CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: 81 Argument and Change in world politics. Neta Crawford proposes a theory of argument that focuses on the role of ethical arguments in fostering changes in long-standing practices. The aim of the series is to publish the best new scholarship in international relations.
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(Neta C. Crawford) Argument and Change in World
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: 81 Argument and Change in world politics. Neta Crawford proposes a theory of argument that focuses on the role of ethical arguments in fostering changes in long-standing practices. The aim of the series is to publish the best new scholarship in international relations.
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Argument and Change in World Politics
Arguments have consequences in world politics that are as real as the military forces of states or the balance of power among them. Neta Crawford proposes a theory of argument that focuses on the role of ethical arguments in fostering changes in long-standing practices. Analyzing colonialism and slavery, the author shows how ethical arguments helpedbringabout the abolitionof slaveryandforcedlabor, anddecolonization. Suggestingthat decolonizationis perhaps the most signicant change in world politics over the past 500 years, the author examines ethical arguments from the sixteenth century justifying the conquest of the Americas, through the twentieth-century debates over decolonization and humanitarian intervention. The author explicitly considers alternative explanations for decolonization and abolition, and shows that economics cannot fully account for either change. She also offers a prescriptive analysis of the role of ethical argument in humanitarian intervention. NETA C. CRAWFORD is anAssociate Professor (research) at the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies at Brown University. She is co-editor (with Audie Klotz) of How Sanctions Work: Lessons from South Africa (1999) and author of Soviet Military Aircraft (1987). CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: 81 Argument and Change in World Politics Editorial Board Steve Smith (Managing editor) Thomas Biersteker Chris Brown Alex Danchev Phil Cerny Joseph Grieco A. J. R. Groom Richard Higgott G. John Ikenberry Caroline Kennedy-Pipe Steve Lamy Michael Nicholson Ngaire Woods Cambridge Studies in International Relations is a joint initiative of Cambridge University Press and the British International Studies Association (BISA). The series will include a wide range of material, from undergraduate textbooks and surveys to research-based mono- graphs and collaborative volumes. The aim of the series is to publish the best new scholarship in International Studies from Europe, North America and the rest of the world. CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 81 Neta C. Crawford Argument and change in world politics Ethics, decolonization, and humanitarian intervention 80 Douglas Lemke Regions of war and peace 79 Richard Shapcott Justice, community and dialogue in international relations 78 Phil Steinberg The social construction of the ocean 77 Christine Sylvester Feminist International Relations An unnished journey 76 Kenneth A. Schultz Democracy and coercive diplomacy 75 David Houghton US foreign policy and the Iran hostage crisis 74 Cecilia Albin Justice and fairness in international negotiation 73 Martin Shaw Theory of the global state Globality as an unnished revolution 72 Frank C. Zagare and D. Marc Kilgour Perfect deterrence 71 Robert OBrien, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte and Marc Williams Contesting global governance Multilateral economic institutions and global social movements 70 Roland Bleiker Popular dissent, human agency and global politics Series list continues after index Argument and Change in World Politics Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention Neta C. Crawford iuniisuio n\ rui iiiss s\xoicari oi rui uxiviisir\ oi caxniioci The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom caxniioci uxiviisir\ iiiss The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcn 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org First published in printed format ISBN 0-521-80244-X hardback ISBN 0-521-00279-6 paperback ISBN 0-511-03256-0 eBook Neta C. Crawford 2004 2002 (Adobe Reader)
For Rose, Greta and Robert
Contents List of illustrations page x List of tables xi Acknowledgments xii Introduction 1 1 Argument, belief, and culture 11 2 Ethical argument and argument analysis 82 3 Colonial arguments 131 4 Decolonizing bodies: ending slavery and denormalizing forced labor 159 5 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood 201 6 Sacred trust 249 7 Self-determination 291 8 Alternative explanations, counterfactuals, and causation 343 9 Poiesis and praxis: toward ethical world politics 399 Appendix: African decolonization 436 Select bibliography 440 Index 457 ix Illustrations 1 Ethical argument and new starting points page 108 2 Europeans in Africa in 1880 206 3 Europeans in Africa in 1914 219 x Tables 2.1 Variations in normative beliefs and behavioral norms page 92 2.2 A method of formal argument analysis 120 2.3 Informal argument analysis of ethical arguments 125 3.1 Topoi for early arguments in favor of colonialism 142 6.1 League of Nations Mandates 263 6.2 Process of League Mandate supervision 267 7.1 United Nations Trust Territories 313 7.2 International plebiscites and referenda 326 8.1 Numbers in the armed forces of Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, 19751990 371 8.2 South Africas expenditures for arms acquisition 373 xi Acknowledgments I startedwritingthis bookin1992as ashort articleondecolonizationfor a project on norms of humanitarian intervention sponsored by the Amer- ican Academy of Arts and Sciences. I am grateful to Laura Reed and Carl Kaysen for thinking that I was up to the task. Since then, this book has made its ever-evolving appearance in many places, and I have been inspired, educated, and inuenced by the work of scholars and friends, some of whom will no doubt disagree with nearly everything I say. If I leave anyone out, it is because the process was long and frequently interrupted for months at a time. I am grateful to Hayward Alker. His eclectic mind, scholarship, and intellectual enthusiasm, or more accurately, exuberance and genuine interest in all sorts of approaches to the questions of international rela- tions andphilosophies of social science inspires. I have written this book with Hayward in mind: holding an attitude of respect for all modes of inquiry, looking everywhere I could think of for insight, regardless of discipline, and taking everything seriously, at least for the moment, so that I can see what others have to offer. E. P. Thompson and Joan Scott were vital exemplars of courageous intellectual and political engagement and the best of arguers. It was an education to work with them on something we all cared about in the 1980s. Randy Forsbergs unagging commitment to making peace and her belief in reasoned discourse has also inspired over the past two decades. Jackie Cock has been a generous and critical reader and the model of intellectual and political engagement. Lynn Edens work on organizational frames was an inspiration for its economy, vivid wri- ting, and blending of the empirical and theoretical; I know I have not met the standards set by Lynns example but the effort to do so has made this a better book. And Lynn introduced me to Kathy Goldgeier, xii Acknowledgments without whose help this would be an even longer book. James Der Derian andBarbara Cruikshank, wonderful colleagues at the University of Massachusetts, forced me to read Foucault and other posties. Tom Biersteker, Elise Boulding, John Brigham, Carol Cohn, Cynthia Enloe, Matt Evangelista, Sheldon Goldman, Joshua Goldstein, Laura Jensen, Willard Johnson, Robert Keohane, Robert Latham, John Odell, Amir Pasic, Bruce Russett, Steve Smith, Ann Tickner, and Tom Weiss all helped me intellectually, by example, and in the concrete ways that make a career work. Though I rarely ask for advice (preferring to make my own mistakes) all of these colleagues directly or indirectly gave me the benet of their perspectives. Katherine Sikkink, Bud Duvall, Jim Bennett, Alexander George, Robert Jervis, Deborah Welch Larson, Lily Ling, Jack Levy, John Mercer, Nicholas Onuf, Freidrich Kratochwil, Martha Finnemore, Karen Jacobsen, Jim Rosenau, Beth Kier, and Jutta Weldes are also among those whose work I have found stimulating and provocative. Support by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Re- search CouncilMacArthur Foundation program on peace and inter- national security, and a post-doctoral fellowship from the University of Southern Californias Center for International Studies were essential early in my career. The Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies at Brown University provided the space and the resources for me to reconceptualize the book. Tom Biersteker and Tom Weiss, in par- ticular, along with all of the support staff, worked to make the Watson Institute a stimulating environment. They succeeded. Students at the University of Massachusetts, and Brown University made teaching enjoyable. I presented an early version of the arguments at the International Studies Association in early 1994, at Yale University in December 1994, and at Harvards seminar on Ethics and International Affairs in Novem- ber 1995. At Yale, Bruce Russett and Alexander Wendt asked me why I wasnt focusingmybookentirelyonethical arguments about colonial- ism and decolonization since there was surely enough material there. They were right, and I thank them for the gentle nudging. I also pre- sented portions of the argument at the International Studies Association in 1994 and at a roundtable for the American Political Science Associ- ation meeting in Washington, DC in August 1997. Drafts of the rst two chapters were presented at University of California, Riverside and Duke University in March and May 1998. At these talks I beneted from the comments of Juliann Allison, Tom Beirsteker, Seyom Brown, xiii Acknowledgments Peter Feaver, Chris Gelpi, Andrew Kydd, Cecelia Lynch, Amir Pasic, Bruce Russett, Alex Wendt and others. I also thank Beth Kier for arrang- ing a small critical seminar for me at Harvards Center for Science and International Affairs in December 1998 and for asking me to clarify the table on which arguments occur. The last chapter was rst presented at a conference on international ethics organized by Amir Pasic at Brown University in the spring of 1997. Substantially revised it appeared in the 1998 edition of the journal Ethics & International Affairs. An invitation by Wayne Sandholtz to talk about the problem of humanitarian inter- vention at the University of California, Irvine in March 2000 pushed me to further develop the ideas presented in the last chapter. A pr ecis of the whole book was presented at Stanford University in March 2000 and I thank the participants of that seminar, especially Lynn Eden and Judith Goldstein, who went after my arguments relentlessly. Hayward Alker, Jill Breitbarth, Lynn Eden, Martha Finnemore, Peter Katzenstein, Meg McLagan, Barry ONeill, and Jack Snyder gave me detailed com- ments on all or parts of the manuscript. I nished the rst draft of the book while I was the Peace Fellow at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. What a privilege. Anthropol- ogist Meg McLagan and economic historian Gail Triner read portions of the manuscript and argued generously with me, while historians Kate Baldwin and Ann Blair gave me many citations. The blessing and prob- lemof conversations with historians and anthropologists is the vastness of their knowledge. I am appropriately humbled. Rachel Manleys gift for passionate expression also humbled. I also beneted from stimula- ting conversations with Tracy Isaacs, Deborah Valenze, Meridel Ruben- stein, Aaronette White, Wu Man, Maggie Keane, Evelyn Barbee, Tamar Diesendruck, Sheila Kennedy, Loretta Mickley, Marsha Moses, Ellen Winner, Christina Shea, Marlene Goldman, Jill Reynolds, Sheila Pepe, Carol Mason, Tytti Soila, Deborah Woodcock, Jeanne Nightingale and Lynnette Bosch. Their work will affect me for years to come in ways I havent yet gured out. While colleagues provided example, critical comments, real inspira- tion, and imaginary audience over the years, my greatest debts are to those who encouraged me to continue to have fun, put work in con- text, and to aim for clarity. I am sure this book took longer to write because of my propensity for play (and for writing other things when I should have been writing directly about argument), but I wouldnt have had it any other way. Elizabeth Cohen, Lisa Mascaro, Ann Ferguson and Carol Shea were wonderful and too rarely hiking and Indian food xiv Acknowledgments eating companions. Taylor, Meredith, and Zoe Adams lent their humor. My brother Robert was endlessly amusing, my sister Greta, full of argu- ment. My parents, Robert and Jeanne Crawford, encouraged in a sort of back door way by continually asking when I would be nished. Lisbeth Gronlund, David Wright and Kirsten were the best of Arlington bud- dies. Karen Kurlander and Jade McGleughlin gave generous assistance when the going got rough, as did Ellen Grossman and Gail Phillips. Barry ONeill gave his humor and an occasional song. Bob and Laurel Breitbarth, Jackie Cock, David Fig, Carl Nightingale, Lisa Mascaro, Leslie Vinjamuri, and Oliver Wright opened their homes to me on three continents; though they may not have realized it, I wrote portions of the book in their houses. My dog Shana certainly wished her human would play stick and ball more often; many typos in the manuscript were the result of her long nose nudging my arm and I am grateful to Cambridge UniversityPress for catchingthose, as well as for all the other work they did on the book. Jill Breitbarth, the sine qua non, was a source of both calm and distraction and a wonderful partner through numer- ous adventures. Finally, my late grandmother, Odell, who reminded me (repeatedly) that she was the grandaughter of Jordan and Amy Ware, American slaves, is never far from my thoughts and I hope this book is something that would have stood up to her supportive criticism. xv Introduction This book follows three lines of inquiry, each equally important. First, it proposes a new theory of argument and change in world politics, focus- ing in particular on the role of ethical argument and normative change. Second, it intervenes in an older academic dispute, the problem of why colonialism ended. 1 Third, in the prescriptive voice of international po- litical theory and ethics, it suggests how, building on the practices of ethical argument that are already in place, certain practices of interna- tional relations might be used to make world politics more just and peaceful. Why focus on argument and change? International relations theorists havetwogeneric social conditions toexplain: order andchange. Scholars have done well at explaining more stable aspects of world orders, such as bi-polar and multi-polar systems, but much less well at explaining, or more ambitiously, predicting signicant changes in world political and economic relations. Of course accounting for stability, equilibrium, and change is no easy task and probably no single variable can do all or even most of the explanatory work. But that has not stopped international relations theorists from proposing master variable accounts of world politics for example, stressing the drive for power or the operation of markets. International relations theory has difculty accounting for change in part because it has thus far not developed a clear understanding of pro- cess. The world is ordered or it changes; stasis or rupture. This view is a consequence of our meta-theoretical building blocks. International 1 These explanatory aims are both constitutive and causal in the sense that Alexander Wendt describes in On Constitution and Causation in International Relations, Review of International Studies 24 (December 1998), 101117. 1 Introduction relations theorists usuallyfocus ontheactors (or agents) of worldpolitics and the big structures of states and alliances within an anarchic envi- ronment. Actors or agents have characteristics (rationality) andinterests (power), while structures such as anarchy or hierarchy (colonialism) constrain and dispose the relations among states. There is little room for argumentation in this understanding because argument is a process. Once we begin to see world politics as constituted by agents, structures, and processes, it is possible to grasp the role of processes like argument and persuasion and to see how change may occur. I do not intend with my focus on argument to sweep all other accounts to the side or to ban- ish complexity or contingency. Rather, I showthat once we pay attention to political argument, we will see the role the making and persuasive- ness of arguments plays in maintaining orders, changing relations, and overturning practices. A focus on argument may also allow us to see room for human agency within the operations of seemingly inexorable political and economic forces. The major arguments are these. First, the usual understanding of agents andstructures as constituting the major forces of worldpolitics is incomplete without an understanding of the processes of world politics. Second, political argument, persuasion, and practical reason are funda- mental processes within and among states. Third, beliefs and culture are respectively the content and the context of political argument; with- out them actors could not understand the arguments that others make, nor could actors successfully argue with others. Fourth, ethical argu- ment analysis is a way to understand and explain normative change in world politics. Fifth, once the central importance of the processes of ar- gument and reason in world politics is recognized, it is possible to think prescriptively about using ethical argumentative processes to re-make world politics. I did not begin this work with a clear theory of argument and per- suasion. Rather, I began by wanting to understand a puzzle: why did one of the most enduring practices of world politics come to an end so close to the peak of its practice? While some small colonial territories remain, the end of formal colonialism as a legitimate practice is perhaps the biggest change inthe structure andpractice of international relations in the last 500 years. Many colonies became independent in the 1960s and in 1997, with much ceremony, Great Britain returned Hong Kong to China after more than a century of colonial rule. At least in the popu- lar imagination, the peaceful withdrawal from the island by the empire meant that the sun had nally set not only on the British empire but also 2 Introduction on colonialism itself. 2 Why did old-fashioned colonialism end? Why did colonialism end when it did? Why didnt colonialism end much earlier? Colonialism ended when it was arguably still protable and coloni- zers could, if they wanted to, still enforce their will on the colonized. There was nothing inevitable about decolonization in the realm of ideas or normative beliefs. There are probably no economic laws that in- hibit the protability of colonialism, even in the age of industrialization and free markets, nor any reasons why militarily powerful states cannot impose themselves on weaker states should they choose to do so. The powerful could still cut off the hands or heads of those who resist impe- rial rule, they could still deny the weak the franchise, and tell them how they must order their political, economic, and religious affairs. Yet, as Julius Nyerere, Tanzanias rst independence political leader said, Mil- itary occupation of another country against the wishes of the people of that country is internationally condemned. This means that colonialism in the traditional and political sense is now almost a thing of the past. 3 Explaining the end of colonialism is obviously important. Particular colonial systems have risen and fallen over the past several thousand years, but there is something distinctive about the decolonization of the late twentieth century. No new colonies were formed in the last twenty- ve years. And colonizers did not just stop acquiring colonies at mid century, they began to give up the colonies they already held. In the few instances during the late twentieth century when states tried to annex land, such as Indonesias 1975 invasion of East Timor, those actions were contested not only by the subjects of colonization, but by outsiders. In one case, Iraqs attempted annexation of Kuwait in 1990, states used military force under the authority of the United Nations to remove Iraq and nullify its conquest. Colonizers, once proud, now express remorse. In 1993, the president of the United States apologized for the US annex- ation of the Hawaiian Islands one hundred years earlier. Colonialism made the world map look much as it does, and decolonization began at what was perhaps the peak of that ancient practice. 2 Chinas occupation of Tibet is among the exceptions. While Tibets legal status is hotly debated, the occupation denies the political self-determination and religious freedom of the people of Tibet. Several other territories, many small interms of population, andothers muchlarger, remaininconditions rather likethat of colonies, albeit withcrucial differences. See Robert AldrichandJohnConnell, The Last Colonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 3 Julius Nyerere, Forward, in Chakravarthi Raghavan, Recolonization: GATT, The Uraguay Round & the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1990), pp. 1925: 19. 3 Introduction Colonialism did not just fade away; it became illegitimate. Why and how did this change occur? To rephrase the question in more abstract terms, how do dominant behavioral norms change? Do normative be- liefs have anything to do with those changes? If so, how? There are competing explanations but no consensus about why colo- nialism is no longer legitimate. Most observers think that colonialism ended because it began to cost more than it proted the colonizers. Colonizers, being rational, thus let the practice go out of use and found less costly, more protable, ways of getting what they wanted from former colonies. Or perhaps decolonization occurred not because any one colony was too costly to maintain, but because the imperial powers had overstretched their reach, and could no longer beat down the con- stant and rising resistance to empire in the periphery. Thus, the most commonly given explanations for the end of colonialism stress both the material worldof extractionwhere conquest does or doesnt pay, andthe cognitive world of rational calculators who are either wise or insensible. I give an account of the end of colonialism that stresses factors other than prot, capabilities, and the rational calculation of costs and bene- ts. It is certain that those factors were important. Or rather, I shouldsay that the beliefs actors held about prot, military and economic capabili- ties, and the costs and benets of colonies mattered causally in terms of motivating colonialism and decolonization. But what mattered more in the long run was the making of persuasive ethical arguments containing normative beliefs about what was good and right to do to others. While the colonized had always resisted colonialism, sometimes with great success, what changed in the twentieth century was the content and ba- lance of normative beliefs and the burden of proof. Whereas colonialism had been the dominant practice, or norm, for thousands of years, sup- ported by strong ethical arguments, colonialism was denormalized and delegitimized in the twentieth century because anti-colonial reformers made persuasive ethical arguments. Colonialism could still be considered legitimate and acceptable if the powerful still believed in human inequality and thought it was accept- able to take and hold territory by arms and dictate the life of others with brute force. Colonialism ended, ostensibly for good, in the mid twentieth century, because most Westerners no longer think it is accept- able to control others in precisely that same way. The engine for this change was ethical argument, not force, or changing modes of produc- tion, or declining protability. Ethical arguments, once used to support colonialism, were used to undermine and ultimately to eliminate the 4 Introduction practice. While it is possible to account for the practices of colonialism, the abolition of slavery, and decolonization with primarily economic or material explanations, such accounts are decient to the extent that they fail to appreciate the process and content of argument, especially ethical arguments deployed by domestic and transnational advocates. In focusing on the content of the arguments deployed by advocates of reform, I give relatively little attention to the tactics and mobiliza- tion strategy of reformers. This is not because social movement strategy is unimportant in understanding how arguments become heard and were, or were not, persuasive. On the contrary, the politics of social movements and reform is vital. However, since the techniques of social movement mobilization are much better understood and well known than the account I give here of ethical argument, the emphasis here is less on who argues and how they organize, and more on the content and process of argument and how arguments may prompt changes in political power. 4 The rst chapter, Argument, Belief, and Culture, lays the concep- tual ground for an understanding of the process of ethical argument. It begins by developing the concept and role of argument as a practice of reason and persuasion. 5 Though argument is only one process in world politics, its role is obviously important, andstrangely underemphasized and undertheorized by international relations theorists. World politics is characterized by several kinds of argument. Instrumental or practi- cal arguments are about how to do things most effectively in the social world. Identity arguments suggest that people of a certain kind, such as we the civilized, ought to act in a particular way. Scientic argu- ments use the laws of science, technology, or nature to dene situations 4 On social movements and transnational activism see: Jeffrey W. Knopf, Domestic Society and International Cooperation: The Impact of Protest on US Arms Control Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). Whereas these scholars mention persuasion and inuence at several points in their books, they are primarily concernedwith demonstrating the existence andeffectiveness of domestic and transnational advocacy networks. An excellent book giving more attention to persuasion is Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 5 The chapter focuses on two (ideal-type) forms of reasoning that arguments generally take: top-down (syllogism) and sideways (comparative or associative). Top-down rea- soning in the case of a practical argument looks rather like a syllogism where conclu- sions follow logically from premises. Arguments in the form of side-ways associations, or symbolic arguments, compare cases. They use metaphor, metonym, and analogies to help others draw inferences from one situation that imply actions about other complex situations. 5 Introduction and show how they ought to be addressed. Ethical arguments are about what it is right to do in particular contexts. Argumentationandpersuasiondependoncontent or beliefs. The con- tent of beliefs held by foreign policy decisionmakers shapes their per- ceptions, priorities, andpreferences, especiallyas beliefs become institu- tionalized in practices organizational routines and knowledge making processes. Yet as Dan Reiter suggests, There is no space in realist theory to permit states to have different beliefs about how international poli- tics work. 6 Beliefs, which address all areas of social life, are translated into political action through reason what Aristotle called practical inference which involves reection and political, that is, public, ar- gument. I describe philosophical/ontological, normative, instrumental, and identity beliefs. I also review belief system theory, and specify how the theory developed here builds on and is different from that earlier work. Inaddition, I discuss theories of the foundationof belief andbelief change or learning. Next, I suggest four ways that culture is relevant to an understanding of argumentative processes in worldpolitics. First, sharedcultural back- groundallows meaningful conversations andarguments to occur. With- out this backgroundmeaning, all speech, including argument, wouldbe unintelligible. Second, culture often provides the content for specic be- liefs; it is thesourceof philosophical, normative, identity, andinstrumen- tal beliefs. Third, culture provides the background meaning by which particular beliefs and arguments are consciously judged, and cultures contain the metaphors and historical events which actors consciously use to frame problems. That is, culture is a resource that argument mak- ers draw upon when attempting to be persuasive. Fourth, while culture is one source of the rootedness of beliefs, it can be a source of new beliefs. Practical, scientic, and identity arguments are ubiquitous in world politics and it might be (relatively) easy to convince you that, for exam- ple, practical arguments are at work in decisions over whether or not to intervene militarily, or that scientic arguments used within and out- side epistemic communities, such as those of atmospheric scientists, can change worldpolitics. But ethical arguments are the hardcase. Doethical arguments make a difference? Are they causal, or are they epipheno- menal? 6 Dan Reiter, Crucible of Beliefs: Learning, Alliances, and World Wars (Ithaca: Cornell Univer- sity Press, 1996), p. 5. 6 Introduction Chapter 2, on Ethical Argument and Argument Analysis, gives a theoretical account of how normative beliefs and ethical arguments work in world politics. I chose to highlight the role of ethical argument because skeptics of the role of argument will probably be most skepti- cal about the causal signicance of ethical arguments. I review several, conicting, theories of norms in world politics, specify the differences between behavioral norms and normative beliefs, and show how ethi- cal arguments may link the two. I discuss the conditions under which ethical arguments can be persuasive and describe the process of per- suasive ethical argument. Specically, ethical arguments are generally used to do one of three things: uphold existing beliefs and practices, extend normative beliefs to newareas of practice, and change dominant practices. How can ethical arguments be used to change dominant practices? The process occurs in three phases. First, persuasive ethical arguments deconstruct: they denormalize and delegitimize dominant beliefs and practices. Second, persuasive ethical arguments offer a reconstruction, the articulation of an alternative that meets normative criteria. In this phase, alternative conceptions of possibility and interest are discussed and adopted by some actors. And, in the third phase, actors begin to change their social world. If arguments are persuasive among enough individuals and groups (and enough depends on the context), then the balance of capabilities between those who favor the dominant nor- mative belief and the new normative belief will begin to change. Fur- ther, normative beliefs that change as a consequence of ethical argument may become institutionalized, altering the structures of the world and the starting point for new ethical arguments. In the rst two phases, the action is primarily discursive or rhetorical; in the last phase, the action is more obvious in the political and institutional world as capabilities shift and standard practices are modied. This is a dynamic understanding of how ethical argument can be used to change dominant beliefs and practices. To see whether this understanding makes sense, I then pro- pose a method of informal argument analysis by which it is possible to analyze ethical argument andthe process of persuasion. Finally, some of the methodological objections to the argument analysis approach are raised and answered in the last part of chapter 2. Chapters 3 through 7 show how ethical arguments shaped colonia- lismandwere also usedby reformers who sought to abolish slavery and to end colonialism. Chapter 3, Colonial Arguments, outlines the con- tent of arguments that characterized early debates on colonialism and 7 Introduction describes the famous debate between Bartolom e de Las Casas and Juan Gin es de Sepulveda in 1550 over the humanity of New World Indians. Chapter 4, Decolonizing Bodies, focuses on the movements to end slavery and forced labor, arguing that these were crucial steps on the pathto weakening colonialism. Chapter 5, Faces of Humanitarianism, describes the height of colonialism in Africa and the ways that humani- tarian arguments were used by both colonizers and colonial reformists. Chapter 6, Sacred Trust, focuses on the role of the League of Nations Mandate system in institutionalizing new normative beliefs about colo- nial practice. Chapter 7, Self-Determination, discusses the post-1945 period when decolonization occurred at a rapid pace and became the international norm. 7 Chapters 5 through 7 also include more discus- sion of colonialism and decolonization in South West Africa/Namibia to illustrate the development of both successful and unsuccessful argu- ments in greater detail over a 100 year period. Chapter 8, Alternative Explanations, Counterfactuals, and Causation, summarizes the ethi- cal argument explanation for the end of colonialism, raises competing economic and power political explanations for decolonization, and con- siders counterfactual possibilities. It also concludes the discussion of South West Africa by comparing economic and strategic factors to the role of ethical argument. This book could not have been written without utilizing the work of many historians of colonialism, slavery, and decolonization. Too many of the primary sources I consulted especially the translations of Las Casas sixteenth-century arguments at Valladolid on behalf of Indians, the anti-slaverybriefs of abolitionists, andthe Britishgovernments Blue Book on German South West Africa were vivid descriptions of what Joseph Conrads ctional character Kurtz from Heart of Darkness would call the horror, the horror! Because relativelylittle secondaryworkand analysis has been done on the Mandate system, chapter 6 builds on the work of historians but has been supplemented by deeper investigation into primary material, especially League of Nations documents and the records of the Permanent Mandates Commission. 7 The termdecolonizationis, of course, problematic because it implies the exit of colonizers and the return of social, economic, and political life in colonies to a pre-conquest status. In every instance, however, the colonized are deeply and forever changed by the colonial experience, specically by the introduction of wage labor, the concept of the sovereign state, and ties to European and American economies, while pre-existing institutions and social relations are altered or erased. In this sense no former colony has been able to fully decolonize. 8 Introduction If this were a comprehensive history of the rise and fall of colonialism, I would have been compelled to use more primary sources and to dis- cuss, in much greater depth, colonialism and decolonization in areas of the world that I hardly mention. As it is, some may think the historical analysis andcase material is too long, too descriptive, too wide-ranging, and contains too many citations and events. On the contrary, this work is surely too short as history and does not even mention many events, actors, and arguments some might consider crucial. My explanation for this brevity is the simple fact that I do not intend a comprehensive account but only to persuade you of the importance of argument, es- pecially ethical argument, in the practice and end of colonialism. My admiration for the skill of narrative historians has only grown through the process of writing this book and I have not attempted to duplicate their work. Rather, I hope to have provideda template for the analysis of argument andhistorical change fromwhichother, more comprehensive, histories can be read and re-interpreted. 8 Chapter 9, Poiesis and Praxis: Toward Ethical World Politics, de- velops an approach for making the practices of world politics more ethical and legitimate. In a world of clashing cultures and conicting beliefs about what is right, how ought we decide what to do about the pressing questions of world politics? Specically, how can we decide the important ethical and policy questions of when and how to con- duct humanitarian interventions? Poiesis and Praxis unlike previ- ous chapters which are historical and analytical is forward-looking and prescriptive. Using and elaborating on the approach to argument knownas discourse ethics, it discusses the process of ethical argument by which world politics might be remade with regard to the problem of humanitarian intervention. International politics and foreign policy decisionmaking involve de- liberation and choice, though decisions are made in highly constrained choice situations. The answer to the why question why this thing and not another is found in the content of the arguments and the process of reason. The process and content of argument are fundamental forces in world politics they are constitutive of the world. The beliefs that actors hold about the world and the outcome of political arguments, whether 8 Careful readers will note that in a few cases in the book my spelling of place names and organizations change. The inconsistency is not mine, but the fact that over decades, the names themselves sometimes changed or were written differently by sources. Simi- larly, to avoid anachronism, I use names for groups of people, in their historical context, e.g.Hottentot, whichare nowor might be consideredderogatory. Nooffense is intended. 9 Introduction they are considered persuasive, make world politics and foreign po- licy what it is, as much or more than the distribution of power among states. The content of worldpolitics is foundinparticular beliefs, andthe process of politics is shaped by the arguments and beliefs of everyday discourse, public political rhetoric, legislation, court proceedings, and private memos. In turn, the process of argument and the content of beliefs are institutionalized in practices organizational routines and knowledge-making processes that are part of the cultural environ- ments of domestic and world politics. This argument about arguments offers an alternative theory of choice in international relations that is not based on rational actor theory, but on the role of practical reason and the importance of beliefs rooted in culture. The major evolutionary or revolutionary changes of world politics are thus a consequence of rea- soned choice as much as change is due to accident or material forces and structures. 10 1 Argument, belief, and culture Soldiers and their generals ght for many causes, worthy and unwor- thy, and when it comes to the battleeld the considerations are pretty much the same, whatever the cause. The generals study each others tactics across thebattlelines, oftenwithadmiration. Theyarethetechni- cians of warfare. The soldiers of the contending armies display courage (and sometimes cowardice), and the people they ght for make heroic sacrices (or exploit the war for gain) on both or all sides, although perhaps to different degrees and in different ways. To learn what the ghtingandthe courage andsacrices meant one must lookelsewhere, behind the physical contest to loyalties and emotions, thoughts and ideas, moral convictions and arguments. One must ask what moral and mental content shaped the decisions that brought these people to the battleeld. 1 To be of greatest interest to us, the act of demolishing another must be enshrined in justications. The muscle movements must occur in a context of verbal legitimacy. 2 Why do people, either alone or in groups, choose one action and not another? How do they even come to know that they must make a de- cision? Why choose blockade over invasion, or confrontation over ap- peasement? Indeed, how do people decide what is worth ghting for at all? Surely actors are often circumscribed by resources, or their op- tions seem limited by the structure of choice (such as time pressure), but generally decisionmakers still have options even within constraint. Individuals and groups make decisions through a process of practical 1 William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 4. 2 Harold Lasswell, World Politics and Personal Insecurity (New York: The Free Press (1935) 1965), pp. 2324. 11 Argument and change in world politics reason or argument, while the beliefs containedin those arguments help actors, both in groups and by themselves, decide what to do. Reason is the process individuals go through in deciding how the world works and how they will act in it. 3 Political argument is public reason. The necessity of making good arguments, ones that convince oth- ers, preoccupies domestic governments, social movements, and asso- ciations. Why? Because justication is necessary. What is not clear to scholars of world politics is how argument could have any importance outside the domestic realm. Focusing on argument thus runs against the grain of international relations theory. 4 However, analysis of the pro- cess and content of arguments is crucial for understanding constancy and change in world politics. Argument is not merely rhetoric. 5 Even those who use brute force make arguments about why it was neces- sary or wise to do so. The tendency to downplay argument, belief, culture, andpolitical dis- course has deeproots. Political philosopher Thomas Hobbes proclaimed covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to se- cure a man at all. 6 Hans Morgenthau, in Politics Among Nations, urges scholars of international politics to assume rationality and a drive for 3 Rational actor theories describe one kind of reasoning but certainly do not encompass all forms of reasoning. 4 Exceptions include: Thomas Risse, Lets Argue! Communicative Action in World Pol- itics, International Organization 54 (Winter 2000), 139; Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds., The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domes- tic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Hayward R. Alker, Redis- coveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996); FriedrichV. Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Thomas F. Homer-Dixon and Roger S. Karapin, Graphical Argument Analysis: ANewApproach to Understanding Arguments Applied to a Debate about the Window of Vulnerability, International Studies Quarterly 33 (September 1989), 389410; Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games, and Debates (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1960); Gavan Duffy, Brian K. Federking, andSeth A. Tucker, Lan- guage Games: Dialogical Analysis of INF Negotiations, International Studies Quarterly 42 (June 1998), 271294; Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Histor- ical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1992); and Martti Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument (Helsinki: FinnishLawyers Publishing Company, 1989); AndrewLinklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foun- dations of the Post-Westphalian Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). Outside international relations see: Brian M. Barry, Political Argument: AReissue with a NewIntroduction (London: Routledge, 1990); Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics, 2nd edn (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998) and Michael Billig, Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 5 And like casuistry, rhetoric is not bad, though in recent years both terms have the connotation of empty speech that is separate from and/or conceals real interest. 6 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Penguin (1651) 1986), p. 223. 12 Argument, belief, and culture power. 7 Given an assumption of rationality, dened as the pursuit of ones interests, it matters little what actors think or how they use ar- guments to persuade others to act. Structural theories of international politics, which emphasize the anarchical character of the international system and suggest that most outcomes can be explained by reference to the distribution of capabilities (most importantly, power) among states, similarly assume and emphasize a narrowly dened rational- ity. Kenneth Waltz argues that systemic forces of international politics (the balance of power) pushactors to be sensitive to costs . . . whichfor convenience can be called an assumption of rationality. 8 Further, even constructivists who argue that rules regulate behavior and constitute actors identities appear to hold the view that there is a rational core to behavior in international politics. 9 Post-structural and critical theory approaches to world politics, which emphasize discourse, come closest to articulating a role for argument. 10 The process of foreign policy decisionmaking and international rela- tions is characterized by political arguments that occur among elites, within organizations, between elites and masses, in the public sphere, within authoritarian states, and in the anarchical international system. There is a tight relationship between belief and argument: beliefs are translated into political action through reasoned argument. Even when beliefs appear, by themselves, to lead to actions such as the use of force by states, actors reason and give reasons to others about why force must be used. Reasoning involves both individual reection and political, or public, argument. Arguments and beliefs gain their content and are 7 The tendency of Hobbes and Morgenthau to downplay the role of ideas and argument is ironic given the centrality of political argument in Thucydides. 8 Kenneth N. Waltz, Reections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to My Critics, in Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1986), pp. 322345: 331. 9 Constructivist primers include Peter Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Secu- rity: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Emanuel Adler, Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics, European Journal of International Relations 3 (September 1997), 319364; Audie Klotz, Norms in International Relations: The Struggle Against Apartheid (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989). 10 See David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); KarenLitn, Ozone Discourses: Science and Politics in Global Environmental Cooperation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Roxanne LynnDoty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 13 Argument and change in world politics intelligible through and within cultures. In other words, arguments de- pend on and refer to beliefs and those beliefs are embedded in a context of other beliefs which may or may not be explicit or structured. Argu- ment in foreign policy decisionmaking and international politics is only one species of the processes of international politics. 11 Argument The dominant view of how issues are decided was well articulated in 1862 by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck: The great ques- tions of the age are not settled by speeches and majority votes . . . but by iron and blood. 12 Yet, as foreign policy decisionmakers come to believe it is time to act, and there is no obvious course of action dic- tated by preexisting beliefs and policies, they begin to argue over the correct action. Arguments are an effort to persuade others to see the world in a particular way and to act in accordance with the conclu- sion that follows from the argument. Practical arguments are about how to act in the social world; scientic arguments are about the natural world; ethical arguments are about what it is right to do in particular situations; and identity arguments are about how different understandings or actions in the world are implied on the basis of identity. Argument as reasoning and persuasion Political argument is a form of persuasion and intersubjective reason- ing. While decisionmaking is characterized by reection and often keen intelligence, it is not rational, at least not in the sense scholars usually think of as rational (dispassionate utility maximizing). Rather, foreign policy decisions are the product of preexisting beliefs and the process 11 Processes are the regular practices that the agents of world politics engage in as they create, maintain, and transform themselves and the structure of world politics. Other pro- cesses are: constitutive, reproductive, communicative, discursive and oppositional. Ar- guments communicate beliefs and information about how others understand the world. Argumentation is also a discursive practice; arguments only make sense within discursive or knowledge structures and within the larger cultural/historical context within which they take place. Arguments can bolster, modify, or destroy knowledge structures. Argu- ments are also constitutive in that they dene, make, and maintain corporate/collective agents and some aspects of social structure. Reproductive and oppositional processes are also dependent on arguments. We could oppose each other or reproduce ourselves in any number of ways. How groups choose to do so, or to change from one mode of production or opposition to another, is by a process of persuasive arguments and reasoning. 12 Quoted in Hagan Schulze, Germany: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1998), p. 140. 14 Argument, belief, and culture of argument within and among groups they are reasoned. Such polit- ical reasoning takes the form of an argument that contains beliefs and a logic or logics of inference. 13 The goal of political arguments may be to convince or persuade another (or some third party), or discourse ethical argument can be used by interlocutors to reason or to nd truth to- gether. In the former instance, the focus of most of this book, those who argue are convinced of their position and are trying to persuade the other or an important audience that they are right. 14 In the latter case, actors are more open to challenges to their position and to changing their beliefs and conclusions. Practical reasoning or inference is an internal act of deliberation that individuals can use to work through problems; it is a route to dis- covery, not just to retrospective explanation or justication, or to self- encouragement. 15 Public or political arguments attempt to inuence private reasoning and affect a groups choice: political arguments pro- vide reasons that actors think and hope others will nd persuasive. Of course, coercion is possible and frequently used, but it is very expen- sive to coerce others over prolonged periods. To get other states to go along with yours, whether in a coalition, alliance, or large international organization (or at least not to oppose your state) those others must be convinced to act, or at least not to block your action. Thus, politics is thick with places where arguments can and must be persuasive. When practical reason is a public process of argument, advocates in effect take their audience through the steps of practical inference and/or associa- tive reasoning. 16 Thus, a strict division between internal and external reasoning breaks down in practice since individuals acquire and under- stand history and historical analogies as part of a social process. Reason and persuasive argument have been discussed for millennia by philosophers and rhetoricians. Aristotle distinguished practical from theoretical reasoning (or wisdom) in the Nichomachean Ethics, where he says that practical wisdomis concernedwithaction. 17 Theoretical rea- soning or wisdom concerns answering the question of what is or is not 13 I say more about logics of inference later. 14 Risse, Lets Argue, calls this rhetorical action. 15 Robert Audi, Practical Reasoning (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 184. 16 Aristotle links practical reasoning and politics in book 6 of The Nichomachean Ethics, translated with an Introduction by David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 17 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, p. 146 (book 6, ch. 7). Also see Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, translated with an Introduction by Hugh Lawson-Tancred (New York: Penguin, 1991). Habermas relates Aristotelian practical reason to discourse ethics in J urgen Haber- mas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 15 Argument and change in world politics true, while practical reasoning is concerned with answering the ques- tionof howtoact inresponse topractical problems. 18 Practical reasoning concludes with an answer to a practical question, such as, paradigmat- ically, What am I to do?, asked in the context of a felt problem. 19 Further, as Aristotle notes, deliberation over practical problems may consist of chains of practical reasoning, as people reason about how to achieve something they have dened as a good. We deliberate not about ends but about means . . . Having set the end, they consider how and by what means it is to be attained; and if it seems to be produced by several means they consider by which it is most easily and best produced, while if it is achieved by one only they consider how it will be achieved by this and by what means this will be achieved, till they come to the rst cause, which in the order of discovery is the last . . . and what is last in the order of analysis seems to be rst in the order of becoming. 20 Forms of argument: top-down, rule-based and sideways, associative There are different ways to deconstruct and represent practical reason and arguments. 21 Political debates and arguments may often be de- scribed as Aristotelian practical reason where actors, who are goal or norm driven make arguments that move from general premises to specic conclusions. For example, si vis pacem para bellum/ if you want peace prepare for war. Though we seldom make arguments in a form where the architecture is so transparent, practical reasoning may be illustrated in the form of a syllogism or practical inference: the rst, 18 Aristotle distinguished episteme or theoretical knowledge from phronesis, or practical wisdom, used for resolving particular problems. Theoretical statements or arguments are idealized, atemporal, and necessary in the sense that they depend on the initial axioms being correct and on the consistency of subsequent deductions. Practical statements or arguments are concrete (resting on experience), temporal, and presumptive in the sense of being revisable. Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: AHistory of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 2628. 19 Audi, Practical Reasoning, pp. 1819. 20 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, pp. 5657. Toulmin calls larger arguments macro- arguments, and the arguments embedded in larger arguments micro-arguments. Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), p. 94. 21 I am for the most part omitting explicit discussion of formal theories of argument and discourse because I have chosen to emphasize the process of argument in world politics specically in understanding colonialism, decolonization, and humanitarian intervention rather than theories of argument. Further, I am not developing a formal method for analyzing arguments but rather, in chapter 2, proposing an informal method. 16 Argument, belief, and culture or major, premise expresses a goal, the second, or minor, premise artic- ulates a cause-effect belief, and the conclusion regards a practical neces- sity, the statement of an action to bring about the desired goal realizing, of course, that there may be more than one way to achieve the goal. 22 Form of practical syllogism/Inference Premise: desired goal or norm/good Premise: causeeffect argument or representation of the situation Conclusion: description of action implied by the argument Practical inferences are the single step from a set of premises to a conclusion and practical reasoning is a sequence of practical infer- ences linked by more than one step of inference. 23 Practical reasoning may then be represented as a syllogism with prior syllogisms, linked in inferential or purposive chains, and such arguments may be analyzed in terms of their deductive logic. Good arguments of this sort ought to have conclusions that followlogically fromtheir premises, and whether something follows logically depends on the content of beliefs embed- ded in the argument and the wider background of culture. All practical arguments are vulnerable to being questioned. First, an- tagonists may debate the desirability of the proposed goal and whether the goal is worth the actions required to achieve it (meta-argument). Second, they may focus on the second premise, specically on whether the particular meansend relationship given as part of the argument is correct whether the beliefs given about how the world actually works in the ways presumed by the argument are correct. Third, interlocu- tors may question the validity of a practical inference; in other words, whether the correct conclusion was drawn from the argument. Fourth, actors may agree on the goal, the endsmeans premise, and the infer- ences drawn from the argument, but argue over whether the actions requiredto reach the goal are feasible. Or nally, using a powerful rhetor- ical move, opponents to a dominant argument may raise a competing syllogism or suggest different relevant comparisons. In contrast to top-down reasoning, when actors perceive similarities between situations they may reason horizontally, by association, that it is wise to act in ways that worked in the rst instance, assuming that what applies inone situationought toapplyina similar case. Arguments 22 Douglas N. Walton, Practical Reasoning: Goal-Driven, Knowledge-Based, Action-Guiding Argumentation(Savage, MD: RowmanandLittleeld, 1990), pp. 16-21 discusses alternative formulations of premises and conclusions of a practical inference. 23 Ibid., p. 129. 17 Argument and change in world politics which take this formdepend for their power on howclosely the present circumstances resemble those of the earlier precedent cases for which this particular type of argument was originallydevised. . . the truths andcer- titudes established in the precedent cases pass sideways, so as to provide resolutions of later problems. 24 Inferences in horizontal/associative reasoning are based on simplifying, or in some cases caricaturing com- plex situations through the use of metaphor, metonym (recalling a part or aspect of something to refer to characteristics of the whole), or anal- ogy, and comparing them with other situations. Metaphor, metonym, and analogy are thus a crucial part of the in- ternal reasoning of individuals how they come to understand, learn, and decide by themselves and public argument. Intended analogies may often be conveyed in one word or phrase that is synonomous with lessons learned: Munich recalls appeasement and ultimately the failure to prevent aggression; Pearl Harbor recalls a surprise attack with devastating consequences. Yuen Foong Khong argues that as a form of reasoning, analogies are cognitive devices that help policy- makers performsixdiagnostic tasks central topolitical decision-making. Analogies (1) help dene the nature of the situation confronting the policymaker (2) help assess the stakes, and (3) provide prescriptions. They help evaluate options by (4) predicting their chances of success, (5) evaluating their moral rightness, and (6) warning about dangers associated with the options. 25 In sum, actors are asserting that the present situation is like the one recalled, attempting to frame a situa- tion and simultaneously implying that one ought to act according to the lessons of the analogy. Metaphor is one, if not the major, cognitive means that communicating minds have for simplifying and making sense of highly complex phenomena. 26 In sum, reasoning can be used by an individual actor as a route to discovery to help them determine the right course of action to solve a particular problem and also as a form of public reason or political argument. 27 In making arguments, individuals give reasons, and evi- dence to support those reasons, to persuade others of the rightness of a course of action or opinion that they advocate. Although psychologists 24 Jonsen and Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry, p. 35. 25 Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 10. 26 Paul Chilton, Security Metaphors: Cold War Discourse from Containment to Common House (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), p. 28. 27 Audi, Practical Reasoning, p. 184. 18 Argument, belief, and culture may debate whether human reasoning is top-down, rule-following, or associative, research on foreign policy decisionmaking suggests that arguments and inferences are made both ways. 28 Major political argu- ments, especially those involving ways of life and fundamental social concerns, usually occur over long periods of time and sometimes fea- ture discrete debates over supporting issues and points of evidence. Meta-arguments are also part of the process. Meta-arguments: the real, the good, the frame Coherent arguments are unlikely to take place unless and until actors, on at least some level, agree on what they are arguing about. The at least temporary resolution of meta-arguments regarding the nature of the good (the content of prescriptive norms); what is out there, the way we know the world, how we decide between competing beliefs (ontology and epistemology); and the nature of the situation at hand (the proper frame or representation) must occur before specic arguments that could lead to decision and action may take place. Meta-arguments over epistemology and ontology, relatively rare, oc- cur in instances where there is a fundamental clash between belief sys- tems and not simply a debate within a belief system. Such arguments over the nature of the world and how we come to know it are partic- ularly rare in politics though they are more frequent in religion and science. Meta-arguments over the good are contests over what it is good and right to do, and even how we know the good and the right. They are about the nature of the good, specically, dening the quali- ties of good so that we know good when we see it and do it. Ethical arguments are about how to do good in a particular situation. More common are meta-arguments over representations or frames about how we ought to understand a particular situation. Sometimes actors agree on how they see a situation. More often there are differ- ent possible interpretations. Thomas Homer-Dixon and Roger Karapin suggest, Argument and debate occur when people try to gain accep- tance for their interpretation of the world. 29 For example, is the war defensive or aggressive? Dening and controlling representations and images, or the frame, affects whether one thinks there is an issue at 28 On the debate in psychology, see Steven A. Sloman, The Empirical Case for Two Systems of Reasoning,Psychological Bulletin 19 (January 1996), 122; Gerd Gigerenzer and Terry Regier, How Do We Tell an Association from a Rule? Comment on Sloman, Psychological Bulletin 19 (January 1996), 2326. 29 Homer-Dixon and Karapin, Graphical Argument Analysis, p. 390. 19 Argument and change in world politics stake and whether a particular argument applies to the case. An actor ghting a defensive war is within international law; an aggressor may legitimately be subject to sanctions. Framing andreframing involve mimesis or putting forwardrepresen- tations of what is going on. In mimetic meta-arguments, actors who are struggling to characterize or frame the situation accomplish their ends by drawing vivid pictures of the reality through exaggeration, anal- ogy, or differentiation. Representations of a situation do not re-produce accurately so much as they creatively re-present situations in a way that makes sense. Mimesis is a metaphoric or iconic augmentation of the real, imitatingnot the effectivityof events, but their logical structure and meaning. 30 Certainfeatures are emphasizedandothers de-emphasized or completely ignored as the situation is recharacterized or reframed. Representation thus becomes a constraint on reasoning in that it limits understanding to a specic organization of conceptual knowledge. 31 The dominant representation delimits which arguments will be consid- ered legitimate, framing how actors see possibilities. As Roxanne Doty argues, the possibilityof practices presupposes the abilityof anagent to imagine certain courses of action. Certain background meanings, kinds of social actors and relationships, must already be in place. 32 If, as Donald Sylvan and Stuart Thorson argue, Politics involves the selective privileging of representations, it may not matter whether one representation or another is true or not. 33 Emphasizing whether frames articulateaccurateor inaccurateperceptions misses therhetorical import of representation how frames affect what is seen, or not seen, and subsequent choices. 34 Meta-arguments over representation are thus 30 Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations, p. 298. 31 Donald A. Sylvan and Deborah M. Haddad, Reasoning and Problem Representation in Foreign Policy: Groups, Individuals and Stories, in Donald A. Sylvan and James F. Voss, eds., ProblemRepresentation in Foreign Policy Decision Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 187212: 189. 32 Roxanne Lynn Doty, Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist Analysis of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines, International Studies Quarterly 37 (September 1993), 297320: 298. 33 Donald A. Sylvan and Stuart J. Thorson, Ontologies, Problem Representation, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Journal of Conict Resolution 36 (December 1992), 709732: 731. 34 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (New York: Harper, 1974); Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, and Sara Lichtenstein, Response Mode, Framing, and Information-Processing Effects in Risk Assessment, in David E. Bell, Howard Raiffa, and Amos Tversky, eds., De- cision Making: Descriptive, Normative, and Prescriptive Interactions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 152166; Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, Rational Choice and the Framing of Decisions, in Bell, Raiffa, and Tversky, eds., Decision Making, pp. 167192. 20 Argument, belief, and culture crucial elements of political argument because an actors arguments about what to do will be more persuasive if their characterization or framing of the situation holds sway. But, as Rodger Payne suggests, No frame is an omnipotent persuasive tool that can be decisively wielded by norm entrepreneurs without serious political wrangling. 35 Hence framing is a meta-argument. Associative reasoning, especially analogies, are particularly useful in meta-arguments about the frame. Thus, Dwain Mefford argues, the process of reasoning by analogy probably exerts greatest impact in the initial steps of the overall process. It helps shape the decision makers initial orientation and posture. It is here that candidate interpretations are rst marshaled, later to be scrutinized and reworked or rejected. 36 Historical analogy is both a frame and a mechanism for internal discov- ery andreason. The ambiguous andincomplete information that a new situation typically presents is often pieced together and completed on the basis of parallels drawn to past incidents. The parallels, once recog- nized, guide actors expectations as to what may ensue fromthe present situations if the parallel holds. 37 In some cases, analogies that in retro- spect seemmisplacedor poorlyrememberedhelpedpolicymakers settle on what are regarded as mistaken policies. 38 Some scholars are wary of analogy because it seems to do too many things in argument. For example, Jack Levy distinguishes between analogies that help us reason and those that are rhetorical. Some fail to differentiate between genuine learning and the rhetorical or strate- gic use of historical lessons to advance current preferences or fail to construct research designs that expedite the empirical distinction be- tween these causal processes. 39 Levy discounts the rhetorical. Instead of genuinely learning from historical experience, individuals might use 35 Rodger Payne, Persuasion, Frames, and Norm Construction, unpublished manuscript (University of Louisville, 2000). 36 Dwain Mefford, Analogical Reasoning and the Denition of the Situation: Back to Snyder for Concepts and Forward to Articial Intelligence for Method, in Charles F. Hermann, Charles W. Kegley, Jr., and James N. Rosenau, eds., New Directions in the Study of Foreign Policy (London: HarperCollins Academic, 1987), pp. 221244: 222. 37 Ibid., p. 223. 38 See Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 1976), pp. 275279; Yaacov Y. I. Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds: Information Processing, Cognition, and Perception in Foreign Policy (Stanford: Stanford Uni- versity Press, 1990), pp. 296341. Also see Khong, Analogies at War; Ernest May, Lessons of the Past (New York: Oxford, 1973); Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989). 39 Jack S. Levy, Learning and Foreign Policy: Sweeping a Conceptual Mineeld, Inter- national Organization 48 (Spring 1994), 279312: 282. 21 Argument and change in world politics historyinstrumentally. Theyoftenselect fromhistorical experiencethose cases that provide the greatest support for their preexisting policy pref- erences, or they reinterpret a given case in a way that reinforces their views, so as to rally support for their preferred policies, whether they be driven by views of the national interest or partisan political interests. 40 Discountinginstrumental uses of analogymisses the purpose andeffects of historical/analogical statements as meta-arguments. The intention is preciselytopersuade andthe framingeffect is oftenquite powerful. 41 As Khong says, that policymakers use the same analogies to justify their choices does not vitiate the diagnostic role of the analogies in helping policymakers arrive at those choices. 42 Why do actors nd one framing analogy or metaphor more persua- sive thananother? The answer probablylies inthe personal histories and cultural contexts of decisionmakers. Further, as Vertzberger argues, the logic of analogical reasoning dictates that the greater the perceivedcor- respondence between the past and the present or future, the greater the credibility of the analogy and the appropriateness of analogical reason- ing are perceived to be. 43 This perceived correspondence is crucial. Consequently the weight given to inferences and denitions of the sit- uation based on lessons from history is higher than the weight given to competing inferences and denitions of the situation based on other knowledge structures, such as deductive logic. In the same vein, the greater the perceived correspondence, the more likely is high credibility and trust in the validity of the analogy. . . . 44 But correspondence is not merely recognized or perceived. Rather, policymakers often argue that the case corresponds with their preferred analogy, making the sit- uation correspond with the past that they want to emphasize. Further, framing is shaped and constrained by dominant cultures. To understand which arguments are persuasive, and how one ar- gument is chosen over another, it is important to know which repre- sentation or characterization of the situation was believed and why one representation was chosen over competing frames. Winners of the fram- ing contest, or more importantly, the content of the representation they employ, have powerfully set the terms of subsequent argument. The content of the accepted representation focuses debates simply because 40 Ibid., 306. 41 For a psychological approach, see Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 42 Khong, Analogies at War, p. 16. 43 Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds, p. 319. 44 Ibid. 22 Argument, belief, and culture when the same issues are framed one way versus another, some argu- ments will seemmore persuasivethanothers. Further, the at least tempo- rary settling of meta-arguments over the good, ontology, epistemology, and representations, is the topoi or starting point of other arguments. 45 Among like-minded individuals, and in cases where the issue was less what the starting point was than what to do about a particular ques- tion, decisionmaking will likely feature much less meta-argument than debate on the content of arguments on the table, a search for consensus, and a focus on the best means of implementing decisions. The settling of arguments can lead to a new round of meta-argument, however, as the practices implied and entailed by the conclusion of arguments change the way the world works and is understood. Content of argument Political arguments can be classied into four ideal-type categories that vary in terms of their content: practical/instrumental, ethical, scientic, and identity. In complex situations that demand complex arguments, more than one, in some cases all these types of arguments may be de- ployed. Although the bulk of the empirical part of this book concerns the role of ethical argument the other types are also common in world politics. Practical or instrumental arguments involve beliefs about cause and effect relations among individuals; they are about how to do things in the social world. For example, prior to World War I, strategists in the French, German, and Russian militaries argued that offensive military doctrines were the best defense, and convinced the civilian leaders of those states to adopt offensive strategies. 46 Practical arguments work by giving good accounts of the social world, and thus they rely on hearers being convinced by the practical beliefs that support those arguments. Practical arguments mayalsoshowthat aprevious or alternative process for accomplishinga certaintaskinthe social worldwas inadequate or in- effective. Words like counter-productive, futile, or ineffective will convey this sense. Those employing practical arguments may also then make the claim that an alternative process is better (e.g. more efcient, more effective, or less costly) than the dominant practice. Such a claim may or may not rest on the belief that advocates of the new practical alternative have a better understanding of how the social world works. 45 Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions, pp. 3839, 41, 218219. 46 See Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 23 Argument and change in world politics Scientic arguments are about the constraints and possibilities of the physical and natural world, using the laws of science, technology, or nature, as they are understoodat the time. Scientic arguments are often made by members of scientic epistemic communities and by others who invoke natural laws. 47 For example, the interlocutors in inter- national policy debates about global warming rely on scientic (and economic) arguments. Old-fashioned realist theories and a good deal of contemporary foreign policy rely on what are thought to be scien- tic views of human nature as at root concerned with the acquisition of power. Scientic arguments work, or are persuasive, to the extent that they make powerful ontological claims about the natural world that are coupled with epistemological, procedural, claims about how to make new knowledge. These procedures for producing new knowl- edge become the only valid grounds for judging whether or not in- formation and arguments should be heard and how they should be judged. Scientic arguments work by defeating other claims to un- derstanding the natural world and by posing plausible accounts of the processes of the natural world that cohere with other scientic accounts. Ethical arguments concern how to act in a particular situation so as to be doing good, assuming that the good has been dened through cul- tural consensus or meta-argument. Ethical arguments may assert that an existing normative belief or moral conviction ought to be applied in a particular situation, and they are used to promote new norma- tive beliefs. To simplify in a way that parallels the model of practical inference, ethical arguments may take the form of positing the exis- tence of an ethical or prescriptive normative belief (premise 1), then specifying that the particular context is an instance covered by the pre- scriptive norm (premise 2), which implies (conclusion) that to do good, one ought to act in ways consistent with the prescription. Ethical argu- ments may also be characterized by sideways reasoning, where simi- larities and differences between cases suggest what is right to do in a new situation. 48 Chapter 2 describes in detail how ethical arguments work. Identity arguments posit that people of a certain kind act or dont act in certain ways and the audience of the argument either positively or negatively identies with the people in question. Identity arguments 47 See Peter Haas, Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coor- dination, International Organization 46 (Winter 1992), 136. 48 See Jonson and Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry. 24 Argument, belief, and culture mayapplyto groups or to individuals, but theyare specicallyabout the characteristics of those individuals andwhat those characteristics imply in terms of actions or reactions. Asimple example is the following: civi- lized nations do not permit genocide (premise 1); we are civilized (premise 2); those who permit or conduct genocides are barbarians and we, the civilized should not allow this practice (conclusion). Identity arguments work by producing or calling upon previously existing identities and differences among groups and claiming that specic behaviors are associated with certain identities. Identity argu- ments therefore dependheavily onthe depthandtaken-for-grantedness of identities or identity beliefs. To be most persuasive, identity and difference must be seen as deeply embedded and natural. Identity arguments work to the extent that hearers are not immediately con- scious of the ways that identity and difference are produced and nat- uralized by the individual performance of actions, the discourses of insiders and outsiders which articulate the characteristics and repro- duce the histories of groups, and the institutions that produce iden- tities such as schools, religious societies, or states. Further, identity arguments are often linked with practical or scientic arguments, as for example in this statement by a member of the French parliament in 1930: France has not yet become sufciently conscious of the extent to which its colonies offer possibilities of prestige, elements of power and pros- perityfor its material recoveryandopportunities todiffuse anddisplay the splendor of its spirit. None of our national preoccupations is as im- portant as that one. They all, whether they concern our security, our nancial recovery, problems of population or of the reinforcement of our inuence in the universal concord of people, they all have their full signicance and precise implications only if viewed from this as- pect. In fact on reection one may rightly say: France will be a great colonizing power, or it will cease to be France. 49 Identity and ethical arguments are often tightly linked. To be a good person, or in the above case, a great and splendorous nation, implies or perhaps even requires, certain good behaviors. France will be a great colonizingpower, or it will cease tobe France.Identityarguments, perhaps more obviously than other arguments, also make use of and are bolstered by emotions or feelings of belonging and love, or alternatively 49 L eon Archimbaud quoted in Rudolf von Albertini, Decolonization: The Administration and Future of the Colonies, 19191960 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company Inc., 1971), p. 265. 25 Argument and change in world politics of hatred and contempt. Nationalist discourses, for example, depend on ethnocentric and national identity, which entails love and we-feeling for the ingroup and imply a political program of state-building. Thus, arguments do not depend solely on cold cognitive processes for their persuasiveness, but also on emotions. 50 Emotion and argument Arguments are more or less well received depending on the emotional status of the hearer and the emotional content of the argument. When individuals are angry or hostile toward an interlocutor, they are less open to persuasion than if they are neutral or feeling empathetic. More subtly, some arguments may trigger feelings as well as thoughts. Histor- ical analogies are cognitively persuasive in arguments if they convince us that there are similarities between one situation and another; the les- son learned in the previous situation, therefore, ought to be applied to the new situation. If the events match (are similar in respects deemed signicant) it is more likely that individuals who belong to generations with direct experience of an event used in the analogy, or who have had some direct contact with those who experienced the event, will likely have a greater emotional reaction. Analogies may also be emotionally persuasive. Emotions are often purposefully evoked by political actors to increase our receptivity to their arguments. Nationalist leaders may promote fear of outsiders and love of country. International and non-governmental organizations use guilt and empathy to prompt disaster relief and foreign aid. Emotional appeals may be particularly effective when conicts are represented in ethnic or racial terms, and when there is a reservoir of pre-existing negative beliefs and feelings toward outgroups, or where those beliefs and feelings can be easily stimulated and stoked. Both ethical and identity arguments are emotional and derive much of their persuasive- ness from how well they elicit appropriate emotions, such as love or shame. Both cognition and emotion inuence persuasiveness, but the effects are not straightforward or easily disentangled. Persuasiveness that de- pends on careful cognition may be impaired by positive moods. Con- versely, attempts to evoke emotions such as fear may backre since the kind of arguments used in fear appeals appear to disrupt careful 50 See Neta C. Crawford, The Passion of World Politics: Propositions on Emotion and Emotional Relationships, International Security 24 (Spring 2000), 116156. 26 Argument, belief, and culture evaluation of message content. 51 But arguments that evoke fear may have positive consequences when interlocutors want fearful subjects to pay less attention to logic. Process and meaning If the process of political argument is ubiquitous, why do one thing and not another? And why are particular arguments understood to be per- suasive enough to change the prevailing practice? In other words, the entire causal story is not capturedby the process of argument. To answer questions about the particular constitution of the world at one moment, and how world political practices change, one must turn to content. 52 Meaning-content is found in the individual words used by those who are making arguments, andin the context that is readily apparent to par- ticipants because of their cultural background and immediate historical experience. Words are a part of human behaviour. They are mental categories which both represent, and are part of, the world and which impose intentionality and coherence on that world. Language is not just an intellectual activity distinct from the material world. Concepts and contexts are inseparable. Language is part of the social and political structure; it reveals the politics of a society. Hence analysis of political discourse will indicate how the political world is perceived, and a di- achronic analysis of concepts can be helpful in uncovering long-term structural changes by showing how words acquire new meanings in the contexts of such changes. 53 Further, as Aristotle noted, arguments are nested: more difcult so- cial andpolitical issues will often be tiedto other complex andcontested arguments and belief systems, linked to chains of prior argument. Con- sider the following syllogism about achieving peace. The rst premise articulates the goal of actors, the second premise makes a claim about a causal relationship, and the conclusion states a logical action that 51 Francine Rosselli, John J. Skelly, and Diane M. Mackie, Processing Rational and Emo- tional Messages: The Cognitive and Affective Mediation of Persuasion, Journal of Exper- imental Social Psychology 31 (March 1995), 163190: 167. 52 Meaning is the manifest understanding of beliefs and arguments and the related web of associations including the background beliefs held by interlocutors and observers by which they are able to understand the arguments and beliefs. Linguists call this deep structure. Associative arguments are particularly rich with meanings that may not be obvious to interlocutors and which may vary among interlocutors. 53 K.H.F. Dyson, The State Tradition in Western Europe: A Study of an Idea and Institution (Oxford: Martin Robinson, 1980), pp. 12 quoted in Chilton, Security Metaphors, p. 25. 27 Argument and change in world politics follows from the premises. The context is a question about how to use ones military to promote peace. Example of Practical Inference in Foreign Policy Arguments Premise: We desire international peace. (goal of actor) Premise: The best waytoachieve peace is througha strongmilitary. (causal argument) Conclusion: We ought to make a strong military. (An action is required or desired; follows from premises) There are nearly always competing practical arguments on the table or in the background. An alternative position to the argument pre- sented above is the condence-building perspective where the goal or major premise is the same the expression of a desire for peace but the premise concerned with end-means relations makes an alternative claimbased on different beliefs. The causal argument might be phrased, The best way to achieve peace is through assuring the other side that you have peaceful intentions where the conclusion might be commu- nicate or disarm. Both examples illustrate that there are multiple supporting beliefs and arguments that underpin complex arguments. 54 Instrumental be- liefs frequently come into play in arguments about practical questions such as howshall the state defend itself. For example, military doctrines include a mix of strategic, operational, andtactical beliefs about the most efcient and effective ways to deter and ght wars. Those beliefs affect decisions about the acquisition of equipment, the structure and content of training, and the conduct of military campaigns. But those beliefs are also used in arguments by those within and outside militaries to legitimize or delegitimize other arguments about which weapons to ac- quire in what number, how forces ought to be trained, and how wars ought to be fought. Thus, reasoning is contextual, including particular knowledge or larger belief contexts (culture). Actors, persuasive context, and non-ideal speech Political argument is institutionalizedin worldpolitics, albeit under dif- ferent rules of procedure and standards of evidence, in several venues. Indeed, diplomacy is not only the mediation of estrangement and alien- ation, as James Der Deriansuggests, it is the formal andinstitutionalized process of argumentationamongstates carriedonbyofcial or unofcial 54 On using articial intelligence to model practical reasoning see Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations and Walton, Practical Reasoning. 28 Argument, belief, and culture representatives of governments. 55 Besides bilateral diplomacy, venues for argument in world politics include international courts, commis- sions, and the resolution-making bodies of international organizations as well as transnational movements. In domestic settings, argumenta- tion is institutionalized in the peer review process of disciplinary jour- nals, in the op-ed and letter pages of newspapers, and in public institu- tions such as courts, legislatures, and political campaigns. Many kinds of actors in world politics are involved in making arguments, fromindi- viduals in governmental bureaucracies to diplomats who wish to make treaties to avoid or end wars, to members of the press and intellectuals who write opinion pieces about foreign policy, to staff members of non- governmental organizations (NGOs) who desire a change in a states foreign policies or the policies of inter-governmental organizations such as the United Nations or the World Bank. 56 If argument-making is institutionalized and ubiquitous, it is not unaf- fected by the purpose, context, and the identities of speakers and hear- ers. Some scholars of argument, notably J urgen Habermas, talk about the conditions for ideal speech where only the force of the better ar- gument convinces. 57 No institutional power, physical threats, or lies get in the way of the logic of argument and inference. In an ideal speech situation, all actors are competent and able to challenge the premises of their interlocutor, and the interlocutor must be prepared to justify their claims to validity. Thus, those who presume that argumentation is primarily a proce- dure whereby two or more individuals try to arrive at an agreement or truthpotentiallymiss animportant context of argumentation. 58 Asearch for agreement may characterize some interpersonal arguments, but po- litical arguments are different insignicant respects. 59 First, participants 55 See James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Estrangement (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987). 56 Much of what transnational advocacy networks do involves making meta-arguments and arguments. See Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Ad- vocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). 57 See J urgen Habermas, Justication and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993) and Habermas, Between Facts and Norms. 58 Frans H. vanEemeren, RobGrootendorst, SallyJackson, andScott Jacobs, Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), p. 12. Also see H.P. Grice, Logic of Conversation, in P. Cole and J.L. Morgan, eds., Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts (New York: Academic Press, 1979), pp. 4158; Denis J. Hilton, The Social Context of Reasoning: Conversational Inference and Rational Judgement, Psychological Bulletin 118 (September 1995), 248271. 59 While I share the desire of political theorists who seek to create non-coercive ideal speech communities I amhere describing world politics, not at this point trying to remake it. The last chapter is prescriptive. 29 Argument and change in world politics in political argument, while they may sincerely want to persuade the other and come to agreement, sometimes have no thought of trying to persuade their immediate interlocutor; rather theyare playingtoalarger audience, hoping to persuade non-participants and thus shift the polit- ical balance of power. Moreover, while persuasion of ones counterpart is often the point of making arguments, there are also other reasons to argue. Specically, advocates of a particular positionmaybe attempting, by stating their case, to rally their own supporters as a way of mobiliz- ing their preexisting political power. Or advocates may be attempting to lay the rhetorical grounds (change the frame) as the background for a future argument. Or someone may give an argument in order to pro- claim and establish their identity as a standard bearer or person who holds particular beliefs. Second, in major political arguments that occupy domestic and inter- national societies over long periods of time, larger issues and relations of power in addition to the ostensible issue being debated are usually at stake. The occurrence of a major political argument means the dissat- isfaction that is characteristic of all political arrangements is occurring in a context of shifting ideas and power relations: there would be no argument if all were settled. Rather, justications in the form of argu- ments would perhaps be used to maintain the taken for grantedness of the existing relationship. The occurrence of political argument indicates that there is either a normative belief that the issues at stake should not be decided by force alone or a practical judgment that a conict cannot be decided by force. This is the case in all domestic societies, regardless of the level of authoritarianism. Third, the scope for argument varies within and across institutional settings. For example, there is potentially greater scope for argument in democracies if only and simply because the dominant institutions have regular occasions, times, and venues for hearing arguments. A normative belief in public deliberation underlies the institutionaliza- tion of argument. In a democracy, when no side has the power to simply impose their view (and they often get that power by having won prior arguments and institutionalizing their victory), a decision often comes about as a result of the process of argument. The scope for argument is decreased in authoritarian settings. Specically, one cannot neglect the important role of both simple allegiance (unreasoned faith) or unques- tioned belief in the normality and legitimacy of certain institutions and practices, and fear, which can be quite effective in holding authoritarian states together. For fear to work, it requires that people believe adverse 30 Argument, belief, and culture consequences will come about if they violate the dictates of the lead- ership. Authoritarian elites demonstrate their power against potential dissenters by making dissidents the subject of, for example, ridicule, job loss, kidnapping, torture, or execution. But the role of argument is not entirely absent in authoritarian set- tings. Hegemons often make arguments so that they may maintain their position and because they believe what they argue. Even coer- cion requires arguments that are persuasive enough to convince those who will operate the mechanisms of coercion that coercion is neces- sary and that they must participate. Intimidation intended to produce fear cannot go all the way to the top at all times. Indeed, political ar- guments occur even among elites in authoritarian societies and the felt need and the practice of using arguments to mobilize constituencies testies to the importance of argument. 60 Counter-arguments may be raised by those who are already in a counter-hegemony, or who seek to form one; they are using these arguments to change not only the beliefs and practices of the society but also the capabilities of the hege- monic social order, perhaps to overturn it. In other words, the people who make arguments come fromandconstitute elements of civil society that seek either to maintain or to overturn social practices. In the case of those who seek to overturn practices, their arguments may be successful enough to change the arrangement of authority and power within the civil society. In fact, they may have to do so to change dominant social practices. Fourth, though everyone may argue, not all are persuasive. Politics, even in democratic contexts, is certainly not an ideal speech situation where preexisting power and authority have been removed from the scene or equalized and only the force of the better argument convinces. Political argument occurs on a decidedly unlevel playing eld of discourse between differently powerful actors. Those whose beliefs are dominant usually hold an advantage in arguments; their position has set the terms of debate, dening what will be considered at all, and within that realm, what will be considered legitimate. In addition, those who hold the dominant position are usually the dominant class, with all the tools of privilege media access, positions of political and social vis- ibility and authority, recognized expertise, and presumed legitimacy at their disposal. These elites are, in other words, hegemonic in a 60 I thank Seyom Brown for suggesting this clear phrasing of my argument. 31 Argument and change in world politics Gramscian sense. 61 Moreover, authority is not accidental. To advance the newthinking inthe Soviet Union, for example, Gorbachevreplaced many old thinkers with new thinkers who could further promote those ideas in their agencies. 62 Further, as the work on decisionmaking under conditions characterized by high degrees of uncertainty and complexity suggests, interlocutors with specialized knowledge may have rhetorical power disproportionately greater than their ostensible rank. 63 For example, in a Western medical context physicians will have greater authority attributed to their arguments over non-physicians in discussions of human health and neurologists will have greater authority than oncologists in discussions on treating multiple sclerosis or Parkinsons disease. Finally, although in ideal speech situations, everything should be on the table, in most political arguments, much goes unsaid. For example, actors commonly make other assumptions about fellowconversational- ists and inferences about content that go beyond the explicit contents of arguments. Hearers may assume that speakers utterances are true. If the hearer attributes properties such as sincerity, reliability, and knowl- edgeability to the speaker, then the hearer may well consider the proba- ble truthvalue of anutterance to be high. If, onthe other hand, the hearer considers the speaker to be insincere, unreliable or unknowledgeable, then the hearer may well consider the probable truth of the utterance to be low. 64 Andhearers alsouse contextual knowledge toll inthe blanks of explicit arguments. 65 Contextual factors generally held exogenous to game models may prove decisive for outcomes. These factors include actors beliefs about the nature of the interaction, their beliefs about other actors beliefs, and the means by which actors convey and infer intentions to and from one another. 66 In sum, while meta-arguments as well as more specic identity, sci- entic, practical, and ethical arguments are made all the time by many actors, not all arguments have the same chance to be persuasive. Per- suasive context the purpose and intended audience of the argument, 61 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971). Also see Stephen Gill, ed., Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 62 Levy, Learning and Foreign Policy, p. 300. 63 Haas, ed., Special Issue: Knowledge, Power, and International Policy Coordination. 64 Hilton, The Social Context of Reasoning, p. 250. 65 Grice called this practice conversational implicature. See H.P. Grice, Logic of Con- versation; Duffy, Frederking, and Tucker, Language Games. 66 Duffy, Frederking, and Tucker, Language Games, p. 271. 32 Argument, belief, and culture whether larger issues are on the table, the relative power and identities of the interlocutors, and the relevant cultural contexts affect the suc- cess of persuasive efforts. The existence of argument as a practice is consistent; what varies across social formations and depending on the structure of power within groups, are the resources of authority and publicity (the ability to make arguments heard). Those who wish to form counter-hegemonies must make persuasive arguments to bolster their position and form a social movement. Argument, belief, and legitimation Even in cases where one side has imposed their views or practices on another, the process of argument and persuasion is still crucial: hege- mons must convince others to carry out their wishes because even the leviathan falls asleep. In other words, although it is especially important to politically insecure elites, legitimation is a preoccupation of all ruling elites because at all times, even in totalitarian systems, governance re- quires some level of voluntary submission to authority. 67 To minimize resistance leaders of states must convince people that their actions are legitimate (done for a good reason and/or under right authority) on some level, or else they could not govern without the use of expensive surveillance and coercive mechanisms. To a greater or lesser degree leaders have to legitimate their policies, to themselves, to their legisla- tors, and to their electorates. They do this by the use of language and concepts. Consequently they must draw, proactively or retroactively, on the discourses (beliefs, practices and associated linguistic realizations) of the society of which they are a part. 68 Elites can use any number of legitimating ideologies to show that there are good arguments for a political orders claim to be recognized as right andjust. 69 Legitimatingideologies usedinpolitical orders have included divine right, meritocracy/elitism, democratic/republican rep- resentation, and socialism. Legitimating ideologies are more or less 67 Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, in Herbert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, eds., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Thomas Franck, The Emerging Right to Democratic Gov- ernance, The American Journal of International Law 86 (January 1992), 4691. Loyalty and idealism can, to a certain extent, function in place of good reasons. See David Lumsdaine, Moral VisioninInternational Politics: The ForeignAid Regime, 1949-1989 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 12. 68 Chilton, Security Metaphors, p. 31. 69 See J urgen Habermas, Legitimation Problems in the Modern State, in J urgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), pp. 178205: 178. 33 Argument and change in world politics acceptable as societies move from one historically distinct situation to another that is, as their beliefs change. Fascism and divine right are now mostly discredited legitimating ideologies, made unacceptable to Westernsocieties as the belief assumptions behindthose ideologies were understood differently and were delegitimized. Legitimation crises are a sense that the government or governing group does not deserve the allegiance and compliance of the people because their actions are no longer understood as being done for a good reason. A fundamental legitimation crisis occurs when a governments legitimating ideology is discredited or successfully challenged, for ex- ample, when divine right is no longer seen as a legitimate basis for rule. Aregime legitimation crisis occurs when a particular clique, for example a social class or ethnic group, is seen as illegitimate. A policy legitima- tion crisis occurs when specic policies of a government are seen as so troubling as to throw into question the policy or programs of the rul- ing group. A personal legitimation crisis occurs when the leadership of a particular individual is seen as illegitimately obtained or they have misused the trust of the people. A personal legitimation crisis is likely when a governments leader and/or their close associates are suspected of or proven to have broken the law or social norms by, for example, accepting bribes or intimidating political opponents. There may also be cultural or societal legitimation crises, when longstanding practices are no longer taken for granted and seen as legitimate. 70 States that cannot convince their populations that their actions are le- gitimate eventuallysuffer legitimationcrises; if those crises are not reme- died through persuasion, the state may modify its policy or be forced to undergo a serious restructuring, perhaps a revolution. Individuals may be more receptive to ethical arguments if they live in societies that are in the midst of a legitimation crisis; and vice versa, ethical arguments may become the seeds of a legitimation crisis. Of course a legitimation crisis of one type may spark other sorts of legitimation crises as, for example, whenthe anti-slavery movement createdproblems for conservative rule inBritainandwhenit sparkedtensions over states rights andfederalism in the United States. 71 70 This is a simpler model of legitimation needs and crisis than J urgen Habermas, Legiti- mation Crisis (Boston: BeaconPress, 1975) where Habermas focuses onthe consequences of the decreasing role of the lifeworld andthe decline of cultural expectations as rationality and expectations about the states role in providing well being increase. 71 Habermas suggests stages of legitimationare connectedwithsocial-evolutionarytran- sitions to newlearning levels andthat the legitimations of a supersededstage, no matter 34 Argument, belief, and culture States must provide arguments, which are seen to be legitimate, for their actions. Environments thick with international institutions (such as the United Nations, the world court, regional organizations of states, and non-governmental organizations) and transnational advocacy net- works provide venues where states, corporations, and individuals have to justify their international behavior. International institutions and governments must also increasingly justify their actions and inactions to attentive international and domestic publics. 72 As Martha Finnemore argues: When states justify their interventions, they are drawing on and articulating shared values and expectations held by other decision makers and other publics in other states. Finnemore suggests that this is literally an attempt to connect ones actions to standards of justice, or perhaps more generically, to standards of appropriate and acceptable behavior. Thus, through an examination of justications we can begin to piece together what those internationally held standards are and how they may change over time. 73 Within international society, arguments and behaviors are judged on the basis of prevailing international belief systems, including normative beliefs. Thus, successful arguments in world politics must pass both domestic and international muster. Why do arguments succeed? To say that argument is ubiquitous, and how certain arguments might work, does not yet fully answer the question of whether argument is causally important. Meta-arguments are causally important when their exponents succeed in setting the framework for understanding events. This framing effect is particularly important in crises, when actors may what their content, are depreciatedwith the transition to the next higher stage; it is not this or that reason which is no longer convincing but the kind of reason. Habermas, Legit- imation Problems, p. 185. I agree with Habermas that once certain types of justication are understood as illegitimate, a state is not likely to successfully resort to another variety of the same type of legitimating ideology. But whether there are progressive stages of legitimation connected to social-evolutionary stages is not clear. Nor is it clear that a soci- ety must hold only one type of legitimating ideology at a time. Indeed, it seems possible to use two or more legitimating ideologies simultaneously, with perhaps one reinforcing the weaknesses of the other. In sum, all political institutions face legitimation problems, but those problems do not always become fundamental, regime, policy, or personal legit- imation crises. 72 Thomas Risse-Kappen, Public Opinion, Domestic Structure, and Foreign Policy in Liberal Democracies, World Politics 43 (July1991), 479512; Paul Wapner, Politics Beyond the State: Environmental ActivismandWorldCivic Politics, World Politics 47 (April 1995), 311340. 73 Martha Finnemore, Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention, in Katzenstein, ed., Culture of National Security, pp. 153185: 159. 35 Argument and change in world politics have little time toreconsider a frame once it has beenacceptedor become dominant. We can infer that scientic, identity, ethical, and practical arguments were causally important if actors change their beliefs and behavior after they have heard arguments and if other explanations fail to account for the change. A more detailed discussion on cause and ethical arguments appears in chapter 2. If argument is ubiquitous, why are some arguments persuasive and others not? Persuasive arguments often have one or more of the charac- teristics of being emotionally appealing, accounting for evidence, and addressing the concerns raised by counter-arguments. Persuasive argu- ments are alsooftenconsistent withpreexistingbeliefs. Further, some ar- guments are persuasive simplybecause the frame has beenset sowell by advocates that no other argument seems plausible. Additionally, there may be a bias toward coherentism, with successful meta-arguments dis- posing hearers to accept subsequent arguments that cohere with them. Further, especially in the case of practical arguments, the logic of cer- tain arguments may be more compelling than the alternatives. Other arguments are persuasive because they are made by authorities or ex- perts, andthe culture defers tothose experts. (The literature onepistemic communities is implicitly an example of the effectiveness of scientic arguments.) 74 Persuasive arguments must also often change underly- ing beliefs. Finally, arguments may, as suggested above, resonate with or evoke an important emotional response. Thus, the content of argu- ments is important in explaining their persuasiveness, but so too is the cultural context within which arguments are made and heard. Why do some arguments win out over others? Of course, more persuasive arguments may win. But we know that not all com- pelling arguments succeed in changing minds or behavior, and thus we must take into account the four aspects of the discursive context that affect the success of arguments: access, organizational ability, chance, and coherence with the larger material and ideational context. First, to have a possibility of succeeding, arguments must be heard. Since politics is far from an ideal speech community or level playing eld, many arguments will never be heard or achieve the same legitimacy as those made by advocates with the power to squash alternative perspectives or to pay for media access. Second, successful arguments are made by savvy political actors who mobilize support, while those who do not mobilize and change the balance 74 See Haas, Introduction. 36 Argument, belief, and culture of political power may have good arguments, but poor organizing ability. Third, there is a degree of chance involved in the success of some arguments over others. For example, if the proponents of an argument happen to be unskilled rhetoricians, their arguments may fail decisively while weaker arguments may have more skilled proponents. Finally, arguments are less likely to be persuasive if the social and material context economics and strategic interests do not align with the argument. This does not mean that argument actually boils down to material conditions, but rather it acknowledges the complexity of the relationship between arguments and preexisting cultural, strategic, and economic factors. On the other hand, arguments that have already suc- ceeded in reframing actors understanding of their interests, and assist- ing social movements or reformers in restructuring important elements of economy and politics, are more likely to be persuasive. Belief Decisions for war will always be affected by the beliefs about war which prevail within the society in question and the effect these have on na- tional behaviour. These beliefs have varied greatly from one age to an- other. In some war has been seen as glorious and honourable, in some as wicked; in some as cheap and in some expensive. A widespread belief that war is a normal and inevitable feature of international life must affect the behaviour of all states (if only because every one must be in a position to counter the expected onslaught of others). In other words, it is not only beliefs that exist within particular states that will affect their propensity to war, but also the beliefs they know to ex- ist elsewhere within their [international] society. All are affected by the expectations and assumptions of the international community as a whole. 75 There are essentially three views of the role of belief in decisionmak- ing. Many scholars suggest that we should start analysis of decisions by assuming rationality or else we will be lost in a realm of thick de- scription and mired in the quicksand of idiosyncratic explanations and unpredictability. 76 Different rational actors, given the same situation, should essentially be interchangeable as they weigh costs, risks, and 75 Evan Luard, War in International Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 21. 76 See Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). 37 Argument and change in world politics benets and maximize given utilities. The content of beliefs seems less important, inthis view, thanthe rational process of decisionmakinggiven particular beliefs, preferences, and probabilities. A second view supposes that the process of decisionmaking is es- sentially rational, but because individuals are limited in their cognitive capacities and are occasionally, especially in crisis situations, inuenced by feelings or other (ir/rational) considerations, beliefs may bias an indi- viduals processing of information and their decisions. Herbert Simon, for instance, distinguishes betweensubstantive, ideal type decisionmak- ing, andprocedural or boundedrationality, whichrecognizes a decision- makers cognitive limits. 77 In this view, we can use tools that include an understanding of belief (cognitive belief systems, misperception the- ory, organization theory, or even psychological analysis of individual decisionmakers) to ll in the gaps of the master rational actor narra- tive. From this perspective, we expect both affective (emotion driven) and cognitive (information processing) biases inside the black box. 78 Or, as Max Weber said: the construction of a purely rational course of action. . . serves the sociologist as a type . . . By comparison with this it is possible to understand the ways in which actual action is inuenced by irrational factors of all sorts . . . in that they account for the deviation from the line of conduct which would be expected on the hypothesis that the action was purely rational. 79 Sydney Verba argued that [o]ne of the major values of the rationality model may be that it facilitates the systematic consideration of deviations from rationality. 80 Thus, even those who use cognitive and abnormal psychology to explain decisionmaking under stress, or those who look to explain unsuitable military doctrines by the pathologies of militarismand na- tionalism, presume a rational outline for decisionmakinganda rational irrational dichotomy. Similarly, rationalist scholars have begun to 77 Herbert Simon, Human Nature in Politics: The Dialogue of Psychology with Political Science, The American Political Science Review 79 (June 1985), 293304. 78 See Jervis, Perception and Misperception; Richard Ned Lebow, Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crises (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein with contributions by Patrick Morgan and Jack Snyder, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Deborah Welch Larson, Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Janice Gross Stein, Building Politics into Psychology: The Misperception of Threat, Political Psychology 9 (June 1988), 245271. 79 MaxWeber, trans. A.M. HendersonandTalcott Parsons, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 92. 80 Sidney Verba, Assumptions of Rationality and Non-Rationality in Models of the In- ternational System, in Klaus Knorr and Sidney Verba, eds., The International System: The- oretical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 93117: 116. 38 Argument, belief, and culture acknowledge the role of ideas but regard them as always a valuable supplement to interest-based, rational actor models. 81 Barry Weingast regards belief systems, when held by all actors in a system as a co- ordinating device that functions like complete information, solving a large scale coordination problem. 82 A third view, taken here, argues that beliefs are neither rational nor irrational: beliefs are the propositions that individual people andgroups have about themselves, others, and the world around them. They think those ideas are true they believe them. When nearly everyone in a group holds a certain belief, and it is taken for granted, perhaps even conrmed by experience, then beliefs may have the status of knowl- edge, truth, or reality. More often than not, however, although one particular belief may be dominant (have the most political and social clout), other beliefs about the same subject may compete with a dom- inant belief. The meaning statements that members of a society dont believe at all, or dont yet believe, are described by skeptics with vary- ing degrees of respect as a notion, idea, knowledge, theory, myth, ideology, faith, or dogma. 83 If others dont share our beliefs, we may try to convince them of their truth. But regardless of the truth of a belief, as Luard argues, All are affected by the expectations and assumptions of the international community as a whole. 84 Philosophical, instrumental, normative, and identity beliefs Philosophical beliefs are ontological and epistemological. They are about the kind of reality humans inhabit, the general qualities of human beings or human nature and the natural world, and about how to know more about the world. Philosophical beliefs include views about howto decide between competing beliefs and when to add newbeliefs or mod- ify or even eliminate already held beliefs. For example, we could believe that we will know more about the world if a god reveals truth to us, or we might believe in the scientic method, or we might trust that history 81 John Kurt Jacobsen, Much Ado About Ideas: The Cognitive Factor in Economic Policy, World Politics 47 (January 1995), 283310: 285. 82 Barry R. Weingast, A Rational Choice Perspective on the Role of Ideas: Shared Belief Systems andStateSovereigntyinInternational Relations,Politics andSociety23(December 1995), 449464: passim 460461. Similarly, Katzenstein says, Collective expectations can have strong causal effects. Peter J. Katzenstein, Introduction: Alternative Perspectives on National Security, in Katzenstein, ed., Culture of National Security, pp. 132: 7. 83 My emphasis on belief and the process of argument does not mean that other aspects of agents, such as their dispositions (e.g., to be skeptical or accepting), desires, habits, and feelings, are unimportant. 84 Luard, War in International Society, p. 21. 39 Argument and change in world politics repeats itself andour guide to the present andthe future lies inanunder- standing of the past. Realist foreign policy decisionmakers generally believe that humans are by nature aggressive or at least interested in acquiring power. Realists also tend to hold positivist epistemologies in the sense of believing that observation of the empirical world the world revealed by our senses is trustworthy. 85 Philosophical beliefs are often the content of meta-arguments. Normative beliefs are ideas individuals and groups hold about how they ought to act (or not act) to do what is right or expected. They are prescriptions with justications attached to them. Prescriptive norma- tive statements follow from normative beliefs, e.g. thou shall not kill. Normative beliefs are the content of ethical arguments. Although multiple, conicting meanings attributed to the term normmaynot bethegreatest shortcomingintheworkoninternational norms, there is conceptual confusion about the idea of norms. 86 Many use norm to mean the most common practice, while others talk about norms as oughts or ethical prescriptions. Unfortunately, international relations theorists frequently use norms to denote both senses. 87 Fur- ther, it is also not uncommon to imply norms are synonymous with shared ideas, a form of common knowledge. For example, Kratochwil says that norms are standards of behavior dened in terms of rights and obligations. 88 But Kratochwil also says that norms reduce uncer- tainty, allow the pursuit of goals and shared meaning, dene situations and rules of the game, and provide the template for solutions. In these senses, for Kratochwil, norms are not prescriptive, but like other forms of common knowledge or shared belief. 