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Millennium: Journal of

International Studies2014, Vol. 42(3) 837 –859

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MILLENNIUMJournal of International Studies

1. Most importantly, Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, eds, The Expansion of InternationalSociety (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).

Civilisation, Barbarism andthe Making of LatinAmerica’s Place in 19th-Century InternationalSociety

Carsten-Andreas SchulzUniversity of Oxford, UK

AbstractThe present study revisits the position accorded to Latin American states in the conventional

account of the expansion of international society. Drawing on English School theory and legal

history, it develops a critique of the ‘standard of civilisation’, contending that the boundaries

of international society were much more malleable and diffuse than the conventional narrative

suggests. The argument is illustrated with reference to the historical experience of LatinAmerican states: despite the profound impact that European colonisation had on the region, the

marginalisation of Latin American states within international society was commonly framed in

civilisational terms. Rather than taking their ‘western’ identity and thus membership for granted,

the paper demonstrates the role that civilisational rhetoric played in the making of Latin America’s

place in the heterarchical international order of the ‘long 19th century’. The article concludes by

discussing some implications for theorising the evolution of international society.

Keywords

standard of civilisation, expansion of international society, English School, civilisational analysis,Latin America, hierarchy

Introduction

According to the orthodox narrative of the expansion of international society – told byHedley Bull, Adam Watson and others – the 19th century marked a watershed in thetransformation of an originally European into a global international society.1 European

Corresponding author:

Carsten-Andreas Schulz, Nuffield College and DPIR, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 1NF, UK.

Email: [email protected]

MIL0010.1177/0305829814541318Millennium: Journal of International Studies Schulzresearch-article2014

Conference Article

at University of Limpopo Turfloop Campus on March 25, 2016mil.sagepub.comDownloaded from

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838 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(3)

2. The case for the 19th century as global historical turning point is made by Barry Buzan andGeorge Lawson, ‘The Global Transformation: The Nineteenth Century and the Making ofModern International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2013): 620–34.

3. See Barry Buzan, ‘Culture and International Society’, International Affairs 86, no. 1(2010): 339–40; Jacinta O’Hagan, Conceptualizing the West in International Relations:

From Spengler to Said (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); and ‘The Question of Culture’,in International Society and its Critics, ed. Alex J. Bellamy (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2005); John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western

International Theory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 4. Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilisation’ in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1984). 5. Helen Milner, ‘The Assumption of Anarchy in International Relations Theory: A

Critique’, Review of International Studies 17, no. 1 (1991): 76; David A. Lake, Hierarchyin International Relations, Cornell Studies in Political Economy (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 2009), 45–51.

overseas expansion began in the early 15th century. But it was not until the ‘long 19thcentury’, the period between the French Revolution and the outbreak of the First WorldWar, that the ‘West’ drew together the different parts of the world, and by doing so, cre-ated the global international order we know today.2 More recently, the English School

orthodoxy has come under considerable criticism, as revisionist authors question thenarrative’s Eurocentric bias and its neglect of colonialism as a fundamental institution ofinternational society. The present study builds and extends upon this literature by exam-ining the protracted experience of Latin American states with international society.

Central to the English School orthodoxy is the belief that international society was as anoutgrowth of 17th-century Europe, and therefore deeply rooted in western civilisation.3 Following this logic, the historical evolution of international society is conceptualised interms of a binary distinction between the members of international society on the one hand,and those who were gradually admitted into what was once an exclusively European ‘club’

on the other. The admission of new members was mediated through the so-called ‘standardof civilisation’, according to which the ‘expansion’ of international society was quintes-sentially a confrontation between the ‘West’, defined as European and of European-descent,and the more heterogeneous ‘rest’.4 By the turn of the 19th century, it is argued, the ‘stand-ard of civilisation’ emerged as an explicit legal principle, requiring non-western societiesto accept western norms and institutions before they qualified for full membership.

In contrast to this formal-legal conception, this study posits that, firstly, the ‘standardof civilisation’ needs to be understood as part of a wider civilisational discourse thatrationalised inequalities in international society. This necessarily shifts the question of

‘admission’ to one of international ‘standing’ and the political consequences this entailed.Secondly, from this it also follows that formal recognition as part of the family of ‘civi-lised’ states does not necessarily imply membership in the core of international society.Rather, the argument supports the view that conceives of the international realm as strati-fied. Anarchy, defined as the absence of a supreme governing authority above the state,does not preclude the possibility of hierarchy in international relations.5 However, con-trary to attempts to devise a single hierarchical ordering of states, the findings suggestthat 19th-century international society was ‘heterarchical’, in the sense that it comprised


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6. Barry Buzan and Mathias Albert, ‘Differentiation: A Sociological Approach to InternationalRelations Theory’, European Journal of International Relations 16, no. 3 (2010): 318;Jack Donnelly, ‘Rethinking Political Structures: From ‘Ordering Principles’ to ‘VerticalDifferentiation’ – and Beyond’, International Theory 1, no. 1 (2009): 63–6; and ‘TheDifferentiation of International Societies: An Approach to Structural International Theory’,

European Journal of International Relations 18, no. 1 (2012): 153, 57; Gerry J. Simpson,Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 17, 56–61. See also Edward Keene, ‘TheStandard of “Civilisation”, the Expansion Thesis and the Nineteenth-Century InternationalSocial Space’, Millennium 42, no. 3, (2014): 651-673.

7. The most comprehensive, although problematic, treatment remains Adam Watson, ‘NewStates in the Americas’, in Expansion of International Society, eds Hedley Bull andAdam Watson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). More recent accounts include MikulasFabry, Recognizing States: International Society and the Establishment of New States

since 1776 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 49–78. On the case of Cuba, seeGerard Aching, ‘On Colonial Modernity: Civilization Versus Sovereignty in Cuba, c.1840’, in International Relations and Non-Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism,and Investigations of Global Modernity, ed. Robbie Shilliam (London: Routledge,2011). On Haiti, see Cristian Cantir, ‘Fear of a Black Planet: The Haitian Revolution inInternational Society’ (paper presented at the International Studies Association AnnualConvention, San Francisco, 3–6 April 2013). Reus-Smit discusses Latin American inde-

pendence, but takes a critical stance towards the English School in Individual Rightsand the Making of the International System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2013), 30–2.

8. James Mayall, Nationalism and International Society (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1990), 64; see also Reus-Smit, Individual Rights, 19–23.

9. O’Hagan, Conceptualizing the West , 114.

different dimensions of stratification.6 Because of the multiple hierarchies at work, civi-lisation was mobilised not only against non-western political communities, but withinEurope and the ‘West’ itself.

The analytical shift towards civilisational rhetoric is crucial for understanding the

making of Latin America’s place in 19th-century international society. Latin Americahas received only scarce attention from the English School.7 This is unfortunate ontwo counts. For one, it neglects an early and crucial stage in the evolution of moderninternational society: what Mayall described as the first of the ‘three great waves ofmodern state creation’.8 The consequence being that the English School has missedthe history of opportunity to explore the rich international history of the region. Foranother, the Latin America forcefully illustrates how cultural determinism has limitedthe analysis of the English School. Considered by European elites as ‘white settlersocieties’ modelled on European peoples, ideas and institutions, the English School

categorises Latin America as being part of the ‘West’.9 The terms of the debate wereset by Watson: ‘What really and decisively made the settler states of the Americasconsider themselves, and be considered, members of the European family was thatthey were all states on the European model, inhabited or dominated by people of




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10. Hedley Bull, ‘The Emergence of a Universal International Society’, in The Expansionof International Society, eds Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1984), 122; Bull and Watson, Expansion, 18; quote from Adam Watson, The Evolution of

International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis (London: Routledge, 1992), 268. 11. Watson, ‘New States in the Americas’, 139. 12. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 3rd edn

(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002 [1977]), 26–38. Note that some of its traits were also presentin Wight’s System of States of the same year. Wight, however, emphasises the ‘dual nature’of international society, in which forms of exclusion co-existed with notions of a universalcommunity of mankind, see Martin Wight, Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester UniversityPress, 1977), 110–52. I thank the anonymous reviewer for drawing attention to this.

