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International Law and the Mediation of Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2014

Christian Reus-Smit
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Extract

When international relations scholars think about international law they either ignore culture or offer highly deterministic accounts of its role. For the majority of scholars, international law is a rational construction, an institutional solution to the problem of order in an anarchical system, a body of rules and practices that reflect the contending interests and capabilities of major states. Issues of culture barely rate a mention. For others, culture is the deep foundation of international law, the structuring “mentality” that gives law its form and content. International law, from this perspective, is a Western cultural artifact, globalized through centuries of imperialism and hegemony. These contrasting views lead to different expectations about the future of international law in today's culturally diverse international order. For rationalists, law's fate will be determined by the shifting configuration of interests that accompany new functional challenges and great power transitions. For the more culturally attuned, there are two possibilities. One is that functional utility will replace culture as law's foundation. International law may well be a Western cultural artifact, but “rational buy-in” will sustain it in a multicultural world. The other, more pessimistic, expectation is that the rule of international law will be fundamentally undermined by cultural diversity, particularly as rising non-Western powers articulate and promote markedly different cultural norms and values.

Type
Roundtable: The International Rule of Law
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , Spring 2014 , pp. 65 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2014 

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References

NOTES

1 For other discussions of the English School's perspective on these issues, see Buzan, Barry, “Culture and International Society,” International Affairs 86, no. 1 (2010), pp. 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hurrell, Andrew, On Global Order: Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Wight, Martin, Systems of States (Leicester U.K.: Leicester University Press, 1977)Google Scholar, p. 22.

3 Ibid., p. 33.

4 Ibid., p. 34.

5 Ibid., pp. 51–52.

6 Ibid., p. 46.

7 Ibid., p. 34.

8 Ibid., p. 153.

9 See Reus-Smit, Christian, The Moral Purpose of the State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

10 Wight, Systems of States, p. 34.

11 Bull, Hedley, Justice in International Relations: The 1983–84 Hagey Lectures (Waterloo, Ont.: University of Waterloo, 1984)Google Scholar.

12 Bozeman, Adda, Future of Law in a Multicultural World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971)Google Scholar, p. 14.

13 Bozeman, Adda, “The International Order in a Multicultural World,” in Bull, Hedley and Watson, Adam, eds., The Expansion of International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, p. 390.

14 Ibid., p. 404.

15 Bozeman, Future of Law, p. 38.

16 Bozeman, “The International Order in a Multicultural World,” p. 406.

17 Bozeman, Future of Law, p. 181.

18 Ibid., p. 186.

19 Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of Civilizations (New York: Touchstone, 1997)Google Scholar, p. 53.

20 See, for example, Anghie, Antony, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, and Koskenniemi, Martti, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Jacques, Martin, When China Rules the World (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 2009)Google Scholar, p. 228.

22 Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State, ch. 6.

23 See Gong, Gerrit W., The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Bowden, Brett, The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 I term this conception “Benedictine” because the classic statement of this understanding is Benedict's, RuthPatterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973)Google Scholar, originally published in 1934.

25 Tylor, Edward Burnett, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, Volume 1 (London: Murray, 1871)Google Scholar, p. 1.

26 See Sewell, William H., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Spiegel, Gabrielle M., ed., Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 52–55Google Scholar.

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30 Ibid., pp. 47–49.

31 Ibid., p. 14.

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33 Bull, Hedley, The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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35 Reus-Smit, Christian, “The Politics of International Law,” in Reus-Smit, Christian, ed., The Politics of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 41–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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41 Space prevents a detailed account of the negotiation of the two International Covenants, and the following discussion draws on the more detailed exposition presented in my recent book, Reus-Smit, Christian, Individual Rights and the Making of the International System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 5.

42 “It should not be forgotten,” Adamantia Pollis and Peter Schwab argue, “that the San Francisco Conference which established the United Nations in 1945 was dominated by the West, and that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted at a time when most Third World countries were still under colonial rule.” Pollis, Adamantia and Schwab, Peter, “Human Rights: A Western Construct with Limited Applicability,” in Koggel, Christine M., ed., Moral and Political Theory, Vol. 1 of Moral Issues in Global Perspective (Peterborough, U.K.: Broadview Press, 2006, 2nd ed.)Google Scholar, p. 62.

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44 Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, the United States, and New Zealand, among others, all ran this line. United Nations, Yearbook of the United Nations 1950 (New York: UN Department of Public Information, 1950)Google Scholar, p. 525.

45 Ibid., p. 522.

46 United Nations, “General Assembly, Third Committee, summary records,” General Assembly Document A/C.3/SR.296, 1950, p. 69.

47 Quoted in Normand, Roger and Zaidi, Sarah, Human Rights at the UN: The Political History of Universal Justice (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, p. 405.

48 Quoted in ibid., p. 227.

49 United Nations, Yearbook of the United Nations 1953 (New York: UN Department of Public Information, 1953)Google Scholar, p. 385.

50 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, December 16, 1966, Article 50.

51 United Nations, United Nations Yearbook 1953, p. 187.

52 Mose, Erik and Opsahl, Torkel, “The Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,” Santa Clara Law Review 21, no. 1 (1981), pp. 275–76Google Scholar.

53 Reus-Smit, Individual Rights, p. 183.

54 Simon Chesterman, “An International Rule of Law?,” New York University Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers (2008), Paper 70, p. 15.

55 Ibid., p. 32.

56 Ibid., p. 39.