89 A distinction between norms and normative beliefs should minimize confusion. Norms describe the dominant practice or behavior. The behav- ioral normis the behavior that typies the mode ina distributionof be- haviors, while those that fall outside of the range of dominant practices are often considered abnormal. Behavioral norms (or conventions), may, like common knowledge, create expectations about how actors 85 See Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations, pp. 612 on ontological, epistemological, and methodological orientations in international relations theory. 86 Gregory A. Raymond, Problems and Prospects in the Study of International Norms, Mershon International Studies Review 41 (November 1997), 205245. 87 See Janice E. Thompson, Norms in International Relations: A Conceptual Analysis, International Journal of Group Tensions 23 (1993), 6783. Thompson argues that we should reserve the term norms to describe normal practices. 88 Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions, p. 59. 89 Ibid., passim, e.g., pp. 9, 10, 48, and 50. 40 Argument, belief, and culture will behave in certain situations. When discussing norms as domi- nant practices or expectations about such practices, I use the phrases convention, dominant practice, norm or behavioral norm. If the behav- ioral norm is respect for sovereignty, dened as non-interference in the domestic affairs of governments, then actors expect non-interference. What if a practice is not universally adhered to? It may still be con- sidered a behavioral norm if the behavior is commonly expected, and if, when actors do not follow the expected behavior, sanctions are con- sidered and/or applied against those who violate the norm. In sum, statements about social conventions or behavioral norms describe the dominant practice and the shared expectation that actors will followthe norm in the appropriate context. Principles, rules, and laws are prescriptive normative statements that rest on normative beliefs. Behavioral norms are identied by wide compliance and are usually justied with normative beliefs that are themselves justied by other normative or practical beliefs. 90 Behav- ioral norms and prescriptive norms/normative beliefs are clearly re- lated but should not be equated. A norm describes the dominant practice or behavior, and normative beliefs often justify the normal practice. 91 Legal or social sanctions for violating norms signal the exis- tence of prescriptive norms and normative beliefs. Beliefs that are pre- scriptive statements about what dominant practices ought to be, are termed prescriptive norms or normative beliefs depending on whether I am describing an injunction to behave a certain way, or the beliefs about why it is good to behave this way. Ethical arguments are char- acterized by the use of prescriptive statements that rest on normative beliefs. Instrumental beliefs are the practical ideas we have about cause andef- fect in the natural and social worlds and about howto get what we want accomplished. They are both general and specic guides to action, with the level of specicity usually related to the specicity of the task. They suggest what to do once we have perceived and evaluated the nature of a situationandidentiedour goals. Instrumental beliefs maybe codied 90 Conventions or behavioral norms are similar to Jon Elsters social norms and pre- scriptive norms are similar to his moral norms. See Jon Elster, Norms of Revenge, Ethics 100 (July 1990), 862885, especially 863866. 91 Douglas Foyle argues that in the realmof public opinion foreign policy decisionmakers hold normative beliefs about the desirability of input from public opinion affecting foreign policy choices. Douglas C. Foyle, Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: Elite Be- liefs as a Mediating Variable, International Studies Quarterly 41 (March 1997), 141169: 145. 41 Argument and change in world politics in organizational routines (institutionalized) and used, in combination with philosophical (ontological and epistemological) beliefs, to produce new knowledge. Instrumental beliefs are often the content of scientic and practical arguments. For example, one can think of foreign policies, whichare composedof manydifferent elements, as instrumental beliefs. One element of a states foreign policy is military doctrine, instrumen- tal beliefs that help determine how a state organizes its military forces and intends to use those forces in war. Military doctrines rest on ever- more specic instrumental beliefs, such as the utility of certain weapons (based on experience and scientic-technical knowledge/beliefs) under various conditions or the ratio of offensive to defensive forces needed to successfully engage in a breakthrough assault. Identity beliefs include related and probably co-dependent beliefs about self and other. Self-identity beliefs are the beliefs we hold about our individual selves andabout our group, includingwhobelongs inthe group. Self-identitybeliefs are often, perhaps always, pairedwithbeliefs about other individuals or groups. They include stereotypes, whether positive or negative, and notions of essential self and essential other, including the idea that self and other do not change and that groups are homogeneous there is little variation among individuals who be- long in certain categories of us and other/them. Yet according to the pragmatic and historically contingent view of the foundation of beliefs, there is not much about identities that is natural or xed (except by our understanding of our history); identities, like norms, are socially con- structed and simultaneously constitutive of the social world. Identities seem to be both mutually constitutive and historically/sociologically determined. Often identities include conceptions of roles arguably different from and overlapping with identities for both self and others. Roles are a combination of situation-specic behaviors (driven by normative beliefs) and identity: individuals know which roles to assume in part because of their identity, and they know who they are, their identity, in part by the roles they perform. Roles expectations and customs about behavior only make sense in certain contexts. 92 There is often a re- ective and reasoned interaction of identity, role expectations (context- and norm-inuenced) and prescriptive social norms. 93 For example, US Senator Richard Russells identity argument for a surprise attack 92 See Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 155159, 164170. 93 On national role conceptions see, for instance, Stephen G. Walker, ed., Role Theory and Foreign Policy Analysis (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987). Similarly, constitutive 42 Argument, belief, and culture during the Cuban missile crisis included a role belief: It seems to me that we are at a crossroads. Were either a rst class power or were not. 94 Foundations of belief Foundations are the grounds for holding a particular belief or set of beliefs. To focus on foundations, ask: on what is the belief based and how can it be justied or shown to be true. 95 There are at least four views about the foundations of belief. Foundationalists, or materialists, argue that well-founded beliefs about the world reect a material reality (ontology) that we come to know through our sense experiences or observations (epistemology). Individuals base their beliefs on observation just as empiricists base their science on observables or sense impressions. Perceptions can be more or less accurate; accurate perceptions correspond to reality and directly justify basic beliefs. Beliefs based on observation may in turn indirectly, or inferentially, justify other beliefs. Rational individuals only hold those beliefs which they can justify rationally either directly or indirectly from empirical observation. Others beliefs will be intelligi- ble to us, if the other is rational, because their beliefs rest on the same foundations. A justied belief is grounded on some observation, or it is grounded on or entailed in some other belief that is itself grounded on observation. In other words, one can give a reason, rooted in the world of material observation, for the particular belief being held. Good arguments rest on empirically justied beliefs. The anti-foundationalist position holds that beliefs are accidental, historically contingent, and essentially arbitrary. We must accept the introduction of chance as a category in the production of events. 96 norms are those which create new actors, interests or categories of action. They are beliefs about the properties or characteristics of a role. Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, International Norm Dynamics and Political Change, International Organization 52 (Autumn 1998), 887917: 891. 94 Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 258. 95 This is similar tobut not thesameas askinghowapersoncametoholdaparticular belief. Someone may acquire a belief second-hand, e.g. through education or hearsay, rather than by coming to hold the belief in some rst-hand (experiential or reective) way. For an introduction to philosophical approaches to belief, see Robert Audi, Belief, Justication and Knowledge (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1988). An introduction to psychological approaches is Susan T. Fiske and Shelley E. Taylor, Social Cognition (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.: 1984). 96 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 231. 43 Argument and change in world politics In this case we would expect a wide variety of beliefs. According to anti-foundationalists, beliefs should also be highly sensitive to cultural context and the arrangement of discursive power within social groups. [W]hat ties Dewey, Foucault, James and Nietzsche, together the sense that there is nothing deepdown inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creat- ing a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions. 97 Inthecoherentist perspective, ones beliefs, nomatter howtheyarede- rived, are mutuallysupporting, formingacoherent network: one accepts as justied those beliefs which t with other beliefs. Abasic criterion for a coherent epistemic state is that it should be logically consistent. 98 The beliefs in a coherent belief system entail each other, they are tied to other beliefs in a system where beliefs are justied if they are part of that system. In the pragmatic view, beliefs do not necessarily accurately reect a material reality, nor are they necessarily consistent with other beliefs, but they come about and remain because they work to help an indi- vidual get along psychologically or they coordinate social and practical activity. Correspondence to reality is not necessarily the foundation of belief. 99 The foundation of a belief is its utility. A justied belief in the pragmatic view is one that works or is useful in a particular context. According to pragmatists, beliefs that do not work will or ought to be rejected or revised. There is good evidence for all of these perspectives on the foun- dation of belief. That is, some kinds of belief seem to be founded on observation, others on nothing in particular but habit or social convention, while some beliefs are held because they cohere with some other belief, or because they work to help actors understand or act with efcacy. It is not necessary to decide that particular be- liefs are well justied to see that beliefs are used and useful in argu- ments. However, beliefs and arguments that rest on foundations that 97 RichardRorty, Consequences of Pragmatism(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. xlii. 98 Peter Gardenfors, The Dynamics of Belief Systems: Foundations Versus Coherence Theories, in Cristina Bicchieri and Maria Luisa Dalla Chiara, eds., Knowledge, Belief and Strategic Interaction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 377398: 380. 99 See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 44 Argument, belief, and culture are perceived as shaky will obviously be more vulnerable to counter- arguments. Belief system theories The theory of belief systems presentedhere grows out of, but diverges in signicant ways from, earlier theories of belief systems and operational codes. Yet, as Steve Smith notes, a bewildering variety of terms is used in international relations to describe the essential features of the concept of belief system: terms such as the image, operational code, cogni- tive map . . . All of these focus on basically the same factor: the nature of the ltering device of existing beliefs about empirical and normative issues. 100 Most scholars of belief systems inworldpolitics holdfounda- tionalist or coherentist views of beliefs. They also tend to presume that belief systems affect decisionmaking by inuencing information pro- cessing tasks specically that beliefs bias perceptions (assuming that objective observers, not inuenced by preexisting beliefs, would have accurate perceptions and make rational decisions unbiased by their prejudices). For example, Ole Holsti characterizes belief systems as composed of a group of images of the past, present, and future: they are a set of lenses through which information concerning the physical and social environ- ment are received that establish goals and order preferences. 101 Holsti argues: [O]ur behavior is in large part shaped by the manner in which we perceive, diagnose, and evaluate our physical and social environ- ment. Our perceptions, in turn, are ltered through clusters of beliefs about what has been, what is, what will be, and what ought to be. He says beliefs provide us with a more or less coherent code by which we organize and make sense out of what would otherwise be a confus- ing array of signals picked up from the environment by our senses. 102 Similarly, Stephen Walker argues that belief systems inuence, but do not determine, diagnostic and choice propensities. The dominant in- ference pattern is the principle of cognitive consistency, from which are derived two general propositions: (a) beliefs tend to reinforce one 100 Steve Smith, Belief Systems andthe Studyof International Relations,inRichardLittle and Steve Smith, eds., Belief Systems and International Relations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 1136: 11. 101 Ole Holsti, The Belief System and National Images: A Case Study, Journal of Conict Resolution 16 (September 1963), 244252; 245. 102 Ole R. Holsti, Foreign Policy Decision Makers Viewed Psychologically: Cognitive Process Approaches, in James Rosenau, ed., In Search of Global Patterns (New York: The Free Press, 1976), pp. 120144: 122. 45 Argument and change in world politics another to form a coherent belief system; (b) under specied conditions beliefs constrain the range of alternative choices and thereby inuence the nal decision. 103 Robert Jervis argues that preexisting beliefs are rational in the sense that they help actors make sense of the world. Beliefs can help decision- makers increase the signal-to-noise ratioof environmental cues, but they can also be misleading if they are inappropriate or held without critical reection. 104 As Jervis suggests, There is no way to draw a neat, sharp line between that degree of holding to existing beliefs and disparaging discrepant information that is necessary for the intelligent comprehen- sion of the environment and that degree that leads to the maintenance of beliefs that should be rejected by all fair minded men. 105 Individu- als may ignore discrepant information because it simply does not make sense from within their paradigm and perhaps they do not see what they cant understand. Or individuals may misperceive the information, assuming that the presently held paradigm accounts for the incoming data. Those lacking rm preexisting beliefs may be more prone to be- ing swayed by the latest argument or alternative presented, while those who hold rm beliefs may be prone to premature cognitive closure, cut- ting off analysis of information or policy alternatives because they are alreadyconvincedof the correct path. 106 Individual andgroupbelief sys- tems may change over time, for instance due to changes in personnel, or dramatic historical events which cause people to learn something new because their previous beliefs were inadequate. Jervis argues quite per- suasively, however, that individuals are often quite resistant to change and they may employ any number of strategies to avoid changing their beliefs. 107 Alexander George, building on the work of Nathan Leites, pro- posed identifying an actors operational code belief system through a systematic content analysis of an actors philosophical and instru- mental beliefs. 108 George argued that the way to determine the effect of 103 Stephen G. Walker, The Evolution of Operational Code Analysis, Political Psychology 11 (June 1990), 403-418: 409. Also see Stephen G. Walker, Operational Codes and Content Analysis: The Case of Henry Kissinger, in Imtrad Gailhofer, William E. Saris, Marrianne Melman, eds., Different Text Analysis Procedures for the Studyof DecisionMaking(Amsterdam: Sociometric Research Foundation, 1986), pp. 1327; and Coding Instructions for the OC Procedure, in ibid., pp. 111120. 104 Jervis, Perception and Misperception, pp. 143ff., 156161. 105 Ibid., p. 177. 106 Ibid., pp. 175, 187. Also see Larson, Origins of Containment, p. 65. 107 See Jervis, Perception and Misperception, especially pp. 291296, on the methods indi- viduals employ to preserve their beliefs. 108 Alexander George, The Operational Code: A Neglected Approach to the Study of 46 Argument, belief, and culture operational code beliefs on decisions is either by demonstrating congru- ence between beliefs and decisions or by tracing the process of decision- making. In process tracing one seeks to establish the ways in which the actors beliefs inuenced the receptivity to and assessment of incoming information, his denition of the situation, his identication and evalu- ation of options, as well as, nally, his choice of a course of action. 109 The congruence methodrequires muchless informationabout the actual decision process. The researcher identies the nature of the subjects be- liefs and policy preferences and then determines whether the decisions follow from those beliefs. The causal signicance of operational codes is not necessarily proven by this procedure, its plausibility is merely established. 110 In sum, work on belief systems has been primarily cognitive and focused on perceptions, assuming that preexisting beliefs bias perceptions. 111 Beliefs are understood to be privately held by indi- viduals and those beliefs affect perceptions and sometimes help them organize their responses to situations. For example, Dan Reiter suggests that states act as if they have beliefs, or ideas about international politics. 112 Alexander George argues: Neither . . . diagnosis of situa- tions nor . . . choice for action is rigidly prescribed and determined by these beliefs. 113 Despite this last caveat, there is little discussion of the exact role of beliefs in the decisionmaking processes of individuals or groups. These cognitively inuenced theories of belief presume that beliefs are rst of all (biasing) lenses, and secondly lead reexively or somewhat unreectively(thoughnot rigidly) topolicychoices. Actors behave in ways that are essentially unreectively consistent with their beliefs. Political Leaders and Decision-Making, International Studies Quarterly 13 (June 1969), 190222. Nathan Leites rst suggested the phrase operational code in The Operational Code of the Politburo (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951). 109 George, The Causal Nexus, p. 113. 110 Ibid. pp. 106113. 111 Others have examined the role of beliefs and related concepts in social life e.g. cognitive psychology, the sociology of knowledge, the history of ideas, and philosophy of science: schemas, wertrationality, discourse, episteme, ideas, ideology, and paradigms. Some of these concepts from outside political science, namely Max Webers ideas about wertrationality, Michel Foucaults ideas about discourse, episteme, and knowledge, and Thomas Kuhns arguments about scientic paradigms, and feminist theorists of gender, are similar to mine. 112 Dan Reiter, Crucible of Beliefs: Learning, Alliances, and World Wars (Ithaca: Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1996), p. 12. 113 George, Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy, p. 45. 47 Argument and change in world politics The emphasis on perception is partly explained by the close relation- ship belief system scholars have had with cognitive psychology, draw- ingparticular inspirationfromschema theory. Schemas helpdecision- makers deal with complexity by providing a framework of concepts and connections; they are higher order knowledge structures . . . that embody expectations guiding lower order processing of the stimulus concept. 114 Schemas are, in a sense, like grammar, providing the frame- work for understanding incoming information and quickly articulating a response. 115 So schemas are abstract concepts and notions about ex- pectedrelationships, theories that inuenceperceptionbyorganizingin- coming informationandinuence behavior by providing a guide to suc- cessful responses in similar instances. In certain stylized situations, one type of schema, knownas ascript, maydescribe the waythat individu- als approach frequently encountered situations that offer little variance. In sum, a script is a hypothesized cognitive structure that when acti- vated organizes comprehension of event-based situations. In its weak sense, it is a bundle of inferences about the potential occurrence of a set of events and may be structurally similar to other schemata that do not deal with events. In its strong sense, it involves expectations about the order as well as the occurrence of events. In the strongest sense of a totally ritualized event sequence (e.g., a Japanese tea ceremony), script predictions become infallible but this case is relatively rare. 116 Vertzberger argues: information that ts into existing schemata that is cognitive structures of organized prior knowledge abstracted from specic experiences is noticed earlier, considered more valid, and pro- cessed much faster than information that contradicts or does not t into any particular schema. 117 While schema and belief system theory point to the ways individuals respond to what they see as routine situations, it is deterministic. This kind of theorizing too often neglects both the reective characteristics of humans, how we deal with multiple, sometimes contradictory, ideas at once, and ignores the political context of decisionmaking in foreign pol- icy where individuals must make arguments to justify their perceptions 114 Robert Abelson, Psychological Status of the Script Concept, American Psychologist 36 (1981), 715729: 715. 115 See George, The Causal Nexus, p. 97, and Larson, Origins of Containment, pp. 50 57; Deborah Welch Larson, The Role of Belief Systems and Schemas in Foreign Policy Decision-Making, Political Psychology 15 (March 1994), 1733. Also see chapter 6 in Fiske and Taylor, Social Cognition. 116 Abelson, Psychological Status of the Script Concept, p. 717. 117 Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds, p. 60. 48 Argument, belief, and culture andactions. The process of political argument andthe fact that individu- als are reective sometimes changing beliefs suggests that observers ought not to expect a determinative relationship between beliefs, deci- sions, and behavior. Rather, beliefs are part of the process of political argument that characterizes foreign policy decisionmaking. Nor should we necessarily be concerned with whether beliefs accurately reect the real world or bias perceptions. What is of concern is the content of beliefs, whether or not they are true, and the ways beliefs, which can change, are used in inference and argument. Beliefs and belief system theory revised Beliefs are arguments that we have become convinced of, whose conclu- sions we take for granted. Beliefs help us not only to perceive the world and organize our perceptions, they also help us constitute the so- cial world, make the world according to our beliefs. As John MacLean argues, beliefs are not separate or apart from the social world: what the beliefs, practices and institutions of a society actually are depends on what they mean to its members and, in this sense, meaning is not merely descriptive of things in society; it is necessarily constitutive of them too. 118 That is, when we believe our beliefs, and others believe them, we often act as if they were real. Belief has meaning and gives meaning. We act according to those meanings. Further, we use beliefs to reason, to gure out new meanings. And while beliefs are privately held, their content is a product of the individuals social interactions. Put another way, beliefs are not simply private but both individual and social. The fact that beliefs are intersub- jectively shared, or at least publicly contested, is important for under- standing their role beyond structuring individual cognition. Beliefs are held by individuals and groups they are intersubjective. It is common to draw a distinction between interests and belief Choices of specic ideas may simply reect the interests of actors 119
as if interests were self-evident, and beliefs followed unproblematically
from interests. But as Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes argue, by main- taining this distinction, the investigation of the social construction of interests is in practice disavowed because it is assumed. . . that inter- ests are given and can be determined in isolation from ideas. Further, they argue this distinction creates a tendency to understand ideas 118 MacLean, Belief Systems and Ideology, p. 76. 119 Goldstein and Keohane, Ideas and Foreign Policy, p. 11. 49 Argument and change in world politics merely as tools which are used by policy-makers to manipulate various audiences, such as international elites, domestic publics or bureaucra- cies. As a consequence, when decision-makers interests are dened as analytically distinct from ideas, then ideas are easily dismissed as mere justication, as post-hoc rationalizations of policies made on the grounds of already given material interests. 120 Thus, a distinction be- tween interests and beliefs should not be drawn too sharply if only because beliefs and arguments help people decide what they think of as interests. Acluster of beliefs is a belief systemwhenit is characterizedbya focus on a particular subject or problem (although the exact nature of the subject and its relation to other subjects may at times be under dispute) and there are multiple and overlapping belief systems within societies. For example, within the issue area of domestic policy there may be health care or welfare belief systems that are themselves related to different beliefs about the role of the state. Foreign policy belief systems are fo- cused on the problem of a states relation to other states and the content of the beliefs articulates how to understand and deal with other states. Within a general foreign policy belief system, particular sets of beliefs are focused on political, economic, cultural, and military components of the subject. And, as suggested earlier, there may be contentious dis- agreements within groups about whether certain beliefs are properly part of the larger subject area. For example, beliefs about human rights may or may not be considered part of the realm of foreign policy. A focus on a particular problem is not enough to make a collection of beliefs a belief system. The adherents to a particular set of beliefs will usually argue that the beliefs themselves come out of or were revealed from within an historical tradition. In addition, those who hold the par- ticular belief system, and perhaps even the critics of the belief system, argue that the ideas are related to each other somehow (besides their his- torical relationship). They argue that there is an internal logic to the system that is sometimes claimed to be religious, or natural, or at other times scientic. Belief systems consist of related beliefs at various levels of generalization core, contingent, and role-specic. Assuming that the beliefs in a belief system are characterized by both coherence and a historical relationship, one will often be able to predict elements of a belief system from knowledge of a few core elements and the history of 120 Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes, Beyond Belief: Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in the Study of International Relations, European Journal of International Relations 3 (1997), 193237: 200201. 50 Argument, belief, and culture the belief system. But beliefs and belief systems are not always coherent. And within societies different, even conicting, belief systems may be held within and among social groups. Previous work on foreign policy decisionmaking notes variation in the relative importance, taken-for-grantedness, and exibility of beliefs within a belief system, suggesting that there are hierarchies of belief. 121 For example, Douglas Blum argues that there are core, intermediate, and peripheral beliefs. The core level of the belief system consists of philosophical beliefs, or basic assumptions and values from which ev- erything else in the belief system is ultimately derived. Because inter- national politics is by denition an interactive realm, we may postulate that core beliefs provide the most basic concepts relevant to interac- tion. Intermediate beliefs are abstract but presuppose and are logically subordinate to core beliefs: they function to provide normative direc- tion as well as additional analytic concepts. Peripheral beliefs include detailed, tactically relevant information about the political world. 122 Others propose that beliefs are hierarchically structured and that these structures compare across states; individuals hold general foreign pol- icy postures which rest on underlying core values which structure more specic policy beliefs. 123 While one can agree or disagree with these particular schemes, some beliefs in belief systems are clearly more central, and possibly more dif- cult to modify, than others. Core beliefs, whether philosophical, norma- tive, instrumental, or about the identities of self and others, are general and fundamental and they seem to be held with little variation, regard- less of context. Like the foundations of a building, core beliefs provide 121 Ideologies are belief systems that are consciously articulated, developed, promoted, and defended. They often have explicit agendas or action orientations that adherents promote. Thus, the difference between belief systems and ideologies is the consciousness with which beliefs are held and the explicitness of the action agenda. 122 Douglas W. Blum, The Soviet Foreign Policy Belief System: Beliefs, Politics, and For- eign Policy Outcomes, International Studies Quarterly 37 (December 1993), 373394: 375 376. Also see George, The Operational Code. 123 Jon Hurwitz, Mark Pefey, and Mitchell A. Seligson, Foreign Policy Belief Systems in Comparative Perspective: The United States and Costa Rica, International Studies Quar- terly 37 (September 1993), 245270; Hurwitz and Pefey take a cognitive approach: be- cause humans have severe cognitive limitations, they often behave as cognitive misers, coping with their shortcomings by taking short cuts whenever possible. Jon Hurwitz and Mark Pefey, How are Foreign Policy Attitudes Structured? A Hierarchical Model, American Political Science Review 81 (December 1987), 10991120: 1099. Philip Tetlocks hi- erarchy is fundamental, strategic and tactical beliefs. Philip E. Tetlock, Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy: In Search of an Elusive Concept, in George W. Breslauer and Philip E. Tetlock, eds., Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy (Boulder: Westview, 1991), pp. 2061: 2731. 51 Argument and change in world politics the support and basic architecture around which other beliefs are held. Contingent beliefs and their relation to behavior are more contextually specic. They are like rules of thumb that are evoked, referred to, and used to guide action, depending on a particular circumstance. And like rules of thumb, contingent beliefs may be ignored or overruled if they are seen to conict with core beliefs. Role-specic beliefs are the ideas that people have about how they or others ought to behave when they are performing a particular role or job. As noted, role-specic beliefs and normative beliefs are connected. For example, an identity one is a citizen of the United States may be further specied by the context of an individual and the situation: the individual is a male over the age of 18 who must, they believe, register for the military draft. Thus, it is that individuals duty in their role as a good citizen to register for the draft. Here, identity and behavioral norms are both constituted and reinforced by laws about who is a citizen and the rights and obligations of those citizens. Whether or not individuals behave in accordance with the lawand social expectations will further depend on the particular so- cial pressures they confront, their personal religious and philosophical beliefs, and their personal reection/reasoning. Of course this example shows that roles are not always completely voluntarily assumed or en- acted and such an understanding is implicit in such terms as reluctant imperialists and the involuntary roles of international pariah and rogue states. Belief systems are held intersubjectively and produced by groups of individuals at various levels of aggregation. Belief systems may be held by small decisionmaking groups, such as military planners, or there may be a dominant institutional belief system, shared by mem- bers of particular bureaucracies such as the US State Department. Fur- ther, within larger and smaller groups there will often be dominant belief systems as well as rival belief systems that challenge core, contin- gent, and perhaps even the role-specic elements of the dominant belief system. The idea of coherence and interdependence of beliefs in a belief system does not necessarily mean that there is a naturally logical re- lationship between beliefs; the beliefs may simply be related by his- torical circumstances. In this sense, the system-ness of the belief system may only make sense internally and historically, while indi- vidual beliefs that are part of a larger belief system, may contradict each other. Moreover, belief systems consist of a set of beliefs that are organized and relatively constant over time that is, the beliefs do not 52 Argument, belief, and culture uctuate abruptlyfromdaytoday. 124 Still, beliefs andbelief systems do change. Belief change and learning Belief systems heldbyindividuals andgroups maybe elastic (malleable) or inelastic (xed). Individual belief systems are probably formed (or adopted) early in ones life and the exibility of an individuals be- liefs probably decreases over time. States leaders and propagandists recognize this property of belief systems, which is why the control of institutions that shape the ideas of youth have been so important to states andpolitical movements. DanReiter argues that formative events, specically world wars, structure the beliefs of states. 125 However, in- dividual beliefs and belief systems tend to persist, even in the face of disconrming evidence as individuals ignore information that discon- rms the schema or, in some cases, struggle to make the evidence t the existing schema. 126 Yet we know that individual beliefs do change and such change is a crucial aspect of the persuasiveness of arguments. How is it that people change their beliefs and under what circumstances will they do so? Theories of belief change generally follow from the foundational, pragmatic, coherentist, and accidental perspectives on the foundations of belief. Foundationalists expect belief change to occur either if the material world changes, or if the rational justications for holding a particular belief change or can no longer be supported. According to theories in cognitive psychology, schemas may change if the incoming evidence is undeniably, unambiguously, not inkeepingwiththe existing schema. Belief systems are sometimes gradually modied, but, at other times, individuals may experience a dramatic conversion where, if core beliefs are revised, large portions of preexisting belief are jettisoned in favor of new beliefs. According to the pragmatic view, beliefs are revised or jettisoned when they no longer work in a particular context. This working may or may not be dependent on material realities. For example, the perceived failure of Soviet-style communism to produce material pros- perity led many to abandon their belief in it. 124 Jerel A. Rosati, The Carter Administrations Quest for Global Community: Beliefs and Their Impact on Behavior (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987), p. 16. 125 Reiter, Crucible of Beliefs. 126 See Jervis, Perception and Misperception, pp. 217287. 53 Argument and change in world politics Coherentists, while not providingaunique argument about the causes of belief revision, argue that belief change will be minimal. Peter Garden- fors describes this as a conservative process of belief revision. When we change our beliefs, we want to retain as much as possible of our old beliefs; information is in general not gratuitous, and unnecessary losses of information are therefore to be avoided. We thus have a criterion of informational economy motivating the coherentist approach. 127 Foucault argued that the eld of the history of ideas was itself characterized by a coherentist bias. The history of ideas usually credits the discourse that it analyzes with coherence. If it happens to notice an irregularity in the use of words, several incompatible propositions, a set of meanings that do not adjust to one another, concepts that cannot be systematized together, then it regards it as its duty to nd, at a deeper level, a principle of cohesion that organizes the discourse and restores it to its hidden unity. This law of coherence is a heuristic rule, a procedural obligation, almost a moral constraint of research. . . But this same coherence is also the result of research. . . It appears as an optimum: the greatest possible number of contradictions resolved by the simplest means. 128 Finally, if beliefs are historically contingent, we would expect them to change either willy-nillylike fashioninclothing; or accordingtochanges in the discursive, cultural, and institutional context. As the relations of power change, so might the content of beliefs. While these questions are discussed at greater length below, I remain agnostic on the question of the source of beliefs and on the way that beliefs change. All four views of the grounding and change of belief foundational, pragmatic, coherent, andanti-foundational maybe cor- rect depending on the beliefs in question. In any case, arguments play a role in all these methods of belief change. How are beliefs spread? Individuals are, for the most part not passive receptacles of beliefs. Reective individuals consider new beliefs and arguments and make decisions about whether to adopt those beliefs on the basis of the form of reasoning they are using, the t of those be- liefs with other beliefs they hold, their need for the belief to explain something, and whether others whom they respect take the belief se- riously. Thus, beliefs do not spread like contagious disease, by simply being in the air or through mere contact. Individuals and groups 127 Gardenfors, The dynamics of belief systems, p. 381. 128 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 149. 54 Argument, belief, and culture must be receptive to new beliefs, and people usually reect on beliefs before adopting them or modifying longstanding beliefs. And as Jack Levy argues, individuals learn how to learn. They learn new decision rules, judgmental heuristics, procedures, and skills that facilitate their ability to learn from subsequent experience. 129 Of course there are exceptions to the rule of reectivity: some individ- uals are relatively passive and malleable and this probably varies over time and cultures. For example, in places and eras where charismatic authority, in the sense described by Max Weber of personnal charisma, is dominant, one would expect many individuals to simply adhere to the beliefs espoused by the charismatic authority. Others may require some other form of conviction. In traditionally stereotyped periods, charisma is the greatest revolu- tionary force. The equally revolutionary force of reason works from without by altering the situations of action, and hence its problems, - nally in this way changing mens attitudes towards them. . . Charisma, on the other hand, may involve a subjective or internal reorientation born out of suffering, conicts or enthusiasm. It may then result in a radical alteration of the central system of attitudes and direction of action with a completely new orientation of all attitudes toward the different problems and structures of the world. 130 Mass and elite beliefs The public is generally considered less interested, less well informed, and less powerful in determining the foreign policies of states than are elites. 131 Yet non-elite input into the making of world politics occurs more frequently, and is more fundamental to the process of foreign pol- icy, than is generally assumed. 129 Levy, Learning and Foreign Policy, p. 286. 130 Max Weber, The Principal Characteristics of Charismatic Authority and its Relation to Forms of Communal Organization, in J.E.T. Eldridge, ed. Max Weber: The Interpretation of Social Reality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 229234: 234. 131 For instance, authoritarian personality literature examines this question. Also see Paul Sniderman and Philip Tetlock, Interrelationship of Political Ideology and Public Opin- ion, in Margaret Hermann, ed., Political Psychology: Contemporary Problems and Issues (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1986), pp. 6296; Ora Sliktar, Identifying a Societys Belief Systems, in Herman, ed., Political Psychology, pp. 320354; Philip Converse, The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics, in David Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (London: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), pp. 206261; William A. Gamson and Andre Modigliani, Knowledge and Foreign Policy Opinions: Some Models for Consideration, The Public Opinion Quarterly 30 (Summer 1966), 187199. 55 Argument and change in world politics Is there a divergence between mass and elite beliefs? There are sig- nicant differences. 132 The notion of the masses needs disaggregation into, for example, classes, races, genders, social formations, andpolitical parties. Mass beliefs appear to be less tightly structured, and more ex- ible than elite beliefs, perhaps only because the masses that constitute public opinion are of many different types with more or less coherent andclearly structuredbeliefs about worldpolitics. Elites tendto be more homogeneous. Does public opinion inuence policy and elite beliefs? There is some evidence for consistency between public opinion and foreign policy. 133 Douglas Foyle argues that mass beliefs or public opinion, inuence for- eign policy when decisionmakers believe that such inuence is desir- able and that public support is necessary for a foreign policy to suc- ceed: decisionmakers beliefs and attitudes about public opinion can profoundly inuence their reaction to public opinion. 134 Mass beliefs constrain decisionmaking behavior at the extremes and in the general conduct of world politics. More precisely, mass beliefs have little ef- fect if the beliefs are not strong in one direction or another. But when mass beliefs are strongly held in one direction, foreign policy decisions and behavior will be constrained because elites need to mobilize public support (in both democracies and non-democracies) for the implemen- tation of labor and/or capital intensive decisions. That is, mass beliefs are especially important because the masses provide much of the capital (in the form of taxes) and labor (for armed forces, extraction of natural resources, and industrial production) necessary for modern warfare. 135 Elites may successfully appeal to mass beliefs to increase the acceptabil- ityof a preferredpolicyoption(tothe masses andother elites) while they may, conversely, feel unable to select options they feel the masses will ndunacceptable. Thus, mass beliefs inuence elite decisionmaking be- havior by setting acceptability constraints. Decisionmakers who hope to 132 For example, see Benjamin I. Page and Jason Barabas, Foreign Policy Gaps between Citizens and Leaders, International Studies Quarterly 44 (September 2000), 339364. 133 See Bruce Russett, Controlling the Sword: The Democratic Governance of National Security (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Foyle, Public Opinion and Foreign Policy. 134 Foyle, Public Opinion and Foreign Policy p. 164. 135 This point is not new, yet we tend to forget it. See, for instance, Vasquez: War cannot be initiated, as Bueno De Mesquita would have us believe just by a simple decision of the leader. The public must be mobilized not only to accept the decision, but to ght and sacrice enthusiastically in order to give the state the highest chances of success. For this reason, even if the decision maker wants to go to war, he (or she) may not initiate it because of domestic constraints. John A. Vasquez, Foreign Policy, Learning and War, in Hermann, Kegley, and Rosenau, eds., New Directions, pp. 366383: 367. 56 Argument, belief, and culture retain power over the long haul believe that they must make decisions that are acceptable to the masses and other (non-decisionmaking) elites, and they are constrained by this belief. 136 In addition, the size and level of sophistication of the politically ac- tive masses determines their effect on elites. Of course, if the decision requires little in the way of mass mobilization, or if the effects of mo- bilization can somehow be minimized or deferred, then the content of mass beliefs and public opinion will be less important as a constraining force unless elite opinions or behavior precipitate a legitimation crisis. While the content of elite beliefs, especially those of foreign policy de- cisionmakers, will most often be at the forefront here, the content of beliefs held by other members of society is still important. This is be- cause elites come from the wider social milieu, are dependent upon it for political support even in authoritarian states and must make their decisions in ways that can be justied to these more attentive and organized masses. This is the role of public opinion. Perhaps more immediately important in shaping elite behavior than mass belief is the role of organized publics. When masses are or- ganized into coherent social movements and transnational advocacy networks of activists driven by values rather than by material con- cerns or professional norms they may be both norm entrepreneurs, deploying arguments based on principled beliefs, and shape the po- litical context or conditions of acceptability within which states and other social actors try to act. 137 Through direct action, these move- ments may also make large-scale behavioral change, without the di- rect involvement of governments, desirable, possible, and a fact on the ground. In sum, the content of beliefs held by both unorga- nized and organized publics affects the making and receptivity of arguments. Culture No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a denite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even 136 See Philip Tetlock, Accountability: The Neglected Social Context of Judgement and Choice, in Research in Organizational Behavior, vol. VII (London: JAI Press, 1985), pp. 297 332; Barbara Farnham, Political Cognition and Decision-Making, Political Psychology 11 (March 1990), 83111; and Jennifer S. Lerner and Philip E. Tetlock, Accounting for the Effects of Accountability, Psychological Bulletin 125 (March 1999), 255275. Note that acceptability, accountability, and responsibility are not necessarily rational concepts. 137 Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders, p. 2. 57 Argument and change in world politics in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind those stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs. 138 Most history, when it has been digested by a people becomes myth. Myth is an arrangement of the past, whether real or imagined, in patterns that resonate with cultures deepest values and aspirations. Myths create and reinforce archetypes so taken for granted, so seem- ingly axiomatic, that they go unchallenged. Myths are so fraught with meaning that we live or die by them. They are the maps by which cultures navigate through time. 139 Aculture makes some things possible, some things desirable, andsome things unimaginable. 140 If there were one global culture and humans lived without a sense of history we might not be conscious of culture as a concept, nor think it was interesting. Yet historical experience and contact with others who believe differently and have different practices makes us conscious of culture. For example, in the 1490s, a Catholic Pope, not war, decided the NewWorldboundaries betweenSpanishandPortuguese explorers, and the Popes decision was ratied by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. The foreign policy practices of European states in the late 1400s were em- beddedwithinbothChristianreligious andsecular beliefs andpractices, while international authority was vested in the Catholic Church. The for- eign policy practices of the early twenty rst century, at least in most Westernstates, aremorestronglyembeddedintherational belief system, and authority is vested in separate states whose leaders and peoples are for the most part loathe to give power to international religious author- ities. Chronological distance makes the practices of fteenth-century international actors seem strange. In the late 1950s Margaret Mead summarized anthropologys con- cept of culture as the systematic body of learned behavior which is transmittedfromparents to children. 141 RuthBenedict, Meads teacher, described culture as the ideas and standards that people have in com- mon and that hold them together; culture includes the motives and emotions and values that are institutionalized. . . habits of thought. 142 138 Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1959), p. 2. 139 Ronald Wright, Stolen Continents: The New World Through Indian Eyes (New York: Houghton Mifin, 1992), p. 5. 140 Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine Between the Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 165. 141 Margaret Mead, A New Preface in Benedict, Patterns of Culture, p. vii. 142 Benedict, Patterns of Culture, pp. 16 and 49. 58 Argument, belief, and culture Further, Benedict argued, The signicance of cultural behavior is not exhausted when we have clearly understood that it is local and man- made and hugely variable. It also tends to be integrated. A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action. 143 Culture, a property of social groups, is the organization and practice of interconnectedbelief systems inparticular places andtimes. Whenso- cieties organize meaning and make their social reality through practices that conform with widely held beliefs, they are maintaining their cul- ture. Just as beliefs are arguments whose conclusions we have become convinced of, cultures are the beliefs, symbols, and practices that social groups are convinced of or in great measure take for granted. While keeping in mind that simple cultural explanations may seem satisfying when they are made about another culture, and simplistic if applied to ones own culture, the challenge is to understand how culture (un- derstood as a system of background beliefs and practices which make life meaningful in particular settings) may inuence, but not necessarily determine, argument-making and the reception of arguments. 144 Culture is important for understanding the process of argument in world politics for several reasons. First, culture is the background of shared interpretations (unconsciously held intersubjective beliefs) and practices, the starting point or topos that allows meaningful conversa- tions and arguments to occur among individuals and groups; culture is the lifeworld that serves as the stable foundation upon which action and arguments are understood. Second, because cultures contain and organize belief systems, they provide the content for specic identity, normative, practical, and scientic beliefs. Third, culture provides the background meanings the metaphors and historical events by which specic beliefs and arguments are consciously judged and which actors intentionally use to frame problems. Fourth, culture can be a source of new beliefs and arguments and can thus be a source of innovation. Culture in international relations theory Rational actor theories tend to treat culture as irrational and exogenous, and for many realist scholars of world politics, culture is irrelevant. This view is, however, relatively recent. In the 1930s, students of world poli- tics argued that culture was relevant and in fact that certain institutions 143 Ibid., p. 46. 144 Belief systems focus on specic issue areas while cultures contain webs of belief sys- tems and practices. 59 Argument and change in world politics of international relations were deeply inuenced by culture. Margaret Mead argued that war is a social invention, and Freud contended that civilization and culture could tame human instincts and reduce the drives towardwar. 145 After MeadandFreud, however, culture was not a termthat sawmuch use among international relations theorists andRob Walker could justiably argue that there is a relative neglect of culture among mainstreamscholars of international relations. 146 To an extent, Vertzberger notes, this neglect is understandable, since ultimately sub- societal units are the bodies actually carrying out decisionmaking tasks, whereas societal factors are less apparent to the observer. 147 When culture is noted and theorized by mainstream international relations scholars, it is usually assumed that cultures exist within states and civ- ilizations while conict reigns between cultures, as is the argument in Samuel Huntingtons ideas about the clash of civilizations. 148 Yet, as Walker argues: If questions about culture turn out to be little more than questions about sovereignty and national identity, then there are only two inter- esting avenues worth exploring. One is the way in which culture, understood as anthropological difference, constitutes the central prob- lem to overcome, a corroboration of the deeply fractured character of human communities. The other is the way such divisions have in fact been overcome by the fragile accommodations of statesmanship. 149 Scholars of comparative politics have paid more attention to culture. For example, Lucien Pye, Sydney Verba, andothers describedwhat they thought were distinctive national political cultures. 150 This work was 145 Margaret Mead, Warfare is Only an Invention Not a Biological Necessity, in Leon Bramson and George W. Goethals, eds., War: Studies from Psychology, Sociology and Anthro- pology (New York: Basic Books, 1964), pp. 269274; and Sigmund Freud, Why War? in Bramson and Goethals, War, pp. 7180. 146 R.B.J. Walker, The Concept of Culture in the Theory of International Relations, in Jongshuk Chay, ed., Culture and International Relations (New York: Praeger, 1990), pp. 3 17: 9. 147 Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds, p. 260. 148 Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer 1993), 2249. 149 Walker, The Concept of Culture in the Theory of International Relations, p. 11. 150 Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba, The Civic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba, eds., Political Culture and Political Develop- ment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); John S. Dufeld, Political Culture and State Behavior: Why Germany Confounds Neorealism, International Organization 53 (Autumn 1999), 765803. 60 Argument, belief, and culture criticized for reifying and stereotyping cultures, and interest in culture waned, until recently. Writing in what has become a new wave of atten- tion to political culture, Lucien Pye argues, Since political power rests largely upon expectations, communications, and shared sentiments and values, politics is essentially a cultural phenomenon. Indeed, politics would be impossible without culture, and cultures, of course, differ ac- cording to time and place. 151 For the anthropologists Sonia Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, political culture is the particu- lar social construction in every society of what counts as political. In this way, political culture is the domain of practices and institutions, carved out of the totality of social reality, that historically comes to be considered as properly political (in the same way that other domains are seen as properly economic, cultural, and social). 152 So, there are two concepts of culture a wider one, and a narrower, political culture. Contrarytothe ideaof relative neglect,international relations schol- arship on culture does exist, though culture is often confused with belief in this literature. In the late 1970s, Ken Booth argued that ethnocentrism was both an important feature of politics among nations and deeply embedded in international relations theory and the practice of threat assessment. 153 Stephen Rosen suggests that culture, specically social structure, may inuence military effectiveness. 154 Elizabeth Kier, who denes a militarys organizational culture as collectively held beliefs within a particular military organization, suggests that culture, espe- cially beliefs about the role of armed force, affects the formation of mil- itary doctrine. 155 Military organizations cultures shape their members understandings and choices: military organizations develop strong collective understandings about the nature of their work and the con- duct of their missions, and these organizational cultures inuence their choices between offensive and defensive military doctrines. 156 Further, 151 Lucien W. Pye, Introduction: The Elusive Concept of Culture and the Vivid Reality of Personality, Political Psychology 18 (June 1997), 241254: 247. 152 Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, Introduction: The Cultural and Political in Latin American Social Movements, in Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds., Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), pp. 129: 8. 153 Ken Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism (New York: Holmes and Meyer, 1979). 154 Stephen Peter Rosen, Military Effectiveness: Why Society Matters, International Se- curity 19 (Spring 1995), 531. 155 ElizabethKier, Culture andFrenchMilitary Doctrine Before WorldWar II, inKatzen- stein, ed., The Culture of National Security, pp. 186215: 203. 156 Kier, Imagining War, p. 4. 61 Argument and change in world politics she argues, civilians cultural understanding of the role of military force in the domestic arena governs their participation in developing doctrine. 157 Similarly, Alastair Johnston argues that strategic cultures affect military strategy, dening strategic culture as an integrated system of symbols (i.e. causal axioms, languages, analogies, metaphors, etc.) that acts to establish pervasive and long-lasting strategic prefer- ences by formulating concepts of the role and efcacy of military force in interstate political affairs, and by clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the strategic preferences seem uniquely realistic and efcacious. 158 Culture has alsobeenhypothesizedas a factor inpromotingpeace and war. EchoingMeadandLuard, JohnVasquez argues that, Not all histor- ical periods and not all actors (or dyads) experience the same amount of war. This suggests that war is not as culturally acceptable in some times and places as in others. 159 Johan Galtung warned against cultural vi- olence or cultural elements used to justify or legitimatize direct or structural violence. 160 Bruce Russett has suggested, among other pos- sible explanations, that the peace observed among democracies may be due to common culture. 161 Marc Howard Ross argues that psychocul- tural dispositions shape howgroups andindividuals process events and the emotions, perceptions, and cognitions the events provoke. These dispositions link particular events to culturally shared threats to self- esteem and identity and the culture of conict is specic norms, practices, and institutions associated with conict. 162 Elise Boulding argues that to promote peace one should promote a peace culture. 163 Samuel Huntington believes that in the post-cold war world the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conict will be cultural. 164 Huntington regards civilizations as the highest cultural 157 Ibid. p. 21. 158 Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism and Strategy in Maoist China, in Katzenstein, ed, The Culture of National Security, pp. 216278. 159 John A. Vasquez, Foreign Policy, Learning and War, in Hermann, Kegley, and Rosenau, eds., New Directions, pp. 366383: 372. 160 JohanGaltung, Cultural Violence, Journal of Peace Research 27 (August 1990), 291305: 291. 161 Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 35. 162 Marc Howard Ross, The Culture of Conict: Interpretations and Interests in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 10 and 21. 163 Elise Boulding, Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History (Syracuse: Syracuse Uni- versity Press, 2000). 164 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations? p. 22. 62 Argument, belief, and culture grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have. 165 Others emphasize the cultural foundations of regional and global in- ternational society. Luard argued that, It is not possible to consider the behaviour of states without regard to the social context, the interna- tional environment, within which they exist; nor to consider a society of states without regardtothe motivations andbehaviour whichcharacter- ize the individual states which are its members. 166 As Bull argued, a common feature of . . . historical international societies is that they were all founded on a common culture or civilization. 167 Further, Bull dis- tinguished between diplomatic culture and international political cul- ture or the intellectual andmoral culture that determines the attitudes towards the states system of the societies that compose it. 168 Bull be- lieved that the future of international society is likely to be determined, among other things, by the preservation and extension of a cosmopoli- tan culture, embracing both common ideas and common values, and rooted in societies in general as well as in their elites, that can provide the world international society of today with the kind of underpinning enjoyedby the geographically smaller andculturally more homogenous international societies of thepast. 169 Bull andAdamWatsonarguedthat international society grew out of and follows a Western European pat- ternandthat, it is not our perspective but the historical recorditself that can be called Eurocentric. 170 Ronald Jepperson, Alexander Wendt, and Peter Katzenstein argue that an international cultural environment is the context of national security policymaking where culture refers to both a set of evaluative standards, such as norms or values, and to cognitive standards, such as rules or models dening what entities and actors exist in a systemand howthey operate and interrelate. 171 Specif- ically, they suggest, this international cultural environment includes a layer of formal institutions or security regimes, a layer of world 165 Ibid., p. 24. 166 Luard, War in International Society, p. 13. 167 Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 16. 168 Ibid., p. 316. 169 Ibid., p. 317. 170 Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, Introduction, in Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, eds., The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 19: 2. Also see Adam Watson, European International Society and its Expansion, in Bull and Watson, eds., Expansion of International Society, pp. 1332. 171 Ronald L. Jepperson, Alexander Wendt, and Peter J. Katzenstein, Norms, Identity, and Culture in National Security, in Katzenstein, ed., Culture of National Security, pp. 33 75: 34 and 56. 63 Argument and change in world politics political culture which includes elements like rules of sovereignty and international law, norms . . . and standardized social and political technologies, and nally, a layer of international patterns of amity and enmity. 172 Thus, while it would be an exaggeration to say that culture gures prominently in international relations theory, many scholars give cul- ture an important role in shaping beliefs, practices, and identities in organizations, nations, and international societies. Character and location of culture Culture is often conceptualized as having the same properties as belief. For instance, Vertzberger describes culture in such a way that it is syn- onymous with a cognitive understanding of belief. Culture represents a unied set of ideas that are shared by the members of a society and that establish a set of shared premises, values, expectations, and action predispositions among members of a nation that as a whole constitute a national style. 173 Vertzberger hypothesizes several cultural affects on foreign policy decisionmaking (that are not distinct fromthe affects oth- ers attribute to beliefs), arguing that Individuals, organizations, and groups information processing and denitions of the situation are af- fected and sometimes actually dictated by their being part of a distinct societal-national environment, culture, and experience. 174 He also ar- gues that, At the core of culture, in most cases, are broad and general beliefs and attitudes about ones own nation, about other nations, and about the relationships that actually obtain or that should obtain be- tween the self and other actors in the international arena. 175 Culture thus biases attention to danger, assessment of risk, modes of cognitive operation such as associative versus abstract thinking, and perceptions about the most acceptable means of conict resolution, and interferes with correctly understanding what actors from another culture say. 176 Yet culture is more than belief. As a set of practices culture con- tains behavioral norms, symbols (meanings attached to objects, social events, and action), and ways to reproduce philosophical, instrumen- tal, normative, and identity beliefs. Within cultures, the belief systems of individuals and groups are embedded in, and sit side by side with, 172 Ibid., p. 34. 173 Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds, p. 267. 174 Ibid., p. 260. 175 Ibid., p. 268. 176 Others attribute these effects to individual beliefs. 64 Argument, belief, and culture other belief systems (such as religious, ethical, and scientic traditions). Together these webs of beliefs andpractices constitute a societys culture or rather its multiple cultures. Thus, culture is the larger background of beliefs andpractices (sometimes routinizedandstandardizedwithin in- stitutions) withinwhichthe particular belief systems andsub-cultures of groups sit. Culture is conveyed in a groups language or more precisely in the meaning of discourse. A discourse, i.e., a system of statements in which each individual statement makes sense, produces interpretive possibilities by making it virtually impossible to think outside of it. A discourse provides discursive spaces, i.e. concepts, categories, metaphors, models and analogies by which meanings are created. 177 As Kier ar- gues, when actors are totally inside their culture, it consists of many assumptions that are rarely debated and seem so basic that it appears impossible to imagine things could be different. 178 Further, cultures exist in time and place, they are situated within groups. While actors are more or less unself-conscious about aspects of their culture, they may be quite self-conscious about other elements of it. Further, actors must constantly work to reproduce their cultures as new members are born and old members die. And because groups are rarely completely homogenous and/or devoid of contact with other groups, challenges to a dominant culture are constant. Part of the socialization of new members into a community with a particular culture includes teaching members their groups history. This history is inculcatedalong- side the practices, rules, and philosophical, instrumental, normative, and identity beliefs held by most group members. For example, to be part of a monetary culture, one must learn the normof paying for things with money rather than taking them or trading for them. Of course, an- alyzing anothers culture is also rather like holding up a mirror to ones own culture. 179 Thus, another part of the work of making a culture, and maintaining it, can include comparing a culture with itself at a previous time or comparing one culture with other cultures. So far, I have described culture as if it were located somewhere in an exclusive community. But it is possible to locate complex webs of meaning andregular practices among groups of individuals, andwithin larger cultures among groups who are characterized by race, class, reli- gion, occupation, and sex as well as by political afliations. I consider 177 Doty, Foreign Policy as Social Construction, p. 302. 178 Kier, Imagining War, p. 26. 179 See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 65 Argument and change in world politics cultures in ve locations: epistemic communities, formal organizations, bounded political communities (nations and states), civilizations, and global cultures. Obviously, any one person may participate in several cultures. Epistemic communities and formal organizations have belief systems and culture in the sense of regular and accepted practices. Peter Haas denes an epistemic community as a network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and au- thoritative claim to policy relevant knowledge within that domain or issue area. Epistemic communities have (1) a shared set of normative and principled beliefs . . . (2) shared causal beliefs . . . (3) shared notions of validity. . . (4) a common policy enterprise. 180 Epistemic communi- ties share a culture in the sense that these beliefs entail larger world views that they subscribe to and which make their practices and discus- sions meaningful. Culture also exists within organizations, shaping the way organiza- tions do their job. Elizabeth Kier denes organizational culture as, the set of basic assumptions, values, norms, beliefs, and formal knowledge that shape collective understandings. 181 LynnEdenshows howthe par- ticular knowledge-making practices of nuclear weapons organizations frame their understandings of nuclear weapons effects. 182 Organizations have methods for socializing their members into the beliefs characteris- tic of members of the organization. They have ways of ridding blatant non-believers fromthe group, and they have practices, or standard op- erating procedures, which they recognize as normal and which guide their actions in particular contexts. Cultures also exist in bounded political communities. Martin Samp- son suggests that a set of norms, standards, rules or collective mental programming refers to a national culture that has certain properties. 183 Sampson says these socially created and learned factors exist across a variety of institutions within a single nation-state; one may detect them inmany different functional settings families, associations, businesses, and governmental organizations and one may also detect them over a large range of time periods . . . and he argues that these factors affect 180 Haas, Introduction, p. 3. 181 Kier, Imagining War, p. 28. 182 Lynn Eden, Whole World on Fire: The Making of Organizational Knowledge about U.S. Nuclear Weapons Effects (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming). 183 Martin W. Sampson, Cultural Inuences on Foreign Policy, in Hermann, Kegley, and Rosenau, eds., New Directions, pp. 384405: 385. 66 Argument, belief, and culture the processes of foreignpolicydecisionmaking. 184 Similarly, Vertzberger argues that national political cultures are the source of biases in infor- mation processing. While these national political cultures are much less homogenous than they are generally described, there are such cultures. In addition, groups of states and groups of organizations that tran- scend states may share more general historical, religious, ethical, and scientic traditions. Shared beliefs, common institutions, and regular interactionof states andnon-state actors (such as multinational corpora- tions andsocial movements) constituteinternational societies. 185 Hedley Bull argues that, if contemporary international society does have any cultural basis, this is not a genuinely global culture, but is rather the culture of so-called modernity. And if we ask what is modernity in cul- ture, it is not clear how we answer this except by saying that it is the culture of the dominant Western powers. 186 It is possible now more than at any other point in world history to speak of emergent world cultures. Globalization, the catch-phrase for the emergence of these world cultures, the spread of international mar- kets, and the growing interdependence of productive processes, sug- gests the technological capacities and the economic, social, and political interactions that have createdthe emergent worldculture. Further, some twentieth-century events the cold war, ozone depletion, global envi- ronmental change, and the AIDS pandemic, as well as the development of a universal human rights discourse were experienced and inter- preted as global phenomena. As Scott Turner argues, civil society is increasingly global not only because groups are establishing linkages across national borders, but also because of the nature of the issues around which NGOs and social movements converge. 187 There are at least three overlapping spheres of an emerging global culture: political structures and processes, economic structures and pro- cesses, and issue-specic belief systems. The global culture is charac- terized by: dominant belief systems that sometimes conict with each other (namely, individual human rights, commercialism, capitalism, militarism, increased respect for the rule of law or liberalism); a set of common international institutions (such as the United Nations, the 184 Ibid., pp. 385386. 185 See Christian Reus-Smit, The Constitutional Structure of International Society and the Nature of Fundamental Institutions, International Organization 51 (Autumn 1997), 555589. 186 Bull, Anarchical Society, p. 39. 187 Scott Turner, Global Civil Society, Anarchy and Governance: Assessing an Emerging Paradigm, Journal of Peace Research 35 (January 1998), 2542: 31. 67 Argument and change in world politics World Court, and the World Trade Organization); and transnational epistemic communities of scientists, social scientists, nancial experts, critical social movements, and cultural intellectuals. In the political sphere, as Dorothy Jones has noted, there is an emerging Code of Peace resting on international law alongside the older international cultures of military force and realpolitik. 188 Critical transnational social movements challenge the militarism, prot-orientation, andauthoritari- anismof dominant social institutions andcultural representations play a pivotal role in the formation and maintenance of social protest. 189 To highlight the emergence of a global culture is not to say that local, na- tional, and regional cultures are dying, though they might be, or to say that the now dominant cultures will always be dominant. Rather, the shape of global cultures is emerging out of sometimes contradictory cul- tures. Finally, to some extent, the dominant emerging world culture is marked by a certain respect for pluralism, which probably means that despite the form of globalization that is synonymous with homogeniza- tion, other cultures will remain for centuries. But simply noting that groups hold some shared beliefs, and partici- pate in common practices that may or may not be institutionalized, does not tell us how culture affects the process of argument. I go further than those who suggest that culture (like belief) is the source of mispercep- tions and cognitive biases. Culture is the stable foundation that makes and allows intelligible argument; cultures are the source of specic be- liefs; culture is consciously used to frame and judge arguments; and culture can foster belief innovation. Culture as lifeworld or stable foundation Culture is the background of shared interpretations and practices, the unstated topos or starting point that allows meaningful conversations and arguments to occur. Beyond language, taken for granted beliefs that members of a society share, and the practices associated with these beliefs, allowand enable actors within a community to understand each other without having to make everything explicit. Culture provides the 188 DorothyV. Jones, Code of Peace: Ethics and Security inthe World of Warlord States (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989). 189 Richard G. Fox and Orin Starn, Introduction, in Richard G. Fox and Orin Starn, eds., Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), pp. 116: 6. Also see R.B. J. Walker, One World, Many Worlds: Struggle for a Just World Peace (Boulder: Lynn Reinner, 1988), pp. 6162; Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders. 68 Argument, belief, and culture oor or background of meaning on which actors can construct other meanings and interpret each other. Habermas development of Edmund Husserls idea of Lebenswelt, or lifeworld, best captures this aspect of culture formed from more or less diffuse, always unproblematic, background convictions. 190 The life- world seems real or objective to those who share it even as it stores the interpretive work of preceding generations. 191 This fundamental background which enables hearers to understand speakers is an implicit knowledge that cannot be represented in a nite number of propositions; it is a holistically structured knowledge, the basic elements of whichintrinsicallydene one another; andit is a knowledge that does not standat our disposition, inasmuchas we cannot make it conscious and place it in doubt as we please. When philosophers nevertheless seek to do so, then that knowledge comes to light in the formof commonsense certainties. . . . 192 Actors who hold different ideologies (understood as explicitly devel- oped belief systems) may share a lifeworld and this allows arguments between ideologies to be intelligible, at least to a certain extent, to par- ticipants. Conversely, as Habermas suggests, lifeworlds constrain what will be seen as a valid argument since the taken-for-granted aspect of cultures is the rst level, or order, of interpretation of arguments, al- though the act of interpretation at this point is generally unconscious. The linguistic worldview is reied as the world order and cannot be seen as an interpretive system open to criticism. 193 Antonio Casseses understanding of the role of prevailing ideolo- gies of international law illustrates the relationship between belief sys- tems and the lifeworld. International legal rules are, however, a simple 190 J urgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Volume One: Reason and the Ratio- nalization of Society trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 70. Fred Dallmayr argues: In the weak conception, the life-world is basically viewed as a pream- ble to reason or rational reection, as a non- or pre-rational antechamber to cognition but the antechamber that pliantly submits to thought (as the result of an inherent afnity be- tweenprereasonandreason). Inthe strongversion, bycontrast, the life-worldfunctions no longer as a mere precursor of reason or as its relatively immature or embryonic modality, but rather emerges as an integral dimension of thought, a dimension impinging power- fully on the status of rational or cognitive claims (not by nullifying them but by changing their sense). FredR. Dallmayr, Life-World: Variations on a Theme, in Stephen K. White, ed., Life-World and Politics: Between Modernity and Postmodernity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1989), pp. 2565: 26. 191 Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, p. 70. 192 Ibid., p. 336. 193 Ibid., p. 71. 69 Argument and change in world politics reection of the constellation of power in the world community, as well as the prevailing ideologies and political concerns. For Cassese, both power and the content of the prevailing international culture provide the content and limits of international law. The scholar, however dis- satised he may be with this state of affairs, cannot but take note of the present legal regime with all its aws and lacunae, and pinpoint the emerging strands of the international system. 194 Casseses legal regime is a belief system, embedded within a lifeworld where legal systems or prevailing ideology make sense, and is essentially taken for granted. Legal practices, including argument andproof, are institutionalizedand legitimate. The importance of this backgroundstock of meaning has not gone un- noticedby scholars of domestic andforeignpolicy. For example, Charles Elder and Roger Cobb argue that a political culture acts to limit the range of problems and problem solving alternatives that are likely to be considered, or for that matter, even entertained or recognized. 195 Vertzberger argues that accumulated historical experience, political culture, as well as geopolitics, provide enduring perspectives, attitudes and beliefs, within which defense and security policy predispositions emerge. 196 Michael Shapiro argues that it is important to recognize that policy thinking is not unsituated. . . representational practices arise out of a societys more general practices . . . 197 Shapiro further suggests that Representations of public policy, then, have an ideological depth to the extent that they engage in a stock of signs with which people make their everyday lives intelligible. 198 Similarly, Roxanne Doty ar- gues: The reception as meaningful of statements revolving around pol- icy situations depends on how well they t into the general system of representation in a given society. 199 The taken-for-granted aspect of culture provides stability. And, like other forms of common knowledge, culture can make communication, cooperation, andcoordinationeasier amongthose who share beliefs and expectations because they can anticipate how others within the culture 194 Antonio Cassese, Self-determination of Peoples: A Legal Reappraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 162. 195 Charles D. Elder andRoger W. Cobb, The Political Uses of Symbols (NewYork: Longman, 1983) p. 85. 196 Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds, p. 272. 197 Michael J. Shapiro, Representing World Politics: The Sports/War Intertext, in James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro, eds., International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 6996: 71. 198 Shapiro, Representing World Politics, p. 73. 199 Doty, Foreign Policy as Social Construction, p. 303. 70 Argument, belief, and culture will think and act in particular contexts. These aspects of culture as communicative background, stable arena, the common knowledge that facilitates cooperation and coordination, and boundary for argument are generally in the background of social interactions, where members of a group are unaware or unconscious of their situatedness within that culture. This property also makes understanding other cultures in and on their own terms difcult. Finally, as the deep background of social interaction and discourse, culture and the particulars of a decisionmaking situation inuence a groups openness to argument as a process. In a culture that places a high value on agreement and conformity, arguments will be rare and relatively minor. Culture may also delimit the scope of arguments, that is, how deeply one can raise objections to beliefs and practices. In some contexts, it may not be possible to challenge core beliefs, especially if this suits elites who wish to maintain their hold on the reins of cul- tural power. Dominant hegemonic practices attempt to achieve some sort of closure of the social, that is, to produce a relatively unied and normalized set of categories to understand reality . . . 200 Culture as a source of specic beliefs Perhaps most obviously, culture often provides the content for spe- cic philosophical, instrumental, normative, and identity beliefs at the core, contingent, and role levels. Further, epistemic communities, small groups, and organizations may develop beliefs that are particular to their culture. One can see how cultures are the source of particular foreign policy beliefs by examining the beliefs that are dominant in a states foreign policy. Vertzberger, for example, argues that concepts of national be- longing in the sense of which group of nations the state sees itself as belonging to, as well as international role and status, are culturally determined. 201 Nationalists posit continuity of past and present culture, history, and genetic material. But while we can argue that there are certain common characteristics of nationalism, the specic character of nationalist beliefs varies. For instance, one of the rst uses of the term nationalism was in an essay published in 1774 by the German paci- st Johann Gottfried Herder. 202 Herders conception of nationalismwas 200 Arturo Escobar, Culture, Practice and Politics: Anthropology and the Study of Social Movements, Critique of Anthropology 12 (December 1992), 395432: 406. 201 Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds, p. 282. 202 Anthony Smith, Theories of Nationalism, 2nd edn (New York: Holmes & Meier Publish- ers, 1983), p. 167. 71 Argument and change in world politics both spiritual and linguistic in the sense that he believed in an evolved organic volkgeist (folk-spirit), and that only through expression in ones native tongue could humans reach their fullest potential. 203 A gener- ation later, Prussian nationalist Johann Fichte espoused the idea that Germans were specially suited for leadership because their language, unlike other European languages, was original and unpolluted. 204 The ingredients of a particular dominant foreign policy belief sys- tem within a state are based on the particular history of the state (or dominant political group) as mythologized by national historians, dra- matic personal and group experiences such as war or occupation, and individual socialization (parents/family, schools, peer groups). As Dan Reiter argues, foreign policy beliefs are often lessons drawn from past events. 205 The most vivid events will have the greatest impact. And, as Robert Jervis argued two decades earlier, individual learning and belief change may occur when foreign policy decisionmakers are con- fronted with dramatic stimuli. 206 Certain events are seen and coded as paradigmatic for members of a culture. For example, members of post- World War II European and North American policy elites came to see Munich as a paradigm of appeasement, with the lesson that appease- ment only encourages aggressors. Thus, to understand the source and substance of the foreign policy belief system of states, one has to un- derstand the particular history of the state as it has been mythologized by national historians, and also the social and political history of the individuals dominant in foreign policy decisionmaking. Foreign policy belief systems are embedded in larger belief systems (religious, ethical, and scientic traditions) and common historical experience; in other words, they are grounded in the historically situated culture(s) of the community in question. As in the case of common historical analogies, the transmission of culture involves the socialization of its members in the dominant discourse, that is the symbols and interpretations of historical events. Cultural framing Some symbols are so widely understood within a culture, so taken for granted, and so powerful, that they merely have to be invoked for 203 Hans Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1955), pp. 3032. 204 Ibid., p. 36. 205 Reiter, Crucible of Beliefs, p. 12. 206 Jervis, Perception and Misperception. 72 Argument, belief, and culture participants in a conversation to make the standard emotional and cog- nitive associations. Yet, as Vertzberger argues, the images of particular past events or situations are often based to some degree on a m elange of fact and ction not always clearly distinguished from each other. There are historical facts, mass media reports, national mythologies, artistic impressions in writing, painting, or artifacts all reinforced by the per- sons own imagination and selective memory. 207 Further, multiple and conicting cultural frames are available as actors viewevents fromepis- temic, organizational, national, or international cultural perspectives. As Kier argues, there are not denitive meanings attached to an objec- tive empirical reality. As important as material factors may be, they can be interpreted in numerous ways. 208 Actions are thus intelligible rst through an unconscious cultural lens, the lifeworld. But the effect of culture is not only deep and unconscious. Advocates consciously and unconsciously use culturally dominant interpretations in their meta-arguments to represent situations to others. They use his- torical experience, cultural signs (including metaphors, myths andcom- mon analogies), and beliefs to reason and to make arguments to others. Contemplating the sins of the system, painting banners, making speeches, marchingthese boldactions are woundaroundanarmature of cultural meanings before they power up social protest. As dissent grows and protest erupts, there may be improvisation, there must be inclusion (and exclusion), there can be persistence and success and, very often, there will be failure. Every step in the process involves the creation and diffusion of cultural meanings. At every step, too, histor- ical events create new social conditions within which these meanings deploy. 209 Cultural framing may be used as part of a justication for positions already taken, or as part of publicly communicated evaluations of the validity of positions others have taken. The fact that actors consciously employ culture, perhaps even cynically or disingenuously, as a part of their rhetorical menu does not mean that we should discount cultural framing. Rather, this use underscores the importance of cultures role in argumentation and the grounding of particular beliefs. 207 Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds, p. 297. 208 Kier, Imagining War, p. 3. 209 Fox and Starn, Introduction, p. 8. 73 Argument and change in world politics Culture as obstacle to and source of innovation Though there is sometimes a tendency to think of culture as monolithic, resilient and unchanging, culture is not static, nor does culture simply constrain and dispose. Cultures can enable innovation in at least three ways. First, andmost obviously, whenpeople froma relatively homogenous culture come into contact with a different set of cultural beliefs, new beliefs and practices may be introduced into both cultures. After some reection, some of these beliefs may be adopted wholesale or melded in a syncretic way. Sub-cultures withina dominant culture mayalsoexpose new beliefs to the larger culture. But it is important to emphasize that the transmission of beliefs does not guarantee their adoption. Members of cultures often resist new beliefs, and why any new belief is adopted must be explained since some beliefs and practices are adopted while others are not. The cultural aspects of resistance to, and adoption of, new beliefs is perhaps best seen in debates within traditions, such as those documented by scholars of the philosophy and history of science who have written about debates within scientic belief systems when scientists proposed radical new ideas. 210 Highly cohesive groups or cultures that are isolated from outside in- uences and who hold rigid, self-reinforcing, standards of proof for the adoption of new beliefs may be most resistant to change. They may also be prone to groupthink where group members strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alterna- tive courses of action. 211 Irving Janis suggests that in circumstances of extreme crisis, group contagion occasionally gives rise to collective panic, violent acts of scapegoating, and other forms of what could be called group madness. But, Janis argues, much more frequent . . . are instances of mindless conformity and collective misjudgement of seri- ous risks, which are collectively laughed off in a clubby atmosphere of relaxed conviviality. 212 Thus, according to Janis, a policymaking group which displays the symptoms of groupthink will not survey all 210 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientic Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1955); Paul Thagard, Conceptual Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 211 Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1982), p. 9; Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1972). Also see Irving L. Janis, Crucial Decisions: Leadership in Policymaking and Crisis Management (New York: The Free Press, 1989). 212 Janis, Groupthink, p. 3. 74 Argument, belief, and culture the objectives and policy alternatives, nor candidly assess the risks and costs of alternatives. 213 Moreover, individual decisionmakers in group- think settings tend to think in less cognitively complex ways. 214 Janis is correct in pointing to the contributing role of homogeneity in the group- think process: the primary cause of groupthink is the desire to maintain consensus in a group of like-minded individuals. Crisis situations may be more likely to generate groupthink because decisionmaking groups tend to decrease in size at those times and there may be great pressures felt to come to consensus quickly. 215 Groupthink and censorship are, of course, not the same. Censorship is a more direct and conscious process where individuals with informa- tion or opinions that directly contradict the dominant view are silenced or their views systematically screened out of the discourse and the deci- sionmakingprocess. Intotalitariansettings, individuals withsuchviews may frequently silence themselves (self-censorship), to preserve their lives or their position within the hierarchy. Thus, censorship and self- censorship may contribute to groupthink and both may be more likely in extremely homogenous cultures that stress cohesion and consensus. Second, when individuals and groups face new social and material challenges, suchas overpopulationor climate change, innovationis pos- sible. But innovation is not guaranteed. Groups may hold on to their old beliefs and ways of acting even if others might consider change imperative. The content of webs of preexisting belief, and a groups knowledge-making practices will affect whether changes in social and material conditions will be understood as challenges to old beliefs, and whether the pre-existing beliefs are changed. 216 Ineither case, those who 213 Ibid., pp. 174175. 214 PhilipTetlock, Identifying Victims of Groupthink FromPublic Statements of Decision Makers, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (August 1979), 13141324. 215 Ole R. Holsti, Crisis Decision Making, in Philip E. Tetlock, Jo L. Husbands, Robert Jervis, Paul C. Stern, and Charles Tilly, eds., Behavior, Society and Nuclear War, Volume One (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 884: 2021. Of course, even in crisis situa- tions small groups do not always fall prey to groupthink. For critiques of groupthink and discussionof small groupdecisionmaking, see RamonJ. Aldag andSally Riggs Fuller, Be- yond Fiasco: A Reappraisal of the Groupthink Phenomenon and a New Model of Group Decision Processes, Psychological Bulletin 113 (May 1993), 533552; Paul tHart, Eric K. Stern, and Bengt Sundelius, eds., Beyond Groupthink: Political Group Dynamics and For- eign Policy-Making (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); and Robert Abelson and Ariel Levi, Decision Making and Decision Theory, in Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson, eds., The Handbook of Social Psychology, 3rd edn (New York: Random House, 1985), pp. 231309: 292293. 216 On change and resistance to it, see Elder and Cobb, The Political Uses of Symbols, pp. 106109. 75 Argument and change in world politics advocate belief change will have to make arguments to others to show why they should adopt new beliefs. Even if the group is not confronted by substantially novel circum- stances, new beliefs and arguments may be developed by those who for some reason (their economic, social, or cultural position or the logical development of their beliefs) have come tosee the worlddifferentlyfrom the social formations or classes of the dominant culture. These individ- uals may attempt to develop a cohort of likeminded people, promoting a social movement, who work to develop an analysis that re-frames the dominant understanding of the world and outlines a program for re- form or revolution. For example, human activity had long affected the environment. The environmentalism of the 1960s and 1970s grew out of the experiences and understanding of individuals who felt the pre- vailing actions of humans harmed the environment and ultimately the quality of human life. Activists work to persuade others to see the world as they see it, and set about trying to change aspects of the dominant culture. As Fox and Starn suggest, protest builds and sometimes trans- forms the cultural meanings shared by communities and groups. 217 Powerful new beliefs and arguments have the capacity to fracture the prevailing belief consensus and consequently fracture the political con- sensus among the dominant elites themselves. Third, cultures maycontainwithinthemtheattitudinal seeds for belief revision and innovation. Specically, conservative cultures may go to great lengths to preserve and transmit unchanged beliefs and practices. Onthe other hand, cultures that containbelief systems that are extremely self-reective, putting their own beliefs and modes of reasoning on trial, or that contain elements which consciously foster innovation in the arts and sciences, may be more prone to belief revision and change. It is possible that these cultures are characterized by a form of reasoning that de-emphasizes formal logic as the sole mode of reasoningandprizes diversity and experimentation. The source of culture Not surprisingly, there are intense debates amonganthropologists about the source of culture. Specically, is culture autonomous, is it an effect of biological forces, or does it reect the material base and the organi- zation of production? The latter is a naturalist functional utility account 217 Fox and Starn, Introduction, p. 7. 76 Argument, belief, and culture of culture where culture is an effect of material forces. 218 As Marshall Sahlins argues: At rst glance the confrontation of the cultural and material logics does seem unequal. The material process is factual and independent of mans will; the symbolic, invented and therefore ex- ible. The one is xed by nature, the other is arbitrary by denition. Thought can only kneel before the absolute sovereignty of the physi- cal world. 219 If culture is an ideational effect of material forces, then those who argue that material forces are the cause of social behav- ior have not been defeated by an account that stresses the importance of culture. Politics still boils down to material causes and biological drives. Yet there is good reason to doubt materialist/functionalist accounts of the origins of culture. As Sahlins argues, nothing in the way of their capacity to satisfy a material (biological) requirement can explain why pants are produced for men and skirts for women, or why dogs are inedible but the hindquarters of the steer are supremely satisfying of the need to eat. Nor are the relations of production the division of labor by culturally dened categories and capacities deducible from materially determined categories and capacities of the population. 220 In other words, while it is true that cultural practices include activi- ties that are motivated by material factors and biological needs (e.g. building houses to stay warm or dry; eating meat to satisfy hunger), one ought not to fall into the functionalist trap of assuming that there is only one way to satisfy a need. Humans could and do satisfy their material needs for shelter and food in other ways. The mate- rial forces taken by themselves are lifeless. 221 As Sahlins suggests, nature rules only on the question of existence, not on specic form. 222 He argues: So far as the denite properties of a cultural order are conceived, the laws of nature are indeterminate . . . Culture is not merely nature expressed in another form. Rather, the reverse: the action of nature un- folds in the terms of culture; that is, in a form no longer its own but embodied as meaning. Nor is this a mere translation. The natural fact assumes a new mode of existence as a symbolized fact, its cultural de- ployment and consequence now governed by the relation between its 218 This dichotomy is familiar as the free will versus determinism and the agent versus structure debates. 219 Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1976), p. 207. 220 Ibid. 221 Ibid. 222 Ibid., p. 209. 77 Argument and change in world politics meaningful dimension and other such meanings, rather than the rela- tion between its natural dimensions and other such facts. All of this of course within the material limits . . . From the moment of cultural syn- thesis, the action of nature is mediatedby a conceptual scheme . . . Such being the feature of nature culturalized, nature as it exists in itself is only the raw material provided by the hand of God, waiting to be given meaningful shape and content by the hand of man. It is as the block of marble to the nished statue; and of course the genius of the sculptor in the same way as the technical development of culture consists in exploiting the lines of diffraction within the material to his own ends. 223 But if materialist-functionalist accounts of culture seem inadequate, especially in the face of contemporary and historical cultural diversity, then what accounts for culture? Sahlins puts a premium on human re- ection, how we actively make meaning out of the natural world, order it and our relations to each other. Which leaves social scientists in the awkward position of being interpreters of interpretation. Despite the importance of the question, an account of origins is not necessary at this juncture if what one wants to understand is the consequences of culture. Summary and caveats Political arguments and debates are forms of reasoning in a political context where the aim can be both private discovery or deliberation as well as public motivation, justication, and mobilization. Ethical, sci- entic, practical, and identity arguments are frequent in world politics, as are meta-arguments over framing, the nature of the world, how we know it, or what is good. Arguments may occur in a simple form, such as single practical or identity arguments, or they may be more complex concatenations of arguments. Further, the contexts of arguments (the who, when, why and where) affects their persuasiveness. Arguments may be subject to dissection as one moves back and forth along infer- ential and belief chains of reasoning to support or attack elements of a particular argument or supporting arguments. Good arguments are ones that give hearers good reasons to believe their conclusions. Persuasive arguments also use emotional appeals and draw on our feelings as much as they use vertical logic or horizontal associative reasoning. Arguments are not necessarily rational in a simple utility maximizing sense, but they will be reasoned: they will aim to answer some questions and consist of beliefs and supporting beliefs, 223 Ibid., pp. 209210. 78 Argument, belief, and culture giving reasons for conclusions. Similarly, symbolic arguments which use sideways or associative forms of reasoning, such as analogies, may or may not be appropriate. Nevertheless, inappropriate analogies may be persuasive. The reason one argument wins over another is rst of all that its advo- cates have been heard, while many arguments are never heard. Second, successful arguments are made by savvy political actors who mobilize political support. Third, accidents of history, such as the skill and access of those making the case, may affect the success of arguments. Fourth, arguments are less likely to be persuasive if the social and material context does not cohere with the argument. Again, this does not mean that argument actually boils down to material conditions. Rather the relationship between arguments and preexisting cultural, strategic, and economic factors is complex since previous argument shaped the world in which present arguments occur. Beliefs are neither rational nor irrational features of a decision- making process. Beliefs philosophical, instrumental, identity, and nor- mative are historically and socially contingent. The persuasiveness of arguments and judgments about the validity (legitimacy) or logic of po- litical arguments are also contingent. There is no rational (or irrational) foundationfor social beliefs. We canonlyunderstandbeliefs historically, by examining their unfolding within particular historical contexts or as the result of reason. Moreover, there are fewreal material interests that cannot be viewed in more than one way. That does not mean certain ac- tions should not be considered counter-productive, but the criteria for judging foreign policy decisions should be the framework of reason, not ideal-type rationality. Rational actor theory itself consists of a set of be- liefs organized in a belief system that stresses natural foundations for belief and accurate assessments of costs, risks, and benets. The argument rests on several key premises and assumptions. First, thoughwe oftenspeak of individuals alone as making decisions, foreign policy decisionmaking and policy implementation is both an individ- ual and a group activity. Many are involved in its various steps, from informationgatheringtooptionformulation, decision, andimplementa- tion. Even in dictatorships, it matters what participants think about the reasons given for a particular decision, and action. In other words, the non-coercive aspects of politics are ultimately about legitimacy andthus we must understand the processes by which certain activities become legitimate and normal and by which individuals are persuaded to act or believe. 79 Argument and change in world politics Second, in the process of making arguments, decisionmakers must constantly remind each other of their identities, goals, reasons, and jus- tications. Thus, shared belief systems are crucially important for the simple reason that shared beliefs help individuals see the same things, share a vision of the group, and come to an agreement about goals and policies. Belief systems do what rational actor theorists and game theo- rists woulddescribe as facilitate coordination. But philosophical, instru- mental, normative, and identity beliefs also shape understanding and interests: the content of these coordinating ideas is crucially important. Third, what is self-evident, and taken for granted in an individuals belief systemis not necessarily basedon real, objective, andobvious ma- terial interests. Much of the scholarly literature and popular discussion of foreign policy assumes that the material interests of states are obvious and essentially unproblematic and can be taken for granted. Indeed, the terms self-interest and national are rarely dened and their mean- ing has usually been unproblematized, as were the ways foreign policy decisionmakers argued for their particular view of national interest. 224 But, I argue, both individual and intersubjectively shared beliefs are the foundation for most of these taken-for-granted assumptions. Little is self-evident about national interests. Fourth, there is nothing rm, everlasting, or immutable about these beliefs whether they are philosophical, instrumental, normative, or about identities. Foreign policy beliefs are constructed, maintained, and modied through social practices. Beliefs are as constructed and open to reinterpretation as the arguments that decisionmakers use to con- vince themselves and others of the correct foreign policy decision. Major foreign policy shifts are as likely to be the result of changes in belief systems as they are to be the result of changes in the structure of international politics or in the composition of the ruling elite of an individual nation. Fifth, beliefs donot recognize borders inside states or outside them. As Luard argues, international politics is a milieu of social interaction and there are dominant beliefs in this environment which structure actions: it is the ideology of international society the set of assumptions and expectations whichare establishedthere whichdetermine the thinking of individual decisionmakers, and so the way they will respond when facedwith a particular threat, dignity, or affront. 225 Luardargues that it 224 Exceptions include Katzenstein, ed., Culture of National SecurityandMarthaFinnemore, National Interests and International Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 225 Luard, War in International Society, p. 3. 80 Argument, belief, and culture is not possible to consider the behavior of states without regard to the social context, the international environment, within which they exist; nor to consider a society of states without the motivations and behav- ior which characterize the individual states which are its members. 226 Interdependence includes belief inhis view. Nostate is anisland(what- ever its geographical situation). All states at all times have had regular contact with some other states. 227 Thus, individuals and groups do not come up with beliefs, evaluate them, or make persuasive arguments in a social vacuum. Foreign policy belief systems are embedded within and reect larger social and historical complexes of meaning. While we can see cultures in various social and political groups in- cluding epistemic communities, organizations, states, civilizations, and international or global settings, scholars must take care not to reify cul- tures in particular locations. Rather, it is possible to recognize that in certain times and places, people share beliefs and practices and ways of understanding their history, at least enough to supercially understand the arguments of those within their culture. The practice of colonialism variedover time as cultures changedandthose who triedto alter aspects of colonialismconstantlyranintoculture. It wouldbe extremelydifcult to understand how colonialism changed from the dominant practice to one that is considered illegitimate without examining the larger cultural context whichshaped, andwas usedtoshape, its constitutive arguments and practices. This theory of the causal and constitutive role of arguments offers a specication of howbeliefs (or what most call ideas) work in worldpoli- tics. A theory of argument offers a way to understand the links between domestic political processes, nongovernmental organizations, and in- ternational institutions to international structures and processes not simply as multilevel games but also as multilocal and multivocal argu- ments where the goal is to persuade others and change practices. By focusing on the content of beliefs and the role of argument and reason, this theory moves away from the implicit rational/irrational dualism that dominates international relations theory. My argument focuses in- stead on how the meaning-content of beliefs and arguments is both historically and logically related to, and dependent upon, the meaning of other beliefs and arguments that are themselves not necessarily related to material interests or perceptions/misperceptions of the social world. 226 Ibid., p. 13. 227 Ibid., p. 15. 81 2 Ethical argument and argument analysis I want to account for the ways in which men and women who are not lawyers but simply citizens (and sometimes soldiers) argue about war, and to expound the terms we commonly use. I am concerned precisely with the present structure of the moral world. My starting point is the fact that we do argue, often to different purposes, to be sure, but in a mutually comprehensible fashion: else there would be no point in arguing. We justify our conduct; we judge the conduct of others. Though these justications cannot be studied like the records of a criminal court, they are nevertheless, a legitimate subject of study. 1 Ethical argument is ostensibly the hard case for demonstrating the im- portance of argument in world politics. To make an ethical argument, as opposed to any other kind of argument is to propose three things simultaneously: that a behavior or course of action is good and right; that others ought to do this good thing; and that despite the strength of my conviction, I will not force you to do what I believe is the good, but rather I seek to persuade you to believe as I do and act according to that belief. Further, ethical arguments clearly rest on normative beliefs, but they are also usually closely related to identity and constitutive beliefs. To do the right thing is to be a good human either as an individual or a member of a group (identity) or as part of ones role (constitutive belief). And ethical arguments, because of their relation to beliefs about how it is that we are good, how it is that we relate to others, are emotional and this is part of their distinctive appeal and power. Those who make ethical arguments at least want to be seen as good and at most believe that they are suggesting what is good. 1 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. xxvii. 82 Ethical argument and argument analysis The dominant account of the role of ethics in international relations is that it is a stand in for material interests and is the product of power. Such is the view of E.H. Carr: Theories of social morality are always the product of a dominant group which identies itself with the community as a whole, and which pos- sesses facilities denied to subordinate groups or individuals for impos- ingits viewof life onthe community. Theories of international morality are, for the same reason and in virtue of the same process, the product of dominant nations or groups of nations . . . morality is the product of power. 2 These and similar claims are found in the writings of Thucydides and Hobbes. Arguments about the irrelevance of ethics or morality are power- ful. Translated into their assumptions, those who say that morality is the product of power are actually making several claims. First, they suppose that when individuals make ethical claims, those statements mask some real interests that are not moral. Rather, the interests are selsh. Further, these selsh interests or self-interested behavior and arguments are motivated at root by material causes such as the de- sire for power or survival. Moreover, to act self-interestedly is to be rational, in the sense of utility maximizing, while action motivated by ethical concerns is irrational. Since states are rational, and since in the world of international politics militarily/materially powerful states dominate (the strong do as they will, the weak as they must), international ethics is an oxymoron. Representatives of states who say they act for moral reasons are covering up some other, self-interested motive. In this view, theories of world politics that give ethical accounts of behavior are at best mistaken and at worst mislead- ing. Another strong argument, as articulated by Joshua Cohen, grants some causal weight to morality but suggests that morality has been internalized and is part of the interests of individuals. He argues that some ethical explanations . . . have force. That force derives from the general claim that the injustice of a social arrangement limits its viability. Cohen continues: Social arrangements better able to elicit voluntary cooperation have both moral and practical advantages over 2 Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis, 19191939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), pp. 79 and 81. 83 Argument and change in world politics their more coercive counterparts. 3 Cohen makes this argument with specic reference to the demise of slavery, suggesting that slavery conicted with slave interests in material well-being, autonomy, and dignity. Slavery is unjust because it could not be the result of a free, reasonable, and informed agreement. Suppose, then, that one comes to understand certain facts, all of which can be recognized independent from the procedures of moral reason- ing: that slaves share the natural properties that are sufcient for being subjects of legitimate interests, that they have the fundamental inter- ests, and that slavery sharply conicts with those interests. Moral rea- soning about slavery, proceeding in light of these facts, and giving due consideration to the interests of slaves, is bound to recognize the inter- ests as legitimate and to condemn slavery as unjust. To say, then, that the wrongness of slavery explains the moral belief is to note the fol- lowing: that moral reasoning mandates the conclusion that slavery is unjust; and that the moral belief is produced in part by that kind of rea- soning. And once the injustice is recognized, it is reasonable to expect that recognition plays some role in motivation, that it contributes to the antagonism of slaves to slavery, that it adds nonslave opponents to slave opponents, and that, once slavery is abolished, it helps to explain why there are not strong movements to bring it back. 4 Cohens arguments are actually a version of rational actor the- ory, where it is rational to act in accordance with normative beliefs. The moral weight also gures implicitly in the conicting interests view . . . The conict of slavery with legitimate slave interests, and the fact that masters interests in preserving slavery are not legitimate, plausibly helps to tip the balance in favor of stable departures from slavery. 5 The basic assumptions of rational actor theory are familiar yet bear repeating. First, people are means to ends rational: theydevise strategies and engage in behaviors that move them efciently toward achieving their goals. Second, people are utility maximizers: they will choose the course of action with the greatest perceived benets. Third, people cal- culate costs, risks, and benets in an unbiased manner. Fourth, prefe- rences are given and stable. Rational actor theory does not pretend to tell us about the source of preferences or interests, nor how preferences change. In sum, human behavior can be explained in terms of rational 3 Joshua Cohen, The Arc of the Moral Universe, Philosophy & Public Affairs 26 (Spring 1997), 91134: 93. 4 Ibid., p. 131. 5 Ibid. 84 Ethical argument and argument analysis decision processes. Individuals weigh costs, risks, and benets of alter- native actions, and they choose the course of action with the least costs and risks, and the greatest benet. In the case of Cohens argument about the demise of slavery, an ethical explanation makes sense because slavery conicts with the rational slaves interest, and because it con- icts with slave interests the institution of slavery is costly, in fact more costly than benecial in most circumstances. Morality and self-interest are thus still distinct from each other in this view, although as Gregory Raymond argues, self-interests and norms frequently coexist. 