13. Bull and Watson, Expansion.

European culture and descent’;10 they were ‘rather boorish and provincial members, perhaps, but that was no great matter’.11

The view that the colonial legacy of Latin American states facilitated their ‘admis-sion’ into international society is not without merit. As in the case of the United States,

and with the only notable exception of Haiti, most states were diplomatically recog-nised by the European powers during the first years of independent statehood.Furthermore, unlike China, Japan or the Ottoman Empire, 19th-century legal scholarsdid formally regard Latin America as integral part of international society. However,what this view misses is that Latin American states, at times, fell short of the require-ments of civilised life. Viewed from the core of international society, political instabil-ity in Spanish America, and racial and cultural heterogeneity, more generally,undermined the standing of Latin America within the family of ‘civilised’ states.

In what follows, the study first revisits the English School debate on the evolution of

international society. The review sets the stage for a critique of Gong’s ‘standard of civili-sation’. The argument suggests that rather than treating the ‘standard of civilisation’ as awestern-defined legal principle, it should be seen as part of a wider civilisational discoursethat was ubiquitous in the 19th century. The importance of this analytical shift is illustratedwith the experience of Latin American states following independence in the early 19thcentury. The discussion demonstrates that the position of Latin America in internationalsociety was far more uncertain than Watson suggests. Elites in 19th- and early 20th-centuryLatin America were deeply concerned about the place of their societies in the family of‘civilised’ nations. This is reflected by the way in which civilisational rhetoric was

employed to make sense of Latin America’s place in the world. As an ideal, civilisation provided the ideological justification for the promotion of European-style modernisationand nation-building promulgated by Latin American elites – often with deleterious impli-cations for non-white and indigenous populations in the region. The study concludes thataccounts of the ‘standard of civilisation’, which maintain that non-western countries were barred from entry into international society until they adopted western norms and institu-tions, understate the important contradictions that existed within the ‘West’ itself.

Revisiting the Expansion Story

Although some elements were already present in earlier English School writings,12 itwas only in The Expansion of International Society,13 edited by Hedley Bull and




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14. Ibid., 1. 15. Ibid., 6. 16. O’Hagan, ‘The Question of Culture’, 209; see also Iver B. Neumann and Jennifer M. Welsh,

‘The Other in European Self-Definition: An Addendum to the Literature on InternationalSociety’, Review of International Studies 17, no. 4 (1991): 328–9.

17. Cited in O’Hagan, ‘The Question of Culture’, 211; see also Buzan, ‘Culture and InternationalSociety’, 1.

18. Bull, Anarchical Society, 15. 19. Gong, Standard of ‘Civilisation’ . 20. Ibid., 3, 44, 97; quote in Gerrit W. Gong, ‘Standards of Civilization Today’, in Globalization

and Civilizations, ed. Mehdi Mozaffari (London: Routledge, 2002), 78.

Adam Watson, that the orthodox account was developed in full. Their narrative beginswith the emergence of an anarchical society of states in Europe, continues with thespread of this order to the rest of the world due to European economic and militarydominance, and ultimately concludes with the transformation of the originally

European into a global international society. Before western expansionism, there wasno international society that was global in scope, but rather a number of regionalsocieties, ‘each with its own distinctive rules and institutions, reflecting a dominantregional culture’.14 As the authors make clear, ‘it was never the case, before Europeunified the globe, that relations between states or rulers that were members of differ-ent regional international systems [sic] could be conducted on the same moral andlegal basis as relations within the same system, for this basis was provided in part by principles that were culturally particular and exclusive’.15

Culture is of central importance to the English School narrative.16 In the first place,

cultural solidarity is thought to be an important source of (regional) order: ‘We mustassume’, as Wight put it, ‘that a states-system will not come into being without a degreeof cultural unity among its members’.17 In much the same vein, Bull argues that histori-cally existing international societies were largely founded upon a ‘common culture orcivilisation’, defined by ‘a common language, a common epistemology and understand-ing of the universe, a common religion, a common ethical code, a common aesthetic orartistic tradition’.18 For Bull, this cultural or civilisational foundation raises importantquestions about the stability of modern international society, which has expanded beyondits originally European core.

The western origins of international society are closely intertwined with the powerrelations that its ‘diffusion’ entailed. In this context, it was Gong’s treatment of the‘standard of civilisation’ that set the terms of the debate.19 In an influential book basedon his doctoral thesis written in the 1970s under Hedley Bull’s supervision, Gong sug-gests that the expansion of international society was not only about European economicand military dominance, but a ‘confrontation between civilizations and their respectiveculture systems’.20 In short, non-western peoples had to comply with a certain western‘standard’ in order to gain full membership in international society. Although rathervague at first, Gong argues that in the course of the 19th century the standard developed

into an explicit legal doctrine based on the tripartite classification of peoples into ‘civi-lised’, ‘barbarous’ and ‘savage’ – whereas only the first enjoyed the full rights




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21. Gong, Standard of ‘Civilisation’ , 4, 240. The distinction goes back to James Lorimer, The Institutes of the Law of Nations: A Treatise of the Jural Relations of Separate Political

Communities, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1883), 101. In fact, Lorimer makes a strongcase for the continuing importance of natural law. On the difficulty of characterising 19th-century legal scholars as either ‘positivist’ or ‘naturalist’, see Martti Koskenniemi, The

Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2001), 4.

22. Bull, ‘The Emergence of a Universal Interantional Society’, 120–2. 23. Examples include Yannis A. Stivachtis, The Enlargement of International Society: Culture

Versus Anarchy and Greece’s Entry into International Society (London: Macmillan, 1998);Barry Buzan and Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez, International Society and the Middle East: EnglishSchool Theory at the Regional Level (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); BarbaraA. Roberson, ‘Law, Power and the Expansion of International Society’, in Theorising

International Society: English School Methods, ed. Cornelia Navari (Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2009); Shogo Suzuki, ‘Japan’s Socialization into Janus-Faced European

International Society’, European Journal of International Relations 11, no. 1 (2005): 137– 64; and Civilization and Empire: China and Japan’s Encounter with European InternationalSociety (London: Routledge, 2009); Neil A. Englehart, ‘Representing Civilization:Solidarism, Ornamentalism, and Siam’s Entry into International Society’, European Journalof International Relations 16, no. 3 (2010): 417–39.

24. Neumann and Welsh, ‘Addendum’, 329. 25. For instance, John Anthony Pella, ‘Expanding the Expansion of International Society: A

New Approach with Empirical Illustrations from West African and European Interaction,1400–1883’, Journal of International Relations and Development 17, no. 1 (2014): 91–5.

