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Right of entry or right of refusal? Hospitality in the law of nature and nations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2010

GIDEON BAKER
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Abstract

This article explores the account of international hospitality found in the natural law tradition from Vitoria to Kant. Rather than limit itself to intellectual history, the focus here is on a more enduring theme: the double-bind of hospitality which the natural lawyers encountered in seeking to find a place for the welcome of the foreigner in the ‘law of nations’. Although these thinkers agreed on a natural right of communication, this proved destabilising, even destructive, of the property claims by which hosts establish their domain as properly theirs in the first place. All struggled with this double-bind, though this took different forms, from the concern that the law of hospitality might thereby justify colonial appropriation to fears for how it could threaten sovereignty. Two thinkers arguably find a way out of the double-bind of right of communication-right of property in hospitality, but sacrifice the law of hospitality in the process: Pufendorf, subordinating communication to property, turns hospitality into charity and thereby effectively denies it status as a law of nature; Kant, putting communication first, makes hospitality a matter of right, not philanthropy, but also sees it as instrumental to the development of a global civil condition, where it would be redundant.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 1423 - 1445
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2010

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References

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6 The emphasis on sociability obviously had a strongly theological dimension, as in Vitoria's argument that human communication and cooperation are God's will. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this point.

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15 Although our thinkers assume, or so I argue, something like these two ‘rights’, I am not claiming that these are the terms in which they couch their own arguments on hospitality. ‘Right of communication’ and ‘right of property’ is rather my own reconstruction of the key terms of the natural lawyers' various discussions of hospitality, as I read them. This reconstruction is then directed towards deconstructive rather than historical understanding – that is, I seek to draw out paradoxes at the heart of the thought of hospitality rather than to add to our knowledge of how this thought has been differently articulated in diverse spatio-temporal contexts. This deconstructive reading does not claim that hospitality is a transhistorical concept, but rather that otherwise very different answers to the question of how to receive the stranger nonetheless share an inability to harmonise the ‘communication’ and ‘property’ that all talk of hospitality always already assumes. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to clarify my point of departure.

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41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.

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44 Ibid.

45 Ibid., p. 177.

46 Ibid., p. 1771.

47 Ibid., p. 179.

48 Ibid., p. 183.

49 Ibid., pp. 178, 180.

50 Ibid., p. 181.

51 Ibid., p. 178.

52 Ibid., p. 179.

53 Ibid., p. 183.

54 Ibid., pp. 179–80.

55 Ibid., p. 180.

56 This tension between property and communication continues in Vattel's discussion of rights of shelter held by exiled and banished peoples (see ibid., p. 180).

57 Ibid., p. 182.

58 Ibid., p. 184.

59 See, for example, ibid., p. 185.

60 Ibid., pp. 185–6.

61 Pufendorf, Samuel von, On the Law of Nature and Nations, trans. B. Kennett, ed. Barbeyrac (Clark, NJ: The Lawbook Exchange, 2005 [1672]), p. 244Google Scholar .

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91 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 106.

92 Niesen, ‘Colonialism and Hospitality’, p. 94.

93 Kant, Immanuel, ‘The Metaphysics of Morals’, in Kant: Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet and ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 138Google Scholar .

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95 Kant, ‘The Metaphysics of Morals’, pp. 172–3.

96 Niesen, ‘Colonialism and Hospitality’, p. 95.

97 Ibid., pp. 98–100.

98 See, for example, Benhabib, Seyla, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 38CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

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100 Benhabib, The Rights of Others. See also, Anderson-Gold, Sharon, Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001)Google Scholar .

101 Kant, ‘The Metaphysics of Morals’, p. 137.

102 Niesen, ‘Colonialism and Hospitality’, p. 101.

103 Ibid., p. 102.

104 Kant, ‘The Metaphysics of Morals’, p. 172.

105 Niesen, ‘Colonialism and Hospitality’, p. 102. Flikschuh, Katrin, Kant and Modern Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 141Google Scholar . See also, Muthu, Sankar, ‘Justice and Foreigners: Kant's Cosmopolitan Right’, Constellations, 7:1 (2000), pp. 34–35Google Scholar .

106 Niesen extends Flikschuh's ‘unilateral appropriation’ to include ‘colonial usurpation’. Unlike the former, the latter is not even in principle ratifiable in a global civil constitution and will instead have to be rectified.

107 Niesen, ‘Colonialism and Hospitality’, p. 103; Brown, Garrett W., ‘Kantian Cosmopolitan Law and the Idea of a Cosmopolitan Constitution’, History of Political Thought, 27:4 (2006), p. 664Google Scholar ; Flikschuh, Kant and Modern Political Philosophy.

108 Niesen, ‘Colonialism and Hospitality’, p. 103.

109 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 106.

110 Niesen, ‘Colonialism and Hospitality’, p. 105; cf. Hinsley, F. H., Power and the Pursuit of Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963)Google Scholar .

111 Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, p. 4.

112 Hunter, , ‘Kant's Cosmopolitanism from a Historical Viewpoint’, in Hindess, B. and Walker, R. B. J. (eds), The Cost of Kant, forthcomingGoogle Scholar .

113 Ibid., p. 10.

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118 Ibid., p. 21.

119 Ibid., p. 23.

120 Kant, ‘Critique of Practical Reason’, p. 252.

121 Hunter, ‘Kant's Cosmopolitanism from a Historical Viewpoint’, p. 23.

122 Ibid., pp. 27–8.

123 Kant, ‘The Metaphysics of Morals’, p. 418.

124 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 106.

125 Derrida, , Adieu, p. 50Google Scholar ; Derrida, , On Cosmopolitanism, p. 16Google Scholar . For exemplary recent statements of hospitality as instrumental to cosmopolitan right from a Kantian perspective, see Brown, ‘Kantian Cosmopolitan Law’ and Brown, Garrett W., ‘Moving from Cosmopolitan Legal Theory to Legal Practice: Models of Cosmopolitan Law’, Legal Studies, 28:3 (2008), pp. 430–451Google Scholar .

126 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, pp. 106 (emphasis added) and p. 107.

127 Ibid., p. 107.

128 Ibid., pp. 107–8.

129 Ibid., p. 105.

130 Denis Diderot, Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville, in Diderot:, DenisPolitical Writings, trans. and ed. J. H. Mason and R. Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar . For an extended discussion of hospitality in Diderot's Supplement, see Klausen, Jimmy, ‘Of Hobbes and Hospitality in Diderot's Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville’, Polity, 37:2 (2005), pp. 167–192Google Scholar .

131 Onuf, ‘Friendship and Hospitality’.

132 Not that hospitality in world politics needs other than the inter- of the inter-national (a world of city-states, for example, would serve just as well as – better than, implies Derrida in On Cosmopolitanism – nation-states). Indeed, whether the figure of the foreigner, a figure which is necessary to the ethics of hospitality, requires territorialisation at all (that is, would hospitality indeed be redundant under conditions of cosmopolitan political community?) is a question for another occasion, one I consider in my book on hospitality in International Relations forthcoming with Routledge. My point here is simply to note the absence of hospitality from contemporary global imaginaries, including visions of cosmopolitan futures.