6 However, normative beliefs can have force, and the power of those beliefs in argument is related specically to their content. People use arguments (instrumentally) because they want to persuade the other and they nd that ethical arguments are often persuasive. In the case of ethical arguments they want to persuade the other that behaving in a certainway is normatively goodandtherefore they ought to behave that way. Convincing ethical arguments provide good normative reasons to do one thing versus another. The reasons given in a persuasive ethi- cal argument seem good, rst because people believe in the values put forward in the argument, and second, because they believe that the pro- posed course of action will help to realize those values. In other words, when they are successful, ethical arguments work primarily because of their persuasive power and the source of this persuasive power is their content. Ethical arguments may also have political power if the balance of belief shifts to the position articulated by the ethical argument, which means that those who deploy successful ethical arguments must be as politically savvy as those who deploy practical, identity, or scientic arguments. Ethical arguments that occur within political groups and among them are as important and ubiquitous as practical, scientic, and identity arguments in world politics. The key question is whether there is a causal relationship between normative beliefs and behaviors that become dominant. I argue that there is, and that the causal power of normative beliefs lies in ethical argument. The aims in this chapter are to articulate the workings and role of ethical argument; to explicate the relationship between ethical arguments, normative beliefs, and behavioral change; and to suggest a way to study ethical arguments in world politics. I make my case for the importance of ethical argument in several steps. First, I develop 6 Gregory A. Raymond, Problems and Prospects in the Study of International Norms, Mershon International Studies Review 41 (November 1997), 205245: 232. 85 Argument and change in world politics the concepts of behavioral norms and normative beliefs, distinguishing between them and discussing their potential relationships. Second, I briey discuss alternative theories of behavioral norm and normative belief change. Third, I developthe theory of ethical argument that shows how ethical arguments can be persuasive. Fourth, I explore some of the reasons behavioral norms and normative beliefs are difcult to change, but how, nevertheless, ethical arguments might seem persuasive. Finally, I discuss methodological questions and propose a method of ethical argument analysis. Behavioral norms and normative beliefs International relations scholars frequently talk about norms but do so in ways that frustrate analysis by blurring the distinction be- tween behavioral norms and normative beliefs. They also emphasize common knowledge properties of norms that are not unique to norms. Further, it is not uncommon for the norms literature to proceed as if the dominant practice were the same as the normative belief. Behavioral norms are simply typical, or modal, behavior or the dominant practice in certain contexts. 7 Normative beliefs are beliefs about what it is right to do. What is distinctive about prescriptive nor- mative statements and normative beliefs is their emphasis on what is right and good. This prescriptive normative quality is precisely what theorists are asserting or denying has causal import, so it is vital not to confound normative beliefs and behavioral norms or else one risks circular and imprecise arguments (in the form of norms cause norms). 8 It is not unusual, even among the most careful scholars, to procede as if common knowledge and normative beliefs are one and the same. For instance, Friedrich Kratochwil suggests that norms are used to as- cribe praise or blame, but he highlights the function of norms in deci- sionmaking and problem solving ordering and coordination effects arguing that norms decrease uncertainty, allow the pursuit of shared 7 Robert O. Keohane uses the phrase typical, or modal, behavior in The Demand for International Regimes, in Stephen D. Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 141171: 145. 8 See Raymond, Problems andProspects inthe Studyof International Norms, andJanice E. Thompson, Norms in International Relations: A Conceptual Analysis, International Journal of Group Tensions 23 (1993), 6783. 86 Ethical argument and argument analysis meanings, and help actors coordinate by dening situations and the rules of the game. 9 For Audie Klotz, norms are beliefs, or shared (thus social) understandings of standards for behavior. 10 Klotz says that Discrimination based on raci ally dened categories, evident in racist language, personal actions, or social policies, is bad, and indi- vidual equality (lack of racial discrimination) is good. 11 Failing to dis- tinguish dominant behaviors from the beliefs that might cause them, Klotz says: Nor are all norms moral, since these standards can have functional and nonethical origins and purposes. 12 Christopher Gelpi also confounds common knowledge with normative, that is, prescrip- tive force, when he emphasizes the role of norms as focal points for interpreting behavior and as reputational constraints. 13 Gregory Raymond argues that contrary to the Hobbesian assertion that the in- dependence of states implies that there are no rules, acknowledged normative standards exist in the absence of a common power to keep everyone in awe. 14 But when Raymond argues that Norms are ubiquitous . . . The web of expectations created by norms guide behavior; even in the absence of centralized mechanisms to enforce compliance, he does not distinguishnormative beliefs fromother kinds of beliefs or common knowledge. 15 And while focusing on the pre- scriptive aspect of norms as a standard of appropriate behavior, Finnemore and Sikkink nevertheless say, Norms channel and reg- ularize behavior; they often limit the range of choice and constrain actions. 16 As shared expectations about behavior, both behavioral norms and normative beliefs may have common knowledge effects, decreasing un- certainty about what actors are likely to do in certain circumstances, and facilitating coordination because norms, that is, both behavioral norms and normative beliefs, are functional in ways that are similar 9 Friedrich Kratochwil, Rules Norms and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), passim, esp. pages 911; 48; 50; 5859; 6970 and 100. 10 Audie Klotz, Norms in International Relations: The Struggle Against Apartheid (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 14. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Christopher Gelpi, Crime and Punishment: The Role of Norms in Crisis Bargaining, American Political Science Review 91 (June 1997), 339360: 339. 14 Raymond, Problems and Prospects in the Study of International Norms, p. 207. 15 Ibid., p. 208. 16 Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, International Norm Dynamics and Political Change, International Organization 52 (Autumn 1998), 887917: 891 and 894. 87 Argument and change in world politics to the role of other ideas (conventions) or knowledge and institutions. 17 In this sense, norms are not unique. Non-normative beliefs (e.g. scientic propositions), habits, and rules indeed any form of common knowledge and agreed upon procedures may help actors coordinate or limit the range of choice. Because there is nothing unique about this aspect of normative beliefs, scholars ought to take care not to confuse the possible coordinating effects of normative beliefs (that are similar to the effects of any form of common knowledge and focal-point agreements) with the unique prescriptive characteristic of normative beliefs. Both behavioral norms andnormative beliefs usually have a traceable history; actors will often be able to say when and sometimes why they or their ancestors began a practice and why they thought a normative belief was right. But behavioral norms may also be arbitrary. In other words, there may be no goodethical or practical reasons for a behavioral norm, yet, for some accidental reason, the practice is accepted and ex- pected. In this situation, no one seems to have what might be recognized as an ethical or logical argument to justify the practice, though post-hoc rationalizations for the practice might spring to mind if practitioners are pressed. Finally, in the sense that dominant practices and expectations do these things (normalize, decrease uncertainty, shape interests and the scope of consideration, and legitimize behaviors), they are struc- tural features of international and domestic politics. In other words, behavioral norms and normative beliefs are both constitutive (meaning making) and regulative (constraining). Anillustrationmay helpclarify the distinctions andoverlaps between behavioral norms and normative beliefs. It is possible to view complex international practices, suchas warmaking, colonialism, diplomacy, and trade in certain contexts, as behavioral norms. These complex prac- tices are composed of other behavioral norms (regular behaviors) and normative beliefs. For instance, war is composed of several behavioral norms regarding violence that leads to injury, mutilation, and death. And within the conceptual domain of these particular practices, there are normative beliefs prescriptions about how injury, mutilation, and deathought to (or ought not to) come about, that rest onother normative beliefs about what it is goodandright to do. Since the widespreadadop- tion of the convention on chemical weapons in the twentieth century, as 17 Institutionalists stress the role that institutions and ideas can play in reducing trans- action costs, providing focal points, and decreasing uncertainty among rational actors. Also see Gary Geortz, Contexts of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 98. 88 Ethical argument and argument analysis RichardPrice andNina Tannenwaldargue, the use of chemical weapons in war has been seen as something that ought not to be done, accord- ing to international law, while other methods of injury, mutilation, and death, such as machine guns, remain more or less acceptable and ex- pected or normal. 18 But even the acceptability of methods in war is constrained by the pre-existing web of normative beliefs in a culture such as the belief that it is not right to kill prisoners of war or non- combatants. 19 Types and variations of behavioral norms and normative beliefs As Raymond notes, Over time all norms vary with regard to commu- nal meaning, perlocutionary effect, degree of internalization, extent of conformity, patterns of deviance, and so on. 20 It is worthwhile saying more about the variations in behavioral norms, normative beliefs, and the possible relationships between behavioral norms and normative be- liefs. Normative beliefs, as propositions about what it is good and right to do, vary along several dimensions: basic type; scope of obligation; specicity; and links to other normative beliefs. Behavioral norms vary in terms of prevalence, degree of institutionalization, links to normative beliefs or normativity, and the costs of non-compliance. It is possible to distinguish four basic types of normative belief: sub- stantive (more commonly called regulative norms), procedural, con- stitutive, and meta-normative. 21 Substantive normative beliefs dene and prescribe what qualities and behaviors are good, for example the belief that truth is good. Procedural normative beliefs prescribe how to decide what is good and right, for example that democratic or re- publican procedures ought to be used. Constitutive normative beliefs are about the characteristics of a good social entity or what makes in- dividuals or social groups count as something. 22 For example, those who follow the particular prescriptions entailed by the normative be- lief in question are (good) soldiers, states, allies, and so on. Those 18 See Richard Price and Nina Tannenwald, Norms and Deterrence: The Nuclear and Chemical Weapons Taboos, in Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 114152. 19 On the constraining effects of culture see Tracy Isaacs, Cultural Context and Moral Responsibility, Ethics 107 (July 1997), 760684. 20 Raymond, Problems and Prospects in the Study of International Norms, p. 235. 21 It is more common to distinguish regulative and constitutive norms. 22 These are sometimes related to identity beliefs. 89 Argument and change in world politics who do not follow the particular normative prescriptions may cease to be considered soldiers, states, and allies. Meta-normative beliefs prescribe that normative prescriptions ought to be followed. The dis- tinction between substantive normative beliefs and meta-normative beliefs is that Moral codes and various moral taboos have a connec- tion with custom. . . But rules such as that promises ought to be kept, or that it is immoral to tell a lie seem to be rather different . . . Their exis- tence cannot truly be said to depend on historical contingencies . . . the rule such that promises ought to be kept presupposes the existence of the institution of promising. . . [that] need not be universal. 23 Some normative beliefs such as those promoting truth-telling, promise- keeping, treating like cases alike, and following legitimate rules are meta-normative since they are prescriptions that are intended to guide norm following in general and help create an intersubjective expecta- tion that normative prescriptions will be followed because it is good to do so. Despite the existence of meta-normative beliefs, prescriptions are not always followed. There are context specic beliefs about the scope of obligations arising from a particular normative belief about when to behave in the ways prescribed by the normative belief. Universal nor- mative beliefs dene the scope of obligation such that everyone must all the time without exception, follow the prescription (in international law, the principle of jus cogens where absolutely no derogation is per- missible). Role normative beliefs limit the scope of obligation to those whose formal or informal role it is to comply with the prescribed or proscribed behavior. For example, neutral states are expected to behave one way and not another, while allies can be expected to follow dif- ferent prescriptions. Normative beliefs are also often conditional; the scope of obligation depends on the conditions of the specic situation. Under conditional normative beliefs, for example, actors ought to fol- low the prescription if there is time, if they are able, if doing so does not conict with another specied normative belief, such as not caus- ing greater harm, and so on. For example, food-rich states ought to contribute to famine relief while food-poor states are not expected to do so. Normative beliefs also vary by the explicitness of their specica- tion. The normative belief may be vague in terms of the scope of the 23 Georg Henrik von Wright, Norms, Truth and Logic, in Georg Henrik von Wright, Practical Reason (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1983), pp. 130209: 138. 90 Ethical argument and argument analysis obligation, or the belief may be well specied, with the conditions for its scope of obligation well elaborated. Further, the articulated justica- tion (persuasive reasons to hold the belief) for the normative belief may be vague or explicit. Finally, normative beliefs also vary by the density of their relation to other normative beliefs. Normative beliefs are articulated in laws, myths, and religious doctrines and they rarely stand alone. Behavioral norms and prescriptive normative statements are linked to, and embed- dedin, wider webs of normative beliefs andbehavioral norms whichare in turn embedded in wider social institutions and networks of beliefs or culture. Like normative beliefs, behavioral norms vary in their prevalence, de- gree of institutionalization, normativity, andthe cost of non-compliance. By denition, behavioral norms are a dominant practice. Publicity about behavioral norms becomes commonknowledge andmayhave the prop- erty of easing coordination. But several behaviors may be possible in different situations, and the prevalence of a behavior may vary from always, to frequently or infrequently practiced. For example, in the last several centuries most, though not all, states have establishedorganized armed forces. In cases where a practice is infrequent, it ought not to be considered a behavioral norm. The degree of institutionalization of behavioral norms is the extent to which routines and procedures that facilitate or constitute the per- formance of the behavioral norm are built into standard operating pro- cedures and regulations of organizations that function in the relevant issue area. Institutionalization is how normative beliefs are both inter- nalized within organizations as they are incorporated into practices, policies, andrules andexternalized, as rules are adoptedby other bod- ies. Highly institutionalized norms will be associated with rules about when to engage in practices that facilitate the conduct of the behavioral norm and actors will consciously practice the behavioral norm and de- vise routines for its execution. Moreover, institutionalization can con- tribute to changing actors understandings of their interests; as Kathryn Sikkink has argued about human rights norms in US policy, ideas em- bodied in institutions created bureaucratic interests based on the per- petuation of those policies. 24 24 Kathryn Sikkink, The Power of Principled Ideas: Human Rights Policies in the United States and Western Europe, in Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 139170: 167. Sikkink also stresses the importance of NGOs. 91 Argument and change in world politics Table 2.1 Variations in normative beliefs and behavioral norms Normative Beliefs Behavioral Norms Type Prevalence substantive infrequent procedural frequent constitutive invariable meta-normative Scope of Obligation Degree of Institutionalization universal none role some conditional highly Specicity Normativity vague or explicit scope none: habit vague or explicit justication weak/implicit strong/explicit w/ sanctions if violated Links to Other Normative Beliefs Costs of Non-compliance few low many high Behavioral norms may also vary in terms of normativity, the artic- ulation of justicatory links between behavioral norms and normative beliefs. Sovereignty, for example, has high normativity. Habits are the behavioral norms that are not at all explicitly and consciously linked to normative beliefs. Those behavioral norms that are linked may be tied strongly and explicitly, or weakly and implicitly, to normative beliefs. Violations of behavioral norms that are strongly linked to normative beliefs are probably more likely to be sanctioned than those with weak or non-existent links to normative beliefs. It may still be costly to violate norms which are not strongly linked to normative beliefs, but the costs will be due more to the loss of efciency and ease of coordination. Alternative theories of norms and normative belief There are several ways to think about the possible causal relationships between normative beliefs and behavioral norms: normative beliefs as irrelevant; normative beliefs and behavioral norms as rational; and nor- mative beliefs as part of reason or elements of ethical argument. 92 Ethical argument and argument analysis Some realist theories of international relations argue, as noted above, that normative beliefs are causally irrelevant. As Hans Morgenthau claimed, A realist theory of international politics will also avoid the other popular fallacy of equating the foreign policies of a states- man with his philosophic or political sympathies, deducing the for- mer from the latter. 25 Thus, Morgenthau argued, the role of nor- mative beliefs may be simply embodied in the tendency of foreign policy decisionmakers to think that their own views are right. Mor- genthau implored scholars of foreign policy to avoid making that mistake. To know that nations are subject to the moral law is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in relations between nations is quite another . . . On the other hand, it is exactly the concept of interest dened as power that saves us both from that moral excess and that political folly. 26 If normative content does matter, realists see the role of ethical argu- ments as only instrumental, as moral justication for the power quest. 27 Realists answer the question of the origins of behavioral norms with the argument that behavioral norms are contingent, accidental historical phenomena that are maintained by habit and ex- tended by custom or further accident. Or, as E.H. Carr argued, morality reects the interests of the dominant power. The second view, that norms are rational and functional, is ar- ticulated by both realist and liberal international relations theorists. In this view, the causal force of normative beliefs, and actors re- ceptivity to particular ethical arguments, derives from the extent to which norms are seen as customary. Several scholars take this approach. As Keohane argues, international regimes perform the function of reducing uncertainty and risk by linking discrete is- sues to one another and by improving the quantity and quality of information available to participants. 28 As Robert Axelrod argues, norms may reduce uncertainty and facilitate coordination by pro- viding a focal point. 29 Similarly, Christopher Gelpi suggests that 25 Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace sixth edition, revised by Kenneth W. Thompson (New York: Knopf, 1985), p. 6. 26 Ibid., p. 13. 27 Nicholas Spykman, quoted in Jack Donnelly, Twentieth Century Realism, in Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel, eds., Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 85111: 94. 28 Keohane, The Demand for International Regimes, p. 162. 29 Robert Axelrod, An Evolutionary Approach to Norms, American Political Science Review 80 (December 1986), 10951111. 93 Argument and change in world politics Norms are enabling when they serve as focal points, which I label normative referents, to help states coordinate their behavior. In this case, norms alter state behavior by helping them interpret the be- havior of other states in an uncertain international environment. 30 Conceptual confusion confounding prescriptive norms with com- mon knowledge effects and dominant behaviors is evident in these statements. This has the effect that, rather like the rst normative be- liefs are irrelevant view, the rational and functional explanation for the causal force of norms boils down to the position that specic qualities of perceived goodness are irrelevant. This is because the causal force of norms, under this hypothesis, derives from their ability to decrease un- certainty and coordination costs by, for example, providing focal points. Another versionof the rational norms perspective is anevolutionary/ practical account of behavioral norms, such as proposed by Robert Axelrod, where what works well for a player is more likely to be used again while what turns out poorly is more likely to be discarded. 31 There is some randomness, but the emphasis is on functionality and trial anderror processes. More efcient norms triumph; states dowhat works and the analysis of what is chosen at any specic time is based upon an operationalization of the idea that effective strategies are more likely to be retained than ineffective strategies. 32 Ann Florini, who ar- gues that norms are like genes, suggests that the reproductive success of norms depends on natural selection processes. First, whether a norm becomes prominent enough in the norm pool to gain a foothold; second, how well it interacts with other prevailing norms with which it is not in competition, that is the normative environment; and - nally, the external environmental conditions such as the distribution of power and the availability of human or natural resources. 33 Rational norms theorists also sometimes argue, consistent with the norms are irrelevant school, that behavioral norms and normative be- liefs (to the extent that there are normative beliefs) are imposed and maintainedbyhegemons tosuit their material interests. 34 The reasonthe hegemon prefers one norm over another is not a normative belief in the goodness or rightness of the behavior. Under this hypothesis, the causal 30 Gelpi, Crime and Punishment, p. 340. 31 Axelrod, An Evolutionary Approach to Norms, p. 1097. 32 Ibid. 33 Ann Florini, The Evolution of International Norms, International Studies Quarterly 40 (September 1996), 363389: 374. 34 For instance suggested by Axelrod in An Evolutionary Approach to Norms p. 1108 and Carr, The Thirty Years Crisis. 94 Ethical argument and argument analysis force behind behavioral norms is rational material interests and the fact that the behavior has become a norm is only a testament to the power of the hegemon to impose the desired behavior and impose costs on trans- gressors. The norm simply suits the interests of a hegemon and the preferences of more powerful actors will be accordedgreater weight. 35 In sum, according to these rational/functional accounts of behavioral norms, the adoption of norms is a rational activity which facilitates coordination and reduces uncertainty for many, or at least for one pow- erful actor. Normative content is basically irrelevant normative beliefs are epiphenomenal; any ethical meaning is essentially a gloss on ma- terial interests. Particular behavioral norms are preferred because they provide stability rather than the instability of having no expectations; they are devices to overcome the barriers to more efcient coordina- tion in an anarchic environment. 36 Actors keep their normative com- mitments because of the costs that international audiences (i.e. other governments) may impose on state leaders if they do not keep their commitments. 37 But, as the discussion above should have made clear, any common knowledge and agreement on a convention could be ra- tional. The specically normative content would seem to be irrelevant in the rational actor account of norms. Thus, for the most part, the ra- tional interest account boils down to the position that normative beliefs are irrelevant/epiphenomenal. A third view is that the prescriptive content of normative beliefs matters in how one behavioral norm is chosen over another. 38 For ex- ample, Robert Jackson argues that normative ideas that originated in the West were a crucial factor in the abolition of colonialism and the institution of self-determination in the greater part of the non- Western world . . . 39 Ethan Nadelmann argues that norms emerge and are promoted because they reect not only the economic and se- curity interests of dominant members of international society but also 35 Keohane, The Demand for International Regimes, p. 146. 36 Ibid., p. 151. 37 Gelpi, Crime and Punishment, p. 341. 38 Klotz, Norms in International Relations; Gary Geortz and Paul F. Diehl, Toward a Theory of International Norms: Some Conceptual and Measurement Issues, Journal of Conict Resolution 36 (December 1992), 634666; David Welch, Justice and the Genesis of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Martha Finnemore, Norms, Culture, and World Politics: Insights from Sociologys Institutionalism, International Organization 50, (Spring 1996), 325347. An analysis of how normative beliefs affect politics is of course different from making the claim that world politics ought to be concerned with ethics. 39 Robert H. Jackson, The Weight of Ideas in Decolonization: Normative Change in Inter- national Relations, in Goldstein and Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy, pp. 111138: 112. 95 Argument and change in world politics their moral interests and emotional dispositions. 40 This suggests that for new behavioral norms to become dominant, the most powerful ac- tors must nd that their economic and security interests must coincide with the proposed new norm, or at least not be counter to it, and that they may also believe the prescription is good on substantive normative grounds. 41 My arguments are closest to this school. Yet these accounts of behavi- oral norm change are often vague about the precise relationship they suggest between behavioral norms and normative belief. For instance, JohnMueller suggests that norms aresoldbynormentrepreneurs, that is, people who peddle norms. Mueller argues that people sort through this huge market of ideas and prove receptive to some while remaining immune to others. 42 But in Muellers account one has to explain re- ceptivity, that is, the conditions under which people and states buy a particular normandinternalize certainnormative beliefs andnot others. Nadelmann suggests an answer. This is not to argue, I should stress, that states or governments hold moral views; rather, the capacity of particular moral arguments to inuence government policies, particu- larly foreign policies, stems from the political inuence of domestic and transnational moral entrepreneurs as well as that of powerful individ- ual advocates within the government. 43 Again, after a certain point, the particular normative content of norms doesnt seem to matter so 40 Ethan A. Nadelmann, Global Prohibition Regimes: The Evolution of Norms in Inter- national Society, International Organization 44 (Autumn 1990), 479526: 524. 41 Both argument and imposition are necessary unless actors share a common normative framework. This applies to both good and bad norms. In other words, bad nor- mative beliefs like unequal treatment of women or persons of a different race must be imposed by force because those who are treated unequally will not submit without resis- tance. Similarly, those who hold good normative beliefs may not be able to persuade the holders of bad norms to change their practices without compulsion. 42 For example, John Mueller, Changing Attitudes Towards War: The Impact of the First World War, British Journal of Political Science 21 (January 1991), 128: 2527. Mueller may have been the rst to use the phrase norm entrepreneurs. Mueller does not specify how norm entrepreneurs succeed, only that their work is difcult. Robert Keohane uses the phrase political entrepreneur to describe those who promote regimes, usually . . . a government. Keohane, The Demand for International Regimes, p. 155. Laffey and Weldes argue that describing entrepreneurs and the marketing of ideas suggests a metaphor of ideas as commodities. They propose instead to use the metaphor of ideas as capital. Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes, Beyond Belief: Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in the Study of International Relations, European Journal of International Relations 3 (1997), 193237. 43 Nadelmann, Global Prohibition Regimes, p. 483. Similarly, Wapner credits transna- tional interest groups with promoting ecological sensibility. Paul Wapner, Politics Beyond the State: Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics, World Politics 47 (April 1995), 311340. 96 Ethical argument and argument analysis much for either Mueller or Nadelmann. Morality among states boils down to power and political inuence inside them; it is difcult in these accounts to say why one normative belief and a practice entailed by it, was preferred over another, only that one side had more political power than another. 44 Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink propose an account of the life-cycle of norms (although they seemto be eliding the distinction and possible causal connection between prescriptive normative beliefs and behavioral norms). The rst stage in their life-cycle, when norm entrepreneurs persuade others to embrace their norm, is norm emergence. The second stage in the life-cycle, norm acceptance, is a cascade characterized by a dynamic of imitation as norm leaders attempt to socialize other states to become norm followers. In this stage, norm cascades are facilitated by a combination of pressure for conformity, desire to enhance international legitimation, and the desire of state leaders to enhance their self-esteem. The third stage, inter- nalization of the norm, is when norms acquire a taken-for-granted quality and are no longer a matter of broad public debate. They further suggest that though there is no guarantee that a norm will inevitably go through the process they describe, in those cases where norms cascade and are internalized, they may eventually become the prevailing stan- dard of appropriateness against which newnorms emerge and compete for support. 45 Finnemore and Sikkink may be on the right track, but normative content has faded from view with the emphasis on stages. What is interesting and important about these accounts is their assertion that the prescriptive normative content of norms is, more or less, causally important in changing dominant practices. In general terms, I agree with these scholars but fear that an account which insufciently explains the process of persuasion, and fails to show how the prescriptive content of normative beliefs is causally important, will not itself be persuasive. Thus, I give an explicitly normative account of behavioral norm change. Certainly the adoption of behavioral norms could be accidental or rational, but it is also often a consequence of people being convinced 44 For example, see Chaim D. Kaufmann and Robert A. Pape, Explaining Costly Inter- national Moral Action: Britains Sixty-year Campaign Against the Atlantic Slave Trade, International Organization 53 (Autumn 1999), 631668. 45 Finnemore and Sikkink, International Norm Dynamics and Political Change, p. 895. The life-cycle metaphor also suggests scholars of norms ought to try to account for the decline, metamorphosis, and death of both behavioral norms and normative beliefs, as well as the emergence, acceptance, and internalization of norms. 97 Argument and change in world politics by persuasive ethical arguments. Specically, some behavioral norms, namely those with a normative content, are developed and adopted be- cause they reect or are implied by normative beliefs; these behavioral norms are adopted over other possible practices because the advo- cates of the norm made persuasive ethical arguments that appealed to normative beliefs. It is not to say that the normative beliefs are in re- ality good or true or will always be seen as so; only that actors, when they make ethical arguments, are trying to convince others that the be- liefs they champion are good and the practices that necessarily follow from subscribing to those beliefs are good. What makes an ethical ar- gument persuasive? How is it seen to be good? In this ethical argument explanation of the adoption of normative beliefs and behavioral norms, interpretation and meaning are a central element of a theory of beha- vioral norm and normative belief change. Ethical arguments, like other kinds of argument, are ubiquitous in world politics. Advocates for newbehavioral norms certainly engage in horse-trading, propaganda, andcoercion, but theyalso engage indebate and argument. This is so even in the case of inter-state war. As Michael Walzer argues: whether or not its specic terminology is adopted, just war theory has always played a part in ofcial arguments about war. No political leader can send soldiers into battle, asking them to risk their lives and to kill other people, without assuring them that their cause is just and that of their enemies unjust. 46 Successful ethical arguments set the terms of debate, even to the point where people who are moved by other reasons, for instance by emotions or practical considerations, feel compelled to make ethical arguments. Walzer recognizes this. And if the [just war] theory is used, it is also misused. Sometimes it serves only to determine what lies our leaders tell, the complex structure of their hypocrisy, the tribute that vice pays to virtue. 47 The question, then, is understanding the ethical arguments that people make and the force those arguments have to persuade. Ethical arguments Maintaining beliefs and practices Normative beliefs are the ethical arguments we already hold as true. When people make ethical arguments they are rst using normative 46 Walzer, Preface to the Second Edition, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. xixii. 47 Ibid., p. xii. 98 Ethical argument and argument analysis beliefs in an attempt to get others to believe as they believe, and then often trying to get them to act in ways that are implied by or entailed in holding such a belief. Ethical arguments are used in three contexts: to uphold existing practices, to extend normative prescriptions to new areas of practice, or to change dominant practices andnormative beliefs. When advocates use themto upholdpractices, ethical arguments nor- malize, legitimize, and also support and reproduce the existing cogni- tive, political, and institutional order. Specically, normative beliefs can be enunciated in prescriptive statements that indicate what is normal. In other words, normative beliefs can normalize make certain ac- tions and actors appear to be normal (and often unquestioned) and others abnormal. 48 Even practices that are not done by the majority of a population may be considered normal if they t into the dominant framework or web of normative beliefs. If actions can be relatedto a nor- mative belief, they can be seen as legitimate more than actions which are not prescribed by a normative belief. Ethical arguments also legitimize behaviors by giving good reasons for a practice. Ethical arguments that we already believe thus support and reproduce a larger cognitive world order (because people believe the normative prescriptions and ethical arguments), and help maintain relations of power as people act in ac- cordance with the prescriptions implied by the dominant normative beliefs. 49 Ethical arguments that are used to uphold dominant practices are institutionalized: the routines or standard operating procedures of an institutional practice performed for normative reasons being justi- ed by ethical arguments. Much of the work done by ethical arguments occurs in the context of upholding existing or dominant practices and remains part of the background, taken for granted. Advocates may also use ethical arguments to apply or extend existing normative beliefs (rules, laws, standards of conduct) tonewsituations or problems. To apply existing normative beliefs in newcontexts, one must win the contest of representations and successfully frame a situation as an instance covered by the existing normative belief. The argument may be extended by an analogy that takes this form: We do X in certain situations because it is good; this other case, or new situation, is very muchlike or the same as the situations where we doX: therefore we must 48 See for example Geortz, Contexts of International Politics, p. 27. 49 Ethical arguments are a discursive strategy in a Foucauldian sense although Foucault did not emphasize the process of argument in the way I do here. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1972). 99 Argument and change in world politics extend the practice of X to this new situation if we want to do good. 50 This use of ethical arguments to extend practices is perhaps the most common form of such arguments where we are conscious that ethical arguments are being made. One should not assume, however, that the attempt to apply and extend ethical arguments to a situation is always genuine. One of the best ways to make something bad look good is to say that it is so. Hypocrisy is rife in wartime discourse, because it is especially important at such a time to appear to be in the right. It is not only that the moral stakes are high; the hypocrite may not understand that; more crucially, his actions will be judged by other people who are not hypocrites, and whose judgments will affect their policies toward him. 51 Ethical arguments and normative change Actors use ethical arguments when they try to change dominant nor- mative beliefs and behaviors. Advocates use prescriptive normative beliefs in arguments to normalize and proclaim the abnormal, to legitimize or delegitimize their actions and the actions of others, and to inuence the construction of interests and the sense of possibility in decisionmaking. Challenging old normative beliefs and creating new normative-ethical standards is more difcult, however, than main- taining old practices or applying dominant normative beliefs to new situations. 52 Advocates of a new normative belief or new behavioral norm, even one within the bounds of the dominant belief system, must persuade others that their position is superior on ethical grounds, or that ethical grounds are outweighed by or, conversely, trump other considerations. 53 In the role of resisting dominant (behavioral) norms or establish- ing new norms, ethical arguments can be used to denormalize (that is 50 For example, after World War II, it became increasingly clear to the majority of white males in the U.S. that the norm that all men were created equal clashed with the unequal treatment and political rights of minorities and women. Those who advocated change deployed arguments that rested on already accepted arguments of equality and claimed that therefore political rights must be extended. 51 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 20. 52 There are parallels here to Thomas Kuhns understanding of scientic revolutions. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientic Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 53 If someone argues only on practical grounds, they argue within the dominant discourse though practical arguments may also be deployed by those who wish to win on ethical grounds. Thus, ethical arguments may be given as purely ethical arguments, but they are often linked to practical, identity, philosophical, and scientic arguments. 100 Ethical argument and argument analysis defamiliarize or make strange) the dominant norm. Ethical arguments may also delegitimize a dominant norm, showing how it is wrong and ought to be questioned. If successful, denormalization and delegitima- tion deconstruct the existing discourse. Next, ethical arguments offer a reconstruction. Those making an ethical argument may pose alternative prescriptions and suggest that an alternative order is conceivable, de- sirable, and possible, and this may have the effect of changing actors conceptions of their interest. And persuasive ethical arguments may help overturn the status quo as the powerful who uphold the dominant normcan no longer convince others to abide by or impose the old norm. Even hegemons must convince their henchmen that they must uphold an existing order or impose a new one. If they cant do that, their politi- cal support may wane. Finally, new normative beliefs, and the practices impliedby holding such beliefs, may be institutionalized. In sum, world politics is always already based on ethical argument. Note however that arguments do not necessarily proceedin the orderly way I have laidout: reconstruction may precede and indeed cause deconstruction and not all may be convinced at once, with signicant portions of the popula- tion coming to change their beliefs only after the social world has been reorganized. 54 Deconstruction of dominant beliefs and practices Denormalization. Widespread and traditional practices are familiar and seem normal to the majority, and there is little reason to question those beliefs and behavioral norms as long as they are considered normal and good. For such practices to be changed, they must be questioned. Why were actors engagedin these particular practices? Why believe one thing or engage in one particular behavior and not another? Unques- tionedpractices are normal, while normal practices are unquestioned. Simply asking why? may cause participants in a system to question dominant beliefs and behaviors, while posing an alternative may also defamiliarize or denormalize the dominant practice, making it seem strange. Symbolic arguments, especially analogies, are also often suc- cessful strategies for denormalizing practices. Beliefs and practices that are successfully denormalized will be seen as one of many possible op- tions or may even seem abnormal. Denormalization is thus actually a meta-argument, where what is at stake is the framing of a practice as 54 As utopians know, simply asserting an alternative may denormalize and delegitimize the dominant practice. 101 Argument and change in world politics normal or abnormal. The move to denormalize is successful to the ex- tent that previously taken-for-granted practices are no longer seen as givens. If denormalization succeeds, the framing of a dominant prac- tice shifts from unquestionable and unproblematic to questionable and problematic. Without denormalization, it is unlikely that delegitimation will be successful. Delegitimation. Legitimate actions are done for a good reason (as op- posed to being performed out of habit or fear of punishment). Legit- imate commands are developed using the right process, given under the direction of the appropriate authority, and made for a good rea- son. Ethical arguments may upset or alter the perceptions of legiti- macy associated with a dominant practice by showing a disjuncture or hypocrisy between present behavior and an already existing nor- mative belief. In this case, what once seemed acceptable is no longer acceptable on the basis of arguments that mobilize logic, empathy, or analogy to question the legitimacy of a practice. The exposure of hypocrisy is certainly the most ordinary, it may also be the most impor- tant form of moral criticism. 55 Delegitimized practices can no longer pass the test of being done for good reason because we no longer think the reason is good, or at least, good enough. Criticism of the action or behavior may shade over into an implicit or explicit critique of the institution conducting the behavior, prompting the sorts of legit- imation crises described above. Linkages of non-dominant prescrip- tive norms to already established dominant beliefs and norms may help boost the legitimacy of new practices. As Finnemore and Sikkink suggest, the construction of cognitive frames is an essential compo- nent of norm entrepreneurs political strategies, since, when they are successful, the new frames resonate with broader public understand- ings and are adopted as new ways of talking about and understanding issues. 56 Denormalization and delegitimation are crucial meta-arguments: without this initial stepof deconstruction, subsequent steps inthe ethical argument, especially the posing of alternatives, are unlikely to be un- derstood or successful. Denormalization and delegitimation, together serve to deconstruct the dominant beliefs, and throw into question pre- viously unquestioned behaviors. Dominant normative beliefs and the practices associated with them are unlikely to be abandoned unless and 55 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. xxix. 56 Finnemore and Sikkink, Norm Dynamics and Political Change, p. 897. 102 Ethical argument and argument analysis until actors also see new possibilities for action and understand their moral interests in new ways. Deconstruction is crucial in this regard because it creates a moral space, an opening, through which new beliefs and arguments may be heard. Reconstruction Changing conceptions of possibility and interests. By positing a new nor- mative belief and advocating new behaviors, ethical arguments may change actors conceptions of what is possible or what is desirable. As some new good is seen as possible or more urgent, ethical argu- ments can even result in actors reframing their interests, or the order of their preferences. This is the power of utopian or visionary narra- tives: utopians not only critique the normality and legitimacy of the present order by contrasting it with a better place, they are obvi- ously articulating the particulars of the better place and, they hope, making that better place seem both desirable and achievable. New nor- mative beliefs are also more likely to win acceptance if advocates suc- ceed in changing actors conceptions of their interests (what they want or believe they need). An interest is formulated when agents believe in the value or goodness of something. 57 For example, in the early 1990s, promoting democratization was seen as a good, and (re-)dened as a U.S. interest that would structure foreign policy. The order of prefer- ences would be changed by adopting this normative belief if promot- ing democracy became more important than promoting free trade and prots. Political and institutional change Changingcapabilities. Changecancertainlyoccur intheabsenceof norma- tive consensus; not everyone has to be persuaded by ethical arguments for the inuence of ethical arguments to be felt. 58 Ethical arguments that have persuaded enough people that a dominant practice is strange, ille- gitimate, and undesirable can mobilize groups to take strategic action to change the dominant practice. Normatively based and motivated re- sistance, when focused in the political arena in the form of organized 57 As FinnemoreandSikkinkargue, manynormentrepreneurs donot somuchact against their interests as they act in accordance with a redened understanding of their interests. Ibid., p. 898. 58 Scholars of social movements have already observed this. See for instance, Jeffrey Knopf, Domestic Society and International Cooperation: The Impact of Protest on U.S. Arms Control Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 103 Argument and change in world politics boycotts, sanctions, op-eds, electoral campaigns, legislation, court chal- lenges, and lobbying, may alter the capacity of the actors who held the dominant normative belief to carry out the practices associated with that belief as they change the balance of belief within a population. Those who take strategic action based on normative commitments may be particularly committed, dedicated to long-term, seemingly losing, struggles with dominant institutions. 59 And as Keck and Sikkink ar- gue, some issues may be easier than others to mobilize around: Issues that involve ideas about right and wrong are amenable to advocacy networking because they arouse strong feelings . . . and infuse meaning into these volunteer activities. 60 Indeed, ethical arguments that res- onate with the emotions and pre-existing normative commitments of activists are probably more likely to mobilize activists to take the sort of sustained strategic action that can change the balance of capabilities within states and across borders. Those who hold the dominant normative belief may be disabled by a strategically powerful minority who hold a different belief, or the bal- ance of those holding new normative beliefs may shift so that those who were once in the majority become a minority. Ethical argument explanations do not, therefore, completely replace accounts of change based on the rational political action of politicians who, for instance, want to remain in ofce by pleasing the voters; rather, an ethical argu- ment explanation can show why one behavior, and not another, pleased the voters. Pragmatic reformers, discussed at greater length below, may thus initiate reforms sought by those motivated by normative concerns, just so that they can maintain their position. Further, piecemeal reforms may alter the system, and the capabilities of actors within it, in ways that either normatively or pragmatically motivated reformers do not anticipate and perhaps never intended. As Robert Jervis powerfully argues, this is because of interconnections within social systems which mean that many effects are indirect, me- diated and delayed. 61 Thus, relatively small changes may avalanche into large, unanticipated, openings for reform, further argument, and 59 Finnemore and Sikkink rightly focus on the affective and principled components of those who deploy ethical arguments: it is very difcult to explain the motivations of normentrepreneurs without reference to empathy, altruism, andideational commitment. Ibid., p. 898. 60 Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in Transnational Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 26. 61 Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Social and Political Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 29. 104 Ethical argument and argument analysis institutionalization. For example, ending slavery decreased the prof- itability of colonialism and the power of colonial actors to press for their interests in the metropole. Weakened colonizers could not resist the efforts of colonial reformers, who, for example, pushed for im- provements in political representation and working conditions within colonies, which in turn enabled the colonized to more effectively resist the colonizer and push for greater reform. Institutionalization. Once new prescriptive normative beliefs have been accepted, they may become institutionalized in a two-step process. First, practices designed to enact and ultimately realize the normative belief are articulated and measures of successful compliance are de- vised. The beliefs are instantiated in rules, laws, regulations, standard operating procedures, or other kinds of expected practices within in- stitutions; they become practical and measurable. Second, compliance is monitored by administrators or bureaucrats, and even outsiders, to ensure that the normative prescriptions implied by the normative be- liefs are followed. Actors become accountable. Institutionalization may create new structures of political opportunity for actors who would seek to expand the scope of application for newly accepted norma- tive beliefs. 62 For example, normative beliefs about the treatment of slave and then forced labor in colonies was gradually institutional- ized in domestic law and international organizations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, eventually leading to the outlawing of both practices. 63 Institutionalization of normative beliefs both requires some base level of consensus and, in turn, usually entails even more ethical and practi- cal (perhaps even scientic and identity) arguments as actors choose among options for realizing the prescriptive normative beliefs they have adopted. Failures at institutionalization or implementation may prompt a reevaluation of underlying normative beliefs and ethical arguments. 62 Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, Mayer N. Zald, eds., Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunity, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 63 Several scholars have rightly stressed the importance of institutionalization. See for example, Edward Weisband, Discursive Multilateralism: Global Benchmarks, Shame, and Learning in the ILO Labour Standards Monitoring Regime, International Studies Quarterly 44 (December 2000), 643666; Sikkink, The Power of Principled Ideas; Ronald Jepperson, Alexander Wendt, and Peter J. Katzenstein, Norms, Identity, and Culture in National Security, in Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security, pp. 3375; and Finnemore and Sikkink, Norm Dynamics and Political Change. 105 Argument and change in world politics Once institutionalized, or made practical by diplomats, lawyers, bu- reaucrats, and administrators, normative beliefs are implemented as part of the taken for granted of international politics, further chang- ing the structure of world politics. The articulation of expectations in the form of benchmarks and timetables, and the establishment of new routines and standard operating procedures allows other ethi- cal arguments to be bootstrapped into the system, accelerating the dynamic of ethical argument and normative change. United Nations treaty making on self-determination is one example of the process and consequences of institutionalization by the making of international agreements: Treaty-making has contributed to the emergence and consolidation of general rules in two ways. Firstly, when the treaty rules were elaborated, Member States of the UN had an opportunity to take a stand, to voice their views and concerns as well as to react to the statements of other governments. All these pronouncements had an impact that went beyond their nal result the treaty provisions because they stimulated debate and prompted States to adopt po- sitions that were conducive to their gradual acceptance of general standards on the matter. Treaty-making is also relevant in another respect. Once adopted, treaty rules had a signicant spin-off effect, in that together with the monitoring mechanisms overseeing their implementation they led to contracting States being increasingly amenable to the adoption of the course of action dictated by the rules. As membership in the UN came practically to coincide with membership of the world community and the number of contract- ing Parties to the Covenants increased at a rapid pace, a growing number of States became bound by international legal standards on self-determination and consequently behaved as required by those standards. 64 Institutionalization has two important consequences. First, future actions that can be represented as relevant in terms of the new nor- mative standard are judged differently once the new standards, and in particular, the criteria for approval and disapproval including rewards and sanctions have been articulated. Once normative be- liefs are institutionalized, they are measurable, enabling compliance and non-compliance with the prescriptive standards to be identied 64 Antonio Cassese, Self-determination of Peoples: A Legal Reappraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 67. 106 Ethical argument and argument analysis and named. 65 Second, with institutionalization, the table on which all subsequent arguments occurs has changed, with newly institutional- ized normative standards becoming the starting point, topoi, for future ethical arguments. Normative belief change that becomes institution- alized may create a path dependent dynamic for subsequent cogni- tions, emotional reactions, political arguments, and behaviors as initial choices preclude future options and make other options available. 66 Insum, complexprevailinginternational practices (behavioral norms) may change as a result of a process of ethical argumentation. 67 Ethical arguments that are intended to change dominant beliefs and beha- vioral norms work by denormalizing/defamiliarizing dominant prac- tices, delegitimizing them, changing actors conceptions of their inter- ests, and sometimes by changing the capabilities of dominant actors to carry out the practices associated with those norms. 68 Institutional- ization articulates and embeds prescriptive normative standards in the 65 As Finnemore and Sikkink argue, institutionalization contributes strongly to the pos- sibility of a norm cascade both by clarifying what, exactly, the norm is and what consti- tutes a violation (often a matter of some disagreement among actors) and by spelling out specic procedures by which norm leaders coordinate disapproval and sanctions for norm breaking. Finnemore and Sikkink, Norm Dynamics and Political Change, p. 900. Finnemore and Sikkink talk about tipping and threshold points, arguing that tipping occurs after about one-third of states in the system adopt the norm or if crucial or critical states adopt the norm. Some states may be crucial, for instance, Britain was crucial in the case of ending the slave trade in the nineteenth century, but as Finnemore and Sikkink acknowledge, tipping does not have a theoretical underpinning. Ibid., p. 901. 66 Walter Powell, Expanding the Scope of Institutional Analysis, in Walter Powell and Paul DiMaggio, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago, Press, 1991), pp. 183202: 192. 67 Finnemore and Sikkink stress socialization arguing that states change their behavior because of emulation, praise, and ridicule. Finnemore and Sikkink, Norm Dynamics and Political Change, pp. 902903. 68 I agree with much of Freidrich Kratochwils excellent book Rules, Norms and Decisions. Like him, I argue that normative beliefs are part of the discourse of actors in international and domestic politics. Kratochwil emphasizes the process of practical and legal reasoning as an antidote to the conception of international politics as anarchic and points out the importance of what might be called meta-norms of argument: fairness, predictability, and reliability. I emphasize the prescriptive, normative content of ethical arguments and thus their ability to legitimate, normalize, and so on. I also focus more directly on the source of normative beliefs and ethical arguments by suggesting that normative beliefs and re- ceptivity to ethical arguments are based on the dominant belief systems and identities of actors. Some scholars hypothesize the source of norms, but many who study norms often have little to say about the sources of particular practices and normative beliefs. Exceptions include Martha Finnemore, Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Interven- tion, in Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security, pp. 153185; David Halloran Lumsdaine, Moral Vision in International Politics: The Foreign Aid Regime, 19491989 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Paul A. Kowert, The Cognitive Origins of International Norms: Identity Norms and the 1956 Suez Crisis, paper prepared for delivery at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association. 107 E t h i c a l
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c h a n g e C h a n g e c a p a b i l i t i e s I n s t i t u t i o n a l i z a t i o n 1 . E t h i c a l a r g u m e n t a n d n e w s t a r t i n g p o i n t s Ethical argument and argument analysis routine practices of states, international organizations, and even corpo- rations, which in turn changes the starting point for future perceptions, evaluation, and behavior with reference to the issue area covered by the now dominant normative belief. Institutionalization changes the starting point (topoi) of future arguments. Institutionalization of nor- mative beliefs, adopted because ethical arguments have been success- ful, changes the course of politics as it opens some paths and closes off others. Figure 1 includes an arrow representing the pathway from institutional change to a new rhetorical starting point. This argument about ethical argument will be supportedif the content and process of arguments follows certain patterns. Dominant behaviors will be challenged with ethical arguments that question the normality, legitimacy, and the conception of interests inherent in the dominant practice. Second, an alternative prescription will be put forward. Third, those who make ethical arguments may seek to mobilize the masses or particularly inuential elites (e.g. depending on the issues, members of the media or religious groups) in order to force the dominant practice to change; in so doing, they will alter the capabilities of those who carry out the dominant practice. Resilience of behavioral norms and normative beliefs While ethical arguments may be effective in changing normative beliefs and behavioral norms, it is not easy to bring such changes about. 69 Both behavioral norms and normative beliefs are quite resilient for several reasons, some having to do with the normativity of the belief or practice, and others having to do with the difculty of changing any belief or long-standing practice. There are several non-normative reasons that belief and behavior change are difcult. First, change can be costly, because, to the extent that a convention or prescriptive norm coordinates behavior, actors will comply with a behavioral norm if they expect others to conform. 70 Fur- ther, actors may comply with dominant practices or beliefs simply out of unreective habit and/or the difculty of bucking deeply institutiona- lized normative beliefs. 69 Keck and Sikkink put this even more strongly, Normative change is inherently dis- ruptive or difcult because it requires actors to question this routinized practice and contemplate new practices. Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders, p. 35. 70 Cristina Bicchieri, Norms of Cooperation, Ethics 100 (July 1990), 838861: 842. 109 Argument and change in world politics Further, individuals and groups may be reluctant to alter normative beliefs, as well as behavioral norms which are strongly normative, if doing so requires rethinking an entire complex of related normative, scientic, practical, and identity beliefs which an individual has become convinced are good and sees no other reason to challenge. Resistance to taking on new normative beliefs if they require massive belief revision may also be due perhaps to desire for economy, or a wish for coher- ence, or because putting many beliefs up to re-evaluation is cognitively difcult or even emotionally painful. Perceptive and articulate individuals may acknowledge their reluc- tance to change normative beliefs specically because it requires them to change many other beliefs and behaviors. This was the case in 1917 when Charles Buxton, a member of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, argued against a post-World War I peace arrange- ment that included consulting with African natives. Are we prepared to say that what we would apply to the natives of Africa should apply also to the natives of India? If not, then we lay ourselves open to this charge of hypocrisy. 71 Thus, once establishedandinstitutionalized, it is particularly difcult for behavioral norms to change. In these instances, whenpeople adhere toestablishedpractices because it maybe inefcient or costly to alter behavior, or they do not think to try something else, or because deeply institutionalized behaviors are difcult to alter because they are tightly linked to other beliefs and behaviors, the goodness or normativity of the practice is not the primary reason for resilience. In addition, individuals may conform if doing so brings approval and/or there is a clear material benet to conformity, while non- conformity leads to disapproval or sanction. If individuals or groups want to do what is required by law or social pressure because they fear disapproval, they may comply with prevailing normative beliefs and practices. But again, the normativity of the behavior (its link to pre- scriptive normative beliefs) may not be what motivates individual com- pliance, although normativity may motivate the imposition of sanctions for non-compliance. Groups and cultures also vary in their openness to argument, and this may account for the resilience of some beliefs and practices. Though people may hold divergent views, they may go along to get along if they and others place a high value on conformity and group cohesion. Every groupof any kindwhatsoever demands that eachof its members 71 See chapter 6, note 17 this vol. 110 Ethical argument and argument analysis shall help defend group interests. Every group stigmatizes any one who fails in zeal, labor and sacrices for group interests . . . The group force is also employed to enforce the obligations of devotion to group interests. It follows that judgments are precluded and criticism is silenced. 72 Moreover, homogenous groups may be less likely to entertain changes in practice, simply because it never occurs to them. I have emphasized several non-normative reasons why it is difcult for arguments to change beliefs. Is there something distinctly normative about the resilience of normative beliefs? In other words, do actors ad- here to them because they are thought to be good? Actors could be moved (or not) by other kinds of non-ethical arguments, for instance practical arguments. If, to change a practice, it is unnecessary for actors to deconstruct (denormalize and delegitimize) normative beliefs, then one could argue that it was not normative belief, but other kinds of be- lief that underpinned a dominant practice and resilience was due to the non-normative reasons, for example, the costliness of any change, or the failure to consider other alternatives. Yet there are reasons for normative belief resilience and adherence to established behavioral norms that appear to be uniquely normative. The simplest reason to resist change implied by new ethical arguments would be because an individual agrees with the dominant normative belief and thinks its content is good in itself. Or someone could believe that in following the prescription they are likely to bring afrmation of their own goodness as a person in a specic role they are good because they follow the existing prescription. In this case, they have internalized the role, they believe it, and also believe in the content of the normative beliefs. An ethical argument that is unpersuasive in this instance fails to convince the actor that they ought to change their evaluation of an already held normative belief, and fails to convince the person that they ought to think differently about their role. In sum, there are powerful reasons both normative and non- normative why individuals adhere to pre-existing practices. Ethical arguments that succeed in changing beliefs and practices must be ex- tremelypersuasiveinorder toovercometheinertiaof habit, theobstacles of institutionalization, the possible confusion and loss of efciency as- sociated with change, the personal identication and stakes individuals may have in the practice, and the belief that the old practice is good. 72 William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Man- ners, Customs, Mores and Morals (Boston: Athenaeum Press, 1906), p. 15. 111 Argument and change in world politics Increasing receptivity and persuasiveness Ethical arguments are unlikelyto be persuasive if actors are unreceptive. Receptivity depends on a number of factors that are both intrinsic and extrinsic to the content of the ethical arguments, and those seeking to identify factors that, ex ante, indicate which arguments will succeedover others, should pay careful attention to extrinsic and intrinsic conditions. The extrinsic characteristics of persuasive ethical arguments described in chapter 1, in the discussion of persuasive context, are briey recalled here. Arguments must rst be heard. Since most domestic andinternational political arguments do not occur on a level playing eld, whether or not an argument is heard depends on the discursive space within which the argument takes place. In other words, if those who challenge dominant normative beliefs cannot get a broad hearing of their arguments, those arguments are unlikely to have a chance or opportunity to be persua- sive. Democracies and egalitarian groups may be more open to ethical arguments that compete with the dominant belief system because those groups already hold substantive normative beliefs about freedom of ex- pression, they may have forums where new ideas can be articulated, and in the case of relatively egalitarian settings, the economic barriers to broadcasting speechmay be relatively lower thaninnon-democracies or highly stratied societies. Asecondextrinsic constraint is the credibilityof those whoare making the ethical argument. If those who make the ethical argument can claim some relevant expertise or have beengrantedauthoritybyaninstitution, the audience is usually more likely to give their arguments a hearing. The relevant expertise and institutions from which individuals can gain authority of course varies with the culture, although religious author- ities and moral philosophers are often given great credence in making and judging ethical arguments. Yet even here, extrinsic and intrinsic constraints overlap because who will be considered a legitimate inter- locutor depends onthe institutionalizationof beliefs, since as Jepperson, Wendt, and Katzenstein note, institutionalization of ideas in research institutions, schools of thought, laws, government bureaucracies deter- mines not only policy, as they say, but who is able to critically comment on policy. 73 73 Jepperson, Wendt, and Katzenstein, Norms, Identity and Culture in International Se- curity, p. 50. 112 Ethical argument and argument analysis Once heard, how might an ethical argument defeat the formidable intrinsic barriers to changing normative beliefs? First, the pre-existing system must be deconstructed but not entirely. Those who hear eth- ical arguments usually compare those arguments with the beliefs they already hold. This view of receptivity is related to a school of ontol- ogy known as coherentism, which supposes that beliefs are justied by their connection and similarity to other already held beliefs. Ethical arguments that hearers nd persuasive usually make sense within the framework of an individuals already existing beliefs about the partic- ular issue area, their identity, and t the existing social structure. Thus, the meaning of the web of beliefs that normative arguments are made within and against helps to determine the receptivity of individuals to a particular ethical argument. But even if ethical arguments do not naturally t within dominant webs of belief, advocates of new beliefs and practices can try to make them t by reinterpreting the pre-existing webs of belief, or by fabricat- ing plausible connections with analogical arguments. As Mark Laffey andJutta Weldes argue, t does not just happen; rather, it is made. That is, the t between new and existing ideas is actively constructed rather than simply there in the ideas themselves. 74 Just as successful meta- arguments reframe existing practices so that they are denormalized and delegitimized, newnormative beliefs are oftenframedas consistent with some pre-existing normative beliefs. Those wishing to block adoption of normative beliefs, and the practices associated with them, could argue that those beliefs do not t with the culture and therefore ought not be adopted. What does it mean exactly for normative beliefs to cohere with pre- existing beliefs and for receptivity to ethical arguments to depend on the congruence between the content of ethical arguments and the dom- inant belief systems of actors? Normative beliefs gain their legitimacy by their substantive content (meaning) relationship to other beliefs. 75 Ethical arguments that match or complement the content of religious, social, or scientic belief systems that are part of the dominant culture are more likely to be successful than arguments that clash with existing webs of belief. The pre-existing logic of accepted behavioral norms 74 Laffey and Weldes, Beyond Belief, p. 203. Similarly, Finnemore and Sikkink argue that Activists work hard to frame their issues in ways that make persuasive connections between existing norms and emergent norms. Finnemore and Sikkink, NormDynamics and Political Change, p. 908. 75 See Audi, Belief, Justication and Knowledge. 113 Argument and change in world politics and normative prescriptions will inuence receptivity to new norma- tive beliefs and practice. Symbolic arguments, in particular those us- ing analogies, may be particularly useful in showing or constructing a coherent t. Further, receptivity to ethical arguments also depends on the t between the self-conceptualization of actors identity and the proposed normativebelief. Thereareat least threecomponents topolitical identity: (1) a sense of the political self, and what is distinctive about self in relation to others 76 ; (2) a historical narrative about self often partly mythical and religious, involving certain lies or constructions about the homogeneity of the self and howgood and honorable the self is; and (3) an ideology or political program. Advocates of a new practice often say that their proposed normbetter ts with the kind of people that they are or would like to see themselves as. The identities of actors will be used as part of the argument usually by appealing to the consistency of the argument with the identity being evoked. For example, if we are good, virtuous, just, and superior to others as most ethnocentrists believe then we are justied in imperial conquest. If we are good, virtuous, just, and equal to others, then imperialism cannot be justied. Similarly, arguments for humanitarian intervention may rest on identity andconceptions of roles in a particular situation. America was founded onamoral purpose, andits peopleretainastrongcommitment toamoral foreignpolicy. Theyare alsoextremelygenerous. Givenable andforceful leadership, it should be possible to generate a spirit of disinterested altruism that will support humanitarian intervention. 77 Foreign policy decisionmakers and members of the public hold mul- tiple identities that include their nation, race, gender, class, family, religion, age, occupation, and education. 78 States are collections of individuals and groups, with both distinct and overlapping identi- ties, and transnational identities are not uncommon. These multiple identities, and their malleability, are important in the context of eth- ical arguments to the extent that argument makers call upon, create, and manipulate identities. These identities or roles may offer con- icting normative guidelines even as they are potential openings for 76 This is similar to what Wendt calls social identity. Alexender Wendt, Collective Identity Formation and the International State, American Political Science Review 88 (June 1994), 384396: 385. 77 Guenter Lewy, The Case for HumanitarianIntervention, Orbis 37 (Fall 1993), 621632: 624. 78 See Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security. 114 Ethical argument and argument analysis normative appeals. Conversely, ethical appeals may at the same time include the techniques of constructing new identities or not recogniz- ing or disavowing other identities. If an existing conception of identity cannot be changed actors may try to change the composition of the de- cisionmaking group so it will be more receptive to the particular ethical arguments they want to see adopted. And because ethical arguments are about how to act toward others so as to be a good person, ethical arguments are inherently emotional. Specically, most humans want to be good, do good, and feel well re- garded by others. Thus, one can increase receptivity to ethical argu- ments that seek to change practices that affect others by showing that the other deserves our empathy and good treatment even while exist- ingpractices meanthat we are not doinggoodbythem. Greater empathy may enable actors to get past the rst threshold, that of being heard, thus increasing the hearers receptivity. Receptivity of actors to new ethical arguments also depends on the prescriptions t with existing social structures (which are themselves dependent on beliefs). It is common sense that if the majority of a so- ciety is, for example, dependent on unequal relationships of extraction and exploitation, it will be more difcult for people to reconceptualize their interests, see hypocrisy, or to mobilize resistance to the dominant behavior. 79 Radically new prescriptive norms that clash with many so- cial practices are likely to take hold only gradually, or piecemeal. In a context where advocates of new normative beliefs and practices face a complex institution with multiple sources of support, a great deal has to be changed to achieve the desired state. When many of the support- ing constitutive practices and prescriptive normative beliefs have to be changed the advocates of new normative beliefs will be regarded as utopians. Advocates of new normative beliefs and practices may then attempt to gradually change the aspects of the world that are obstacles to normative change so that individuals will be more receptive to their larger ethical argument. Emphasizing the dependence of receptivity on existing social prac- tices and structure is not to fall back on interest. Rather, social practices and structures are in great measure a consequence of the belief systems that rationalize and order societies as, for instance, modes of production or class relations. Capability is also obviously important but it is also 79 Aside from providing greater political opportunities for discourse, democracies may also be more vulnerable to ethical arguments than non-democracies because democracies are relatively more vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy. 115 Argument and change in world politics clear that societies make resources available for those activities, how- ever costly, that they consider important, e.g. national military forces and the arts. Outside of the rare extreme cases where there is absolutely no way to do something, material capabilities and constraints matter little unless and until they are perceived. In sum, successful ethical arguments are able to reframe issues and set the terms of debate, even to the point where people who are moved by other reasons, such as practical considerations, feel compelled to make ethical arguments. Ethical appeals work well when their content is linked to the dominant belief systems, social institutions, and iden- tities of actors. Those who make arguments often intuitively recognize the importance of increasing receptivity by explicitly or implicitly mak- ing links to larger ethical belief systems, identities, and existing social structures. 80 The plausibility and extent of those links are then judged by interlocutors. When the proposed ethical argument does not t or even strongly conicts with dominant beliefs, identities, and institutions, advocates of newnormative beliefs and practices must try to win the meta-argument of representation and completely reframe the situation, or at least se- riously destabilize the dominant frame. The persuasiveness of ethical arguments that clash with the dominant beliefs and institutions of a so- ciety may increase if the argument offers an entirely new conception of a situation or problem that individuals nd persuasive. 81 In this way, the t of the new beliefs with the dominant beliefs, identity, and social structure will not matter so much and ethical arguments can escape the conservatism of being judged by existing ethical world views. Those making ethical arguments that attempt to alter the dominant frame will try to denormalize and delegitimize not only the particular beliefs and practices they seek to alter but will denormalize, delegitimize, and offer alternatives for the larger web of beliefs andinstitutions that support the dominant behavioral and prescriptive norms. If interlocutors succeed in entirely reframing the situation, the ethical argument is then judged by other criteria, standards of its own making, and this may increase receptivity to the ethical argument. Ethical arguments are made in different venues or forums; or to bor- row from parliamentary discourse, arguments are put on a table. Some 80 On social movements and framing, see Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 106122. 81 These are conceptual revolutions or paradigm shifts. 116 Ethical argument and argument analysis venues may lower the extrinsic constraints to ethical argument by being relatively egalitarian and having rules of procedure that provide op- portunities for ethical argument. Other forums will be relatively closed procedurallyor substantivelyinterms of the kinds of arguments that can be brought up. The intrinsic constraints of the table have to do with the lifeworld aspect of cultures (whether the relevant cultural venue is an epistemic, organizational, political community, civilizational or global context), where the background of shared interpretations is the uncon- scious basis for understanding arguments. The importance of the table and venue become clear when the table changes over time or across social settings. There is no way to know for certain which arguments will be per- suasive and over what period of time. But we can predict that argu- ments which fail to overcome extrinsic constraints (cannot be heard and do not come from authority) will be less likely to succeed than ar- guments that can be heard. Further, advocates who are unable to win the meta-argument and reframe prevailing practices so that they are vulnerable to ethical critique are unlikely to succeed. Argument is a dy- namic process conducted by reective individuals advocates can alter their rhetorical tactics in an attempt to increase their persuasiveness, and opponents of change may try to counteract potentially successful challengers. Reason versus rationality Some scholars of norms are concerned that their arguments not be taken as a repudiation of rational actor theories where actors are sup- posed to make choices and behave accordingly in ways that will bring them the greatest rewards at the least cost. This view of rationality stresses cold cognitive processes. But ethical arguments are neither ra- tional nor irrational. They are convincing to the extent that they give persuasive reasons for believing and doing. Neither receptivity to eth- ical arguments, nor the intrinsic appeal of arguments, is necessarily rational in the former sense. In other words, scholars of world politics are better off thinking in terms of the process of reason rather than in terms of rationality. Those who make arguments are giving reasons for a belief or course of action and their appeals may be emotional as well as cognitive. Emotional appeals work because individuals want to feel good about themselves by knowing they are doing good, and others see them as 117 Argument and change in world politics doing good. 82 Or emotions may help individuals feel empathy toward others. Cognitive appeals, for instance arguing that holding one nor- mative belief is consistent with or entails holding another belief, are also not necessarily entirely un-emotional. Strong emotions that are associated with some normative beliefs may affect, either positively or negatively, the receptivity to ethical arguments on the basis of co- herence. As the following chapters on slavery, forced labor, and colo- nialism show, emotional and cognitive appeals were important aspects of ethical arguments whether those arguments were made by people who wanted to keep or overturn these institutions. The process was internal reasoning or public argumentation that involved giving rea- sons. Some of the reasons took the form of rational calculation, es- pecially on the issue of whether colonial institutions were protable, but that was only one form of reasoning at work. In other words, ar- gumentation is not simply and only a rational process, if what one means by rationality is the unemotional and narrow pursuit of real interests using costbenet analysis. Persuasive ethical arguments are emotional, rooted in social contexts, and related to webs of other arguments. Is a theory of ethical argument merely a reiteration of rational ac- tor theory? Ethical argument explanations are different from ration- al actor accounts in at least two senses. First, rational actor theories generally regard normative beliefs, when they are considered at all, as secondary to interests, whereas a theory of ethical arguments re- gards normative beliefs on equal ground with other beliefs, and sug- gests that normative beliefs sometimes constitute interests. Second, to the extent that at the point of nal decision, decisionmakers fol- low what might be considered a rational process of weighing options and choosing among alternatives, every part of reasoning before then was based on the content of pre-existing beliefs and the outcome of prior arguments. The implementation of the nal decision will also essentially be determined by how those same or evolving beliefs are used in arguments. In other words, the work of decisionmakers is reason and persuasion, not so much rational calculation. The work of scholars is to interpret their reasoning and the effects of actors persuasive efforts. 82 See Vaughn P. Shannon, Norms are What States Make of Them: The Political Psychol- ogyof NormViolation, International Studies Quarterly, 44 ( June 2000), 293316; Weisband, Discursive Multilateralism. 118 Ethical argument and argument analysis Ethical explanations Ethical arguments madebyparticipants inapractical situationarediffer- ent fromethical explanations whichare givenby people who are observ- ing a behavior and trying to say what caused it. When normative beliefs are used in arguments about what it is good to do, people are making ethical arguments. When someone says that they or someone else acted ethically, or that an individual or group behaved in a certain way be- cause of ethical reasons, they are giving an ethical explanation of social behavior. That ethical arguments occur everywhere, all the time, does not meanthat they are necessarily signicant causally. Arguments could be merely rationalization or post-hoc justication. A method of informal argument analysis While it may be that one method of argument analysis suits all types of political arguments, it is more likely that the method would vary with the scope and types of arguments to be understood. Most scholars of political argument use formal and semi-formal approaches. Formal argument analysis, or articial intelligence modeling of logic, focuses on validity and the structure of inferences, tracing the logical structure and identifying the substantive support (warrants) for arguments. 83 Formal argument analysis is better suited to tracing debates that are relatively short term, where moves andcounter-moves are immediate andexplicit, and focused on relatively small areas of contention in instances where we can assume that actors were trying to come to an agreement with their interlocutors and their arguments are relatively clearly laid out in a logical form. Similarly, semi-formal argument analysis is also focused onspecic exchanges. 84 Anexample of one approach, takenfromGavan Duffy, Brian Federking, and Seth Tucker is summarized below. 85 Obviously not all political arguments are about relatively narrow or technical issues; in some instances, political arguments address major social and political institutions and therefore require comprehensive 83 For an example of formal approaches used in international relations theory, see Hayward R. Alker, The Dialectical Logic of Thucydides Melian Dialogue, American Political Science Review 82 (September 1988), 805820; Hayward R. Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 2363; Gavan Duffy, Brian K. Federking, and Seth A. Tucker, Language Games: Dialogical Analysis of INF Negotiations, International Studies Quarterly 42 (June 1998), 271294. 84 See Thomas F. Homer-Dixon and Roger S. Karapin, Graphical Argument Analysis: A New Approach to Understanding Arguments Applied to a Debate about the Window of Vulnerability, International Studies Quarterly 33 (September 1989), 389410. 85 See Duffy, Federking, and Tucker, Language Games, p. 272. 119 Argument and change in world politics Table 2.2 A method of formal argument analysis 1. List explicit moves, including non-verbal actions that convey meaning. 2. Specify an inventory of propositions (non-controversial facts or beliefs of the relevant parties) that express the background knowledge necessary to understand the dialogue. 3. Pragmatic analysis of the dialogue, constructing inventories of propositions conveyed implicitly, noting those aspects of meaning that are context dependent. 4. Formal argument analysis of moves conveyed implicitly and explicitly. Test: certain action theorems follow logically from the contents of the inventories. Source: From Duffy, Federking, and Tucker, Language Games, p. 272. arguments. Nor do political arguments only occur in a focused way in one forum where advocates are intent on coming to an agreement with fellow interlocutors. In many cases, it may not be the intention of par- ticipants to directly inuence their immediate counterparts; rather, the point is to sway a wider audience andinuence the balance of belief and power. These larger political arguments may occur over several years, some for decades or centuries andare oftencharacterizedbyaninformal style. To focus on the formal structure of the smaller debates that com- prise long, comprehensive, and informal arguments would certainly be illuminating, but one runs the risk of missing the larger landscape. I use a method of informal argument analysis that may be better suited to understanding and tracing the effects of the looser, and more long-term arguments that characterize these long informal discourses. The method of informal argument analysis developed here occurs in ve steps. 86 First, having identied a problem or issue area, ana- lysts seek to identify the purpose of particular arguments that are be- ing used in efforts to maintain or challenge a practice. Analysts must then specify the arguments role. Whether arguments are intended to facilitate deliberation, reframe the issues, persuade others, or do all of these things, may be inferred from what the speaker says and by the 86 I could just as well have called my approach rhetorical analysis since I am concerned with what Aristotle called rhetoric. Both rhetoric and casuistry have negative associations in our present context, so I use the more neutral, or relatively less laden term argu- ment. See Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, translated with an introduction by H.C. Lawson- Tancred (New York: Penguin Books, 1991); Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 120 Ethical argument and argument analysis location (forum) where the arguments are made. 87 Argument analysis is easier in some instances than in others. In the transition from estab- lished behavioral norms to new norms, there are likely to be periods of confusion and uncertainty. With two or more conicting (and per- haps nearly equally legitimate) prescriptive normative beliefs on the table, expectations will be uncertain, coordination will be more dif- cult, and the sense of approval or disapproval associated with certain practices may be in ux. It is at these points that ethical arguments may be the most prolic and explicit, as interlocutors strive to be clear and persuasive in their attempts to maintain an existing prac- tice or establish a new mode of behavior. South African arguments to maintain their rule over South West Africa/Namibia after many powers had given up their colonies are an example. Similarly, crisis may make ethical arguments more pointed, as President Kennedys Secretary of State Dean Rusk suggests in a discussion of the Cuban missile crisis: at the end of the day, moral and ethical considerations play a very important part, even though people dont wear these things on their shirtsleeves or put these things in ofcial memoranda . . . People act in reference to their basic moral commitments [which] are likely to come to the fore when situations become critical. 88 Second, one must identify the specic beliefs (core, contingent, and role) that are heldby dominant actors andthat are at work ina particular political context. As Jonson and Toulmin note, Each discipline has its special eld of debate, within which people of experience share konoi topoi (commonplaces) that is, bodies of experience that underlie the forms of argument that guide deliberationanddiscussioninthe particu- lar eld. 89 The goal is to nd the topoi (starting point) of the arguments actors used to uphold or change practices and the background of preex- isting beliefs that interlocutors presupposedin making their arguments. By intending, implicating, presupposing, and entailing, speakers con- vey far more than they say. Efforts to analyze the contents of political talk that restrict themselves to surface utterances are thus likely to miss much of the politically relevant content. 90 87 On forums, see Stephen Toulmin, Richard Rieke, and Allan Janik, An Introduction to Reasoning (New York: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 1416. Also see, Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture, pp. 280288. 88 Quoted in James G. Blight, The Shattered Crystal Ball: Fear and Learning in the Cuban Missile Crisis (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littleeld: 1990), p. 93. 89 Albert R. Jonson and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 74. 90 Duffy, Frederking and Tucker, Language Games, p. 276. 121 Argument and change in world politics Third, informal argument analysis expands the time horizon and asks where immediate and background beliefs came from and why and how they changed. As Nardin suggests, arguments about international af- fairs, like ethical and political arguments more generally, have a his- tory. Accordingly, the study of international ethics must be, at least in part, historical. 91 Analysis of political arguments must thus be con- text sensitive, looking for the deeper beliefs that are the starting points and background assumptions without which the arguments would be unintelligible. This entails examining the process and content of deci- sionmaking over long periods of time within particular historical and cultural contexts. The idea of a tradition encourages us to ask what kinds of arguments were characteristic of particular communities at particular moments. It also suggests the importance of looking at the concepts or languages employed by particular kinds of argumentation. And because these conceptual languages change through time, in some cases becoming transformed into new languages, the study of tradition leads naturally to the study of conceptual change. 92 Fourth, informal argument analysis attempts to show how and why some beliefs and arguments won out over others and ultimately why certain policies were chosen. In practice this means tracing whether and howthe ethical arguments put forwardsucceededinchangingthe terms of debate (winning meta-arguments and reframing the issues), and whether an ethical argument meant to overturn a practice was able to denormalize, delegitimize, change actors conceptions of possibility and their interests, alter the balance of political power, and have its norma- tive beliefs institutionalized. This also entails looking at the grounds for change in the support for conformity and receptivity to newarguments. Informal argument analysis thus emphasizes the content and process of arguments the words used (and not used), appeals actors make to dominant (unquestioned) beliefs and other normative beliefs, claims about legitimacy, and the use of evidence. This method focuses on how the arguments develop over long periods of time, in particular social settings, including denition and redenition of the problem (meta- arguments), and the evolution of the features in the argument that are taken for granted or contested. 91 Terry Nardin, Ethical Traditions in International Affairs, in Nardin and Mapel, eds., Traditions of International Ethics, pp. 122: 19. 92 Ibid. 122 Ethical argument and argument analysis What is central is the discourse(s) which construct a particular reality . . . This approach suggests that what foreign policy is need not be limited to the actual making of specic decisions nor the analy- sis of temporally and spatially bounded events. Similarly, foreign policy makers need not be limited to prominent decision makers, but couldalso include those rather anonymous mem- bers of the various bureaucracies who write the numerous memoran- dums, intelligence reports, and research papers that circulate within policycircles. The discourse(s) instantiatedinthese various documents produce meanings andinsodoingactivelyconstruct the reality upon which foreign policy is based. 93 Fifth, the results of informal argument analysis ought to be com- pared with other plausible explanations for behaviors to see whether the arguments are important causally. There are several tests for the causal signicance of ethical argument. (1) temporal ordering norma- tive beliefs and ethical arguments should be given as a justication for the behavior before or simultaneous to a behavior change, not after; (2) after an ethical argument succeeds, one would expect a (not nec- essarily universal) congruence between the normative beliefs that un- derpinned the ethical arguments and the behavior; (3) the relevant nor- mative beliefs should be used in arguments about correct behavior and those who use those arguments are not ignored or mocked; (4) when the prescriptions for behavior implied by the ethical argument are not adhered to, those who do not adhere to the standards of normative be- lief attempt to justify their (non-normal) behavior on ethical or practical grounds; (5) the normative belief is linked with other normative beliefs, becoming part of the arguments used to advance these other norms. For example, anti-slavery, human rights, and self-determination beliefs shouldbe discussedwitheachnorms reasoningbeingusedtolegitimize the other norms. 94 Two stronger tests of the role of normative belief andethical argument are: (6) the presence and use of international sanctions by the majority 93 Roxanne Lynn Doty, Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist Analysis of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines, International Studies Quarterly 37 (September 1993), 297320: 303. 94 Even if normative beliefs and ethical arguments pass all of these tests, we still cannot prove causality. However, passing all or several of these tests make it more likely that normative belief and ethical argument had a causal role. If, after analysis of the type that I propose, there is little reason to think that normative beliefs and ethical argument had much inuence on behavior, then advocates of new behavioral norms should focus their attentions on changing the interests and capabilities of actors not on winning arguments and changing beliefs. 123 Argument and change in world politics of the international community to change the behavior of those who violate the normative prescriptions or those who support such norm violators. Finally, (7) ethical arguments may be viewed as causally important whether andtothe extent that actors withincentives toviolate normative prescriptions act counter to their interests and follow the new normative prescriptions, or to the extent that actors re-frame their interests inlight of comingtoholdnewnormative beliefs. For the last test to be valid three conditions should hold: states (or rather the inuential elites that shape government policies) and other actors should know their interests (or at least believe they do); actors should not have been compelled by other (non-normative) circumstances, such as a change in their ability to pursue their interests; and some more efcient solution for achieving the same ends, while not technically violating the norma- tive prescriptions that followed from ethical arguments, was not found. This interest test should not be seen as creating a dichotomy between the normative and the self-interested behavior or actors. Ethical argu- ments may be used to change actors conceptions of their interests, and successful ethical arguments may alter the political situationto the point where it changes the material capabilities of actors. Rather, this test focuses our attention on the crucial relation between the ideational and material. Table 2.3 summarizes the steps of informal argument analysis. Examining the role and causal signicance of ethical argument thus entails operating at three levels. First, scholars using this method must showthat argumentationor practical reasoningwas apart of theprocess. Second, an informal argument analysis must determine if the ethical arguments were used to deconstruct and reconstruct normative beliefs and to change the political and institutional facts on the ground. Third, scholars havetodeterminetherelevanceor explanatoryweight of ethical arguments. Persuasive ethical arguments may be one of several reasons or the sole reason for a change. If analysis suggests that there were other reasons that beliefs and behavior changed, and ethical arguments were not explicit or implicit, then an ethical explanation for change does not hold. Objections Claims about the role of beliefs and argument must answer important objections. First, how can any scholar talk about beliefs and claim a relationship between beliefs and behavior? How can we be sure that the beliefs and justications for action that are articulated by foreign policy decisionmakers are the actual reasons for their behavior, rather 124 Ethical argument and argument analysis Table 2.3 Informal argument analysis of ethical arguments 1. Identify the main arguments on the table over the course of the debate. 2. Identify the immediate beliefs contained in the arguments that are the topoi/starting point. 3. Identify the background (historical and cultural) beliefs. 4. Trace form and fate of the ethical arguments. Do ethical arguments that seek to overturn a dominant practice denormalize the dominant beliefs and practices? delegitimize the dominant beliefs and practices? change conceptions of possibility and interests? change the political capabilities of actors as the balance of belief changes? become institutionalized? 5. Compare the plausibility of an ethical argument explanation with a material interest explanation. Do ethical arguments pass the tests of temporal ordering congruence between normative beliefs and behavior the relevant normative beliefs are taken seriously those who do not adhere to the standards of normative belief attempt to justify their (non-normal) behavior on ethical or practical grounds the normative belief is linked with other normative beliefs, becoming part of the arguments used to advance these other norms international sanctions are used by the majority of the international community to change the behavior of those who violate the normative prescriptions or those who support norm violators actors with incentives to violate normative prescriptions act counter to their interests and follow new normative prescriptions, or re-frame their interests in light of new normative beliefs. than public justications, private rationalizations, or perhaps the rant- ing and ravings of the mad? No scholar can know for certain what someone else believes. We can only show what someone claims to be thinking, what they claim to believe, by examining their public utter- ances. Some utterances are obviously more credible as a reection of beliefs than other statements. For example, it is likely that statements made toinsiders are more closelyrelatedtosharedbeliefs thanare public statements. Rational actor theorists face the same problem of knowing what someone thinks and what counted when they made decisions. Does it matter whether people mean what they say and say what they mean? Clearly people sometimes believe the ethical arguments they make, and sometimes they do not believe them. Establishing 125 Argument and change in world politics whether normative beliefs and ethical arguments are actually causes, versus rationalizations or justications, must be dealt with by any ar- gument about beliefs. Jack Snyder has warned against taking justica- tions too seriously: many explanations are awed because they take the justications of statesmen and strategists at face value. . . . 95 Rather, Snyder argues, some arguments are just not to be believed because the oblique justications . . . were largely debating points masking a variety of economic, bureaucratic, and political interests. 96 It is clear that sometimes people lie and do things for reasons other than the ones they claim to be the true motives for their actions. In in- dividual instances, it is difcult to tell the real beliefs and reasoning that underlie a particular action. And, as Snyder suggests, arguments and beliefs can constrain or blowback: Even if the elite avoids inter- nalizing its own myths, it may nonetheless become equally entrapped in its own rhetoric. 97 Fortunately, decisionmaking in world politics is a process of repeateddecision andactions. If decisionmakers are inconsis- tent in areas and among cases where we would expect consistency, then we may suspect their beliefs are being articulatedas justications. In ad- dition, there are layers of reasons for any foreign policy decision and ac- tion: if the publicly articulated beliefs do not seem to match the motives for action, that does not necessarily mean that normative beliefs had no inuence on the decision. The fact of the argument being sincere or insincere may be irrelevant if the argument is what convinces others to act in accordance with the conclusion of the ethical argument. And even if the rst use of an ethical argument was disingenuous, it may have force in future situations because it may be seen as having set a precedent. Second, it may be possible to establishthat decisionmakers made ethi- cal arguments for action, but those arguments could be beside the point. Unless actors honestly disclose their full reasoning, observers cannot discount non-ethical reasons for their behavior. In other words, ethical arguments may have some force, but a solely ethical explanation may be insufcient. For example, a US policymaker could argue that the United States ought not use nuclear weapons because such use is immoral. In 95 Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 10. 96 Ibid., p. 10. Actually, in this book, Snyder talks about the role of argument, e.g. the blurring of sincere belief and tactical argument has been common (pp. 4142) but he does not offer a systematic treatment of argument. 97 Ibid., p. 42. 126 Ethical argument and argument analysis fact, ethical arguments against nuclear use may have come up in every instance when policymakers considered using nuclear weapons in war. Nuclear weapons may not have been usedbecause such use was consid- ered wrong. But an ethical explanation for non-use may be insufcient. Non-use couldalso be explainedby practical considerations, such as the inability of nuclear weapons to be used for military effect, or the fear of nuclear retaliation and escalation. Still, to argue that nuclear weapons were not used for political reasons, namely that their use would be unpopular, is to fall back on an ethical explanation if the unpopularity of their use is foundedonnormative beliefs suchas the viewthat nuclear weapons violate principles of non-combatant immunity. 98 But there is an even more subtle problem of establishing whether eth- ical explanations are appropriate. Specically, people may arrange their social institutions because they believe that they are right in the sense of being normatively good. But this can lead to two different outcomes. On the one hand, an individual may seek to arrange their world so as to do good; these individuals are motivated by a belief in fairness and justice that others deserve the same rights as they do. On the other hand, a system that some might consider unjust, for instance slavery or colonialism, might be deemed acceptable to its practitioners. In this instance, oppression and discrimination are considered warranted be- cause the practitioners of the unjust systemdo not believe inthe equality of the other; they may never have considered the rights of the other; or they may have found the other undeserving of the same treatment as themselves. In fact, they believe that the injustice is appropriate and good. Here an ethical explanation applies. In both these instances we can plausibly give ethical explanations. But what about those instances where people do what we might con- sider the good and right thing, but they are motivated not by a concern for justice but rather driven by a desire to contain reform? They see that if some concessions are not made, the unjust system may fall altogether as the oppressed revolt. And according to Joshua Cohen, revolt is in- evitable since unjust systems are not in the interest of the oppressed. These individuals who make concessions to prevent revolt, lets call them pragmatic reformers, act out of a concern that their unjust world not fall apart under the pressure of those who want to create an ethi- cally just system. Although pragmatic reformers do not hold the same 98 See Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Normative Basis of Nuclear Non-Use, International Organization 53 (Summer 1999), 433468. 127 Argument and change in world politics normative beliefs as those who are motivated by a concern for justice, they are willing to reform the unjust system along lines that the person motivatedbya concernwithjustice wouldapprove of, inorder tosave it. Pragmatic reformers may even give ethical arguments for reformalong- side their practical arguments. Does an ethical explanation t here, or are we in the realm of the practical or pragmatic justice? On the face of it, it seems that an ethical explanation cannot be applied to those who make reforms in order to save the unjust system. Yet even if arguments given by pragmatic reformers are merely jus- tications, the fact that these actors feel they must make a justication in the form of an ethical argument indicates the importance of these argu- ments. Thecontent of thejusticationis not incidental. Theelaborateness and vehemence of justications tells us as much about the character of the culture as do the genuine utterances. The clearest evidence for the stability of our values over time is the unchanging character of the lies soldiers and statesmen tell. They lie in order to justify themselves, and so they describe for us the lineaments of justice. Wherever we nd hypocrisy, we also nd moral knowledge 99 So it is important to trace the content of justications, even if we know they are not the real or only reasons for action. If genuine or disingenuous arguments are made, we know that argument is an important process in world pol- itics. The content of the lies we tell ourselves is part of the architec- ture of ethical world politics; lies indicate the bounds of the acceptable. Those who are motivated by a belief in justice create the conditions where pragmatic reforms or pragmatic justice is required. (And the un- intended consequence of pragmatic reforms may be to catalyze greater reform.) I use an interpretive method of informal argument analysis, yet, there are strong objections to interpretivism, especially the choice of inter- pretation. But how does one know that this interpretation is correct? Presumably because it makes sense of the original text: what is strange, mystifying, puzzling, contradictory, is no longer so, is accounted for. 100 Interpretations canmake sense andstill be wrong. That is, there canbe mis-understandings, that may not articulate what the actors intended or believed either privately or intersubjectively. I dont think that there is a way around this potential problem for positivist, rationalist, or 99 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 19. 100 Charles Taylor, Interpretationandthe Sciences of Man, inPaul RabinowandWilliam Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science: AReader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 2571: 27. 128 Ethical argument and argument analysis interpretivist approaches. One can only try to get closer to the data through thinking thoroughly historically and simultaneously by grant- ing the role that ones own beliefs and context/culture are playing in the interpretive process. 101 This argument raises the problem of falsiability. This theory of foreign policy beliefs and arguments is so comprehensive, because it rst of all supposes that argument is a ubiquitous and causally impor- tant process how can we tell when and if it is wrong? At the most fundamental level, I am not sure that any social science theory, espe- cially rational actor theory, much less a theory of argument, belief, and culture, is falsiable. 102 Rather, theories canbe more or less useful for un- derstanding. This theory of arguments would not be useful if outcomes were regularly explained by non-normative factors. Establishing the causality of arguments and beliefs is not the only aim. The other aim is to understand the content of world politics, which may tell a great deal about howand why actors do what they do. On the other hand, one should suspect a theory if it doesnt t the evidence that is, if the theorys implicit and explicit predictions dont match the record of the process and the content of foreign policy. A theory is also uninteresting if it fails to tell us anything that we did not already know using other theories. For example, neither rational actor theories, nor the theories of bounded rationality most often used to correct rational actor accounts, tell us about the sources of foreign policy goals, or how those goals change. The theory of political argument will be interesting and worthwhile if it can tell us something about the source of foreign policy goals, illuminate the processes that decisionmakers engage in to make their decisions, and help us see better than before the content of world political action. Can ethical explanations still have causal force if actors fail to make explicit ethical arguments? Ethical arguments may not be made explic- itly and still have causal force in a situation where everyone agrees with the good. Consensual cultures do not need to justify or defend their 101 Discussion of interpretation and social science is vast and grounded in both anthro- pological and philosophical literatures. For more on these issues with particular reference to international relations theory see: Mark Neufeld, Interpretation and the science of International Relations, Review of International Studies 19 (January 1993), 3961; Richard Price, Interpretation and Disciplinary Orthodoxy in International Relations, Review of International Studies 20 (April 1994), 201204. 102 Lakatos argues that at their hard core theories cannot be falsied. Imre Lakatos, The Methodologyof Scientic ResearchProgrammes (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1978). I thank Jack Snyder for helping me to clarify my argument here. 129 Argument and change in world politics beliefs against a competing set of beliefs. 103 In other words, in cases where there are no arguments specically about the practice in ques- tion, one can assume that everyone agrees (silence means consent) and takes the particular practice for granted to the extent that they dont feel the need to justify it. Silence in the context of coercion however should signal just the opposite. 103 Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine Between the Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 141. 130 3 Colonial arguments What we have to do is analyze specic rationalities rather than always invoking the progress of rationalization in general. 1 The sense of humanity was narrowly limited by race and religion. People of different blood and different faith were hardly considered human beings at all, and the highest moral requirements were satised by tendering them the blessings of Christianity and civilization. 2 Humanist values could be invoked and at the same time violated through the hierarchical classication of human beings that implied different standards of treatment for different kinds of subjects . . . the ethical prescriptions impliedby Enlightenment values appliedto some kinds of subjects but not to others. 3 For thousands of years, from ancient Persia, to Greece, Rome, China, and Aztec and Inca America, to the enormous colonial empires of Britain, Spain, and France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, colonialism was claimed by leaders of the metropole to be good for both the imperial power and the colonial holding. Colonialism the political control, physical occupation, and domination by one group of people over another people and their land for purposes of extraction and settlement to benet the occupiers was consid- ered a normal practice until the early twentieth century. In most cases, occupied land was distant from the center, or metropole, of 1 Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, in Herbert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, eds., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 208226: 210. 2 Quincy Wright, Mandates Under the League of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), pp. 78. 3 Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in NorthSouth Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 42. 131 Argument and change in world politics the people from the occupying state and control was against the ex- press wishes of the occupied people. Until the mid-nineteenth cen- tury, when the institution began to change in signicant ways with the end of slavery, colonialism also entailed the control of peoples bodies and minds, as well as their social and political organization. 4 Normative beliefs and ethical (as well as practical, identity, and scien- tic) arguments were used by proponents of colonialism to uphold the practice. Yet, by the mid-twentieth century the behavioral norm and pre- scriptive normative beliefs were just the opposite decolonization of former colonies. Sovereignty, self-determination, and non-intervention became dominant international normative beliefs applicable not only to Europeans and North Americans, but to all. Why, after thou- sands of years has colonial empire, as an accepted system of political organization, ended? Or, why wasnt colonialism as a sys- tem overturned much earlier? It is common to argue that decol- onization is explained by the changing material interests and ca- pabilities of colonizers and interveners, that Empire ceased to be a paying proposition with the rise of capitalism. 5 Marxists argue that imperialism was largely replaced by neo-colonial relations of extraction and domination. The alternative explanation is that ethi- cal convictions or norms were at work and virtually wiped out colonialism. 6 In other words, the colonizers changedtheir minds about the rightness of colonialism. 7 Why and how did they change their minds? 8 4 Empire is the political control of the core country, the metropole, and these distant colonies by leaders of the metropole. 