26. Suzuki, Civilization and Empire, 21–5.

27. Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2005); Paul Keal, European Conquest and the Rights of

Indigenous Peoples: The Moral Backwardness of International Society (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2003); Lauren A. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal

and obligations of international law.21 Membership, in this sense, was conditional on acertain degree of homogenisation, requiring non-European countries to undergo pro-found political and social reform and, importantly, to accept the rules and principle ofinternational society.22

The orthodox narrative has attracted considerable attention lately. As a result there isnow a much better understanding of the historical evolution of international society.23 Apart from reassessing individual cases, this revisionist scholarship has focused on what Neumann and Welsh called the ‘unspoken presuppositions’ of the conventional narra-tive.24 Accordingly, the conventional view is overly Eurocentric,25 portraying interna-tional society as a teleological force for good until its foundations were undermined bythe ‘revolt against the West’. By focusing on how non-Western societies accepted more progressive elements, such as diplomacy and international law, the orthodox accountdownplays the ‘Janus-faced’ nature of international society.26 Thus, revisionist critics

object that the evolution of modern international society was marked by the impositionof colonial rule, the exploitation of non-European peoples, and the negation of the rightsof indigenous communities.27 Viewed from the perspective of indigenous peoples, as




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Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);and, importantly, Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism andOrder in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

28. Roger Epp, ‘At the Wood’s Edge: Toward a Theoretical Clearing for Indigenous Diplomaciesin International Relations’, in International Relations – Still an American Social Science?Toward Diversity in International Thought , ed. Robert M.A. Crawford and Darryl S.L.Jarvis (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), 312.

29. Fred Halliday, ‘The Middle East and Conceptions of “International Society”’, in InternationalSociety and the Middle East: English School Theory at the Regional Level , eds Barry Buzanand Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 10–13, 18–19.

30. Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society, 29–39. 31. Ibid., 97; see also Jörg Fisch, ‘Internationalizing Civilization by Dissolving International

Society: The Status of Non-European Territories in Nineteenth-Century International Law’,in The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the

First World War , eds Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2001), 254–5.

32. Ian Clark, Legitimacy in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 36.

33. The case is made by Ian Hall, ‘The Revolt against the West: Decolonisation and its Repercussionsin British International Thought, 1945–75’, The International History Review 33, no. 1 (2011):43–64; a more critical stance is taken by William A. Callahan, ‘Nationalising InternationalTheory: Race, Class and the English School’, Global Society 18, no. 4 (2004): 305–23.

Epp reminds the reader, the expansion of international society was a violent history ofexclusion and homogenisation, often going hand in hand with the disregard for indige-nous treaty-rights, as exemplified by the westward expansion of Canada and the UnitedStates.28 Hence, for Halliday, the institutions of international society did not spread in a

peaceful way, but through what the author terms ‘coercive diffusion’: the political, eco-nomic and cultural subjugation of non-European peoples.29 That is to say, what the ortho-dox account called ‘expansion’ merely conceals the fact that European colonialism wasa major driving force in the development of international society. The point is well madein Keene’s critique of the ‘Grotian tradition’.30 Rather than promoting the peaceful exist-ence of states, international society contained a ‘dualistic mode’: one based on the tolera-tion of difference, the other following a totalising logic, namely ‘civilisation’. As Keene puts it, ‘[a]t the same time as the “Westphalian system” of equal and mutually independ-ent territorially sovereign states was taking shape, quite different colonial and imperial

systems were being established beyond Europe, predicated above all on the division ofsovereign prerogatives across territorial boundaries and the assertion of the rights ofindividuals, especially to property’.31

The recent revisionist literature has provided a necessary corrective of the orthodoxaccount. But a note of caution is needed here: Eurocentrism as a theory of history shouldnot be confused with Eurocentricity as neglect of the non-European world. It is simplynot the case that the English School has failed to engage with colonialism and its histori-cal legacy.32 Quite the contrary, their account is one of the few approaches outside post-colonial theory where these questions feature prominently. After all, the consequence of

the rapid break-up of the British Empire was a central concern for the British Committeeon International Relations, out of which the English School eventually emerged.33




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34. Bull and Watson, Expansion, 6. 35. Ibid., 2. 36. Wight, Systems of States, 124. 37. Hence the debate on whether the Ottoman Empire acceded international society with the

Treaty of Paris in 1856. Gong asserts that the Sublime Porte was outside internationalsociety until the abolition of the capitulations by the Treaty of Lausanne, Standard of‘Civilisation’ , 31–2; Stivachtis disagrees, see Culture Versus Anarchy, 87. For a criticalappraisal, see A. Nuri Yurdusev, ‘The Middle East Encounter with the Expansion of EuropeanInternational Society’, in International Society and the Middle East: English School Theoryat the Regional Level , eds Barry Buzan and Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez (Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2009), 71–9. 38. The point seems implied in the more recent assessments of the system/society distinction,see Barry Buzan, From International to World Society? English School Theory and theSocial Structure of Globalisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 108;Pella, ‘Expanding the Expansion’, 93; Reus-Smit, Individual Rights, 15–19.

To some extent, Bull and Watson even allude to the idea of transformative encounters between ‘West’ and the ‘rest’. Yet despite being aware that the evolution of internationalsociety cannot be separated from its geographical spread,34 the impact of non-Europeanson this ‘simultaneous process’ is simply not part of their narrative. Ultimately, Bull and

Watson’s approach is self-consciously Eurocentric: ‘Because it was in fact Europe andnot America, Asia, or Africa that first dominated and, in so doing, unified the world, it isnot our perspective but the historical record itself that can be called Eurocentric’.35

The ‘Standard of Civilisation’ as Civilisational Discourse

The self-conscious Eurocentrism of the ‘expansion story’ seems increasingly out oftouch with today’s zeitgeist and hardly defensible in light of the insights gained fromrevisionist scholarship. However, an important but often neglected aspect is the way in

which ‘admission’ into international society has been conceptualised. Wight is excep-tional in this regard, in that he recognises the ‘dual nature’ of international society, wherea predominately European ‘inner circle’ was nested within a more universal ‘trans-European penumbra’.36 More generally, however, there has been a tendency to apply arigid binary distinction between members and outsiders of international society.37 Notonly does this view underestimate the extent to which international society was stratified,it also draws on predefined civilisational boundaries that mark off the presumed members of international society from those outside it. This view suggests that the interna-tional order consisted of two groups: on the one side, the ‘West’ – defined as European

and European settler societies; on the other, the ‘rest’, political communities who had tocomply with Western standards that were externally defined and alien to their own cul-ture and value system. The important point is this: if we accept the revisionist view thatcolonialism and inequality were central components of international society, then thosesubject to unequal relations can no longer be treated as outsiders.38

The move away from membership towards rank or position within internationalsociety requires rethinking the standing of the so-called ‘standard of civilisation’.Within the discipline of IR, Gerrit Gong’s treatment has become a standard reference




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Schulz 845

39. Gong, Standard of ‘Civilisation’ ; see also Boris Barth and Jürgen Osterhammel, Zivilisierungsmissionen: Imperiale Weltverbesserung seit dem 18. Jahrhundert (Konstanz:UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2005).

40. Jack Donnelly, ‘Human Rights: A New Standard of Civilization?’, International Affairs 74,

no. 1 (1998): 1–23; Robert H. Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World ofStates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 290; Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society,120–44; Roland Paris, ‘International Peacebuilding and the “Mission Civilisatrice”’,

Review of International Studies 28, no. 4 (2002): 637–56; Bruce Mazlish, Civilizationand its Contents (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 104; Brett Bowden,The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea (Chicago, IL: Universityof Chicago Press, 2009); Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, 310;Mark Mazower, ‘Paved Intentions: Civilization and Imperialism’, World Affairs 171, no. 2(2008); Simpson, Outlaw States, 246; Yannis A. Stivachtis, ‘Civilization and InternationalSociety: The Case of European Union Expansion’, Contemporary Politics 14, no. 1 (2008):

71–89, and ‘Democracy, the Highest Stage of “Civilised” Statehood’, Global Dialogue 8,no. 3/4 (2008); Ian Clark, ‘Democracy in International Society: Promotion or Exclusion?’, Millennium 37, no. 3 (2009): 563–81 (567).

