolonial actors. Haile Selassie I, years later, would also come to adopt the pan-African agenda with the zeal of the convert, becoming one of the architects of the aforementioned OAU in 1963. And yet, any recovery of this polity’s legacy of anti-racist struggle cannot be complete without a mention of the ways in which the Ethiopian Empire, itself, reproduced racial hierarchies within its own borders. As Asseraf well reminds us (in relation to Arabic feelings of ethnic animosity against ‘black’ Africans in French-colonised Algeria), notions of racial hierarchy were not solely a European invention.Footnote ⁹⁵ Imperialism, no doubt, ossified (and even radicalised) certain ‘racial’ tensions in the colonised world – with lasting consequences to our days.Footnote ⁹⁶ But we also ought to remember that ‘some of the most vocal “anticolonial states” – such as Indonesia and India – simultaneously repressed independence campaigns and pursued imperial expansion’.Footnote ⁹⁷ The same was true of the mid-century Ethiopian polity. Ultimately, for ‘the wretched of the earth’, the day will not be saved by any dazzling Knight: white, black, or otherwise.Footnote ⁹⁸