5 Michael Mandelbaum, The Reluctance to Intervene, Foreign Policy 95 (Summer 1994), 318: 14. 6 Robert Axelrod, An Evolutionary Approach to Norms, American Political Science Review 80 (December 1986), 10951111: 1096. 7 Robert H. Jackson, The Weight of Ideas in Decolonization: Normative Change in In- ternational Relations, in Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 111138; Ethan Nadelmann, Global Prohibition Regimes: The Evolution of Norms in International Society, International Organization 44 (Autumn 1990), 479526; James Lee Ray, The Abolitionof Slaveryandthe Endof International War, International Organization 43 (Summer 1989), 405439; Gary Geortz and Paul F. Diehl, Toward a Theory of Interna- tional Norms: Some Conceptual and Measurement Issues, Journal of Conict Resolution 36 (December 1992), 634666. 8 There are other explanations for the end of colonialism. One is that the colonizers over- stretched, their reach exceeded their grasp, and they had to retreat. Another is that the colonized overthrew the colonizer; guerrilla wars succeeded where wars of resistance failed. See chapter 8. 132 Colonial arguments Those who sought to change the dominant regime of colonialismused ethical arguments to denormalize and delegitimize colonialism and self-interested military interventions. They also used practical, identity, and scientic arguments to bolster their ethical arguments against colo- nial practices. Thus, over the course of several hundredyears, the charac- teristic beliefs andconstitutive practices of colonialismwere challenged, modied, and gradually abandoned in line with a growing belief in the equality of others and increased respect for the rights of colonized human bodies and politics. The process of these challenges was ethi- cal argument; the content of the argument was more or less persuasive given the preexisting beliefs and cultures of the societies in which the arguments took place. In some cases, the preexisting beliefs that un- derpinned colonialism were challenged. The agents who made these arguments were a new set of humanitarians, distinct from the old- fashioned humanitarians who thought colonialism was good for the colonized because it brought them civilization and Christianity. Fur- ther, ethical arguments changed the cultural and material context of colonialism. Colonialism did not end all at once. Rather, it was gradually disman- tled, in part by actors who had little or no idea that their advocacy and partial reforms would lead to the questioning and ultimately the elimination of an entire political order. Colonialism was revised and modied because of the inuence of ethical arguments about the very practices that made colonialism what it was slavery, forced labor, tor- ture, expropriation of land and resources, denial of the protections of the rule of law, and denial of political representation. Colonialism was rst signicantly modied when the slave trade and then slavery were abolished (and abolition itself was a consequence of ethical arguments) in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Colonialismwas further modi- edwith the introduction of the League of Nations Mandate systemand later the UnitedNations Trusteeshipsystemwhere, byinternational law, certain colonies were to be administered in more humane ways and the goal gradually (and to some degree unintentionally) became to increase the prospect of self-determination for the inhabitants of these territories. Ethical arguments against colonial practices were only successful be- cause the beliefs about colonial subjects held by colonizers were widely reassessed. Those who argued against colonialism, whether the colo- nized or reformers based in the metropole, linked their preferred nor- mative beliefs to established belief systems (legal, religious, ethical, and political) that stressed human equality and the rule of law. The cluster 133 Argument and change in world politics of principles and normative beliefs of equality, self-determination, nationalism, democracy, human rights, non-intervention, and anti- racism which all in various ways assert and argue for the equality of former colonial subjects, gained broader persuasive power as they were rst applied in the heart of the colonial powers, the mother countries, and as these arguments were generalized to cover all human beings. This chapter begins unraveling the causes for the end of colonialism by describing the beliefs and practices of the institution of colonialism, that is, bysketchingthe outlines andsome of the content of the European colonial culture. I rehearse the arguments that supported and opposed colonialism, and include thick descriptions of colonial practices for sev- eral reasons. First, it is not possible to fully comprehend the signicance of the end of colonialism without understanding exactly what colonial- ism (an extremely complex political, social, and economic system) was and how it was justied, and recalling the specic taken-for-granted beliefs that supported colonial practices. Those who argue that there is no difference between colonialism and neo-colonialism have perhaps forgotten what colonialism entailed. If we re-focus our eyes on colonial- ism as it was practiced when it was largely taken for granted, we will better see the disjunctures (and continuities) in arguments, beliefs, and practices between colonialism, decolonization, and humanitarian inter- vention. For instance, the slavery, mutilation, massacre, and outright theft of land that were common colonial practices are not characteris- tic of the decolonized world, while the arrogance of the colonizer and former colonizer may be similar. Second, I review colonial beliefs and arguments to emphasize how ethical arguments not only are used by advocates of social change in attempts to overturn practices, but are deployed by those in dominant positions to support and normalize dominant practices. European colo- nialism was a cultural production; religious, scientic, economic, and political beliefs and practices all worked to make colonialismwhat it be- came in the Americas, Africa, and Asia and the colonizers made ethical arguments to justify and support colonial practices. Though it seemed natural, colonialism depended on practical, scientic, identity, and eth- ical arguments. The ethical arguments of the colonizers rested on two key sets of beliefs, neither of which was new: the identity belief in Euro- pean superiority and the rm belief in expanding the scope, with force if necessary, of the Christian religion. Third, I begin with early colonial arguments regarding the conquest of the Americas and the treatment of Indians in order to emphasize the 134 Colonial arguments obvious but frequently overlooked historical fact that there were eth- ical arguments about elements of colonial practice and belief if not fundamental challenges to colonialism as an institution for hundreds of years before colonialism was ultimately delegitimized. Even at the two zeniths of modern European colonialism conquests of the New World in the sixteenth century andof Africa in the nineteenth century there were ethical debates about its justness. Ethical arguments for re- formfrequently failed to spark signicant change in the short term. This chapter recalls some of the early arguments about colonialism, most no- tably the sixteenth-century debate between Bartolom e de Las Casas and JuanGin es de Sep ulveda over the treatment of the Indians inthe Spanish conquest of the new world. Colonialism and decolonization dened Though colonialism varied over time and place, its characteristic prac- tices were political control, economic expropriation (including slavery, forced labor, extraction of land and natural resources for little or no compensation, the payment of tribute to the colonizer), and cultural control, such as forced religious conversion and education in the lan- guage of the metropole. A schematic outline of the colonial plot after 1492 would look like this: a new land populated by barbarians and savages is discovered; missionaries and explorers chart the area, im- parting the colonizers values and marking out what is worth taking. Next, private and public companies backed by the might of govern- ments stake claims (concessions), and begin settlements in order to do business. Metropolitan governments move military forces into the region to protect the missionaries, explorers, and settlers and also the investments of these private corporations. The language, religion, po- litical, and economic systems of the rst inhabitants of the area are recognized only long enough to subdue the local people and cement alliances with local collaborators that help smooth the way. Roads, ports, and railways are constructed by the colonizer, usually with the heavy input of colonized labor, to facilitate settlement and resource ex- traction. A colonial government is developed to coordinate these ac- tivities and signal to other potential colonizers that the area is already taken. That government enforces language instruction, religious conver- sion, and the economic system of the metropole, displacing or crushing the preexisting backward language, religion, and economy. Colonial economies are controlled for the colonizers benefit: manufacturing is 135 Argument and change in world politics restricted so that often only those goods the colonizer deemed appro- priate are manufactured in colonies while imports into colonies usually come fromor through the ports of the colonial power. Colonial practices were linkedtopolitical, religious, economic, andscientific belief systems in the metropole, and colonialism would likely have looked quite dif- ferent if they had not been so linked. Colonialism is the most intrusive, comprehensive, and institutionalized form of intervention, or coercive interference, in the affairs of others. 9 And, until recently, colonialism conferred prestige on the colonizer. What causes colonizers to make colonial systems? The theories are well known. Most liberal and Marxist scholars favor economic expla- nations, arguing that when the economies of metropolitan countries need new markets, raw materials, less expensive labor, or a new place to invest, economic interests push their states to expand. 10 Another ex- planation stresses colonialism for strategic, balance-of-power, reasons: great powers seek colonies to balance against rivals, or to protect the geopolitical assets they already hold, such as trade routes. 11 A third set of explanations stresses domestic sources: colonies are established because of the interests of some dominant coalition which benets po- litically or economically from colonies or the wars needed to get them; or colonies are established to deal with a domestic political crisis, such as overpopulation; or because of atavistic, militarist tendencies. 12 Decolonizationis commonlyunderstoodas theendof formal political, economic, andmilitarycontrol of acolonizedterritorybyanother power. With decolonization, formal independence is granted to the colony and sovereignty(legal autonomy) is declaredbytheinhabitants of theformer colony. The new state is then recognized by other states and admitted to international society and international organizations as a member of equal standing. Yet the end of formal political domination by colonizers did not entail an immediate and complete break in relations of control. Economic and sometimes political interference by former colonizers and multinational 9 On defining intervention, see R.J. Vincent, Nonintervention and International Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 313. 10 For example, J.A. Hobson, Imperialism (New York: James Pott and Co., 1902); V.I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism(NewYork: International, 1939); Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 1990). 11 Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Ofcial Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961). 12 Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (New York: A. M. Kelly, 1951). 136 Colonial arguments corporations in developing countries governance, finance, and trade is not infrequent, and some would thus argue that decolonization is a fiction or at least an unfinished program. Indeed, there is a strong case to be made that colonizers replaced colonialism with neocolonialism, a more subtle relationship of dependency and control informal political inuence, unequal economic relations, and even occasional military in- tervention. As Adebayo Adedeji argues: negative decolonization is like emancipation from slavery freedom from being owned by others. But real positive decolonization will only arrive when Africans are effective participants in the world economy and have commensurate share in global power. 13 Nonetheless, therearesignicant differences betweencolonialismand neocolonialism. Under colonialism, the native inhabitants of colonies had fewif any political rights vis- ` a-vis the colonizer. Land and resources were often taken and occupied by settlers, corporations, and colonial governments with little or no compensation by military force and no end was in sight. Native people were forced to work, under pain of corporal punishment or imprisonment, for the companies and govern- ments of the colonizer for little or no wages. Brutality was common and accountability for it was absent or quite distant. While there is still inequality, with decolonization political freedom has been greater, and financial compensation for resources and labor has generally improved. With the greater political freedom following decolonization, there has also beenincreasedscope, althoughnot complete freedom, for economic self-determination. To suggest that little if anything has changed, that neocolonialism is just as bad as colonialism, is to make an ethical ar- gument by analogy, one that relies on the arguments that helped bring about the end of colonialism. 14 I have chosen to focus on decoloniza- tion, stressing the political and military aspects of the relations between colonizers and colonized. Howand why decolonization did not include signicantly rearranging the worldeconomy so that it is more equitable, and that the inhabitants of former colonies had more economic control, should become evident after an examination of the arguments, beliefs, and culture that produced decolonization. 13 Adebayo Adedeji, Comparative Strategies of Economic Decolonization in Africa, in Ali A. Mazrui, ed., UNESCO General History of Africa VIII: Africa Since 1935 (Oxford: James Curry, 1999), pp. 393431: 431. Decolonization, as a blanket term, also ignores the different political forms and arrangements that characterized the granting of formal independence to states in the twentieth century. 14 The fact that neo-colonialismhas a pejorative connotationmaypresage more persuasive and effective future arguments about international political economy. 137 Argument and change in world politics Decolonization is a context-specific regime (which grew in opposi- tion to the colonial regime) that included normative beliefs, adminis- trative practices in colonies, international law, and other procedures to eliminate colonialism and prevent its reimposition. Following Ethan Nadelmann, decolonization might be called a global prohibition regime where those who refuse or fail to conform are labeled as de- viants and condemned not just by states but by most communities and individuals as well. 15 In discussing decolonization as a cluster of be- liefs (including the ideas of political self-determination, human rights, non-intervention, and sovereignty) and practices, I am emphasizing the normative element of the regime. The focus here is on how colonialism became delegitimized and was replaced with new normative beliefs namely, that states should not keep colonies because it is wrong to deny nations and individuals political self-determination. Colonialism was formally delegitimized as an acceptable international practice, and the behavioral norm decisively shifted to decolonization in 1970, when the United Nations called colonialism a crime and instituted sanctions against remaining colonial powers, such as Portugal and South Africa. The timing of the change depended on the ability of actors to change the balance of political power within and among states. And that change depended on the success of ethical arguments in changing the beliefs and constitutive practices of colonialism. Early Colonial arguments and beliefs The rst stepinunderstanding the role of arguments inmaintaining and later dismantling colonialism is to identify the main arguments on the table, though the table itself can change, as it did in the case of European colonialism. Inthefteenthandsixteenthcenturies, thetablewherecolo- nial arguments were made was inhabited by important members of the dominant religious culture. After the Reformation, secular and legal ac- tors joined the debate, though religious arguments remained important because of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century religious revival. In the twentieth century colonial arguments took place among, and were judged increasingly by, bureaucrats at international organizations and the general public. But before the colonial arguments of the sixteenth century, colo- nialism had been debated for thousands of years. Even at the height 15 Nadelmann, Global Prohibition Regimes, p. 479. 138 Colonial arguments of the ancient Athenian empire, colonizers found it necessary to jus- tify colonialism. The Athenian leader Pericles reasoned that empire was natural and benecial to the glory and economic strength of the imperial state and argued that all states would desire empire if they had the military might to acquire it. The Athenians told the Spartans: We have done nothing extraordinary, nothing contrary to human na- ture in accepting an empire when it was offered to us and then refusing to give it up. Three very powerful motives prevent us from doing so security, honour, and self-interest. And we are not the rst to act in this way. Far from it. It has always been the rule that the weak should be subject to the strong; and besides, we consider that we are worthy of our power. 16 Further, the Athenians argued, Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can. 17 Even while making ethical arguments, advocates of colonial empire obviously felt that it was im- portant to belittle their causal force; as Pericles asserted in the Melian dialogue, toargue against imperialismonthe basis of justice ininterstate relations was irrelevant, unless there was equal power to compel each side in a dispute. 18 That the Athenians felt they had to make arguments for their actions is a testament to the need for justication of the natu- ral, whether on grounds of normative, philosophical, instrumental, or identity beliefs. Colonial arguments are rst of all meta-arguments that try to x the representation of the other. The other is weak, inferior, and deserves domination by the strong, the superior. Colonial policies follow from the meta-argument: genocidal violence is acceptable. Yet the colonizers beliefs about themselves clashed with colonial practices. Howcould the benevolent and superior colonizer be so cruel? This question caused an internal critique of colonial practice which emerged powerfully in the early and mid-sixteenth century. This emphasis on the narrative, arguments, and actions of the col- onizer is not to suggest that there was a complete lack of resistance to colonialism. Just as colonialism was a behavioral norm, so was 16 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 80. 17 Ibid., p. 404. 18 Ibid., p. 402. 139 Argument and change in world politics resistance to it. 19 Further, colonialism as a system of practices that embodied prescriptive normative beliefs (as well as philosophical, in- strumental, and identity beliefs) was increasingly challenged within the metropole itself by those who held other beliefs. Especially after 1492, the legal and religious debates in Europe over colonialism were artic- ulated with great and intensifying clarity. There were essentially three positions. 20 In the positive law tradition, colonialism was justified and good because the inhabitants of the colonized lands were less-than-human savages who lacked the attributes Europeans believed were marks of civilization, including government. Further, these savages were not us- ing the land properly (in accordance with Western agricultural and scientific practices). And since the international law that Europeans practiced was developed among Christian European states, it did not apply to uncivilized and non-Christian peoples. Moreover, such laws as there were between states derived (echoes of Pericles) from superior force. Since the non-Europeans lacked sufcient force to consistently re- pel European colonizers, and were also non-Christian and uncivilized in European ways, their land was fair game terra nullius. But even after missionaries converted indigenous peoples, often with the use of force or bribes, conquest obviously continued. From the beginning, as Robert Jackson argues, the European colo- nial enterprise was deeply normative. 21 And it was also as deeply re- ligious as the Christian Crusades against Moslems and Jews that pre- ceded the conquest of the Americas. Since political authority in the late middle ages was basedonreligious authority, authorizationfor colonial- ism by the Church was a necessary part of its legitimation. Columbus conquests were legitimized by his charter from the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, while their right to conquest was legitimized by Pope Alexander VI in the 1493 papal bull Inter Caetera, which gave the monarchs all the land they had already found and to be discovered. 19 For example, see: William B. Taylor and Franklin Pease, eds., Violence, Resistance, and Survival in the Americas: Native Americans and the Legacy of Conquest (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1994). 20 Concise summaries of these arguments are found in Lynn Berat, Walvis Bay: Decoloniza- tion and International Law (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Christos Theodor- poulos, Colonialism and General International Law: The Contemporary Theory of National Sovereignty and Self-Determination (New York: New Horizon Publishing House, 1988) and Michael Donelan, Spain and the Indies, in Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, eds., The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 7585. 21 Jackson, The Weight of Ideas in Decolonization, p. 119. 140 Colonial arguments Papal authorization for conquest in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was conditional on converting infidels to Christianity. Among other works well-pleasing to the Divine Majesty and other things desirable to our heart, certainly the most outstanding is that the Catholic Faith and the ChristianReligionespeciallyinour times is beingexaltedandspread and extended everywhere and the salvation of souls procured and bar- barian nations subdued and brought under that faith. 22 The Treaty of Torsedillas in 1494 the foundation of which was papal authority demarcated zones of conquest in the New World between Spain and Portugal. The mark of discovery and possession in both the Americas and Africa, upon whose southern shores the European explorers had also begun to land, was typically the erection of a stone cross. Sixteenth-century Spanish monarchs, though perhaps particularly zealous, were not alone in articulating a religious rationale for explo- ration and conquest. In 1541, the French kings commission to explorer Jean de la Rocque said he should inhabit the aforesaid lands and coun- tries and build there towns and fortresses, temples and churches, in order to impart our Holy Catholic Faith and Catholic Doctrine, to con- stitute and to establish law and peace, by officers of justice so that they [the Native Americans] may live by reason and civility. 23 Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who took possession of New Foundland for Britain, was given authority to discover . . . such remote, barbarous, and hea- then lands, countries, and territories not possessed by any Christian prince or people nor inhabited by Christian people and the same to have, holde, occupy and enjoy. 24 Table 3.1 articulates some of the core beliefs that grounded the arguments in favor of European colonialism in the Americas. These are the familiar topoi (starting point) for ar- guments that were also used to justify later colonialism in Africa and Asia. 22 Pope Alexander VI, Inter Caetera quoted in Donelan, Spain and the Indies, p. 79. This was not the rst time a Pope had sanctioned war and slavery. In 1455, following Ottoman seizure of Constantinople, Pope Nicholas VauthorizedSpanishandPortuguese conquests against all enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, which was viewed as license for expeditions not only against the Turks, but Africa as well. Nicholas V, Romanus Pontifex, quoted in Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), p. 4. 23 Quoted in Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 15001800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 33. 24 Quoted in Patricia Seed, Taking Possession and Reading Texts: Establishing the Au- thority of Overseas Empires, in Jerry M. Williams and Robert E. Lewis, Early Images of the Americas: Transfer and Invention (Tu cson: The University of Arizona Press, 1993), pp. 111147: 112113. 141 Argument and change in world politics Table 3.1 Topoi for early arguments in favor of colonialism Philosophical Colonialism and empire are natural. Instrumental The colonizer will make better, more productive, use of the land than natives because European agricultural techniques are more advanced than those of the natives. Normative It is good to spread the Christian faith, to convert pagans, and to bring civilization to barbarians. There are, in an Aristotelian sense, natural slaves, incapable of reason, and masters must reason for them. Identity The colonized (e.g. Aztecs and Incas) think that the conquistadors are gods (e.g. Quetzacoatl and Viracocha respectively). The colonizers are racially superior to the colonized by virtue of and as evidenced by all their accomplishments. The core belief underpinning the arguments in favor of European colonial practices from slavery to the expropriation of land and the forced religious conversion of the inhabitants of colonies was the con- viction that European colonizers were superior in every way to the colo- nized. Aristotle, in a passage widely quoted and debated by NewWorld colonizers, argued that From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule. 25 Although in their early encounters with Africans, Americans, and Asians, the Europeans tended to stress religious differences between themselves and others, European mate- rial, military, navigational, and technical competence were also taken as evidence of European superiority. 26 The indigenous inhabitants of newly conquered lands were viewed by the majority of the colonizers as less civilized, less intelligent, and even less human than Christian Europeans. The clearest evidence of the inferiority of the colonized was the fact that even though indigenous populations resisted colonialism, 25 This is perhaps the most famous statement of Aristotle on slavery, quoted in David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 70. In Politics, Aristotles remarks on slavery are embedded in a wider discussion of natural order. There can be little question that Aristotle believed in slavery as a natural institution. For he is by nature a slave who is capable of belonging to another (and that is why he does so belong), and who participates in reason so far as to apprehend it but not to possess it; for the animals other than man are subservient not to reason, but to feel- ings. Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 23. 26 Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, andIdeologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 142 Colonial arguments the imperialists generally won. Anthropology and evolutionary bio- logy of the nineteenth century later gave scientific proof of European superiority. In this view, colonialism, with all of its constitutive prac- tices slavery, forced labor, the theft of land for cultivation and raw materials for industries in Europe was just because the natives were considered less deserving than Europeans. Thus, colonialism was not only the international behavioral norm, it was a regime (rules, norms, and procedures) that codied and reected the colonizers belief in the inferior status of the conquered. The dominant positive law position was challenged most forcefully by those who adhered to a natural law tradition, who argued that colo- nialism was illegitimate because it violated the natural rights of the inhabitants of colonizedregions. Inthis view, savages hadsovereignty and political institutions of their own and all humans, not just Chris- tians, were subjects of international law. Advocates of the natural law position argued, along the lines of Thomas Aquinas, that divine law did not vitiate human law, and therefore the religious status of non- Christians did not mean that they were necessarily without rights. Though not always entirely consistent in their views, these publicists thus held that any land inhabited by people who were linked by some political organization, no matter how primitive or crude, was not terra nullius. 27 A third position was that colonialism could be legitimate in some circumstances but not in others. Specically, colonial acquisitions were just if the landwas empty or if the natives made little productive use of the land. For instance, in 1539 Francisco de Vitoria argued that native populations had rights but that all humans had the right to commerce. If the Spaniards were to use this right inoffensively and the Indians were to prevent this maliciously, a situation might arise in which the Spaniards might justifiably go to war against them. . . and take their labor and their land. 28 Since the object in question was not without an owner, Vitoria argued, Spain had no right to take the land, and Spains claim to title gives no support to a seizure of the aborigines any more than if it had been they who had discovered us. 29 Eighteenth-century legal theorist Vattel argued, When the nations of Europe, which are too confined at home, come upon lands which the savages have no special 27 Berat, Walvis Bay, p. 107. 28 Quoted in Donelan, Spain and the Indies, p. 84. 29 Quoted in Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 61. 143 Argument and change in world politics need of and are making no present and continuous use of they may lawfully take possession of them and establish colonies in them. 30 There were heated debates about colonial practices. The first of these was over the nature of those who the conquistadors and religious evan- gelists met in the New World. A second great debate, described in chapter 4, was over slavery and forced labor. Few, if any, participants in these debates challenged the legitimacy of colonialism per se. Rather, even as reformers tried to make colonialism conform to certain nor- mative beliefs while preserving the institution as a whole, the pillars of colonial domination were made strange, undermined, destabilized, and delegitimized. The rst of the great debates: Are these Indians not men? The conquistadors and later Spanish settlers took possession of the land and people in the Americas as quickly as they could. Those conquista- dors and settlers who served the Spanish king well were given grants of land and encomienda, a system that entitled them to the use of Indian la- bor for two or three years, during which time the encomenderos were also supposedto instruct the natives inChristiandoctrine. The Indians made captive as slaves or personal servants worked in gold and silver mines, built roads, dams, and residences for encomenderos, transported goods as porters (tamemes), labored on the farms established by encomenderos, and were even soldiers for the conquering army. In addition to direct labor, Indians were forced to pay a tax tribute to the Spanish. Immediately after their first encounters with the Indians, Europeans began to argue about how to treat those they met, debating whether the Indians were capable of understanding Christianity and becom- ing Christians, whether intermarriage was allowable, and whether the Indians were beasts and natural slaves. The answers were not immedi- ately apparent. Christopher Columbus writing about the New World shows both awe and abhorrence for those he met. 31 Cortez, who con- quered the Aztecs just a few decades later, similarly articulated both contempt and respect for the culture he found: these people live al- most like those in Spain, and in as much harmony and order as there, 30 E. Vattel, from the Law of Nations, quoted in Berat, Walvis Bay, p. 107. 31 Lewis Hanke, All Mankind is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolom e de Las Casas and Juan Gin es de Sepulveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), p. 4. 144 Colonial arguments and considering that they are barbarous and so far from the knowledge of God and cut off from all civilized nations, it is truly remarkable to see what they have achieved in all things. 32 The most intense debates were perhaps among members of the Catholic Churchandsoone of the first challenges toSpanishcolonialism in the New World came from members of the Dominican religious or- der who charged that the Spanish had failed to convert the natives, the crucial condition of Pope Alexanders 1493 right to conquest. 33 There was widespread attention when, in 1511, Antonio de Montesinos, a member of the Dominican order living on Hispaniola, preached a ser- mon urging that Indians be Christianized, but questioned the violent methods of the conquistadors. With what right and with what justice do you keep these poor Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude? By what authority have you made such detestable wars against these people who lived peacefully and gently on their own lands? 34 And, going to the core of the issue, Montesinos asked, Are these Indians not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as yourselves? 35 Another Dominican, Matias de Paz, argued around the same time, that, It is not licit for Christian princes to make war on the infidels for a whimof domination or for the desire to gain riches, but only inspired by the zeal of faith. . . so that the name of our Redeemer be exalted and praised throughout the entire world. 36 The Dominicans criticisms reached Spain and sparked a wider debate and an ambiguous period of conquest where the Spanish were alternately solicitous and brutal, as if no one wantedto be as cruel as the Dominicans hadcharged. Spanish laws of conquest exemplified and institutionalized the fea- tures of the argument. The Laws of Burgos in 1512 were the first reg- ulations on Spanish conquistadors use of Indians as servants, and the conditions inwhichIndians couldbe kept (suchas providinghammocks so that Indians did not have to sleep on the ground). Under these laws, Indians would work nine months per year for the Spanish and three months for themselves. After their fourth month of pregnancy, women 32 Quoted in ibid., p. 12. 33 Seed, Taking Possession and Reading Texts, pp. 124125. 34 Quoted in Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale, 1993), pp. 7071. 35 Quoted in Hanke, All Mankind is One, p. 4. Also see Hayward R. Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 168. 36 Quoted in Luis N. Rivera, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), p. 39. 145 Argument and change in world politics were not to work in mines or fields, and the exemption continued until their children were three. Law number 24 said, no one may beat or whip or call an Indian dog (perro) or any other name unless it is his proper name. 37 The Laws also ordered Spanish conquerors to educate Indians in the Christian faith and baptize their children. After further debate, the royal lawyer for Ferdinand and Isabella drewup another document, the Requerimiento (Requirement), in 1513, which the Spanish were supposed to read to the natives when they came upon them. The Requirement obliged the natives to acknowledge their submission to both the Church and the Spanish monarchy. Na- tives usually did not understand the Spanish or Latin reading, or per- haps did not hear the words at all because the Spaniards often did not bother to read it to them within hearing distance. Even under these con- ditions, failure to immediately submit was the authority for conquest and the Requirement warns of severe punishment for the crime of not submitting: 38 We shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do all the harm and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey, and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him; and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their Highnesses, or ours, nor of these gentlemen who come with us. And that we have said this to you and made this Requirement, we request the notary here present to give us his testimony in writing, and we ask the rest who are present that they should be witnesses of this Requirement. 39 The royal historian, Gonzalo Fern andez de Oviedo y Vald ez, not known for his sympathy for Indians, described one reading of the Re- quirement this way. 37 Laws of Burgos quoted in Hanke, All Mankind is One, pp. 89. 38 That potential subjects of New Spain might understand and still reject proselytizing, as Montezuma did, was also ostensibly irrelevant. Montezumas response to Cortezs expla- nation of his Christianizing mission, according to Bernal Daz, was I have understood your words and arguments very well before now, fromwhat you have said to my servants at the sand dunes, this is about three Gods and the Cross, and all those things that you have preached in the towns through which you have come. We have not made any answer to it because here throughout all time we have worshipped our own gods, and thought they were good, as no doubt yours are, so do not trouble to speak to us any more about them at present. Quoted in Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, p. 139. 39 Quoted in Hanke, All Mankind is One, p. 36. 146 Colonial arguments It appears that they had been suddenly pounced upon and bound before they had learnt or understood anything about Pope or Church, or any one of the many things said in the Requirement; and that after they had been put in chains someone read the Requirement without knowing their language and without any interpreters, and without either the reader or the Indians understanding their language, they had no chance to reply, being immediately carried away prisoners, the Spaniards not failing to use the stick on those who did not go fast enough. 40 If this was howsuch occasions typically went, why bother writing the Requirement andreading it to the natives? In whose eyes must conquest be legitimate? Obviously the only relevant audiences were God and other Europeans. The Spanish conquerors were faithful to elements of the Requirement. Indians were routinely enslaved. Technically, two categories of slaves were allowed: those acquired in war, esclavos de guerra, and those who were already slaves among the Indians, esclavos de rescate. In practice, such distinctions were not widely observed. Slaves were branded on their face, arms, and legs, to indicate their status, and if freed were branded again on the face. As historian William Sherman recounts, contemporary observers documented frequent slaving expeditions in Central America with some Spaniards, such as Diego L opez de Salcedo, widely known for their cruelty. One observer, named Pedraza, charged that when the Indians were taken on the road in chains by L opez de Sal- cedo and his men some of the carriers faltered under the strain and could not continue. In order to avoid the delay caused by opening the chains to release the stragglers, their heads were cut off and the vic- tims were left on the road, the head on one side and the body on the other; and they went on their way. 41 Brutality was the main feature of conquest. On their way from Honduras to Nicaragua, the Spaniards burned towns and caused great destruction. Recently-delivered babies were taken from their mothers breasts and tossed aside. Caciques [chiefs] and principales were put in collars and chains in groups of ten. More than four hundred Indians were taken from the valley of Guamira loaded down with the merchandise of the governor and his compan- ions. If an Indian fell his head was cut off. 40 Ibid., pp. 3637. 41 William L. Sherman, Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth-Century Central America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 45. 147 Argument and change in world politics In Aguatega 200 Indians were punished: one-third of them were put in a large hut and burned to death; another one-third were torn to pieces by dogs; eyes were plucked out, arms were cut off, and other cruelties were practiced on the remaining one-third of the Indians. 42 Debates about the treatment of Indians took place in both secular and religious settings. In 1524, King Charles V established the Council of the Indies which governed Spains colonies in the Americas until 1834. Meeting in Madrid, the six to ten members of the council appointed by the king were charged with issuing all legislation, and approving ex- penditures and official acts by colonial officials. In 1526 King Charles proclaimed Ordinances about the Good Treatment of the Indians re- quiring that at least two religious men or ordained clerics accompany all expeditions. 43 The Church hierarchy generally supported conquest and encomienda. Still, some members of the Franciscan and Dominican orders hotly debated the humanity of Indians and Charles V seems to have been swayed by arguments on both sides. For several decades, arguments about how to treat the Indians fo- cused on the question of their humanity and suitability for indoc- trination in Christian beliefs, with many arguing that Indians were beasts. The Bishop of
Avila, Francisco Ruiz, said, Indians are malicious people . . . but they are not capable of natural judgment or of receiving the faith. . . and they need, just as a horse or a beast does, to be directed and governed by Christians who treat them well and not cruelly. 44 About two years later, in 1519, in an audience before King Charles V, the Franciscan Bishop Juan de Quevedo said Indians were siervos a natura. 45 Quevedo said, If any people ever deserved to be treated harshly, it is the Indians, who resemble ferocious beasts more than rational creatures. 46 The Dominican friar Tom as Ortiz said in 1525 that Indians were incapable of learning. . . God has never created a race more full of vice . . . the Indians are more stupid than asses and refuse to improve in anything. 47 Ortiz charged that Indians do not have any human artistry or skills . . . they turn into brute animals. 48 The Royal historian Oviedo said that Indian heads were different than Europeanheads: Theywere not, infact, heads at all, but rather hardand thick helmets, so that the most important piece of advice the Christians 42 Ibid., p. 46. 43 Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, p. 43. 44 Quoted in Hanke, All Mankind is One, p. 11. 45 Quoted in ibid. 46 Quoted in Sherman, Forced Native Labor, p. 154. 47 Quoted in Hanke, All Mankind is One, pp. 1112. 48 Quoted in Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, p. 137. 148 Colonial arguments gave when fighting in hand to hand combat with them was not to strike themonthe head, because that broke the swords. Andjust as their heads were hard, so their understanding was bestial and evilly inclined. 49 In about 1532 or 1533, Domingo de Betanzos charged that the Indians were incapable of religious instruction, and later he argued that they were beasts, destined for extinction. 50 Betanzos views, whose precise word- ing has in many cases been lost, were widely discussed and provoked a strong reaction among those who thought Indians were not beasts but humans. What was at stake in the question of whether Indians were human was the legality of the conquest. As Francisco de Vitoria wrote in 1535 about the wars in Peru: I do not understand the justice of this war . . . . In truth, if the Indians are not men but monkeys, non sunt capaces iniuriae. But if they are men and our fellow creatures, as well as vassals of the Emperor, I see no way to excuse these conquistadores, nor do I know how they serve your majesty in such an important way by destroying your vassals. 51 Pope Paul III, upon hearing arguments that Indians were beasts and incapable of learning to be Catholics, and the counter-claim that those who were making such arguments were doing the work of the devil, issued the Bull, Sublimis Deus, in June 1537. In it he said, the Indians truly are men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic faithbut, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it . . . they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen it should be null and of no effect. 52 Charles V reacted to both Pope Pauls statements, and those of Vitoria, whose 1539 lectures on De Indis questionedunfetteredconquest, by trying to squash debate unless he had authorized it. 53 The king was unsuccessful at muzzling the pope and other members of the Church. At the same time the monarchy also triedto curb the colonizers worst abuses. In 1542, Charles V proclaimed, New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians, restricting the en- comenderos practices. The New Laws specifically prohibited enslaving any more Indians and forbade using Indians as tamemes (porters) except in extraordinary cases (which colonists were quick to proclaim), and 49 Quoted in Pagden, European Encounters, p. 57. 50 Hanke, All Mankind is One, pp. 13, 19, 27. 51 Quoted in ibid., p. 16. 52 Quoted in ibid., p. 21. 53 Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, pp. 8485. 149 Argument and change in world politics certainly not without paying them. 54 Existing slaves were to be set free unless encomenderos could prove just title to them. Further, the law forbade the establishment of new encomiendas, and upon the death of the owners of existing encomiendas their title was to revert to the king. Spanish settlers protested against the New Laws, many officials of New Spain delayed their implementation as much as possible and, in Peru, settlers revolted. Resistance to reform was nothing new. En- comenderos had long evaded the laws protecting the Indians, and it was difficult for the crownto enforce its regulations, so rules were frequently redrafted. In 1545, the Council of the Indies modified the New Laws, allowing continuation of the encomienda land and forced labor system. Slaverywas still prohibited, but onlywiththe appointment of a vigorous judge in Central America, Alonso L opez de Cerrato, who served from 1548 to 1555, were laws protecting Indians more vigorously enforced and large numbers of Indian slaves freed. The debate in Spain and the Americas over treatment of the Indians thus reached a peak at mid-century. In 1549 Betanzos made a deathbed retraction of his views about the bestial nature of Indians. 55 Mean- while, Judge Cerratos enforcement of the New Laws was opposed by many Spanish colonizers although supported by some members of the church based in the colonies. Some Spanish settlers traveled to Spain fromthe NewWorldin order to push for making their encomienda grants perpetual the Indians could be held forever (in perpetuity) as laborers and this status would be inherited by their children. Encomenderos and conquistadors arguedthat encomienda shouldbe perpetual since this was the best way to reward them, as agents of the king, and to promote the 54 Spanish conquistadors and encomenderos used tamemes to carry their personal effects, food, and the goods that owed to and from Spain, on their backs. Tamemes often traveled hundreds of miles carrying loads of 75 to 100 pounds in all sorts of weather through lowlands and mountains. They were given little to eat and though they were supposed to be paid, were often enslaved. In one of the most catastrophic examples, one expedition saw 4,000 tamemes loaded for a journey from which no more than 6 survived to return to their homes. Sherman, Forced Native Labor, p. 114. The Spanish government gradually regulated the use of tamemes, for instance, saying in 1530, that they should not carry loads from coasts to highlands or the other way around, because such extremes in climate were devastating. In 1533, Spain ordered that no one could carry more than 50 pounds, and that distances ought to be limited. The NewLaws saidtamemes must be paidandsome Spanish governors (notably Contreras of Nicaragua, after 1535) prohibited the use of tamemes and encouraged instead cart-building and road construction. Crown money was allocated for the purpose of road construction from the 1540s onward. Still, the laws were selectively implemented and enforced, and tamemes were widely used until roads and draft animals were more widely available. Ibid., pp. 222224. 55 Hanke, All Mankind is One, p. 30. 150 Colonial arguments religious conversion of Indians. Further, they argued, the very natives will benefit because if they are held in perpetuity they will be treated well . . . 56 Inthe same period, JuanGin es de Sep ulveda was tryingto get his long treatise on the inferiority of Indians and the justice of conquest in the Americas, then circulating in manuscript form, published in Spain and Rome. 57 Sep ulveda had earlier, in the 1520s and 1530s, made arguments for the justice of Spains campaigns against heresy and its war against the Turks. 58 Sep ulvedas argument against Indians rights was based on Aristotles distinction between rulers and natural slaves, and bolstered by evidence from Oviedo who regarded the Indians as incapable of be- coming Christians and wrote, in any case, that God is going to destroy them soon. 59 Further, Sep ulveda argued that Pope Alexanders 1493 Bulls were a right to conquer in order to civilize. 60 One of the most vocal supporters of Indians, and of the judge Cerrato, was Bartolom e de Las Casas, who had for decades argued for Indian rights. Before becoming a harsh critic of European treatment of the Indians, Las Casas participated in and benefited from the cruelest as- pects of the conquest, including holding encomienda until 1514 and par- ticipating in the conquest of Cuba with Diego Velazques. 61 Although he apparently heard Montesinos 1511 sermon, Las Casas said his revised understanding of the situation of the Indians resulted from a personal religious experience. 62 Actingonhis newbeliefs while Bishopof Chiapa, Las Casas denied absolution to those Spaniards who practiced slavery and urged others to do so. Las Casas wrote an indictment of Spanish conquest, Brevsima relaci on de la destruccon de las Indios (Most Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies), published in 1542, that turned the religious mission on its head. He argued that Spanish brutality was so awful that the more 56 Quoted in Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, p. 129. 57 Juan Gin es de Sep ulveda, Democrates Segundo o de las Justas Causas del la Guerra Contra los Indios, ed., Angel Losada (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cienticas, Instituto Francisco de Vitoria, 1951). The Council of the Indies refused to publish the manuscript. The Royal Council of Castile, the University of Salamanca, the University of Alcala, and the Council of Trent all either refused to consider the manuscript or refused to publish it. Sep ulveda could not get the manuscript published in Spain or Rome, and a summary of it, published in Rome in 1550, was banned in Spain, with Charles V ordering conscation of any copies that made it to Spain. See Hanke, All Mankind is One, pp. 6263. 58 Hanke, All Mankind is One, pp. 6162; Pagden, Lords of All the World, p. 100. 59 Oviedo quoted in Hanke, All Mankind is One, p. 45. 60 Pagden, Lords of All the World, p. 100. 61 Hanke, All Mankind is One, pp. 67. 62 Pagden, European Encounters, pp. 7173. 151 Argument and change in world politics they proceeded to discover, and destroy, and lose people and lands, the more remarkable were the cruelties and iniquities against God and his children that they perpetrated. 63 Las Casas argued that kindness was more certain than cruelty to bring converts to Christianity and he urged that all conversion should be through peaceful persuasion. Las Casas criticized encomienda because it showed the contempt Spaniards had for the unfortunate Indians, whom the Spaniards did not love and adore as people but rather as use, work, and sweat, as one does with wheat, bread or wine. 64 Las Casas was apparently one of the prime movers behind the legislation of the New Laws in 1542. 65 In 1546, Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians, including Las Casas, con- vened a conference in Mexico to discuss slavery. 66 Las Casas railed against the vehement, blind and disorderly greed from which all harm and evil come and after his return to Spain furiously lobbied the Coun- cil of the Indies and the king in 1549 against encomienda and forced conversions. 67 Las Casas versus Sep ulveda Critics of Spains colonial practices in the Americas were able to force a formal debate. In July 1549, the Council of the Indies proposed to King Charles V that all conquest be suspended until they decided how con- quests may be conducted justly and with security of conscience. 68 In April 1550 the king briey halted all conquests until a method for con- ducting them could be found, and a disputation between Sep ulveda and Las Casas began in August at Valladolid in front of the Council of Fourteen to debate the question: Is it lawful for the King of Spain to wage war on the Indians, before preaching a faith to them, in or- der to subject them to his rule, so that afterward they may be more easily instructed in the faith? 69 The king sent outstanding theolo- gians and members of the Council of the Indies to judge the arguments of Sep ulveda and Las Casas. 70 Las Casas and Sep ulveda agreed that 63 Quoted in Stephanie Merrim, The Counter-Discourse of Las Casas, in Williams and Lewis, eds., Early Images of the Americas, pp. 149162: 152. 64 Quoted in Santa Arias, Empowerment Through the Writing of History: Bartolem e de Las Casass Representation of the Other(s), in Williams and Lewis, eds., Early Images of the Americas, pp. 163179: 171. 65 Sherman, Forced Native Labor, p. 273. 66 David Traboulay, Columbus and Las Casas: The Conquest and Christianization of America, 14921566 (New York: University Press of America, 1994), p. 177. 67 Las Casas quoted in Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, p. 139. 68 Council of the Indies quoted in Hanke, All Mankind is One, p. 66. 69 Ibid., p. 67. 70 Ibid., p. 67. 152 Colonial arguments conversion of Indians to Christianity was the goal; they differed about the Indians capacity for such conversion and the methods which could be used legitimately to impose Spanish rule. Both men used a mix of ethical, identity, practical, and philosophical arguments. Sep ulveda, who spoke for three hours on the first day, summarized his unpublished Democrates Segundo to the Council, making essentially four points in his argument that war against Indians was just. First, he said that Indians were barbarians and thus ought to be subjects of the Spanish; second, Indians committed crimes against natural law, includ- ing human sacrifice and idolatry; third, Indians oppressed and killed innocent people; fourth, war may be waged against infidels in order to prepare them for learning the Christian faith. Sep ulvedas arguments clearly rested on the assertion of Indian in- feriority. Sep ulveda relied on Oviedos claims that Indians had actu- ally heard and accepted the gospel before but had forgotten it and later fallenintoidolatry, andfurthermore, that Indians were unteachable, and anyway, the land belonged to Spain and conquest was only recovery. 71 Sep ulveda argued that Indians were little men (homunculos) in whom you will scarcely find traces of humanity. . . 72 Further, Sep ulveda be- lieved: In prudence, talent, virtue and humanity they are as inferior to the Spaniards as children to adults, women to men, as the wild and cruel to the most meek, as the prodigiously intemperate to the continent and temperate, that I have almost said, as monkeys to men. 73 He said: But if youdeal withthe virtues, if youlookfor temperance or meekness, what can you expect from men who were involved in every kind of intemperance and wicked lust and who used to eat human esh? And dont think that before the arrival of the Christians they were living in quiet and the Saturnian peace of the poets. On the contrary they were making war continuously andferociously against each other with such rage that they considered their victory worthless if they did not satisfy their monstrous hunger with the esh of their enemies, an inhumanity whichinthemis somuchmore monstrous since theyare sodistant from the unconquered and wild Scythians, who also fed on human esh, for these Indians are so cowardly and timid, that they scarcely with- standthe appearance of our soldiers andoftenmanythousands of them have given ground, eeing like women before a very few Spaniards, who did not even number a hundred. 74 71 Ibid., pp. 4041. Oviedo argued that North Americans were the descendants of a Visigothic diaspora. 72 Quoted in ibid., p. 85. 73 Quoted in ibid., p. 84. 74 Quoted in ibid., p. 85. 153 Argument and change in world politics In rebuttal, Las Casas reportedly read his entire manuscript In De- fense of the Indians Against the Persecutors and Slanders of the Peoples of the New World Discovered Across the Seas to the Council over the course of ve days. 75 The Defense is scathing: I think Sep ulveda wrote that little book hastily and without sufficiently weighing the materials and circumstances. 76 Las Casas respondedtoSep ulveda onthe basis of both law and fact and argued that Sep ulveda and Oviedo were wrong about the incapacity of the Indians and that it was the Spaniards who in the absolutely inhuman things they have done to those nations they have surpassed all other barbarians. 77 Domingo de Soto, a member of the Council of Fourteen recalled Las Casas arguments for his fellow Council members this way: The bishop [Las Casas] described at length the history of the Indians, showing that though some of their customs were not particularly civil, they were not however barbarians on this account but rather a settled people with great cities, laws, arts, and government who punished unnatural and other crimes with the death penalty. They denitely had sufcient civilization that they should not be warred against as barbarians. 78 Las Casas supportedhis Defense with earlier works andanother docu- ment, what he called the second part. 79 The first part, 63 chapters, summarized Sep ulvedas arguments, critically reviewed Sep ulvedas and Oviedos histories, and finally asserted that Indians are our broth- ers, and Christ has given his life for them, and therefore war against them ought to end, since they are docile and clever, and in their dili- gence andgifts of nature, theyexcel most peoples of the knownworld. 80 Las Casas also charged that the methods of conquest were counter- productive and against natural law which requires humans to treat others as they would like themselves to be treated: What good can come from these military campaigns that would, in the eyes of God, who evaluates all things with unutterable love, 75 Bartolom e de las Casas, In Defense of the Indians Against the Persecutors and Slanders of the Peoples of the New World Discovered Across the Seas, trans. and ed. Stafford Poole (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974). 76 lbid., p. 297. 77 Ibid., p. 29. 78 Quoted in Hanke, All Mankind is One, p. 80. 79 Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, p. 362. For example, Las Casas wrote a plea for peaceful evangelism, rather than forced conversion, in the late 1530s, De Unico Vocationis Modo [The Only Way of Attracting all Peoples to the True Faith] and his Entre Los Remedios proposed alternative methods of governing the Indies. 80 Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, p. 362. 154 Colonial arguments compensate for so many evils, so many injuries, and so many unaccus- tomed misfortunes? Furthermore, how will that nation love us, how will they become our friends (which is necessary if they are to ac- cept our religion), when children see themselves deprived of parents, wives, husbands, and fathers of children and friends? When they see those they love wounded, imprisoned, plundered, and reduced from an immense number to a few? 81 After Las Casas had finished reading his manuscript, the Council ad- journed the proceedings to consider the arguments. The Council recon- venedfor a secondroundof debate at ValladolidinMay1551. According to Sep ulveda, this round focused on the meaning of Pope Alexanders Bulls of donation. Since the records of the Council have been lost, one may assume that Las Casas repeated many of his earlier arguments. 82 The Council did not make any formal decision about the merits of either mans position. But, politically, in the short run, Las Casas lost, and perpetuity was granted in Peru by King Philip in 1556, who argued that Indian labor was needed to run the colonies. 83 However, inthe long run, Las Casas views didhave some effect. First, the king continued to support the reformer Cerrato in Central America who persisted in his vigorous implementation of the New Laws. Sec- ond, though Las Casas later publicly regretted his advocacy of African slavery as a substitute for Indian bondage, the practice became widespread in the Americas, replacing Indian slavery by the end of the seventeenth century. 84 Third, religious conversion was made more voluntary and treatment of the remaining Indians, by then the area had been largely depopulated, was made less harsh. The Requirement was replaced in 1573 with the Instrument of Obedience and Vassalage, which was also to be read to the Indians. 85 With this document, and the Ordinances Regarding New Discoveries and Towns, the word con- quest was banned and pacification was substituted, signifying that future conversion should be peaceful. Most important, Indian slavery was ended and debt bondage or naboria was curbed. Tribute was also reduced. Further, the encomienda system, where Indians were required to do labor without pay for the Spanish, instead of or in addition to pay- ing tribute, was eventually replaced by the repartimiento system. Under 81 Ibid., p. 29. 82 Hanke, All Mankind is One, pp. 6869. 83 Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, p. 130. 84 SpainexportedenslavedAfricans tothe Americas before Las Casas made his arguments about AfricanslaveryreplacingIndianslavery. SeeArthur F. Corwin, Spainandthe Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 18171886 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), p. 4. 85 Hanke, All Mankind is One, pp. 120121. 155 Argument and change in world politics repartimiento Indian villages were required to send a certain number of workers per week to a Spanish town for compulsory wage labor, either for private or public works. Less brutal thanits predecessor, repartimiento also existed side by side with various combinations of wage and forced labor, such as Indian contract and free labor, and African slavery. 86 Summary The behavioral normand dominant normative belief in the late fteenth century was colonization and religious crusade. Yet, even in this back- ground, those who paid for and conducted colonization in the New World felt they had to justify their actions. The way they did so was to try to extend their previous ethical arguments about conquest and slavery from the European context to the New World by arguing that Indians were inferior, and that conquest was a religious act of recla- mation. Identity, practical, and philosophical arguments were also de- ployed. Las Casas and Vitorias comments on the treatment of Indians were not intended to be, nor were they, deep criticisms of colonialism per se. Rather, both Dominicans wanted Christianization to occur, and Vitoria thought brute force was acceptable if the Indians continually refused to take up Christianity. Even the judge Cerrato who enforced laws against Indian slavery in Central America and argued against colonists who saidIndian slavery was necessary (telling Spaniards to do the labor themselves) saw himself as a faithful servant of imperial interests. 87 In line with these modest goals, early victories against the worst abuses of colonialism in the New World were modest yet significant. Even when Indian slavery ended, the encomienda and later repartimiento systems of forced labor for Indians continued. Las Casas wrote in 1562: For days upon days, years upon years we have overlooked the two kinds of tyranny by which we have destroyed countless republics; one called conquest when we first entered. . . The other was and is tyrannical government . . . to which they gave the name repartimiento or encomienda. 88 And even after the mid-sixteenth-century reforms, Any sign of rebelliousness became the pretext for slave raids. For 86 Elinor G. K. Melville, LandLabour Relations in Sixteenth-Century Mexico: The For- mationof Grazing Haciendas, inPaul E. Lovejoy andNicholas Rogers, eds., Unfree Labour in the Development of the Atlantic World (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1994), pp. 2635. 87 See Sherman, Forced Native Labor. 88 Quoted in Trabouley, Columbus and Las Casas, p. 183. 156 Colonial arguments example, in 1620 governor Alonso de Guzman of Costa Rica invented a rebellion among the Aoyaque Indians in order to attack and enslave them. 89 Brutality toward Indians continued in the Spanish controlled parts of the New World, although it was less horrific and less commonly lethal. As historian William Sherman notes: While in the second half of the sixteenth century one does find examples of clearly abusive, and sometimes cruel, treatment, the extreme cases are appreciably less common. 90 Sherman argues that in part this was because the next gen- eration of Spanish elites were born and raised in New Spain; they were Creoles who socialized intimately from birth with mestizo and Indian people. Certainly they mistreated Indians, but they were less likely to kill them. 91 The difference is signicant and symbolizes, as Sherman suggests, that there was greater empathy and that the first debate, over the humanity of the Indians, was decided in favor of the Indians. Las Casas position was ultimately successful because he was able to change the identitybeliefs of the conquistadors andtheir emotional relationship to the Indians. Nonetheless, Las Casas and other reformers did not intend to over- throw the system, only to curb its excesses on behalf of Indians. Thus, it is true that some of the burden of abuse was shifted from Indians to Africans. 92 Africans had already been brought to the Americas by the English, Spanish, and Portuguese for slavery. Holding Africans in lower regard than Indians, Las Casas for at least three decades had proposed African slavery as a substitute for Indian enslavement. 93 While the de- bates and reforms of the sixteenth century were part of the process of reforming colonialism to make it less brutal, declining populations of Indians, due toepidemic disease andharshtreatment, ironicallyboosted the rationale for African slavery. Finally, while the immediate effect of the debates was ambiguous modest reforms in the treatment of Indians and greater reliance on 89 O. Nigel Bolland, Colonization and Slavery in Central America, in Lovejoy and Rogers, eds., Unfree Labour, pp. 1125. 90 Sherman, Forced Native Labor, p. 331. 91 Ibid., p. 332. 92 In North America, Indians were also enslaved, though usually in smaller numbers than Africans. Indians, too, often allied with or harbored escaped African slaves, and it was more common to attempt to keep the two populations separate. The French governor in Mississippi called for an end to Indian slavery in 1728. Indians were still enslaved by English colonists and Americans well into the nineteenth century, though the policy that prevailed was more characteristically war, extermination, and/or treaties and forced resettlement. 93 Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, pp. 180, 183. 157 Argument and change in world politics African slaves the arguments of the critics of colonialism gained international attention. For example, Las Casas The Destruction of the Indies was translated into Dutch (1578), English (1583), Latin (1598), and German (1599). 94 Las Casas won the meta-argument, reframing the role of slavery in conquest and, with Vitoria, he inadvertently planted the seed of colonialisms denormalization. Many of the arguments used in the sixteenthcenturytolimit the ill treatment of Indians were toreappear 200 years later in debates about modifying and ending African slavery. Thus, the starting point for future arguments about colonialism, in par- ticular the treatment of slaves and colonial subjects, was changed by the sixteenth-century debates over the treatment of Indians. 94 Trabouley, Columbus and Las Casas, p. 187. 158 4 Decolonizing bodies: ending slavery and denormalizing forced labor Too much time has been lost in declamation and argument in peti- tions and remonstrances against British slavery. The cause of emanci- pation calls for something more decisive, more efcient than words. 1 Slavery and forced labor, two of humanitys oldest institutions, were among the dening characteristics of colonial practice and understand- ing their demise is vital for understanding decolonization. 2 Between 1500 and the mid-nineteenth century, What moved in the Atlantic in these centuries was predominantly slaves, the output of slaves, the in- puts to slave societies, and the goods and services purchased with the earnings onslave products. 3 Forcedlabor was alsoimportant inthe eco- nomic development of African colonies. Africans, forcefully recruited, were often the mainstay of the troops of colonial conquest, and forced laborers built the roads, bridges, and railways that took out the com- modities produced by forced labor. Since colonizers were too few or unwilling to do the work required to maintain and expand colonial holdings, and the colonized often wanted little or nothing to do with the colonizer, none of these colonies wouldhave enduredwithout unfree 1 Elizabeth Heyrick, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition; Or, an Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West Indian Slavery (London pamphlet 1824), quoted in Claire Midgley, Slave Sugar Boycotts, Female Activism and the Domestic Base of British Anti-Slavery Culture, Slavery and Abolition 13 (December 1996), 137162: 153 emphasis in the original. 2 In addition to the well-known slave trading and slavery institutions of France, Britain, Spain, and the United States that endured into the nineteenth century, Ancient Egyp- tians, Greeks, Romans, Sub-Saharan Africans, Asians, Aztecs, and some nations of Native North America practiced slavery (often getting slaves from conquest in war). But, as with colonialism, slavery was not the same in practice in all places at all times. 3 Barbara L. Solow, Introduction, in Barbara L. Solow, ed., Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 120: 1. 159 Argument and change in world politics labor. That it was legitimate for the main part of the required labor to be performed by slaves or forced laborers was the dominant belief and assumption for most of the era of colonialism. The abolition of slavery and amelioration of forced labor are rele- vant for understanding the end of colonialism in several respects. First, disagreements about the causes of abolition are both parallel to and a precursor of debates about the end of colonialism. 4 Second, colonialism consisted of more than one set of beliefs and practices, including, most importantly, the belief that those whowere colonizeddeservedandeven benetedfromtheir subjugation. Once these core beliefs andpractices of colonialismcame under widespreadcriticism they were denormalized and delegitimized colonialism itself was vulnerable to denormaliza- tion and delegitimation. Third, the demise of slavery and forced labor signicantly alteredthe institutionof colonialisminways that were gen- erally unanticipated, even by the advocates of change. Though colonial- ism remained in many instances protable for colonizers, protability diminished with the end of slavery and forced labor, and some of the economic incentive for having colonies was undermined. Further, the political fortunes of colonial interests declined as their economic clout waned. And, as long as colonialism included slavery and forced labor, large police forces were required to make those systems work in the face of slaves and forced laborers resistance and rebellion. With the end of slavery and decline of forced labor, the institutions which required the most police power, reasons for political domination and physical occu- pation, were diminished. Thus, if the roots of decolonization are in the demise of the practices of slavery and forced labor, and the cause of abo- lition was changing normative beliefs through ethical argument, then ethical arguments are a powerful underlying cause of decolonization. After being practiced in the West for thousands of years, legal aboli- tion of the slave trade andslavery was relatively quick, though abolition did not come all at once and there were even setbacks. For example, Britains policy on slavery took decades to resolve, even as Britain led other European and American states in abolishing slavery. British Chief Justice Lord Manseld ruled in 1772 that slaves brought to England 4 See, Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1944); Thomas Bender, ed., The Anti-Slavery Debate: Capitalismand Abolitionismas a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, eds., The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 160 Decolonizing bodies couldnot be forciblydeportedbytheir masters toa slave colony. This ran counter to a 1729 ruling by Judge Philip Yorke and Judge Charles Talbot that a slave could be forcibly returned from England to the colonies. Britain regulated the slave trade to make it more humane in 1788 with Dolbens Act, reducing the number of slaves per ship to decrease mor- tality during voyages. 5 Both the US and Britain made the trade in slaves illegal in 1807. After British slave traders got out of the business, Spanish, Portuguese and other slavers took up most of the slack of the trade in the nineteenth century. It was only in 1833, with the Emancipation Act, that Britain formally abolished slavery in its colonies inthe West Indies, Mauritius, Cape of GoodHope, andCanada though it introduced an apprentice system in its place and emancipation followed four years later. But emancipation of British-held slaves in India and Ceylon did not occur for another decade. And, though Spain outlawed Indian slavery in the sixteenth century, it maintained African slavery well into the nineteenth century. The French allowed Indian and African slavery in their colonies in the Americas and when the Spanish took control of French Louisiana in 1769, Spain allowed Indian slaves to be kept in that territory. In 1792, Denmark, not then a signicant partic- ipant, decided to gradually outlaw the slave trade, to be accomplished over the course of ten years. Emancipation for Danish Caribbean slaves was granted in 1848. French policy was perhaps most vacillating. While the law did not initially allow African slaves in France, in 1716 the law was amended so that slaves could be brought to France. Revolutionary France, after proclaiming the Rights of Man, abolished slavery in 1794, reinstated slavery in 1802, abolished it again for a short time under Napoleon, and restored it in 1814. France outlawed the slave trade in 1821 and nally abolished slavery in 1848. The late history of slavery was characterized by both the rise of indus- trial capitalism and the increased articulation of the rights of slaves and of the obligations of masters to treat slaves better. I begin with a brief discussion of the economics of abolitionism and the economic argu- ments on the table during the anti-slavery movement and argue against a simple economic explanation for abolition. Economics generally favored keeping the slave trade and slavery in place. Slaves and forced laborers incrementally gained legal recognition and protections 5 Also in 1788, the House of Commons began an impeachment proceeding against the British proconsul of India, Warren Hastings, for violating his trust by committing injus- tices against the people of India. 161 Argument and change in world politics that were gradually enforced before the abolition of both practices, and well before industrialization took hold in the colonies. Rather than economic forces, it was the movements to end the slave trade and abolish slavery that worked to change beliefs, interests, and even the capabilities of the pro-slave forces. The normative and consti- tutive beliefs which supported slavery and forced labor were gradually undermined and new, more egalitarian, beliefs supplanted previous be- liefs. Identity and role beliefs also changed. Where once good social entities kept slaves or used forced labor for the purpose of uplifting the undeveloped, beliefs reversed: only bad social entities used slav- ery and forced labor. The process that led to belief change was ethical argument, which mobilized individuals to form and join social move- ments to change the domestic political and international conditions that supported slavery. After abolition, the anti-slavery movement turned its attention to forced labor. Like slavery, forced labor was gradually regulated in the nineteenth century, with abolition of forced labor fol- lowing in the early and mid-twentieth century. The abolition of slavery and forced labor were gradual processes that began with denormaliza- tion and delegitimation, then regulation, and ultimately the abolition of unfree labor. Slavery Economics of abolition Were the slave trade and slavery protable? Did the institutions end because they became less protable? These questions are still hotly de- bated among economic historians and, to answer them, it is important to understand the complex role of slavery in colonial economies. Three modes of production were common in colonies and slave soci- eties after 1500: simple extraction of raw materials such as animal pelts, timber, and mineral wealth; plantation farming; and manufacturing. All three required labor that was in extremely short supply if natives avoided Europeans or were killed by disease and war, and if work- ers from the metropole were reluctant to move to the colonies. Slavery and forced labor do not work well for hunting and timber harvesting when it is easy for workers to escape into forests where they can subsist. Compulsory labor does work for mining, farming, manufacturing, and for public works such as road building. Land was abundant in the New World while labor for expansion and development was scarce. At the same time that Native American 162 Decolonizing bodies populations were diminished by Spanish conquest and literally deci- mated by disease (including measles, plague, typhus, and small-pox), the settlers demand for labor grew with their appetite for gold, silver, wood, road-building and portage. There was little incentive for free people to work for others if they could work for themselves, and until the nineteenth century, Europeans did not ock in droves to the Americas. Only in the 1840s did the net migration of free persons to the New World nally exceed the forced migration of slaves. 6 The Spanish, andthenother colonizers, enslavedtens of thousands of Native Americans, a practice that began almost as soon as the rst explorers arrived. As natives died in epidemics, more were captured from areas where they still lived in large numbers and moved to meet the demand for unfree labor. But as Native Americans died at too great a rate, or ran off, the initially more expensive African slave labor became more attrac- tive to colonizers and importation of African slaves began even before Native Americanslaverywas outlawed. Later, East Indian, Chinese, and Irish indentured laborers were imported, gradually at rst, to supple- ment African slave and forced labor in the Americas. In many places in the Americas, especially in the Caribbean, African andNative American slaves often exceeded 50 percent of the population, and in some colonies, slaves were more than 90 percent of colonial populations. 7 However, since the African slave population in the Americas was usually not self-sustaining more male slaves were brought to the Americas from Africa (men were worth more on the block), infant mor- talitywas highamongslaves, andsuicide byslaves was not uncommon slave economies depended on continuing to extract slaves from Africa. In 1713, provisions in the Treaty of Utrecht between England and Spain granted England a monopoly on the African slave trade for thirty years, with monarchs of both countries receiving a quarter of the prots of the trade, and the British expected to pay a duty to Spain for each imported slave. The monopoly ended in 1750, and the Royal African Company, charged with carrying out the trade, went bankrupt. 8 There- after, the British slave trade was privatized, though still subsidized by the Crown. A new holding company, granted an annual sum of 10,000, 6 DavidEltis, Economic Growthandthe Endingof the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 24. Also see Solow, Introduction. 7 See Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, Appendix C, pp. 353364. 8 See W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 16381870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), p. 3. 163 Argument and change in world politics maintained the forts necessary for African slavery. Any trader, as long as they paid a small fee ( 2) to the government for the use of African ports could legally engage in the trade. 9 By the mid-eighteenth century, Britain dominated the slave trade. Estimates vary, but from the 1500s to 1870, between 9 million and 10 million people were transported to North and South America by the major British, Portuguese, French, US, Dutch, and Danish slave car- riers. Not all are counted in this gure. No one knows for sure how many died after capture, en route to slave ships, and in crossing from Africa to the Americas in the middle passage. Records for mortality rates on the ships that succeeded in crossing (and not all did, whole ships went down) generally range from 4 percent to 55 percent, though much higher mortality rates were not unusual. In 1773, one Dutch slave ship, the Nooitgedacht, lost 89 percent of the 157 slaves aboardto a scurvy epidemic, though the mortality rates for Dutch slave traders were an av- erage of 17 percent. 10 French mortality rates in the eighteenth century averaged about 14 percent. 11 One English slaver, Captain Collingwood of the Zong threw his cargo of 132 diseased slaves overboard in order to claimthe insurance whichwouldnot have beenpayable if they haddied a natural death. 12 In the last century of the trade, however, mortality aboard ship was declining for slaves (although not for the crews) and in 1848 the British Foreign Ofce estimated mortality rates for slaves aboard ship of about 25 percent. 13 One assumes that, despite these risks, the slave trade must have been alluring to those Europeans and Americans who proted from it. The fortunes of Bristol and Liverpool were thus built upon the bodies of tens of thousands of negroes. . . . The prots of the Round Trip, as it came to be called, made it the most paying of all regular trade routes. 9 Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 14401870 (NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 265. 10 Johannes Postma, Mortality in the Dutch Slave Trade, in Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, eds., The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Academic Press, 1979), pp. 239260: 252253. 11 Herbert S. Klein and Stanley L. Engerman, A Note on Mortality in the French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century, in Gemery and Hogendorn, eds., Uncommon Market, pp. 261272. 12 Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and The Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Frank Cass, (1949) 1968), p. 8. 13 Mortality rates for the white crews were generally higher than for slaves both before and after reforms on the condition of slave transport. See Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), especially pp. 268, 276 and Postma, Mortality in the Dutch Slave Trade. 164 Decolonizing bodies It was commonly divided into three passages. On the outward pas- sage [from Britain] the cargo consisted of textiles, hardware, alcohol and antiquated rearms. These were traded on the [African] coast for slaves, who were shipped to America and the West Indies in the no- torious Middle Passage. The principal cargoes taken on there for the homeward passage were sugar, tobacco and rum. 14 Though protability of the slave trade varied with demand, trans- portation, and insurance costs, mortality of slaves on ships, and the costs of repressing slave resistance and rebellions on ships it was, overall, extremely protable. While the gure of 30 percent prot is often cited, Roger Anstey conservatively calculates that British slave traders averaged closer to 10 percent prots for the period 1760 to 1810, when the trade was at its peak. 15 Christopher Lloyd suggests that it was possible for British slavers to net as much as 60,000 in a single voyage. 16 Protability and demand for the slave trade may have been higher in markets where slave populations were not self-sustaining and hadtobe bolsteredbycontinuingimports fromAfrica. Bythe eighteenth century, female slaves were reproducing at rates in the US that could sustain and enlarge the slave population, thereby decreasing US de- mand for imported slaves. But demand for imported slaves remained high in the Caribbean and South America, where female slaves gen- erally were far fewer in proportion to male slaves (e.g. in Cuba one- third of slaves were female), and slave populations were generally not self-sustaining. 17 British colonies in the West Indies depended heavily on slave labor for production of exports in the eighteenth century. Eric Williams argues that slavery and the other legs of the triangular trade of humans and 14 Lloyd, The Navy and The Slave Trade, p. 5. 15 Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 17601810 (London: Macmillan, 1975) pp. 4647. E. Phillip LeVeen, The British Slave Trade Suppression Poli- cies, 18211865 (New York: Arno Press, 1977), p. 22 calculates that slave trade prots were 8.8 percent in the Caribbean in 1800. But prot was never the sole justication given by advocates. British admirals claimed that the slave trade was a valuable way of training seamen who would be available at times of war. On the other hand, Wilberforce showed that the Slave Trade was not so much a nursery as the graveyard of seamen, since the mortality aboard slave ships was well beyond all comparison greater than that on board vessels engaged on other trades, and the hardbitten seamen pressed fromthat type of ship were more of a hindrance than a help on board a man-of-war. Lloyd, The Navy and The Slave Trade, p. 10. 16 Lloyd, The Navy and The Slave Trade, p. 6. 17 Arthur F. Corwin, Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 18171886 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), p. 15. 165 Argument and change in world politics goods among Africa, the West Indies, and Britain, made an enormous contribution to Britains industrial development. The prots from this trade fertilized the entire productive system of the country. 18 Thus, Britishanti-slave policy inthe nineteenthcentury does not seemto make sense economically because, as David Eltis argues, In 1800, if one were to argue in terms of economic self-interest, the British should have been actively encouraging the slave trade and slave settlements throughout the world. Such a policy would have been highly effective in achieving national goals as laid down by the amalgam of London merchants and landed gentry who dominated British government at this time. It would have best served the aims of manufacturers and wage earners alike. 19 Furthermore, when its policy toward the slave trade changed, British efforts to suppress the international slave trade were enormously costly. Not only were slave economies doing better than non-slave economies, the British government paid for suppression of the trade. Three squadrons of naval patrols on the east and west coasts of Africa and in Latin America were involved in slave trade suppression. Naval patrols alone by the British Africa Squadron (based off the west coast of Africa) cost hundreds of thousands of pounds annually, and although the number of ships on station varied with Britains other uses for naval power (for instance, the Crimean War) by the 1840s, when the Africa Squadron was at its peak, Britain often devoted over 10 percent of its naval manpower and between a sixth and a quarter of its warships to suppressing slave trafc. 20 From 1811 to 1870, the Africa Squadron alone cost 6.8 million in direct expenses and some 5,000 seamen and of- cers died, mostly of malaria, in suppression duty. 21 The cost of main- taining the Africa Squadron far exceeded the value of Britains annual trade with Africa. 22 Britains total direct costs from 1810 to 1870 for slave trade suppression, including bounties for naval crews, the special court at Sierra Leone, compensationfor wrongful arrests, andthe money 18 Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, p. 105. 19 Eltis, Economic Growth, p. 6. 20 Ethan Nadelmann, Global Prohibition Regimes: The Evolution of Norms in Interna- tional Society, International Organization 44 (Autumn 1990), 479526: 492. Also see Eltis, Economic Growth, pp. 9293. 21 LeVeen, British Slave Trade Suppression Policies, p. 78 and Lloyd, The Navy and The Slave Trade, p. xi. 22 Howard Temperley, British Antislavery, 18331870 (London: Longman, 1972), p. 45; Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, p. 171. 166 Decolonizing bodies paid to other governments to obtain treaties to end the trade, were at least 13.9 million. 23 Although the increased cost to slave traders of doing business cannot be estimated with great condence, British suppression certainly made the slave trade more difcult and costly. Eltis estimates that the costs of acquiring slaves rose between 8 and 11 percent after the British set about curbing the slave trafc to the Americas. 24 In fact, because slaves could command such a high price, protability grew even under suppression, until the Brazilian and Cuban slave imports halted at mid-century. If a slaver could make it to Cuba in the period between 1856 and 1865, prots averaged over 90 percent, though prots of around 20 and 30 percent were more common for slaves sold in Cuba or southern Brazil between the 1820s and 1850. 25 Such high rates of prot are no surprise to students of sanctions and trade embargoes: those who are caught can lose all while those who succeed in busting embargoes can command premium prices. In sum, slave trading was, until very late, a lucrative venture for slave traders. The slave trade even remained protable after Britain began to suppress the trade, because though risks of capture increased, over time, the price of slaves grew. The slave trade did not end because it was no longer protable. Indeed, the price to Britain, which led the effort to abolish the trade, was extremely high. Rather, the slave trade ended because it was suppressed for normative reasons and because after abolition demand for slaves ended. But what about slave labor itself ? Did slavery become less protable? Arguments stressing economic causes for the end of slavery claim that slavery became too costly or was gradually outmoded with improve- ments in agricultural production and early industrialization. Economic arguments also suggest the ways that slave resistance, including slave revolts, and the costs of supervision and work slow-downs by slaves, increased the costs of slavery so that wage labor became relatively more attractive. 23 LeVeen, British Slave Trade Suppression Policies, pp. 7880. Eltis, who does a more com- prehensive accounting than LeVeen, argues that direct costs of suppression to the British government were much higher. Eltis, Economic Growth, pp. 9194. Also see Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (NewYork: Longman Group, 1975). Other countrys navies patrolled the coast for slave ships, though they were not as effective as the British. 24 Eltis, Economic Growth, p. 140. Indeed, after 1807, because of the prots involved, British merchants participated in the trade in other ways, for instance in outtting the ships for slavers. Parliamentary laws after this point gradually constrained and criminalized this activity. 25 Ibid., p. 161 and LeVeen, British Slave Trade Suppression Policies, p. 22. 167 Argument and change in world politics As with the economic gains of the slave trade, the protability of slave labor is disputed. Slavery could be more or less protable depending on a number of factors, including the cost of acquiring slaves and the productivity of slave labor versus the costs of feeding, housing, and training slaves. The costs of fending off slave rebellions and revolts also varied. Need for repression was constant, although the aggregate costs of repression probably declined as slave revolts decreased. The success- ful slave revolt inHaiti in1791, whichresultedinFrenchdecolonization, was certainly frightening to slave holders throughout the New World, but it was the exception. Large-scale slave revolts in English colonies, such as the maroon rebellion in Jamaica in 1739, seemed to be declining in the Americas prior to the establishment of abolition movements, and only increased during the decades (17901832) when abolitionists were already most active. 26 Again, the crucial case is probably Britain, which was at the forefront of the industrial revolution and whose huge West Indian empire de- pended on slave labor. Did Britain abolish slavery because it was no longer protable as a means of production? If free labor were less ex- pensive than slave labor in the British colonies, it should have been so all along, and slave systems should never have taken hold on such a large scale in the rst place. (And the price of obtaining slave labor for other colonial powers did not grow until after Britain moved to abolish its part in the trade.) Still, early on, British abolitionists stressed the eco- nomic benets of free labor, and the laissez-faire policies championed by Adam Smith and others stressed morality and used the rhetoric of free- dom current in Europe after the French Revolution and the war against Napoleon. 27 Lord Palmerston, in 1842, argued that anti-slavery activity brought both economic and moral reward: Let no man imagine that those treaties for the suppression of the slave trade are valuable only as being calculated to promote the great 26 Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Per- spective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 100103. Some of the largest revolts were fueled by news of abolitionist activity: revolts in Barbados in 1816 involved some 20,000 slaves, Demerara in 1823 involved 30,000 slaves, and Jamaica 183132 involved 60,000 slaves. These revolts were ruthlessly squashed by colonists who killed 400, 250, and 540 slaves respectively during or after these revolts. Michael Craton, Emancipa- tion from Below? The Role of British West Indies Slaves in the Emancipation Movement, 181634, in Jack Hayward, ed., Out of Slavery: Abolition and After (London: Frank Cass, 1985), pp. 110131. 27 See James Walvin, Freedom and Slavery and the Shaping of Victorian Britain, in Paul E. Lovejoy and Nicholas Rogers, eds., Unfree Labour in the Development of the Atlantic World (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1994), pp. 246259. 168 Decolonizing bodies interests of humanity, and as tending to rid mankind of a foul and detestable crime. Such was indeed their great object and their chief merit. But in this case as in many others, virtue carries its own reward; and if the nations of the world could extirpate this abominable trafc, and if the vast population of Africa could by that means be left free to betake themselves to peace and innocent trade, the greatest commer- cial benet would accrue, not to England only, but to every civilized nation which engages in maritime commerce. The slave trade treaties therefore are indirectly treaties for the encouragement of commerce. 28 But most people didnt think abolition would bring growth. They feared just the opposite, and those concerns proved correct. For Britain, the toughest anti-slavery crusading state, slavery was quite protable even at the time it was abolished by Parliament. The most lucrative and fastest-growing segments of the colonial economy sugar, coffee, and tobacco depended on slave labor. Dependence on slave labor for British colonial production of cotton, which fed Britains textile mills, and sugar, in fact grew over the course of the abolition movement. For instance, slaves providedlabor for 70 percent of Britains cottonindustry in 1787; by abolition in 1838, slaves/apprentices provided 90 percent of the labor. 29 As Seymour Drescher notes, the world economy as a whole seems to have been as optimal for expanding the Atlantic slave system at the end of British slavery in the 1830s as it was at the beginning of popular abolitionism in the 1780s. 30 And abolition was economically costly. Productivity in British West Indian economies immediately declined following abolition, while Cuba andBrazil, whichstill practicedslavery, hadrobust economies and their demand for slaves grew. Only high duties on Cuban and Brazil- ian sugar somewhat protected British West Indian planters, and those were reduced after 1846. Declining competitiveness after abolition ex- plains why British West Indian planters eventually joined international abolitionist efforts. 31 For Drescher, British abolition is thus paradoxi- cal. The real economic paradox of abolition is that in one major re- gion after another the British colonies, the American South, Cuba, and Brazil political power had to intervene to constrict or to abolish major slave systems whose economic advantages remained intact well after the transformation of British abolitionism into a world human rights 28 Quoted in ibid., pp. 252253. 29 Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, p. 7. 30 Ibid., p. 4. 31 LeVeen, British Slave Trade Suppression Policies, p. 69; Corwin, Spain and Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, pp. 53 and 60. 169 Argument and change in world politics movement. 32 Similarly, David Eltis argues, since land was still abun- dant andlabor inthe NewWorldremainedscarce at the time of abolition, there was a profound incompatibility between economic self-interest and anti-slavery policy. 33 The paradox of abolition for Britain is further heightened once one factors in the costs of compensation to slave holders for abolition. The British government paid colonial slave owners 16.7 million in 1836 and 4.1 millionin1837 incompensationfor emancipation. Spending oncom- pensation in 1836, at 25.6 percent of total government expenditures, ex- ceeded total spending for the army, ordnance, and the navy combined. And though spending on compensation for slave owners in 1837 was much less, 7.6 percent of total government expenditures, it was close to total British spending on its navy for that year. 34 ManyinFrance whowere contemporaryobservers of Britishabolition thought British policy in freeing almost 800,000 slaves was folly, and the pro-slavery French emphasized the decline in British revenue and pro- ductivity that followed emancipation in the West Indies. One French pro-slavery advocate argued in 1844 that production in the English West Indies had fallen by more than a third. 35 The president of the Council of Ministers, Adolphe Thiers, told the Chamber of Deputies in 1840 that British emancipation has considerably diminished work and production. 36 Although French abolitionists said these claims were ex- aggerated, as Lawrence Jennings argues, pro-slavery forces in France nevertheless used the British economic difculties following emanci- pation to bolster their cause, hoping perhaps that practical arguments would trump ethical ones. 37 Changes in modes of production could explain the demise of slavery in such a relatively short period (if colonial economies had, in fact, been subject to dramatic changes in production), but such changes do not account for moral or religious arguments about the evil of slavery. If slavery were no longer protable, there would have been little reason to outlaw it. And, if slavery were uneconomical there would have been little opposition to abolition; rational actors would simply have acted to 32 Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, p. 5. Emphasis in the original. 33 Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, p. 15. 34 Spending in 1836 on the army, ordnance, and navy totaled 11.7 million; spending on the navy for 1837 was 4.2 million. Calculations based on gures in B.R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 587, 595. 35 Joseph Napol eon Ney, quoted in Lawrence C. Jennings, French Reaction to British Slave Emancipation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), p. 76. 36 Quoted in ibid., pp. 7889. 37 Ibid., p. 206. 170 Decolonizing bodies use the more efcient forms of free labor. As Martin Klein argues: Most slave systems were functioningwell whenslaverycame under attack. 38 Indeed, during the period in which Spain used slave labor and Britain didnot, Spanishcolonial resistance inCuba to Britishabolitionismgrew, with Cubans insisting that abolition would bring economic ruin. 39 As Martin Klein suggests, though slavery was used and abandoned, and used again through history, something different occurred in the eighteenth century. There were times in many parts of the world when slavery declined, often replaced or absorbed by other forms of exploitation. During the late medieval period, slavery disappeared in northern Europe, and in seventeenth-century Russia it was absorbed within a rather harsh form of serfdom. The use of slaves was declining in South-East Asia during the nineteenth century, most strikingly in Thailand. There is no evidence, however that slavery was seriously attacked in any part of the world before the eighteenth century. 40 Thus, declining prots cannot explain the end of slavery. Something else was going on. Growing belief in the greater protability and moral virtues of free labor, and the belief that slavery was wrong, explain the outlawing of slavery. Abolitionists made persuasive ethical arguments. Constructing and deconstructing slavery The argument for slavery in Western culture was grounded in the an- cient Aristotelian belief that some humans were natural slaves. Voltaire said of black people, whom he called animals, that it was a seri- ous question whether they are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from them. 41 French dictionaries in the eighteenth century frequently dened negroes as slaves which are extracted from the African coast. 42 In 1858, an American scholar of slave law, T. R. R. Cobb, wrote: this inquiry into the physical, mental, and moral development of the negro race seems to point them clearly, as peculiarly tted for a labo- rious class. The physical frame is capable of great and long-continued 38 Martin A. Klein, Slavery, the International Labour Market and the Emancipation of Slaves inthe NineteenthCentury, inLovejoy andRogers, eds., Unfree Labour, pp. 197229: 212. 39 See Corwin, Spain and Abolition of Slavery in Cuba. 40 Klein, Slavery, p. 201. 41 QuotedinWilliamB. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 15301880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 88. 42 Quoted in ibid., p. 145. 171 Argument and change in world politics exertion. Their mental capacity renders them incapable of successful self-development, and yet adapts them for the direction of the wiser race. Their moral character renders them happy, peaceful, contented and cheerful in a status that would break the spirit and destroy the energies of the Caucasian or the native American. 43 Advocates of slavery and the trade also argued that the practices ben- eted the enslaved and the society from which slaves were taken. An eighteenth-century pamphlet said, In certain vast regions of the Africa [sic] Continent, where the Arts are almost as little known of rural as of civil cultivation, inhabitants grow faster than the means of sustaining them; and Humanity itself is obliged to transmit the supernumeraries, as objects of trafc, to more enlightened, or less populous countries; which, standing in constant needof their labour, receive theminto prop- erty, protectionandemployment. 44 Later, the EnglishmanBoswell said: To abolish [slavery] . . . would be extreme cruelty to the African savage, a portionof whomit saves frommassacre or intolerable bondage intheir own country, and introduced into a much happier life, especially now when their passage to the West Indies, and their treatment there, is humanely regulated. 45 Not all agreed with these views, even in the eighteenth century. The American Quaker anti-slavery activist Anthony Benezet arguedthat the slave trade hurt Africans and he disputed the arguments that slavery was natural in Africa. The . . . natives were an inoffensive people, who, when civilly used, tradedamicably with the Europeans . . . And. . . there is no reason to think otherwise, but that they generally lived in peace amongst themselves. 46 Some philosophers and political commentators portrayed slavery as a corrupt and corrupting institution. In 1748 Montesquieu wrote, The state of slavery is in its own nature bad. It is neither useful to the master nor to the slave; not to the slave because he can do nothing through a motive of virtue; nor to the master, because by having an unlimited 43 T.R.R. Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America: To Which is Prexed, An Historical Sketch of Slavery, 1858 quoted in Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 16191860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 18. 44 Stephen Fuller, Remarks on the Resolutions of the West India Planters and Merchants (1789) quoted in Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, p. 293. 45 Quoted in Lloyd, The Navy and The Slave Trade, pp. 67. 46 Anthony Benezet, Some Historical Account of Guinea, its Situation, Produce, and General Disposition of its Inhabitants with an Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Slave Trade, its Nature, and Lamentable Effects (London: (1771) 1788), pp. 5051, quoted in Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, p. 216. 172 Decolonizing bodies authority over his slaves he insensibly accustoms himself to the want of all moral virtues, and thence becomes erce, hasty, severe, choleric, voluptuous, and cruel. 47 Rousseau also argued vociferously against slavery, turning Aristotle on his head in The Social Contract, by saying that no matter howwe look at it, the right of enslavement is invalid, not only because it is illegitimate, but also because it is absurd and mean- ingless. The words enslavement andright are mutuallycontradictory; they exclude each other. 48 And Tom Paine in 1775 noted that Ameri- cans complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them while they hold so many hundreds of thousands in slavery. 49 Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, made a strong economic argument against slavery and in favor of free labor. The ex- perience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done byslaves, thoughit appears tocost onlytheir maintenance, is inthe end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. And while Smith argued that free labor was generally superior to slave labor, he nonetheless implied slavery was based on a natural human impulse. The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing morties him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen. 50 Though Smith is generally understood to say that slavery was never protable, he did argue that in some cases slavery could be extremely protable. In our [British] sugar colonies . . . the whole work is done by slaves, and in our tobacco colonies, a very great part of it. In this instance: The prots of a sugar-plantation in any of our West Indian colonies are generally much greater than those of any other cul- tivation that is known either in Europe or America: And the prots of a tobacco plantation, though inferior to sugar, are superior to those of corn . . . Both can afford the expense of slave cultivation, but sugar can afford it still better than tobacco. 51 47 Quoted in Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, p. 103. 48 Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract or the Principles of Political Right in Rousseau, The Essential Rousseau, trans. Lowell Bair (New York: Times Mirror, 1974), book 1, ch. IV, p. 15. 49 Paine quoted in Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 220. 50 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1994), book II, ch. II, p. 418. 51 Ibid., pp. 418419. 173 Argument and change in world politics Economic arguments became increasingly important, but given the culture of Europe inthis era, Christianitywas the primarytable onwhich to represent slavery andjudge arguments about it. Building on the argu- ments of those who advocated better treatment for slaves, abolitionists tried to persuade the majority that slavery was not natural after all, and that it ought to be abandoned because it was immoral, against the plan of Gods Providence. The Quaker Benezet suggested that slavery was inconsistent with Christian principles, arguing that slaves were undoubtedly the children of the same Father . . . for whom Christ died. 52 British and American Quakers and evangelical abolitionists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Granville Sharp, at- tempted to sufciently prove that slavery was ever detestable in the sight of God. 53 Sharp used the history of the Israelites as evidence against slavery, saying that they were reminded of their Bondage in Egypt: for so the almighty Deliverer from Slavery warned his people to limit and moderate their bondage, which the Law permitted, by the remembrance of their own former bondage in a foreign land, andby a remembrance also of his great mercy in delivering them from that bondage: and he expressly referred them to their own feelings, as they themselves had experienced the intolerable yoke of Egyptian Tyranny! Thou shalt not oppress a Stranger; for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt (Exodus 23:9). And again: Thou shalt remember that thou wast a Bond-man in the land of Egypt, and the Lord thy God redeemed thee (Deuteronomy 15:15). 54 Evangelical British abolitionists warned that failure to abolish the slave trade was against Gods order and could lead to divine retribu- tion on both a personal and national level. 55 Abolitionists argued that the American Revolution and the later war against France were divine 52 Benezet, Some Historical Account of Guinea, p. 79, quoted in Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, p. 214. 53 Granville Sharp, The Law of Retribution (London: 1776), pp. 23 quoted in Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, p. 185. 54 Granville Sharp, The Just Limitation of Slavery in the Laws of God (London: 1776), pp. 67, quoted in Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, p. 188. 55 In line with their views, evangelical abolitionists often favored other benevolent social policies. For example, the prominent English abolitionist William Wilberforce, a mem- ber of parliament, was also against hanging, in favor of penal reform, and argued for a more generous welfare provision for the poor. In England, Antislavery was part of a religious, philanthropic andreformcomplex whichembracedmissionary activity, temper- ance, peace, free trade and limited political reform. David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 17801860 (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 6. 174 Decolonizing bodies punishment against Britain. 56 In 1807, James Stephen, a leading aboli- tionist, argued that the ravages of Napoleonic wars were divine wrath for Englands failure to give up the slave trade despite their knowledge that it was wrong. Who are the people that have provoked God thus heinously, but the same who are among all the nations of the earth, the most eminently indebted to his bounty? He has given to us an unexamined portion of civil liberty; and we in return drag his rational creatures into a most se- vere andperpetual bondage. Social happiness has beenshoweredupon us with singular profusion; and we tear fromoppressed millions every social, nay almost every other comfort. In short, we cruelly reverse in our treatment of these unhappy brethren, all the gracious dealings of Godtowards ourselves. For our plentywe give themwant; for our ease, intolerable toil; for our wealth, privation of the right of property; for our equal laws, unbridledviolence andwrong. Science shines upon us, with her meridian beams; yet we keepthese degradedfellow-creatures in the deepest shades of ignorance and barbarity. Morals and manners have happily distinguishedus fromthe other nations of Europe; yet we create and cherish in two other quarters of the globe, an unexampled depravity of both. A contrast still more opprobrious remains. God has blessed us with the purest effulgence of the Gospel; and yet we dishon- our by our slave trade the christian name; and perpetuate the darkness of paganism among millions of our fellow creatures. 57 These arguments, which denormalized, delegitimized, and pro- claimed the trade and slavery against Britains national interests and identity were powerful precisely because of their religious ground- ing. Not surprisingly, much of the argument occurred among theolo- gians. Granville Sharp, for instance, met with twenty-two of twenty-six bishops in 1779 in order to press his anti-slavery arguments and he was apparently well received. 58 In response, pro-slavery forces mounted powerful arguments. For example, some religious gures cited support for slavery in the Bible. One such attempt, by the Reverend Raymond Harris in 1788 was titled: Scriptural Researches on the Licitness of the Slave Trade. Shewing its Confor- mity with the Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion. Delineated in the Sacred Writing of the Word of God. 59 British advocates of slavery at the 56 See Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, p. 193; Turley, Culture of English Antislavery, pp. 2829; 205. 57 James Stephen, The Dangers of the Country (London: 1807), pp. 195, 212 quoted in Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, pp. 195196. 58 Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, p. 246. 59 Turley, Culture of English Antislavery, p. 23. 175 Argument and change in world politics turn of the nineteenth century also argued that abolition would give trade and military advantages to Britains enemies, especially France. 60 Abolitionist movement strategy Some abolitionists responded to the concern about British interests by suggesting that emancipation itself could follow slowly after abolition of the trade. 61 But the strategy and tactics of the movement were not self-evident, and British abolitionists debated whether to go for total abolition and risk losing all (immediatists), or to start with more mod- est goals, namely rst curbing the trade and then seeking abolition (gradualists). The ofcial name of one London group illustrates their tactical and strategic vision: The London Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Dominions. Their tactics for rousing public ire and pressuring the government included letters to prominent ofcials, petitions, direct appeals, pamphleteering, and mass meetings. A gradual approach to slave questions is evident even among those who became the most ardent advocates of abolition. Quakers, while at rst loathe to bring up an issue that might divide the community of Friends, since some Quakers favored and practiced slavery, took pro- gressively strong positions against the trade and slavery. For example, at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1758, members decided to ex- clude from the business of the church any Friends who bought or sold slaves and urged members to free any slaves they had. In 1776, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting disowned anyone who still had slaves. Other Yearly Meetings had also taken up the question of slavery, and the American Quakers turned to lobbying their colonial governments and, after Independence, the United States government, to end the slave trade and slavery. 62 Further, in an early example of transnational acti- vity by a non-governmental organization, Anthony Benezet and other American Quakers, notably John Woolman, attempted to inuence English Quakers against slavery, for instance in pamphlets such as Benezets 1766 A Caution to Great Britain and her Colonies in a Short Rep- resentation of the Calamitous State of the Enslaved Negroes in the British Dominions, which was published in London. 63 The Pennsylvania Abo- lition Society and other American Quakers corresponded with English 60 Ibid., p. 26. 61 Ibid., p. 28. 62 Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, pp. 211212. 63 Ibid., p. 214. 176 Decolonizing bodies abolitionists, feeding themnews of their tactics in both state legislatures and the US Congress. 64 Benezet and Woolman made frequent business trips to England in the 1760s and 1770s. English Quakers, following the American lead, established an anti-slave trade committee in London in 1783, writing articles for newspapers, distributing anti-slave trade tracts, such as the Case of Our Fellow Creatures, The Oppressed Africans (1783), andlobbiedagainst slavery, presenting their rst anti-slave trade public petition to Parliament in 1783. In May 1787, the Committee for the Abolitionof the Slave Trade (or the LondonCommittee) was formed, with Quakers comprising nine of its twelve founders. 65 The movement also included members of the legislature, notably William Wilberforce, who put the question of abolishing the trade to Parliament for many years before it nally succeeded in 1807. Both American and British anti-slavery movements, dominated by upper-class men, believed persuasion would succeed, as the minutes of a meeting in July 1787 of the London Committee show. Our im- mediate aim is, by diffusing knowledge of the subject, and particular modes of procuring and treating slaves, to interest men of every de- scription in the Abolition of the Trafc; but especially those from whom any alteration must proceed the Members of our Legislature. 66 The London Committee published and distributed thousands of copies of such titles as Thomas Clarksons Summary View of The Slave Trade and John Newtons Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade (both 1788). In ad- dition, the London Committee printed and distributed copies of a slave ship plan and sections (a dramatic image of slaves packed horizontally, side by side and head to toe) to members of parliament and copies of relevant parliamentary debates to the public. 67 In addition, parliamen- tary petition campaigns were coordinated by the London Committee and abolitionists in Manchester. In early 1788, 102 petitions with about 60,000 signatures were sent to Parliament by abolitionists. In 1792, 519 petitions with about 400,000 signatures were presented to the House of Commons from all over England, more petitions than had been sent on 64 J. R. Oldeld, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade, 17871807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 5153. 65 James Walvin, AnAfricans Life: The Life andTimes of OlaudahEquiano, 17451797(London: Cassell, 1998), p. 155; Oldeld, Popular Politics, p. 42. 66 Quoted in Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, p. 255. 67 The Committee nanced printing of 8,000 ship plans in 17881789 alone. Oldeld, Popular Politics, p. 166. 177 Argument and change in world politics any subject in a single session. 