41. See, for instance, Said Amir Arjomand and Edward A Tiryakian, eds, Rethinking Civilizational Analysis (London: Sage, 2004); Martin Hall and Patrick T. Jackson, Civilizational Identity:The Production and Reproduction of ‘Civilizations’ in International Relations (Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., Civilizations in World Politics: Pluraland Pluralist Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2010).

42. Martin Hall and Patrick T. Jackson, ‘Introduction: Civilizations and International RelationsTheory’, in Civilizational Identity: The Production and Reproduction of “Civilizations”

in International Relations, eds Martin Hall and Patrick T. Jackson (New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2007), 6. 43. Peter J. Katzenstein, ‘A World of Plural and Pluralist Civilizations: Multiple Actors,

Traditions, and Practices’, in Civilizations in World Politics: Plural and Pluralist Perspectives, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein (London: Routledge, 2010), 6.

in the debate on the evolution of international society.39 What is more, the argumenthas been extended to contemporary world politics, as a growing number of authorssuggest that democracy, the protection of human rights and the principles of liberalmarket economics, among other things, constitute a new ‘standard of civilisation’ for

the post-Cold War order.40The more recent wave of civilisational analysis in IR provides important insights to

reassess the ‘standard of civilisation’.41 As Hall and Jackson point out, rather thanconceptualising civilisation in essentialist terms – as ‘thing-like entity’ defined byessential attributes – this scholarship argues for treating civilisations as processes, ‘andin particular, as ongoing processes through which boundaries are continually producedand reproduced’.42 This conceptual move shifts the focus towards the social construc-tion of civilisational identities and, importantly, to the way in which civilisational dis-course is employed to frame actors’ identities. In other words, how ideas about

civilisation ‘are mobilized politically to create, maintain, or shift socially significant boundaries’.43 Jackson’s basis is the case of Germany in the 20th century: having been branded the enemy of western civilisation during two preceding world wars, publicdiscourse in Germany and the United States framed the country as integral part of an




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44. Patrick T. Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of theWest (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006).

45. Eileen P. Sullivan, ‘Liberalism and Imperialism: J.S. Mill’s Defense of the British Empire’, Journal of the History of Ideas 44, no. 4 (1983): 605–6, 10; Duncan Bell, ‘Empire and

International Relations in Victorian Political Thought’, The Historical Journal 49, no. 1(2006): 281–98 (283); Bruce Nelson, Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

46. John Stuart Mill, ‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention’, in The Collected Works of JohnStuart Mill , vol. XXI, ed. John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984[1859]), 118; see, Beate Jahn, ‘Barbarian Thoughts: Imperialism in the Philosophy of JohnStuart Mill’, Review of International Studies 31, no. 3 (2005): 599–618 (605); and JenniferPitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 47. Cited in Sullivan, ‘Liberalism and Imperialism’, 606.

48. Ann Towns, ‘The Status of Women as a Standard of “Civilization”’, European Journal of International Relations 15, no. 4 (2009): 681–706. 49. Andrew Phillips, ‘Saving Civilization from Empire: Belligerency, Pacifism and the Two

Faces of Civilization during the Second Opium War’, European Journal of International Relations 18, no. 1 (2012): 5–27 (10).

‘ancient cultural community’ and close western ally shortly after the Second WorldWar.44

The ideal of civilisation did not demarcate a clear boundary between the ‘West’and the ‘rest’. The colonisation of predominately white and Catholic Ireland was

rationalised by the very same civilisational rhetoric that was also invoked to justifyBritish rule over India.45 The civilisational self-confidence of John Stuart Mill is wellknown. As he wrote in 1859: ‘To suppose that the same international customs, and thesame rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilised nation andanother, and between civilised nations and barbarians, is a grave error, and one whichno statesman can fall into’.46 Ireland, in Mill’s view, was not part of civilised human-ity: ‘I myself have always been for a good stout despotism, for governing Ireland likeIndia’.47

The ubiquity and ambiguous nature of the civilisational discourse is also evident in

Towns’ insightful discussion of the political status of women.48 Arguing that the 19th-century ‘standard’ required the exclusion of women from political life, Towns convinc-ingly demonstrates the malleability of civilisational ideas and the way that these were played out within the ‘West’ and, to a lesser extent, between western and non-westernstates. Nor was civilisation only invoked to justify imperial rule as debates surround-ing Britain’s bombardment of Canton in 1856 demonstrate. According to Phillips,‘[t]hroughout the 19th century, and even under the lengthening shadow of Europeanimperialism’, he writes, ‘“civilization” contained multiple meanings, some of whichserved to aid and abet imperial violence, while others worked to arrest – or at least

temporarily inhibit and frustrate – imperial enterprises’.49

This was not an isolatedcase, as similar arguments were made during the Second Boer War of 1899–1902.While supporters of the war portrayed the Boer republics, and in particular Kruger’s




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50. See, for instance, Andrew Thompson, ‘Imperial Propaganda during the South AfricanWar’, in Writing a Wider War: Rethinking Gender, Race, and Identity in the South AfricanWar, 1899–1902, eds Gregor Cuthbertson, A. M. Grundlingh, and Mary-Lynn Cuthbertson(Athens, GA: Ohio University Press, 2002), 314.

51. Gong, Standard of ‘Civilisation’ , 5, 240; Gong, ‘Standards of Civilization Today’, 78–80. 52. Gong, Standard of ‘Civilisation’ , 21, 100. 53. Anghie, Imperialism, 56–65. 54. Kalevi J. Holsti, Taming the Sovereigns: Institutional Change in International Politics

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 155; Suzuki, ‘Japan’s Socialization’,140–1.

55. Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer , 134–5, emphasis in original; see also Liliana Obregón, ‘TheCivilized and the Uncivilized’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, eds Bardo Fassbender et al . (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 935–6.

56. Georg Schwarzenberger, ‘The Standard of Civilisation in International Law’, Current Legal Problems 8 (1955): 212–34 (220).

Transvaal government, as backwards and despotic, critics condemned Kitchener’sscorched earth campaign and the detention of civilians in concentration camps as‘methods of barbarism’.50

It is worth recalling at this point that Gong considered the ‘standard’ the result of a tran-

sition from natural law to positivism, during which ideas of civilisation became mouldedinto an explicit legal doctrine that defined the boundaries of international society.51 WhileGong alludes to the discretionary nature of the ‘standard’,52 its relation with internationallaw is important: first because the deliberative nature of law allows for the identification ofspecific criteria; and second, because it renders the ‘standard of civilisation’ an integral partof a foundational institution of international society.53 Yet while the formalist take seems to be widely accepted within IR,54 historians of international law have highlighted the ambiv-alent nature of the ‘standard’. The point is succinctly made by Koskenniemi:

No stable standard of civilization emerged to govern entry into the ‘community of internationallaw’… The existence of a ‘standard’ was a myth in the sense that there was never anything togain. Every concession was a matter of negotiation, every status dependent on agreement, quid

pro quo. But the existence of a language of a standard still gave appearance of fair treatmentand regular administration to what was simply a conjectural policy.55

The argument is somewhat different from the explicit legal principle outlined by Gong.Late-19th and early-20th century international lawyers did not universally recognise theexistence of such a principle. Gong draws on Schwarzenberger, who first described the‘standard’ in an article published in 1955. According to the latter, European political andeconomic dominance entailed a ‘civilising process’ that transformed the respublica chris-tiana (the universal community of Christianity) into a universal ‘world society’. Once theinternational legal order was detached from its theological foundation, state recognitionmerely depended on ‘whether its government was sufficiently stable to undertake bindingcommitments under international law and whether it was able and willing to protect ade-quately the life, liberty and property of foreigners’.56 At first sight, Schwarzenbergerseems to follow the view of a gradually expanding international society. Yet the ‘standard




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57. Charles Lipson, Standing Guard: Protecting Foreign Capital in the Nineteenth and TwentiethCenturies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 16–19; Martha Finnemore,The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 2003), 25. For a bibliographical overview, see Michael Tomz, Reputationand International Cooperation: Sovereign Debt across Three Centuries (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 2007), 114–15.

58. Lassa Oppenheim, International Law: A Treatise (London: Longmans, 1905), 30–1. 59. Ibid., 30–4. 60. Ibid., 33. 61. Cited in Simpson, Outlaw States, 238. 62. Bell, ‘Empire’, 283, emphasis added.

of civilisation’, thus conceived, applies to European and non-European states alike. Thiswas more commonly known as the ‘minimum standard of treatment’, which was enforcedagainst smaller states in Europe, Asia and, predominantly, Latin America throughout the19th century.57

Lassa Oppenheim, for instance, considered the debate on whether international lawextended to ‘Christian civilisation’ only, or ‘as far as humanity itself’, as unproductive.In the author’s view, states were ‘civilised’ once willing and able to meet their interna-tional obligations.58 At the same time, however, his work illustrates the difficulty of cat-egorising the members of international society along civilisational lines. In what can beregarded as an early account of the expansion story, Oppenheim identified differentstages in which the international community expanded: from Europe, to the Americas,over the inclusion of the Ottoman Empire, to the acceptance of the ancient powers ofEast Asia.59 But Oppenheim also alludes to the difficulties of making a final judgement

about the place of Persia, Siam, China, Korea and Abyssinia: ‘These are certainly civi-lised States, and Abyssinia is even a Christian State’, yet he maintains that ‘their civilisa-tion has not yet reached that condition which is necessary to enable their Governmentand their population in every respect to understand and to carry out the command of therules of International Law’.60 The fundamental contradiction was aptly captured by JohnWestlake: ‘Our international society exercises the right of admitting outside states to parts of its international law without necessarily admitting them to the whole of it’.61

Oppenheim’s comments on Abyssinia and other seemingly ‘civilised’ states suggeststhat a wholly different logic than ‘civilisation’ was at work here: namely, racial preju-

dice. As Bell explains, the dichotomy between civilisation and barbarism was but one possible conception of global order, and one that was riddled with contradictions andambiguities:

The binaries were complemented, supplanted, and occasionally undermined by other attemptsto classify and order the world. This often resulted from the difficulties faced incorporatingliminal societies, those that fell awkwardly between the categories of civilized and barbarian.China, Japan, Russia, the Ottoman empire, the newly independent republics of Latin America,even the countries of southern Europe – all presented difficulties and generated debate.62

All this does not dispute that civilisational language was employed to justify inequalityin 19th-century international society. But it warrants a note of caution not to treat the




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63. See, Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 2006); Rafe Blaufarb, ‘The Western Question: The Geopoliticsof Latin American Independence’, American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 742–63.

64. Frank Moya Pons, ‘Haiti and Santo Domingo, 1790–c. 1870’, in The Cambridge History of Latin America: From Independence to c. 1870, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1985), 239; Robbie Shilliam, ‘What about Marcus Garvey? Race and theTransformation of Sovereignty Debate’, Review of International Studies 32, no. 3 (2006):379–400 (391–3).

‘standard of civilisation’ as an explicit principle that neatly distinguished the membersfrom the outsiders of international society.

The Making of Latin America’s Place in InternationalSociety

As the following section will illustrate, the stark dichotomy between members and out-siders, in combination with the emphasis on culturally defined boundaries, is not helpfulfor understanding the place of Latin America in international society. The new states ofLatin America emerged from the ‘Atlantic Revolutions’ that shook the internationalorder of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.63 While the French Revolution plungedEurope into a major war, the European empires in the Americas were almost completelydismantled within a few decades: the United States declared its independence from

Britain in 1776, closely followed by the slave-led Haitian Revolution of 1791. The crisisthen spread to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies after France invaded the IberianPeninsula in 1808. In Spain, Napoleon forced the king and his heir, Ferdinand VII, toabdicate while installing his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte, on the throne. The impris-onment of the royal family led to the establishment of self-governing juntas throughoutthe Spanish empire. First loyal to the Spanish crown, tensions between royalists andautonomists escalated following the defeat of Napoleon and the reinstatement of theBourbon monarchy. Civil wars turned into wars of independence and the definitive breakaway of the rebellious provinces from Spain. After the decisive defeat of Spain at

the Battle of Ayacucho in 1824, only Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanishcontrol as the last remnants of a formerly vast empire.

The cases of Haiti and Brazil were variations on this theme. The independence ofHaiti was the result of a successful slave-revolt that culminated in independence in 1804.To an important extent, the events in Saint-Domingue were an outgrowth of the FrenchRevolution, as the slaves of the ‘Pearl of the Antilles’ demanded the end of slavery andrecognition of the newly won liberties of the French Revolution.64 The rebellion inFrance’s most prosperous colony had major international ramifications, drawing Britainand Spain into a long military conflict over the control over the island. Crucially, the

Haitian Revolution led to the first free black state, even though the new republic remainedisolated internationally during the first decades of its existence. Britain and the UnitedStates were willing to deal with the ‘black Jacobins’ in exchange for commercial favours, but the latter withheld recognition until 1862. Haiti was only (conditionally) recognised by France in 1825 in exchange for 150 million francs (and fully in 1838 after the




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65. Moya Pons, ‘Haiti and Santo Domingo’, 261; Shilliam, ‘What about Marcus Garvey?’, 395. 66. Richard Gott, ‘Latin America as a White Settler Society’, Bulletin of Latin American

Research 26, no. 2 (2007): 269–89 (279); see also Philippe R. Girard, ‘Caribbean Genocide:Racial War in Haiti, 1802–4’, Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (2005): 138–61.

67. Cited in Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), 96–7.

68. Cantir, ‘Fear of a Black Planet: The Haitian Revolution in International Society’. 69. Cited in ibid., 8; the point is forcefully made by Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of

World Politics.