68 The petitions, rootedin Christian belief, focused on the humanity of the slaves and the inhumanity of the trade, often called Britains participation in the trade a national disgrace. 69 In 1788 British abolitionists sought to reassure the public that the movements aim was only to end the trade, not slavery itself: how- ever acceptable a temperate and gradual abolition of slavery might be to the wishes of Individuals it never formed any part of the Plan of this Society. 70 Yet advocates of immediate abolition, such as Elizabeth Heyrick quoted at the opening of this chapter, argued that petition- ing, declamation and argument were insufcient and other tactics hopefully more efcient than words notably boycott, must be used. British and American Quakers rst practiced personal abstention from slave produced products in the 1760s. Later, abstention grew into a movement tactic that not only well-educated upper-class males could participate in, but that encompassed women and members of other classes. In 17911792, and again from 1825 to 1829 British abolition- ists organized boycotts of sugar grown with slave labor. 71 Slave-grown produce was an important part of the English economy and, by 1800, tropical groceries, including sugar, comprised about 35 percent of the total value of imports to Britain and sugar was Britains largest im- port by value in the eighteenth century. 72 When British abolitionists set out to halt West Indian grown sugar consumption in 1791, within six months an estimated 100,000 people had stopped using sugar. 73 Later, Thomas Clarkson estimated that 300,000 people had stopped in 17911792. As Claire Midgleynotes, [t]his compares withthe estimated 390,000 (adult male) signatories to anti-slavery petitions in 1792. 74 In both the slave-grown sugar boycotts of 17911792 and 18251829, abo- litionists promoted the sugar grown in the East Indies by free labor, arguing that it wasnt tainted. If West Indian farmers were weakened at all economically by the boycotts, their inuence in Parliament may have suffered, though in 1823, the Anti-Slavery Society counted ve Lords and fourteen members of the House of Commons, while at least fty-six members had a personal interest in slavery. 75 68 See Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, p. 76 and Oldeld, Popular Politics, pp. 49 and 61. 69 See Oldeld, Popular Politics, pp. 115119. 70 Quoted in Temperley, British Anti-Slavery, p. 7. 71 Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, p. 79. 72 Midgley, Slave Sugar Boycotts. 73 Ibid., p. 146. 74 Ibid., p. 146. 75 WilliamA. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 18301865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 100. 178 Decolonizing bodies The transnational abolition movement also included slaves and free blacks, who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries described the conditions of slavery and articulated the reasons for abolition. By 1750 there were about 20,000 black people in England, and by the late eigh- teenth century, some were quite visible in the abolitionist movement. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century anti-slavery movements used pub- lished slave narratives, organized public forums for the live testimony of freedmen and escaped slaves, and circulated reports by journalists and abolitionists of the conditions of slaves as evidence that slavery was evil and that slaves deserved better treatment. In written and live testi- monies, both former slaves andwhite abolitionists portrayedthe brutal- ity of slavery in vivid language and with clear physical evidence. In the late eighteenth century, about twenty black abolitionists were active in England and the best known of this group included Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano. Equiano, for example, authored a 520 page book, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustava Vassa, the African (1789), toured Britain widely, and wrote for English papers. 76 In March 1788, Equiano petitioned Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III, on behalf of my African brethren for an end to the slave trade and for giving slaves the rights and situation of men. 77 Among the most famous former slave activists in the US during the nineteenth century were Nat Turner, Soujourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass, though narratives by many others were widely read and the live testimony of former slaves was often part of anti-slavery meetings. 78 Never before had slaves found a voice that slave holders and non-slave holders heard in relatively large numbers. The fact that slaves were participants in the discourse was doubly important because it facilitated the development of empathy between slave and non-slave and helped to break down the core belief held by many Europeans of the African as savage. Freed slaves and their descendents also began to criticize the larger institution of colonialism. 79 Eighteenth and early nineteenth-century advocates of abolition, whe- ther gradualists or immediatists, were really arguing two cases. First, 76 See Oldeld, Popular Politics, pp. 125 and 126. 77 Quoted in Walvin, An Africans Life, p. 156. 78 A selection of slave narratives is found in William L. Andrews and Henry Louis Gates, eds., Slave Narratives (New York: Library of America, 2000). 79 For example, the booklet by the Reverend James Theodore Holley, A Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race for Self-Government and Civilized Progress, as Demonstrated by the Historical Events of the Haytian Revolution and the Subsequent Acts of that People Since their National Independence (New Haven, CN: 1856). 179 Argument and change in world politics they argued for ending the slave trade on ethical grounds: it corrupted Africa and Africans and was evil, a sin, a wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade. 80 This was their most powerful argument a meta-argument on the nature of the good, about the virtues of slavery in the eyes of God and they succeeded in reframing the practice as being against Gods providence to the point that in 1806 Wilberforce was able to argue in Parliament that he found it unnecessary to refute the religious argu- ments given in favor of the slave trade since he could take it for granted that the scriptural basis for slavery hadbeendisproved. Indeed, among the various nal proofs of the purity and excellence of the religion we possess, it is not the least remarkable that not only is the practice of the Slave Trade forbidden, and the principle on which it proceeds held out for our abhorrence; but it is specically denounced as the worst of rob- bery, those concerned in it being branded as the stealers of men. 81 The abolitionists second argument, in response to pro-slave trade interests, was that it was practical to end the slave trade. Having essentially lost the meta-argument about the religious sanc- tion for slavery in the scriptures, advocates of the slave trade began to emphasize practical arguments. For example, in the 1806 Parliamen- tary debate, General Tarleton argued against outlawing the slave trade on several practical grounds. First, he claimed that the prosperity of Liverpool is intimately connected with the African Slave Trade and the amount that taxes fromLiverpool alone contributes to the public purse, is near 3 millions annually. 82 If Liverpool suffered, he argued, all ship- ping would be impaired, leading to serious negative consequences for the entire colonial empire. Tarleton also claimed that if the slave trade were ended the war with France would be hurt because government revenue would fall. Nor is this all: those who suffer will come to Parliament for compensa- tion for their losses. There will be no pretense for refusing such com- pensation, because, whatever may be said about the injustice or the inhumanity of this trade, it is not to be denied that it is a trade which has been carried on under the auspices of this House, and agreeably 80 Quoted in Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, p. 43. 81 Wilberforce quotedin Substance of the Debates on a Resolution for Abolishing the Slave Trade which was moved in the House of Commons 10th June 1806 and in the House of Lords 24th June 1806 (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968), pp. 2930. (Spelling has been made consistent with modern English). 82 Quoted in ibid., p. 11. 180 Decolonizing bodies to law; and if it is now to be abolished, all those who have carried it on must have their losses made up . . . and this compensation, I can assure his Majestys Ministers, will be very considerable in its amount. 83 Similarly, LordCastlereagh, while grantingthe desirabilityof abolishing the trade on moral grounds, questioned whether it was possible to do so. Indeed, he argued that the whole movement was counterproductive because without Britain the slave trafc will be conducted by others [France, Spain, and Portugal] under their ags, so that the trade will be carried on in a more inhuman manner hereafter than it is at present. 84 Castlereagh argued instead for using a gradually rising systemof duties to discourage the slave trade. Inresponse, abolitionists also deployedpractical arguments about the timing and economic risks of abolishing the slave trade. Wilberforce, for example, argued that Castlereaghs proposed duty on slave imports would not work. He asked, does not my noble friend recollect, that although during the time we have been discussing this subject, the price of slaves has increased 100 percent, that is to say from thirty to seventy pounds a head, a much larger increase than any duty which he would thinkimposing, yet that the number of slaves importedintothe Colonies has not diminished? 85 Many advocates of abolishing the trade, as part of their long-term strategy for abolition, were willing to put up with slavery for a time, thereby hoping to diffuse the arguments of those who said abolition wouldruinthecolonial economy. AbolishingtheBritishslavetrade, they claimed, would still be a signicant feat given the fact that at the peak of their involvement in the fty years prior to ending the slave trade, British slavers controlled50 percent of the slave trade. As Anstey writes, advocates of the gradual approach also claimedthat any economic dam- age caused by abolishing the trade could be minimized: With proper encouragement a slave population could reproduce itself, there would be no need for slave imports, and there was no threat to the plantation owner and to the West Indian plantation economy. 86 Abolitionists turned to the project of ending slavery after Parliament voted to end British participation in the slave trade. 87 In the years of the abolition movement, petitions organized by anti-slavery societies to 83 Quoted in ibid., p. 12. 84 Quoted in ibid., p. 17. 85 Quoted in ibid., pp. 3132. 86 Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, pp. 312313. 87 On the links and continuity between British and American anti-slavery organizing see Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Anti-Slavery Cooperation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972). 181 Argument and change in world politics the British parliament often outnumbered petitions for all other causes until slavery was abolished. 88 In 1823 the London Anti-Slavery Soci- ety pressed Parliament into urging West Indian colonial governments to reform slave practices, but planters resisted the efforts. 89 In 1825 the anti-slaverysocieties beganpublishingthe Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter (London) which included such articles as On the Demoralizing Inu- ence of Slavery (men accustomedto govern slaves are unt to manage free labourers). 90 Another article was The Question Calmly Consid- ered What will be the probable consequences, as affecting the pub- lic peace of the Colonies and the well-being of the Slaves themselves, of the early and entire extinction of Colonial Slavery, by an act of the British Parliament? 91 In the latter, abolitionists responded directly to pro-slavery arguments that emancipation would bring chaos. The evils which the colonists affect to dread, from such an emanci- pation of their slaves, are of two kinds rst civil insubordination, tumult, and disorder issuing in pillage, conagration, and massacre; and secondly, the deterioration of the slaves condition, and his return to all the miseries and privations of the savage state. In argument, it has been hitherto assumed by the colonists as indisputable, that such would necessarily be the consequence of an immediate or even very early emancipation of the slaves; and we must admit that not a few of those who are decided enemies of colonial slavery, both in its principle and practice, have far too readily yielded their assent to this unwar- ranted assumption. We call it unwarranted, because we are not aware of any attempt ever having been made to prove its truth. . . We are ac- quainted with no such evidence. We know even of no single case in which emancipation of slaves proceeding from the legal authorities of the state, and unresisted by violence on the part of the masters has led either to public disorder, or to the unhappiness and discomfort of the slave, or to the deterioration of his moral, intellectual, and political condition. If there be such a case, let it be stated and proved. 92 In the 1830s alone, several new organizations formed in Britain to work for abolition and emancipation and over 5,000 anti-slavery peti- tions were sent to Parliament in early 1833. 93 When Parliament passed the Emancipation Act in 1833, freeing 800,000 slaves in Mauritius, the 88 Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, pp. 59 and 9192. 89 Temperley, British Antislavery, p. 12. 90 Appearing in Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter 2 (January 1828), 161174: 164. 91 The Question Calmly Considered, Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter 3 (10 November 1830), 453475. 92 The Question Calmly Considered, pp. 454455, emphasis in the original. 93 Roger Anstey, Religion and British Slave Emancipation, in David Eltis and James 182 Decolonizing bodies West Indies, Canada, and the Cape of Good Hope, abolitionists were disappointed in its provisions for an apprenticeship system of four and six years andfor compensationto slave owners, so they kept organizing, ultimately securing an early end to the apprenticeship system in 1838. The BritishandForeignSocietyfor Universal Abolitionof NegroSlavery and the Slave Trade was founded in 1834; the Central Negro Eman- cipation Committee founded in 1837 became the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1839. Also founded in 1839 were the Aborigines Protection Society and the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and the Civilization of Africa. There were about 100 local chapters of national anti-slavery organizations in Britain between 1839 and 1869. 94 Anti-slavery activists formed the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London in 1839 for the universal extinction of slavery and the slave trade. A descendent of previous anti-slavery organizations, the groups constitution stated that the extinction of Slavery and the Slave-trade will be attained most effectively by employment of those means which are of a moral, religious, and pacic character. The means to be employed were to be ethical andpractical argument and economic leverage: 1. To circulate, both at home and abroad, accurate information on the enormities of the Slave-trade andSlavery; to furnish evidence to the in- habitants of Slave-holding countries, not only of the practicability, but of the pecuniary advantage of free labour; to diffuse authentic intelli- gence respecting the results of emancipation in Hayti [sic], the British Colonies and elsewhere; to open a correspondence with Abolitionists in America, France, and other countries; and to encourage them in the prosecution of these objects by all methods consistent with the princi- ples of this Society. 2. To recommend the use of free-grown produce (as far as practicable) in preference to Slave-grown; and to promote the adoption of scal regulations in favour of free labour. Walvin, eds., The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), pp. 3761: 48. Although most abolitionist activity focused on slavery, some abolitionists advocated the establishment of colonies of former slaves. British abolitionist Granville Sharpe, in 1787, helped freed slaves establish a colony in Sierra Leone. The American Colonization Society formed in December 1816 to support former slave colonies in West Africa took what would become Liberia at gunpoint and established a colony for freed slaves. Though many in the US and Britain had enthusiastically supported colonization of West Africa by former slaves, pub- lic opinion was more divided by the 1830s. Fladeland, Men and Brothers, pp. 80105. 94 Christine Bolt, The Anti-Slavery Movement and Reconstruction: AStudy in Anglo-American Co-operation, 183377 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 4. 183 Argument and change in world politics 3. To obtain the unequivocal recognition of the principle that the Slave, of whatever clime or colour, entering any portion of the British Domin- ions, shall be free . . . 4. To recommend that every suitable opportunity be embraced for evincing in our intercourse with Slave-holders and their apologists, our abhorrence of the system which they uphold, and our sense of its utter incompatibility with the spirit of the Christian religion. 95 Institutionalization: suppressing the slave trade When the British Parliament abolished the slave trade in March 1807 it set stiff penalties for violators: slave trade vessels wouldbe forfeitedand a ne of 100 would be imposed for each slave found on board. In 1811, slave trading was made a felony and in 1824 a capital offense. Making the trade illegal and eventually punishable as a felony was a great step in institutionalizing the now dominant normative belief in Britain that the trade in slaves was wrong. The next step, a decades-long effort by Britain to suppress the entire international slave trade, was itself the occasion of another long domestic and international argument. The scope of the British effort to suppress the slave trade, initially small, grew to be enormous. The British Royal Navy stationed ships off the coast of, rst, West Africa, andlater, East Africa andAmericanwaters to intercept slave ships. 96 The British Africa Squadron between 1816 and 1865 ranged from three to a peak of thirty-six ships (in 1845) patrolling the coasts at any one time to interdict slave ships, while other cruisers were also empowered to search suspicious ships. 97 The British govern- ment also established a Slave Trade Department in 1819 to monitor the trafc. 98 The slave trade was regularly on Britains nineteenth-century diplo- matic agenda. Abolitionists sent 800 petitions toParliament in1814, with about 1 million signatures, urging the government to push the French to end the trade. 99 In 1815, the Congress of Vienna passed a resolution on suppressing the slave trade as repugnant to the principles of humanity 95 Constitution of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, conrmed at a public meeting at Exeter Hall, 17 April 1839 (emphasis in original). 96 The US intermittently made a commitment to patrols between 1820 and 1864, as did France from 1811 to 1870. 97 Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, pp. 249250. 98 See D. Eltis, The Direction and Fluctuation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 18211943: ARevision of the 1845 Parliamentary Paper, in Gemery and Hogendorn, eds., Uncommon Market, pp. 273301: 276. 99 Temperley, British Antislavery, p. 8. 184 Decolonizing bodies and universal morality. 100 The slave trade was also raised at the Aix-la- Chapelle meeting in 1818, and at the Congress of Verona in 1822 it was called a pest which has too long desolated Africa, degraded Europe, and aficted humanity. 101 By 1839, Britain had treaties with all ma- jor maritime powers except the United States providing for the right to search each others merchant vessels. 102 According to historian Arthur Corwin, standard British procedure was to withhold diplomatic recog- nitionor raticationof a treatyof commerce, amityandpeace or torefuse to facilitate a loan in the London money market until the lesser power agreed to cooperate with British cruisers in closing the trafc. 103 The treaties were expensive; in 1817 Britain paid Spain 700,000 for the right to search ships under the Spanish ag and for agreements to prohibit slave trafc north, and then 3 years later, south of the equator. 104 Since Spain did not found an Abolitionist Society until 1864, external pressure for abolition was practically all there was apart from the efforts of a few, isolated, individuals. 105 Britainalso paidPortugal 300,000 to endits part in the slave trade north of the equator after 1820. 106 Thus, suppression was associated with high moral purpose: many British righteously con- demned other states who participated in the slave trade. In 1864 Prime Minister Palmerston wrote: The Portuguese are . . . the lowest in the moral scale and the Brazilians are degenerate Portuguese, demoralized by slavery and slave trade, and all the degrading and corrupting inu- ences connected with both. 107 The British signed several bilateral treaties and coordinated their naval patrol efforts off the coast of Africa with a number of countries after 1816. Britain even established international courts, joint courts of 100 Text of Declaration of the Eight Powers, relative to the Universal Abolition of the Slave Trade, quoted in Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York: Longman Group, 1975), p. 11. James Walvin, The Public Campaign in England Against Slavery, 17871843, in Eltis and Walvin, The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, pp. 6379: 6768. 101 Text of the resolution quoted by Sir Edward Mallet at the Berlin Conference in R. J. Gavin andJ. A. Betley, The Scramble for Africa: Documents on the Berlin West Africa Conference and Related Subjects 1884/1885 (Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1973), p. 187. Notably, the members of the Congress could not agree on Britains recommendation to denounce the trade as piracy and a refusal to admit to their domains the produce of the colonies of States allowing the trade. Du Bois, Suppression of the African Slave Trade, p. 138. 102 Klein, Slavery, p. 202. 103 Corwin, Spain and Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, pp. 3132. 104 Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade, p. 14. 105 Corwin, Spain and Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, pp. 20 and 2225. 106 Ibid., p. 30. 107 Quoted in Eltis, Economic Growth, p. 85. 185 Argument and change in world politics mixed commission, through bilateral treaties with Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and later Brazil. The courts sat in several locations, including Sierra Leone, Cape Town, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, and New York to try slave traders. International cooperation of this sort was unprecedented, though not without controversy. For in- stance, Britain claimed that the captured slaves freed by the mixed court in Havana were nevertheless being sold in Cuba. 108 Yet international diplomatic arguments and insults were mild com- pared to Britains domestic debate over the suppression policy. Both Houses of Parliament issued separate reports on British efforts to end the trade after hearings in 1848 and 1849 in the House of Commons, and hearings in 1849 and 1850 in the House of Lords. Members heard evi- dence and arguments at the hearings that came to opposite conclusions. Opponents of suppression suggested the effort was a huge expense for little result. And the nancial costs of suppression were staggering. On the other hand, supporters of suppression argued that Britain had al- ready succeeded in greatly diminishing the slave trade and said that without interdiction, the trade would grow in Africa and in the colonies inCentral andSouthAmerica. 109 Some abolitionists estimatedthat slave trafc actually grew in the 1830s and 1840s but that suppression should continue nevertheless. 110 Was suppression a success? More than 1,635 ships were captured be- tween 1808 and 1867 and over 160,000 Africans were freed, mostly by the British (over 85 percent). 111 But the overall success of the British interdiction effort is difcult to know given the efforts slave traders went to to conceal the trafc. Christopher Lloyd argues that the success of interdiction efforts uctuated violently, and it is doubtful if the preventive cruises ever captured more than 10 percent of the shipping involved until they were given more latitude in the treatment of foreign vessels and the demand for slaves was stopped by the importing coun- tries themselves. 112 Philip Curtin estimated that despite Britains effort 108 See ibid., p. 86; Corwin, Spain and Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, pp. 3942. 109 Extracts from the Evidence Taken Before Committees of the Two Houses of Parliament Relative to the Slave Trade, with Illustrations from Collateral Sources of Information (London: Davidson, 1851); reprinted (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969). 110 Thomas Fowell Buxton, a prominent English abolitionist, claimed in the late 1830s that the trade might have doubled. Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, p. 105. 111 Eltis, Economic Growth, p. 9798. Lloyd estimates that 149,843 slaves in the Atlantic slave trade were liberated by the Royal Navy between 1810 and 1864. Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, pp. 275276. 112 Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, p. xii. 186 Decolonizing bodies at interdiction, except for periods of war, trade nevertheless continued, at a level about a thirdless thanits eighteenthcentury peak. 113 Since the revolutionary leaders San Martn, Bolvar, and Hidalgo of the Spanish colonies abolishedslaveryinArgentina (1816) GranColumbia andChile (1821), Peru, Guatemala, and Uruguay (1828) and Mexico (1829), the major trafc in slaves from Africa to the New World went to Cuba and Brazil. LeVeen credits the British with rates for interdicting slave trafc to Cuba and Brazil as 15.3 percent from 1821 to 1830, 46.5 percent from 1831 to 1840, 35.6 percent from 1851 to 1860. 114 The evolution of slavery as practiced in the United States All thirteen American colonies had slaves. The changing status of slavery from accepted institution to increasingly suspect practice is illustrated by the ambiguous and contradictory slave law of the colonial and pre-civil war United States. Slave law varied by state because the United States was much more a collection of states in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, under the philosophy of states rights, rather than one uniform nation. 115 After the Declaration of Independence, Northern states under pressure from abolitionists moved to abolish slavery. Vermont was rst to make slavery illegal in 1777, and Massachusetts did the same in 1781. The slave trade resumed after the war and slavery, of course, remained legal in the South, with slave states dominating the government through much of the pre-civil war era: the Electoral College andthe House of Representatives, because of the constitutional provision that counted a slave as three-fths a per- son for purposes of apportioning seats, was overrepresented by slave states. As slavery was denormalized and delegitimized in the colonies and later the United States, new practices to protect the slave were insti- tutionalized in slave law, even in the southern United States. In the seventeenth century, for instance, the homicide of a slave was allowed in South Carolina if it was done as a correction but not if it was done maliciously. By the 1740s, there were nes for killing a slave in South Carolina. In 1791, North Carolina said the killing of a slave who was not resisting his/her master, was murder. In 1798, Georgias new constitution said, Any person who shall maliciously dismember or 113 Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, p. 269. 114 LeVeen, British Slave Trade Suppression Policies, p. 30. 115 See Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade. 187 Argument and change in world politics deprive a slave of life shall suffer such punishment as would be in- icted in case the like offence had been committed on a free white per- son, and on the like proof, except in case of insurrection by such slave, and unless such death should happen by accident in giving such slave moderate correction. 116 Later, Alabama, Missouri, and Texas adopted similar laws. Even before the American abolitionist movement led by Quakers, for- mer slaves, and other human rights advocates gathered political force in the nineteenth century, cruelty toward slaves was also gradually regulated. 117 In colonial South Carolina, while whipping was legal, a 1740 law imposed a ne of up to 100 for cutting out the tongue, eye, or testicles of a slave. A slave would become free according to an 1860 Maryland law if their master was convicted of abuse three times. 118 There were also laws requiring that masters provide food and clothing for slaves, and in 1852, a law in Alabama requiring a master to treat his slave with humanity. 119 The US Congress debated slavery many times from its rst session in 1789 to abolition. 120 And, as in England, Congress was subjected to pop- ular petitions on the slave trade and slavery from abolition societies in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Congress acted in 1794 to prohibit US citizens from supply- ing slaves to foreigners. The later Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves into the US after 1 January 1808, was passed by Congress and signedby President JeffersoninMarch 1807. Thoughthe slave trade was prohibited by law, it continued to be conducted clandestinely, and the several Congressional acts to suppress the trade were not consistently or vigorously enforced. In1818the USpassedthe AntislavingAct and, in1820, the USdeclared the slave trade piracy and sent a few ships to the West African coast to conduct interdiction. Between1818and1821USnaval ships stationedoff the African coast caught eleven slave ships with 573 Africans on board. But after this initial burst of activity, US interdiction efforts essentially halted. The idea of letting ships with US ags be searched by the British 116 Quoted in Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, p. 172. 117 There are dozens of excellent books on anti-slavery activism in the US. Because it is well known, and parallels British anti-slavery movements, I will not recapitulate that history here. 118 Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, p. 183. 119 Quoted in ibid., p. 184. 120 See William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), and Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade. 188 Decolonizing bodies had been raised several times in the US Congress in the 1820s, and also by the British, but never approved by the US administration. Many slavers took to ying under American ags, making them immune to British searches. With the 1842 WebsterAshburton Treaty, the US and Britain promised to maintain more substantial anti-slavery patrols on the coast of West Africa. Despite the WebsterAshburton Treaty, the small US squadron sent to patrol the African coast for slave trafc was ineffective and unable to interdict many slavers. Only in 1862 when the US and Great Britain signed the Treaty of Washington, granting the mutual right of search at sea and establishing mixed courts in NewYork, Cape Town, andSierraLeone totryslave traders, was suppre- ssion of slavers ying the US ag successful. 121 In sum, much as Indian slavery had been regulated in South America by Spain before it was abolished in the colonies, and well before the Civil War, slavery in the United States was gradually regulated by legis- lation and the courts, protecting slaves from the worst behavior of their masters. Were reforms primarily motivatedby pragmatism(in the belief that better treated slaves would perhaps produce more offspring and be less likely to revolt or attempt escape), or was there a genuine change in how slaves were regarded? Some reforms were undoubtedly moti- vated and supported for pragmatic reasons. Adam Smith argued that, The protection of the magistrate renders the slave less contemptible in the eyes of his master, who is therebyinducedto consider himwithmore regard, and to treat him with more gentleness. Gentle usage renders the slave not only more faithful, but more intelligent and, therefore, upon a double account, more useful. 122 But there are reasons to believe that pragmatism was not at the main root of the reforms. 123 First, though convictions for offenses against slaves were not frequent, by the early nineteenth century, as Thomas Morris notes, There was truth in the remark of William Gaston of the North Carolina Supreme Court: A cruel Master is a term of oppro- brium which would be as bitterly resented and is as carefully avoided as that of a dishonest tradesman or of a drunken mechanic. 124 The occasions when masters were brought to court to be held to account for 121 Lloyd, The Navyandthe Slave Trade, pp. 5559; 175181; Thomas, The Slave Trade, pp. 616 620: 775. 122 Smith, Wealth of Nations, book IV, chapter VII, p. 634. 123 And though morally motivated reformers probably would have balked at the notion, pragmatic reformers inadvertently made the process of moral reform easier. 124 Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, p. 185. 189 Argument and change in world politics their actions were instances where the justice of slavery itself was ar- gued. Second, the regulation of slavery was generally opposed by slave masters and the governments in slave states on the grounds that slaves had to fear their masters or the institution would fall apart. As North Carolinas Judge Rufn said in 1829, in overturning the conviction of a master in the murder of his slave, The power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect. 125 Thus, while most masters were probably little moved by anti-slavery arguments, anti-slavery arguments changed the beliefs of the rest of US culture, gradually changing the balance of political forces in the US so that re- form was gradually institutionalized. Forced labor Several humanitarian ironies were occasioned by the end of the slave trade and slavery. First, as it had in Latin America when Indian slavery ended, abolition gave impetus to forced labor practices (which allowed corporal punishment) that continued well after slaverys demise in both Latin America and Africa. Second, ending slavery became an argument in the mid and late 1800s for the imposition of colonies in parts of Africa that were not yet subject to European rule. 126 As Joseph Chamberlain, then British colonial secretary, said in 1900 about Nigeria: sooner or later we shall have to ght some of the slave dealing tribes and we can- not have a better casus belli . . . public opinion here requires that we shall justify imperial control of these savage countries by some serious effort to put down slave dealing. 127 Humanitarians wouldlater take upargu- ments against both those practices. Andthird, processes of international cooperation developed to halt the trafc in slaves facilitated smoother colonization. 125 Rufns opinion in State v. Mann, quoted in Mark V. Tushnet, The American Law of Slavery, 18101860: Considerations of Humanity and Interest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) p. 60. Also see Alan Watson, Slave Lawin the Americas (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989). 126 Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, p. 105. 127 Quoted in Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade, p. 294. Miers writes, when the Imperial East Africa Company said in 1892 that it had to leave Uganda for nancial reasons, The Liberal government of the day was prepared to let the territory go but the issue was carriedto the electorate in a widespreadpress andpropaganda campaign which resulted in a spate of petitions urging its retention largely on the grounds that the slavery and slave trade would be abolished. Other reasons such as economic advantages and the need to save the Christian missions were also cited but the biggest single consideration was the suppression of slave trafc. Ibid., p. 294. 190 Decolonizing bodies Forced labor in many forms, for example, indentured servitude, encomienda (until 1550) and repartimiento for private or public work (after 1550), had long coexisted with slavery and free labor. Similarly, by a Frenchlawof 1686 the number of engag es or indenturedservants was to be equal to the number of slaves in Saint Domingue. In some cases, slave emancipation led directly to forced labor, as when Great Britain ended slaverybylawin1833 (not coveringcolonies controlledbythe East India Company, including India), but allowed six years of apprenticeship (labor without pay for 45 hours a week) in the West Indies and Africa. As soon as Britain halted apprenticeship in 1838, plantation farmers faced a labor shortage, since, if they could, apprentices left plantations. In response, colonial assemblies enacted laws, such as the Contract Act in Antigua, to force workers back to the farm while others were com- pelledto work for fear of arrest under the vagrancy laws passedinmany colonies. 128 Further, as in Jamaica, farm wages were purposefully kept lower than rents so many former slaves went into debt and were forced to work for former masters. Where former slaves were not enough, East Indians and Chinese laborers were imported. Indentured workers often had no idea of the terrible conditions they would face in Asia, the Americas, or Africa. 129 Some 28 million Indians left India between 1846 and 1932, mostly to work in some form of forced labor. 130 Seymour Drescher notes that of the total intercontinental ow of indentured labourers toex-slave colonies after 1838, two-thirds, went toBritishfron- tier colonies deprived of African labour during the previous 30 years. For a generation after apprenticeship more than 95 percent of inden- tured labourers from Africa and India went to ex-slave colonies as a whole. 131 Forcedlabor byAfricans for Europeans was alsowidespreadinAfrica. Even as Europeans crusaded to end slavery, Africans were not only re- quired to volunteer their labor, but the punishment for not volun- teering, and for other crimes such as vagrancy and failure to pay hut and head taxes, was forced labor. 132 It was the colonial custom 128 Vagrancy laws had been similarly used in the 1500s by Spain in Central and South America against both Spanish and Indians. See William L. Sherman, Forced Na- tive Labor in Sixteenth-Century Central America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), pp. 194196. 129 W. Kloosterboer, Involuntary Labour Since the Abolition of Slavery: A Survey of Compul- sory Labour Throughout the World (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960). 130 Klein, Slavery, p. 207. 131 Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, p. 10. 132 Elizabeth Elbourne, Freedom at Issue: Vagrancy Legislation and the Meaning of Freedom in Britain and the Cape Colony, 17991842, in Lovejoy and Rogers, eds., Unfree 191 Argument and change in world politics to indenture the African free children born on white farms in Dutch South Africa until the age of eighteen or twenty-ve. 133 While the Portuguese ended slavery in their African colonies in 1878, according to Gann and Duignan, until the system of indigenato was ended in 1961, Portuguese Africans were under obligation to work in a manner ap- provedof by the administrationfor at least six months of the year, or else be contracted by the government. 134 British and French colonies also used forced labor in their colonies, especially during the world wars, to build and maintain roads, work on farms, and serve in the military. 135 Forced labor in French West Africa grew after slavery was abolished there in 1905. Forced labor arguments Some of the most ardent advocates of forced labor were evangelical Christians, who claimed forced labor would bring moral uplift. Advo- cates believed forced labor was good since it transformed people living in a pre-civilized condition, where they were supposedly idle and lazy, and put them to useful work. Elizabeth Elbourne argues that this system reects the evangelical and philosophical world view dominant in England at the time which saw nomadic cultures as backward and empty and in need of assistance in rising out of a state of nature. 136 One colonial ofcer, Colonel Collins, in a report on the Khoikhoi and San of Southern Africa to the British governor of the Cape in 1808, said native South Africans were multitudes of savages, of the ercest dispo- sition, dispersed throughout such a vast extent of country, in no part of which they have a settled residence, and from which they plunder their neighbours in every direction; without the idea of any law, divine or human; connexionamongthemselves, except suchas arises fromthe ties of parental, or conjugal affection; and even without the least knowledge of the manner of cultivating corn or rearing cattle. 137 French advocates of forced labor made similar arguments in the early 1900s. 138 Labour, pp. 114150; Commission on International Justice and Goodwill, The System of Forced Labor in Africa (New York: Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, 1926). 133 Elbourne, Freedom at Issue, p. 117. 134 L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan, Burden of Empire: An Appraisal of Western Colonialism in Africa South of the Sahara (New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 379. 135 Ibid., p. 256. 136 Elbourne, Freedom at Issue, pp. 118120. 137 Quoted in ibid., p. 118. 138 Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 18951930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 192 Decolonizing bodies Colonial law articulated and reected these beliefs. The Caledon Proclamation, or Code, as it was also known, issued by the British governor of the Cape Colony in 1809 made it possible to impress any Hottentot (non-European) considered vagrant who could not pro- vide evidence of work and a xed residence. Since Hottentots were not allowed to own land, xed residence implied living in a colonial institution. According to the Code, this was supposed to be good for all parties. [I]t is necessary that not only the inhabitants of the Hottentot nation, in the same manner as the other inhabitants, should be subject to proper regularity in regard to their place of abode and occupations, but also that they should nd an encouragement for preferring entering the service of inhabitants to leading an indolent life, by which they are ren- dereduseless bothfor themselves andthe communityat large. 139 These ideas were persistent. As the famous British explorer Sir Richard Burton wrote in 1864: I see no objection to render liberatedlabour forcible until the African race is educated for wages, and such habits are not learned in a day. 140 Reforming forced labor As with slavery, many religious communities eventually switched po- sitions on the desirability of forced labor, leading campaigns to end various forms of coercion. For example, coinciding with the abolition- ist movement, British humanitarians and Christians in the London Missionary Society campaigned to end forced labor in Southern Africa in the early nineteenth century. The Hottentots or rather Khoi, them- selves also argued for free labor, mobility, and the return of their land. 141 Reformers eventually succeeded in ameliorating labor conditions in Southern Africa. Forced labor by Hottentots was halted in 1828 in Ordinance 50, which endedthe Caledon Code, although forcedlabor for up to a year by black Africans found without passes was still allowed in Ordinance 49. 142 British protection of Hottentots became one of the main reasons Boers moved from the coast to the interior in their Great Trek to escape British interference. The campaign to completely end forced labor used ethical arguments that denormalized the practice. In 1835, some anti-slavery activists formed the British and Foreign Aborigines Protection Society, which 139 Proclamation quoted in Elbourne, Freedom at Issue, p. 122. 140 Burton quoted in Eltis, Economic Growth, p. 28. 141 Elbourne, Freedom at Issue, pp. 139142. 142 Ibid., pp. 128129. 193 Argument and change in world politics publicized forced labor and other conditions that were against the inter- ests of the people the British were nowcalling aborigines and natives. 143 Forced labor was documented in journals such as the Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines Friend (London) and by journalists in main- stream papers. Reformers stressed the humanity of the laborers, and the inhumanity of the practice, arguing that forced labor was corrupt- ing, not elevating. Christian groups distributed pamphlets containing testimony such as: I could not get my mind away from the compari- son between the life which these people led in the old days, and that which they are living now. That was called heathenism; the present is hell. That was primitive liberty and comfort; this is the backwash of civilization grinding servitude and moral degradation. 144 This was implicitly an argument stressing the hypocrisy of Western practices. But, as with the anti-slavery campaigns, reformers did not only de- ploy a moral discourse. Reformers identity arguments attempted to demonstrate the humanity of the African laborer. I foundthemto be a moral people. Not withthe morality of civilization, with its niceties and hypocrisies, but they had a morality of their own which they scrupulously observed . . . They were an honest people. In my ve years of dealing with them I lost nothing by theft, when there was unlimited opportunity for them to steal. They kept their bargains when their word was passed to one whom they respected and trusted . . . They were a hospitable people. No stranger, especially a white man, who came to their kraals was refused a place to sleep and food to eat, such as they had to give. They did not charge a price for their hospitality, they regarded it good manners on the part of the guest to be as generous as they had been. They were a courteous people. There was a strict system of etiquette among themselves and towards strangers . . . 145 The identity argument aimed specically to humanize and in some cases esteem African culture as compared with the culture of the colonizers. 143 For a discussion of their activity see Alpheus Henry Snow, The Question of Aborigines in the Law and Practice of Nations (New York: G.P. Putnams Sons, 1921), pp. 811. 144 Commission on International Justice and Goodwill, System of Forced Labor, p. 8. 145 Ibid., p. 8. 194 Decolonizing bodies Their clothing was sometimes nearly as brief as that which can be seen nowadays at Coney Island; their house-keeping was about as crude as may be found in more civilized communities; their superstitions were much the same as other peoples who have passed through in their racial infancy; but my experience among them led me to believe that theywere about as decent, andmuchmore kindly, thananypersonwho would call them heathen. I would have trusted myself or my family to their tender mercies more readily than to those of some persons who would call them savages. 146 Practical arguments that forced labor had terrible consequences for the social order of African society echo Benezets late eighteenth- century arguments about the corrupting inuence of the slave trade. But now this [morality, honesty, hospitality, and courtesy] has largely changed. The customs and laws which governed themin the past under their chiefs have been almost entirely displaced by the regulations of a commercial company, administered very largely by hostile black po- licemen. They have in the change lost not only their liberties, but their decencies as well. 147 Forced labor, it was argued, fostered disruption of families, drunkenness, and prostitution. Further, to elicit empathy, the advocates of reform quoted data from reports of Western scho- lars documenting abuse. They also noted the practical costs of policing forced labor. A Chief told Professor Ross the following: A man who was the best carpenter in the district furnished his own tools and food and got nothing, not even a tax receipt. Informed that his wife was sick he obtained a days leave to go home. Finding her in child-birth and with no one but a little girl to help her he outstayed his leave one day. A ciapaio came, tied him up, and brought him to the Post where the Administrator had him given a severe beating with the palmatorio [a hammer like instrument for beating the palms of the hand of a pris- oner] and thrown into prison. Next morning early the Chief saw them bring this man out of prison with his hands too swollen to close, give him a hoe and set him to work on the road. An armed ciapaio stood over him and kept him steady at work. He was weak from lack of food and could not hold the hoe handle between thumb and palm. 148 The turn against forced labor was linked to both humanization of the laborer and changing religious beliefs, as Christian theology became thoroughlyimbuedwithfree market ideology. Free labour was a means 146 Ibid., pp. 89. 147 Ibid., p. 9. 148 Ibid., p. 20. 195 Argument and change in world politics by which the individual expiated guilt and constructed his own salva- tion: slavery and bonded labour were morally damaging to the slave- owner as well as preventing the slave or labourer from having an equal opportunity to rise in civilization through economic advancement. 149 Perhaps not coincidentally, while the freedom of free labor varied in Europe, increasingly greater protection was given to free labor as masterservant relations and wage labor were rst criticized and then better regulated to protect workers in Europe and North America from the mid-1500s onward. 150 But as with slavery, pragmatic reformers inadvertently bolstered the cause of normatively motivated reformers. For example, forced labor in French West Africa was gradually reformed in the 1920s even as its use was approved by the colonial government as a form of both civilizing Africans and, obviously, as a way to get the fruits of their labor. This contradiction was possible because the main impetus for reform was pragmatic. African labor was scarce and better treatment, including the provision of basic health care, could, reformers argued, both increase the population and increase its productivity. 151 Thus, the existence of forced labor and efforts to reform and end the practice are important in two senses. First, it shows how colonizers saw free versus unfree labor. As Martin Klein argues, the continued importance of labour coercion suggests that capital could not get the labour it wanted in other ways, at least in some areas. 152 Many still saw an economic reason for coercion. Second, the debate over ending forced labor illustrates how anti-slavery principles were generalized, using analogies, by those who fought against forced labor. Evangelical Christians, already having decided that slavery was evil, eventually reframed the practice of forced labor as slavery, and recycled their cri- tiques of slavery to undermine the institutions of forcedlabor. ACouncil of Churches pamphlet argues that forced labor was slavery or worse than slavery. 153 The League of Nations appointed a Temporary Slavery Commission in 1924 which discussed both forced labor and slavery. One British ofcial argued, for example, that concubinage in this sense 149 Elbourne, Freedom at Issue, p. 131. 150 Paul Craven and Douglas Hay, The Criminalization of Free Labour: Master and Ser- vant in Comparative Perspective, in Lovejoy and Rogers, eds., Unfree Labour, pp. 71101; Nicholas Rogers, Vagrancy, Impressment and the Regulation of Labour in Eighteenth- Century Britain, in Lovejoy and Rogers, eds., Unfree Labour, pp. 102113. 151 See Conklin, Mission to Civilize, pp. 213245. 152 Klein, Slavery, p. 207. 153 Commission on International Justice and Goodwill, System of Forced Labor, p. 19. 196 Decolonizing bodies means slavery (slave status) . . . 154 Long after most colonial powers hadlimitedor haltedforcedlabor, Portugal continuedthe practice. Ase- nior administrator in Portuguese Angola argued, Under slavery, after all, the native is bought as an animal: his owner prefers him to remain as t as a horse or ox. Yet here [in Angola] the native is not bought he is hired from the State, although called a free man. And his employer cares little if he sickens or dies, once he is working, because when he sickens or dies his employer will simply ask for another. 155 This was associative reasoning: since most agreed that slavery is bad, if forced labor is the same as slavery or worse, then surely it too must be abolished. 156 An ethical argument explanation for decolonizing bodies To show that ethical arguments explain the end of slavery and forced labor, I must rst demonstrate that ethical arguments were made in fa- vor of ending these practices and that other forces, namely declining protability, were not the underlying cause of their demise. 157 The slave trade, slavery, and forced labor remained protable during most of this period. Or, at least, they were widely thought to be protable by those who used those institutions and fought against their abolition. Slavery was still protable in the colonies when it was ended, while ending slav- ery hurt economically. But the actual protability of slavery and forced labor rose and fell depending on the context. In any case, either free labor or slavery could have worked well to promote economic growth, and indeed, both did. Both free labor and slavery proved protable and the institutions existed side by side for centuries. What matters in 154 Quoted in Paul E. Lovejoy and Jan S. Hogendorn, Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 18971936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 241. 155 H. Galv ao quoted in Davidson, Let Freedom Come, p. 109. 156 Forced labor was only abandoned in African colonies by France in 1946 and it was used by Portugal into the 1970s. The dop systemin South Africa, where winery workers were paid in wine rather than cash, only ended in the mid 1990s. More will be said below about how forced labor was regulated in colonies during the inter-war period by the International Labor Organization and the Mandate system. 157 James Lee Ray and Ethan Nadelmann also suggest that slavery was ended because of changed ethical convictions and the persuasive efforts of those in the secular and religious communities that advocated emancipation. James Lee Ray, The Abolition of Slavery and the End of International War, International Organization 43 (Summer 1989), 405439; Nadelmann, Global Prohibition Regimes. 197 Argument and change in world politics terms of explaining the end of slavery and forced labor is what people thought about protability. Or rather whether they thought protabil- ity (or morality) was the right frame from which to understand and represent the questions of slavery and forced labor. And clearly, though economic arguments were made both for and against slavery and forced labor, what seems to have mattered more were religious and philosophical arguments. This is no surprise, since during the eighteenth, nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries, the life- worldof Europeans, thebasis onwhichtheyheldandjudgedarguments, was dominated by religion. When the dominant religious-political com- munityviewedslaveryas just andgood, andas contributingtothe uplift of the enslaved, slavery was allowed and even admired. When the reli- gious community thought that idleness was evil, and forced labor good, then forced labor was likewise admired. When some Christian theolo- gians no longer held such views, they attempted to persuade others with their ethical-religious (and practical) arguments against slavery and forced labor, which eventually denormalized and delegitimized these practices. Opponents of slavery argued that the Bible did not en- courage slavery, and that slavery was wrong. Religious arguments were persuasive because the dominant culture was Christian. But secular arguments also became important and help explain why, after failingfor thousands of years, anti-slaveryarguments were increas- ingly persuasive. When by the 1780s the secular culture began to stress the rights of man, free labor, and a belief in progress, anti-slave argu- ments could gain a foothold. As the Earl of Abingdon said in parliament in 1793: the idea of abolishing the slave trade is connected with the lev- elling system and the rights of man. . . what does the abolition of the slave trade mean more or less, than liberty and equality? What more or less thanthe rights of man? 158 Inother words, without greater empathy for slaves, whichwas activelyfosteredbythe abolitionists, andwithout a way to frame anti-slavery arguments as consistent with the background of dominant religious/cultural beliefs andthe risingrights of man dis- course, anti-slave trade and emancipation arguments would likely have been as unsuccessful as they had been in the past. Similarly, with the slave trade and slavery abolished, the starting point for other ethical ar- guments had moved. Ethical arguments that questioned and opposed forced labor, equating forced labor with slavery, delegitimized forced labor by analogy and thus depended on the success of anti-slavery 158 Quoted in Walvin, An Africans Life, p. 183. 198 Decolonizing bodies arguments for their persuasive force. Further, with the rise of free la- bor beliefs, an alternative practice was not only imagined, but said to be better for economic and spiritual reasons. As Martin Klein argues: In the context of European history, it is impossible to argue that society became more humane, but people certainly began to regard certain kinds of exploitation as immoral. Slavery eventually became redun- dant, an inefcient way of getting labour, but emancipation took place long before that happened. Abolition was often forced on the peri- phery by a centre committed to a free labour ideology and convinced that free labour was essential to dramatic growth and transformation of the capitalist world. This ideology was given its loftiest expres- sion by the abolition movement spawned by and consistently sup- ported by Christian Churches. It was also powerful enough that those non-Western elites who sought to understand Europes ascendancy invariably saw free labour as a crucial part of that ascendancy. It is only these ideological agendas that can explain why Europe turned against slavery when it was still protable . . . Dependent on democrat- ically elected European parliaments for their budgets, colonial admin- istrations were vulnerable to the pressures of abolitionist groups and increasingly had difculty controlling the ow of information about their policies. 159 At a deep level, the cultural background within which arguments about slavery and forced labor occurred, changed, allowing arguments against slavery which had been available for centuries to be heard anew by a wider audience. Yet to emphasize the role of ethical arguments, articulated primarily in religious terms during the period of contesta- tion over slavery and forced labor, does not mean that practical argu- ments about the economics of slavery and forced labor, or scientic, and identity arguments were not at work. All sorts of arguments were used by both the advocates of slavery and forced labor and by those who fought for abolition. Ethical-religious arguments were especially salient when the table was dominated by those with strongly held reli- gious beliefs. Economic (practical) arguments became more salient with growing secularization and the rise of capitalist economic beliefs. Slav- ery and forced labor ended because those who made ethical arguments against those practices were able to convince enough people to support abolition. They did so by rst denormalizing and delegitimizing slav- ery and then by humanizing the slave. If domestic politics was crucial 159 Klein, Slavery, p. 213. 199 Argument and change in world politics in ending British or American slavery, the domestic balance of forces changed because of ethical argument. Regulatingandendingslaveryandforcedlabor hadimportant andof- ten unanticipated consequences for the institution of colonialism. With the end of slavery and the increasing freedom of colonial labor, some of the protability of empire decreased. More importantly, however, by the time the United States, in 1865, and Brazil in 1888, nally ended slavery, several generations had debated the issue and thousands had died over the question. 160 Core beliefs had been challenged and altered, while core practices of colonialism were no longer considered normal and legitimate. Not only was involuntary labor at issue: European and American abolitionists directly challenged the notion of the less-than- humanandinferior status of the dark races. 161 Not only was the material world different, the starting point, or topoi, of colonial arguments al- tered once slavery had been abolished and forced labor was challenged. Which arguments were successful depended on changed identity be- liefs about others and greater empathy. Abolitionist and free labor argu- ments helped humanize the inhabitants of the colonies in the minds of the colonizers. In both cases, reformers institutionalized newnormative beliefs which had ripple effects throughout the entire colonial system. For example, forced labor was only abolished in French colonies in 1946 while forced labor continued in Portuguese colonies much longer. The end of widespread belief in natural slaves, the Aristotelian ideal, was the end of slavery, while the abolition of colonialism began with the decolonization of slave and forced laborers bodies. 160 Of course, unfree labor continued well into the twentieth century. Stalin and Hitler used slave labor during World War II, and only in 1963 did Saudi Arabia formally abolish slavery. What is signicant beyond the continued existence of unfree labor is that those who practice slavery and forced labor seek to conceal it, whereas in previous eras, con- cealment was not considered necessary. See Roger Sawyer, Slavery in the Twentieth Century (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1986). 161 Gann andDuignan, Burden of Empire, p. 10, argue that slavery was the rst of the great social issues of the colonies. 200 5 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood I made war against them. One example was enough: a hundred heads cut off, there have been plenty of supplies at the station ever since. My goal is ultimately humanitarian. I killed a hundred people . . . but that allowed ve hundred others to live. 1 I cannot forget that the natives are not represented among us, and that the discussions of the Conference will, nevertheless, have an extreme importance for them. 2 The fundamental principle of our colonial policy must be scrupulous respect for the beliefs, habits and traditions of the conquered or pro- tected peoples. 3 Colonialism wore two humanitarian faces in the late nineteenth and earlytwentiethcenturies, aggressive andreformist. Aggressive humani- tarianism a modied, benevolent, colonialism was the famous white mans burden which European powers took up in Africa, and theUSshoulderedinthePhilippines. Withthegradual turntoaggressive humanitarianism, Western colonialism in Africa thus began an uneven transformation from brute force to what Foucault called disciplinary power or the panopticon. In the former, power is exercised through 1 LeonFi evez, aBelgianCongoofcial, in1894, quotedinAdamHochschild, KingLeopolds Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifin Company, 1998), p. 166. 2 Sir Edward Malet at the Berlin West Africa Conference quoted in R. J. Gavin and J. A. Betley, The Scramble for Africa: Documents on the Berlin West Africa Conference and Related Subjects 1884/1885 (Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1973), p. 131. Spelling as it was in the original. 3 French Minister of Colonies, Georges L eygu es, in 1906, quoted in R.F. Betts, Methods and Institutions of European Domination, in A. Adu Boahen, ed., Africa Under Colonial Domination, UNESCO General History of Africa, VII (Paris: UNESCO, 1985), pp. 313331: 315. 201 Argument and change in world politics terror anddestruction; inthe latter, while nakedforce is still used, power is increasingly exercisedthrough discipline, socialization (eliciting com- pliance by instilling in the other a coincidence of interests and beliefs), and surveillance. 4 Aggressive humanitarianism became dominant as colonial powers used anti-slavery arguments to justify greater intervention and colonial settlement in Africa. In 1883, Lord Granville, Britains minister of for- eign affairs, would insist to the Portuguese that ending slavery justied colonial conquest: Her Majestys Government . . . stated their chief ob- jects to be the abolition of slavery and the civilization of Africa by the extension of legitimate commerce. 5 Further, the habits and techniques of international cooperation that grew out of the Concert of Europe and the anti-slavery patrols fostered more orderly colonization of Africa, at least among colonial rivals, than had been the case in the Americas. The aggressive face of humanitarianism and international cooperation in colonization were exemplied in arguments and beliefs expressed at the Berlin West Africa Conference in 1884 and in the reality of colonial- ism in Africa. Humanitarianisms second face was modestly reformist, though re- formers ultimately and unwittingly articulated increasingly powerful anti-colonial arguments and sparked reforms they had little idea would ultimately mortally weaken colonialism itself. Emerging from the anti- slavery movement, and fueled by vivid journalistic accounts of colonial excess, primarily in Africa, organizations like the Aborigines Protec- tion Society, the African Association, and the Congo Reform Associ- ations, called for reform, gradually denormalizing and delegitimizing both naked colonialism and the practices of the aggressive humanitar- ians. Even as armed resistance to European expansion and revolts in already colonized areas led by traditional leaders continued, Africans educatedin European schools also took upthe call for reform. Just as the anti-slavery movement succeeded in shifting the grounds of argument from assuming that the brutal exploitation of slavery was an acceptable means and outcome of European interaction with natives, the colo- nial reform movement (inadvertently) denormalized colonialism itself by placing reform on the agenda of colonial governments and into the practical administration of colonies. 4 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 5 Letter from Granville to DAntas, 15 March 1883, in Gavin and Betley, The Scramble for Africa, pp. 25: 2. 202 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood The turn of the century was a period of complexity and contradiction for colonizers. Slavery was no longer a legitimate practice, andtherefore it was to be fought against, yet for the Victorians, as Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher argue, Expansion in all its modes seemed not only natural and necessary but inevitable; it was preordained and ir- reproachably right. 6 So it was entirely consistent with the dominant beliefs of the 1880s for British Prime Minister Gladstone to argue for principled expansion: Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of almighty God as can be your own. 7 Gladstones contradictory arguments did not seem contradictory at the time. The transition from naked aggression to aggressive humanitarian- ism is perhaps not so difcult to understand. Aggressive humanitarian views (we dominate you for your own good, and to show you how well you are being treated, we will feed you better and give you reli- gion) were usually articulated by aggressors and it made sense from a practical standpoint if only to leave some labor to utilize to become less brutal. The more difcult question is: why and how did aggressive humanitarianismyieldtoreformism? That colonial expansionwouldul- timately be seen as conicting with remembering the rights of the savage resulted from several factors: changing normative and iden- tity beliefs; a reframing of colonial practices; and greater opportunity for reformists, including the colonized themselves, to inuence colonial practices. First, as discussed at length above, the victory of the anti-slavery movement challenged or changed core normative beliefs about colo- nialism and the colonizers relationship to the colonized. The savage had economic and political rights and deserved progress in both those realms. Further, while indigenous diplomatic and military resistance to the colonial effort was erce, it was joined in Europe and the Americas when the descendants of North American and Caribbean slaves artic- ulated a Pan-African challenge to colonial oppression and argued for self-determination. The fact that Western-educated Africans, Indians, and former slaves in the Americas were able to articulate their criticisms of colonialism helped decrease, and in some cases bridge, the cultural 6 Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Ofcial Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 3. 7 Quoted in Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 289. 203 Argument and change in world politics distance between colonizer and colonized, and evoked empathy for the colonized. While a colonial discourse of expansion and conquest was still hegemonic in European capitals, it was increasingly challenged by humanitarian reformers and by the internal logic of normative beliefs held among the colonizers. White Europeans who were increasingly supportive of and allied with Pan-Africans slowly realized that their ar- guments were compelling in ways they had not anticipated; arguments for self-determination could not, logically, be limited. 8 Second, the colonial project was reframed when Europeans, who held these new beliefs about the rights of the natives, learned more about conditions in colonies, especially those in Congo and Southern Africa. Prior generations had, of course, learned about and participated in colo- nial massacres and other atrocities, but they did not do so while hold- ing new background beliefs about the rights of natives. Earlier gen- erations had, as a consequence, generally not seen these practices as massacre and atrocity; their new belief in the humanity of the sav- ages helped them to understand colonialism in a different way. In other words, there was greater press coverage of the realities of colo- nial conquest and administration, in part occasioned by the new beliefs mentioned above, but knowledge of atrocities alone would not have led to critique and oversight. New normative beliefs reframed the practices recharacterizing colonialism from benevolent and legitimate, to at least suspect. Third, nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans were more po- litically active and democratic than ever before. Liberal democratic and socialist ideas were in full bloom, trade unionism was on the rise, and suffrage and literacy were expanding. Political organizations dedicated toward educating the public and persuading them to take action about conditions in the colonies used the media and democratic institutions to pressure their governments to reform. Though they used roughly the same techniques as the abolitionists, greater democracy at home meant their efforts saw fruition much more quickly in the realm of colonial policy, because as social movement theory suggests, they had greater political opportunity. This was a crucial part of changing the balance of capabilities and power that supported colonial practice. 8 Neta C. Crawford, Decolonization as an International Norm: The Evolution of Prac- tices, Arguments, and Beliefs, in Laura Reed and Carl Kaysen, eds., Emerging Norms of Justied Intervention (Cambridge: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1983), pp. 3761: 53. 204 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood The peak of colonial expansion was initially characterized by great condence in colonialism, but became increasingly marked by criticism of colonial practice. At the outset of this period, inaugurated by the Berlin West Africa Conference of 18841885, colonialism was still un- derstood as normal by the majority of the colonizers, and enthusiasts of colonialism formed pro-colonial lobbies. With the exception of the abolition of slavery, European colonial practices in Africa were about as brutal as colonialism had been in the Americas. This is most obvious in the case of the German conquest of South West Africa and Belgian conduct inthe Congo, so that it is possible to say that inmany ways colo- nialism reached its peak in Africa, especially in terms of intensity. But late nineteenth-century European colonialismin Africa was also the his- torical moment and location of some of colonialisms greatest tensions. Over the next thirtyyears, colonialismwas denormalizedbythe human- itarians so that even these horrible practices did not pass unnoticed. Africa Making rules of legitimate conquest Europeans began their voyages to Sub-Saharan Africa in the late 1400s. For example, Portuguese explorers Jacob Canus and Bartholemew Diaz landed on the coasts of South West Africa and South Africa, respec- tively, in the 1480s, setting up crosses to mark their landfall. Missionar- ies and small commercial companies followed over the next centuries but Europeans did not enter Africas interior or remain on the coast in large numbers, inpart because they fearedunknown, andas yet untreat- able, disease and saw little loot, besides humans, to acquire. With some help from philanthropists and churches, freed slaves set up colonies in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and like their white European counterparts, they largely be- lieved in the virtues of imperialism and the civilizing mission. In the mid-1800s, Africans were still represented as savages and Africa was generallyconsidereddangerous andwithout economic signicance. The greatest EuropeanAfrican interaction had focused on the slave trade rst enlarging it and then curbing it. Except for the Dutch trading set- tlement in South Africa pushed further into the interior by the British, Europeans were ostensibly content to stay close to the coasts, in trad- ing posts and small settlements. As late as 1880, some 90 percent of the continent was stilled ruled by Africans. 205 Argument and change in world politics Ceuta (S) Madeira (P) Canary Islands (S) Ifni (S) (S) Melilla TUNIS SENEGAL Kita (F) TRIPOLI GOLD COAST LAGOS EGYPT ALGERIA Mediterranean Sea R e d
S e a (F) Obok Pemba Zanzibar (F) (F) (F) ETHIOPIA MADAGASCAR Z A N Z I B A R S U L T A N A T E M O Z A M B I Q U E SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC NATAL ORANGE FREE STATE CAPE COLONY ANGOLA GABON (F) (S) So Tom (P) Fernando Po (S) Grand Bassam LIBERIA (F) Porto Novo (F) SIERRA LEONE PORT. GUINEA THE GAMBIA British (B) French (F) Spanish Portuguese (P) Turkish Independent Boer republics 0 0 1000 500 1000 miles 2000 km 20E 40E 60E 0 20W 40S 40S 20S 20S 0 0 20N 40N 20W 0 20E 40E 60E 20N 40N (S) 2. Europeans in Africa in 1880 206 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood But European interest in Africa grew, generated by an ambitious Belgian king, white explorers, commercial interests, and missionaries. At mid-century, King Leopold of Belgium had great ambitions to set up a colony somewhere in the world and in 1862 he went to Seville, Spain, to study records of Spanish colonialism: I am very busy here going through the Indies archives andcalculating the prot which Spain made then and makes now out of her colonies. 9 In 1876, Leopold, who was by then set on acquiring a colony in Africa, convened a Geographical Conference in Brussels of experts on Africa and famous humanitarians. He used the meeting to set up an International African Association, os- tensiblyfor humanitarianpurposes, of whichhe was president. Through various guises, such as the Committee for Studies of the Upper Congo and the International Association of the Congo, Leopold established his interest in the Congo region. Leopold also nanced exploration by Henry Morton Stanley, who made treaties of free trade for Leopold along the Congo river. In April 1884, a representative for Leopold got the US Congress to recognize his claims to the International Association of the Congo and the International African Association. Also during the mid and late 1800s, German missionaries and mer- chants began to buy land in South-West Africa. Bismarck early on had been opposed to colonial expansion but there was mounting public and political pressure for colonization. Germany was drawn into Africa af- ter the missionaries andmerchants appealedfor protection fromnatives and other European interests, and, in April 1884, Germany declared the commercial venture of Adolf L uderitz in South-West Africa a protec- torate. In November 1884, Bismarck called an international conference todeal withthe international rivalryover the areaknownas the Congo. 10 Although widely thought to be the place where the map of Africa was redrawn, few borders were actually decided at the Berlin West Africa Conference of 18841885, though Leopolds new Congo state was rec- ognized by the conference attendees. 11 Diplomatic recognition of the Congo would have enormous signicance for people who lived under Leopolds rule, but the most important issues discussedin Berlin, andin the diplomatic exchanges that preceded and followed it, were the basic rules for the partition of Africa by European states. Because the confer- ence set the terms for conquest by dening the condition of legitimate 9 Leopold quoted in Hochschild, King Leopolds Ghost, p. 37. 10 An overviewis S.E. Crowe, The Berlin West Africa Conference, 18841885 (London: Long- mans, Green and Co., 1942). 11 Leopold was not at the meeting. 207 Argument and change in world politics colonial territory as effective occupation, and developed provisions for notifying other powers of the acquisition of new territory, the Berlin meeting ensured that European governments partition and occupation of Africa would proceed without undue risk of war between the great European powers. European interest in Africa was propelled by humanitarian, eco- nomic, and power political reasons. Like the famous African explorer David Livingston whose African travels, along with those of Stanley and the French explorer de Brazza had fascinated the European and American world the Europeans present at the Berlin meeting believed commerce, Christianity, and civilization were inextricably intertwined. Colonizers desiredthe glory of empire, anendtoslavery, the resources and trade of Africa, and they wanted to hold territory that would help them protect their other colonial interests in the Middle East and across the Indian Ocean. There was a general acceptance, indeed a positive glorication, of colonialism among the Great Powers. Yet tensions that would become contradictions over the next thirty years were already evident at Berlin. In the face of serious anti-colonial critiques, diplomats felt compelled to make complex arguments, grounded in liberal beliefs, to support colonial expansion. Berlin Con- ference participants frequently mentioned the political rights of native occupants and discussed efforts to curb the internal African slave trade, all of which would be ensured through the benets of conquest and free trade. 12 At the opening of the conference, for instance, Otto von Bis- marck noted that the purposes of meeting were to end the slave trade and promote free trade, saying that the meeting should facilitate the access of all commercial nations to the interior of Africa. 13 Britains representative, Sir Edward Malet, speaking just after Bismarck, agreed that the point of the meeting was to ensure freedom of commerce but he then immediately stated, I must not, however, lose sight of the fact that, in the opinion of Her Majestys Government, commercial interests should not be looked upon as the exclusive subject of the deliberations of the Conference. Malet said, While the opening of the Congo mar- kets is to be desired, the welfare of the natives should not be neglected; to them it would be no benet, but the reverse, if freedom of commerce, 12 This is in marked contrast to previous legal treatment of natives: for example, neither the treaty between Britain and France ending their war in North America in 1763, nor the treaty between the US and Britain, ending the Revolutionary War, mentioned the natives whose land was occupied, although natives had fought for both sides in each case. 13 Gavin and Betley, The Scramble for Africa, p. 129. 208 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood unchecked by reasonable control, should degenerate into licence. The link between humanitarian ideas and commerce are evident. I venture to hope that this will be borne in mind, and that such precau- tions will be adopted for the regulation of legitimate commerce as may tend to insure, as far as possible, that its introduction will confer the advantages of civilization on the natives, and extinguish such evils as the internal Slave Trade, by which their progress is at present retarded. I cannot forget that the natives are not represented among us, and that the discussions of the Conference will, nevertheless, have an extreme importance for them. The principle which will command the sym- pathy and support of Her Majestys Government will be that of the advancement of legitimate commerce, with security for the equality of treatment of all nations, and for the well being of the native races. 14 There were other prominent discussions of native rights at the Berlin conference. For example, the US delegate, Mr. Kasson, attempted to insert into the nal act, without success, the idea that Modern interna- tional lawsteadily follows the road which leads to the recognition of the right of native races to dispose freely of themselves and of their hered- itary soil. In conformity with this principle, my Government would gladly adhere to a more extended rule to be based on a principle which should aim at the voluntary consent of the natives whose country is taken possession of in all cases where they may not have provoked the aggression. 15 Declaring that the US had a special interest in slav- ery given its recent civil war, Kasson proposed that anyone engaged in slave trafcking ought to be refused the right of residence and that slave traders should be treated as an enemy of the whole world, just like a pirate. 16 Humanitarianism and commerce were thus deeply entwined in the resulting General Act, with the consequence that its second paragraph stated twin purposes for colonial powers coming to agreement: manag- ing the process of conquest and rule, and promoting civilization. Wishing, in the spirit of good and mutual accord, to regulate the con- ditions most favourable to the development of trade and civilization in certain regions of Africa, and to assure to all nations the advan- tages of free navigation on the two chief rivers of Africa owing into 14 Ibid., p. 131. 15 Quoted in Quincy Wright, Mandates Under the League of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), p. 15. A slightly different version is quoted in Malcolm Shaw, Title to Territory in Africa: International Legal Issues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 42. 16 Gavin and Betley, The Scramble for Africa, p. 228. 209 Argument and change in world politics the Atlantic Ocean; being desirous, on the other hand, to obviate the misunderstanding and disputes which might in future arise from new acts of occupation (prises de possession) on the coast of Africa; and concerned, at the same time, as to the means of furthering the moral and material well-being of the native populations . . . 17 Chapter I spelled out the guarantees for free trade, and Chapter II articulated opposition to slavery, declaring an agreement to employ all the means at its disposal for putting an end to this trade and for punishing those who engage in it. 18 That this was a transition moment is clear in Chapter I, Article 6, which states in part: All the Powers exercising sovereign rights or inuence in the aforesaid territories bind themselves to watch over the preservation of the na- tive tribes, and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being, and to help in suppressing slavery, and especially the Slave Trade. They shall, without distinction of creed or nation, protect and favour all religious, scientic or charitable institu- tions, and undertakings created and organized for the above ends, or which aim at instructing the natives and bringing home to them the blessings of civilization. 19 The terms for effective occupation were articulated in the General Act and by the Institute of International Law at its session in Lausanne in 1888 andpublishedin volume 10 of the Institutes Annuaire (18881889). Occupation was deemed effective when the act of taking possession was done in the name of a government, other European governments were notied diplomatically, and order was maintained by a local gov- ernment. Any disagreements among Europeans about the status of a territory would be worked out diplomatically, and if this was unsuc- cessful, the parties will appeal to the good ofces, the mediation, or the arbitration of one or several third powers. With these rules in place, it was less likely that the Europeans scramble for Africa would lead to the kinds of wars that characterized the British and French race for ter- ritory in North America. And although there were no power political or economic reasons for this to be part of an international understanding of European cooperation for conquest, Europeans were obliged to treat the natives, or aboriginals, with respect. Art. IV. All wars of extermination of aboriginal tribes, all useless se- verities, and all tortures are forbidden, even by way of reprisals. 17 Ibid., p. 288. 18 Ibid., p. 292. 19 Ibid., p. 291. 210 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood Art. V. . . . local authority will respect or will cause to be respected all rights, especially of private property, as well of the aborigines as of foreigners, including individual and collective rights. Art. VI. The local authority has the duty of watching over the con- servation of the aboriginal populations, their education, and the ame- lioration of their moral and material condition. 20 Cooperation among European governments and aggressive humani- tarianism became increasingly institutionalized in 18891890 when the Conference of Brussels, attended by more than a dozen states, agreed to suppress the Arab slave trade and slavery in Africa, as well as limit the trade in liquor to Africa. 21 Article I of the Brussels General Act enunci- ated how the slave trade would be combated through the progressive organization of the administrative, judicial, religious, and military ser- vices under the sovereignty or protectorate of civilized nations, the establishment of strongly occupied stations in the interior, the con- struction of roads and railways connecting the coast to the interior, and other means, including the restriction of the importation of rearms, at least those of a modern pattern, and of ammunition in the areas where slave trading was being conducted which, according to the treaty, was most of Sub-Saharan Africa. 22 The colonizers were also to diminish intestine [sic] wars between tribes by means of arbitration; to initiate them in agricultural labor and the industrial arts so as to increase their welfare; to raise them to civilization and bring about the extinction of barbarous customs . . . 23 Further, the Brussels Act proposed creating institutional mechanisms to promote abolition, namely international of- ces in Brussels and Zanzibar and the regular exchange of information between governments about the slave trade. Although the Brussels of- ce apparently never opened, other aspects of the act were adhered to; specically, from the perspective of conquest, the attendees agreed to restrict the ow of weapons to Africa and they did so with increasing effectiveness. 20 Lausanne Institute of International Law quoted in Alpheus Henry Snow, The Ques- tion of Aborigines in the Law and Practice of Nations (New York: G.P. Putnams Sons, 1921), pp. 289291: 290. 21 The participants included representatives from: Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Britain, Congo, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Norway, Persia, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the United States, and Zanzibar. See Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York: Longman Group, 1975), pp. 236291. 22 Snow, Aborigines in the Law and Practice of Nations, pp. 294306, General Act quotes from p. 296. 23 Quoted in ibid., p. 297. 211 Argument and change in world politics Insum, at Berlin, Lausanne, andBrussels the aggressive humanitarian tone was deeply intertwined with the concerns of free trade and effec- tive occupation. Diplomats at Berlin felt convinced that both missions commerce and civilizing were necessarily accomplished with occupa- tion, and that civilizing would come about through commercial activity. At Lausanne and Brussels they spelled out how colonial expansion would be conducted so as to be both safe for Europeans and legitimate. Thus, while Europeans and North Americans were self-conscious about the potential illegitimacy of colonialism, late nineteenth-century colo- nialism was still imbued with high moral fervor, bolstered by theories of Social Darwinism and white racial superiority. The civilizing mission and colonial lobbies By the late nineteenth century, the idea in Europe of a civilizing mission was already several centuries old. Indeed, for all his concern about Indi- ans, even Bartolom e de Las Casas wantedto bring religion to the natives of Central and South America. The Final Act of the Berlin West Africa Conference provided for the protection of missionaries and others who would bring Christianity and other benets of civilization to Africa. In- deed, Christian missionaries often preceded commercial ventures and settlers in Africa. Thewider cultural support andcontent for theideas of aEuropeanciv- ilizing mission were deep in Western European beliefs in the superiority of their culture and were articulated in new beliefs about European bio- logical/racial superiority. While earlier in the nineteenth century strong arguments for monogenism (a single origin for human beings) were made by the British physician James Pritchard and others, polygenism hadfoundwider support in anthropology andthe biological sciences by the middle of the century. Polygenists argued that the different races of man were so different from each other in their physical, mental and moral attributes as to form not mere varieties of one single species, but instead several different biological species of their own. 24 Physi- cal anthropologists continued to measure humans and to classify them 24 Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 18001860 (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 29. Also see Michael Banton, Racial Theories, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Pat Shipman, The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); Robert Bannister, So- cial Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979); Greta Jones, Social Darwinism and English Thought: The Interaction Between Biological and Social Theory (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980). 212 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood according to their physical differences while phrenologists argued that differences inthe humanskull correspondedtodifferences inthe human brain and mental capacities. Charles Darwins Descent of Man (1871) and his The Origin of the Species (1859), took for granted a hierarchy of lower and higher races and were also widely understood to support ideas of racial hierarchy. It is well known that these beliefs spread beyond the scientic com- munity into popular culture and political discourse. In simple terms, if social life was like the natural order, imperial expansion was natu- ral. Or as Theodore Roosevelt said at the turn of the century, In this world the nation that has trained itself to a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities. 25 Conquest proved the manliness and superiority of the conqueror, while to be con- quered demonstrated inferiority, childlikeness, and femininity. Many Europeans were convinced, as well, of their scientic and technical superiority. 26 Popular European and American enthusiasm for colonialism proba- bly peaked between 1880 and 1900, and it was during this period that the pro-colonial lobbies, who found their support in the widespread belief in the civilizing mission, had perhaps their greatest visibility and success at inuencing colonial policy. German public interest and pressure for colonialism at the time of the Berlin West Africa Confer- ence was high. In Germany, the Central Society for Colonial Geogra- phy, was founded in 1878 and the German Colonial Union, founded in 1882, had some 121 branches and 12,500 members by 1886. The So- ciety for German Colonization, founded in March 1884, merged with the German Colonial Union in 1887, forming the Deutsche Kolonial Gesellschaft with about 16,000 members. 27 Some members of these soci- eties personally participated in German colonization in East and South West Africa and the societies pushed for government support of the colonies. 25 Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, Revd edn (New York: George Braziller, Inc.: 1955), p. 170. 26 See Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell, 1989). 27 W. O. Henderson, The German Colonial Empire, 18841919 (London: Frank Cass, 1993), pp. 3132; Wolfe W. Schmokel, Dream of Empire: German Colonialism, 19191945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); Richard A. Voeltz, German Colonialism and the South West Africa Company, 18841914 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1988). 213 Argument and change in world politics In France, two congresses convened on colonialism in 1889 and 1889 1890. The latter, the National Colonial Congress, specically aimed to coordinate the activities of the many smaller pro-colonial organiza- tions and included four dozen members of parliament. The Comit e de lAfrique fran caise, founded in 1890, sponsored exploration of Africa, publisheda monthly newspaper to persuade the public of the benets of colonization, and lobbied the French government in favor of expansion in Africa. The Union Coloniale Fran caise founded in 1893 was explicitly concerned with promoting economic development of the colonies for French commercial interests. Both societies included members of par- liament as did later organizations, such as the Parti Colonial, formed in 1892, andthe Comit e du Maroc, formedin 1904, to promote French colo- nialism in Morocco. The French colonial lobby stressed both nationalist reasons for expansion and the potential economic benets of empire. 28 As Jules Ferry, an ardent advocate of empire argued: Colonies are for rich countries one of the most lucrative methods of investing capital . . . I say that France, which is glutted with capital and which has exported considerable quantities, has an interest in looking at this side of the question . . . It is the same as that of outlets for our manufactures. 29 Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher argue that British advocates of expansion were driven similarly by economic, spiritual, and moral fervor. Since the Evangelical revival and the rise of secular liberalism, the issues presented by tropical Africa to the British nation had been derived from the ethical constructs of these movements. They suggest that Concern for Africa owed from some of the most vivid experi- ences of Victorian religious and political life. And for this reason the chief African questions for the Victorians were ones of atonement and duty. The chains had to be struck from the Africans neck. He must be converted. He would be civilized. He should be traded with. But for all their enthusiasm, the earlier Victorians refusedto rule him. 30 However, late Victorians did rush to rule Africa. 28 Stuart Michael Persell, The French Colonial Lobby, 18891938 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1983). 29 Quoted in A. Adu Boahen, African Perspectives on Colonialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 31. 30 Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, p. 27. They also argue that aside from those with nancial and trading interests, the impetus for actual formal colonial rule in Africa, when it came, was ofcial concern for larger strategic goals British rivalry with France and protection of routes to their lucrative colonial assets in India. Ibid., pp. 191, 463464. But this ignores BritishcolonialisminAfrica that couldnot be clearly or indirectly linked to strategic assets. 214 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood Conquest, resistance, revolt The rush to establish effective occupation of Africas interior after the Berlin West Africa Conference was called the Scramble for Africa and Europeanstates didjust that, conquering andswindling Africannations out of their land and political independence, and establishing European colonies that covered almost the entire continent. 31 Conquest often fol- lowedthe same script. Africanleaders were offeredtreaties of protection and free trade by the representatives of a European government inter- estedin the region. The protection was against war by other European or African nations and in some cases quite welcome. The free trade was a monopoly granting exclusive trading rights to the European state. An African leaders refusal to accede to treaties generally led to war. Declarations and treaties on free trade and ending slavery were thus not only rules for Europeans conduct in Africa with other Europeans, but also legal rationalizations for dispossessing African rulers of their land if they refused to conduct commerce on European terms or if they practicedslaveryor allowedslave trading. Some Africanrulers who re- fused to succumb to the exigencies of British imperialism were arrested or treacherously trapped and deported fromtheir own countries. 32 For example, King Jaja of Opobo and others, resisted offers of protection by the British. It was only after painstaking explanations and assurances by Consul Hewett that they consented to sign the treaty less the clauses dealing with freedom of trade. This consul invited him to dinner on board a British boat in 1887 and ordered the boat to sail away after King Jaja and his party had settled down to their dinner. King Jaja was taken to Accra, and tried and convicted on phony charges of trade monopoly. He was then deported to the West Indies where he died in 1891. Other famous African rulers who were deported to the Seychelles included King Prempeh I of Asante, Bai Bureh of Sierra Leone, and Mukama Kabarega of Bunyoro. King Prempeh, who was deported in 1896, was allowed to return to Kumasi in 1924, when the British adjudged him to be an old and broken man. 33 Because most African leaders thus arrested were exiled for many years, Boniface Obichere argues that banishment by the British was a 31 See Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 18761912 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991). 32 Boniface I. Obichere, African Critics of Victorian Imperialism: An Analysis, Journal of African Studies 4 (1977), 120: 3. 33 Ibid., p. 3. 215 Argument and change in world politics very effective method of implanting their own authority in the politi- cal vacuum which they created. 34 African leaders who werent killed or kidnapped and banished wrote letters, negotiated with British colo- nial ofcials on the frontier, and many took up arms to halt colonial expansion. Of course, because Africans resisted the Europeans, colonizers also used brute force, as these lines from a widely quoted poem by Hilaire Belloc suggest: Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim Gun, and they have not. 35 Because Europeans usually had fewer soldiers on the battleeld, they recruited or coerced Africans to join their militaries. But the most important factor weighing against the Africans was that the European militaries deployed superior weapons, and this was ensured after they agreed at the Brussels meeting in 18891890 to prohibit export of rearms toAfrica. Thoughsomearms merchants evadedtheembargo, it was effective at preventing even wealthy African nations fromgetting the most advanced weapons in sufcient numbers to halt the European advance. Despite their military disadvantage, African resistance to occupation was often intense and sustained. In many cases, African militaries man- agedto postpone for years the advance of European forces. For instance, the Ashanti and the Zulu beat the British several times. The Ethiopians, with an army numbering over 100,000, held off the Italians until 1935 by defeating them in 1896. Even with the embargo, some Africans were able to acquire modern arms and mobilize large military forces. Samori Tour e of West Africa built a force of well over 30,000 in 1887 armed with modern European guns a combination of domestic manufac- tures and imports paid for partly by trading slaves. Though lacking artillery, Samori forestalledFrenchconquest for years. 36 The Barue of the Zambesi similarly opposed Portuguese colonial expansion for several decades in the late nineteenth century, in part with homemade modern arms. 37 Still, even with these and other exceptions, prolonged African military resistance was generally unsuccessful. 34 Ibid., p. 4. 35 Quoted in Hochschild, King Leopolds Ghost, p. 90. 36 See MBaye Gueye and A. Adu Boahen, African Initiatives and Resistance in West Africa, 18801914, in Boahen, ed., Africa Under Colonial Domination, pp. 114148: 123127. 37 See Alan F. Isaacman, The Tradition of Resistance in Mozambique: Anti-Colonial Activ- ity in the Zambesi Valley, 18501921 (London: Heinemann, 1976). For summaries of the armed resistance and revolts, see Boahen, African Perspectives on Colonialism, pp. 6466 and Bruce Vandervort, Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa, 18301914 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998). 216 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood Once occupied, some Africans collaborated, trying to make the best of colonial rule, while others attempted to modify and resist it by what- ever means necessary. As Terrence Ranger argues, virtually every sort of African society resisted, and there was resistance in virtually every region of European advance. 38 Some used work stoppages and strikes to modify colonial governance, and to obtain better working conditions and wages. Major armed revolts included the Hut Tax Rebellion of 1898 in Sierra Leone, the Asante Rebellion of 1900 in the Gold Coast, the long Ekumeku Rebellion of 18931906 in Nigeria, and the Ndebele-Shona Rebellion of 18961897 in Southern Africa. The 19051906 Maji Maji rebellion in Tanganyika against the Germans was perhaps the largest, engaging over twenty African ethnic groups spread over 10,000 square miles. It was also the most brutally repressed uprising in East Africa, with 75,000 Africans killed, and the German starvation strategy leading to a famine causing 250,000300,000 more deaths. Some anti-colonial forces used the pen and formed political institu- tions to lobby for the maintenance of their own legal institutions and autonomy. African organizations, such as the Fantsi Amanbuhu Fekuw of Gold Coast, often combined political and cultural resistance to the colonizer, and there were a number of Aborigines Rights Protection So- cieties and similar organizations in the continent. One early reformer, Reverend Alexander Crummell, born in New York in the early nine- teenth century and educated in Cambridge, England, was part of the African-American movement that founded Liberia. Crummell believed in the virtues of commerce and the progressive force of Western civiliza- tion in Africa, but he also questioned aspects of the colonial situation. I am not satised that the wealth of this, our Africa, should make other men wealthy and not ourselves. It troubles me in the night, and in the day it vexes me, that of all the moneys poured out here, so little stays at our own water-side. 39 The intellectuals John Africanus Horton, Edward Blyden, and James Johnson, were less enamored with Western civilization. The British-educated West African Horton rejected the idea that Africans were inferior to any others and he devoted several of his books to refuting the scientic and anthropological arguments of the mid-nineteenth century that proclaimed African inferiority. Horton was 38 T.O. Ranger, African Initiatives and Resistance in the Face of Partition and Conquest, in Boahen, ed., Africa Under Colonial Domination, pp. 4562: 47. 39 Quoted in J. Ayo Langley, Ideologies of Liberation in Black Africa, 18561970: Documents on Modern African Political Thought fromColonial Times to the Present (London: Rex Collings, 1979), p. 26. 217 Argument and change in world politics also an early advocate of Pan-Africanism. Blyden, a West Indian who moved to Liberia in 1851, and a professor of Greek and Latin at Liberia College, wrote admiringly in several books of traditional African so- cial, economic, and political systems and was also an early advocate of Pan-African solidarity. Johnson, a Yoruba who argued for Nigerian nationalism, believed in Africa for the Africans. 40 Though the European scramble and partition were often effected by force, argument was still important. The fact that Europeans gave African leaders opposition to free trade and protection as a ratio- nale for conquest, rather than proclaiming a natural right to conquest, signies a shift toward the legalist viewof conquest espoused by Vitoria and Vattel in opposition to the anything goes positive law view dom- inant in the past. Indirect rule Like its incarnation in the Americas, European colonialism in Africa consisted of political control, economic expropriation, forced labor, ex- traction of land and natural resources for little or no compensation, the payment of tribute to the colonizer, and cultural control, such as forced religious conversion and education in the language of the metropole. Colonization in Africa followed a familiar plot: a new land populated by barbarians and savages was discovered or, in the case of Africa, explored by missionaries and individual charismatic explorers who chartedthe area. Next, as in the Americas, private andpublic companies backed by the might of governments staked claims (concessions), and began settlements in order to do business. European governments de- ployed militaries to protect settlers and investments. Colonizers made treaties of European protection with Africans, while preexisting dis- agreements and differences between native populations were exploited so that a divide and rule strategy would succeed. The language, re- ligion, political, and economic systems of the rst inhabitants of the area were recognized only as long as it took to subdue the local peo- ple. Colonizers constructed roads, ports, and railways, with colonial labor, to facilitate the extraction of resources and settlement of the land and developed local government in order to coordinate these activi- ties and signal to other potential colonizers that the area was already taken. 40 Boahen, AfricanPerspectives onColonialism, pp. 2022andLangley, Ideologies of Liberation, pp. 3238. 218 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA WALVIS BAY (British) S.W. AFRICA BASUTOLAND SWAZILAND M A D A G A S C A R Comoro Is. (French) Zanzibar (British) Madeira (Portuguese) Canary Is. (Spanish) IFNI (Spanish) SPANISH MOROCCO ALGERIA FRENCH WEST AFRICA LIBYA (British-Occupied) EGYPT TUNISIA ANGLO- EGYPTIAN SUDAN EMPIRE OF ETHIOPIA (Condominium) ERITREA SOMALILAND (Fr.)(Br.) S O M A L I L A N D ( I t a l i a n ) BRITISH E. AFRICA GERMAN E. AFRICA BELGIAN CONGO KAMERUN NIGERIA GAMBIA PORTUGUESE GUINEA SIERRA LEONE LIBERIA GOLD COAST T O G O L A N D Fernando Po (Spanish) So Tom (Portuguese) E Q U A T O R I A L F R E N C H A F R I C A NORTHERN NORTHERN RHODESIA BECHUANA- LAND SOUTHERN RHODESIA NYASALAND CABINDA ANGOLA SPANISH GUINEA M O R O C C O R I O D E O R O UGANDA DARFUR (Br. Prot.) (Br. Prot.) ot.) M O Z A M B I Q U E S O U T H E R N Pemba (Portuguese) Portuguese British British-occupied French Belgian German Spanish Italian 0 0 1000 500 1000 miles 2000 km 20E 40E 60E 0 20W 40S 40S 20S 20S 0 0 20N 40N 20W 0 20E 40E 60E 20N 40N Independent states Areas ceded by France to Germany in 1911 DARFUR (was an independent state not effectively incorporated into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan at this stage) 3. Europeans in Africa in 1914 219 Argument and change in world politics In this way, Africa was completely colonized, with the exceptions of the independent states of South Africa and Ethiopia, by 1914, only a few decades after colonization began. Italy held Somaliland; Germany controlled South West Africa, Kamerun, and a portion of East Africa (Tanzania); Portugal had Guinea, Angola, and Mozambique; Spain had Rio De Oro (now Western Sahara). Most of the rest of the continent was run by either Britain or France. Of course, one major difference between colonialism in the Americas and Africa was that, after the late nineteenth century, slavery was not legal in most European colonies in Africa, and all the colonizing na- tions that met at Berlin had pledged to combat it. However, since most Africans were little interested in working on the roads, railroads, mines, and farms of white settlers, and slavery was outlawed, forced labor was widely used. A second important difference was due to demographics. While, in the Americas, native populations declined at an astounding rate, and Europeans found the climate hospitable for colonization and settlement, Africans did not die in great numbers upon contact with colonizers, andEuropeans were not immediatelycomfortable inAfrican climates. Thus, Europeans were well outnumbered by Africans, and in order to govern Africa without the constant use of force, some sort of cooperation had to be devised. This meant that in the era of conquest European armies made use of African troops, usually mercenaries or conscripts drawn from a different region. It also meant that when it came time to rule, European governments relied on local African rulers and collaborators more than they had in the Americas, which meant keeping some aspects of African political systems in place and using them in a system of indirect rule. 41 As a French colonial administra- tor explained, There is no colonization without native policy; no native policy without a territorial command; and no territorial command with- out native chiefs who serve as links between the colonial authority and the population. 42 In terms of concrete everyday practice, indirect rule meant that after Europeans established military authority, they ruled natives through 41 Muchis oftenmade of differences among styles of French, British, German, Portuguese, and Belgian administration in Africa. The sharpest contrast is usually described as be- tween French (direct) and British (indirect) rule. The French tended to crush traditional authority systems and insert their own method of governance while the British tended to rule through traditional leaders and leadership structures. While there were important differences, colonial administration generally embodied varying degrees of indirect rule. 42 Robert Delavignette in 1946, quoted in Betts, Methods and Institutions of European Domination, p. 317. 220 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood settler administrations which in turn governed through African lead- ers whose authority Europeans both borrowed and enhanced. Local chiefs collected taxes, organized the labor pools necessary to satisfy the demands of the colonizers, and handled disputes among natives. The police forces were primarily staffed by Africans under the directions of Europeans. European administrations governed the European settlers directly through settler administrations. European governments paid for colonial administration and infra- structure primarily with taxes on huts or persons, or on protable European-runconcessions. Taxes alsoforcedAfricans out of their subsis- tence economies and into the wage economy. As Kenyas governor said in 1913, We consider that taxation is the only possible method of com- pelling the native to leave his reserve for the purpose of seeking work. Only in this way can the cost of living be increased for the native . . . it is on this that the supply of labour and the price of labour depend. To raise the rate of wages would not increase, but would diminish the sup- ply of labour. 43 Colonial governments typically required free Africans, prisoners, andvagrants to provide periods of labor to the government for the construction of roads and other infrastructures. Forced labor for public works and taxes thus subsidized administrative costs. German South-West Africa WhenGermanytriedto establishcolonies inEast andSouthWest Africa, it met with determined African resistance. The Germans crushed this resistance with enormous brutality, and on the face of it, there seems no room in this history for the play of argument, much less ethical argu- ment. As Bismarck said, The great questions of the age are not settled by speeches and majority votes . . . but by iron and blood. 44 Ultimately, the Germans killed tens of thousands of Africans in South-West Africa, subjected most of the rest to forced labor, and took the land and cattle. After they found diamonds, they took those and made enormous pro- ts. Nevertheless, arguments identity, practical, scientic, andethical were an important part of the process, though more often than not native South-West Africans lost their arguments. 43 Quoted in M.H.Y. Kaniki, The Colonial Economy: The Former British Zones, in Boa- hen, ed., Africa Under Colonial Domination, pp. 382419: 397. 44 Quoted in Hagan Schulze, Germany: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1998), p. 140. 221 Argument and change in world politics As they had elsewhere in Africa, religion and commerce preceded colonial government in South-West Africa. The Portuguese, English and Dutch hadall set foot on what was to become South-West Africa starting in the fteenth century, but only German missionaries made an effort to stake out a settlement. The missionaries were followed decades later, in 1882, by the entrepreneur Adolf L uderitz, who sought German pro- tection. Assured of at least qualied protection in 1884, L uderitz suc- cessfully acquired a great deal of land, mainly on the coast, and thus German interest in the area grew. As Bismarcks agent Count M unster wrote to Britains Lord Granville to forestall British interest in the area, The Imperial Government regards itself bound to afford protection and encouragement to German subjects carrying on trade in districts where sufcient protection is not guaranteed by a recognized Civil organization. 45 Later, when L uderitz was failing nancially, he sold his assets to the Deutsche Colonial Gesellschaft f ur S udwest Afrika, a private German corporation which expanded its assets by purchasing other land from the natives. Like other colonial powers, German policy was rst to take land from natives by treaty if possible, and to exploit preexisting disagreements andconict betweennative leaders, especiallythe long-standingconict between the two largest groups in the area, the Herero and the Nama. Those natives who resisted incorporation were to be made to submit. In 1885 Bismarck sent Dr. Heinrich Goering (Hermann Goerings father) to negotiate treaties of protection with the South West African natives, and thus the ofcial Germanpresence was extended. The Germans gave their newly acquired land to other commercial companies, to concessions, and to settlers, taking the rest as crown land. Some African leaders took German protection from Goering or later emissaries as part of their strategy against other groups. For example, in part to help them in their war with the Nama, the Herero submitted to German protection in 1890. Questioning the wisdom of the alliance, Hendrik Witboi, a Nama chief, wrote to the head of the Herero after he learned of the treaty: But dear captain, you have now accepted another Government; you have surrendered to that Government in order to be protected by an- other human Government from all dangers, chiey and foremost to be protected from me in this war . . . You are to be protected and helped by the German Government, but dear captain do you appreciate what 45 Letter quoted in I. Goldblatt, History of South West Africa from the Beginning of the Nine- teenth Century (Cape Town: Jutta & Company Limited, 1971), p. 86. 222 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood you have done? . . . but it appears to me that you have not sufciently considered the matter, having in view your land and people, your de- scendants who will come after you and your Chieftains rights. Do you imaginethat youwill retainall therights of your independent chieftain- ship after you shall have destroyed me (if you succeed)? That is your idea, but dear Captain in the end you will have bitter remorse, you will have eternal remorse, for this handing of your land and sovereignty over to the hands of white people . . . But this thing which you have done, this giving of yourself into the hands of white people for gov- ernment, thinking that you have acted wisely, that will become to you a burden as if you were carrying the sun on your back. 46 The Germans tried to force a treaty with the Nama in 1892 but some, under Witboi, repeatedly declined and instead made a peace treaty with the Herero in November. In 1892 Witboi wrote to the British magistrate in Walvis Bay seeking information: Germans are encroaching on my land and now even my life is threat- ened they come to destroy me by War without my knowing what my guilt is . . . I have been told that it is their intention to shoot me and I ask Your Honour. Perhaps you can tell me why? Perhaps you will know because you are parties to a treaty and of you English and Germans the other nation can do nothing without the knowledge of the other; because as I have heard (and I ask Your Honour) that the English Government and the German Government held a big meeting and dis- cussed to whom this land Africa should be assigned for the purpose of concluding Protection Agreements with the Chiefs of the land; and thereupon you English surrendered the land to the Germans. But you also said at the meeting that no Chief should be compelled by force. 47 Witboi appealed to Britain to curb the Germans. His appeal framed German behavior as profoundly unjust: So also has it come to pass that some Chiefs have accepted German protection. . . . The Germans told those Chiefs that they wished to pro- tect them from other strong nations, which intended to come into the land with armies and deprive the Chiefs, by force, of their lands and farms; and that therefore it was their (the Germans) desire to protect the Chiefs from such stupid and unjust people . . . but so far as I have seen and heard, it appears to me wholly and entirely the reverse. The German himself is that person of whom he spoke, he is just what he describedthose other nations as. He is doingthose things because he 46 Quoted in Union of South Africa, Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and their Treatment by Germany (London: His Majestys Stationery Ofce, 1918), p. 20. 47 Quoted in ibid., p. 25. 223 Argument and change in world politics rules and is now independent, with his Governments laws; he makes no requests according to truth and justice and asks no permission of a chief . . . He personally punishes our people at Windhuk and has al- ready beaten people to death for debt . . . It is not just and worthy to beat people to death for that . . . He ogs people in a scandalous and cruel manner. We stupid and unintelligent people, for so he regards us, we have never yet punished a human being in such a cruel and improper way. He stretches persons on their backs and ogs them on the stomach and even between the legs, be they male or female . . . 48 Seeking to crush them if they would not sign up for protection, Ger- mans under Commander Curt von Fran cois attacked the Nama by sur- prise in April 1893 at Hornkranz, killing at least eighty people, mostly women and children. Witboi escaped and decided to go on the offen- sive. After some ghting during whichneither side couldgainthe upper hand, the new German ofcer in charge of South West Africa, Theodore Leutwein, wrote Witboi a letter, and in May the Nama and Germans came to a truce that would last until 1 August 1894. 