70. See Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the SlaveTrade Question 1807–1869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 66–7; EdwardKeene, ‘A Case Study of the Construction of International Hierarchy: British Treaty-Makingagainst the Slave Trade in the Early Nineteenth Century’, International Organization 61,no. 2 (2007); Fabry, Recognizing States.

indemnity was renegotiated).65 Brazil and the Spanish American republics, in turn, wouldnot recognise Haiti until the 1860s. In part, this was because of the fear that a successfulslave-rebellion could encourage similar revolts on the American continents. But the mas-sacre of the island’s white population also heightened racial anxieties in Europe and the

Americas,66 converting Haiti into a symbol of Jacobin zeal and the dangers of blackemancipation. The wider implications are apparent in the ‘Ostend Manifesto’, leaked in1854, in which US diplomats called for the annexation of slave-holding Cuba to preventthe Spanish colony from becoming an ‘Africanized … second St. Domingo [Haiti], withall its attendant horrors to the white race, and suffer the flames to extend to our ownneighbouring shores, seriously to endanger or actually to consume the fair fabric of ourUnion’.67 By contrast, Haitian officials sought to mobilise European support for theircause by referring to an explicit civilisational rhetoric that emphasised their Enlightenmentlegacy and the ability of blacks to prosper.68 Given the Haitian experience, it is difficult

to agree with Watson that ‘race was not considered a barrier to formal statehood in thefirst half of the nineteenth century’.69

Race and racial prejudices also played a role in the Brazilian case. The history of itsindependence begins with the evacuation of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro underBritish protection in 1807. In 1821, João VI returned to Portugal, leaving his son behindas regent of Brazil. However, after the Portuguese Cortes demanded also the return of the prince, popular pressures forced Pedro I to declare independence in 1822 in order to preserve Braganza rule in Brazil. The newly proclaimed Brazilian empire swiftlydefeated loyalist forces and successfully subdued ensuing regional rebellions, thus

avoiding the fragmentation that Spanish America underwent after independence. The preservation of the Braganza monarchy provided the new regime with sufficient resourcesand legitimacy that the new republics in South America often lacked vis-a-vis domesticopposition. Braganza rule furthermore facilitated international recognition so that by1826 its independence was recognised by Portugal and Britain, in the latter case in theform of an anti-slave trade treaty.70

Monarchical rule and Brazil’s comparatively smooth transition into independentstatehood provided its elite with a sense of superiority over their ‘barbarous’ neighbours




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71. Ori Preuss, ‘Brazil into Latin America: The Demise of Slavery and Monarchy asTransnational Events’, Luso-Brazilian Review 49, no. 1 (2012): 96–126 (97).

72. The most comprehensive treatment remains Alan K. Manchester, British Preeminence in

Brazil, its Rise and Decline: A Study in European Expansion (Chapel Hill, NC: Universityof North Carolina Press, 1933), 209. 73. Ribeiro to Palmerston, 16 June 1834, FO 13/115; Law Officers’ Opinion, 30 September

1834, FO83/2237; and Palmerston to Ribeiro, 13 November 1834, FO 13/115. 74. Leslie Bethell, ‘O Brasil no Mundo’, in A Construção Nacional: 1830–1889, vol. 2, ed. José

Murilo de Carvalho (Madrid: Mapfre, 2012), 156. 75. Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, The Emperor’s Beard: Dom Pedro II and the Tropical Monarchy

of Brazil , trans. John Gledson (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004); Preuss, ‘Brazil into LatinAmerica’, 99.

76. Thomas E. Skidmore, ‘Racial Ideas and Social Policy in Brazil, 1870–1940’, in The Idea of

Race in Latin America, 1870–1940, eds Richard Graham et al . (Austin, TX: University ofTexas Press, 1990), 8–9; José Murilo de Carvalho, ‘As Marcas Do Período’, in A Construção Nacional: 1830–1889, vol. 2, ed. José Murilo de Carvalho (Madrid: Mapfre, 2012), 26; onthe ideology of racial ‘whitening’, see George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800– 2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 117–51.

in Spanish America.71 But Brazil, too, was facing considerable challenges. First of all,Brazil inherited from Portugal a treaty regime that provided for the preferential access ofBritish goods to its domestic market. Adding insult to injury, Britain also insisted on thecontinuation of the much-resented Office of the Judge Conservator until 1844, which

effectively excluded British subjects from Brazilian jurisdiction.72 Although the institu-tion seemed to have been of little practical importance, for Britain, it was a necessity justified by the concern that Brazil would prove unable to administer justice. For Brazil’saristocracy, however, it was an anomaly and an insult to their dignity as it placed the‘tropical monarchy’ on par with less ‘civilised’ peoples.73 Brazil is an intriguing reminderthat extraterritorial jurisdiction was not only exercised by the ‘West’ against the ‘rest’, but could be found within the ‘West’ itself.

Furthermore, the traditional emphasis on issues of economic dependency and Brazilianmonarchical rule misses the fact that the country was regarded as backwards and exotic.74

Brazil’s tropical climate was one reason, slavery and the presence of a large non-white population another. Thus, even more noxious than the Judge Conservator was the slavetrade, which pitted the economic interests of Brazil’s landed elite against the Britishnavy, which, following the Aberdeen Act of 1845, suppressed the ‘abominable trade’even within Brazilian waters – including its rivers and ports. Although the slave tradehad ceased by the 1850s, within Brazil, slavery became increasingly seen as an anachro-nistic institution that negated the empire its rightful place in the community of states.75 However, rather than framing the issue in humanitarian terms, abolitionists such asJoaquim Nabuco argued that slavery would hold back civilisation in the country, among

other things, by discouraging white immigration.76

Although racial boundaries werenever wholly fixed in Brazil, following the abolition of slavery in 1888, and under theinfluence of scientific racism (after all, Arthur de Gobineau, one of its founding fathers,had been a French diplomat in Brazil) the debate shifted away from slavery to the conse-quences of Brazil’s non-white majority. As Skidmore notes, Brazilian intellectuals




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82. See, for instance, Miguel A. Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).

83. Frank Safford, ‘Politics, Ideology and Society in Post-Independence Spanish America’, inThe Cambridge History of Latin America: From Independence to c. 1870, ed. Leslie Bethell(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 384–9.

84. David Bushnell and Neill MacAulay, The Emergence of Latin America in the NineteenthCentury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 22–6.

85. Mercedes de Vega, ed., Historia de las Relaciones Internacionales de México, 1821–2010.

V. Europa (México: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 2011), 162, 184. Note that theUnited States was generally supportive of Juarez. 86. Gong, Standard of ‘Civilisation’ , 3, 97. 87. Cited in Matthew Brown, ‘Introduction’, in Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture,

Commerce and Capital , ed. Matthew Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 19, emphasis inoriginal.

politically consolidated states.82 Rather, with only a few exceptions such as Chile, thewars of independence were followed by renewed civil war over the political balance between the new capitals and their hinterland, economic policies, and the role of theChurch, which had formed a central pillar of the Spanish colonial order.83 This further

exacerbated economic hardship and led to the break-up of vast colonial viceroyalties intonumerous smaller states, largely created along former administrative boundaries.84

Political instability had important international ramifications: First, under the ‘mini-mum standard of treatment’, ‘civilised’ states had the responsibility to protect the life and property of foreigners who resided within their territory. Because Spanish Americanstates were often unable to meet this international obligation, foreign powers, mostimportantly Britain and France, intervened militarily on numerous accounts. Most inter-ventions took place in the form of naval blockades, such as during the Pastry War (1939)and the Venezuelan Crisis (1902–3). Only a few notable exceptions led to outright mili-

tary occupation, as in the case of Mexico, where Napoleon III established a monarchyheaded by the Habsburg prince Maximilian in the 1860s. Maximilian’s execution in 1867 by order of Benito Juarez, a Zapotec from the state of Oaxaca and first indigenous presi-dent of Mexico, caused uproar in Europe, and strengthened the belief that the countrywould ‘continue to live in barbarism’ under the rule of a vengeful savage.85 But theseinterventions had very little to do with a clash between western and non-western civilisa-tions, as Gong would have it.86 The case is well illustrated by Lord Palmerston remarksfrom 1850:

These half-civilised governments, such as those in China, Portugal, Spanish America, require adressing-down every 8 or 10 years to keep them in order. Their minds are too shallow to receivean impression that will last longer than some such period, and warning is of little use. They carelittle for words and they must not only see the stick but actually feel it upon their shoulders

before they yield to that only argument which brings them to conviction, the argumentum Baculinum.87

Second, political instability reinforced pre-existing cultural and racial stereotypes, whichhardened in the course of the 19th century. These prejudices drew mainly from twosources: the first related to ideas about Spanish despotism, the so-called ‘Black Legend’,




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88. See Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900,trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010 [1973]); AnthonyPagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500– c.1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); James Muldoon, The Americasin the Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquestof America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).

89. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Démocratie en Amérique, vol. 2 (Paris: Gosselin, 1835), 436–7. 90. Cited in Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 4.

91. The Times, 21 March 1829, 2. 92. Liliana Obregón, ‘Between Civilization and Barbarism: Creole Interventions in International

Law’, Third World Quarterly 27, no. 5 (2006): 815–32 (823); see also Louise Fawcett,‘Between West and Non-West: Latin American Contributions to International Thought’,The International History Review 34, no. 4 (2012): 679–704; Ivan Jaksic, Andrés Bello:Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2001); Liliana Obregón, ‘Completing Civilization:

Creole Consciousness and International Law in Nineteenth-Century Latin America’, in International Law and its Others, ed. Anne Orford (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2006); and Arnulf Becker Lorca, ‘Universal International Law: Nineteenth-CenturyHistories of Imposition and Appropriation’, Harvard International Law Journal 51, no. 2(2010): 475–552.

dating back to the anti-Spanish propaganda of the Dutch Revolt of the 16th century; thesecond, to the writings of 18th-century European naturalists who described the flora,fauna and, by extension, peoples of the New World as degenerated and effeminate.88 Taken together, these ideas were invoked to call into question the civilisational standing

and ability of creoles to self-rule. As the ‘last-born children of civilisation [derniers-nésde la civilisation]’, Tocqueville argued, Spanish and Portuguese Americans relied uponthe guidance of their older brothers.89 A similar culturalist tone also underpinned USforeign policy towards the region. As John Quincy Adams made clear to Henry Clay in1821:

Arbitrary power, military and ecclesiastical, was stamped upon their education, upon theirhabits, and upon all their institutions. Civil dissension was infused into all their seminal

principles. War and mutual destruction was in every member of their organization, moral,

political, and physical.90

Spanish American independence was secured but this did not imply full membership inthe family of ‘civilised’ nations. As The Times editorial from 21 March 1829 summarisedthe predicament: political instability provided proof that Spanish America was ‘tooimperfectly civilized for self-government, though too powerful for foreign restraint’.91 Latin American elites, by contrast, were highly receptive to the civilisational discoursethat emanated from Europe. Its appropriation was particularly evident among LatinAmerican jurists, perhaps the most important being Andrés Bello, for whom politicalconsolidation was crucial to ‘complete civilization’.92 In the 1840s, Bello’s polemic with




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93. Juan Maiguashca, ‘Historians in Spanish South America: Cross-References between Centreand Periphery’, in The Oxford History of Historical Writing , eds Stuart Macintyre, JuanMaiguashca, and Attila Pók (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 467–9.

94. Cited in Schoultz, Beneath the United States, 70. 95. Arthur P. Whitaker, The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 1954). 96. Arturo Ardao, Génesis de la Idea y el Nombre de América Latina (Caracas: Centro de

Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos, 1980), 81, 103; Charles A. Jones, AmericanCivilization (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2007), 20. Hence the uneaseof postcolonial scholars with the notion of ‘Latin America’ as continuation of colonial ine-quality, see Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 42,57–8.

97. Cited in Liliana Obregón, ‘Noted for Dissent: The International Life of Alejandro Álvarez’, Leiden Journal of International Law 19, no. 4 (2006): 983–1016 (990).

98. Obregón, ‘Completing Civilization’, 252–3.

José Victorino Lastarria over the civilisatory merits of Spanish colonisation inspiredsimilar debates elsewhere in Spanish America.93 The question became even more rele-vant in the context of the Mexican-American War (1846–8) and the doctrine of the ‘man-ifest destiny’ in the United States, which negated the rights of Native Americans and

Mexicans to their lands on the grounds that they were deemed unfit to self-government.Such beliefs were not exclusive to the United States. To quote Palmerston once more(1857): ‘I have long felt inwardly convinced that the Anglo-Saxon Race will in Processof Time become Masters of the whole American Continent North and South, by Reasonof their superior Qualities as compared with the degenerate Spanish and PortugueseAmericans’.94 By contrast, in Latin America, elites scorned the fact that they were put inthe same category as their non-white fellow countryman, which is one reason why theracialised idea of latinidad was so warmly embraced. The other, related reason, of course,was the growth of anti-American resentment in response to US expansionism. In fact, the

relations between Latin America and the United States were more protected than thissuggests, as the notion of a Western Hemisphere that stood aloof from Old World politicsfound widespread appeal in the region.95 However, when José María Torres Caicedowarned that the ‘Latin American race’ could be absorbed by the Anglo-Saxon North, itreflected to an important extent a deeper concern of elites in Latin America about their place in international society.96

For the jurist Carlos Calvo the problems of Latin America’s place in internationalsociety arose from the ‘absolute ignorance in Europe of our state of civilisation and pro-gress’, which gave way to European interventionism in the region.97 The case has been

extensively studied by Obregón:

Nineteenth-century Creoles argued that, if the civilization of Europe was unified and perfected,theirs was left half-way or lacking after the end of Spanish colonial domination. The Creoles’national mission was to do everything necessary to complete the civilization that the Spanishcolonizers had brought with them … More than a consequence of colonization, the Creoles’will to civilization was self-imposed, one of the factors they knew to be essential to therecognition of their new nations as sovereign states and as members of the so-called ‘communityof civilized nations’, as well as for national and regional advancement.98




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99. Ayşe Zarakol, After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2011), 150.

100. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, trans. Kathleen Ross(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003 [1845]).

101. Carlos Altamirano, ‘El Orientalismo y la Idea del Despotismo en el Facundo’, Boletín del Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana “Dr. Emilio Ravignani” 9 (1994).102. Sarmiento, Facundo, 224–5.103. Paul W. Drake, Between Tyranny and Anarchy: A History of Democracy in Latin America,

1800–2006 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 127.

In a sense, then, elites in Spanish America felt compelled to deal with a similar‘stigma of civilizational backwardness’ that Zarakol identified in Turkey followingthe dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.99 By the mid-19th century, civilisationalrhetoric became a staple in political discourses throughout the region. Especially the

writings of the French historian and statesman François Guizot, which struck a chordwith a local elite that tried to make sense of political instability, economic backward-ness and, although far less explored in the literature, a perception of falling behindwithin international society. Nothing exemplifies this better than Facundo, written by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento,100 who would later become president of Argentina(1868–74). Written during his exile in Chile in 1845, Facundo was a thinly veiled polemic against Juan Manuel de Rosas, a military strongman from the province ofBuenos Aires who dominated Argentine politics between 1829 and 1852. Sarmiento’swritings developed an enormous political and intellectual legacy. For Sarmiento,

Argentina’s problems stemmed from the confrontation between two different socie-ties: one cultured and ‘civilised’, represented by the city of Buenos Aires that wasfirmly oriented towards Europe; the other, ‘barbaric’ and ‘American’, which he asso-ciated with the gaucho, the mix-blood inhabitants of Argentina’s vast plains.The work is riddled with orientalist images that equate the gaucho with the nomadsof the Asian steppe.101 But more importantly, it was written to delegitimise Rosasand the federalist cause domestically, while appealing to a European audience – andexplicitly Guizot, then Foreign Minister of France – from whom he expected moresupport in the defence of civilisation in South America.102 After the fall of Rosas in

1852, the group of public intellectuals surrounding Sarmiento took it upon them-selves to modernise Argentina according to a European template, which dominatedArgentina’s ‘oligarchic republic’ until the extension of suffrage in 1912.103 Sarmientohimself promoted European immigration to Argentina and played an important rolein the ‘Conquest of the Desert’, the aggressive military against the country’s indig-enous population that opened a vast swath of lands for cattle farming, the basis ofArgentina’s economic boom of the late and early 19th century. The role that civilisa-tional discourse played in Argentina’s history is particularly revealing: Argentinawas not ‘admitted’ into the family of ‘civilised’ states because it was or was per-

ceived as a ‘white settler society’, as Watson argued, quite the contrary, Argentina became a ‘white settler society’ because Argentine elites were concerned that theircountry would not live up to certain civilisational ideals.