49 During the truce, Leutwein proposed an unconditional surrender, submission, and charged the Nama with making war against his African neighbors, which he said was an affront to the German emperor. 50 Witboi refused to submit and asked instead for a peace that respected both sides. Witboi and Leutweins arguments On 18 August 1894, Witboi wrote to Leutwein in an attempt to keep his autonomy and avoid battle with the Germans. Witbois letter was an argument for the extension of the principle of self-determination to his territory, and he again used arguments he thought the colonizer would recognize and must logically extend to apply to the Nama people. My dear highly honoured Mr. Leutwein, Major, God has created different states, and therefore I know and believe that it is no sin or crime that I should remain Kaptain of my land and my people. If you wish to kill me on account of my independent rule over my country, and without any cause on my part, that cannot do me any harm or occasion me any disgrace, for then I shall die in honour, in defence of my rights. Witbois letter demonstrates his recognition of the importance of legal justication for the Germans before the world. He says I bear no 48 Quoted in ibid. The Report notes that Witbois letter was received and transmitted to the British government. 49 Horst Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism (18841915) (London: Zed Press, 1980), pp. 7071. 50 Leutwein to Witboi, quoted in Report on the Natives, p. 84. 224 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood guilt in respect of the things you impute to me as crimes, and which you employ as grounds for condemning me to death. These are things which you have conjured up in order to appear before the world as a man who has honour, right andtruthonhis side. But dear friend, I tell youthat I am truly free and at ease in my mind, because I know myself to be innocent of any guilt. Witboi also acknowledged that the German military was superior to his forces, but, consistent with his strong religious beliefs, he presumed that the Lord would help him. But you say that might is right, and in accordance with that, you act towards me because you are mighty in that you possess arms and all the other weapons. I agree that you are powerful, and I cannot hold a candle to you. But dear friend, you come to me with an armed force, and you say you are going to shoot at me. Well then, I shall return the re; but not in my name, or in relying on my strength; rather in the name of the Lord and relying on His strength, and I defend myself with His aid. Finally, Witboi implied that the Germans would lose the ethical argument in the eyes of the world and made a last plea for peace: You wish to lay on me the blame for the shedding of blood, but that is out of the question. I have offered you peace, and still do so a genuine peace and I ask you to leave me in peace. 51 Witbois letter was probably written too late, since Major Leutwein had already called for reinforcements and planned to attack again once those forces arrived. In any case, Leutwein replied a few days later: all further letters in which you do not offer me your submission are useless . . . . 52 Witboi said nothing and German troops, reinforced, went to war against the Nama. Witboi and the Nama lost when their ammu- nition and food ran out, and they were forced to sign a treaty with the Germans in mid-September. Leutweins treaty was, after all, not premised on a total surrender for the Nama they were allowed to keep their weapons and many in Germany, and a number of settlers in South-West Africa, thought the treaty should not be approved by the chancellor. The settlers, and the ofcer Leutwein had replaced, argued that Leutweins terms were too lenient. Fran cois said: Comparedwith the damage Witbooi has caused, I regard the . . . peace as far too mild. The war against Witbooi has cost the German Empire approximately four million Marks. The damage it 51 Witboi letter to Leutwein quoted in Goldblatt, History of South West Africa, pp. 122123. This is similar to statements the Melians made to the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War. 52 Quoted in Report on the Natives, p. 85. 225 Argument and change in world politics has caused in the colony is at least as great. But he appears to have lost only areas that are at great distance from Gibeon [Witbois home]; his tribe remains united; he retains his weapons and, it seems, the captured ries as well; and he receives a salary of 2,000 Marks. 53 Leutwein was compelled by the criticism to explain his conduct in the war and make a practical argument for the German governments recognitionof his treatywithWitboi. Ina letter tothe Germanchancellor, Leutwein humbly said he thought his negotiated settlement was the wisest move given the possibility of a prolonged war if total surrender was the object. He wrote: All my detractors operate onthe premise that I was free to treat Witbooi as I wished and that I acted in the way I did for reasons that are im- possible to understand. I must submit, Your Grace, that this was not so. In all colonial wars in which one faces a really formidable enemy, it is a question of either destroying him or coming to an understanding with him. As we have seen on more than one occasion, victory alone is of no avail and severe punishment will only produce a secret enemy intent on casting off his shackles. This is a lesson I have drawn fromthe study of English colonial history from which we Germans can learn much more than that. 54 Rather than trying to totally defeat the Nama, a negotiated settlement was the wisest thing for Germany since Witboi was still strong and defeating his forces would have required 3,000 instead of 300 ries. Leutwein was, of course, making an economic argument as well as a diplomatic one Germany could ill afford the expense of a long war and he implored the chancellor to make the case to the emperor. But, he said, If Your Grace does not subscribe to my view, nothing has been lost either, since he could easily resume war against the Nama: I should have no difculty in nding a pretext that would put Kaptein Witbooi in the wrong. 55 The emperor did agree to Leutweins treaty, and this inaugurated an almost eleven-year period of coexistence between the Germans and Nama where Witbois forces even assistedthe Germans divide andcon- quer strategy, helping to suppress other Africans. Leutwein successfully fed the friction between Nama and Herero. Leutwein said: The war with Witboi had, at the very beginning of my colonial activ- ity, opened my eyes to the difculty of suppressing native risings in 53 Quoted in Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, p. 78. 54 Quoted in ibid., pp. 7879. 55 Quoted in ibid., p. 79. 226 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood South-West Africa. Since that time I have used my best endeavor to make the native tribes serve our cause and play them off one against the other. Even an adversary of this policy must concede to me that it was more difcult, but also more serviceable, to inuence the natives to kill each other for us than to expect streams of blood and streams of money from the Old Fatherland for their suppression. . . . 56 Despite their great numerical superiority, the Nama, Herero, and other peoples of South-West Africa were unable tokeepGermansettlers, of whomthere were about 3,700 in1903, at bay. 57 Only the Ovambo, who lived farthest from the majority of German settlers and their military, were left relatively alone. The Africans weakness was due in part to the Germans military superiority, but was also because they were dev- astated by epidemics. A rinderpest epidemic in 1897 wiped out much of the cattle on which they depended for subsistence; an epidemic of typhoid fever the following year further weakened the Africans. The German expropriation of land continued, and a system of Native Re- serves was established in 1898. Thus, the German colonial government reduced the Africans to the state of rightlessness. And, Displaying a blatantly racist attitude, the Germans described Africans as baboons and treated them accordingly. 58 German behavior in South-West Africa was not natural; it had to be argued before it could be implemented. The colonists arguments de- pended on social Darwinist identity and normative beliefs, namely the belief in German superiority, and the ability to dominate militarily jus- tied such domination. As one high-ranking German colonial ofcial, Paul Rohrbach, wrote: The decision to colonise in South-West Africa could after all mean nothing else but this, namely that the native tribes would have to give uptheir lands onwhichthey hadpreviously grazedtheir stock inorder that the white man might have the land for grazing his stock. When this attitude is questioned from the moral law standpoint, the answer is that for the nations of the Kulture-position of the 56 Leutwein, quoted in Report on the Natives, p. 10. 57 Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, p. 244. 58 Ibid., p. 132. As one missionary observed The real cause of the bitterness among the Hereros toward the Germans is without question the fact that the average German looks down upon the natives as being about on the same level as the higher primates (baboon being their favorite term for the natives) and treats them like animals. The settler holds that the native has a right to exist only in so far as he is useful to the white man. It follows that the whites value their horses and even their oxen more than they value the natives. Quoted in Jon M. Bridgman, The Revolt of the Hereros (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 62. 227 Argument and change in world politics South African natives, the loss of their free national barbarism and their development into the class of labourers in service of land and dependent on the white people is primarily a law of existence in the highest degree. It is applicable to a nation in the same way as to the individual, that the right of existence is justied primarily in the degree that such existence is useful for progress and general development. By no arguments whatsoever can it be shown that the preservation of any degree of national independence, national property, and political organizationby the races of South-West Africa, wouldbe of a greater or even of an equal advantage for the development of mankindin general or of the German people in particular, than the making of such races serviceable in the enjoyment of their former possessions by the white races. 59 Consistent with these beliefs and arguments, German colonial rule over Africans was harsh. German settlers who took land and cattle from the Africans and coerced them into labor were ignored or assisted by the German police. The fewGerman settlers who were tried for murder- ing or ogging Africans were often given light sentences or acquitted, while the rule of thumb in cases where Africans killed Germans was a death sentence. As German director of land settlement, Karl Dove, said: leniency towards the natives is cruelty to the whites. 60 The large- scale theft of thousands of head of cattle under the pretext that the grazing cattle were trespassing on German land, or later through swin- dling, was particularly enraging to Africans though they could do little about it. 61 One African, Daniel Kariko, described the cattle swindle this way: Our people were being robbed and deceived right and left by German traders, their cattle were taken by force; they were ogged and ill- treatedandgot noredress. Infact the Germanpolice assistedthe traders instead of protecting us. Traders would come along and offer goods. When we said we had no cattle to spare, as the rinderpest had killed so many, they said they would give us credit. Often. . . the trader would simply off-load goods and leave them saying that we could pay when we liked, but in a few weeks he would come back and demand his money or cattle in lieu thereof. He would then go and pick out our very best cows he could nd. Very often one mans cattle were taken to pay other peoples debts. If we objected and tried to resist the police 59 Rohrbach, quoted in Report on the Natives, p. 19. 60 Quoted in ibid., p. 49. 61 Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, pp. 117119. 228 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood would be sent for and, what with the oggings and the threats of shooting, it was useless for our poor people to resist. . . . They xed their own prices for the goods, but would never let us place our own valuation on the cattle. They said a cow was worth 20 marks only. For a bag of meal they took eight cows . . . Some debts they claimed had never existed . . . 62 Rebellion and rivers of blood In late 1903 the Bondelswartz of the southern region of South-West Africa rebelled after the Germans promulgated regulations compelling them to regard a white man as a superior being, and proclaimed that the evidence of a white man can only be outweighed by the state- ments of seven coloured persons in court. 63 German authorities had also interfered in an internal dispute, despite treaty provisions grant- ing autonomy to the Bondelswartz in such matters, and in the process they killed a Bondelswartz leader. When German troops moved south to crush the Bondelswartz uprising, the Herero people, led by Samuel Mahero, began a revolt that shocked the Germans with its intensity and initial success. The Herero only targeted German men and would spare the Boers, British, and other African groups: We decided that we would wage war in a humane manner and would kill only the German men who were soldiers, or would become soldiers. 64 Even with these limitations, in a few weeks in January 1904, the Herero mounted a seri- ous challenge to the German presence, and despite a shortage of arms and ammunition, they again took the initiative in April and May. Only when Governor Leutwein was reinforced by troops from Germany did German forces take the initiative. By August, the Herero were in retreat. The chief of the Army General Staff, Graff Schlieffen, was put in charge of the operation, which he ran from Germany. Because he was considered too lenient, inadvertently encouraging the uprising, Leutwein was replaced in July as military commander by General Lothar von Trotha, already well known for his ruthlessness in colonial wars in China and East Africa. Trotha told Leutwein in 1904: I know enough tribes in Africa. They all have the same mentality in- sofar as they yield only to force. It was and remains my policy to apply this force by unmitigated terrorism and even cruelty. I shall destroy the rebellious tribes by shedding rivers of blood and money. 65 Von Trotha 62 Quoted in Report on the Natives, pp. 4748. 63 Leutwein quoted in ibid., p. 33. 64 Quoted in ibid., p. 57. 65 Trotha quoted in Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, p. 154. 229 Argument and change in world politics gave orders on 2 October 1904 to shoot every Herero: I believe that the Herero must be destroyed as a nation. 66 Cash bounties for rebellion leaders, dead or alive, were offered by the general. On 29 October, the general asked Herero leaders to come in to arrange a peace treaty and when they arrived, he had them shot. 67 Von Trotha then issued orders that every Herero within German boundaries was to be shot regardless of whether or not they were armed. Although the orders were later revised to be less harsh, von Trotha nevertheless continued the policy with the support of General Schlieffen, whowrote on23 November: One mayagree withTrotha that the whole nation must be destroyed or driven out of the country. After what has happened the co-existence of whites and blacks will be very difcult, unless the blacks are kept in a state of forced labour, indeed a kind of slavery. Racial war, once it has broken out, can only be ended by the destruction of one of the parties. 68 To escape the German troops, the Herero went east into the desert and the General Staff decided that driving them into the desert would be their policy: The arid Omaheke was to complete what the German Army had begun: the extermination of the Herero nation. 69 Under Trothas orders, and with the knowledge of the General Staff, the militarythenblockedoff other routes, andforced the Herero into the desert where many died of thirst. Many Germans objected to the policy of exterminating the Herero. 70 Those who opposed German policy, and especially von Trothas ex- termination order, included the chancellor, Prince von B ulow, who ar- gued to the kaiser that the order was contradictory to all Christian and humane principles. 71 Notably, B ulow did not oppose concentra- tion camps where the rest of the Herero people would be placed and kept for the time being. 72 Rather, von B ulowargued pragmatically that extermination was unwise since the native population was essential both for farming and stock-breeding and for mining and was detri- mental to Germanys place among the civilized nations and would add 66 Quoted in Peter Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988), p. 10. Also see Goldblatt, History of South West Africa, pp. 132133 and Helmut Bley, Namibia Under German Rule (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 1996), p. 164. 67 Report on the Natives, pp. 5960. 68 Quoted in Bley, Namibia Under German Rule, p. 165. 69 General Staff, Die K ampfe der deutschen Truppen in S udwestafrica, auf Grund amtichen Materials bearbeitet von der Kriegsgeschichtlichen Abteilung I des Grossen Generalstabes (Berlin: 1906), vol. I, p. 207, quoted in Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, pp. 155156. 70 Henderson, German Colonial Empire, p. 86. 71 Quoted in Bley, Namibia Under German Rule, p. 163. 72 Quoted in Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, p. 165. 230 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood fuel to the violent campaign already being waged against Germany. 73 The head of the German Colonial Department, St ubel, argued that the extermination program was damaging to the Germany army. 74 On the other hand, Schlieffen thought von Trotha was correct: The intention of General von Trotha can therefore be approved. The only problem is that he does not have the power to carry it out. 75 The General Staff felt constrained by public opinion which Schlieffen noted was against ex- termination, and therefore, he said, Trothas plan could not be carried through successfully in the face of present opinion. 76 On 8 December 1904, though much of the damage had already been done, Trothas ex- termination order was countermanded. A few thousand Herero were able to cross the desert into other territory, while others were able to slip across German lines and nd shelter elsewhere in South-West Africa. The remaining Herero were put in concentration camps. The Herero, whohadaskedthe Nama tojointhemat the outset of their rebellion, fought alone and were essentially defeated when the Nama, again led by Hendrik Witboi, nally took up arms against the Germans in October 1904. Since the settlers were calling on the German army to exterminate the Nama as well as the Herero, they feared attack after von Trotha nished with the Herero. About 1,2001,400 Nama fought a German force in South-West Africa of about 10,000. Even with far supe- rior repower, due to their limited mobility, the Germans were unable to quickly defeat the Nama. 77 Thus, the war dragged on and General von Trotha was withdrawn from South-West Africa in November 1905 before he was able to defeat the Nama. 78 The Nama were able to ght for several years, but like the Herero, they faced a de facto policy of ex- termination and were slowly crushed, with the last Nama rebels nally being put down in March 1908. The 1911 census reveals howefcient German strategy and the subse- quent camps were: about 50 percent of Nama people (whose population had been estimated at about 20,000 in 1904) and 75 to 80 percent of the Herero population (estimated at about 80,000 in 1904) had been killed by German forces by the end of 1905. 79 On the other hand, a total of 676 73 Quoted in Bley, Namibia Under German Rule, p. 166. 74 Bley, Namibia Under German Rule, pp. 166167. 75 Quoted in Bridgman, Revolt of the Hereros, p. 130. 76 Quoted in Bley, Namibia Under German Rule, p. 165. 77 See Bridgman, Revolt of the Hereros, pp. 140 and 169. 78 Still, General von Trotha was given the Order of Merit by the Kaiser in 1905. Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, p. 615. 79 Report on the Natives, p. 35. Bley, Namibia Under German Rule, p. 150. 231 Argument and change in world politics Germans were killedinaction, 689 diedfromillness, 907 were wounded, and 76 were missing; the cost of putting down the rebellion, up to 1906, was estimated at 182 million Marks. 80 By its end in 1908, the war was estimated to have cost Germany nearly 500 million Marks. 81 Conditions were brutal for Africans followingGermanvictory. Herero andNama survivors were sent to camps where about 45 percent of them died. 82 Hosea Mungunda, described by the British as a Herero headman at Windhuk, testied about conditions for survivors: Those who were left after the rebellion were put into compounds and made to work for their food only. They were sent to farms, and also to the railways and elsewhere. Many were sent to Luderitzbucht and Swakopumund. Many died in captivity; and many were hanged and oggednearly to death anddiedas a result of ill-treatment. Many were mere skeletons when they came in and surrendered, and they could not stand bad food and ill-treatment. . . . The young girls were selected and taken as concubines for the sol- diers; but even the married women were assaulted and interfered with. . . When the railways were completed and the harbour works, we were sent out to towns and to farms to work. We were distributed and allocated to farmers whether we liked them or not. 83 A 1907 law obliged all natives over the age of seven to carry passes. Other ordinances prohibited natives from owning land, riding animals or cattle, and decreed that natives without visible means of subsis- tence would be treated as vagrants. 84 Punishment for vagrancy, de- sertion, negligence, disobedience and insolence included lashes and/or imprisonment. One European, Johann Noothout, who visited South- West Africa after the rebellion noted, If a prisoner were found outside the Herero prisoners camp, he would be brought before the Lieutenant and ogged with a sjambok. Fifty lashes were generally imposed. The manner in which the ogging was carried out was the most cruel imag- inable . . . pieces of esh would y from the victims body into the air. 85 German farmers were also widely known to abuse the Africans who worked for them. 80 Bridgman, Revolt of the Herero, pp. 164; Henderson, German Colonial Empire, p. 81. 81 John H. Wellington, South West Africa and its Human Issues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 212. 82 Bley, Namibia Under German Rule, p. 151. 83 Quoted in Report on the Natives p. 101. 84 German colonial law quoted in ibid., p. 111. 85 Noothout quoted in ibid., p. 100. 232 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood Role of argument German colonizers certainly used arguments as well as the whip and rie. But Witbois arguments, their futility, and the history of German slaughter of Nama and Herero people in South-West Africa appear to be powerful evidence against my claim that ethical arguments are im- portant in world politics. Indeed, this history illustrates the obvious: not all ethical arguments are successful. Witbois arguments failed for at least three reasons. First, and most important, the prevailing beliefs among the Germans did not allow the majority of German settlers to see the humanity of the Nama and other people of South-West Africa. Witbois arguments simply did not make sense. Second, the most important argument was not between Witboi and Leutwein or between any South-West African and German. What determined German behavior were arguments within Germany and among Germans and other civilized countries. Witbois argu- ments might have been more effective had the audience that the Ger- mans themselves had to address been less convinced of the rightness of colonial conquest. As it was, Reichstag debates over German South West Africa policy showed that many members were convinced of the less than fully human status of the South-West Africans, and a policy of extermination was therefore acceptable, at least for a time. As Graf Ludwig zu Reventlow said in 1904 during the Reichstag debate: Of course we are for humanity with respect to human be- ings of all kinds; but in contradiction to some of the orators preced- ing me, I would conclude by abjuring the interested authorities: Do not apply too much humanity to bloodthirsty beasts in the form of humans. German colonial theorist Paul Rohrbach argued that the Herero lacked the capacity to be educated to moral independence. 86 Yet ethical arguments were also made against German policy. Dur- ing one debate in the Reichstag, Social Democrat August Bebel called the German actions, not just barbaric, but bestial. 87 The extermi- nation order was ultimately countermanded by the civilian govern- ment, although it was too late for the majority of the Herero and Nama. 86 Quoted in Helmut Walser Smith, The Talk of Genocide, the Rhetoric of Miscegena- tion: Notes on Debates in the German Reichstag Concerning South West Africa, 190414, in Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, eds., The Imperialist Imagi- nation: German Colonialism and its Legacy (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 107123: 107, 114. 87 Quoted in ibid., p. 111. 233 Argument and change in world politics Third, the dominant European culture (the table on which German arguments were made) was consistent with German beliefs and behav- ior. German behavior was not unusual for conquerors, though the scale of killing in 1904 might have been unusual for colonial policy in the early twentieth century. Indeed, it was only during and after World War I, when Europeans argued that captured German colonies should not be returned to Germany, that Europeans paid much attention to the German slaughter and their subsequent treatment of the natives in South-West Africa. 88 For instance, Britain published the famous Blue Book, the Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and their Treatment by Germany, in 1918, with testimony of South-West Africans and other evi- dence of Germanatrocities inSouth-West Africa, includingphotographs of manacles, hangings, and the shredded backs of natives who had been lashed. 89 Reform Germanpolicytowardthe Africans inSouth-West Africachangedinsev- eral important respects after 1908. TheCenter andSocial Democratic Par- ties in Germany advocated reforming colonial policy toward Africans. The Reichstag and the Colonial Ofce, under its new secretary, Bern- hard Dernburg, passed laws for reforming the treatment of Africans in South West Africa. The L uderitz Bay Chamber of Mines and the railway construction concerns made native welfare an explicit preoccupation. 90 Why? First, the extermination program turned stomachs in Germany and South-West Africa and some farmers and missionaries advocated more humane policies. 91 Second, there was an inadequate supply of la- bor. After the natives lost the right to own cattle and land, most of the remaining African labor worked on white farms or in copper mining. Though there had been an extensive search for diamonds and gold, diamonds were not discovered in South-West Africa until April 1908. 88 D. Chanaiwa, African Initiatives and Resistance in Southern Africa, in Boahen, ed., Africa Under Colonial Domination, pp. 194220. Wm. Roger Louis, Great Britain and Germanys Lost Colonies, 19141919 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 16; Wright, Man- dates Under the League, p. 28. 89 The Germans replied in 1919 with a White Book that argued that German treatment of natives in the colonies was no worse than what the British did against the Boers and elsewhere andsuggestedthat some ofcers inSouthWest Africa hadrefusedto followvon Trothas exterminationorder. Die Behandlung der einheimischen Bevolkerung in den Kolonialen BesitzungenDeutschlands und Englands (Berlin, 1919). Alsosee Wellington, South West Africa and its Human Issues, pp. 236237. 90 Henderson, German Colonial Empire, p. 114. 91 Bley, Namibia Under German Rule, p. 226. 234 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood After their discovery, South-West Africa, whichhadnot beena protable colony, became protable, at least for the shareholders of the German South-West Africa Companyonwhose landthe diamonds were found. 92 By 1913, whites in South-West Africa, who numbered 14,840 in 1913, de- pended even more on African labor, of which 12,523 were employed on farms and 9,541 were employed in industry such as railroad construc- tion and mining for copper and diamonds. 93 While on a visit to South-West Africa in August 1908, Secretary Dernburg framed the reasons for reform in practical terms. At the moment, 2 percent of the country has been colonized and yet already there is a notable shortage of labour. We therefore are forced to improve living conditions for the natives, in order to preserve them as a labour force both for present needs and as a healthy new gener- ation in the future. Appropriate measures include medical attention, the provision of the natives former foodstuffs particularly milk for the Herero and permission for the Herero to buy cattle. 94 In March 1909 Dernburg also gave an ethical argument for aggressive humanitarian reforms: It has often been said. . . that everywhere in Africa where Europeans can work. . . the destruction of the blacks is a law of nature which will be fullled in native wars. This is a very questionable assumption. It is out of keeping with our position as a civilizing and protecting power. It makes colonization a process of deliberate exploitation and as the history of South-West Africa shows it causes Germany endless sacrices. It also offends the moral sensitivity of the greater part of our nation, on which our colonial policies are based. In Germany we do not attempt to live according to Darwinist principles: on the contrary, civi- lization has the task of offering assistance and protection to the weak and helpless, to the morally and economically underprivileged. This must remain our policy towards our fellows in SWA, at least towards those who remain loyal to us. 95 This statement articulates the rift between the majority of German set- tlers andthecolonial administrationandsuggests hownakedaggression slid toward aggressive humanitarianism and made room for reformist arguments andaction. Colonial administrators andcivil servants, taking 92 Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, p. 244. Drechsler argues that, with the exception of Togo, none of the German colonies were protable, p. 247. 93 Ibid., p. 244; Bley, Namibia Under German Rule, p. 198. 94 Quoted in Bley, Namibia Under German Rule, p. 230. 95 Quoted in ibid., p. 231. 235 Argument and change in world politics their lead fromthe Colonial Ofce, began to defend Africans against the excesses of colonial settlers for both pragmatic and normative reasons. Local newspapers also talked of colonial excesses committed by so- called dubious elements in the settler community, the black sheep and scoundrels, and there was an admission by some of the settlers that, in at least a few cases, a settler disciplining his African workers went too far. 96 Though sentences were light, some whites were prose- cuted for ill-treating their African workers and the practice of ogging withsjamboks, althoughit continued, met withgreater scrutinyandwas more often prosecuted when it went to what the settler administration thought was extremes. 97 German administration of South-West Africa came to an end in 1915 when the colony was invaded by South African troops in World War I, so it is not possible to say how far the Germans would have gone with these modest reforms. The United States and the Philippines In response to an anti-colonial revolt in Cuba, Spain imprisoned Cuban civilians in reconcentration camps where terrible conditions killed more than 200,000 people. Citing Spanish abuses, the US government framedtheir war against Spainin1898 as ananti-colonial exercise, while others represented the war and other elements of US turn of the century foreign policy as part of a struggle of the ttest. In an 1899 speech, The Strenuous Life, Theodore Roosevelt said: We cannot avoid the responsibilities that confront us in Hawaii, Cuba, Porto [sic] Rico, and the Philippines. All we can decide is whether we shall meet them in a way that will redound to the national credit, or whether we shall make of our dealings with these new problems a dark and shameful page in our history. It was an identity argument: real men are imperialists: The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man who has lost the great ghting, masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills stern men with empires in their brains all these, of course shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties . . . I preach to you then, my countrymen, that our country calls not for the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth 96 Ibid., pp. 254255, 264265. 97 Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, p. 235; Bley, Namibia Under German Rule, pp. 263267. 236 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idlyby, if we seekmerelyswollen, slothful ease andignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world. 98 The US took Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines in the war and set up the administrations in these islands despite intense domes- tic opposition to the policy. The argument for the US occupation of the Philippines was aggressive humanitarianism. The US Philippine Com- mission, set up to govern the archipelago islands, issued a proclamation on 4 April 1899 stating that the aim. . . is the well-being, the prosperity, and the happiness of the Philippine people, and their elevation and ad- vancement to a position among the most civilized people in the world. Further, the commission emphatically asserts that the United States is not only willing, but anxious, to establish in the Philippine Islands an enlightened system of government under which the Philippine people may enjoy the largest measure of home rule and the amplest liberty consonant with the supreme ends of government. The proclamation promised that the US would enforce its sovereignty: those who re- sist it can accomplish no other end than their own ruin. The procla- mation then articulated the rights of the Philippine people and the obli- gations of the US government to provide the most ample liberty of self-government . . . which is reconcilable with the maintenance of US administration as well as roads, railroads, and schools. 99 On 3 December 1900, President McKinley said to the American peo- ple that US possession of the Philippines was an unsought trust which should be unselshly discharged. 100 Politicians and academics at the turn of the century described Filipinos as semi-civilized, good imitators, imprudent, with characteristics of a faithful dog or monkey. 101 Consequently, Filipinos must be led to civilization, or as President McKinley said, they were wards of the US. Our obliga- tion was not lightly assumed; it must not be otherwise than honestly fullled, aiming rst of all to benet those who have come under our 98 Quoted in Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, p. 180. 99 Quoted in Snow, Aborigines in the Law and Practice of Nations, pp. 329331. 100 Quoted in League of Nations, The Mandates System: Origin, Principles, Application (Geneva: League of Nations, 1945), p. 11. 101 Quoted in Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 3841. 237 Argument and change in world politics fostering care. 102 Elihu Root, secretary of war from 1899 to 1904, when the US was establishing the administration of the Philippines by force, said of US government: We undertook to go a little farther thanother countries hadgone, andto make the rst consideration of our government in the islands the train- ing of the inhabitants inthe difcult art of self-government, so that they would as soon as possible become competent to govern themselves in- stead of being governed by us. Accordingly, one of the rst things that we didwas to sendover teachers by the shipload thousands of them and to establish schools all over the islands. And then we provided a form of government under which the Philippines should receive what may be called clinical instruction in administration and in the applica- tion of the principles which we consider vital to free self-government andwe providedthat, stepbystep, just as rapidlyas theybecame famil- iar with the institutions of free government and capable of continuing them, the powers of government should be placed in their hands. I am sure that this view of suitable treatment of the Philippines, so long as we are to be inthe islands at all, commends itself to the best intelligence and practical idealism of the American people. 103 While stressing American benevolence in contrast to Spanish corrup- tion and brutality, Root and others underemphasized the consequences of the US governments counter-insurgency war in the Philippines. Some 20,000 guerrilla rebels died, and about ten times that number died of war-related disease and hunger. The US government generally argued that occupation was tempo- rary, while opponents, including socialists and Democratic Party leader WilliamJennings Bryan, made ethical, practical, andidentity arguments against war and occupation. One black newspaper editorialized: For the question of self-government or subjection for the Filipinos is the 102 QuotedinWright, Mandates Under the League, p. 13. Later presidents also framedthe US role as guardianship: Theodore Roosevelt said, inDecember 1904, that he earnestlyhoped that in the end they will be able to stand, if not entirely alone, yet in some such relation to the United States as Cuba now stands. The US was attempting to develop the natives themselves so that they shall take an ever-increasing share in their own government. Robert Taft said in December 1912, We are seeking to arouse a national spirit and not, as under the older colonial theory, to suppress such a spirit. Woodrow Wilson called the US a trustee of Filipino people in 1915. Wright, Mandates Under the League, pp. 1314. 103 Quoted in Snow, Aborigines in the Law and Practice of Nations, pp. 333334. Similarly, in 1901 the US Supreme Court implied that US occupation of Cuba was temporary when it held that the island was territory held in trust for the inhabitants of Cuba to whom it rightfully belongs and to whose exclusive control it will be surrendered when a stable government shall have been established by their voluntary action. US Supreme Court in Neeley v. Henkel (1901), quoted in Wright, Mandates Under the League, p. 13. 238 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood old slavery question put in another form. 104 In 1898, US labor leader Samuel Gompers argued against expansion, saying it was against the great principle of self-government of the people, for the people, by the people. And, he said, Is it not strange that now, for the rst time, we hear that the Cubans are unt for self-government . . . Gompers warned with regard to the Philippines, Can we hope to close the ood gates of immigration from the hordes of Chinese and the semi-savage races comingfromwhat will thenbe part of our owncountry? Gompers rejected economic arguments for expansion: it is not necessary that we shall subjugate by the force of arms any other people in order to obtain that expansion of trade. 105 US expansion into the Philippines attracted perhaps the most vehement opposition because the anti-colonial move- ment there, having nearly defeated the Spanish, did not throw down their arms and welcome the US but kept ghting, requiring thousands of US soldiers to suppress them over several years, while thousands of Filipinos died mounting resistance. The US managed to suppress the rebels, and occupied the islands until the Japanese invaded in World War II. The second face: reform and anti-colonial organizations Religious missionaries, educators, and medical personnel went to the colonies with the aimof improving the conditions of Africans under Eu- ropean rule. These men and women worked alongside or directly with private corporations and colonial governments, even as they champi- oned indigenous rights. As historian Frederick Cooper notes: The re- formist critique of imperialism gone wrong emphasized the morality and normalcy of colonial rule. 106 Yet, despite their initial support for colonialism, reformers arguments graduallybecamemoreanti-colonial. How did qualied support and minimal reformism become a major critique of colonialism? First, some missionaries and journalists who went to the colonies became ardent critics of aggressive humanitar- ianism because they so believed in colonialism but saw that it had 104 Quoted in Philip S. Foner and Richard C. Winchester, eds., The Anti-Imperialist Reader: A Documentary History of Anti-Imperialism in the United States. Volume I, From the Mexican War to the Election of 1900 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1984), p. 168. 105 Quoted in ibid., pp. 202, 205, 207, 210. 106 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 27. 239 Argument and change in world politics failed in its civilizing mission. Second, several anti-colonial organiza- tions grewfromabolitionist movement roots and the logic of their argu- ments pulled themincrementally toward increasingly harsh critiques of colonial practices. Colonial reformers usedthesametactics as their abolitionist forebears: they conducted mass public meetings on colonialism and published journals and pamphlets detailing colonial abuses and their efforts to ameliorate them. The reformers primarytools were meta-argument and ethical argument: they directly lobbied parliaments and heads of state for more humane conditions in colonies, and in some cases supported African and Asian efforts for independence. For example, in England, the Aborigines Protection Society formed in the late 1830s to assist in protecting defenceless, and promoting the advancement of, uncivilized tribes. 107 Less critical of colonial policy was the Anti-Slavery Society, though there was considerable overlap in the top membership of both organizations. And as with the anti-slavery movement, some Aborigines Protec- tion Society members, for example Thomas Fowell Buxton, were also prominent members of the House of Commons. PartlythroughBuxtons efforts, parliament established a Select Committee on Aborigines. Re- porting in 1837, the Select Committee was critical of certain colonial practices: It is not too much to say that the intercourse of Europeans in general, without any exception in favor of the subjects of Great Britain, has been, unless when attended by missionary excursions, a source of many calamities to uncivilized nations. Too often, their territory has been usurped, their property seized; their numbers diminished, their character debased, the spread of civilization impeded. 108 The remedy for these harms was expressed in the committees conviction that there is but one effectual means of staying the evils we have occasioned, and of imparting the blessings of civilization, and that is the propagation of Christianity, together with the preservation, for time to come, of the civil rights of the natives. 109 Activists sought to increase public awareness of the conditions in the colonies in order to build broad public support for their amelioration. In the late 1800s the Aborigines Protection Society (APS) protested the deportation andexile of African leaders, such as Jaja of Opoba andChief 107 Quoted in Amalgamation of the Anti-Slavery Society and the Aborigines Protection Society, Anti-Slavery Reporter 28 (MarchMay 1909), 2728: 27. 108 Quoted in Snow, Aborigines in the Law and Practice of Nations, p. 10. 109 Quoted in ibid., p. 11. 240 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood Nana of the Isekiri, and the use of chartered companies to colonize and form colonial governments. As Annie Coombes notes: the Aborigine ProtectionSociety made no bones about what they sawas one of the cen- tral contradictions of using chartered companies as governing bodies namely the contradiction of maintaining a just government while at the same time being necessarily constrained to make all decisions on the basis of achieving the highest dividend. The Societys journal, the Aborigines Friend, frequently carried vigorous criticisms of traders. 110 The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society merged with the APS in 1909 to form the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society. The merger was practical and strategic. Now. . . that slavery is so com- monly found under a disguise, and the great evil which has to be fought is the exploitation and coercion of natives in order to secure their labour for the white man, it has appeared to those interested that nothing but good could result from uniting the two similar bodies, and that one strong Society, representing the cause of the native races of mankind, could more effectively serve their interests than two separate organiza- tions working independently, and often hampered by want of adequate resources. 111 The new organization published the Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines Friend, with articles on colonial conditions all over the globe, reports of British parliamentary and colonial ofce activities, and summaries of the proceedings of the Society. The Anti-Slavery and Abo- rigines Protection Societys journal thus attempted to create a different kind of public knowledge of colonialism, by printing reports of colonial abuses, that fueled the emotions that became part of the anti-colonial critique and ethical arguments for reform. Some socialist, labor, and communist movements also supported and publicized anti-colonial activismin the Americas and Europe. In Africa, the reform movement was represented by, for example, the Aborigines Rights Protection Society in Cape Coast (Gold Coast), founded in 1897, and in Nigeria by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Rights Protection Society. Both lobbied the British government to protect African land ownership. 112 The African Association, founded in London in 1897 and 110 See Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagi- nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 33. 111 Amalgamation of the Anti-Slavery Society and the Aborigines Protection Society, p. 28. 112 Kaniki, The Colonial Economy: The Former British Zones, p. 390. Also see Boahen, African Perspectives on Colonialism and contemporary issues of the Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines Friend. 241 Argument and change in world politics dissolved in 1901, signaled the development of an international collab- oration between Africans in diaspora and those on the continent, for improving the lot of those in African colonies. It attracted the support of white liberals in the Aborigines Protection Society and signicant at- tention in the mainstream British press. During its brief existence, the Association lobbied colonial administrators for bettering conditions in Africa and conducted a Pan-African Conference in London, 2325 July 1900, inaugurating a vital Pan-African movement. 113 Conference atten- dees, including W.E.B. Du Bois, petitioned Queen Victoria to improve labor conditions and eliminate pass laws in Southern Africa. The ofcial response to the petition by Colonial Minister Joseph Chamberlain was that the queenwouldkeepthe interests andwelfare of the native races in mind. 114 Revulsion and reform in the Congo and South Africa Although it is certain that none of the colonized valued colonialism, indeed long reviled it, European and American discomfort with the practice did not take root until the turn of the century. Two cases in particular were widely discussed by the humanitarians and used to frame arguments about colonial excess: the Congo and South Africa. Belgian King Leopolds brutal conquest of the Congo rst came under intense international scrutiny in the 1890s. Recall that Leopolds Congo Free State (his private colony) had achieved international recognition and backing as a humanitarian effort: it was to abolish slavery, bring missionaries and hospitals, and open the Congo to free trade. At the Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference, King Leopold continued to frame his actions inthe Congo onhumanitariangrounds. But, in1890 and1891 the rst severe criticisms of Leopolds governance of the Congo by George Washington Williams, who exposed terrible labor practices, received attention in the European and American press. Roads were constructed and rubber was gathered by conscripted Congolese men. Men, whose wives and children might also have been kidnapped, were forced to gather rubber under the lash or at gun-point or else in the fear that they might never see their families again. Women also suffered the same 113 There had been earlier meetings of the same sort, for instance the Chicago Congress on Africa in August 1893 and the Congress on Africa in Georgia in December 1895. P. Olisanwuche Esedebe, Pan-Africanism: The Idea and Movement, 17761963 (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1982), pp. 4547. 114 See Immanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement: AHistory of Pan-Africanismin America, Europe and Africa (New York: Africana Publishing, 1974), pp. 176198. Quote on p. 190. 242 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood fate. Headline coverage in The New York Herald of Williams report on the Congo, published as a pamphlet, read: The Administration of the African Free State Declared by an American Citizen to be Barbarous Investigation Demanded. 115 Williams was also one of the rst to call for self-rule or international trusteeship in Africa. 116 Because of Leopolds high humanitarian proclamations, when condi- tions were disclosed including the enslavement of Africans and the practice of chopping off of hands and heads the irony and hypocrisy revealed were startling. Leopold responded with a campaign to vilify and discredit Williams, who died shortly after he made his reports, and the story faded. Thus, little was achieved in ameliorating conditions in the Congo. Leopold continued for another decade to claim human- itarian motives despite evidence of slavery, forced labor, and hostage taking. Leopold had tremendous incentive not to modify the system. Leopolds administrationmade huge prots fromrubber gathering, and claimed half of the private concessionary company prots from rub- ber (which ran as high as 700 percent due to cheap labor and high demand). 117 Leopolds management of the Congo eventually received more scrutiny from E.D. Morel, another reporter. 118 Morel, who was also a clerk for the company that ran all of the Congos shipping, Elder Demp- ster of Liverpool, noted that weapons went into the Congo and ivory and rubber came out. He wrote, These gures told their own story. . . Forced labour of a terrible and continuous kind could alone explain such unheard of prots . . . forced labour in which the Congo Govern- ment was the immediate beneciary; forcedlabor directedby the closest associates of the King himself. 119 Whereas Morel had previously crit- icized the humanitarians and been a supporter of colonialism, at the turn of the century he began to work with anti-colonial critics in the Aborigines Protection Society in England to expose and promote re- form of Leopolds practices. Morel left Elder Dempster and began a full-time career as journalist and Congo reform activist, publishing in the space of a few years three books on the Congo. Morel and the other Congo reform activists, most of them also members of the Anti-Slavery 115 Hochschild, King Leopolds Ghost, pp. 101114. 116 Ibid., p. 111. 117 Ibid., p. 160. Also see Packenham, The Scramble for Africa, pp. 588589. 118 Morels unnished history of the movement was compiled and published after his death by Wm. Roger Louis and Jean Stengers, eds., E.D. Morels History of the Congo Reform Movement (London: Oxford University Press, 1968). 119 Quoted in Hochschild, King Leopolds Ghost, pp. 180181. Also see Packenham, The Scramble for Africa, pp. 590592. 243 Argument and change in world politics and Aborigines Protection societies, publicized many abuses, especially the colonizers practice of chopping off the hands of Congolese, and got the Congo on the legislative agenda in Britain. The British parliament passeda resolutioninMay1903 urgingthat natives shouldbe governed with humanity and Leopold himself proposed some modest reforms to meet his critics. 120 But, Morel and others wanted to show that despite so-called reforms, little had changed in the Congo. He argued against the Congo state on ethical and practical grounds. His ethical argument was that slavery is wrong and the Congo was slavery. Such then was the main task: to convince the world that this Congo horror was not only and unquestionably a fact; but that it was not acci- dental or temporary, or capable of internal cure. To show conclusively that it was deliberate, and that the consequences would be identical in any part of the tropics where similar conceptions might be intro- duced. To demonstrate that it was at once a survival and a revival of the slave-mind at work, of the slave-trade in being. 121 Morels practical argument was that the situation in Congo was the reverse of the free trade principles under which the Congo state had been established. 122 Morels effort to reframe debate over the Congo received crucial support in 1904 when the British consul to the Congo, Roger Casement, witnessedandexposedatrocities in a report to the For- eign Ofce and in interviews with the press. Morel and Casement then formed the Congo Reform Association and Morel spent the next decade giving public speeches in Britain, and writing articles that were picked up by British newspapers, including the Morning Post, the Manchester Guardian, andThe Times. 123 AnAmericanCongoReformAssociationalso formed. Because of the negative publicity, Leopold was compelled to set upa commission of inquiry to investigate the charges. Unfortunately for the king, his handpicked commission, in 1905, essentially agreed with Casements observations. So did reports from the US consul-general to the Congo. The Congo Reform Association in London proposed in 1905 that the Congo be taken from the king as his private property and run instead 120 Quoted in Hochschild, King Leopolds Ghost, p. 194. 121 Morel, History of the Congo ReformMovement, in Louis and Stengers (eds.), E.D. Morels History of the Congo Reform Movement, p. 63. 122 Ibid., pp. 6469. 123 Wm. Roger Louis, Morel and the Congo Reform Association 19041913, in Louis and Stengers (eds.), E.D. Morels History of the Congo Reform Movement, pp. 171220: 173, 187, 196197. 244 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood by Belgium. This idea was supported by the British Foreign Ofce, elite opinion in Britain, and increasingly in the Belgian parliament. The Re- form Association kept up the pressure for reforms. Finally, in December 1906, international anddomestic pressure forcedLeopoldtoturnhis pri- vate colony over to the Belgian government. Conditions in the Congo improved somewhat because of the international attention and after Belgium formally took over the colony from Leopold in 1908. The Boer War also affected English beliefs about African colonialism, at least as regards their treatment of white settlers. Britain had taken the Cape Colony from Dutch/Boer settlers in 1814 and over the course of the century, many English settled in the Cape while the Boers moved in- land to avoid them, setting up two colonies, Transvaal and Orange Free State. From 1880 to 1881 the Boers fought unsuccessfully to halt British encroachment. Still, the Boers faced a greater inux of English when enormous deposits of diamonds and gold were found in the Transvaal. Just over twenty years later, Boers fought again to keep the English set- tlers out, while the Britishwantedostensiblytoensure the political rights of the English(whothe Boers calleduitlanders) against discrimination by the Boers. AlthoughBritishforeignpolicy decisionmakers fearedthat another military action in South Africa would be unpopular at home, the Transvaal and Orange Free State governments were considered to be too independent and also too close to Germany. After provoking the war in 1899, the British government thought de- feating the Boers would be easy. 124 They were wrong: the British effort required 500,000 soldiers and cost both sides a total of almost 55,000 lives. The war claimed the lives of about 15,000 Africans as well. Britain used concentration camps to intern Afrikaners, and between 20,000 and 26,000 men and women, but mostly children, died in the camps, mainly of dysentery and other diseases. British conduct in the Boer War was so disturbing to both popular British and international opinion that, Support groups were formed in Germany, Holland, France, and Belgium to collect money and send it to the suffering Boers in South Africa. Foreign brigades were formed, as in the Spanish Civil War, to ght on the Boer side against the forces of English oppression and capitalist imperialism. 125 The war and the almost gratuitous harshness of the subsequent British colonial 124 Basil Davidson, Let Freedom Come: Africa in Modern History (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978), p. 29. 125 Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa: The Story of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid (London: Mandarin, 1990), p. 129. 245 Argument and change in world politics administration, which, for example, forbade instruction in Afrikaans in Boer schools, turnedeliteandpopular opinioninEnglandagainst British control and galvanized Afrikaner nationalism. As Gann and Duignan argue, the Boer War helped alter popular and elite British views of the glories of colonial war. The British won a barren victory on the eld; the imperial idea sustained a blow from which it never recov- ered. From the military point of view the conduct of the war brought scant prestige to the British ruling class. 126 So while South Africa re- mained just as rich in diamonds and gold as before the British victory over the Afrikaners, British opinion turned around so completely that South Africa was given autonomous status by Britain in 1910 as a white- controlled self-governing dominion. Conclusion European expansion in Africa was noted for a mix of legalism, inter- national organization, benevolence, and brute force. Though from the reading of the Requirement in the Americas to the conquest of Africa, brutal force was often used to capture and maintain territorial holdings, treaties between native leaders and the colonial powers were generally obtained. Again, although these treaties were usually made through fraud or compulsion, the fact that treaties were obtained at all suggests that the colonists desired at least an aura of legitimacy. 127 Indeed, as Dorothy Jones argues, in North America between 1796 and 1871, Out- right land-grabbing was not nearly so widespread as is commonly be- lieved. There was no need. The treaty system itself was the primary vehicle of transfer. 128 She suggests that, This can happen because ac- countability is not built into the diplomatic system. The only check is the assumption of countervailing force. When that is absent, as it invari- ably is in situations of colonialism, the whole treaty system becomes a weapon in the arsenal of the stronger power. 129 126 L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan, Burden of Empire: An Appraisal of Western Colonialism in Africa South of the Sahara (New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 37. Also see Leonard Thompson, The Political Mythology of Apartheid (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 127 Berat, in Walvis Bay, argues that the treaties were primarily a method of notifying other European colonial powers that a nation had begun the process of colonial occupation of the region. The treaties were also sometimes temporary holding actions for both sides as they sought to augment their forces for another battle. 128 Dorothy V. Jones, License for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. xi. 129 Ibid., p. xii. 246 Faces of humanitarianism, rivers of blood Yet, accountability was evident: outright land-grabbing was con- strained by the normative beliefs of statesmen, diplomats, and domestic opinion. Outright land-grabbing was illegitimate; it hadto be justiedin terms that wouldseemright at the time. Thus, althoughcolonialismwas as yet a largely unquestioned practice, the issues of legitimacy and the rights of the indigenous populations, were not entirely ignored because the dominant culture, the table on which arguments occurred, was af- fected by arguments over slavery and the humanity of others. Colonial reformers fought to frame colonialism as against its own principles. Supporters of colonialism had always argued that it did something good in itself, or was a means to a good end. Nearly all involved in the conquest and colonization said they were motivated by humanitarian concerns. The argument was that free trade (although in many cases nothing was traded so much as loot and labor were just taken) would bring civilization. Open doors were required for commerce and the free access of missionary societies. During the height of conquest and conso- lidation of colonial rule, it was clear that Africans and Asians were to be objects of European control, not the authors of their own aspiration and actions unless it was to sign a treaty of protection under Europeans. Few argued that the colonized could govern themselves. This paternal- ism made sense in the views current at the turn of the century because it was commonly believedthat the backward races were like children, who if they werent completely overwhelmed by the colonizer would need the care of their elders to get along in the world. But, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the specic prac- tices of colonialism were under greater scrutiny by the reformers who had moved on from the anti-slavery movement to challenge colonial practices. As Quincy Wright suggests, this humanitarianism had a long lineage: Humanitarian considerations for subject races was from the rst de- manded by moralists and theologians. Queen Isabella in her letter of February 19, 1495, urged generous treatment of the Indians. The Mis- sionary Bartoleme de las Casas and the half-blood Inca, Garcilaso de la Vega, popularized the cause of the Indian in Spain while the learned theologianFrancis de Victoria assuredhis students at Salmanca that the law of nations protected the Indians even though they were indels. It was not, however, until the later eighteenthcentury that humanitarian- ismbecame organizedandeffective. Throughthe efforts of the Quakers John Woolman (172073) and Anthony Benezet (171384) in America; the Christian philanthropists Thomas Clarkson (17601846), William 247 Argument and change in world politics Wilberforce (17591833), and Thomas Fowell Buxton (17861845) in England; and the revolutionary humanitarians Condorcet (174394), LAbbe Gregoire (17501831), and Mirabeau (174991) in France: soci- eties were formed in these countries to abolish the slave trade and protect the aborigines. Their agitation brought legislation against the slave trade early in the nineteenth century, and their scrutiny was a continuous stimulus to colonial ofces. Although barbarities against natives were still frequent enough, public sentiment was sometimes successfully mobilized for reform, as in the Congo in the early twenti- eth century. 130 Criticisms of colonialism in the heart of the colonial metropole began quite modestly but gradually expanded as anti-colonial reformers real- izedthat their beliefs andarguments about rights couldnot be arbitrarily limited. Still, many reformers, including those cited by Wright, did not yet question the main premises of colonialism and would perhaps have been surprised by the enormous changes wrought from their modest challenges to colonial practice. As a French critic of forced labor in the colonies, Joseph Folliet, wrote in 1934: It is precisely because we accept the general and abstract justice of colonization that we desire, in the specic and concrete instance, to purify it of all that soils it. 131 Folliet articulates one face of humanitarianism while German colonial theorist Paul Rohrbachs social Darwinism is its ugliest representation. But on the eve of World War I, practices which were acceptable to the major- ity in the context of colonization of the Americas, were suspect in the African context precisely because democratic arguments had won the day in Europe and had only to be fully implemented there. The exten- sion and institutionalization of reformist beliefs, and how they changed colonial practices, are addressed in chapter 6. 130 Wright, Mandates Under the League, p. 9. 131 Quoted in Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, p. 27. 248 6 Sacred trust But if the extent of the offence be measured by the professions of high moral purpose previously laid claim to, then, iniquitous as has been the conduct of the EuropeanGovernments towardtheir ownpeoples, it pales in comparison with their conduct towards the peoples of Africa, whose territory they parceled out among themselves with the name of God upon their lips, of whose rights they declared themselves to be the jealous guardians, whose helplessness they invoked to justify their own protective aegis, and to whomthey sent their missionaries that these backward folk might be duly instructed in the gospel of the Prince of Peace. Civilizing the African, forsooth! There was a pretty strong element of barbarism in Europes civilizing methods in Africa before the war. 1 Whether or not people speak in good faith, they cannot say just any- thing they please. Moral talk is coercive; one thing leads to another. 2 The previous chapter showed how the anti-slavery movements hu- manitarianarguments rationalizedcolonial expansioninAfrica, yet also denormalized and began to delegitimize some colonial practices. In this chapter I show how reform arguments came to dominate colonial dis- course, and how, with the League of Nations Mandate system, new nor- mative beliefs rst articulated by the colonial reform movement were institutionalized. The paternalistic and aggressive humanitarianism of the Berlin West Africa Conference, which was coupled with conquest, gradually gave way to the less paternalistic beliefs characteristic of the Aborigines Protection Society and of W.E.B. Du Bois, E.D. Morel, and Woodrow Wilson. The aim became uplift, and better that this up- lift would be accomplished non-violently. Because the humanitarians 1 E.D. Morel, Africa and the Peace of Europe (London: National Labour Press, 1917), p. 67. 2 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 12. 249 Argument and change in world politics critique was damning it opened up the space for reconceiving, or re- framing, colonialism. As old-style colonialism was less and less con- sidered normal and legitimate, the political balance of power shifted from naked and unashamed colonialists to those who wanted to at least reform colonialism. Reformist arguments prompted the reconceptual- ization of colonial practices and development of the League of Nations Mandates system. The Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations changed the context in which arguments about colonialism occurred, providing a venue for new arguments and the institutional- ization of new normative beliefs. World War I and mounting pressures for colonial reform Humanitarians critiqued colonialism and asserted new normative be- liefs during World War I in pamphlets, books, and in their lobbying of colonial governments. The discussions among diplomats about what to do with the colonies the victors had captured in World War I was fundamentally inuenced by this wider reformist discourse, and this discourse was in turn embodied in the international innovation known as the League of Nations Mandate system. But it was not obvious that reform of colonialism would be an outcome of the war. During World War I, European governments used their colonies to produce food, revenue, andmanpower for production andmilitary con- scription. More than one million Africans fought as conscripts and vol- unteers for European governments, with the majority being forced to serve; some 150,000 Africansoldiers andcarriers diedinthe war. 3 France raised nearly 430,000 soldiers and several hundred thousand laborers from its African colonies during the war and pushed its colonies to expand their food production for export. French West African, Blaise Diagne was promised a package of post-war reforms in French Black Africa if he could recruit the additional men France required for the Europeanfront. This he did, but the reforms were never put into effect. 4 Belgium raised up to 260,000 from its Congo colony most of whom 3 M. Crowder, The First World War and Its Consequences, in A. Adu Boahen, ed., Africa Under Colonial Domination, UNESCO General History of Africa, VII (Paris: UNESCO, 1985), pp. 283311: 283, 295. Also see Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs S en egalais in French West Africa 18571960 (London: James Currey, 1991) and Basil Davidson, Let FreedomCome: Africa in Modern History (Boston: Little, Brown andCompany, 1978), pp. 114115. 4 Crowder, The First World War and Its Consequences, p. 306. 250 Sacred trust served as porters. Britain beneted from over 1.5 million Indian and coloured colonial subjects serving in the empires military forces. 5 Fur- ther, both white andblack South Africans fought against the Germans in East Africa and South West Africa. 6 During the war, revolts against Eu- ropean rule, both as protests against conscription and to take advantage of the return of Europeans to their home countries, surged in number. Though they sometimes required thousands of European troops to put down, the revolts were not successful. By the end of the war, the Japanese military had captured German islands in the Pacic, while Britain, or the British Dominions, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, held German territory in Asia and Africa. The Allies agreed that captured colonies would not go back to their former masters, but no one in allied governments appears to have seriously entertained the possibility of independence for these colonies. Rather, the British Imperial War Cabinet committee on territorial ques- tions was in favor of annexation. As Lord Curzon, a member of the War Cabinet said: we were meditating the carving up of the world to suit our own interests. 7 The British and Japanese governments se- cretly agreed in early 1917 to support each others claims to captured territory, and public opinion was generally in favor of annexation. 8 Self-determination for the territories was ruled out by Britains Foreign Secretary Balfour who wanted the territory in hand to work out a peace settlement. 9 5 Themajoritywere Indians andcoloredSouthAfricans, but some 10,000coloredWest Indians also served. British colonies also provided some 1.4 million white enlistees. The Military Effort of the British Empire, The Round Table, no. 35 ( June 1919), 495508: 498. 6 Several anti-colonial independence leaders were combatants in World War I for their respective colonial powers. For example, Norman Manley, a leader of the Jamaican inde- pendence movement, served in the European theater, where his brother was killed. One of the rst post-independence heads of state for Jamaica, Manley was also the father of Michael Manley who served in World War II and later became prime minister of Jamaica and a staunch pan-Africanist. 7 During March and April 1917, the Imperial War Cabinet in Britain discussed whether some African territory should be returned to Germany after the war. Most argued against the return. The group also discussed various other methods for changing colonial ter- ritory, including a South African proposal for trading land with Portugal so that South Africa would have a natural frontier and round it off as a compact block of subtropical territory. Minutes of the Territorial Desiderata Committee of the War Cabinet meeting quoted in Wm. Roger Louis, Great Britain and Germanys Lost Colonies, 19141919 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 83. The fact of the Imperial War Cabinets existence highlights the extent to which the self-governing dominions of Britain were well on their way to total independence. The dominions (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa) and India became members of the League of Nations. 8 Ibid., pp. 7879. 9 Ibid., p. 106. 251 Argument and change in world politics Why did the Western allies ultimately agree despite their privately expressed interest in annexation, that they would not keep captured territory? The concern for applying self-determination to the colonies did not originate with heads of state. The question of what to do with the captured territory, and the idea of mandates or international con- trol, was on the table years before the Paris Peace Conference con- vened. The press and the war literature were full of such ideas, as were unpublished private discussions. 10 This was particularly so in Britain, where some of the most far-reaching proposals for reform were widely discussed. Since Britain, or its dominions, occupied and con- trolled the majority of land formerly held by Germany or Turkey, its position on post-war settlement was crucial. What happened during the latter part of the war was that ethical arguments moved the center of the debate from annexation to some kind of international political control. The left, and eventually the center, of British intellectual and political elites argued for some kind of international control of captured German colonies. For example, J.A. Hobson published Towards International Government in 1915, calling for international colonial control. In 1917, E.D. Morel participated in public debates on the subject and published Africa and the Peace of Europe, which proposed internationalization of African commerce, though certainly not decolonization. 11 The British Labour Party, in late December 1917, called for the administration of all colonies in Africa to be transferred to the proposed Super-National Authority or League of Nations and proposed that this administra- tion would take account of the wishes of the people, and also the protection of the natives against exploitation and oppression and the preservation of various tribal interests. 12 In 1917, the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, which still counted members of parliament in its ranks, lobbied British for- eign policy ofcials to include the concerns of native races in the peace talks or in a separate meeting to consider colonial policy, whatever 10 H. Duncan Hall, Mandates, Dependencies and Trusteeship (Washington: Carnegie Endow- ment for International Peace, 1948), p. 108. On previous uses of the words mandate and mandatory in connection with colonial policy, see Quincy Wright, Mandates Under the League of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), pp. 1920. The idea of countries administering colonies was also not new: Britain had granted South Africa the right to administer Basotoland and Bechuanaland in 1909. 11 Moreover, colonialism and imperialism were popularly blamed for causing World War I. 12 Quoted in Louis, Great Britain and Germanys Lost Colonies, p. 91. 252 Sacred trust the nal outcome of the European hostilities may be. . . . 13 The So- ciety used both practical and ethical arguments. We also point out that such a step appears to be not only morally imperative, but in the truest interests of the Colonizing Powers no less than the native peoples, because the white races have become largely dependent on the coloured races for a large proportion of their food stuffs and raw materials. 14 According to the Society, native inhabitants should be given a voice in shaping their own destiny; although it was not a practical proposal . . . this very fact appears to make it more than ever incumbent on the stronger Powers to devise means for adequately safe- guarding the rights and welfare of the native inhabitants. 15 The So- cietys ideas for reform were comprehensive: for example, lynching, forced labor for private prot, and criminal punishment for breaches of civil labor contracts should be halted and land for natives should be reserved. Yet even the reformers argued among themselves. In July 1917, the Anti-SlaveryandAborigines ProtectionSocietyheldaconference onthe future of German colonies where some members argued that German colonization was unjust because the Germans rarely made treaties with the local chiefs and they treated the inhabitants badly. Travers Buxton argued that colonies should not be used like pawns on a chess board, or merely for bargaining purposes. 16 But, Society members disagreed about the proper line to take inlobbying for reforms. Charles Buxton, for example, said the argument for consultation with the natives in former German colonies had no logical limit and this had far-reaching impli- cations; if the Society stated that it is in favor of consultation, We are laying ourselves open as a Society to the charge of hypocrisy. The entire colonial system was at stake. Are we prepared to say that what we would apply to the natives of Africa should apply also to the natives of India? If not, then we lay our- selves open to this charge of hypocrisy. . . We have hitherto accepted the principle of parceling out Africa. We have wished that something better could be found, but, as a matter of fact, we have accepted the usual view that tropical Africa has got to be parceled out . . . If we are 13 Letter to British Foreign Secretary Arthur J. Balfour from the Anti-Slavery and Abo- rigines Protection Society, 22 January 1917, published in the Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines Friend (April 1917), pp. 36:3 14 Ibid., p. 3. 15 Ibid., p. 34. 16 Quoted in Conference upon the Future of German Colonies, Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines Friend (October 1917), pp. 5059: 52. 253 Argument and change in world politics going to adopt this newand startling principle, then we ought to adopt it all around. It should be a general policy. 17 Finally, the Society agreed to a resolution which read: That in any reconstruction of Africa which may result from this War, the interests of the native inhabitants and also their wishes in as far as those wishes can be clearly ascertained, should be recognized as among the principle factors upon which the decision of their destiny should be based. 18 The resolutions were then forwarded to the British Foreign Ofce and London-based representatives of the Allied powers. In November 1917 the Society held a conference on international control of colonies. The attendees again disagreed on which measures were practical and polit- ically feasible but they seemed to agree that some form of international supervision was desirable. 19 In addition to pressure at home from humanitarians, British decision- makers also knew that American President Wilson would probably not agree to annexation. 20 In January 1918, G.L. Beer, who was later chief of the colonial division of the US delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, proposedthat theformer colonies bedealt withunder aMandatesystem. Wilsons speeches echo Beers tone and language. Beer, in written testi- mony to the US Congress, said: Under modern political conditions apparently the only way to de- termine the problem of politically backward peoples, who require not only outside political control but also foreigncapital to reorganize their stagnant economic systems is to entrust the task of government to that state whose interests are most directly involved. . . If, however, such backward regions are entrusted by international mandate to one state, there should be embodied in the deed of trust most rigid safeguards to both protect the native population fromexploitation and also to ensure that the interests of other foreign states are not injured. . . But far more important than any arrangement of this character to secure the inter- ests of the European and American states in such backward countries is the necessity of clearly dened provisions to protect the natives from exploitation. 21 17 Quoted in ibid. p. 54, emphasis in the original. 18 Ibid., p. 59. 19 Conference upon International Control, Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines Friend ( January 1918), 8995. 20 Louis, Great Britain and Germanys Lost Colonies, p. 93. 21 George Louis Beer, African Questions at the Paris Peace Conference (NewYork: Macmillan, 1923), pp. 424425. In January 1918 the US State Department also commissioned the colo- nial legal scholar Alpheus Henry Snow, who produced the historical study The Question 254 Sacred trust After the war the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society cor- responded with both the British Foreign Ofce and President Wilson in the months before the Peace Conference. To Wilson, on 28 Decem- ber 1918, the Society wrote, We beg to urge upon your Excellency that the motive for Colonial expansion should be that implied in the term Protectorate. This term implies that the overseas Powers should be in the position of Trustees for the well being of the inhabitants regardless either of na- tional or colour distinction, a position which involves: The abolition of every form of compulsory labour for private prot; the preserva- tion of indigenous land rights; the rigid restriction of the sale of ardent spirits within the boundaries of all such Protectorate territories, such restrictions again to be impartially imposed; the recognition of some Protectorate and Native rights over sub-surface values, forest and vir- gin produce; the prevention of communicable diseases. 22 Wilsons representative acknowledged the letter but said the president did not have time to meet with the Society on his way to Paris for the Peace Conference. The Societys representative was also pre- vented by the British government from attending a Pan-African meet- ing also organized in Paris. The Society then sent another letter to all delegates of the great powers attending the Paris Peace Conference that included a longer, more comprehensive, version of their proposal to President Wilson. Framing its case as a continuation of the anti-slavery struggle, the Society said: the time has arrived for the stronger Powers to accept as the soundest economic and ethical relationship that of Trustee for the inhabitants and their territory, and that the old policy of regarding such territories primarily from the point of view of possessions to be developedinthe interests of the MetropolitanGovernment is out of date in practice and indefensible both on political and moral grounds. 23 The strongest Societyproposals includedanappeal toendforcedlabor andto create an international tribunal where indigenous people could appeal their treatment. The Societyfurther urgedthat these reforms be extended beyond the captured territories that all Colonizing Powers adopt the reforms and suggested that they be applied rst as conditions of Aborigines in the Law and Practice of Nations in December 1918 (New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1921). 22 Letter to President Wilson quoted in Peace Terms and Colonial Reconstruction, Anti- Slavery Reporter and Aborigines Friend 9 (April 1919), 29: 5. 23 Letter to Delegates quoted in ibid., p. 7. 255 Argument and change in world politics attaching to any territory where status is changed as a result of the war and generally as a standard which every Colonizing Power should accept for tropical countries and peoples under its National Control. 24 The Societys position was, just as some in the Society feared, an attack on the whole institution of colonialism, not simply a proposal for how to treat captured territories. Thus colonial reform became a mainstream project. By late 1918, under public and elite pressure, a consensus was thus formingamongallieddiplomats andelites aroundthe idea of a Mandate system. Public pressure was in part persuasive because it was consis- tent with the already ofcially expressed beliefs in self-determination. Annexation could not be allowed if the victors, especially Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George, were to be bound to their war-time rhetoric. In January 1917, President Wilson told the US Congress, I am propos- ing, as it were, that the nations shouldwithone accordadopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation should seek to extend its policy over any other nation, but that every people should be free to determine its own policy, its own way of develop- ment, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little alongwiththe great and powerful. 25 On 5 January 1918, Prime Minister Lloyd George of Englandarguedfor a general principle of national self-determination, to be applied to the German colonies. 26 In his Fourteen Points speech of 8 January 1918, President Wilson argued for, A free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined. 27 If Wilsonian self-determination did not necessarily meancomplete independence andself-rule, it meant people shouldhave some say in their affairs. On 11 February 1918, President Wilson said, 24 Ibid., p. 9. 25 Quoted in Gaddis Smith, Monroe Doctrine, in Bruce W. Jentleson and Thomas Patterson, eds., Encyclopedia of U.S. Foreign Relations, vol. III (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 159167: 162. President James Monroe told Congress in 1823 that American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for the future colonization of European powers. Quoted in ibid., p. 160. The Roosevelt Corollary, announced in December 1904, asserted a US right to intervene to keep Europeans out of Latin America. 26 Quoted in Wright, Mandates Under the League, p. 25. 27 Woodrow Wilson, Fourteen Points, 8 January 1918. Quoted in Antonio Cassese, Self-determination of Peoples: A Legal Reappraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 21. 256 Sacred trust Peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game, even the great game, now forever discredited of the balance of power; but every territorial settlement involved in this war must be made in the interest and for the benet of the populations concerned, and not as a part of any mere adjustment or compromise of claims amongst rival states. 28 The Bolsheviks also called for peace without annexation and blamed imperialism for the war. During and after the conict, V.I. Lenin pushed the idea of self-determination and decolonization and made the argument that imperialism caused the war. 29 In November 1918, a group of US and British elites, known as the Round Table, met in London and discussed the idea of mandates, pub- lishing a summary of their deliberations in their journal Round Table. De- spite his private efforts tokeepcapturedterritories, General JanSmuts of SouthAfrica, whoprobablyhadreadthe workof the RoundTable before writing his draft plan for a League of Nations, also proposed a Mandate system. 30 Smuts plan, published as a pamphlet in December 1918, said the Mandate system should be conned to Middle East and European territories of the losers of WorldWar I, because he felt that, The German colonies in the Pacic and Africa are inhabited by barbarians, who not only cannot possibly govern themselves, but to whom it would be im- practicable to apply any ideas of political self-determination in the Eu- ropean sense. 31 If Smuts idea of who was ready for self-determination was narrow, he saw Mandate status as temporary, on the route to inde- pendence. President Wilson drew upon Smuts draft for his own draft of the League of Nations Covenant, but broadened the Mandate system to include former German colonies in Africa. While the Peace Conference was under way, in February 1919 dele- gates of the First Pan-AfricanCongress alsomet inParis. Opposedbythe United States and Britain, which denied passports to some of its citizens 28 Quoted in Wright, Mandates Under the League, p. 24. 29 V.I. Lenin, Theses on the Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (March 1916) and Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917). See Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Lenin Anthology (New York: Norton, 1975), pp. 204274. Also see Cassese, Self- determination of Peoples, pp. 1421 and L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan, Burden of Em- pire: An Appraisal of Western Colonialism in Africa South of the Sahara (New York: Praeger, 1967), pp. 5571. 30 Campbell L. Upthegrove, Empire by Mandate: A History of the Relations of Great Britain with the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations (New York: Bookman Associates, 1954); Wright, Mandates Under the League, pp. 2223. 31 Jan Smuts, The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918), quoted in Hall, Mandates, Dependencies and Trusteeship, p. 13. 257 Argument and change in world politics who wished to attend (including a representative of the Anti-Slavery andAborigines ProtectionSociety), the meetingfocusedonstrategies for the liberation for Caribbean and African people. 32 Blaise Diagne, made famous for recruiting over 60,000 West Africans in 1918 for French mili- tary service, helped W.E.B. Du Bois organize the meeting and convinced Frances leader, Clemenceau, toauthorize it over the objections of British and US governments. 33 Despite the travel restrictions, fty-seven del- egates from fteen countries attended, including sixteen from the US, twelve from Africa, and twenty-one from the West Indies. At least one participant in the Paris Peace Conference, C.D.B. King, a member of the Liberian delegation, also attended the Pan-African Conference. 34 The Pan-Africanist proposals were comprehensive in a humanitar- ian reformist sense. Du Bois proposed that all Africa be international- ized, with the former German colonies as the core, adding other terri- tories to this base as time went on. 35 Du Bois said: This Africa for the Africans could be under the guidance of international organization. The governing international commission should represent not simply gov- ernments, but modern culture, science, commerce, social reform, andre- ligious philanthropy. It must represent not simply the white world, but the civilized Negro world. 36 Notably, the 1919 Pan-African Congress did not demand an immediate end to colonialism; rather, its proposals 32 On US and British government efforts to scuttle the 1919 Pan-African Conference, see Paul Gordon Lauren, Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 8384; George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Commu- nism (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1971), pp. 99100. Immanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement: A History of Pan-Africanism in America, Europe and Africa (New York: Africana Publishing, 1974), p. 237. Also see Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines Friend 9 (April 1919), p. 6. 33 Clemenceau reportedly told Diagne, Dont advertise it, but go ahead. Quoted in Geiss, The Pan-African Movement, p. 237. 34 Ibid., p. 238. 35 W.E.B. Du Bois also took a proposal urging self-determination for Africa to Paris for President Wilson. According to the Chicago Tribune: Dr. Du Bois sets forth that while the principle of self-determination cannot be applied to uncivilized peoples, yet the educated blacks should have some voice in the disposition of the German colonies. He maintains that in settling what is to be done with the German colonies the Peace Conference might consider the wishes of the intelligent Negroes in the colonies themselves, the Negroes of the United States, and South Africa, and the West Indies, the Negro governments of Abyssinia, Liberia, Haiti . . . Chicago Tribune, 19 January 1919, quoted in W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History (New York: International Publishers, 1965), p. 9. 36 Du Bois quotedin the Chicago Tribune, 19 January 1919. Du Bois is also quotedas saying: We can, if we will, inaugurate on the dark continent a last great crusade for humanity. With Africa redeemed, Asia would be safe and Europe indeed triumphant. Du Bois, The World and Africa, p. 9. 258 Sacred trust were modest in political terms, though radical with respect to economic issues: The Negroes of the world demand that hereafter the natives of Africa and the peoples of African descent be governed according to the fol- lowing principles: 1. The land: the land and its natural resources shall be held in trust for the natives and at all times they shall have effective ownership of as much land as they can protably develop. 2. Capital: the investment of capital and granting of concessions shall be so regulated as to prevent the exploitation of the natives and the exhaustion of the natural wealth of the country. Concessions shall al- ways be limited in time and subject to state control. The growing social needs of the native must be regarded and the prots taxed for social and material benet of the natives. 3. Labor: slaveryandcorporal punishment shall be abolishedandforced labor except in punishment for crime; and the general conditions of labor shall be prescribed and regulated by the State. 4. Education: it shall be the right of every native child to learn to read and write in his own language, and the language of the trustee nation, at public expense, and to be given technical instruction in some branch of industry. The State shall also educate as large a number of natives as possible in higher technical and cultural training and maintain a corps of native teachers. 5. The State: the natives of Africa must have the right to participate in the government as fast as their development permits, in conformity with the principle that the government exists for the natives and not the natives for the government. They shall at once be allowed to partic- ipate in local and tribal government, according to ancient usage, and this participation shall gradually extend, as education and experience proceed to the higher ofces of state; to the end that, in time, Africa is ruled by consent of the Africans . . . . 37 Du Bois claimed that the Pan-African Congress inuenced the Peace Conference. 38 That was certainly the intent, since the resolu- tions adopted by the Pan-African Conference were addressed to the Allied and Associated Powers assembled in Paris and called for a permanent Bureau in the League of Nations to oversee protection of Africans. Still, none of the standard histories of the Paris Peace 37 Quoted in ibid., pp. 1112. 38 Ibid., p. 10. 259 Argument and change in world politics Conference mention the 1919 Pan-African Congress, though it was cer- tainly noticed by the governments involved, given the efforts of some of themto prevent its occurrence. 39 Yet despite DuBois claim, it is not clear that the Pan-African Congress proposals for a system of oversight for African colonies had an inuence on the shape of the League of Nations Mandate system: At best, the resolutions had only a minor impact upon the deliberations of the Paris Peace Conference. 40 The impor- tance of the Pan-African Congress, then, lay not in the uniqueness of the proposals, nor necessarily with any direct inuence on many dele- gates to the Paris Peace Conference, but rather in the fact that colonial subjects demonstrated their ability and willingness to organize polit- ically and attract public attention and campaign for the amelioration of colonialism. If they were slightly more militant, the Pan-Africanists were part of a larger movement which pushed for some degree of self- determination. The League of Nations Mandate system The activists proposals for colonial reformandfor managing the former colonies of Germany and Turkey were much more comprehensive than the measures ultimately adopted by the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and written into the Covenant of the League of Nations drafted there. This was because, [f]ar from envisaging the eventual independence of colonies such as German East Africa, Allied statesmen at the Peace Con- ference regarded 1919 as the renewal, not the end, of an imperial era. 41 Equality and self-determination, not just securing peace, were on the agenda for the rst time, although there was not a consensus on imple- menting these beliefs. In an important sense, these ideas were nascent or immanent, not yet believed widely or strongly enough among the representatives of the Great Powers to radically reshape foreign and colonial policy, but held just enough to change policy on the margins. For example, when the Japanese-proposed statement of racial equality won a majority of votes at the Peace Conference, President Wilson, as chair of the meeting, rejected it, saying the issue was too serious to be 39 For instance, see H. W. V. Temperley, ed., A History of the Peace Conference of Paris (London: H. Frowde, and Hodder & Stoughton, 19201924), 6 vols.; David Hunter Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant (New York: G.P. Putnams Sons, 1928), two vols. 40 Manning Marable, W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986), p. 102. 41 Louis, Great Britain and Germanys Lost Colonies, p. 7. 260 Sacred trust adopted without unanimous consent, despite the fact that unanimity was not required to pass motions at the conference. 42 Thus, the Peace Conference and the Covenant of the League embodied and reproduced the racial/Eurocentric hierarchy of the nineteenth century, while fore- shadowing and articulating the belief in self-determination that would dominate the diplomacy of the mid-twentieth century. Negotiations over the Mandate systemwere some of the most intense of the Paris Peace Conference. 43 Consistent withthe ambivalent views of the day, the Mandate system was a compromise between the three main ideas on the table about what to do with former colonies: annexation, international control andadministration, or self-determination. The sys- tem that ultimately grew out of Smuts and Wilsons draft covenants, and articulated in Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, was a combination of continued colonialism, its regulation, and a fore- shadowing promise of decolonization. The compromise thus acknowl- edged the widespread belief that annexation was not appropriate but also embodied the view that the inhabitants of these former colonies were not yet suited for independence. Specically, Article 22 said that to those colonies and territories . . . inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world. . . should be applied the principle that the well-being and devel- opment of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization. . . . 44 The idea was tutelage in a paternalistic sense. Further, Article 22 states that the character of the Mandate must differ according to the stage of development of the people, the geographical situation of the territory, its economic conditions and other similar circumstances. 45 Reecting perceived differences in development and levels of civ- ilization, Article 22 created three classes of Mandate. In the language of the Covenant, and according to the mandatory agreements, the former lands of the Turkish empire became Class A mandates, having reached a stage of development where they, with some assistance, would soon be able to stand alone. The Class B mandates, were at such a stage, 42 See Lauren, Power and Prejudice, pp. 82103. 43 On the negotiations over the Mandate system and Article 22 at the conference see Wright, Mandates Under the League, pp. 2443. It is important to recall that not all the cap- tured or disputed territory went into the Mandate system. Areas in Europe were allocated either to one power or another, or in the case of the Saar region of Germany, placed under anInternational Commissionof ve members chairedby its Britishmember andincluding one native of the Saar Basin. 44 Covenant of the League of Nations, Article 22, paragraph no. 1. 45 Covenant of the League of Nations, Article 22, paragraph no. 3. 261 Argument and change in world politics that the Mandatorymust be responsible for the administrationof the ter- ritory under conditions whichwill guarantee freedomof conscience and religion, subject only to the maintenance of public order and morals, the prohibition of abuses such as the slave trade, the arms trafc, the liquor trafc . . . The Class C Mandate territories were those which, owing to the sparseness of their population, or their small size, or their remote- ness fromthe centre of civilisation. . . canbe best administeredunder the laws of the Mandatory as integral portions of its territory, subject to the safeguards above mentioned in the interests of the indigenous popula- tion. As Wm. Roger Louis says, the Class C mandates were regarded, in the phrase current at the time, as colonies in all but name. 46 Rather than deal with all the issues at Paris, the former colonies that were to be in these categories were dened at a later date by the Allied Supreme Council (Britain, France, Italy, Japan and the US), and individual agree- ments were written for each mandate in 1919 and 1920 and conrmed over the next two years. 47 The allocation of territory to mandatory pow- ers was, thoughdecidedby a committee, actually basedonwhichpower tookover the territoryfromTurkeyor Germanyduringthe war. 48 France and Britain had mandates in Togo and Cameroons by an agreement in 1919. There was never an ofcial mandate agreement between Britain and the League on Iraq, only a treaty. The Palestine and Transjordan mandates were split, early on, as were later the mandates for Syria and Lebanon. 49 Other parts of the Covenant made space for colonial reform. Article 23 charged members of the League to undertake to secure just treatment of the native inhabitants of the territories under their control. Article 1 46 Wm. Roger Louis, The Era of the Mandates System and the Non-European World, in Hedley Bull and AdamWatson, eds., The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 201213: 204. 47 See Hall, Mandates, Dependencies and Trusteeships, pp. 130161. Mandatory agreements were not between the inhabitants of the territories and the mandatory power, but rather between the League and the mandatory government. Signicantly, and completely in line with the paternalistic belief of the day, it was rare that the inhabitants of any territory were consulted about their status after the war. For exceptions, see Cassese, Self-determination of Peoples. The Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society drew up a draft proposed mandate agreement and submitted it to the Permanent Mandates Commission in July 1919. Rather more comprehensive than most mandatory agreements that actually came into force over the next few years, they made their draft Memorandum on Colonial Mandates public in the October 1919 issue of the Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines Friend, pp. 6368. 48 Of course, not all captured territory became mandates, only former colonies. 49 League of Nations, The Mandates System: Origin, Principles, Application (Geneva: League of Nations, 1945). 262 Sacred trust Table 6.1 League of Nations Mandates Class Territory Administrative power A Iraq Great Britain Palestine and Transjordan Great Britain Syria and Lebanon France B Togoland France Togoland Great Britain Cameroons France Cameroons Great Britain Tanganyika Great Britain Ruanda Urundi Belgium C South West Africa South Africa New Guinea Australia Nauru Great Britain/Australia Samoa New Zealand Pacic Islands: Marshall, Japan Carolines and Marianas Source: League of Nations, The Mandates system: Origin, Principles, Application (Geneva: League of Nations). noted that any fully self-governing State, Dominion, or Colony . . . may become a Member of the League, if it was voted in by the League As- sembly and the prospective member agreed to comply with the obliga- tions and regulations required of members. Further, the 1885 General Act of Berlin andthe 1890 Brussels Act were revisedafter the Peace Con- ference in a separate agreement, the Convention on the Revision of the General Act of February 26, 1885, and of the General Act and Declara- tion of Brussels of July 2, 1890. Signicantly, the Convention retainedthe emphasis of both prior agreements on commercial openness in Africa but also, in Article 11 committed signatories to continue to watch over the preservationof the native populations andto supervise the improve- ment of the conditions of their moral and material well-being. 50 Thus, after WorldWar I, principles andbeliefs that were essential elements of a decolonization regime self-determination, nationalism, human rights, and an international interest in the affairs of colonial administration were codied in this major international treaty and used to structure international relations. 50 Convention quoted in Hall, Mandates, Dependencies and Trusteeship, pp. 323328: 326. 263 Argument and change in world politics Obviously, however, the League of Nations Mandate system, and the mention of just treatment elsewhere in the Covenant, were a far cry from advocating or implementing decolonization. 51 As M.E. Chamber- lain notes, The Mandatory power was required only to provide good and humane government, to refrain from exploitation, and to suppress evils such as the remnants of the slave trade. 52 Rather, the Mandate system was rst primarily a method of monitoring the treatment of the subjects of mandate territories by means of annual reports by the mandatory power, as required by the Covenant, to the Permanent Man- dates Commission. And, as Quincy Wright argued, Probably none of the mandatory governments has been enthusiastic for the system. They prefer mandates to nothing but doubtless would prefer colonies to mandates. 53 Yet, despite the narrow intentions of its authors (and perhaps in part due to strong criticism of the Mandate system from the left, as not actu- ally much different than colonialism), the Mandate system grew to be more than its framers or the mandatory powers intended, ultimately striking a wedge in the colonial system. 54 The rst edge of the wedge is found in the content of specic mandate agreements, where modest, but still signicant, protections for natives were built into the language of the mandatory agreements. 55 For example, in the Mandate over East Africa, Britain agreed that land transfers shall take into consideration native laws and customs. 56 Further, League mandates were the site of increasing scrutiny of colo- nial labor practices. Besides the enforcement of the anti-slavery regime, forced labor was to be discouraged in League mandate territories. 57 Forced labor was prohibited, for example, in South West Africa except 51 Critics, such as Stalin, believed the Mandate system was simply imperialism. 52 M.E. Chamberlain, Decolonization: The Fall of the European Empires (Oxford: Basil Black- well, 1985), pp. 78; Dorothy V. Jones, The League of Nations Experiment in International Protection, Ethics & International Affairs 8 (1994), 7795. 53 Wright, Mandates Under the League, p. 97. 54 Analysis and mild criticism from the US left came, for instance, from Rayford Logan, The Operation of the Mandate System in Africa, The Journal of Negro History 13 (October 1928), 423477. Some drafters of the League Covenant took a cynical view. See Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, pp. 155160. Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, I, p. 47. 55 It must be borne in mind that so-called treaties of protection between natives and colonizers hadmade some of these promises before. The keydifferences were international oversight and accountability. 56 Text of the British Mandate for East Africa, in Hall, Mandates, Dependencies and Trustee- ship, p. 304. 57 According to their agreements as Mandatory powers, Mandatories were not to armand use the indigenous populations for military and police, except for domestic purposes. 264 Sacred trust for essential public works and services, and then only for adequate remuneration. 58 Similarly, using almost the same language, the text for the British Mandate for East Africa, says the mandatory power shall prohibit all forms of forced or compulsory labour, except for essential public works and services, and then only in return for ad- equate remuneration. 59 As mandatory in East Africa, Britain agreed that it, shall protect the natives from abuse and measures of fraud and force by the careful supervision of labour contracts and the recruiting of labour. 60 The Permanent Mandates Commission Beyond the language of mandatory agreements, the greatest power of the Mandate system to change colonial practice lay in an underrated in- stitution, the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) of the League. The PMCs ofcial role was oversight. But, from the perspective of ethi- cal argument, the PMC was a venue for arguments about colonial prac- tice within the mandates and colonies more generally. As such, it (inad- vertently) promoted the deconstruction of colonialism (denormalizing and delegitimizing elements of colonial practice) and the construction of a new paradigm. The PMC, in publicizing the conditions in the man- dates, also reframed colonial practice. Working in conjunction with the rest of the League of Nations system and the mandatory administra- tions, the PMC also articulated criteria for good colonial administration and created new forms of knowledge and practice about colonialism in the general public and among colonial administrators, and was thus the engine for institutionalizing the new normative beliefs about colo- nial governance. The ultimately revolutionary impact of the PMC was inadvertent because many PMC members were former colonial admin- istrators who were ardent advocates of colonialism. Further, the PMC had little or no direct say in the administration of mandates. Because it could not directly intervene even its questions and recommenda- tions on matters of governance had to be conveyed through the League Council the PMC exercised indirect inuence. Understanding how ethical argument, reframing, and the institution- alization of new normative beliefs occurred and worked especially 58 Text of the Mandate for German South West Africa in T.D. Gill, South West Africa and the Sacred Trust, 19191972 (The Hague: T.M.C. Asser Instituut, 1984), pp. 104105: 105. 59 Text of the British Mandate for East Africa, in Hall, Mandates, Dependencies and Trustee- ship, pp. 303306: 304. 60 Ibid. 265 Argument and change in world politics how transparency, accountability, and the idea of progress for natives was promoted by the process requires an understanding of the en- tire apparatus of the Mandate system, where three bodies, the League Council, the League Assembly, and the Permanent Mandates Commis- sion had roles in supervising mandatory administration. According to the League Covenant, the mandatory power was to submit annual re- ports to the Council; the mandatory and the Council would agree, for each mandate, on the authority of the mandatory power; and a per- manent commission would receive and examine annual reports of the Mandatories and advise the Council on all matters relating to the ob- servance of the mandates. 61 Since the instructions for the PMC were not explicit in every detail, the League Assembly, the Council, and the Commission devised the rules and procedures of mandate supervision and the composition of the permanent commission. 62 Table 6.2 out- lines the main steps in the process of mandatory supervision by the League. Established by the Council of the League in November 1920, the PMC sat in Geneva and usually met twice a year. After some debate over the constitution of the PMC, the Assembly decided that the majority of the ten-member commission would consist of non-Mandatory Pow- ers. PMC members were to be experts sitting in a private capacity, and were to recuse themselves if they were citizens of a country whose mandate was being discussed. 63 Further, a representative of the Interna- tional Labor Organization usually attended Commission sessions. The PMC was linked to the secretary general of the League by a secretary who directeda small staff, known as the Mandates section or secretariat. PMC and secretariat membership had remarkable continuity over the nearly two decades it met. For example, there were only three secretaries from 1921 to 1939 and only two Commission chairmen. Most commis- sioners served several years, but many served much longer, for exam- ple, Marquis Th eodoli of Italy served from 1921 to December 1937, and 61 Article 22, paragraphs 79. 62 The membership, organization, and procedures were adopted by the Council on 1 De- cember 1920 and the Rules of Procedure were devised by the Commission at their rst session in 1921. Some rules were later claried or revised with amendments at sessions of the Commission. See League of Nations, The Mandates System, p. 35. Further, accord- ing to the Mandatory agreements, the Permanent Court of International Justice, establi- shed by the League, could hear disputes as well. 63 There were originally nine commission members. The rst secretary was made an extra-ordinary member in 1924 and a tenth member was added in 1926. Commissioners came fromItaly, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Norway, andSweden andfromthe Mandatory powers of Belgium, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Japan. 266 Sacred trust Table 6.2 Process of League Mandate supervision 1. The mandatory administration submitted an annual report to the Council of the League, answering questions posed to it by the Permanent Mandates Commission. 2. The Mandate Secretariat received and studied the annual reports, and distributed the reports to the PMC members. The Secretariat staff also prepared and distributed questions and background information on the annual reports to members of the PMC, and drafted reports on the petitions to the PMC. 3. Members of the PMC examined the reports, petitions, and any supplementary material sent to it by the Secretariat. 4. The PMC met twice annually to discuss the annual reports and to question the accredited representatives of the Mandatory power on the content of their reports and conditions in the Mandate. Each commission member had anarea of expertise, thoughall, includingthe secretaryandthe representative from the ILO, could participate in the questioning and discussion. 5. The Mandate secretariat staff prepared the minutes of the PMC and helped the PMC write its report to the Council. Reports could contain questions, observations and, rarely, recommendations. The Secretariat staff also kept a le of the Mandatory powers replies to the Permanent Mandate Commissions questions and observations. 6. The Council passedonthe PMCreport andtheir owncomments tothe League Assembly and/or the Sixth (Political) Committee of the League Assembly. The Assembly, made up primarily of non-colonial powers, discussed the reports and sometimes made recommendations to the League Council. 7. The League Council, which included mandatory powers, communicated questions andrecommendations of the PMCandthe Assemblytothe League. The Council also had the power to appoint PMC members, settle disputes, and decide when a mandate was ready for independence. 8. Minutes of the PMC, the PMCreport, and the discussion and any resolutions of the Council and the Assembly were published. Frederick Lugard, of Britain served fromJuly 1923 to July 1936. 64 Two of the shorter terms were the British Commissioners W. Ormsby-Gore and Lord Hankey who resigned the PMC to become members of the British Cabinet. At least some PMCmembers were conscious of their role as framers of public impressions about mandatory government and used the PMCs authoritytopublicizeconditions inthemandateterritories. Theminutes, whichinclude the (sometimes verbatim) records of interactions between commission members and representatives of the mandatory powers, 64 The PMC held thirty-seven sessions, the rst in February 1921, and the last in December 1939. 267 Argument and change in world politics were printed annually in English and French, and made available to the general public, usually within two months of the session. 65 In 1929, the PMC acknowledged publishing its minutes so that it could secure the assistance of public opinion in the moral control incumbent upon the Commission. 66 As Lord Hailey, British member of the Commission from 1936 to 1939 wrote in 1938, only those who have had experience in the internal working of an ofcial administration, in circumstances where there is no organization of public opinion, can appreciate the strength of the inuence which can be exerted by publicity of the nature of that involved in the proceedings of the Commission and Council. 67 As important as publicity was in reframing colonial practice, the more subtle but powerful innovation of the Mandate system was its insti- tutionalization of international oversight of colonial reform practices, which changed colonialism in a way that made decolonization more likely. 68 Normative beliefs about accountability andjust treatment of the natives were institutionalized when the PMC articulated the terms of oversight, specied indicators of just treatment, devised measures of progress, and reviewed the annual reports of the mandatory powers to the Permanent Mandates Commission. Institutionalization made the new normative beliefs concrete and simultaneously helped to defamil- iarize, denormalize, and delegitimize old-style colonialism. The most important technique for indirectly governing the colonies and institutionalizing new normative beliefs was the process of annual reports by the mandatory powers. Each year the same questions were asked, and each year mandatory administrations submitted reports and testied before the PMC. 69 It is not surprising that reports by manda- tory administrators on the conditions within mandates, and their own actions, tended to put mandatory administration in the best possible light. The oral questioning of mandatory power representatives by the 65 The minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) total over 8,000 pages according to one estimate. League of Nations, The Mandates System, p. 49. 66 PMC, Minutes of the Fifteenth Session, 1929, p. 15. 67 Hailey, quoted in Hall, Mandates, Dependencies, and Trusteeship, p. 212. Hall believed that the PMC was not as successful as the Congo reform movement in using publicity and pointed out: In an autocratic system, where free publicity is not possible, no Mandate or trusteeship system could operate. Ibid. 68 Of course the Berlin West Africa Conference and its General Act changed colonialism too, but in a way (by specifying effective occupation) that primarily reinforced the institution. 69 The reports of the mandatory powers to the PMC were not generally printed in the Ofcial Journal of the League of Nations or in the minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission. The League printed one set in 1925, but decided that it was too costly to keep up the practice. 268 Sacred trust PMC was an important innovation of the Commission that helped com- missioners clarify conditions in the mandates and hold administrators accountable. But the Commission limited its oversight in two other respects: the PMC decided that it would not send missions of inquiry to man- date territories, nor could inhabitants of the territories directly petition the PMC. Inhabitants had to go through the mandatory government to make their petitions, although thirdparties couldsendpetitions directly to the chair of the Commission. The right of petitionwas usually usedby Europeans in the mandate territories, andthe mandatory power usually sent its own comments about the petitions along with the petitions it chose to transmit. The PMC argued that to hear petitions directly or to send missions to mandate territories could undermine condence and authority in the administering powers and would also put the Commis- sion in the position of being a judicial body, whereas its ofcial role was one of advising the Council of the League. 70 Perhaps the best illustration of how PMC members saw, in practical terms, the principle that the well-being and development of such peo- ples form a sacred trust of civilization, and how the new normative beliefs about colonialism were articulated and institutionalized by the PMC is the evolution of its questionnaires on mandates. 