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104. The now-classic statement of this connection is Charles Alistair Michael Hennessy, The Frontier in Latin American History (London: Edward Arnold, 1978).

105. In contrast to the literature on indigenous peoples in North America, there is relatively littleanalysis of treaty-making in Latin America. For the colonial period, see Abelardo Levaggi,

Diplomacia Hispano-Indígena en las Fronteras de América: Historia de los Tratados

entre la Monarquía Española y las Comunidades Aborígenes (Madrid: Centro de EstudiosConstitucionales, 2002). On the Southern Cone, see Kristine L. Jones, ed., Warfare,

Reorganization, and Readaptation at the Margins of Spanish Rule: The Southern Margin

(1573–1882), vol. 3 part 2, The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards andtheir Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005),178–220.

106. Alan Adelman and Stephen Aron, ‘From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States,and the Peoples in between in North American History’, The American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999), 814–41 (817); Weber, Bárbaros, 800.

107. Florencia E. Mallon, ‘Indigenous Peoples and Nation-States in Spanish America, 1780– 2000’, in The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History, ed. José C. Moya (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2011), 289. On Mexico and the Northern frontiers, see Alan

Knight, ‘Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–1940’, in The Idea of Racein Latin America, 1870–1940, eds Richard Graham et al . (Austin, TX: University of TexasPress, 1990), 79.

108. José Bengoa, Historia del Pueblo Mapuche: Siglo XIX y XX (Santiago, Chile: EdicionesSur, 1985), 186–9; Jones, Warfare, 177–8.

In fact, the ‘pacification’ of the frontier in Argentina and Chile followed strikinglysimilar patterns to the westward expansion of Canada and the United States.104 Thenative inhabitants of the Southern Cone resisted Spanish conquest and integrationinto colonial society. Unable to subdue the Mapuche by force, Spain recognised their

autonomy in the Treaty of Quillin of 1641, effectively defining the Bio-Bio River asthe southern border of the Spanish Empire.105 The fragile truce was brokered through periodic parlamentos, or peace talks, and ritualised gift exchanges, all of which sug-gests that, in practice, the lack of a common culture did not impede mutual under-standing about the conduct of international relations. While the extent of treatyrelations with the Mapuche was exceptional, similar arrangements became increas-ingly common in the course of the 18th century, especially along the ‘strategic fron-tier’ where Spain competed with Britain and France for supremacy.106 Independencein Latin America then led to a deterioration of the rights of indigenous peoples, as

local elites embraced European notions of nationhood and pushed for the privatisationof communal lands. More often than not, this implied either rural pauperisation orintegration through ‘civilisation’.107 The limited reach of the Chilean nation-state became particularly apparent in 1860, when French adventurer Orélie-Antoine deTounens declared himself King of Araucania and Patagonia, supported by someMapuche tribes in an abortive attempt to form a defensive alliance against theencroaching Chilean state.108 While claiming to inherit the boundaries of the Spanishempire, Chile did not abide to its treaty obligations and, by mid-19th century, beganto recruit German-speaking settlers for the colonisation of Mapuche territory.




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109. Most of Latin America did not experience what James Belich termed ‘hyper-colonization’ in Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 518.

110. David Armstrong, Revolution and World Order: The Revolutionary State in InternationalSociety (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 42–3.

The ensuing revolt was struck down by the Chilean army following the War of thePacific, but not fully resolved until the early 1880s, after which the Mapuche popula-tion was resettled in isolated reservations – all in the name of civilisation.

Conclusion

While elites throughout Latin America drew on the example of the United States, thesimilarities should not be overstated. With only few exceptions, such as the relativelyautonomous communities of the Amazonian Basin, the Southern Cone or Mexico’snorth-western frontier, most indigenous peoples were integrated into Latin Americansocieties through a centuries-long process of racial and cultural mestizaje. They were politically disenfranchised and economically marginalised, but the vast majority was notdisplaced by immigrants from Europe.109 Moreover, the United States may have chal-

lenged many ‘Old World’ rules and institutions,110 but its entry into and position withininternational society fits much better with the pattern described in the orthodox accountof the expansion story. The Latin American case was different because of the liminalstanding that these states came to occupy. Latin American states were surely part of inter-national society, but they were never admitted into its inner core. Latin America is not aregion of ‘white settler states’ nor were these societies regarded as such, which, in prac-tice and contrary to Watson’s remarks, mattered a lot.

The experience of Latin American states illustrates the pitfalls of treating the ‘stand-ard of civilisation’ as an explicit legal doctrine that neatly separated the members from

the outsiders of international society. By contrast, the argument here suggested that the‘standard of civilisation’ was part of a wider and highly ambiguous discourse that wasemployed to legitimise inequality in a heterarchical international society. By drawing thefundamental boundaries of international society in civilisational terms, that is as a con-frontation between the ‘West’ against the ‘rest’, both the orthodox account of the expan-sion of international society and more recent revisionist critics have missed the complexnature of hierarchy in 19th- and early 20th-century international society. The new statesof Latin America were not outsiders of international society. Certainly, the deep imprintthat European colonisation left on these societies facilitated their recognition as inde-

pendent states. Their standing, and the political consequences that this entailed, however,was not determined by their essential ‘western’ attributes. Race and racial prejudices played an important role in this regard, so did the appropriation of civilisational dis-course by local elites.

In the end, the making of Latin America’s place in 19th-century international societycalls into question the binary distinction between insiders and clear outsiders. The con-sequence of the increased interactions on a global scale was that, unlike in previouscenturies, the position of political communities cannot be adequately described as either




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Schulz 859

members or non-members of the (originally European) international order in a meaning-ful sense. From this it also follows that the focus of analysis in the evolution of interna-tional society needs to shift away from identifying particular historical moments inwhich non-western countries ‘entered’ international society, and move towards a better

understanding of inequality therein. Furthermore, this suggests that rather than ‘expand-ing’, international society was transformed during the ‘long 19th century’, which raisesthe question of how the norms and institutions changed during this processes and the rolethat people outside the core of international society played therein. An example was the principle of sovereign equality which, despite antecedents in European legal thought,was not recognised by the 19th-century European international society. It was the mar-ginalised ‘rest’ and, importantly, Latin American elites, who made a strong case for sov-ereign-equality, and the rights of states that emerged from decolonisation (for instance,at the Second Hague Conference) that ultimately contributed to the transformation of

global international society.

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments and suggestions, the author would like to thank Barry Buzan, LouiseFawcett, Edward Keene, and the anonymous reviewers. Earlier versions were presented at the 1stEuropean Workshops in International Studies (EWIS) 2013, and the Millennium AnnualConference 2013.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, ornot-for-profit sectors.

Author Biography

Carsten-Andreas Schulz is a doctoral candidate in International Relations at Nuffield College,University of Oxford.

Millennium Journal of International Studies 2014 Schulz 837 59

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