71 In 1921, its rst year of operation, the PMC drew up a list of about sixty questions that it wanted mandatory powers to answer in their reports with regard to BandCclass mandates. The PMCquestionnaire was intendedto elicit information about compliance with international normative beliefs as stated in the Covenant. Because the focus and language of the ques- tions was negotiated among members of the Commission, their content is worth noting as an articulation of the least common denominator of beliefs about colonial administration. The questions covered slav- ery, labor, arms trafc, trade and manufacture of alcohol and drugs, freedom of conscience, economic equality, education, public health, systems of land tenure, public nances, demographic statistics, and moral, social, and material well being. The Commission also asked for copies of all legislative and administrative decisions with regard to each territory. 70 See League of Nations, The Mandates System, pp. 3846; Wright, Mandates Under the League, pp. 169184; Hall, Mandates, Dependencies, and Trusteeships, pp. 198207. The League Council did, on occasion, usually to resolve border issues, send special commissions to mandated territories. See League of Nations, The Mandates System, p. 45. 71 From Article 22, paragraph 1 of the Covenant. 269 Argument and change in world politics Despite prohibitions on exploitation and the fact that the administer- ingpowers werelegallyobligedtopromotethewell beingof inhabitants, the forced labor that was widespread in non-mandate colonies was also practiced in the League mandate territories, especially in Africa. On labor, the Commission asked whether and how free and forced labor were regulated and protected. Specically, with regard to Class B mandates the questionnaire asked, 1. What are the measures intended to ensure the prohibition of forced labour for purposes other than essen- tial public works and services and what are the effective results of these measures? 2. For what public works and services is forced native labour required? How is this regulated? 3. Are there any other forms of forced labour, such as labour in lieu of taxation, maintenance of highways, etc. If in the afrmative, how are these regulated? 72 At its ninthsession, the PMCexpandedthe questionnaire to about 275 questions, adding more questions about the status of native inhabitants, labor, andpublic health. The enlargedscope of inquiryindicates howthe least common denominator of colonial reformism moved toward more autonomy and self-determination for the natives under mandatory administration. One entirely new set of questions focused on native participation in their own government: 12. Do natives take part in the general administration and, if so, to what extent? Are any posts in the public service open to natives? Have councils of native notables been created? 13. Are there any native communities organized under native rulers andrecognizedbythe Government? What degree of autonomydo they possess and what are their relations with the Administration? Do village councils exist? With regard to Judicial Organization, another new set of questions asked: 30. How are the courts and tribunals of the various instances [civil and criminal] constituted? 31. Do they recognize native customary law, and if so, in what cases and under what condi- tions? 32. Are natives entitled to ofciate in the courts and tribunals: for example as assessors or members of the jury? Other new questions were oriented toward protecting native rights and welfare, and the section of questions on labor issues was expanded and renamed from simply Labour to Conditions and Regulation of Labour. 73 The content of these questions shows a widening scope of 72 Questionnaire Intended to Facilitate the Preparation of the Annual Reports from the Mandatory Powers. Reprinted in Hall, Mandates, Dependencies and Trusteeship, pp. 319 322: 319320. 73 Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, BandCMandates, List of Questions Which the Permanent Mandates Commission Desires Should Be Dealt With in the Annual 270 Sacred trust critical attentionfromabolishingslaverytoextendingnative workers rights. 55. Are there any laws and regulations regarding labour, particularly con- cerning: Labour contracts and penalties to which employers and employed are liable in the case of their breach? Rates of wages and methods of payments? Hours of work? Disciplinary powers possessed by employers? Housing and sanitary conditions in the camps or villages of workers? Medical inspection before and on completion of employment; medical assistance to workers? Compensation in the event of accident, disease or incapacity arising out of, and in the course of, employment? Insurance against sickness, old age or unemployment? . . . 61. Does the existing law provide for compulsory labour for essential public works and services? What authority is competent to decide what are public works and services the essential nature of which justies recourse to compulsory labour? What payment is made to the workers? May such compulsory labour be commuted for a money payment? Are all such classes of the population liable to such labour? For what period can this labour be exacted? . . . 69. Are there any trade unions in the territory? If so, have these unions put forward any protests or demands? Some governments objected to the more comprehensive PMC ques- tionnaire. South Africa, Britain, and Japan opposed the new question- naire in part on the grounds that it was too long. 74 Other mandatory powers did not object as much, but at its eleventh session, the Commis- sion decided that mandatory powers were free to decide whether or not to use the longer questionnaire. Nevertheless, according to observers, Reports of the Mandatory Powers, Distributedto the Council, the Members of the League and the Delegates at the Assembly, Geneva, June 25th, 1926, Publications of the League of Nations, VI.A. Mandates, 1926, 7 pages. 74 Wright, Mandates Under the League, p. 162. Hall, Mandates, Dependencies, and Trusteeship, p. 206. 271 Argument and change in world politics mandatory government reports tended to become fuller and clearer as the years go by. 75 The more complete the annual reports became, andthe longer andmore closely the Commission and the accredited representatives worked together, the more committed the governments were to carrying out the principles of the mandates. The more complete the background statistics given by the mandatory powers and the longer the period of years over which the information stretched, the more they were committed to telling the truth and nothing but the truth. It became part of the wisdom of the Geneva experience that a government which gave statistics committed its future. For once it had begun to give or- dered data, nothing was more likely to come quickly to light than a serious inaccuracy. To the trained eye of an international body and its secretariat . . . a serious inaccuracy, or even the variant fact, stood out as red lights on the page and invited immediate question and comment. 76 Thus the PMCreframedcolonial practice byquestioningandpubliciz- ing conditions in the mandates. New normative beliefs about progress were institutionalized as the meaning of well-being and development were articulated and given more precise qualitative and quantitative measure. The content of the questions tended to articulate specic mile- stones and signs for making practical the belief that more, not less, au- tonomy should be given to the people who inhabited the mandates, es- pecially the native inhabitants, andthus change in a positive direction was implied, indeed demanded. Because the mandatory administra- tions reports were annual, and they were expected to show evidence of improvement inthe economic, political, andsocial conditions of natives, the mandatory had an incentive to improve those conditions. The fact that international surveillance was indirect, via self-reports by manda- tory administrations, meant that to a certain degree, the standards and expectations of the mandates system was internalized by mandatory powers. The legitimate mission of colonialism became development, rather than exploitation. Exploitation was delegitimized and greater native rights and autonomy institutionalized. The role of the PMC as a 75 James C. Hale, The Creation and Application of the Mandate System: A Study in International Colonial Supervision, Transactions of the Grotius Society, vol. XXV (London: Grotius Society, 1940), p. 218. The mandatory Powers, in fact, have continually sought to render their annual reports more comprehensive, and to include in them all relevant information concerning points of special interest to the members of the Commission. League of Nations, The Mandates System, p. 37. 76 Hall, Mandates, Dependencies, and Trusteeship, p. 188. 272 Sacred trust venue for ethical arguments is illustrated by following the discussion of PMC supervision of South Africas administration of their mandate. South West Africa as a mandate While there were certainly many arguments about South West Africa within the Permanent Mandates Commission, it is one of the hardest cases in which to demonstrate that status as a League of Nations Man- date and supervision by the PMC made a difference. South West Africa was the last League Mandate territory to become independent indeed, it was one of the last of any of the worlds colonies to become indepen- dent when South Africa nally left in 1990. Further, South West Africas independence came after decades of guerrilla war. What difference did South West Africas status as a mandate make in the lives of South West Africans? Were the natives protected from the rapes, lynching, con- centration camps, and massacres that characterized German colonial rule? Was South Africa at all deterred from formal annexation by the fact of supervision by the PMC and the League? South West Africa was occupied by South African forces ghting with the Allies early in World War I and ruled under martial law from mid 1915 until 31 December 1920. When the war ended, thousands of Germans living in South West Africa were repatriated to Germany, but thousands remained, and were joined by more than 10,000 new South African occupiers. 77 General Jan Smuts of South Africa thought German colonies in Africa too barbaric for inclusion in the Mandate system and he wanted to annex South West Africa. The South African govern- ment certainly had the military might to do so. Nevertheless, President Wilsons vision of the Mandate system prevailed in Paris and South West Africa became a mandate in 1921. South West Africa was the only territory specically named in Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant. There are territories such as South West Africa and certain of the Pacic Islands, which, owing to the sparseness of their population, or their small size, or their remoteness from the centres of civilisation, or their geographical contiguity to the territory of the Mandatory, and other circumstances, can be best administered under the laws of the 77 The majority of the population, over 208,000 people, were native and coloured, and about 19,000 were European according to the 1921 South African census. League of Nations, The Mandate System, p. 115. 273 Argument and change in world politics Mandatory as integral portions of its territory, subject to the safeguards above mentioned in the interests of the indigenous population. 78 In its mandate agreement, signed on 17 December 1920, and in promises to the natives, South African ofcials pledgedto administer the territory better than the Germans. Specically, Article 2 of the agreement stated that the mandate shall promote to the utmost the material and moral well-being and the social progress of the inhabitants of the territory . . . South Africa was also given full power of administration and legis- lation over the territory subject to the present Mandate as an integral portion of the Union of South Africa. 79 Given this language, it is no wonder that Smuts told the Union of South Africa Parliament in 1925 that mandate status was close enough to annexation: It gives the Union such complete sovereignty, not only administrative, but legislative, that we need not ask for anything more. 80 Although the South Africans regularly contrasted their administra- tion with what they portrayed as the more brutal rule of the Germans, South African administration of South West Africa was brutal from the start and ostensibly little different than old-fashioned colonialism. 81 Al- ready practicing what it called segregation at home, South Africa moved to institute the same arrangement in South West Africa by, for example, conning African natives to native reserves and taking the best land for whites, as it had done in South Africa in 1913. 82 Well over 90 percent of South West Africas native population was thus re- stricted to less than 10 percent of the land. South West Africans were alsorequiredtopayrelativelyhightaxes, whichbothsubsidizedmanda- tory administration and forced Africans to work in wage labor on white farms. In 1923 the PMC questioned the purpose of the native reserve sys- tem. In reply, the South African representative said native reserves were entirely in the interest of the natives. The reasoning was that, na- tives, if allowed to live with the white people, eventually parted with their land and became vagrants and a source of danger. The only way 78 League of Nations Covenant, Article 22, paragraph 7. 79 The complete text of the mandate is found in John Dugard, ed., The South West Africa/ Namibia Dispute: Documents and Scholarly Writings on the Controversy Between South Africa and the United Nations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 7274. 80 I. Goldblatt, History of South West Africa fromthe beginning of the Nineteenth Century (Cape Town: Juta & Company Limited, 1971), p. 210. 81 See David Soggot, Namibia: The Violent Heritage (London: Rex Collings, 1986). 82 The Germans had also used a native reserve system in South West Africa. 274 Sacred trust to preserve the native was to bring him gradually under the inuence of civilisation, as was done in South Africa. 83 This nineteenth-century language did not fare well in the PMC. The chairman of the commission asked simply, whether the systemcould be reconciled with the spirit of the mandates and the civilising mission with which the Mandatory was entrusted. 84 The South African representative then backpedaled and attempted to conceal the nature of the system by describing it in vague terms, saying that the natives originally had their own land which they lost as a consequence of rebellion. 85 South African evasiveness, and the doggedness of the PMC, is apparent in the same session during questioning of the South African representative about labor recruitment practices in South West Africa. The questioner, Mr. Grimshaw, was the ILO expert who sat with the PMC. Mr. GRI MS HAW asked whether vagrants were liable to imprisonment and compulsory employment. Major HERBS T said that punishment for vagrancy might take the form of compulsory employment at a private farm, or at public works, in return for pay . . . Mr. GRI MS HAW pointed out that on page 21 of the report, the number of Ovambos recruited for work was a little over 1,000 apart from those going of their own accord. Did the recruited natives go under compulsion? Major HERBS T said that some pressure was exercised by the native chiefs. There was a European ofcer in Ovamboland, who was in- formed of the requirements of the mines. He made these requirements knowntothechiefs, whothemselves persuadedthenatives torecruit. . . Mr. GRI MS HAW asked whether men were directly compelled to work. Major HERBS T saidthere was no compulsion if they couldshowmeans of subsistence. 86 As this exchange demonstrates, members of the PMC sought to as- certain the conditions for natives working in the mandate, while South African representatives triedto put the best face on these conditions and to justify their policies in light of dominant beliefs. If normative beliefs and legitimacy did not matter, neither side would have bothered with such a discussion. 83 PMC, Minutes of the Third Session, 1923, p. 103. 84 Ibid., p. 104. 85 Ibid., p. 104. 86 Ibid., p. 108. 275 Argument and change in world politics The role of argument is also illustrated in an incident known as the Bondelswarts affair. Not surprisingly, African resistance to South African mandatory rule was evident from the beginning and South Africa often used force to crush that resistance. 87 In 1917, the South African administration imposed a tax on dogs and the tax was increased in 1921. The Bondelswarts, located in the southern part of the mandate, apparently refused to pay the tax and also resisted handing over ve men, including Abraham Morris, for whom arrest warrants had been issued in April. Morris had re-entered South West Africa il- legally from South Africa, and he was apparently armed. This dispute capped a long period of Bondelswart ill-feeling about taxes, wages, and other mandatory administration policies. 88 Accounts of what happened next vary. Most agree that in May 1922 the Bondelswarts prepared to ght, or at least defend themselves, and the mandatory administration moved to crush what they called a rebellion of 500 to 600 people, of which 200 were said to be armed (although only about 40 weapons were captured after the Bondelswarts were crushed). The mandate adminis- trator, Gysbert Hofmeyr, then raised a force of about 400 men, armed with ries and four machine guns, and called in aircraft to bomb the Bondelswarts. This resulted in what some called a massacre: 100 rebels died, including Morris and a small number of Bondelswart women and children. Another 468 of the Bondelswart men were wounded and/or taken prisoner. 89 The Bondelswarts incident was widely reported in South Africa, where the press and members of parliament called for an investiga- tion. One opposition member of the South African parliament, Arthur Barlow, said that black men in the League of Nations would seize upon the incident andour name was going to stink in the nostrils of the countries of the world. 90 But, despite widespread criticism, the prime minister of South Africa, General Jan Smuts, stood up for the actions of Hofmeyr, who submitteda report of the event to the government shortly 87 See Petet Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988); Colin Leys and John S. Saul, et al., Namibias Liberation Struggle: The Two Edged Sword (London: James Currey, 1995); Isaak I. Dore, The International Mandate System and Namibia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985). 88 John H. Wellington, South West Africa and its Human Issues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 285286. 89 See A.M. Davey, The Bondelzwarts Affair: AStudy of the Repercussions (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1961), pp. 58. Also see Goldblatt, History of South West Africa from the beginning of the Nineteenth Century and Wellington, South West Africa and its Human Issues. PMC, Minutes of the Third Session, 1923 (Geneva: League of Nations, 1923). 90 Quoted in Davey, The Bondelzwarts Affair, p. 10. 276 Sacred trust afterwards. Later, under pressure from the South African parliament, Smuts agreed to an investigation by the Native Affairs Commission of South Africa. Reaction abroad was also critical. In Britain, the secretary of state for colonial affairs, Winston Churchill, was questioned about the incident in the House of Commons. Of more concern to South Africa, news of the incident also reached the League of Nations Assembly where the PMC, and the Haitian representative to the League Assembly, Mr. Bellegarde, called for an investigation. Shortly after the Bondelswarts affair, South Africa was due to answer questions on its annual report to the PMC. But, South Africa did not send a representative to the PMC in 1922 to answer questions on its very brief report. The minutes of the meeting say simply that the PMC regretted the absence of a representative of South Africa, that it drew attention to the term Protectorate bestowed upon the mandatory territory in some of the ofcial communications of the mandatory Power, and that the PMCwould like information about the rebellion and its repression. 91 Later that year, in diplomatic lan- guage, the League Assembly unanimously passed a resolution, moved by feelings of great anxiety for the welfare and relief of the survivor, expressing its desire to see the full report on the action that South Africa had promised to produce. 92 In 1923, South Africa supplied the PMC with the required annual report and two special reports on the Bondelswarts incident prepared by the administrator of South West Africa and the panel appointed by Smuts. On 23 July 1923, the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society wrote to the secretary general of the League to point out serious omissions in the two reports and to note that even according to the South Africans themselves, the ghting appeared to have been started by the Mandatory government and that the Bondelswarts were defend- ing themselves. Further, the Society urged the PMC to hear someone on behalf of the Hottentots rather than only to hear fromMajor Herbst, who took part in the attack. 93 Over the course of several days, PMC members closely questioned the South African representatives on 91 PMC, Minutes of the Second Session, 1922, p. 10. The rst opportunity for the PMC to comment on South Africas policies came in 1922 but the South African government did not send anyone to represent the mandatory government at the PMC. South Africa was the only Mandatory administration which failed to send a representative to the PMC that year. In fact, nearly every mandatory government sent a high-ranking representative each year. 92 League of Nations, Assembly Resolution Number 5, Geneva, 20 September 1922. 93 Letter printed as Annex 8, PMC, Minutes of the Third Session, 1923, pp. 287288. 277 Argument and change in world politics events, focusing their inquiry on the deep roots of the trouble, the immediate causes of the uprising, South African conduct in repressing it, and the conditions of the Bondelswarts people following suppression of the rebellion. 94 After a relatively brief discussion of how the ghting arose and was conducted, PMC questioning concentrated on the political and economic causes of the dispute. PMC members asked why the Bondelswarts could not have some form of self-government. The South African representatives said that the Bondelswarts, though they wanted their own chief to be recognized, could not revert to a primitive systemsince the tribes hadbeen broken upby the previous government due tothe constant wars inwhichtheyhadengaged. 95 The minutes note that the PMCfound South African arguments shifting and contradictory: The Chairman did not quite understand the conditions prevailing. At one moment it seemed that the natives had reached some degree of civilisation; at other times they seemed to be wholly barbarous. They found on the one hand that there was a tax on dogs, and on the other that there was no Customs . . . The Commission was informed that cattle owners must pay a ne if their cattle were not vaccinated or branded, a regulation that seemed to show that the organisation of the country was fairly complete. They [the PMC] were now dealing with a question of credit and of advances, which was difcult to understand if the people in question were in a primitive stage. 96 The PMC concluded that the uprising itself could have been pre- vented by better administration and that its repression appears to have been carried out with excessive severity, and, had it been preceded by a demonstration of the overwhelming force at the command of the mil- itary authority, an immediate and perhaps bloodless surrender might have been anticipated. 97 Upon learning of the PMCs forthcoming conclusions, the South Africanrepresentative, Major Herbst, requestedasecondhearing, where he said: I intended to let the case rest where we nished the other day. . . I had not then considered that it was possible that we might get an adverse verdict on this matter from the Commission. . . Saying that 94 In a departure from the usual style, where remarks of Commission members and mandatory representatives were summarized in the third person, the exchange be- tween the South African representatives and the Commission members were appar- ently recorded and published verbatim. PMC, Minutes of the Third Session, 1923, 31 July, 1 August, and 7 August respectively, pp. 113125; 126136; 183187. 95 Ibid., p. 128. 96 Ibid., p. 130. 97 Ibid., p. 136. 278 Sacred trust the administrator, Hofmeyr, had done what nine out of ten administra- tors would have done in similar circumstances, Herbst tried to reframe the incident by arguing that the PMC should see the issue as one not of pre-existing native grievances and a just rebellion harshly crushed, but as the breach of law by the Bondelswarts. He continued: What would be the effect on an Administrator of such a censure coming from a body like the Permanent Mandates Commission? Could he possibly, with any self-respect, continue in occupation of the post? . . . Unless action against the Government is suppressed as speedily as possible, we cannot foresee the consequences . . . We still have natives there who are only impressed by show of force; that is all they recognise as appertaining to a government . . . I would ask the Commission to seriously consider the effect of an adverse criticism in South Africa. We are going to have an immediate outcry. 98 Despite Herbsts plea, the PMCreport submitted to the Council of the League and forwarded to the League Assembly, and the separate state- ment by PMC Chairman Alberto Th eodoli, were critical of the South African conduct before, during, and especially after the rebellion. The Commissions report was more diplomatic than the chairmans state- ment, yet even it was critical of specic practices of the mandatory administration, including the dog tax and the administrations decree requiringnatives topurchase brandingirons for their cattle (The whites actually received their branding-irons, but those which were bought by natives were kept by the Administration). The report was particularly critical of the vagrancy law. The Vagrancy Law of 1920 as interpreted by the Administration made any native wandering abroad liable to arrest if he could not prove legal ownership of at least 10 head of cattle or 50 head of small stock. The magistrate was authorised, in lieu of the punishment prescribed, to adjudge the accused to a term of service on public works or to em- ployment under any municipality or private person other than the complainant, for a term not exceeding that for which imprisonment might be imposed, at such wages as the magistrate deemed fair. This power of imposing forced labour for the benet of private individu- als in lieu of the sentence of the Court is a practice which cannot be approved. 99 98 Ibid., pp. 183184, 186, 187. 99 PMC, Report on the Bondelswarts Rebellion, in PMC, Minutes of the Third Session, 1923, pp. 290296: 293. 279 Argument and change in world politics PMCChairmanTh eodoli of Italywas moreblunt inhis assessment. He argued that the principles which govern mandates and colonies are dif- ferent: As far as themandatedterritories areconcerned, theCovenant of the League of Nations . . . has profoundly and substantially altered colo- nial law and colonial administration. Quoting the Covenant, Th eodoli argued that the actions of governments ought to be in line with the purpose of the Mandate system, namely, the well-being and develop- ment of less-advanced peoples. He said: First in importance come the interests of the natives, second the interests of the whites. He argued that although the PMC did not have all the information it needed, my fundamental impression is that the administration of the territory of South-West Africa, before, during, and after the incident, seems above all to have been concerned with maintaining its own authority in de- fence of the interests of the minority consisting of the white population. Chairman Th eodoli concludes: The Administration ought, on the contrary, in my opinion from the beginning to have carried on a policy and adopted an administrative practice calculated to lessen the racial prejudice, which in those terri- tories has always been the fundamental cause of the hostility which has invariably existed between the native population and the whites. I think, therefore, that the Administration has pursued a policy of force rather than of persuasion, and further, that this policy has always been conceived and applied in the interest of the colonists rather than in the interest of the natives. I admit that circumstances in the past, special conditions on the spot, and the particular characteristics of the population may make the task of the mandatory Power a very difcult one. My conscience, however, will not allow me to admit that these difculties justify a departure from the principles of the mandate . . . 100 On 23 August 1923, the South African representative to the League, E.H. Walton, replied to the PMC report and the chairmans statement, taking strong exception to the criticism in both. 101 As a result of the Commissions work, the Council of the League passed a resolution that, in diplomatic language, censored South Africa for its behavior in the affair and expressed its hope that, in the future, South Africa would 100 Statement made by the Chairman, Marquis Alberto Th eodoli, in PMC, Minutes of the Third Session, 1923, p. 296. 101 E.H. Walton, Comments of the AccreditedRepresentative of the Unionof SouthAfrica on the Commissions Report on the Bondelswarts Rebellion. Annexed to PMC, Minutes of the Third Session, 1923. 280 Sacred trust report improvement in the condition of the Bondelswarts. This might seem like very little. Still, the South African government protested the resolution. 102 Though South West Africans continued to resist South African gov- ernment the administration was much more moderate in response to protests, such as the conict in Rehobeth in 1925 that could, like the Bondelswarts incident, have led to a massacre. 103 The PMC continued to watch the South African administration carefully and to note when it did not seem to be working in the spirit of the Mandate system. For ex- ample, in 1925, when the South African parliament enacted legislation that granted the territorys white population a measure of represen- tative government, the PMC noted that this did not take the natives into account. In 1926 and 1927, the PMC, the Council of the League and the League Assembly all protested a phrase in the treaty between South Africa and Portugal, which settled the boundary between Angola and South West Africa, because the language of the treaty referred to South Africas sovereignty over South West Africa. In 1933, when the South African Parliament proposed granting representation to the man- dates white population in the Union Parliament, the PMC, departing from its usual diplomatic language, criticized South Africas adminis- trationin1934. The PMCarguedthat turning SouthWest Africa, ineffect into the fth province of South Africa was, to undermine the princi- ples of the mandate. 104 The South African government then stalled and eventually backed off under cover of a new South West Africa Commis- sion which said that although such an arrangement would not violate the mandate, in any case it was not necessary to take such a step at that time. After the opinion of the South African commission on this point was communicated to the PMC in South Africas annual report, the PMC then agreed to reserve judgment on the situation. 105 102 Wright, Mandates Under the League, p. 210. 103 On the 1925 campaign of resistance by the Rehoboth community, a petition by the Rehoboth to the PMC, and South Africas negotiated resolution of the dispute, see Wright, Mandates Under the League, pp. 210211; Goldblatt, History of South West Africa, pp. 223225. In 1922, members of the South West African Universal Negro Improvement Association andAfricanCommunities League (foundedinLuderitz in1921) went toGeneva topetition the League for black rule in South West Africa. Tony Emmett, Popular Resistance in Namibia, 19205, in Brian Wood, ed., Namibia, 18841984: Readings on Namibias History and Society (Lusaka: United Nations Institute for Namibia, 1988), pp. 224258: 237. 104 PMC, Minutes of the Twenty-Seventh Session, 1934, p. 63. 105 PMC, Minutes of the Thirty-First Session, 1937, p. 192. Goldblatt, History of South West Africa, p. 235. Solomon Slonim, South West Africa and the United Nations: An International Mandate in Dispute (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 55. 281 Argument and change in world politics South Africa had to regularly justify its behavior and publicly answer to the normative standards articulated by the PMC. The regularity and intensity of outside oversight by the PMC and the League held South West Africa under international scrutiny and made it accountable in ways that would not otherwise have been the case. Thus, while South West Africans were still treated badly, status as a mandate under the League probably prevented South Africa from annexing the territory and perhaps deterred the South African government from perpetrating even more terrible abuses on the African population. Effects and effectiveness of the Mandate system The impact of the Mandate system may be assessed on three levels. First, did conditions improve inside mandates? Second, did the Man- date system have a concrete impact on colonialism as a set of practices in non-mandate territories? Were the beliefs, arguments, and practices articulated and developed with regard to League mandates general- ized beyond the mandate territories and put into effect in other, non- mandate, colonies? Of course, if conditions simultaneously improved in mandates and colonies, then we cannot establish a causal relationship frommandates to other colonies unless it was the same set of beliefs that led to the Mandate systemwhich also affected the general conception of colonialism and led to changes in all colonies. Third, did the Mandate system(inadvertently) affect howcolonialismwas understood, andthus reframe the colonial system? The answer to the rst question, is a qualied yes. International supervision of the mandatory powers by the PMC and the League did affect the conduct of the mandatory powers in individual man- date territories. As envisaged by the language of the covenant, some class A mandate territories achieved independence, specically Iraq in 1932, and Transjordan and Lebanon in 1944 and 1946. 106 However, this 106 Iraqis rebelled in 1920 against British rule, costing the British 400 lives to squash the uprising. There were disagreements over controlling Iraqs newly discoveredoil resources and the British established a monarchy in Iraq where there had been none before. The same year that Iraq became a League mandate territory, the Kurds of northern Iraq were promised autonomy in the Treaty of Sevres and the opportunity, at a later date, to apply to the League for status as a sovereign state. The exact boundaries of Iraq in the Kurdish region were disputed with Turkey, the former colonizers, until the League sided with Iraq in 1925 (with the provisos that Turkey would get 10 percent of Iraqi oil revenues from the Kurdish area and that the rights of the Kurdish population would be respected). Even after formal independence from Britain in 1932, foreign affairs were still controlled by Whitehall. 282 Sacred trust independence was not always complete. In the case of Iraq, for ex- ample, Britain retained control of foreign policy and defense until after World War II. But nominal independence was hardly the outcome for the majority of League mandate territories. However, if most mandates did not become independent, did the Mandate system protect the inhabitants of mandate territories from the abuses that were typical of colonialism? One key point of control in the complex colonial system was government regulation of labor, and this is implicitly recognized by the attention the PMC gave to labor in its questionnaires and oversight. Did labor conditions improve for the subjects of mandates? In one important respect at least in Africa conditionfor labor was essentiallythe same regardless of colonial status: colonial and mandatory governments alike continued to change the system of labor from subsistence to wage labor, and forced labor was a feature of both systems. Indeed, as labor historians have shown, the coerced proletarianization of native labor, whether through forced labor or taxation, is the great legacy of colonialism all over the world. On the other hand, there were certainly important differences be- tween colonial and mandatory labor practices. For example, the recruit- ment and periods of forced labor in mandates was regularly scruti- nized by the PMC. The period of forced labor required in the Belgian mandate territory of Ruanda declined in the late 1920s and early 1930s from 29 to 13 days per year while forced labor requirements remained high in Belgiums other African territory, the Congo, where it reached 120 days in World War II. Indeed, compulsory labor grew in some non- mandate territories: forced labor went from 7 to 12 days per year in French West and East Africa during the interwar period and in the Portuguese colonies in Africa forced labor was ofcially six months per year for men 1460 years old. Head taxes in the Portuguese colonies could further increase the amount of labor required, since the tax was payable with three months of labor per year. 107 The greater length of forced labor in the Belgian Congo colony ver- sus forced labor in a Belgian mandate raises the question of whether there was any transfer of attitudes from mandate to colony. Were in- novations in mandate policy or the notion of sacred trust extended to non-mandate colonies? At least in Britain, the bureaucratic distinction between colonies and mandates was not rm. The General Division 107 C. Coquery-Vidrovitch, The Colonial Economy of the Former French, Belgian and Portuguese Zones, 191435, in Boahen, ed., Africa Under Colonial Domination, pp. 351 381: 360, 363, 367. 283 Argument and change in world politics of Britains Colonial Ofce had the responsibility of dealing with the League mandates. British Secretary of State for the Colonies Ormsby- Gore, who had previously served on the Permanent Mandates Com- mission, told the Foreign Policy Committee of the Cabinet in 1937, that although Article 22 formally applied only to mandates, the prin- ciples were, in practice, identical with the principles by which His Majestys Government was guided in its general administration of the Colonies. 108 Sometransfer of principles andpracticewas alsoinevitable in cases such as British mandate territories and colonies in East Africa, which were economically and politically integrated. 109 And, as will be discussed in Chapter 7, the Mandate system inuenced the treatment of colonies in the later United Nations Trusteeship System and the Decla- ration on Non-Self-Governing Territories. But, most concretely, the Mandate system appears to have inuenced labor practices in all colonies. After 1927, four members of the PMC sat on the newly created Native Labor Committee of the International Labor Organization. The Native Labor Committee focused on forced labor andlong-termlabor contracts inall colonies anddependencies, not just in mandates. As Duncan Hall argues, the conventions on labor that came out of the Native Labor Committees work aimed at extending to dependencies in general safeguards rst given international recognition inthe provisions of the League mandates. 110 In1930the ILOConference adopted the Forced Labour Convention with 93 votes in favor and 63 abstentions (including France, Belgium, and Portugal); no delegations could bring themselves to a principled defense of forced labor. 111 The Conventions goal was the suppression of forced labor in all its forms within the shortest possible period. 112 Didthe Mandate systemaffect howcolonialismitself was understood and framed? The Mandate system was supervised by men and women like LordFrederickLugardof Britain, who, prior tohis service onthe Per- manent Mandates Commission, was a colonial ofcer and the governor 108 D. J. Morgan, The Ofcial History of Colonial Development, Vol. 1: The Origins of British Aid Policy, 19241945 (London: Macmillan Press, 1980), p. 17. 109 Hall, Mandates, Dependencies, and Trusteeship, pp. 232233. 110 Ibid., p. 250. 111 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 29. 112 The Forced Labor Convention said that forced labor could not be used for private purposes, but only for public works for at most sixty days per year, with wages and limited hours. The League of Nations Slavery Convention of 1926 also mentioned forced labor inthe context of preventingforcedlabor fromdevelopingintoconditions analogous to slavery. 284 Sacred trust of Nigeria, for Britain. Lugards notion of the Mandate system was ag- gressive humanitarianism, rather than reform. British methods, he said, have not in all cases produced ideal results, but I am profoundly convinced that there can be no question but that British rule has pro- moted the happiness and welfare of the primitive races. 113 Lugard believed in British colonialism: We hold these countries because it is the genius of our race to colonize, to trade, and to govern. The task in which England is engaged in the tropics alike in Africa and the East has become part of her tradition, and she has ever given of her best in the cause of liberty and civilization. 114 Could he and the other true believers in colonialism who served on the PMC have intended that the Mandate system would change the way colonialism was understood and ultimately undermine the institution? Probably not. Nevertheless, that was the unintended consequence. Britains reforms in its largest colony, India, are an example of the effects of the Mandate system on non-mandate colonies. Indians, of course, had long fought for autonomy, and reforms had begun well be- fore the Mandate systemwas put in place, for example, with the mutiny of Indian soldiers in the Bengal Army in 1857 and the formation of the nationalist Indian National Congress in 1885. British reforms al- lowed greater Indian participation in responsible government with the Indian Councils Acts of 1892 and 1909, but they were not enough for most activist Indians. Mahatma Gandhi, who gradually developed his ideas of non-violent resistance, satyagraha, during his decades of ac- tivism on behalf of Indians in South Africa, returned to India in 1915 and took up his moral campaign there. The 1917 Montague Declaration called for the gradual development of self governing institutions, but two years later the British government in India passed the Rowlett Acts which continued the political restrictions that Britain had imposed dur- ing World War I. Indians peacefully protested these restrictions but the British cracked down on the protesters. The most famous incident occurred when, in Amritsar on 13 April 1919, British General Dyer ordered his troops to re, without warning, on several thousand people who were peacefully disobeying a ban on public meetings. Ultimately, the soldiers killed 379 people andwoundedmore than1,000other protesters. Anofcial British inquiry into the massacre and subsequent oggings during martial law, 113 Lord Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (New York: Frank Cass (1922) 1965), p. 618. 114 Ibid., p. 619. 285 Argument and change in world politics found against Dyer. 115 Thus, while similar crackdowns had been unre- markable, the reframing of the colonial mission, in part exemplied and in part generated by the League of Nations Mandate System, meant that the Dyers action was understood differently than before. In part as a reaction to charges of hypocrisy, Britain again reformed its India policy with the 1919 Government of India Act that enunciated a principle of dyarchy, where some spheres, such as education and health, were transferred to Indian control at the provincial level, while others such as public order were reserved and remained under British control. 116 In1924, the Royal CommissiononIndianizationset goals for increasing the numbers of Indians in the civil service and police force. From1927 to 1930, the Simon (Parliamentary) Commission developed a plantointroduce representative government toIndia, thoughthere were no Indian representatives on the Simon Commission. The non-violent movement in India, protesting the lack of a direct voice in constitu- tional reform, grew to have thousands of adherents in the 1930s and staged many non-violent protests to British rule, attracting world-wide attention. The 1935 Government of India Act gave an Indian federal government nominal domestic authority but retained British control over foreign and military affairs. 117 Thus, Britain reformed the gover- nance of its largest colony in parallel with the reforms it undertook in its mandates. Conclusion There are several conclusions to draw from this discussion of the Mandate system. First, public pressure, deployed in the form of ethical argument, led to the innovation of mandates. Second, ethical arguments, which took place in the forum of the Permanent Mandates Commission, were part of the process of institutionalizing reformist be- liefs. Third, this institutionalization within the Mandate System was generalized to colonies through various mechanisms colonial admin- istration, imitation, and international law. This last point is controversial, but contemporary observers thought that mainstream beliefs about colonialism shifted because of the Mandate system and in fact consciously sought to extend mandate 115 See Chamberlain, Decolonization, on this incident, p.16. 116 Ibid., pp. 6, 16. 117 The rst provincial elections in1937 resultedinCongress Partyvictories insix of eleven provinces and Gandhis party could therefore claim signicant political support. 286 Sacred trust principles to all colonies. For example, in a report to the Grotius So- ciety, James C. Hale claimed that the Mandate system was better than colonialism for inhabitants of mandates. Under the Mandate system, Hale argued, the natives rights are more fully protected, white settlers are prevented from exploiting the natural resources of the territory to their sole advantage, and all States members of the League of Nations are given an equal voice in this supervision, with a view to maintaining the trust undertaken by the League on behalf of civilisation. 118 Notably, one of Hales early reports on the Mandate system was sub- titled, A Study in International Colonial Supervision. Claiming that it was better than the old colonial system, Hale argued that, The Mandatory is merely carrying out a trust, the avowed aim of which is to help the inhabitants of the territory to stand by themselves, and not to govern them for its sole advantage. 119 Hales report the following year was titled, The Reform and Extension of the Mandates System: A Legal Solution to the Colonial Problem. Hale said: despite the di- versity of colonial aims in the nineteenth century, it is clear that since the institution of the Mandate System, the governing principle behind all colonial administration is that of trusteeship. 120 Hale believed that colonialism was already quite changed because of the Mandate system. In other words, several of the colonial Powers of the present day, de- parting from the principle of the exploitation of colonies for economic purposes, tend towards the principle that they are administering the territories with a view to furthering the interests of the natives and raising their standard of civilisation, so that they may one day take their place in the community of nations. The guardianship is to be seen in the increase in educational and health services, in the granting of greater powers to native authorities, and to the encouragement of native hierarchies. 121 The table on which arguments about colonialism occurred was thus forever changed because of the League Mandate system. The idea of a Mandate system, and the eventual end of colonialism through such a system, was no longer simply the opinion of the colonial reformers in social movement organizations like the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines 118 Hale, The Creation and Application of the Mandate System, pp. 185284: 204. 119 Ibid., p. 282. 120 James C. Hale, The Reform and Extension of the Mandates System: A Legal Solution to the Colonial Problem, Transactions of the Grotius Society, vol. XXVI (London: Grotius Society, 1941), pp. 153210: 155. 121 Ibid., p. 155. 287 Argument and change in world politics Protection Society. Rather, there was now a colonial problem which could be solved by extending the Mandate system. Or as Quincy Wright suggested in 1930: The question of extending the system to other areas in the administra- tive sense is of less importance than the extension of its principles. The system has already resulted in wider recognition of the principle of trusteeship, that dependencies should be administered in the interests of their inhabitants; in the principle of tutelage, that the cultivation of the capacity for self-government is such an interest; of the principle of international mandate, that states are responsible to the international community for the exercise of power over backward peoples even if that responsibility is not fully organized. 122 In sum, at the end of World War I, the political rule, military occu- pation, and economic domination which characterized colonialism in previous centuries was still in place, and with the successful crush- ing of anti-colonial revolts that occurred during the war, the colonizers were generally quite secure militarily in their colonies. Yet, in one of the great reversals of international politics, the leaders of the same powers that practiced colonialism on a scale never before seen in the world, would construct, with the League of Nations Mandate system, an in- stitutional mechanism that would gradually deconstruct colonialism. This was an outcome the architects of the Mandate system never in- tended, nor apparently even foresaw, yet it was a consequence of their ethical and practical arguments. Colonialism was thus denormalized, delegitimized, and an alternative reformist conception was put on the table and gradually institutionalized. As Edward Grigg told members of the British House of Commons in 1935, The attack on our position in Africa is not, in my opinion, coming from Africans or from anybody outside ourselves. It is coming from within our own ranks . . . If that kind of propaganda goes on it will undermine the peace of the Colonial Empire, not because of its effects in Africa, but because of its great effect upon ourselves. 123 122 Wright, Mandates Under the League, p. 588. A later observer wrote: The mandated territories became colonial showcases because of the amount of publicity given to them. The impact of specic colonial policies extended beyond the boundaries of the particular mandate. The care taken with the pronouncements of native policy in the mandated territory of Tanganyika, for example, had repercussions in Kenya and Uganda. Wm. Roger Louis, Imperialismat Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 19411945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 93. 123 Edward Grigg, quoted in R.D. Pearce, The Turning Point in Africa: British Colonial Policy 193848 (London: Frank Cass, 1982), p. 12. 288 Sacred trust As opinion shifted from supporting empire to questioning colonial- ism, it was no longer possible for colonizers to simply massacre those who disagreed with colonial government. Indeed, when unrest led to deaths in colonies, it was increasingly shocking. Mandate became a new standard of conduct against which all colonial administration was mea- sured. When colonial administrations failed to show progress of the sort expected in mandates, as was made evident in reports on labor unrest, poverty, and malnutrition in the British colonies in the West Indies and Africa during the 1930s, colonial powers were understood to be failing a sacred trust. 124 The questioning occasioned by these re- ports led to commissions to study various colonial problems, grad- ual reforms, and the inauguration of development assistance to the colonies. This shift is captured in the writings of a staunch advocate of colonialism for economic gain, the prominent French colonial of- cial, Albert Sarraut. In his 1931 book, Grandeur et servitudes coloniales, he wrote: The natives are people like ourselves. They must be treated as such, which means securing for them the basic guarantees of such indi- vidual and personal rights as we claim for ourselves. This is a cate- gorical demand of association policy: it has moral and practical consequences. Exemplifying the mix of motives and beliefs which characterized the period (pragmatic and moral reformism), Sarraut continued: Secondly, the colonized races must be protected from the diseases which strike and decimate them and which reduce the yield of this mighty workforce. This is the task of medical aid. They should be protected against acts of violence and fraud which may threaten their person, work or possessions. Fromthis arises, withthe concernfor gen- eral security in the country, the effort towards a guarantee for personal security through the work of a non-partisan, regular judiciary. . . The native worker must be protected appropriately by means of humane work regulations. The moral and spiritual value of this mass of human beings must be raised. This means the development of education. . . . Finally, our prot eg es must be rendered capable of taking part to a legitimate and appropriate extent in the administration of their own countries. It must therefore be made possible for them to hold public ofce, and the setting-up of representative bodies must enable them to express their wishes. In a word, they should be associates, and not 124 See Pearce, The Turning Point in Africa, pp. 1718; Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, pp. 57109; Morgan, The Ofcial History of Colonial Development, vol. I. 289 Argument and change in world politics serfs, of the power that has taken the fate of their fatherland into its hands. 125 The idea of colonialism had thus moved from mere exploitation to development with an eye toward greater self-determination. The view of colonial subjects had changed from less than human to peoples with rights, althoughinthe viewof many, theystill neededpaternalistic guid- ance. These transformations in belief in turn created greater openings for anti-colonial independence movements to argue and organize polit- ically for self-government which they were able to exploit in the coming decades. 125 Quoted in Hans Ansprenger, The Dissolution of Colonial Empires (NewYork: Routledge, 1981), pp. 7980. 290 7 Self-determination Empires fall; but imperialism is ever resurrected. 1 The British did not relinquish their Empire by accident. They ceased to believe in it. 2 Both the Colonial Ofce and the Colonial Governments have been caught inthe ever-present struggle of our nationtoresolve the dilemma of being autocratic abroad and democratic at home. 3 Many histories and analyses of decolonization stress the post-World War II era, which seems sensible since this is the period when most de- colonization occurred in seventy territories between 1945 and 1979, many of these by 1960 and when anti-colonial normative beliefs were fully articulated. 4 Yet although European colonialismin Africa and Asia looked strong in 1945, the foundations for the change in argument, be- lief, and culture were laid well before that period. Between 1750 and the 1 Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Ofcial Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. v. 2 A.J.P. Taylor quotedincorrespondence toWm. Roger Louis, Imperialismat Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 19411945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. xiii. 3 F.D. Coreld, chief native commissioner, in Report on Native Affairs for Kenya: Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau (London: Her Majestys Stationery Ofce, 1960), p. 28. QuotedinRoxanne LynnDoty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in NorthSouth Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996), p. 106. 4 For example, Robert H. Jackson, The Weight of Ideas in Decolonization: Normative Change in International Relations, in Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 111138; John Darwin, Britain and Decolonization: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World (New York: St. Martins Press, 1988); Henry S. Wilson, African Decolo- nization (New York: Edward Arnold, 1994). Exceptions to post-1945 era focus are Franz Ansprenger, The Dissolution of Colonial Empires (New York: Routledge, 1989) and Antonio Cassese, Self-determination of Peoples: A Legal Reappraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1995). 291 Argument and change in world politics 1930s, arguments made by reformers against the fundamental consti- tutive practices of colonialism slavery and forced labor challenged and ultimately led to changes in important aspects of the institution, so that it was no longer possible to view colonialism itself as legitimate. 5 These changes in colonial practices were signicant enough to say that the colonialismwhich endedin the mid-twentieth century was not quite the same institution that had reached its zenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Post-World War II decolonization may be considered the implemen- tation and extension of already articulated normative beliefs and ar- guments. Thus, at this point, much of my explanatory purchase rests on path dependent processes and institutionalization. Yet one cannot ignore the events of World War II and the arguments and events of the post-1945 period, if only because colonialism was still in place at the endof the war. Nearly 600 million people livedin colonies, mandates, or protectorates in 1945: Britain had over 60 overseas colonies, mandates, or protectorates including over 450 million people; France had over 30 colonies, mandates, or protectorates, controlling over 65 million people; the Dutch had 3 colonies with 53 million people. 6 Several processes contributed to making the post-1945 period the era of decolonization and, with the exception of continuing attention on South West Africa/Namibia, they are the focus in this chapter. I em- phasize the relationship between ethical argument, normative belief, colonial practice, and political opportunity. Again, my approach is in- tendedto highlight the process of argument andthe role, inparticular, of ethical arguments in the growth of anti-colonial sentiments, the decline of racist beliefs, decreasing public support for maintaining colonialism, andthe institutionalizationof the normative belief inself-determination. Though some may nd the description too thick, it is surely too thin since the force of my argument about ethical arguments, and the role of argument more generally, rests on the content of arguments and the in- stitutionalizationof beliefs inthe activities of the UnitedNations andthe practices of colonial governments. Four trends are highlighted: stronger 5 This did not pose a fundamental legitimation crisis for the colonial regimes themselves so much as create a policy legitimation crisis. To solve the crisis, colonialism had to be at least reformed if not ended. 6 Spain had ve colonies including Spanish Morocco with over 1 million people; the Portuguese Empire included eight colonies with about 11 million people; Belgium had two African colonies with about 14 million people. See Muriel E. Chamberlain, The Longman Companion to European Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (London: Longman, 1998). 292 Self-determination anti-colonial resistance; the delegitimation of racist beliefs; ethical argu- ments leading to declining public support for colonialism within the metropole; and the continuing institutionalization of normative beliefs in, for example, the United Nations Trusteeship System. First, anti-colonial movements grewin both the West and the colonies themselves after 1945. Anti-colonial activists used ethical arguments, political organizing and military force. This is sometimes described as a sudden political awakening, though in most cases, anti-colonial political organizations had deep roots in previous movements that had greater or lesser degrees of success under colonialism. In the post-1945 period, anti-colonial activists achieved greater success in organizing colonial populations, they increased coordination across colonies, and in some cases their associated guerrilla movements acquired better mil- itary equipment. Most anti-colonial movements simply wanted the exit of colonial administrations, and self-government along the lines of a nationalist political program that took state sovereignty as a given. Few successful movements had in mind anything more radical. In addition, there was greater international solidarity, especiallyamongdescendants of African slaves in the Americas, Pan-Africanists, who identied with colonial people and pressed for the modication and ultimately the end of colonialism. Second, during the interwar and post-war period, racist beliefs that underpinned colonialism were undermined as scientic racism and social Darwinism were challenged within the scholarly community and wider liberal culture. This coincided with the increased emphasis on political and human rights during and after the war. In other words, the political and cultural basis for anti-colonial arguments shifted from re- garding natives as inferior or non-human, to at least potentially polit- ically equal. Third, public support within colonial powers for maintain- ing colonialism declined as a consequence of the previous generations successful ethical argumentation regarding colonialism. Fourth, though the Mandate system died with the League of Nations, the institutional momentum and mechanisms of the system were car- ried forward and enlarged by the United Nations with, for instance, the formation of the United Nations Trusteeship System and UN oversight of non-self-governing territories. Inaddition, the UNbeganinthe late 1940s to monitor and in some cases conduct plebiscites in UN Trust Ter- ritories and colonies, ensuring that inhabitants were at least consulted about their fates. By the 1960s, the UN was a force for decolonization and the normative belief in decolonization was backed by sanctions 293 Argument and change in world politics against those states, especially Portugal and South Africa, which con- tinued a practice viewed increasingly as an anachronism: unmodied colonialism. Continuing to focus on South West Africa as an indicator and illustration of the role of particular legal arguments, and because South West Africas situation became important in changing the atti- tudes and practices of the UN, I discuss early international efforts to change the status of South West Africa. World War II and colonial arguments: changing opportunity Even during World War II, it was not clear that colonialism would soon end. The war heightened the actual and perceived importance of colonies to the metropole, especially for France and Britain. Speaking in San Francisco after the war, Great Britains Lord Cranborne main- tained that liberty could not have been preserved in the Second World War without colonial empire. 7 As they had during World War I, both France and Britain relied on the raw materials and food produced in the colonies, conscripting workers to boost production. Further, hundreds of thousands of Africans served in the British and French armies, many serving outside Africa. For example, by June 1940, almost 10 percent of the French army in France was African. 8 More than 370,000 Africans served in the British armed forces and tens of thousands more worked as forced labor on farms and in factories. 9 Indians also served for Britain in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Even non-combatant Belgiumincreased the use of forced labor, requiring 120 days compulsory labor in Congo, its African colony, and in Ruanda-Urundi, its mandate territory. 10 War also catalyzed both positive and negative changes for the colonies. Poor wage and labor conditions during the war provoked 7 Harold K. Jacobson, The United Nations and Colonialism: A Tentative Appraisal, International Organization 16 (Winter 1962), 3756. Reprinted in Leland M. Goodrich and David A. Kay, eds., International Organization: Politics and Process (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), pp. 287306: 306; Harold Macmillan on the War Effort and Colonial Policy, a speech to the House of Commons, reprinted in A.N. Porter and A.J. Stockwell, eds., British Imperial Policy, 193864, Volume 1, 193851 (London: Macmillan Press, 1987), pp. 109124. 8 John D. Hargreaves, Decolonization in Africa (London: Longman, 1988), p. 49. 9 See Immanuel Geiss, Pan-Africanism: A History of Pan-Africanism in America, Europe and Africa (New York: Africana, 1974), p. 365. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 125. 10 Michael Crowder, Africa Under British and Belgian Domination, 193545, in Ali Mazrui, ed., Africa Since 1935 (Berkeley: University of California, 1993), pp. 76101: 94. 294 Self-determination strikes and desertion although in some cases, wages were raised, and work conditions improvedto encourage greater worker compliance and productivity. 11 As it had during World War I, labor organizing in the colonies became an increasingly effective form of political activism, as labor saw it had greater leverage. Anti-colonial activism during the war occasioned alarm for the colonizers, as when the British viceroy in India, Lord Linlithgow, wrote to Winston Churchill on 31 August 1942: I am engaged here in meeting by far the most serious rebellion since 1857, the gravity and extent of which we have so far concealed from the world for reasons of military security. 12 While greater polit- ical freedom was allowed in India during the war, in other cases the autonomy won between the wars was taken away during World War II. For example, the former British mandate Iraq, given independence in 1932, was occupied by Britain from June 1941 to the end of World War II because the Iraqi government refused to break off ties with the Axis powers. The British White Paper Statement of Policy on Colonial Develop- ment andWelfare of February1940, whichbecame the basis for the sub- sequent Colonial Development and Welfare Act of July 1940, outlined a policy of providing assistance to the colonies so that they could improve their welfare. As Malcolm MacDonald, then minister of health but for- merly of the Colonial Ofce, noted, the previous Colonial Development Act of 1929 was enacted in order to stimulate that development mostly to bring additional work to idle hands in this country. The 1940 Act, he argued, breaks new ground. It established the duty of taxpayers . . . to contribute directly and for its own sake towards the development in the widest sense of the word of colonial peoples for whose good government the taxpayers of this country are ultimately responsible. 13 This was a signicant nancial commitment: the Act provided for 55 million over ten years. The goals of colonialism had become rather like the goals of the Mandate system, at least rhetorically, although the colonial system itself was not fundamentally questioned at this time by the British Cabinet or most members of Parliament. 14 11 Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, pp. 110166. 12 Quoted in Louis, Imperialism at Bay, p. 8. 13 Speech in the House of Commons by Malcolm MacDonald on the Colonial Develop- ment and Welfare Bill, 21 May 1940, Hansard Parliamentary Debates (19391940), vol. 361, cols. 4148, 5051, in Porter and Stockwell, eds., British Imperial Policy, pp. 94100: 97. 14 Statement of Policy on Colonial Development and Welfare, discussed in D.J. Morgan, The Ofcial History of Colonial Development, Vol. 1: The Origins of British Aid Policy, 19241945 (London: Macmillan, 1980). 295 Argument and change in world politics On the other hand, during World War II the Allies public rhetoric was lled with calls for self-determination, and colonialism became a signicant partisanpolitical issue inBritainduringthe war. For example, the Soviet Union championed a right to self-determination, consistent with V.I. Lenin and Joseph Stalins arguments in favor of it, and pushed the most radical of any governments positions on decolonization. 15 The British Labour Party announced in February 1940 its view that: For colonial peoples, Labour demands that everywhere they should move forward, as speedily as possible, towards self-government. In the administration of colonies not yet ready for self-government the interests of the native population should be paramount, and should be safeguarded through an extension and strengthening of the Mandate System. There must be equal opportunity of access for all peaceful peoples to raw materials and markets in these colonial territories. 16 The Atlantic Charter signed by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in August 1941 stated, in part, that they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of thepeoples concerned,andthat theyrespect theright of all peopleto choosetheformof government under whichtheywill live; andtheywish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them. 17 African independence activists then used the Atlantic Charter to frame arguments for self-determination andindependence. For example, a prominent Nigerianactivist, Nnamdi Azikiwe, published The Charter and British West Africa, and a mem- ber of the legislative council in Ghana, G.E. Moore, argued in 1943 that if there was the right of all peoples to choose the form of gov- ernment under which they live it was a right to which the Africans share. 18 The parts of the Atlantic Charter that dealt with self-determination sparked immediate debate. Not surprisingly, the Labour Party claimed the Charter applied to the colonies, as well as to Europe (meta- argument), while members of the Foreign and Colonial Ofces often 15 Cassese, Self-determination of Peoples, pp. 1419. 16 Labour quoted in James C. Hale, The Reform and Extension of the Mandates System: A Legal Solution to the Colonial Problem, Transactions of the Grotius Society, vol. XXVI (London: Grotius Society, 1941), pp. 153210: 161. 17 Atlantic Charter, reprinted in Porter and Stockwell, eds., British Imperial Policy, pp. 101102. 18 Quoted in Jean Suret-Canale and A. Adu Boahen, West Africa 19451960, in Ali Mazrui, ed., Africa Since 1935 (Berkeley: University of California, 1993), pp. 161191: 161. 296 Self-determination disagreed about how to deal with the implications of the Atlantic Charter. 19 Although President Roosevelt argued that the Atlantic Char- ters emphasis on self-determination was universally applicable, in September 1941 Tory Prime Minister Churchill told the House of Com- mons that the Atlantic Charter was intended to apply only to the states under Nazi control andwas quite a separate problemfromthe progres- sive evolution of self-governing institutions in regions whose peoples owe allegiance to the British crown. 20 On 27 October 1942, Roosevelt said the Charter applied to all humanity. 21 On 10 November 1942, Churchill said, I have not become the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. 22 Churchill was not alone in the British government in publicly resisting the extension of the Atlantic Charter to colonies. Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, in remarks published in the Manchester Guardian in January 1943, said: It would be ignorant, dangerous nonsense to talk about grants of full self-government to many of the dependent territories for some time to come. In those instances it would be like giving a child of ten a latch key, a bank account, and a shot-gun. 23 In private, the secretary of state for the colonies wrote to the deputy prime minister: The truth, I suppose, is that we do not think the Atlantic Charter at present applicable in its entirety to Colonial territories. There is, for instance, the principle of self-determination, which nds a prominent place in the Charter. Can it possibly be said that the African Colonies are t for the application of this principle? Or the West Indies? Or the Pacic Islands? . . . The Atlantic Charter was originally intended, as I understand it, to be concerned primarily with the European coun- tries at present overrun by Hitler. They are adult nations, capable of deciding their own fate. No doubt, the time may come when even the most backward of our Colonies [will] also become adult nations. But at present they are children and must be treated as such. Ought we not to say so, so as to avoid further misunderstanding? 24 19 Onsome of the memos betweenBritishcolonial ofcials regardingthe applicationof the Atlantic Charter to colonies, see D.J. Morgan, The Ofcial History of Colonial Development, Vol. 5: Guidance Towards Self-Government inBritish Colonies, 19411971 (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 15. 20 Churchills remarks reprinted in Porter and Stockwell, eds., British Imperial Policy, pp. 103105: 105. Also see Heather A. Wilson, International Law and the Use of Force by National Liberation Movements (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 58. 21 Quoted in Morgan, The Ofcial History of Colonial Development, vol. I, p. xxvii. 22 Quoted in ibid. 23 Quoted in Louis, Imperialism at Bay, p. 14. 24 Secretary of State for the Colonies, Cranborne, to Deputy Prime Minister Atlee, 14 January 1943, in Porter and Stockwell, eds., British Imperial Policy, p. 142. 297 Argument and change in world politics But it was difcult to prevent the Atlantic Charter from being app- lied to Britains colonies because important elements of the colonial institution were already denormalized and delegitimized. Like the US, New Zealands and Australias political leadership were in favor of ex- tending the Mandate systemin some way; only South Africa and France supported the British position. Despite Churchills reluctance, the US and Britain did discuss colonial policy at ministerial and head of state levels. To clarify the issue, the US and Britain drafted a Joint Declaration on colonial policy in 1943, promising that Parent or Trustee states wouldguide anddevelopthe social, economic andpolitical institutions of the Colonial peoples until they are able without danger to themselves and others to discharge the responsibilities of government. 25 The fact that the legitimacy of colonialism was in increasingly deep trouble in Britain is also illustrated by British government discussions during 1944 about whether to renew and extend the 1940 Colonial De- velopment and Welfare Act. The argument against extending the act turned in part on the expense of colonial welfare during the war. The contribution of the colonies to the war effort was noted with apprecia- tion but nances were still tight. While the private exchanges within the government over the Act focus on the amount of money involved, they also mention the concern of legitimizing British colonial government. For example, Colonial Secretary Oliver Stanley wrote to Chancellor of the Exchequer John Anderson: I make no pretence, however, that this is going to be a protable transaction on a purely nancial calculation. The overriding reason why I feel that these proposals are essential is the necessity to justify our position as a Colonial Power. 26 In explain- ing how he could not whole-heartedly support the request to boost the colonial development budget because of the expense involved but could support a smaller increase, Anderson told Stanley, I recognise the desirability of making some substantial gesture to justify ourselves before world opinion as a great Colonial power and also to assure the Colonies themselves of our intentions. 27 In other words, while the is- sue was ostensibly the amount of the grants to colonies, the pressure to make substantial grants was evidence of the problem of justifying colonial government. This was also well illustrated when Stanley, in a 25 Quoted in Morgan, The Ofcial History of Colonial Development, vol. V, p. 8. 26 Secretary of State for the Colonies to Chancellor of the Exchequer, 21 September 1944 in Porter and Stockwell, eds., British Imperial Policy, pp. 202205: 204. 27 Chancellor of the Exchequer to Secretary of State for the Colonies, in Porter and Stockwell, eds., British Imperial Policy, pp. 206207: 206. 298 Self-determination secret memorandum to the War Cabinet arguing for a larger commit- ment than that recommended by the chancellor of the exchequer, made ethical, identity, and practical appeals in favor of increasing expendi- tures on colonial welfare. 9. I am not pretending that the assistance to the Colonies which I pro- pose will not impose some burden upon this country. I do, however, feel that the Colonial Empire means so much to us that we should be prepared to assume some burden for its future. If we are unable or unwilling to do so, are we justied in retaining, or shall we be able to retain, a Colonial Empire? The burden, however, is innitesimal com- pared to the gigantic sums in which we are and shall be dealing. Nor is the apparent burdenwhollyreal. If these sums are wiselyspent, andthe plans devoted to increasing the real productive power of the Colonies, there will in the long run accrue considerable benet to us, either in the form of increased exports to us of commodities which otherwise we should have to obtain from hard currency countries, or in the form of increased exports from the Colonies, as part of the sterling area to the hard currency countries outside. 10. But I am not basing my argument on material gains to ourselves, important as I think these may be. My feeling is that in the years to come, without the Commonwealth and Empire, this country will play a small role in world affairs, and that here we have an opportunity which may never recur, at a cost which is not extravagant, of setting the Colonial Empire on lines of development which will keep it in close and loyal contact with us. To say now in 1945 that with these great stakes at issue we shall not be able to afford 15 million in 1949, or 20 million in 1953, is a confession of our national impotence in the future. 28 Stanley argued, Finally, it is the moment at which to kill the en- emy propaganda lie that the policy announced in 1940 was forced on us by our critical situation and that we never meant to implement it. Nothing would better conrm our faith in our sincerity than that at the height of our success we should conrm and amplify this policy which was rst announced in the depth of our disaster. 29 Ultimately the Act was renewed and the amount increased to 120 million over the period of 19451956. 30 Thus, by the end of the war, colonialism was delegitimized to the extent that a reformist agenda was dominant in the Anglo-American world. 28 Stanley Memorandum of 15 November 1944 quoted in ibid., pp. 208211: 210211. 29 Louis, Imperialism at Bay, p. 102. 30 Also see ibid., pp. 101102. 299 Argument and change in world politics Similarly, the French were reluctantly moved to take colonial reform seriously, although during the war it was not clear they would do so. General Charles de Gaulle and other French exiles explicitly declared their desire to win back and keep all their colonies. De Gaulle told Roosevelt, I know that you are preparing to aid France materially, and that aid will be valuable to her. But it is in the political realm that she must recover her vigor, her self-reliance, and consequently, her role. How can she do this . . . if she loses her African and Asian territories . . . if the settlement of the war imposes on her the psychology of the vanquished? 31 But, during the war, colonial reformreluctantly became French policy. De Gaulle promised in 1941 to give independence to Frances League of Nations mandates in the Middle East, Syria, and Lebanon. At the 1944 French Africa Conference in Brazzaville, attended by colonial adminis- trators and De Gaulle, Commissioner of the Colonies Ren e Pleven said, In Colonial France, there are no peoples to free, no racial discrimina- tion to abolish. There are populations who feel French and who wish to take a larger part in French life . . . They should be led toward po- litical personality and franchise step by step, not wishing to know any other independence than that of France. 32 At the meetings close the French resolved that, The aims of the civilizing labours of France in the Colonies exclude all possibilities of development outside of the French imperial system: the eventual formationeveninthe distant future of self- government in the colonies must be dismissed. 33 They further stated, It is also desired that the colonial peoples should experience this lib- erty and that their sense of responsibility should be developed little by little so that they may nd themselves associated in the management of public affairs in their countries. 34 Although the aim of the Brazzaville meeting was to discuss issues such as agriculture, economics, medicine, and administration, and although participants explicitly rejected inde- pendence as a goal, the meeting ended up discussing participation by Africans in their own government. 31 Quoted in James W. Silver, Framing a Balance Sheet for French Decolonization: Raymond Aron, Raymond Cartier and the Debate over the African Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Honors Thesis), p. 47. 32 Quoted in Dorothy Shipley White, Black Africa and De Gaulle: From the French Empire to Independence (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979), p. 121. 33 Quoted in Timothy Weiskel, Independence and the Longue Dur ee: The Ivory Coast Miracle Reconsidered, in Prosser Gifford and Wm. Roger Louis, eds., Decolonization and African Independence: The Transfer of Power, 19601980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 347380: 357. 34 Quoted in White, Black Africa and De Gaulle, p. 124. 300 Self-determination French colonial policy in the immediate post-war period reected public ambivalence. Colonial reforms such as allowing trade unions in 1944, abolishing forced labor in 1946, instituting local assemblies, and granting representation of territories in the French National Assem- bly, all had the effect of granting greater rights and representation for Africans. 35 Also in 1946, the Lamine Gu eye law made all colonial sub- jects into citizens. On the other hand, French police cracked down on demonstrations for independence in Algeria in 1945, killing thousands in the region aroundS etif, andin 1946 France began an eight-year war to hold on to Indochina. So much had changed in terms of the laws, if not yet the use of force, that Minister of Overseas France, Marius Moutet, said in 1946 that, The brutal colonial fact, the fact of conquest, the im- position of one nation on other nations, the maintenance of sovereignty that rests only on force, is impossible today. The historic period of col- onization is passed. 36 Perhaps what Moutet meant was that the use of brute force against inferior subjects was no longer unquestioned and unfettered; France still frequently used force, but greater political and economic freedom was also part of the colonial policy. Pan-Africanism and anti-colonial solidarity Pan-Africanism, the solidarity of people of African descent, was both a cultural idea and a political program with roots in the mid and late nineteenth-century writings of Ethiopianists and West African scholars such as John Africanus Horton, James Johnson, and Edward Blyden. 37 35 See Louis, Imperialism at Bay, pp. 4447; Suret-Canale and Boahen, West Africa 19451960, pp. 173174; Majhemount Diop, in collaboration with David Birmingham, Ivan Hrbek, Alfredo Margrido, and Djibril Tamsir Niane, Tropical and Equatorial Africa under French, Portuguese and Spanish Domination, 193545, in Ali Mazrui, ed., Africa Since 1935 (Berkeley: University of California, 1993), pp. 5875: 7274; Elikai MBokolo, French Colonial Policy in Equatorial Africa in the 1940s and 1950s, in Gifford and Louis, eds., The Transfer of Power in Africa, pp. 173210; and Rudolf von Albertini, Decolonization: The Administration of Future Colonies, 19191960 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday &Company, 1971), pp. 364371. French colonies were grouped into two federations, French Equatorial Africa or AEF, consisting of what was known as Middle Congo, Chad, Ubangu-Chari (Central African Republic), and Gabon. French West Africa or AOF consisted of Senegal, French Sudan (Mali), FrenchGuinea, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), C ote dIvoire, Dahomey(Benin), Niger, and Mauritania. 36 Quoted in White, De Gaulle and Black Africa, p. 148. 37 Ethiopianism was primarily concerned with developing an African Christianity, but it also refuted racist beliefs. The later Negritude, black consciousness, and black pride movements, which stressed a cultural as well as political and economic analysis of the sit- uationof Africanpeople, oftenhadaPan-Africancomponent. See P. Olisanwuche Esedebe, 301 Argument and change in world politics The Pan-Africanists main tools were discursive: education and argu- ment. One of their most common rhetorical techniques was to expose hypocrisy and call for consistency between the words and principles of democratic nations and their overseas practices. Their other tool was political organizing. From primarily being based among West African, Afro-British, and African-American intellectuals, during the period between the two worldwars, a world-wide Pan-African movement grewto include more Africans. Pan-Africans also developed a less paternalistic program for African liberation, and came to have a more sharply focused articula- tion of their analysis of colonial economics. The Second Pan-African conference, which held sessions in London, Brussels, and Paris in 1921, endorsed a declaration stressing racism as a problem and proposed self-government for backward groups. Going farther than they had in 1919, conference participants argued that the habit of democracy must be made to encircle the earth. Despite the attempts to prove that its practice is the secret and divine gift of a few, no habit is more nat- ural or widespread among primitive people, or more easily capable of development among masses. Local self-government with a minimum of help and oversight can be established tomorrow in Asia, in Africa, America, and the isles of the sea. 38 A delegation from the conference then traveled to the Permanent Mandates Commission to present a pe- tition which politely suggested that, as the spirit of the world moves towards self-government, mandated areas, being peopled as they are by black folk, have a right to ask that men of Negro descent, properly tted in character and training, be appointed a member of the Mandates Commission as soon as a vacancy occurs. 39 The delegation also asked the League to take a rmstandonthe absolute equalityof races. 40 This was certainly ethical argument: it denormalized and delegitimized both racism and colonialism and offered an alternative which met normative goals already articulated and widely held. The form of the argument was logical inference and side-ways reasoning; after rejecting racism, analogy suggested that there was no limit to democratic principles and therefore no limit to their practice. Pan-Africanism: The Idea and Movement, 17761963 (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1982); A. Adu Boahen, African Perspectives on Colonialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 38 Quoted in George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1971), pp. 108109. 39 Quoted in ibid., p. 112. 40 Quoted in ibid., p. 112. 302 Self-determination Pan-Africanists organized two other congresses before World War II. In 1923, the Third Pan-African Congress held sessions in London and Lisbon with wider participation than previous meetings. Again, most of the demands were modest, requesting that Africans have a voice in their own governments . . . access to land and its resources . . . trial by juries of their peers under established procedures of law . . . develop- ment of Africa for the benet of Africans, and not merely for the prot of Europeans. The most radical statement was the demand for the or- ganization of commerce and industry so as to make the main objects of capital and labour the welfare of the many rather than the enriching of the few. 41 The 1927 Pan-African Congress held in New York involved over 200 delegates from eleven countries. During the interwar period and World War II, many in the African- American elite were increasingly active in denouncing colonialism and imperialism. Before and during World War II, even the moderate US National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was sharply anti-colonial and had strong links and overlapping mem- bership with other more radical anti-colonial organizations. NAACP Secretary Walter White wrote to US President Roosevelt in September 1944 to urge that, the U.S. government will not be a party to the perpet- uation of colonial exploitation andto appoint qualiedNegroes to serve at U.S. government conferences determiningwar or post war policies. 42 According to historian Penny Von Eschen, the African-American press kept up a strong critique of the Europeans conduct of the war: There was erce criticism of the Allies coercive use of unarmed Africans for transport andlabor battalions. This practice causedsuchhighcasualties, the Defender [April 1942] charged, that it was a contradiction of the very principles of liberty and humanity for which we claimto be ghting. 43 But the critique of colonialism was deeper, as the State Department re- ported in 1944: Leading Negro journals like The Crisis, ofcial organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the 41 Quoted in ibid., p. 118. 42 Quoted in Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonial- ism, 19371957 (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1997), p. 74. Alsosee Hollis R. Lynch, Black American Radicals and Liberation of Africa: The Council on African Affairs, 19371955 (Ithaca: Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, 1978); Hollis R. Lynch, Pan- African Responses in the United States to British Colonial Rule in Africa in the 1940s, in Prosser Gifford and Wm. Roger Louis, eds., The Transfer of Power in Africa: Decolonization 19401960 (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 5786; Suret-Canale andBoahen, West Africa 19451960, pp. 165166. 43 Von Eschen, Race Against Empire, p. 33. 303 Argument and change in world politics relatively conservative New York Amsterdam News and the militant left- wing organ, the Peoples Voice conduct a perpetual and bitter campaign against white imperialism. 44 One of the most important anti-colonial groups in the US, the Coun- cil on African Affairs, publicized conditions in colonies and supported liberation movements. Begun in 1937 as the International Committee on African Affairs to educate Americans about Africa, the Committee was reorganized into the Council on African Affairs (CAA) in 1942, with a more explicit Pan-African analysis and liberation agenda. Much of its work on behalf of Africa was dedicated to public education and out- reach. The CAA organized rallies featuring some of its famous support- ers, including the African-American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois and the enormously popular entertainer Paul Robeson. For example, the CAA organized a Colonial Conference in New York, at a branch of a public library on 135th St., on 6 April 1945, which included Kwame Nkrumah and the African-American intellectuals Rayford Logan and Du Bois, along with West Indians and Africans. Conference participants called for an international Colonial Commission to oversee and facilitate the transition of peoples from colonial status to such autonomy as colonial peoples themselves may desire. 45 Many other groups questioned colonialism. In June 1945 an All Colo- nial Peoples Conference met to call for independence. The Pan-African Conference met in Manchester, England in October 1945 with the goal of complete and absolute independence, and the decolonization strat- egy discussed included mass organization through trade unions and political parties. 46 The meeting included sessions on colonialism in the West Indies, Asia, and Africa, and participants came from Antigua, Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica, Gambia, Uganda, Tanganyika, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and other colonies. It included, as usual, W.E.B. Du Bois, but also three future African heads of state, Kwame Nkrumah of Gold Coast (later Ghana), Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, and Hastings Banda of Malawi. In the United States in the immediate post-war period, the CAA and NAACP continued to promote anti-colonial activism through public 44 State Department report quoted in ibid., p. 42. 45 Quoted in ibid., p. 77. 46 In addition, the All Colonial Peoples Conference included the Pan-African Federation, the Federation of Indian Associations in Britain, the West African Students Union, the Ceylon Students Association and Burma Association. Paul Gordon Lauren, Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), p. 173. See Geiss, Pan-Africanism, pp. 401, 408. 304 Self-determination education and by directly lobbying government ofcials. The CAA published the monthly journal New Africa, which included news and analysis of conditions in Africa. 47 In April 1944 members of the CAAs executive board met the ofcials of the newly organized Africa Division of the State Department, and in March 1945, Max Yergan and Alpheus Hunton of the CAA met with Assistant Secretary of State Archibald MacLeish. When the San Francisco Conference on the United Nations opened on 25 April 1945, the NAACP had the status of consultant to the US delegation. 48 The CAA also sent its program for Africa in the peace settlement, Text and Analysis of the Colonial Provisions of the United Nations Charter, to the Secretary of State and US representative to the UN and published a pamphlet, The San Francisco Conference and the Colonial Issue, which they sent to all the delegates at the UN conference. 49 In addition to lobbying the US government and the UN, the CAA at- temptedtofocus USpublic opinionagainst colonialismwithlarge public rallies. A CAA rally at Madison Square Garden in 1946, intended to or- ganize anti-imperialist and democratic forces to inuence American foreign policy, attracted 19,000 people. 50 The day before the rally, the New York Herald Tribune printed a letter to the editor that sketched the problems of land and labor in West Africa, Kenya, and South Africa and spelled out the inadequacies of American policy on Africa and the at- tempts by the SouthAfricangovernment to annex South-West Africa. 51 The rally itself was widely covered in the New York Herald Tribune and the NewYork Times. The CAArally in NewYork for Africa and Colonial Freedom through a Strong UN in April 1947 critiqued South African policies. Another CAA rally at New Yorks Madison Square Garden in September 1947 attracted 15,000 people to hear Lena Horne, Paul Robeson, and former Vice President Henry Wallace. 52 Despite initial unity and the large public response, the anti-colonial movement among black Americans fractured after the anti-communist 47 At its peak in 1946, circulation for New Africa was more than 3,000. But, New Africas inuence was considerably larger than its circulation suggests, as it was subscribed to by church, labor, educational, and political organizations, and was also read by U.S. govern- ment ofcials. It also circulated in Europe, particularly among British leftist and govern- ment circles, and in Africa among nationalist and labor groups. Indeed by 1950 there was a government ban on it in three African countries Kenya, South Africa, and the Belgian Congo. Lynch, Pan-African Responses, p. 60. 48 Von Eschen, Race Against Empire, p. 81. 49 Ibid., p. 83; Lynch, Pan-African Responses, pp. 6162. 50 Von Eschen, Race Against Empire, p. 103. 51 Ibid., pp. 103104. 52 Ibid., pp. 9293. 305 Argument and change in world politics Truman Doctrine was announced in Congress in March 1947. NAACP leader, Walter White, supported both the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, while Paul Robeson and others, including the Progres- sive Citizens of America (PCA), opposedthe Truman Doctrine andCold War polarization. The leadership of the CAAsplit in 1948 between those who supported Truman and those, such as Du Bois and Robeson, who backed Henry Wallace as a candidate for president in 1948. In 1950 the US government revoked Paul Robesons passport because, they said, he was extremely active in behalf of the independence for the colonial peoples of Africa. 53 But while anti-colonial activism among African Americans was dampened by the Cold War, it grew in the rest of the world. The 1955 Bandung Conference, held in Indonesia, was hailed as the rst inter- national conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind by Indonesias president Sukarno, who spoke of being united against colo- nialism and racism. 54 African and Asian delegates from twenty-nine countries, including colonies and newly independent nations, criticized Western racism as the foundation of colonialism. As Carlos Romulo, president of the Philippines, said, To bolster his rule, to justify his own power to himself, Western white man assumed that his superiority lay in his very bones, in the color of his skin. This made the lowliest drunk superior, in colonial society, to the highest product of culture and schol- arship and industry among the subject people. 55 Colonial culture and the decline of scientic racism Twentieth-century Pan-Africanists and other anti-colonial activists rec- ognized the centrality of racist beliefs and the Europeans sense of racial superiority as a foundation of colonialism and challenged the West on this account. Although Social Darwinism, or the belief in the natural 53 US State Department quoted in ibid., p. 124. In 1947, the Attorney General included the CAAon its list of subversive organizations and in 1952 the US Attorney Generals Subver- sive Activities Control Board labeled the CAA as substantially directed and controlled by the Communist Party, USA. Ibid., pp. 115 and 134. Von Eschen writes that, The per- vasive psychologizing of racism marginalized intellectuals such as Du Bois and Hunton, who located racism in the history of slavery and colonialism. Ibid., p. 158. Though the CAAdeniedanassociationwiththe Communist Party in1955 it disbanded. The American Committee on Africa (ACOA) was founded in 1953 and TransAfrica continued solidarity and anti-colonial work. 54 Lauren, Power and Prejudice, p. 224. 55 Romulo quoted in ibid., p. 225. 306 Self-determination superiority of those who dominate others, was prevalent in scientic and popular culture of the West during the late nineteenth century, Africans had consistently rejected European arguments about African inferiority, publishing refutations of European racismand championing African values over European culture. 56 Yet scientic racism and other racist beliefs were still widespread during the early twentieth century. The impetus for Western scientists to reevaluate scientic racism and social Darwinismcame fromboththe scientic community andthe pop- ular reaction to Nazism. 57 One early challenge by the famous American anthropologist Franz Boas, who published The Mind of Primitive Man in 1911, questioned the idea of a difference between the primitive and the civilized in intelligence. Doubt about the science of race continued to grow in part because of the difculty in proving distinct racial types. The anthropomorphic physical anthropology of human measurement was failing to meet the scientists own criteria for good science. There was simply too much variation within so-called racial groups to main- tain rigid typologies based on measurements, and moreover, there was no single agreed-upon measurement scheme. 58 But more important, perhaps, was the growing desire in the 1930s among European and American scientists to refute the Nazis views about race. Adolf Hitlers, Mein Kampf (1925), and the racial ideas of the Nazi movement, received greater attention after Hitlers election to chancellor in 1933. In the US, Franz Boas organized anthropologists and other social scientists to refute racist science. In England, Julian Huxley and Alfred Haddon in 1935 published We Europeans, a Survey of Racial Problems With A Chapter on Europe Overseas, questioning racial science. The scholarly journals Nature and Science published articles, letters, and editorials about racial science. Scientists also convened conferences on race and Nazi science. 59 In December 1938, 1,284 scientists in the US, in- cluding three Nobel laureates, published a Scientists Manifesto critical of pseudo-scientic racialism. 60 56 Boahen, African Perspectives on Colonialism, pp. 2022. 57 Turn of the century American intellectual critics of social Darwinism, for instance Boas and William James, were also often critical of imperialism. See Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, revd edn (New York: George Braziller, 1955), pp. 192200. 58 Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 18001960 (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 162169. 59 See ibid., and Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientic Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 279346. 60 Barkan, The Retreat of Scientic Racism, p. 337. 307 Argument and change in world politics World War II itself brought race to the forefront. The Western pow- ers and the Japanese fought a war lled with racial stereotypes and racist appeals to national solidarity, while the Nazis carried out their exterminationpolicybasedonracial ideas. 61 As BritishLabour politician Clement Atlee told his party in August 1941, Our enemies, the Nazis, set up a monstrous and ridiculous racial doctrine. They declare them- selves to be a master-race to which the rest of us are inferior, and if they assert that claim in respect to Europeans you may be quite as- sured they are going to apply it to everyone else Asiatics, Africans, and everyone. 62 At the same time, racism faced serious challenge in the US when the military became increasingly integrated along racial lines andthe war promptedthe elimination of some racial barriers in the private sector. 63 During the war, the famous scholar Ashley Montague (a former Boas student) published Mans Most Dangerous Myth: The Fal- lacy of Race. Intent on using a scientic argument for larger political goals, Montague wrote: In our time, the problem of race has assumed an alarmingly exagger- ated importance. Alarming, because racial dogmas have been made the basis for an inhumanly brutal political philosophy which has al- ready resulted in the death or social disenfranchisement of millions of innocent individuals; exaggerated because when the nature of con- temporary race theory is scientically analyzed and understood it ceases to be of any signicance for social or any other kind of action . . . It is highly desirable, therefore, that the facts about race as science has come to know them should be widely disseminated and clearly understood. 64 Intellectuals continued their assault on scientic racism after the war. The anthropologist Claude L evi-Strauss published Race et Histoire in 1952 challenging crude cultural evolutionism and hierarchies of societies. 65 Similarly, the UnitedNations Educational, Scientic andCul- tural Organization (UNESCO) convened meetings and published state- ments on race concluding that the capacities of all races were similar. 61 See John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacic War (New York: Pan- theon, 1986). 62 Quoted in Louis, Imperialism at Bay, p. 125. 63 See Lauren, Power and Prejudice, pp. 108144. 64 Ashley Montague, Mans Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), p. ix, quoted in Pat Shipman, The Evolution of Racism: Human Difference and the Use and Abuse of Science (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 161. 65 Paul Clay Sorum, Intellectuals and Decolonization in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), pp. 224232. 308 Self-determination UNESCOs July 1950 statement said, in part, Biological differences be- tweenethnic groups shouldbe disregardedfromthe standpoint of social acceptance and social action . . . According to present knowledge, there is no proof that the groups of mankind differ in their innate mental characteristics, whether in respect to intelligence or temperament. The scientic evidence indicates that the range of mental capacities in all other ethnic groups is much the same. 66 The UNESCO position and other such statements were widely debated among intellectuals, but, by the 1950s, most scientic racism had been refuted by ofcial bod- ies such as UNESCO, and it was no longer possible to make crudely racist statements without challenge. 67 Thus, although, revulsion toward Nazi views shaped the content of the critique of scientic racism, views about the darker races were also challenged and revised. The argu- ment moved forward by analogy: if anti-Semitism was wrong, other forms of racism were wrong. Colonialism could no longer be normal or legitimate once scientic racism was dethroned. UN trusteeship and institutionalization of anti-colonialism Though it would not formally disband until May 1946, the League of Nations essentially died during World War II. And although not of- cially on the table at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference of 1944 which set the outlines of the United Nations, the idea of a trusteeship system to replace the League Mandate system had been discussed by Allied gov- ernments during the war and among members of the public. 68 Further, draft plans developed in the US State Department, starting in August 1942, envisaged a system of international supervision encompassing all dependent territories, not just mandates. A March 1943 draft proposal written under the direction of Secretary of State Cordell Hull foresaw establishing at the earliest possible moments dates when these ar- eas would achieve the status of full independence within a system of 66 The statement was drafted by Montague and rewritten after debates in scientic and anthropology journals as well as in the popular press. Quoted in Shipman, The Evolution of Racism, p. 163. 67 See Barkan, The Retreat of Scientic Racism, p. 341 and Shipman, The Evolution of Racism, pp. 156170. 68 A sample of the debate is a special issue of African Affairs 43 (October 1944) and subse- quent issues of the same journal. The Round Table also published a discussion in December 1944. See James N. Murray, The United Nations Trusteeship System (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1957) and Louis, Imperialism at Bay, pp. 448460. 309 Argument and change in world politics general security. 69 During the Allies Yalta meeting in February 1945, the US pushed for what it called a trusteeship formula for all colonies, even while Churchill rejected the notion outright and said he did not want it discussedat the SanFrancisco Conference to establishthe United Nations in May and June 1945. Churchill said: I absolutely disagree. I will not have one scrap of British territory ung into that area. After we have done our best to ght this war and have done no crime to anyone I will have no suggestion that the British Empire is to be put into the dock and examined by everybody to see whether it is up to their standard. No one will induce me as long as I am Prime Minister to let any representative of Great Britain go to a conference where we will be placed in the dock and asked to justify our right to live in a world we have tried to save. 70 Britain clearly hoped to retain its empire, though Churchill also obvi- ously knew he would have to muster arguments in favor of it. As Lord Cranborne, speaking at the San Francisco Conference, said: Do not let us rule out independence as the ultimate destiny of some of these terri- tories. It is not ruled out . . . But to have it as a universal goal of colonial policy would, we believe, be unrealistic and prejudicial to peace and security. Nor am I sure it is in the minds or desires of the vast majority of colonial peoples themselves. Cranborne continued, What do these people want? They want liberty. Let us give themliberty. They want jus- tice. Let us give them justice . . . Let us help them climb up the rungs of the ladder of self-government. That is the purpose . . . so that ultimately dependent or independent they may play their full part in a peaceful, prosperous and independent world. 71 The arguments in San Francisco among and within delegations over trusteeship and the fate of all the colonies, as at the Paris Peace Confer- ence after World War I, was nally resolved by compromise, this time among the so-calledBig Five powers the US, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China with input from non-governmental organizations and from other states. 72 Churchill ultimately backed down, agreeing to the trusteeship system, Chapter XII of the UN Charter, once he was as- sured participation was voluntary. Thus, the British were pushed by a change in international political capabilities (as a result of a shift in the 69 Quoted in Murray, The United Nations Trusteeship System, p. 25. 70 Quoted in Louis, Imperialism at Bay, p. 458. 71 Quoted in ibid., p. 547. 72 Much of the work was done in Committee II/4. See Murray, The United Nations Trustee- ship System, pp. 3145. 310 Self-determination balance of international belief) to do, if not an about face, a right angle turn. Why? By 1945, ethical arguments had succeeded in denormalizing earlier, more violent forms of colonial rule, delegitimizing the purposes of the system, and putting an alternative systemof trusteeship on the ta- ble that would be the model for all dependencies, as they were called. Further, new normative beliefs were institutionalized as the balance of belief and capability shifted; Britain was no longer able to dictate the normative terms of the international order. Still, the UN Charter ultimately did not go as far as many, notably Egypt, India, Iraq, and the Soviet Union, would have liked in terms of protecting and expanding the rights of dependent peoples. Part of the difculty was in specifying the meaning of self-determination. As the Venezuelan delegate to the meeting said, If it means self-government, the right of a country to provide its own government, yes, we would certainly like it to be included; but if it were to be interpreted, on the other hand, as connotingawithdrawal, the right of withdrawal or secession, then we wouldregardthat as tantamount to international anarchy andwe should not desire that it should be included in the text of the Charter. 73 But the trusteeship system went further than the League Mandate sys- tem. Specically, after rst stating that the purposes of the UN were to maintain international peace and security, Article 1 (2) stated that a purpose was to develop friendly relations among nations based on re- spect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace. As Antonio Cassese argues, the article had a snowball effect, for it lent moral andpolitical force tothe aspirations of colonial countries, strongly backedupbysocialist States. Thus, Article 1(2) was eventuallyperceived and relied upon as a legal entitlement to decolonization. More impor- tantly, the United Nations served as an international forum promoting and channeling the gradual crystallization of legal rules governing this amorphous subject. 74 The broad language of the opening Chapter of the UN Charter was specied in Chapters XII and XIII, respectively establishing a Trustee- ship System and Trusteeship Council. Although there was no explicit discussion of a date to end trusteeship status in the Charter, eventual in- dependence was impliedbythe language of Article 76 (b) of Chapter XII, which stated that the objectives of trusteeship included: to promote the political, economic, social and educational advancement of the 73 Quoted in Cassese, Self-determination of Peoples, pp. 3940. 74 Ibid., p. 65. 311 Argument and change in world politics inhabitants of the trust territories, and their progressive development toward self-government or independence as may be appropriate to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples and the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned . . . Human rights and racial equality were also explicitly linked to the trust territory system in Arti- cle 76 (c and d) where other purposes of trusteeship were outlined: to encourage respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion . . . to ensure equal treatment in social, economic, and commercial matters . . . [and] in the administration of justice . . . The trusteeship system was small since most of the A class mandates were already independent by 1945. In January 1946 all the Mandatory powers of B and C class territories, except South Africa, declared their intention to draw up trusteeship agreements for their territories. Still, the portion of people living in trusteeship, out of the total number liv- ing in old fashioned colonies, was small. Counting the dependencies of Portugal and Spain, there were more than eight times as many non- self-governing territories outside the trusteeship system, and they con- tained over ten times as many people. 75 As with League of Nations mandates, each UN trust territory was set up with an individual agree- ment between the trust power and the UN. The following table de- scribes the United Nations trust territories and their dates of eventual independence. The UN trusteeship system continued and expanded the mandate concept, illustrating how the table on which arguments were made had been altered by the institutionalization of the Mandate system. For example, the Trusteeship Council, like the Permanent Mandates Commission, was to hear reports from trustee powers about their ad- ministration of trust territories in response to a questionnaire based on the one used by the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commis- sion. However, the Trusteeship questionnaire was more detailed than the League questionnaire and indicates institutionalization of beliefs in trusteeship and self-determination. Specically, the questionnaire con- tained the following sections: political advancement in terms of general administration and judicial organization, economic advancement, so- cial advancement including human rights, labor conditions and regula- tions, public health, penal administration, and education. Further, the reports should answer questions regarding the implementation of UN 75 Jacobson, The United Nations and Colonialism, p. 295. 312 Self-determination Table 7.1 United Nations Trust Territories Administering Previous Date of Trust power status independence British Great Britain League 1961 Cameroons Mandate Northern part incorporated into Nigeria. Southern part incorporated into Cameroon French France League 1960 (Cameroon) Cameroons Mandate New Guinea Australia League 1975 Mandate Ruanda- Belgium League 1962 Urundi Mandate Became two states: Rwanda and Burundi Nauru Australia League 1968 Mandate Pacic Islands US League Palau independent in (Carolines, Mandate 1994; Marshall Islands Marshall, and (under independent in 1991; Marianas Japan) Marianas and Islands) Federated States of Micronesia (including Carolines) became US self-governing territories in 1975 and 1979 respectively. Somaliland Italy Italian 1960 (Somalia) Colony Tanganyika Great Britain League 1961 (Tanzania) Mandate British Great Britain League 1957 Togoland Mandate Incorporated into Ghana by plebiscite French France League 1960 (Togo) Togoland Mandate Western New Zealand League 1962 Samoa Mandate General Assembly and Trusteeship Council resolutions with regard to the trusteeship territory. 76 The emphasis was clearly on advancement intheseareas, withtheexpectationthat UNsupervisionwouldaidinthis 76 Murray, The United Nations Trusteeship System, pp. 131139. 313 Argument and change in world politics process. Further, the UN Trusteeship Council was given greater author- ity than the League Permanent Mandates Commission in two important respects. The Council was empowered to make periodic visits to the trust territories, which it didon occasion. 77 Andthe Trusteeship Council could hear petitions by the inhabitants of trust territories without hav- ing those petitions rst screened and forwarded by the administering authority. 78 The trusteeship system became the model for decolonization of non-trust colonies, or in UN parlance, the non-self-governing ar- eas discussed in Chapter XI of the UN Charter, the Declaration Re- garding Non-Self-Governing Territories. The language of Chapter XI shows how deeply beliefs in self-determination had penetrated: Members of the United Nations which have or assume responsibil- ities for the administration of territories whose people have not yet attained a full measure of self-government recognize the principle that the interests of the inhabitants of these territories are paramount, and accept as a sacred trust the obligation to promote to the ut- most, within the system of international peace and security estab- lished by the present Charter, the well-being of the inhabitants of these territories . . . The administering powers, according to Arti- cle 73, should ensure due respect for the culture of the people concerned. . . develop self-government, to take account of the politi- cal aspirations of the peoples . . . to promote constructive measures of development, and report on the economic, social and educational conditions in these territories. And as with the trusteeship system, administering governments were required to submit annual reports, extending the system of accountability to all colonies. 79 To monitor implementation of the goals for non-self-governing territories, the General Assembly later established the Committee on Information from Non-Self-Governing Territories. The template of mandate and 77 Article 87 of the Charter. At rst the British resisted the idea of inspections, fearing their political impact. Louis, Imperialism at Bay, pp. 9596. 78 Rules of Procedure for the Trusteeship Council, approved 23 April 1947, reprinted in H. Duncan Hall, Mandates, Dependencies and Trusteeships (Washington: Carnegie Endow- ment for International Peace, 1948), pp. 371385. Other differences in procedure and sub- stance are discussed in Hall, Mandates, Dependencies and Trusteeships, pp. 277281. 79 Further, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights extended political rights to all human beings [who] are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Illustrating how self-determination was the starting point of debate in the post-war world, the relevant portions of the Declaration state that Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law . . . Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives . . . The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government. 314 Self-determination trusteeship was applied by analogy to all colonies through the Commit- tee on Information: The substantive recommendations of the Trusteeship Council and the Committee on Information have been strikingly similar . . . Both bodies have advocated the same things: increased educational facili- ties for the indigenous inhabitants; enlarged social welfare programs with emphasis on community development; more extensive and com- prehensive economic programs which would aim at diversication; and greater opportunity for inhabitants to participate in decision- making. 80 Thus, normative beliefs in self-government and self-determination rst expressedandinstitutionalizedinthe League Mandate systemwere extended to other colonies and institutionalized into standard operat- ing procedures characteristic of the PMC. But the extent of UN activism was still the subject of argument within the world body. Some mem- bers favored an activist policy on the part of the UN in promoting self- determination and decolonization. As the Indian delegate to the Fourth Committee of the UN said in late 1946: the nal object, which was the autonomy of those territories, should be clearly stated, and . . . the right of the natives to election and partic- ipation in the administration should be afrmed in detail. In particu- lar it should be explicitly stated that no racial discrimination, and no monopoly should be admitted in theory or in fact. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom to present pe- titions would have to be guaranteed. No authority should be given to establish a base without the approval of the United Nations . . . Finally, it was desirable that as with the Americans in the Philippines, a date limit for the transitional regime should be xed. 81 But the UN Charter did not promote immediate decolonization in non-trust territories and there was also disagreement with the Trustee- ship Council based on differing visions of the purposes of the system. Thus, as Heather Wilson shows, some of the rst post-war challenges to colonialism went unsupported by the United Nations despite ap- peals by nationalist groups seeking self-government andindependence. For example, in both 1950 and 1951 the question of [French] Morocco 80 Jacobson, The United Nations and Colonialism, p. 296. 81 Ofcial Record of the Second Part of the First Session of the General Assembly, Plenary Meet- ings (OctoberDecember 1946), Fourth Committee, Trusteeship, Part I (NovemberDecember 1946), p. 70, quoted in Murray, The United Nations Trusteeship System, pp. 5455. 315 Argument and change in world politics appeared on the agenda of the General Assembly but no debate took place, despite appeals by members of the Arab League for discussion of Moroccos status. 82 The French resisted discussion of Morocco in the UN, claiming that it was a domestic matter. In 1953 the UN General Assembly adopted a weak resolution urging continued negotiations be- tween Moroccans and the French, but in 1953 the UN failed to adopt a draft resolution that recognized the right of the people of Morocco to complete self-determination. 83 Similarly, the United Nations took a soft line on French human rights behavior in Tunisia in the early 1950s. On the other hand, by 1960, although in previous years such resolutions had been defeated, the UN was ready to recognize the Al- gerians right to self-determination. 84 The unsuccessful French war to hold on to Algeria ultimately cost more than 500,000 lives over seven years. The increasingly active role of the UN in decolonization efforts dur- ing the 1950s and 1960s, was due perhaps primarily to the greater portion of former colonies in the UN, but also to the institutionaliza- tion of anti-colonial normative beliefs. 85 As Harold Jacobson suggests, the most salient motive force underlying the UNs recommendations seems to have been a feeling that all racial discrimination should cease and that the indigenous inhabitants of dependent territories are enti- tled to a position of full equality. 86 It was inconsistent and thus inco- herent to keep colonies if colonialism was no longer acceptable among civilized peoples, once the humanity and at least theoretical equality of those in colonies was granted. In other words, the UNs activism was a consequence of both normative beliefs and ethical arguments as well as a change in political capabilities. Though some former colonies, e.g. the US sometimes voted in support of colonialism, the majority of votes in the General Assembly could not be counted in favor of colonialism. The scope of self-determination gradually expanded through ethical argument. UN delegates continually debated the meaning of self-deter- mination, with some favoring an anti-colonial interpretation of external 82 Wilson, International Law and the Use of Force, p. 63. 83 Draft Resolution A/2526, 22 October 1953, quoted in ibid., p. 64. 84 Ibid., pp. 6566. 85 This shift in membership was most dramatic in terms of new African states: in 1946 African states comprised less than 10 percent of membership and in 1991 African states were 33 percent of UN members. 86 Jacobson, The United Nations and Colonialism, p. 296. 316 Self-determination self-determination, and others promoting internal self-determination or democracy as paramount. Third World and socialist states generally fa- voreddeningtheconcept as external self-determination, whileWestern countries generally pushed for a conception that stressed internal self- government, arguingthat anemphasis onsovereigntywouldencourage separatism and weaken the international order. Only Chile proposed, in 1952, to include a right to control natural resources. 87 Culminating decades of ethical argument, in 1960 the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 1514, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which said all dependent people had a right to complete independence. 88 Drafted and pushed by the African and Asian members of the UN that had recently won their independence, the language closely resembled that used at the 1955 Bandung Conference. The resolution condemned colo- nialism as alien subjugation, domination, and exploitation, and said that colonialism constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights. Moreover, the resolution declaredthat armedaction or repressive mea- sures of all kinds directed against dependent peoples shall cease in or- der to enable them to exercise peacefully and freely their right to com- plete independence . . . The Declaration further instructed all states to observe the provisions of the UN Charter, the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948) andthe present Declaration on the basis of equal- ity, non-interference in the internal affairs of all States, and respect for the sovereign rights of all peoples and their territorial integrity. Also notable was the fact that not even the states that still held colonies dared to vote against the measure. Rather, the colonial powers formed the majority of the nine abstentions. South Africa, Australia, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, the United States, and the Dominican Republic abstained, while eighty-nine states voted in favor of Resolution 1514, and none voted against. The UN further institutionalized and articulated beliefs in equal- ity and self-determination in 1961 when the General Assembly estab- lished the Special Committee on Colonialism to implement the 1960 Declaration. 89 The Special Committee immediately took an activist role 87 See Cassese, Self-determination of Peoples, pp. 4452. 88 Resolution 1514 (XV). Thomas Franke argues that the declaration is contradictory be- cause it does not consistently use the principle of self-determination. The Power of Legiti- macy Among Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 163165. 89 The UNGAalsocreatedother committees, namelythe Special Committee onSouthWest Africa and the Special Committee on Portuguese Territories, both established in 1961. In 317 Argument and change in world politics in the decolonization process, leading the General Assembly and Secu- rity Council to take stronger positions. From the beginning of its work, the Special Committee gave priority to Africa under the logic that it was in Africa that the largest number of people were still living un- der colonialism and that it was here that the largest colonial territo- ries still existed. 90 For example, the Special Committee spent fteen of its rst twenty-six meetings on the problem of white minority rule in Rhodesia. 91 The Committee heard petitions from Africans who were organizing for political and economic rights and urged that the gov- ernment release all political prisoners. Prior to the British colonys 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), the Special Committee urged Britain to take a stronger line on Rhodesias racial policies and requested that all member states refrain from sending arms and ammu- nition to Southern Rhodesia. Only after the UDI did the UN General Assembly and Security Council, along with Great Britain, gradually im- pose mandatory sanctions on Rhodesian imports and exports. Those sanctions remained in force until an agreement for majority rule was reached in 1979. 92 Although by the mid-1960s decolonization was a fact for many for- mer colonies, the UNcontinuedtoargue about colonialism. InDecember 1966 the UNGeneral Assembly adoptedthe International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which stated in part that all peoples have the right to self-determination. Further, the Covenant said that all par- ties to it, including those having responsibility for the administration of Non-Self-Governing and Trust Territories, shall promote the realiza- tion of the right to self-determination, and shall respect that right in conformity with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations. 93 1962 the General Assembly dissolved these committees and the much older Committee on Information, transferring their function to the Special Committee on the Situation with regard to the Implementation on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, commonly known as the Special Committee or the Committee of Twenty-Four. 90 UN, The United Nations and Decolonization: Summary of the Work of the Special Committee of Twenty-Four (New York: United Nations, 1965), p. 9. 91 David A. Kay, The Politics of Decolonization: The New Nations and the United Nations Political Process, International Organization 21 (Autumn 1967), 786811 reprinted in Goodrich and Kay, International Organization, pp. 307332: 317. 92 A chronology of UN efforts and sanctions is found in Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Jeffrey Schott, and Kimberly Ann Elliot, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered: History and Current Policy, 2nd edn (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1990), Case 653, pp. 285293. 93 The Covenant on Civil and Political Rights also says: All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources without prejudice to any obli- gations arising out of an international economic cooperation, based upon the principle 318 Self-determination In October 1970 UN General Assembly Resolution 2621 (XXV) resolved that colonialism was a crime that violated the principles of interna- tional law and the UN Charter. It also proposed a Programme of Ac- tion for the Full Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, that consisted of assisting freedom ghters with material aid, attacking nancial inter- ests that aided colonialism, and publishing the negative aspects of colo- nialism as well as UN activities in support of decolonization. Notably, this resolution passed 85:5:15. The Programme was followed by numer- ous resolutions recognizing and supporting the struggles of people un- der colonial or alien rule, including those persons under Portuguese, Rhodesian, South African, Indonesian (East Timor) and Moroccan (Western Sahara) domination. Further, individual governments gave nancial and in some cases military support to anti-colonial organi- zations. On the other hand, when twenty-six of fty members of the Organization of African Unity recognized the independence movement in Western Sahara in 1982, it caused a year-long schism within the or- ganization. By the early 1970s the governments of the Soviet Union, Denmark, and Canada all supported Popular Movement for the Liber- ation of Angola (MPLA). 94 The UnitedNations rmest actions insupport of decolonizationwere perhaps its sanctions against Portugal, Rhodesia, andSouthAfrica. 95 For example, the United Nations implemented a voluntary arms embargo against South Africa in 1963 to hasten Namibian independence and in- crease the pressure to reform apartheid, and made the embargo manda- tory in 1977. During the 1970s and 1980s, the UNalso assisted Namibian efforts for independence from South Africa. In 1984 and 1986 the UN arms embargo against South Africa was tightenedto include spare parts andammunition. Similarly, the UNimposedeconomic sanctions against Portugal and Rhodesia, lifting those only after majority rule was certain to be instituted in Mozambique, Angola, and Zimbabwe. 96 of mutual benet, and international law. In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence. 94 Kenneth Maxwell, Portugal and Africa: The Last Empire, in Prosser Gifford and Wm. Roger Louis, eds., The Transfer of Power in Africa: Decolonization 19401960 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 337385: 347348. 95 In 1990 the United Nations began the International Decade for the Eradication of Colo- nialism. Robert Aldrich and John Connell, The Last Colonies (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1998), p. 159. 96 The UN was not the only international organization that promoted decolonization: the Organization of African Unity (OAU), founded in 1963, proclaimed the elimination 319 Argument and change in world politics Anti-colonial movements and negotiated decolonization Decolonizationafter WorldWar II generallyfollowedone of three routes: peaceful negotiatedtransfers of power; internationallymediatedandsu- pervised independence processes, such as plebiscites and UN Trustee- ship; or anti-colonial military rebellions. Although strong anti-colonial movements in the colonies pressed for reform and independence, war was the exception; negotiated transfer or plebiscite was the rule. There were several guerrilla wars for independence in the post-war period, often involving more than one nationalist political movement strugglingfor theliberationof asinglecolony. Francewas themost active in trying to maintain its colonies by force against determined guerrilla resistance in Tunisia, Algeria, Vietnam, and Morocco. In Algeria, the French faced the Front de Lib eration National (FNL) between 1954 and 1962 before De Gaulle negotiated an agreement for French withdrawal. Both the Vietnamese and the Algerians were met with brutal force in response to their rebellions against the French. Nevertheless, France lost decisively at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and despite great military success in the late 1950s, negotiated its way out of Algeria in 1962. 97 Multiple independence movements fought against the Portuguese in Angola (19611974), Mozambique (19631974), and Guinea-Buissau (1963 1974), nally gaining their independence when the Portuguese gov- ernment fell to a military coup in 1975 and the new government ne- gotiated a withdrawal. 98 Similarly, Portugals colony in East Timor was promisedindependence after the coup, but was invadedby Indonesia in 1975, which occupied the territory until 1999. When Spain left its colony Rio de Oro (Spanish Sahara) in 1976, the land was occupied by its neigh- bors Mauritania and Morocco. The occupants of Western Sahara, as it of colonialism as one of its main purposes. The OAU also proclaimed its determination to safeguard and consolidate the hard-won independence as well as the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our States, andto resist neo-colonialisminall its forms. Charter of the Organization of African Unity, adopted on 25 May 1962, emphasis added. The OAU was more forthcoming than the UN with material and political support for decolonization efforts in Africa. The OAU took a stand against Portugal earlier than the UN when it institutedan economic anddiplomatic boycott against Portugals colonial policies in 1963; the UN General Assembly called for an arms embargo and economic sanctions against Portugal in late 1965. In other cases, particularly when the UNneeded guidance on which, of sometimes several, independence movements to recognize in an African state, it looked to the organizations recognized by the OAU. 97 See Anthony Clayton, The Wars of French Decolonization (London: Longman, 1994). 98 See Norrie MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire (London: Longman, 1997). 320 Self-determination became known, thenbegana long, complex, guerrilla, andlegal struggle by the people under the Front for the Liberation of Saguia el Hamra and Rio de Oro, or the Polisario Front for independence from their neighbors. Colonial rebellion was not conned to indigenous peoples; Euro- pean colonists also fought to retain their political domination. For example, Portuguese and Dutch settlers attempted small rebellions against the metropole, and French colons rebelled in Algeria in 1957 and 1960. The most successful rebellion was the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Britain by the European colonial settlers of Southern Rhodesia in 1965. They succeeded in maintaining power until 1980 when a negotiated solution ended their war with the Zimbabwean liberation armies. Despite these armed revolts, decolonization was more often the consequence of a negotiated transition, where independence leaders, working with labor and political organizations, struggled for peace- ful and legal transfers of power following elections. British colonies, for example, often gained independence through staged legal transfers. The white-settler dominated British dominions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa had already achieved a de facto inde- pendence which was recognized at the Imperial Conference of 1926. In Asia, after the British regained Burma from Japanese control, elections led to Burmese independence in 1948. Some nationalist leaders had long histories of working with or in colonial administrations in order to negotiate a transition to self-rule and political independence. For example, the rst French Constituent Assemblies elected in October 1945 and June 1946 included sixty- three members from overseas colonies. Some of these members had many years of experience in colonial administration, including men who would become future leaders of their independent states, such as F elix Houphou et-Boigny (Ivory Coast) and L eopold Sedar Senghor (Senegal). KwameNkrumah, thenotedPan-Africanactivist whobecame the rst leader of Ghana, Africas rst colony to achieve independence after World War II, was part of a long tradition of African activism and participation in the British colonial government of the Gold Coast go- ing back to when two Africans sat on the Legislative Council in 1888. Nkrumah served as leader of government business after elections in 1951, while subsequent elections gave increasing autonomy to Ghana, which nally became independent in 1957. In the West Indies, Norman Manley and his cousin Alexander Bustamante, who led two relatively 321 Argument and change in world politics evenly matched political parties, negotiated greater autonomy and ultimately independence for Jamaica over the course of many years. 99 The independence in 1947 of India, Britains largest imperial holding, was one of the rst post-World War II cases of a largely peaceful trans- fer of power. Decolonization was a protracted process which Indians had been struggling to achieve for decades and some devolution of power had already occurred before World War II. Unsatised with the pace and content of reforms, however, Indians continued to push for complete independence, in a largely non-violent effort, but the British managed to postpone independence until after World War II, partly by jailing most leaders of the popular Indian Congress Party during the war. Still, there was a shift in public opinion in Britain toward Indian as- pirations for independence, which was reected in the change of stance taken by political parties toward decolonization. For example, Britains Labour government of 19451951 was more sympathetic than the Con- servatives to colonial aspirations, identifying them to some extent with the struggles of the British working classes for their own form of self- determination. 100 In India and elsewhere, it was explicit British policy to make sure that the transition from colonial rule to greater self-government and event- ual independence was gradual. As Secretary of State for the Colonies A. Creech Jones said in 1948, The central purpose of British Colonial Policy is simple. It is to guide the Colonial territories to responsible government within the Commonwealth in conditions that ensure to the people concerned both a fair standard of living and freedom from oppression from any quarter. 101 In part, gradualism was intended to preserve as much control over the process as possible. But the Colo- nial Ofce also believed that it would take time to train natives in the mechanics of self-rule. To that end, the British gradually increased the number of native civil servants in government administrative posts in many of its colonies and very gradually gave up some of the func- tions of local government to colonial inhabitants. In addition, British policymakers believed that implementing a Commonwealth among Britains former colonies couldpreserve the connectionof the empire. As Frederick Cooper argues, In the end, ofcials belief in the universal 99 See Victor Stafford Reid, The Horses of the Morning (Kingston, Jamaica: Caribbean Authors Publishing Co., 1985). 100 M.E. Chamberlain, Decolonization: The Fall of the European Empires (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 76. 101 Morgan, The Ofcial History of Colonial Development, vol. V, p. 20. 322 Self-determination value of European social knowledge did not serve to preserve empire, but instead to convince French and British ofcials that they could give it up, believing that they had molded some Africans to the norms of modernity and that they could bequeath to that elite the task of super- intending those who had not made the transition. 102 French decolonization was, like the British process, a slow evolution toward greater recognition of the rights of colonial subjects, as well as the harsh wrenching of freedom through violent means that occurred in Algeria and Vietnam. But violence was the exception. French policy had long been one of assimilation and as a consequence, some formal recognition of the colonial subjects was already part of French policy. For instance, the West African Blaise Diagne had been a member of the French parliament for Senegal during and after World War I and was given a large role in the colonial administration of Africa after the war. In the late 1920s, French Indochina was granted a representative body, dominated by the French but including a large number of elected Indochinese. As Arthur Girault, an interwar theorist of French colonial- ism, wrote in 1927, The policy of assimilation is the safety valve which prevents the rupture: To the man whom we prevent from being prime minister in his own country because his country is a colony, we must offer in exchange the possibility of being prime minister of France. The people we forbid local patriotism must be inspired with love for the common fatherland, the cult of the Empire. 103 During World War II nationalist elites grew more explicit in demand- ing changes that would lead from colonialism to self-government in French Equatorial Africa and French West Africa. While at the 1944 French Africa Conference in Brazzaville, African elites had pressed for an Empire citizenship for Africans that would give them equal civil and political rights with the metropolitan French, by the late 1940s and early 1950s Africans were making more radical demands. An uprising against France inMadagascar was brutallycrushedin1947. Onthe other hand, after the war the French allowed and organized elections for mu- nicipal and colonial representation, and set up the political structures to accommodate this new level of governance by Africans. In addition, in 1955 the French began to give preference to Africans over Europeans to ll vacant posts in colonial administration. Any position that can be lled correctly by an African must be entrusted to him rather than to 102 Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, p. 20. 103 Quoted in Albertini, Decolonization, pp. 290291. 323 Argument and change in world politics a European . . . Between equally qualied candidates, the African must always receive preference. 104 In 1956, the French legislature passed the Loi Cadre, or framework law, that created territorial assemblies, and eventually led to a vote in September 1958 in Frances black African colonies over the kind of relationship they wanted with France. The choice was independence or a relationship of community where members would enjoy both greater autonomy and economic advantages. Most French colonies in West Africa voted for community, except for Guinea, which voted for immediate independence. Yet in relatively short order, Mali, the Ivory Coast, Niger, Dahomy(nowBenin), andUpper Volta(nowBurkinaFaso) peacefully negotiated their independence in 1960. Other French African territories, including Togo, Madagascar, the Republic of the Congo, and Gabonachievedindependence in1960 followingroughlythe same path. Finally, in some cases, the UN facilitated plebiscites in non-self- governing territories. Plebiscites by international organizations were not a new feature of world politics. In 1935, for instance, the Council of the League of Nations had solved a dispute over whether Germany or France should govern the Saar region with an internationally ob- served plebiscite. 105 The United Nations made greater use of plebiscites to help decide the future of territories and the shape of governments. For example, the areas of British and French administration in Togoland conducted plebiscites under UN supervision with inhabitants of British Togoland deciding in 1956 to join Ghana rather than remain a trust ter- ritory, while the Chamber of Deputies of French Togoland voted in 1958 for independence. Most recently, the United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) held a referendum on East Timors status in August 104 French policy quoted in MBokolo, French Colonial Policy in Equatorial Africa, p. 206. 105 At the end of World War I, France demanded the Saar region as compensation for war losses. France did not get the Saar, and the area was placed under the government of an international commission from 1919 to 1935. Germany demanded the return of the Saar in 1933. A Plebiscite Commission oversaw the voting in 1935. Most residents voted for reunion with Germany, with the second largest number casting their ballots for contin- ued trusteeship. See Yves Beigbeder, International Monitoring of Plebiscites, Referenda and National Elections: Self-determination and Transition to Democracy (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1994), pp. 8486. Plebiscites were also used by the French in 1790, 1791, and 1793 to decide the fate of Alsace, Avignon, and Belgium and the Palatinate. Of course other territories were created or annexed without plebiscite after World War I: Poland and Czechoslovakia were created; portions of Europe formerly belonging to Germany and Austria were given to Italy and Poland; and the mandate territories formerly belonging to Germany and Turkey were all allocated without a vote on the part of the inhabitants. See Cassese, Self-determination of Peoples, pp. 12, 2425. 324 Self-determination 1999 where over 98 percent of those registered to vote cast ballots, and of those an overwhelming majority, over 78 percent, rejected continued government by Indonesia. When violence threatened the result, and the lives of the people of East Timor, UN member states led by Australia intervenedandthe UNultimately set up a transitional administration to assist the recovery andself-determination of East Timor. Table 7.2 lists some UNsupervisedreferenda. The resort to internationally supervised plebiscite is perhaps the best example of the institutionalization of the principle of self-determination. 106 Changing power: declining public support in the core Colonial reform movements, from the Congo Reform Association to the Aborigines Protection Societies, were of course long active in the metropolitan countries. After World War II however, anti-colonial sentiment grew in the colonial powers and new organizations, for example the international League Against Imperialism, pressed for decolonization. 107 By the middle of the twentieth century, colonial pow- ers were increasingly constrained by domestic politics as the colonial consensus cracked. Ultimately, as Gann and Duignan suggest, the ma- jority of the intelligentsia in France and Britain experienced a revulsion against imperial ideals. 108 Why was this? In part, the brutality of anti-colonial conicts often led to declining domestic support for colonial policy within the metropole, as happened at the turn of the century with Britains prosecution of the Boer War. Ethical arguments bolstered by reports of colonial brutality changed the domestic balance of power within states and made colonial empire difcult to maintain. For example, British suppression of Malayan com- munists (19481957) became unpopular in Britain. In France, left and mainstream French public intellectuals, such as Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, and Raymond Aron, questioned the morality andutility of colonies. 109 Initially supportive of Frenchcolonial policy after World War II, the press also mounted criticism of colonial policyandFrenchconduct intheir wars inTunisia, Vietnam, andAlgeria. In 1956, journalist Raymond Cartier published articles in the journal Paris Match, questioning the economic wisdom of maintaining colonies. 106 See Aldrich and Connell, The Last Colonies. 107 Davidson, Let Freedom Come, p. 190. 108 Gann and Duignan, Burden of Empire, p. 73. 109 Silver, Framing a Balance Sheet; Sorum, Intellectuals and Decolonization. 325 Argument and change in world politics Table 7.2 International plebiscites and referenda Supervisor/ Location and Date Authority Issue and outcome British Togoland UN Population voted in favor of 1956 UNGA Res. union with the Gold Coast rather 944(X) than continued Trusteeship French Togoland UN Elections for a Chamber of 1958 UNGA Res. Deputies in April 1958 1182 (XII) followed by Chamber of Deputies vote for independence British Northern UN Population voted to postpone a Cameroon 1959 UNGA Res decision on whether to join 1350 (XIII) Nigeria British Northern UN Northern Cameroon decided to join and Southern Nigeria and Southern Cameroon 1961 Cameroon decided to join the Republic of Cameroun. Results were endorsed by a UN GA res. Rwanda 1961 UN Population voted against a UNGA Res monarchy system 1580 (XV) Western Samoa UN Population endorsed the constitution 1961 UNGA Res drafted by the Constitutional 1569 (XV) Convention in 1960 and decided to become independent Malaysia 1963 UN Future of the Sabah and Sarawak decided before establishing the Federation of Malaysia Cook Islands UN General elections; became a self- 1965 UNGA Res governing territory. Residents 2005 (XIX) are New Zealand citizens. Aden 1967 UN Election supervision mission failed Equatorial Guinea UN August referendum on 1968 independence; September, general elections West Irian 1969 UN Self-determination Bahrain 1970 UN Determine wishes of people Papua New Guinea UN Trusteeship Council sent 1972 UNGA Res observers to the elections for the 2156 (XXXVIII) House of Assembly Niue Island 1974 UN New Zealand invited the UN to send authorities to the referendum on self-determination where the population voted in favor of self-government in Free Association with New Zealand; the UN endorsed the results. Islanders are New Zealand citizens 326 Self-determination Table 7.2 (cont.) Supervisor/ Location and Date Authority Issue and outcome Ellice Island 1974 UN UK requested a UN mission to observe a referendum on the separation of Ellice Island from the Gilbert Islands; the population voted in favor of separation and became Tuvalu Mariana Islands UN UN Trusteeship Council 1974 Trusteeship observed a plebiscite in the Council Mariana Islands portion of the Pacic Islands Trust Territory Comoro Islands UN In 1974, the majority of the 1974 and 1976 population of Anjouan, Grand Comore, and Moheli voted for independence while Mayotte voted in 1947 and 1976 to remain part of France French Somaliland UN Election observed 1977 Trust Territory of the UN Referendum; several districts of the Pacic Islands Territory voted to form a 1978 Federation under the Constitution of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM); in 1982 FSM signed a compact of Free Association with the US which came into force in 1986 Palau, Trust Territory UN Plebiscites on the Islands status; of the Pacic nally determined that the Islands 1979, 1983, islands trusteeship status would 1986, 1987, 1990 have a Compact of Free Association with the US; Became independent in 1994 Namibia 1989 UN Elections for democratic government East Timor 1999 UN Referendum on East Timors relationship with Indonesia; East Timorese voted to end their relationship with Indonesia Western Sahara ? UN Morocco has agreed in principle but has stalled implementation of a vote Sources: Aldrich and Connell, The Last Colonies; Beigbeder, International Monitoring; Cassese, Self-determination of Peoples; UN Document A/46/609, 19 November 1991, Human Rights Questions. 327 Argument and change in world politics Other French intellectuals, by emphasizing torture andthe denial of due process inthe colonies, stressedthe hypocrisyandironies of Frenchcolo- nial rule. As Pierre-Henri Simon argued in his Contre la torture (1957), France, by using torture in the colonies is less menaced by the ac- tion of its enemies than by the ruin of its principle. 110 Another anti- colonialist, Jean-Marie Domenach, argued in the journal Esprit in 1957: The right to independence is a consequence of the right of peoples to self-determination, of which France made itself the historical pro- moter. To oppose it would be to oppose our very tradition, our reason to be heard in the world. 111 Domenach also said of the war in Algeria: French youth has been placed in this untenable situation of resisting a people struggling for its dignity. 112 The French state knew it was vul- nerable to these arguments and tried to conceal the evidence for them; from 1955 to 1962, of the 269 times when issues of newspapers or mag- azines were seized by the government, some 40 percent of the cases concerned publications revealing torture, executions or bad conditions in prisons or internment camps. 113 Critics of French policy then argued that colonialism was increasing the danger of domestic fascism. French support for using the war in Indochina to reestablish order fell from 37 percent in January 1947 to 7 percent in February 1954, while those favoring negotiations with the Vietminh grew from 15 percent to 42 percent of those polled in the same period. Further, by February, 18 percent favored abandoning Indochina altogether and recalling the troops. 114 The French war against Algerian nationalists (19541962), eventually engaging about 500,000 troops, grewto be extremely unpop- ular in France. By the late 1950s, enough reports of torture and brutality had made it back to France, despite heavy government censorship, to prompt a debate about the conduct of the war. French opinion in favor of decolonization, as opposed to those favoring the use of military force to crush the Algerian rebellion, grew from 39 percent in early 1956 to 56 percent in early 1958. 115 Perhaps the most extreme domestic political reaction to continued colonialism occurred in Portugal. The Portuguese fought anti-colonial rebellions at great cost inGuinea-Bissau, Mozambique, andAngola, and 110 Quoted in Sorum, Intellectuals and Decolonization, p. 125. 111 Quoted in ibid., p. 71. 112 Quoted in ibid., p. 148. 113 Jacques van Doorn and Willem J. Hendrix, The Process of Decolonization: The Military Experience in Comparative Perspective (Rotterdam: Comparative Asian Studies Program, 1987), p. 36. 114 Sondages polling data reported in Sorum, Intellectuals and Decolonization, p. 10. 115 Van Doorn and Hendrix, Process of Decolonization, pp. 7, 26, 36. 328 Self-determination faced opposition to their rule in their other, smaller colonies as well. On average, Portugal stationed 105,000 troops in its African colonies from 1961 to 1973, a high proportion of them Portuguese rather than African, and nearly 9,000 died in the wars. 116 After initially backing repression of the guerrilla movements, elite consensus on colonial policy gradually fractured. Some wanted more substantial reform while others thought the minor colonial reforms of the Caetano government, allowing some legislative and judicial control in the African colonies, were too much. A top general in the Portuguese military, Antoni o de Spinola, wrote Portugal and the Future, which was critical of the policies. Eventually, top level disagreements in the government about the strategy in Africa whether to continue the status quo of war or to gradually allow a tran- sition to independence plus the grievances of junior ofcers, left room for a military coup in April 1974 by junior ofcers of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), who opposed continued empire. As MFA saw it, Those who beneted from the war were the same nancial groups that exploited the people in the metropolis and, comfortably installed in Lisbon or Oporto or abroad, by means of venal government obliged the Portuguese people to ght in Africa in defense of their immense prots. 117 InJuly 1974, the newregime passedLaw7/74, whichrecog- nizedthe right toself-determination, withall of its consequences, includ- ing the acceptance of the independence of the overseas territories. 118 In 1975, Portugal withdrew from its African colonies. Ethical argument was not, however, always successful at alteringpub- lic opinion. In contrast to the British, French, and Portuguese experi- ences, the population of the Netherlands supported military occupation of Indonesia. The Dutch campaign against West New Guinea national- ists for more than a decade (19501962) was popularly supported in the metropole. Even in 1961, shortly before the actual transition to rule by Indonesia, 56% [of Dutch opinion polled] thought that Papuas coming of age was necessary before independence. 119 South West Africa and failed arguments South West Africas transition from colony to independence as Namibia was complex. It involved negotiations, guerrilla war, Cold War tension 116 MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa, p. 37. 117 Quoted in Maxwell, Portugal and Africa: The Last Empire, p. 359. 118 Law quoted in MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa, p. 88. 119 Van Doorn and Hendrix, Process of Decolonization, p. 8. 329 Argument and change in world politics and cooperation, and action by the UN General Assembly, the Security Council, and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). In many ways this case is bothtypical andunusual andextreme. Inthis discussion, I review the arguments South Africa made to the world community in their at- tempt to keep South West Africa, the arguments made by advocates of Namibian independence, and the logic of International Court of Justice decisions. South African claims may seem absurd now, but, at the time, they were persuasive with some, and this is more understandable if we recall the cultural context, especially in the time between the creation of the UNand the mid-1960s, when South Africas arguments about South West Africa were nally rejected in the world body. The case illustrates the use of ethical arguments by the colonial power, the international observers who sought to modify South Africas rule, and anti-colonial activists and guerrillas, notably the South West Africa Peoples Orga- nization (SWAPO). South African arguments were only ultimately re- jected when scientic racism was rejected and Namibians themselves were able to press their case against occupation. However, ethical argu- ments failed to change the status of South West Africa through most of this period, but nor was South Africa able to persuade the rest of the world that their occupation was just. South Africans persistently argued that South West Africas status as a mandate should end and the territory should be incorporated into South Africa. South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts argued in South Africas House of Assembly on 20 March 1945 that If the League of Nations lapses, then the mandatory system also lapses . . . The man- date will have to be abolished, and the territory can be incorporated as a province of the Union. . . 120 At the San Francisco conference of the United Nations, South Africa claimed that it had treated the inhabitants of South-West Africa well and faithfully performed its obligations un- der the mandate. Because of South West Africas ethnological sim- ilarity with South Africa, and its economic dependence, There is no prospect of the Territory ever existing as a separate State, and the ul- timate objective of the mandatory principle is therefore impossible of achievement. 121 Using results of a consultation of native tribal lead- ers (where independence was not an option), the South African repre- sentative to the UN also claimed that the people of South West Africa 120 Quoted in John Dugard, ed., The South West Africa/Namibia Dispute: Documents and Scholarly Writing on the Controversy Between South Africa and the United Nations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 98. 121 Dugard, ed., South West Africa/Namibia Dispute, pp. 8990: 90. 330 Self-determination freely and unequivocably wanted to become part of South Africa. 122 South African diplomats then claimed that the mandate should be dis- solvedandthat SouthWest Africa shouldbe incorporatedintothe Union of South Africa. 123 Pan-Africanists, anti-colonial activists, and of course South West Africans immediately challengedSouthAfricas versionof international law and history. In early 1946, A. B. Xuma, president of South Africas African National Congress, sent a cable from Johannesburg to the UN saying, We have long experience of South Africas policies, and would not like hundreds of thousands more innocent victims to be brought un- der South Africas race and colour dominated policies. 124 Xuma urged the UN to save their black brothers living in the mandated territory of Southwest Africa from annexation by the Jan Smuts government of the Union of South Africa. 125 In April 1946, the Namibians living in exile in neighboring Botswana sent a memo to the UN protesting South Africas efforts to annex South West Africa, andthe white South African, Reverend Michael Scott of the Anglican Church, carried a petition from South West Africans to the United Nations in 1947. 126 In October 1946, the Council on African Affairs petitioned the UN Human Rights Com- mission for an investigation of South Africas request to annex South West Africa, and Alpheus Hunton circulated the CAAs pamphlet See- ing is Believing The Truth About South Africa. The CAAalso worked with the Indian government, the ANC, the Indian National Congress, and the Joint Passive Resistance Council of South Africa to protest the treatment of Indians in South Africa in 1946 and 1947. In 1946, when the interim Indian government led charges with the UNGA that Indians living in South Africa were discriminated against, the CAA organized letters to Truman, the State Department and the US delegate to the UN urging full support to the Indian governments petition to the United 122 Quoted in ibid., p. 109. James Barber and John Barratt, South Africas Foreign Policy: The Search for Status and Security 19451988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 23, 357358. 123 On South African arguments at the last session of the League of Nations in 1946 see Solomon Slonim, South West Africa and the United Nations: An International Mandate in Dispute (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), pp. 6872. 124 Quoted in Peter Katjavivi, The Development of Anti-Colonial Forces in Namibia, in Brian Wood, ed., Namibia, 18841984: Readings on Namibias History and Society (Lusaka: United Nations Institute for Namibia, 1988), pp. 557584: 564. 125 Quoted in Von Eschen, Race Against Empire, p. 88 . 126 Peter H. Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia (London: James Currey, 1988), pp. 3739. 331 Argument and change in world politics Nations . . . 127 CAA arguments were successful in affecting at least the African-American communitys understanding: South Africas post World War II efforts to annex South West Africa were universally con- demned in African American press. 128 Responding to criticism, the South African delegation presented the UN with a long memo in October 1946. South Africa made four ar- guments: granting that the principle of mandates and trusteeship was ultimately self-government, South Africa claimed that the backward- ness of the vast majority of the population in South West Africa made such a goal impossible; it would be very expensive for the mandate to develop; uncertainty about the future led to difculty in promoting racial peace anddevelopment; andnally, they repeatedtheir claimthat the people of South West Africa had already said in a consultation of their views that they wanted incorporation into South Africa. 129 Debate in the General Assembly over South West Africa was sharp. For example, the so-called consultation of the South West Africans throughtheir tribal authorities was derided since noactual votes bythe people were taken and contrasted with actual voting by whites in the Territory. In December 1946 the UNGA passed a resolution saying that South Africa should place South West Africa under trusteeship. 130 The South Africa representative to the UN refused, but nevertheless promised to continue submitting reports to the United Nations on its administration and said it would administer the Territory in the spirit of the existing Mandate. 131 South Africa continued to press the UN to accede to the incorporation of South West Africa into South Africa, again arguing that the native and European inhabitants had been con- sulted and that it would provide for the welfare of both populations. Because opinion was not uniform within South Africa itself, the gov- ernment had to argue its case there as well and reassure doubters that South Africas external arguments would succeed. In the South African 127 Von Eschen, Race Against Empire, p. 86. Also see Lynch, Pan-African Responses in the United States to British Colonial Rule in Africa in the 1940s, p. 67. 128 Von Eschen, Race Against Empire, p. 88. 129 Summarized in Slonim, South West Africa, p. 79. 130 UNGA Resolution 65 (1), 14 December 1946. Besides recommending that South West Africa be placed in the trusteeship system the resolution clearly articulates the view that the people of South West Africa are undeveloped politically. Considering that the African inhabitants of South West Africa have not yet secured political autonomy or reached a stage of political development enabling them to express a considered opinion which the Assembly could recognize on such an important question as incorporation of their territory . . . . Ibid. 131 Quoted in Dugard, ed., South West Africa/Namibia Dispute, p. 112. 332 Self-determination House of Assembly during March 1947, members and Prime Minister Smuts, clearly mindful of the role of argument, spoke of South Africas case in the world. Member of the South African Parliament Eric Louw said, South Africas case is good. The grounds on which we base our case are sound. They are soundjuridically. They are soundfactually, and I say let us not hesitate. I believe that in this matter we have hesitated too long. Already there has been some talk of sanctions . . . May I sug- gest that we must not allow ourselves to be scared by talk of sanctions, nor to be deected from our course by any such suggestions. 132 In re- ply, Smuts said that he also thought South Africa had a good case but should still refrain from using language which looks like a challenge which may appear provocative and which may put the bristles up of stronger nations than ourselves and make our case more difcult. It is not wisdom to use language that looks like a challenge. 133 Prime Minister Smuts attempted to reframe the situation by suggest- ing that SouthWest Africa was no longer a mandate andhadnot become a trust territory. Smuts argued that with the termination of the Mandate system, the reports by South Africa to the UN fell under Chapter XI, on non-self-governing territories: I should rather associate our position with that of colonial territories, which do not fall under trusteeship, but under the colonial system. 134 Seeking to impose this frame on the UN, South Africa then submitted a report on South West Africa to the UN, stating that it assumed the report would not be examined by the Trusteeship Council. After considering the issue of where to examine the report, the UNGA nevertheless sent it to the Trusteeship Council. 132 Quoted in ibid., p. 124. 133 Smuts quoted in ibid., p. 124. 134 Quoted in ibid., p. 116. On the question of submitting reports to the UN versus the League of Nations, Eric Louw, said in March 1947: I can speak from personal experience, having on two occasions had the honour of submitting the South-West Africa report to the League of Nations Mandates Commission. And Mr. Speaker, let me say this, that the Mandates Commission of those days was a body of sympathetic affable gentlemen. And yet, on each occasion I was examined and cross-examined for two full days by the Commission. I was cross-examined very closely on the Unions administration of South- West Africa. But I suggest that when these reports . . . go to the UNO, it is going to be a very different story. The examination of the Union by the UNO Trusteeship Committee will be very different from what it was in the days of the old League of Nations, because the old League, with possibly half a dozen exceptions, was a white organisation, an organisation of predominantly European powers . . . But the UNO is a horse of a very different colour, because the UNO is predominantly coloured; it consists of predominantly coloured and Asiatic nations and of off-colour nations. A considerable number of South and Central American nations are predominantly of mixed blood. And the position is going to be very different when our representative I pity the poor man turns up to submit his report on South-West Africa, to the UNO as at present constituted. Quoted in Dugard, ed., South West Africa/Namibia Dispute, pp. 118119. 333 Argument and change in world politics When the document was considered in 1947, the Trusteeship Coun- cil noted that it was incomplete and requested replies by South Africa to fty questions, including requests for information on the participa- tion of non-Europeans in the government of South West Africa. When South Africas delegates replied to the Trusteeship Councils questions in 1948, they reiterated their position that South West Africa was not a trust and that its replies should not be taken to imply that South Africa would be accountable to the UN. The Trusteeship Council re- jected the South African frame, and adopted a negative report on South Africas administration of South West Africa, in particular emphasiz- ing the imbalance between resources available to European and native populations. 135 In 1949, South Africa declared that the mandate was over. In an im- plicit recognition of the role of ethical argument, South Africa said it would no longer submit reports to the UN since this created a situ- ation where the Trusteeship Council became a forum for unjustied criticism and censure of the Union Governments administration, not only in South West Africa but in the Union [of South Africa] as well. 136 South Africa, however, continued to make implicit ethical arguments, for instance when South Africa informed the UN of the South West Africa Affairs Act 23 of 1949, under which six white representatives of South West Africa would sit in the South African House of Assembly, and four would sit in the Senate. In a nod to the principle of political representation, one of the white delegates to the Senate would have thorough acquaintance, by reason of his ofcial experience or other- wise, with the reasonable wants and wishes of the coloured races of the Territory. 137 Despite South African recalcitrance, the UN kept trying to get South West Africa into the trusteeship system. India introduced a resolution, passed in the Fourth Committee of the UN by a vote of twenty-seven to twenty in October 1947, urging South Africa to place South West Africa under international trusteeship. The US, UK, andall other colonial pow- ers voted against the resolution. In 1949, the UN Fourth Committee again heard testimony from Reverend Michael Scott on behalf of South West African natives. Also in 1949, the UNGA adopted a resolution to 135 See Slonim, South West Africa, pp. 9195. 136 South Africas letter to the UN on 11 July 1949 quoted in Slonim, South West Africa and the United Nations, p. 100. A longer excerpt is in Dugard, ed., South West Africa/Namibia Dispute, pp. 119120. 137 Quoted in Dugard, ed., South West Africa/Namibia Dispute, p. 120. 334 Self-determination take the question of South West Africa to the International Court of Justice. After hearing arguments from South Africa, Egypt, India, the US and Poland, the ICJ gave the rst of several rulings on South West Africa in its 1950 advisory opinion. In sum, the opinion said that South Africa was not obliged to put South West Africa under the Trusteeship system, but neither could the South African government legally ignore South West Africas status as a mandate: South Africa was obliged to promote the material and moral well-being and social progress of the inhabitants. The Court also afrmed the UNs right to supervise the mandate, essentially substituting the UN for the League. 138 Following the ICJ ruling, in 1951 the UN set up an Ad Hoc Committee to im- plement the advisory opinion and hopefully to negotiate a trusteeship agreement with South Africa. South Africa argued, however, that the ICJ opinion was invalid and that they had no obligation to negotiate a trusteeship agreement for South West Africa with the UN. When South Africarefusedtocooperate, the FourthCommittee heardtestimonyfrom South West Africans and again from Reverend Scott about conditions in South West Africa. Since there had been no progress in getting South Africa to put South West Africa under trusteeship, the UN began to treat South West Africa as a trust territory in all but name. In 1953 the UNGA voted to replace its Ad Hoc Committee with a newCommittee on South West Africa that would, among other things, examine South Africas administration of SouthWest Africa withinthe scope of the Questionnaire adoptedbythe Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations in 1926. 139 In 1954, the Committee on South West Africa invited South Africa to submit a report on the territory covering the years for which the UN had no report. When South Africa refused, the Committee examined relevant information and wrote its own report which concluded that after thirty-ve years of administration under the Mandates System, the Native inhabitants are still not participating in the political devel- opment of the Territory, that their participation in the economic devel- opment is restricted to that of labourers and that the social and educa- tional services for their benet are far fromsatisfactory. 140 South Africa refused to supply reports the following years, and the 1955 and 1956 re- ports of the Committee on South West Africa were again quite critical, 138 Advisory Opinion is summarized and discussed in Slonim, South West Africa, pp. 110 122. Most of the text of the opinion is excerpted in Dugard, ed., South West Africa/Namibia Dispute, pp. 131143. 139 Slonim, South West Africa, p. 141. 140 Quoted in ibid., p. 144. 335 Argument and change in world politics if anything, growing increasingly harsh as South Africa began to ex- tend the apartheid system more completely to South West Africa. 141 The UN then established a Good Ofces Committee which tried, again unsuccessfully, to bring South West Africa into the Trusteeship system. The UNGA continued to invite South Africa to put South West Africa under trusteeship until 1959 and South Africa repeatedly declined to do so. Given these failures, in November 1960, Ethiopia and Liberia, as former members of the League of Nations, asked the ICJ for a binding judgment that Namibia remained a Mandate territory and that South Africas governance of Namibia (in exporting apartheid to the territory) was contrary to its obligations as a mandatory power. 142 South Africa argued that the ICJ lacked jurisdiction. The UNGA passed a resolution supporting the Ethiopian and Liberian effort, and in the following years continuedtopass resolutions statingthat SouthAfricahadfailedtocarry out its responsibilities as a mandate. 143 While the ICJ case was pending, the independence movement in South West Africa achieved greater external recognition and support. 144 The South West African Peoples Organization (SWAPO) and the South West Africa National Union (SWANU), had grown out of the early anti- German resistance efforts and years of political organizing under South African rule. Denied access to South West Africa, the UNs Special Com- mittee for South West Africa went to Accra, Dar es Salaam, and Cairo in 1961 to hear petitions from SWAPO and SWANU representatives urg- ing that SouthAfricas mandate be terminatedandthat self-government based on one man, one vote be set up. 145 The Committee report con- cluded that South Africa was unt to govern South West Africa, that it should be removed from the territory, and called for the indepen- dence of South West Africa. 146 In 1963 the UNGA adopted a resolution which dened any further attempt by South Africa to annex South West Africa as an act of aggression which threatened international peace and security. 147 141 Slonim, South West Africa, pp. 155, 167. South Africas extension of apartheid to South West Africa ironically opened South Africa itself to greater criticismof its racial policies as the area of domestic jurisdiction (Article 2) of the UN Charter, was blurred by the South Africans themselves. 142 For the text of submissions to the ICJ, see Slonim, South West Africa, pp. 375378. 143 UNGA Resolutions 1565 (XV), 1596 (XV), 1702 (XVI), and 2674 (XX). 144 On this early period see Tony Emmett, Popular Resistance in Namibia, 19205, in Wood, ed., Namibia, 18841984, pp. 224225. 145 Dugard, ed., South West Africa/Namibia Dispute, pp. 223225. 146 Ibid., pp. 225226. 147 UNGA Resolution 1899 (XVIII), 13 November 1963. 336 Self-determination When the ICJ ruling nally came in July 1966, the Court found that Ethiopia and Liberia did not have any legal rights or interests in the ter- ritory. The South African government proclaimed victory and attacked guerrilla camps in the Ovamboland region of South West Africa, while SWAPO and SWANU interpreted the ruling as a sign that they should intensify their effort for independence, including armed struggle. 148 South African repression of Namibian independence efforts intensied in response, and the independence movement guerrillas were labeled terrorists. In spite of the ICJ opinion, by 1966 the vast majority of UNGA members had come to believe that if an administering power had failed to live up to either the sacred trust obligation of the League Mandate system, or of the UNCharter obligations to promote the well-being of the inhabitants of trust territories, then the trusteeship had been vitiated by the administering power. This view was clearly articulated in a 1966 UNGA resolution, which passed by a vote of 114 to 2 (with 3 absten- tions), terminating South Africas right to administer South West Africa and stating that South West Africa was therefore a direct responsibility of the UN. [C]onvinced that the administration of the Mandated Territory by South Africa has been conducted in a manner contrary to the Mandate, the Charter of the UnitedNations andthe Universal Declarationof Human Rights . . . Declares that South Africa has failed to fulll its obligations in respect to administration of the Mandated Territory and to ensure the moral and material well-being and security of the indigenous in- habitants of South West Africa . . . 149 The following year, the UNGA passed a resolution creating the UN Council for South West Africa and set June 1968 as the target date for South West African independence. 150 South Africa tried to de- ect international scrutiny by adopting some of the language of self- determination, albeit without the substance. In1968 SouthAfrica moved to create six areas in South West Africa as self-governing nations by passing the Development of Self-Government for Native Nations in South West Africa Act. The 1968 Act explicitly uses the language of self- determination in its preamble: Whereas it is desirable that the native nations in the territory of South-West Africa should in the realization 148 See Dugard, ed., South West Africa/Namibia Dispute, p. 377. 149 Resolution 2145 (XXI), 27 October 1966. The negative votes were South Africa and Portugal; the abstentions were France, the UK, and Malawi. 150 Resolution 2248 (S-V), 19 May 1967. 337 Argument and change in world politics of their right of self-determination develop in an orderly manner to self-governing nations and independence. 151 Meanwhile, South Africa kept defending its role in South West Africa at the UN, for example, sending the UN a letter in September 1969 out- lining its position and arguing that the UN did not have the authority to revoke its mandate. But the General Assembly and Security Council rejected the Self-Government Act. 152 The Security Council called upon all states to refrain from all dealings with the Government of South Africa purporting to act on behalf of the territory of Namibia and fur- ther requested all states to increase their moral and material assistance tothe people of Namibia intheir struggle against foreignoccupation. 153 In response, the South African Department of Foreign Affairs published a 115 page analysis of the legal status of South West Africa. This pattern of UN resolution and South Africa reply continued over the next sev- eral years. The South African government continually rejected the UN position and consistently argued until the 1970s that South West Africa ought to be part of South Africa. The UN General Assembly and Security Council nevertheless found South Africas arguments without merit and in 1970 asked the Interna- tional Court of Justice to rule onthe consequences of SouthAfricas pres- ence inNamibia. The Finnishdelegate tothe SecurityCouncil hopedthat a correct rulingbythe ICJ wouldhelp. . . tomobilize public opinion. 154 In 1971, after reviewing the legal arguments, South Africas policies, the relevant UN resolutions, and the Courts previous decisions, the ICJ found that South Africas occupation, being illegal, had to end. The principle of self-determination applied to Namibia. Further, Member States of the United Nations are . . . under obligation to recognize the il- legality and invalidity of South Africas continued presence in Namibia [and] to refrain from lending any support or any form of assistance to South Africa with reference to its occupation in Namibia. 155 The ruling cleared the way for substantial UN support for the inhabitants of South West Africa and SWAPO. Not surprisingly, SouthAfricanPrime Minster B.J. Vorster rejectedthe ICJ opinion, claimingthat the court was packedagainst SouthAfrica and 151 On the 1968 Act, see Dugard, ed., South West Africa/Namibia Dispute, pp. 431435: 433. 152 See Slonim, South West Africa, p. 328. See UNGA Resolution 2403 (XXIII), 16 December 1968 and UNSC Resolution 264 (1969). 153 UNSC Resolution 269 (1969). 154 Quoted in Slonim, South West Africa, p. 330. Along excerpt of the opinion is in Dugard, ed., South West Africa/Namibia Dispute, pp. 453481. 155 Quoted in Slonim, South West Africa, p. 337. 338 Self-determination that the ICJ rulingwas the result of political maneuveringinsteadof ob- jective jurisprudence. 156 Further, Vorster said, It is our duty to admin- ister South West Africa so as to promote the well-being and progress of its inhabitants. 157 Thus, over the course of several years, South Africas arguments for occupying Namibia were found unpersuasive, and the UN and ICJ moved to push South Africa out by mobilizing public opin- ion against South Africas occupation. International opposition to South Africas behavior in the region and inside South Africa itself grewin the 1970s and 1980s. As is well known, there was also vocal opposition to South Africas domestic government among African states. In 1969, several independent African states is- sued a statement outlining their opposition to minority rule in Southern Africa. The Lusaka Manifesto of April 1969, signed by Burundi, Cen- tral African Republic, Chad, Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, andZambia, proclaimedthat signatory states do not accept that any individual or group has any right to govern any other group of sane adults, without their consent, and we afrm that only the people of a society, acting together as equals, can determine what is, for them, a goodsociety anda goodsocial, economic, or political organization. 158 The Manifesto also urgedthat South Africa, because of its denial of human equality, be excluded from United Nations agen- cies and the UN itself and that South Africa should be ostracized from the world community . . . isolated from world trade patterns and left to be self-sufcient if it can. 159 Why was SouthAfrica so interestedinSouthWest Africa that it would risk such international reaction? Although this is discussed at greater lengthinchapter 8, simplyput, SouthWest Africa was valuable econom- icallybecauseof its vast natural resourcewealthintheformof diamonds, uranium, zinc, and other minerals. Further, as long as South Africa held South West Africas mineral wealth, this was another potential lever of inuencing Western government policies toward South Africa itself. Finally, South West Africa was part of a cordon sanitaire for white mi- nority rule in South Africa which was, according to the South African government, under assault from communism and terrorism. 156 Quoted in ibid., p. 344. 157 Quoted in Dugard, ed., South West Africa/Namibia Dispute, p. 491. 158 Lusaka Manifesto, April 1969, reprinted in Colin Legum and John Drysdale, eds., Africa Contemporary Record (New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1971), vol. II, 19691970, pp. C41C45: C41C42. 159 Ibid., p. C44. 339 Argument and change in world politics If South West Africa was so important, why did South Africa refrain from annexing South West Africa outright? And why did the South African government keep trying to convince the ICJ and the UN of the legitimacy of South African position? Part of the answer has to do with the political culture of Afrikaners and English speaking South Africans. Manywhite SouthAfricans trulybelievedinthe rule of lawandthat they could persuade others that they were right. This belief in lawand public persuasion is evident even in their internal use of lawto enact apartheid andtoroundupandtrypolitical dissidents inthefamous treasontrials of the 1950s and 1960s. Second, as Smuts said, the South Africans felt theyhadnoreasontoalarmthe outside communitysince theyhadmany of the benets of annexation without proclaiming it. A proclamation would only have heightened the distance between South Africa and the United Nations, which increasingly threw its political, and nancial, support behind SWAPO and the anti-apartheid movement. Remaining colonies, free associations, and late decolonization Throughout, I have arguedthat colonialismhas endedas a distinct prac- tice of international politics. In the sense that it is no longer acceptable for states to take territory against the wishes of the inhabitants and to govern the people there without political representation, colonialism is over. In another sense, however, colonialism continues for several million people who live in lands variously described by the governing authorities as crown colonies, dependencies, overseas territories, or au- tonomous communities. Most of these places are islands, many of them beautiful tourist destinations, with small populations. In many cases, administering states made reports to the United Nations justifying their treatment of the inhabitants of these territories and often voluntarily conducted referenda to show that the people chose their status, or at least approved of it after the fact. Referenda or plebiscites were held during the 1980s and 1990s in several of these territories, some conducted under international supervision. For exam- ple, the US-held territories of the Marshall Islands, Palau, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico conducted plebiscites in the 1980s and 1990s to determine their status. When the last UN Territory, Palau, became inde- pendent in 1994, the UN Trusteeship Council suspended its operations. Cura cao, Bermuda, Christmas Island, and New Caledonia, held respec- tively by the Netherlands, Britain, Australia, andFrance, also conducted 340 Self-determination referenda in the 1980s and 1990s. 160 In some cases, such as in Puerto Rico, the population voted to keep their status as self-governing de- pendencies. In other cases, such as East Timor and Tibet where the col- onizers, Indonesia and China respectively, resisted any change, long, hard-fought movements for independence or at least greater autonomy developed and achieved international recognition. In the case of West- ern Sahara, after a long war for independence by the Polisario Front, Morocco agreed in principle to a UN referendum, though it has man- aged to stall its implementation through the 1990s. What is important about these situations from the perspective of my argument about ethical arguments and normative belief is the widespreadpresumptionthat the people inthese territories shouldhave some say about who governs themandhow. In other words, the starting point or topoi of discussion and arguments about status is now self- determination; old-fashioned colonialism is illegitimate even in these remaining colonies. Thus, decolonizationandself-determinationare the standards by which present political relations are judged. Even in cases where colonies remain, most of the governments have gone to great pains to show that their government is legitimate and desired by the inhabitants. In cases where legitimacy is in question because the land was re- cently taken by force and there are strong independence and autonomy movements, such as East Timor and Tibet, Indonesia and China respec- tively have come under tremendous international criticism by human rights groups, governments, and international organizations. The suc- cess of their ethical arguments, if not in every instance their political movements, is illustrated by the fact that leaders of both East Timor and Tibets independence movements have been recognized internationally by the press andwith Nobel Peace Prizes. In neither case, however, were Western governments willing to expend signicant political capital to help bring self-determination to these lands. The belated political success of East Timorese independence versus the failure of Tibetans to achieve independence is thus a consequence of at least ve factors. First, the political and cultural relationship between China and Tibet is extremely complex and cannot be easily framed. Rather, much of the discourse is still at the meta-argument phase where somecharacterizeTibet as asovereignstateinvadedbyacolonizer, while others suggest the relation is a more complex religious, cultural, and 160 See Aldrich and Connell, The Last Colonies. 341 Argument and change in world politics political interrelationship. 161 Second, the Tibetans have not conducted a large-scale guerrilla conict that has provoked brutal Chinese repres- sion, and hence, the sympathies of the world have not been engaged by the emotional outrage that now accompanies brutal repression. East Timorese were massacred in large numbers after 1975 by Indonesian armed forces and reports of these massacres, and continued violent re- pression, were used to great effect by those who argued against the oc- cupation. When militias destroyed much of East Timors infrastructure and terrorized its population following the East Timorese vote for in- dependence in 1999, international observers were outraged. Third, the invasion of Tibet in 1950 occurred before decolonization norms were fully articulated and institutionalized, while Tibets de facto and de jure status as an independent nation was ostensibly less clear in the interna- tional law of the time. By contrast, East Timor had been colonized by a Western power, and, when Portugal left, there was an opportunity for independence. Fourth, China has no powerful domestic opposition to colonialism to constrain their government or support decolonization. The transition to relative democracy in Indonesia in 1998 created an opening for domestic and international public opinion on East Timor, and hence an opening for ethical argument. When the East Timorese populationvotedoverwhelminglyin1999for independence, inaUNsu- pervised vote, Indonesian rule could no longer be considered legitimate by any current standard. Fifth, Chinas potentially enormous military and economic power has deterred Western governments from showing serious and sustained interest in confronting China on human rights issues. Western governments are unlikely to act until an ethically based transnational movement mobilizes support for Tibetans on a scale to rival or exceed the global anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. If the status of Tibet canbe reframedthroughethical (andpractical) argument, change will become more likely. 161 See Tsering Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Melvyn C. Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 342 8 Alternative explanations, counterfactuals, and causation I am very busy here going through the Indies archives and calculating the prot which Spain made then and makes now out of her colonies. 1 I knowenoughtribes inAfrica. Theyall havethesamementalityinsofar as they yield only to force. It was and remains my policy to apply this force by unmitigated terrorism and even cruelty. I shall destroy the rebellious tribes by shedding rivers of blood and money. 2 One of the problems in writing about decolonization is that we know the end of the story. Whether self-government is seen as the outcome of a process of preparation carried out by a colonial state or as a tri- umph wrested from the colonizers by national movements, the story lends itself to be read backwards and to privilege the process of ending colonial rule over anything else that was happening in those years. 3 The content of argument, belief, and culture enables, shapes, and limits, providing a discursive structure to world politics that is as real as the military forces of states or the balance of power among them. Previ- ous chapters highlight the use of ethical arguments by agents to bolster or undermine colonial practices and institutions, but scientic, iden- tity, and practical arguments were also part of colonial and anti-colonial discourses. Yet, as acknowledged, there are powerful alternative expla- nations for the rise of colonial empire, the demise of slavery, and the end of colonialism that stress economic and balance-of-power forces rather than discursive forces. Although it is impossible to completely separate 1 King Leopold quoted in Adam Hochschild, King Leopolds Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifin Company, 1998), p. 37. 2 Lothor von Trotha quoted in Horst Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism (18841915) (London: Zed Press, 1980), p. 154. 3 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 6. 343 Argument and change in world politics the material from the ideational since humans make arguments about the nature of the economic and military world and how to best act in it, and persuasive arguments may lead to behavioral changes which meet up against constraints in the material world, or change that material world it might be useful to try to do so now in order to see the limits of a causal explanation that rests on argument and how the two realms overlap. This chapter examines the most powerful alternative explanations those that rest on material factors for the end of colonialism, con- cludes the discussion of Namibia, and suggests some counterfactuals in order to highlight just which conditions were crucial for decolonization to occur andto recall the role of contingency. I conclude by summarizing my, now qualied, causal arguments. Alternative explanations for post-World War II decolonization Why the sudden shift toward decolonization as the international norm after World War II? Though it would be a legitimate inquiry, the focus here is not on why one imperial power or another was forced to relin- quish, or voluntarily gave up, its colonial holdings, but rather on why colonialism ceased to be a dominant practice and became, instead, one that was viewed as wrong. 4 Still, in explaining the end of colonialism as an accepted practice, as an accepted relationship among states (at least from the perspective of the colonizer), one cannot entirely ignore the specics of these endings, for there may be some underlying economic or political reasons why all these colonialisms ended that explains the demise of colonialism and the rise of decolonization as the behavioral norm. Such are the realist and Marxist arguments, which stress power- political and economic causes for colonialisms demise. There are several versions of economic and power-political explana- tions for post-1945 decolonization growing effectiveness of national liberation movements; increased expense versus declining prots; and the exhaustion of the colonizer and these factors are often linked, even occasionally to ethical explanations. R.F. Betts argues, for example, In large measure, colonial rule ultimately collapsed in Africa because of the declining ability a combined nancial, military and moral 4 In understanding particular decolonizations, one must delve deeply into the history of the metropole, its political, military, and cultural relationship to the colony in question, and the strength of the liberation movements in the colony. 344 Alternative explanations condition of Europeans to continue it in the face of African nation- alist pressure. 5 Liberation movements One version of the power politics explanation stresses how indigenous efforts for national liberation became more effective, tipping the bal- ance of military and political power away fromthe colonizer. According to this account, peaceful and legal movements of intelligentsia and/or guerrilla wars for self-determination were fueled by the insults of colo- nialism and growing nationalist sentiments within the colonies. This viewemphasizes indigenous efforts for national liberation rather than the mobilizationof reformers withinimperial states, or arguments made by the colonized. This view relies on demonstrating that there were increasingly strong nationalist anti-colonial movements. And there is no doubt that these efforts became better organizedandmore effective. For example, during the twentieth century, the legal movements for change and non-violent organization, such as the Indian National Congress in India, and the Convention Peoples Party in Ghana, sought liberation through political reform and at the ballot box. Armed resistance to colonial powers e.g. in the United States in 1776, in Haiti in 1804, culminating in the guerrilla wars of the twentieth century in Algeria, Rhodesia, Vietnam, and Namibia also became harder to defeat. Moreover, independence movements could develop and draw upon nationalist sentiments and pan-national support from their neighbors. 6 Scholars of decolonization movements give several (primarily idea driven) explanations for growing nationalism in the early twentieth century, ranging from increased literacy and the transfer of European nationalist ideals, as natives with Western education returned to the colonies, towhat HedleyBull describes as the psychological or spiritual awakening of Asian, African, Caribbean and Pacic peoples . . . 7 This 5 R.F. Betts, Methods and Institutions of European Domination, in A. Adu Boahen, ed., Africa Under Colonial Domination, UNESCO General History of Africa, vol. VII (Paris: UNESCO, 1985), pp. 313331: 330. 6 On the other hand there were native collaborators who beneted from slavery, forced labor, and other economic institutions of colonialism who facilitated and supported colo- nial practices. 7 Hedley Bull, The Revolt Against the West, in Hedley Bull and AdamWatson, eds., The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 217228: 224. In his famous winds of change speech to the South African Parliament in 1960, Harold Macmillan said, We have seen the awakening of national consciousness in peoples who 345 Argument and change in world politics awakening began, Bull argues, among small groups of the Western- educated, later affecting masses of peoples that led them to perceive the old order no longer as a fact of nature, but as something that could be changed, to recognize that by mobilizing themselves to this end they could indeed change it, to abandon a passive for a politically active role in world politics. 8 Similarly, Margery Perham claims with regard to Africa, that: Most of the tribes quickly accepted European rule as part of an irre- sistible order, one which brought many benets, above all, peace, and exciting novelties, railways and roads, lamps, bicycles, ploughs . . . For the ruling classes it brought new strength and security of status and new forms of wealth and power . . . It was not until a small minority, through their attainment of the higher levels of Western education, and above all through travel came to understand something of the world at large and of their own place in it that the spell of acceptance began to be broken. Excited by the wine of these ideas, and smarting, perhaps, from some experience of the colour bar in Europe, and especially in Britain the young African would return after some years to his country to preach the idea that only by self-government could Africans escape from personal humiliation and win equality of status in a world of which they were at last becoming aware. 9 Explanations focusing on indigenous efforts also stress the growing military effectiveness of resistance movements as they were able to sup- ply themselves with arms and ammunition. 10 What made colonialism have for centuries lived in dependence upon some other power . . . In different places it takes different forms but it is happening everywhere. The wind of change is blowing through this continent and, whether we like it or not, the growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take ac- count of it. Harold Macmillan, The Wind of Change, in A.N Porter and A.J. Stockwell, eds., British Imperial Policy, 193864, Volume 2: 19511964 (London: Macmillan Press, 1987), pp. 522531: 524525. 8 Bull, The Revolt Against the West, p. 224. As D.K. Fieldhouse argues: On the one hand it caused resentment by what it destroyed; on the other hand it encouraged its subjects to think as Europeans, and in so doing narrowed the gap between ruler and ruled. Once a sufcient minority of them had acquired European skills and adopted European assumptions about, for example freedom and equality, alien rule would seem as intolerable an anomaly as that of one European state by another . . . In these ways and for these reasons modern colonialism contained the seeds of its own destruction and decolonization was the inevitable outcome. D.K. Fieldhouse, Colonialism 18701945: An Introduction (New York: St. Martins, 1981), p. 24. 9 Quoted in A. Adu Boahen, African Perspectives on Colonialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1987), p. 62. 10 For a summary of European military-technical advantages, including paternalistic ref- erences to indigenous peoples, see Michael Howard, The Military Factor in European Expansion, in Bull and Watson, eds., The Expansion of International Society, pp. 3342. 346 Alternative explanations possible on such a large scale as existed at the beginning of the twen- tieth century was overwhelming military force on the part of the col- onizers. Fieldhouse is typical when he argues that though resistance to colonialism was widespread at the start and was never entirely eliminated. . . it could everywhere be suppressed or contained because the imperialist possessed far superior military resources and better political organization and there were no external powers to support resistance movements as there were after 1945. 11 According to the balance-of-forces argument, after World War II the colonizers had long lines of communication, often several colonies to defend at once, but fewof the advantages traditionallyassociatedwithdefendingones own territory, even as the colonized were gaining military might. As Michael Doyle argues, Independence became possible . . . when the balance shiftedtothe opponents of continuedrule andthe metropole was not ina position to apply overwhelming force. 12 Thus, although European mil- itary might continuedto grow, andwas at its peak just as decolonization began, the argument is that the ratio of military force between colonizer and colonized shifted; effective resistance became possible in situations where military resistance and revolt had previously been ineffective. Economics of empire Other explanations for decolonization emphasize the growing expense of empire. The imperial elites understanding of the costs and bene- ts of empire changed because empire was in fact less protable than in the past. This explanation also presumes that one of, or the only, cause of colonialism was the economic and strategic utility of colonies; when this utility declined, if it did, rational colonizers let their colonies go. As Michael Howard argues, On the part of the imperial powers, empires at least, formal empires were seen to bring neither political power nor economic advantage commensurate with the effort involved in maintaining them. 13 European elites realized that neocolonialism (informal domination of colonial economies and politics) was less costly than direct military occupation and formal political control. 14 As M. E. Chamberlain argues: 11 Fieldhouse, Colonialism, p. 25. 12 Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 369. 13 Howard, The Military Factor in European Expansion, p. 41. 14 In 1930, US State Department ofcial Benjamin Gerig argued in The Open Door and the Mandates System: A Study of Economic Equality before and since the Establishment of the Mandates System that international mandates were preferable because they were open doors. The Mandates System is undoubtedly the most effective instrument yet devised 347 Argument and change in world politics By the 1950s it had become clear that empire could be expensive in both monetary terms and, if you chose to defend it militarily, as the French and Portuguese were to do, in terms of human resources and of political stability at home as well. Was it worth it? Almost certainly not, if you could leave behind a sufciently stable political structure to provide a satisfactory trading partner; that after all . . . was what the Europeans had been seeking in the nineteenth century; they had only moved to formal political control when they could not nd it. The growing nationalist movements seemed likely to provide such a political structure. 15 Quincy Wright also stresses an economic calculus: Presently humanitarianismwas strengthened by a newappreciation of economic expediency. In the exploitation of thinly populated temper- ate regions extermination of the natives was little loss to the imperial power and perhaps a gain. Immigrants could ll the gap, supplying better labor than the natives and also relieving population pressure in the home territory. But with thickly settled acquisitions like India or tropical acquisitions like Central Africa it began to be seen that the na- tive was an important economic asset. Without his labor the territory could not produce. Thus the ablest administrators like Sir Frederick Lugard in Nigeria began to study the native and cater not only to his material but to his psychological welfare with highly gratifying eco- nomic results. 16 For some, an efciency rationale was probably a persuasive rea- son for colonizers to engage, at a minimum, in pragmatic reforms or even to drop their opposition to decolonization. A parallel argument advanced by both Marxist and non-Marxist theorists of international political economy suggests that imperialismwas increasingly expensive at the same time that changes in modes of production made colonialism less protable. In other words, when the costs of maintaining empire rose, colonialism was no longer seen as protable compared with the benets of trade among already industrialized states. to make the Open Door effective. The mandates principle is irreconcilable with that of national economic imperialism. Quoted in Wm. Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 19411945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 91. 15 M. E. Chamberlain, Decolonization: The Fall of the European Empires (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 76. 16 Quincy Wright, Mandates Under the League of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), pp. 910. 348 Alternative explanations Exhaustion and overreach Exhaustion arguments have a long pedigree and are often related to an over-extension or imperial over-reach thesis. As Edward Gibbon argues in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time, or accident, had removed articial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. 17 The exhaustion explanation for decolo- nization is that the colonial powers ability to maintain empire declined due to the drain of the two world wars and the Great Depression, while armed resistance in the colonies grew. One interwar observer, M.J. Bonn, wrote, The success of these decolonization movements was not so much due to their own innate strength as to the war-tiredness of the great empires. After four years ghting on far-ung fronts, the glamour of adventure had gone. Even the most reckless spirits had drunk their ll and long for peace, cleanliness, quiet and rest. 18 Similarly, Gann and Duignan argue, that after World War I, Britain and France stood at the zenith of their imperial might, but at the very moment of success, real power was slipping from their grasp. They were exhausted. 19 Moreover, if colonial powers were fatigued and overstretched at the end of World War I, by the end of World War II the great powers were in deep trouble nancially; Britain, for instance, had overseas debts of 3,355 million. Increasingly nancially strapped and exhausted, great powers could not bear the expense of policing the empires. J.D. Hargreaves argues, in addition, that one of the rst causes of a stir- ring for African independence was the Great Depression, which led to a decline in commodity prices for sectors of the African agricultural 17 Quoted in Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 15001800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 162. 18 M. J. Bonn, The Crumbling of Empire: The Disintegration of the World Economy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1938), p. 152. 19 L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan, Burden of Empire: An Appraisal of Western Colonialism in Africa South of the Sahara (New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 72. On overreach, also see Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1988) and Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). One could also argue that the Cold War and the desire of the European powers to mobilize to defend against the threat of Soviet expansion caused the colonial powers to reorient their priorities from defense of empire to European defense. However, this does not take intoaccount uses of empire inthe past as apart of the European balancing system. 349 Argument and change in world politics economy, displaced rural Africans, and decreased the metropolitan powers ability to pay for empire. 20 A reply to the alternative explanations While these alternative explanations for post-1945 decolonization increasingly effective liberation movements, greater expense of empire, and the exhaustion and/or overextension of the great colonial powers are important in individual cases, they are insufcient as an account of the end of colonialism as a legitimate practice. When linked together stronger liberation movements increased the expense of maintaining empire just as prots were declining and the great powers were weak- ened by wars with each other the alternative accounts are more plau- sible, but still not entirely convincing. On the argument that growing nationalism and anti-colonialism, which became increasingly effective, brought decolonization, I have shownthroughout that resistance to colonialismby the colonized from the conquest of the Aztecs to the invasion of East Timor was constant. No one in the colonies suddenly awoke to their oppression and began to ght it; anti-colonial movements resisted the colonizers politically and militarily from the outset. The question is: why were liberation movements increasingly effective after 1945? Anti-colonial movements certainly became better coordinated politically and were also supported by labor movements within the metropole and other sympathetic inter- national actors. Thus, mobilizationby liberationmovements was crucial in determining the precise timing and manner of decolonization in par- ticular cases. But anti-colonial movements were not necessarily better armed in relation to the colonizer. Rather, what became increasingly ev- ident was the declining willingness of colonizers to ght for colonies in the same brutal ways they had in the past. Do economic factors account for post-1945 decolonization? Answers depend on economics at several levels and for several kinds of actors. Colonies were extremely important during and after the world wars for those European states which had colonial holdings: colonies supplied raw materials, cheap labor, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers. 21 20 J. D. Hargreaves, Decolonization in Africa (London: Longman, 1988), pp. 3234. 21 Recall that not only did France and Britain use conscripts from the colonies to maintain colonial rule, but conscripts wereusedbothduringandafter theWorldWars tosupplement the European militaries in Europe, for instance occupying the Rhineland for France after WorldWar I. Clemenceau, in1919 decidedtomake conscriptionmandatoryinFrenchWest Africa in order to make up for French manpower shortages due to the carnage of World 350 Alternative explanations Colonies also partially nanced, through taxation, the post-war recon- struction of colonial European states. Thus, as one observer notes, The great irony of decolonization in Africa is that it came almost imme- diately after the post-1945 period when the metropolitan powers had regarded their colonies as an essential economic foundation for their own recovery and future development. 22 Still, the benets of colonies could have been less than the costs of maintaining them. However, arguments stressing the costs of empire often fail to take fully into account the fact that inhabitants of colonies were generally taxed for the privilege of being colonies (taxation with- out representation) and in some cases, taxes apparently paid for the occupation, as during British rule of India during the late nineteenth century. Further, tariffs on imports to colonies also offset the costs of military occupation. 23 Even later, when development came onto the agenda, prots likely outweighed the expense of colonial rule in most cases. Arough calculation suggests that between 1945 and 1951 Britain extracted some 140 million from her colonies, putting in only about 40 million under the Colonial Development and Welfare acts. 24 But in 1952, with falling commodity prices, the colonies were not such an asset. This brings us to the core question: was colonialism protable? In terms of the average settler, metropolitan citizen, investor, or native colonial subject there is no one-size-ts-all answer to the question of colonialism and prot: the economics of colonialism were protable for some and not for others, depending on the period. For Portugal, which was in a difcult economic situation in the post-World War II era, its African colonies provided valuable revenue. Portuguese Angola was rich in iron, diamonds, and oil. And as Kenneth Maxwell notes of Portugal, the large surplus from the African territories would be painful to lose. Portuguese revenue from its African colonies was sub- stantial, not only subsidizing occupation, but bolstering the Portuguese government even in the last years of Portuguese colonialism. In 1973 such earnings represented as much as 5 percent of the gross national product, about $540 million. All the cotton of Mozambique War I. MyronEchenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs S en egalais inFrench West Africa 18571960 (London: James Currey, 1991), pp. 4246. Also see Gann and Duignan, Burden of Empire, p. 213. 22 David Fieldhouse, Arrested Development in Anglophone Black Africa? in Prosser Gifford and Wm. Roger Louis, eds., Decolonization and African Independence: The Transfer of Power, 19601980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 135158: 139. 23 See Doyle, Empires, pp. 236, 251, 253. 24 Fieldhouse, Arrested Development? p. 140. 351 Argument and change in world politics was exported to Portugal and 99.7 percent of its sugar, both at well below world prices. At the same time, the wages of the Mozambique miners working in South Africa were converted into gold shipments to Lisbon in effect a hidden subsidy to the Portuguese war effort, since the bullion was valued at the ofcial rate of $42.20 an ounce instead of the world market price of close to $200 an ounce in 1974. During the three years before the coup, the ofcial value of this gold amounted to at least $180 million. 25 Still, protability was not uniformly distributed. For example, in their study of the economics of the British colonial empire, Lance Davis and Robert Huttenback argue, The British as a whole certainly did not ben- et economically from the Empire. On the other hand, individual in- vestors did. In the Empire itself, the level of benets depended upon whom one asked and how one calculated. For the colonies of white set- tlement the answer is unambiguous: They paid for little and received a great deal. In the dependent Empire the white settlers, such as there were, almost certainly gained as well. 26 On the other hand, Davis and Huttenback argue, As far as the indigenous populationwas concerned, while theyreceiveda market basket of government commodities at truly wholesale prices, there is no evidence to suggest that, had they been given a free choice, they would have bought the particular commodities offered, even at the bargain-basement rates. 27 Most damaging to the economic argument is that the worlds largest colonial power, Great Britain, was uncertain about the economic and strategic benets of its colonial holdings inthe crucial periodafter World War II. Britishgovernment documents showthat ofcials simply didnot know if colonial empire paid, or if so, how much. In a 1957 memo to the Colonial Policy Committee, which he copied to the colonial secretary, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan requested an account of the colonial balance sheet. Macmillan wrote, I should also like to see something like a prot and loss account for each of our Colonial possessions, so that we may be better able to gauge whether, from the nancial and economic point of view, we are likelytogainor lose byits departure. This would need, of course, to be weighed against the political and strategic considerations involved in each case. What the prime minister says 25 Kenneth Maxwell, Portugal and Africa: The Last Empire, in Prosser Gifford and Wm. Roger Louis, eds., The Transfer of Power in Africa: Decolonization 19401960 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 337385: 358. 26 Lance E. Davis and Robert A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Eco- nomics of British Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 267. 27 Davis and Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire, p. 267. 352 Alternative explanations next suggests that he was attempting to make a rational decision about Britains colonial policy. And it might perhaps be better to attempt an estimate of the balance of advantage, taking all these considerations into account, of losing or keeping each particular territory. There are presumably places where it is of vital interest to us that we should maintain our inuence, and others where there is no United Kingdom interest in resisting constitutional change even if it seems likely to lead eventually to secession fromthe Commonwealth. 28 On the other hand, it is also clear from the statement that colonies may have been kept despite their protability or strategic importance. Macmillans request for a balance sheet was a bit late and the answer he received was ambiguous. Three studies were done, and in the last, the conclusionwas drawnthat the economic considerations were fairly evenly matched. Consequently it was felt that the economic interests of the United Kingdom were unlikely in themselves to be decisive in determining whether or not a territory should become independent. Nor was it believed that strategic considerations should be uppermost, as the maintenance of bases against the will of the local Government and people would seriously limit their usefulness. 29 Nor was there a clear consensus during the 1950s on the protability of the colonies among Englands educatedpublic; rather, it was a topic of heateddebate among politicians and intellectuals. To decide whether material constraints forced colonizers to decolo- nize, or declining prots decreased their willingness to pay the costs of occupation, would require a complex balance sheet. Then scholars would have to decide whether gains by individual merchants, capital- ists, or states were offset bythe losses of metropolitantaxpayers, andjust what the signicance of these numerical gures was in terms of politics and capacity to act. Moreover, one would have to know whether these calculations were done by the imperial ofces for the cabinets of colo- nial powers. At least in one case, Britain, the calculations were done very late, well after decolonization had begun. 28 Macmillan also wrote: It would be good if Ministers could know more clearly which territories are likely to become ripe for independence over the next few years or, even if they are not ready for it, will demand it so insistently that their claims cannot be denied and at what date that stage is likely to be reached in each case. Personal Minute from the Prime Minister to the Lord President of the Council, 28 January 1957, reprinted in Porter and Stockwell, eds., British Imperial Policy, 193864, vol. II, p. 451. 29 D.J. Morgan, The Ofcial History of Colonial Development, Vol. 5: Guidance Towards Self- Government in British Colonies, 19411971 (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 102. 353 Argument and change in world politics Explanations that stress declining protability also fail to explain why if imperial powers recognized or began to believe that empire was no longer protable colonizers often stayed on, and in some cases fought extremely costly wars to maintain imperial control. If economic explanations for colonialism and for decolonization are to make sense, one must conclude that leaders of colonial powers were slow learners or that other interests and beliefs kept states interested in colonies. 30 Alternatively, one may conclude that empire was actually protable for certain classes and those classes pushed the rest of the state, through coalition logrolling, to take and maintain colonies. When the coalitions fell through, their colonial policies were abandoned. And if empire be- came less protable, this was in part due to the efforts of reformers: the mission became humanitarian development, and such development in the form of schools, clinics, and infrastructure did not come cheap. What about the argument that formal imperialism (direct occupation and control) became more expensive than informal imperialism (the in- formal control of neocolonialism)? The problems with this account are several. First, wasnt it always the case that it is cheaper over the long run to trade than raid or coerce? If this is so, why would any rational government have colonies? Second, if formal colonialismwas necessary to turn colonial subjects into wage laborers, to create the infrastructure of roads, railways, and ports, and to build the economic assets of plan- tations and mines, could not colonizers have left most colonies much earlier? Why maintain, for instance, Jamaica or Ghana, decades after each had infrastructure, markets, and wage labor economies? What about the exhaustion/overextension thesis? These arguments take several forms: the colonizer was outnumbered, colonizers faced greater logistic or nancial problems, or the colonizers militaries were relatively weak. The exhaustion/overextension argument is the one best supported by evidence. For example, by ghting three guerrilla wars at once, Portugal, never an economic powerhouse, was apparently overextendedin Africa during the 1960s and1970s. By 1974, over a mil- lionPortuguese hadseenservice overseas. One of everyfour adult males was in the armed forces. 31 Similarly, colonizers were overextended 30 Despite his own emphasis on the economics of French colonialism, Raymond Aron argued: The leaders of France have always thought of the national destiny in politi- cal terms rather than economic terms. He believed that France had aspired to glory rather than prot, preferred crusades to commerce. Quoted in Silver, Framing a Balance Sheet, p. 37. 31 Maxwell, Portugal and Africa, p. 339. Also see R.J. Hammond, Portugal and Africa, 18151910: A Study in Uneconomic Imperialism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966). 354 Alternative explanations in the rst wave of Latin American decolonization from Spain in the early nineteenth century. Whereas Haiti achieved independence from France via a slave revolt in the late 1700s, several Spanish colonies in South America achieved independence as a consequence of the over- throw and occupation of Spain by Napoleonic France in 1808. While some colonial settlers remained loyal to Spain, most notably in Cuba, others used the opportunity to rebel, sparking civil wars in Mexico and Venezuela and revolts elsewhere in Spains American empire. When Spain restored its monarchy and recovered from French occupation, it sent troops in 1812 to restore its empire in the Americas. Yet Sim on Bolvar, Miguel Hidalgo, Jos e de San Martn, and other rebels man- aged to free large swaths of the empire, notably Ecuador, Venezuela, Columbia, and Chile and Spain was forced to retreat from New World colonialism. 32 Yet all the exhaustion arguments, when applied to the decolonization of the mid-twentieth century, face the problem that there was nothing new about population ratios or distance. Specically, the colonizer was almost always outnumberedandfacinglonglines of communication. At the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, about 12 percent of the British Empires population was British or European; in 1914 French Africa was controlled by a handful of some 4,200 white Frenchmen, dispersed over a territory fourteen times the size of the metropole and inhabited by between 15 and 16 million Africans. 33 If always historicallyoutnumbered, didcolonizers, after WorldWar II, face greater logistical difculty maintaining long lines of communica- tion to the colonies? On the contrary, improvements in transportation and communication in the post-war era actually decreased logistical problems. If the thesis is that colonizers couldnot pay, theyalsoprobably found it difcult to pay for repression after World War I, yet they con- tinued to do so for decades following the war. Why did not colonial empires fall apart after World War I? Were there cumulative effects of 32 See Jorge I. Dominguez, Insurrection or Loyalty: The Breakdown of the Spanish American Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). Portuguese loss of control over Brazil was more gradual, though it was also sparked by Napoleonic advances in Europe. Inanycase, settler revolts didnot dramaticallychange the social andeconomic structure of Latin American states; the hierarchy of Spanish descendent settlers over mestizos, Indians and slaves remained essentially in place. 33 Dennis Judd, Empire: The British Imperial Experience from 1765 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1996), p. 3; Henri Brunschwig, The Decolonization of French Black Africa, in Prosser Gifford and Wm. Roger Louis, eds., The Transfer of Power in Africa: Decolonization 19401960 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 211224: 216. 355 Argument and change in world politics both world wars and the subsequent Cold War on human, material, and nancial resources, gradually decreasing the ability of the colonizers to hold onto their colonies? Colonial empires for the most part remained intact until ten and fteen years after World War II. Or did these world wars make the colonies appear, as the British said, even more valuable to the colonizer? If the exhaustion is said to be military, the evidence is only partly supportive. Britain and France were much stronger militarily at mid- century vis-` a-vis their colonies than they were before and they could have likely kept their colonies if they had chosen to do so. After defeat- ing Hitler, both countries were secure at home and could have put their military forces to work repressing the anti-colonial militaries. In some cases, notably Vietnam and Algeria, France did so. Only marginal pow- ers defeated Spain, weak Portugal, and apartheid South Africa under sanctions foundcolonialisma great military andeconomic burdenand were forced to retreat. Thus, various economic or power-political explanations for decolo- nization may seem plausible at rst glance, but this set of arguments is less persuasive when one considers four additional points. First, if the great colonial powers hadchosento use their military might to defeat re- bellious colonies in the mid-twentieth century, they would likely have won, the efciency of guerrilla tactics and the advantages of ghting from ones own territory notwithstanding. 34 To be successful, the colo- nial powers would simply have had to resort to the time-tested tech- niques of Germanys von Trotha extermination. Notably, von Trotha went to the effort of killing more than half the native population of Namibia before it had been established that the colony would be prof- itable. Only an ethical argument explanation can suggest why extermi- nation was no longer on the table. Second, evidence for economic explanations of colonialismanddecol- onizationis ambiguous andmaybeindeterminate. Economic arguments assume that, at the end of European colonialism in the twentieth cen- tury, colonies were less protable and therefore less important to the metropolitan powers. Again, the argument is that imperial expansion resulted from the capitalist desire to nd new markets, cheap labor, and inexpensive raw materials, and so on. But if one examines the eco- nomic history of European contact with non-European regions, colonies 34 The exception is Portugal which was not a great economic power by the 1960s and did not have the great military resources of France or Britain. 356 Alternative explanations were not always associated with signicant protability, and on the other hand, in some instances, trade occurred on terms extremely fa- vorable to Europeans, yet colonies were not always established. As Peter Liberman shows, even the conquest and economic exploitation of industrialized states can be protable, if less than efcient. 35 Thus, decolonization was not economically determined: decolonizing pow- ers could have held onto the formal political control of their colonies for economic reasons. Still, as emphasized below, economic (practical) arguments were certainly important in helping to sustain or dissolve support for colonialism. Third, the seeds of the decolonizationregime articulatedinthe League of Nations Mandate system began to germinate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was precisely when colonies were considered necessary by the colonial powers for economic and strategic reasons, and when colonies were, on the whole, considered to be quite protable. Fewdisputed the economic and strategic benets of colonial- ism until mid-century, when the system was already in deep normative trouble. Finally, economic and military conditions for the end of particular colonial empires (a high-cost, low-benet ratio, military defeat, and overextension and exhaustion) have obtained in the past when colonies were lost in war or were temporarily too costly to maintain, but colonial empire as an institution was never outlawed or the subject of sanctions before the mid-twentieth century. Colonies had been abandoned, lost, or exchanged throughout history. What was different about the decolo- nization of the mid-twentieth century was its systematic-ness, and the fact that it would be very difcult today, and in the foreseeable future, to practice colonialism. Though colonizers might have desired the wealth that came with holding colonies, the public and inuential elites in the metropole were gradually persuaded that colonialism itself was an ab- horrent practice, and they were no longer willing to tolerate and pay for it as they had in the past. As Fieldhouse argues, at least in the West European democracies, governments were vulnerable to criticism of brutality by liberals and humanitarians such as the British Anti-Slavery Society. 36 35 Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). For qualications, see Stephen G. Brooks, The Globalization of Production and the Changing Benets of Conquest, Journal of Conict Resolution 43 (October 1999), 646670. 36 Fieldhouse, Colonialism. 357 Argument and change in world politics Practical arguments Ethical arguments about colonialismwere deployed alongside scientic and identity arguments about the practice. In addition, practical argu- ments about the protability and strategic value of colonialism were deployedby proponents of colonialism, reform, anddecolonization and indeed were as ubiquitous as ethical arguments about the practice. Advocates of empire often argued that colonies were protable. Even Adam Smith, a critic of colonies on the grounds that they were pro- tectionist and inhibited free trade, wrote in the Wealth of Nations, To propose that Great Britain should voluntarily give up all authority over her colonies . . . would be to propose such a measure as never was, and never will be adopted, by any nation in the world. 37 As noted earlier, the nineteenth-century French advocate of empire, Prime Minister Jules Ferry, argued, Colonies are for rich countries one of the most lucrative methods of investing capital . . . I say that France, which is glutted with capital and which has exported considerable quantities, has an interest in looking at this side of the question. 38 After World War I, the advo- cates of Frenchcolonialismfrequently toutedthe economic andstrategic virtues of colonies. Yesterday, France needed colonial contingents for the war. Tomorrow it will need them in order to refashion its military instrument. Henceforth its security will be a tributary of its colonies. 39 Albert Sarraut, Frances colonial minister from 1920 to 1924, wrote sev- eral studies of French colonialism in which he argued that colonies of- fered the opportunity for great economic gain. His La Mise en Valeur des Colonies publishedin19221923 urgedgreater investment inthe colonies in order to boost Frances own economy: to supply, without any de- lay, to the needs of our national life the increased amount of primary products that it demands, this is the aim. 40 In the 1930s, the German Ofce for Colonial Policy, whose job in part consisted of convincing the German people of the virtues of colonies, often used economic ar- guments. The 1939 speakers guide for the ofce included this talking point: Colonies are needed because of Germanys lack of space. They are to provide raw materials and markets . . . Aside from their material 37 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (London: 1966), vol. II, pp. 112113. 38 Quotedin A. AduBoahen, African Perspectives on Colonialism(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 31. 39 Albert Sarraut quoted in Rudolf von Albertini, Decolonization: The Administration and future of the Colonies, 19191960 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company Inc., 1971), p. 268. 40 Quoted in ibid., p. 270. 358 Alternative explanations value, colonies must be sought by the Reich in order to provide German youth with a testing ground for character. 41 Similarly, Britains Lord Lugard, in The Dual Mandate, argued that war proved the value of the colonies against the arguments of the Little Englanders. 42 The argument that colonies were economically important was also deployed by advocates of colonial rule after World War II. For example, after the discoveryof oil inthe Sahara, Frances Resident Minister Robert Locoste said in April 1957, These discoveries which are, it appears, of world importance, must conrm our country in her African vocation and justify all the more the effort of the metropole to reintroduce calm into Algeria, which is the key to the Sahara. 43 Similarly, British Conser- vatives in power during World War II tended to argue that the colonies were crucial economically and therefore essential for Britains world position. Conversely, critics of colonialism also frequently used economic ar- guments. Some claimed that colonialism, because it typically involved protectionism, was inherently less protable than free trade. Indeed, protectionism was characteristic of European colonialism. For exam- ple, for two centuries during the height of mercantilism, from the 1650s to the 1850s, British tariff regulations required that all colo- nial trade must be carried on ships owned and registered in Britain and that all goods imported to the colonies must either be the prod- uct of Britain or transshipped through Britain, with duties paid there. British colonies were forbidden to manufacture or export most goods, with only limited manufacturing allowed. Proponents of free trade ob- jected to this system, arguing that competition would be more prof- itable. Others argued that the value of British trade with its colonies was small and generally diminishing. And others argued that only a few benet from imperialism: Although the new Imperialism has been bad business for the nation, it has been good business for cer- tain classes and certain trades within the nation. The vast expenditure 41 Wolf W. Schmokel, Dream of Empire: German Colonialism, 19191945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 3435. 42 Lord Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (London: Frank Cass, (1922) 1965), p. 609. 43 Quoted in James W. Silver, Framing a Balance Sheet for French Decolonization: Raymond Aron, Raymond Cartier and the Debate over the African Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Honors Thesis), pp. 1213. Further, this viewseems to have been widely shared. When the journal of the French Institute of Public Opinion, Sondages, pub- lished the answer to the question, Do you think France will be able to exploit the Saharan petroleum reserves if Algeria becomes Independent, in September 1957, 18 percent an- swered yes, and 53 percent said no. Silver, Framing a Balance Sheet, p. 13. 359 Argument and change in world politics on armaments, the costly wars, the grave risks and embarrassments of foreign policy, the stoppage of political and social reforms within Great Britain, though fraught with great injury to the nation, have served well the present business interests of certain industries and professions. 44 Individual colonies were also singled out for criticismon the grounds that they were unprotable. In 1865, British colonial reformer Charles Adderly claimed that Britains possessions in West Africa, costing a million pounds a year, were a waste, and the parliamentary Committee on West African Affairs, in agreement with Adderly, said: All further extension of territory or assumption of government, or new treaties offering protection to native tribes, would be inexpedient . . . 45 After World War I, one British observer wrote, The glorious days when the native could be squeezed for the benet of the Crown, as well as for the planters and merchants prots, are gone forever. From the budgetary point of view, colonies cost more than they bring in. Tributes have gone out of fashion and subsidies are the rule. 46 In the 1930s the scholar Grover Clark set about computing what he called The Balance Sheets of Imperialism: Facts and Figures on Colonies. Three main claims have been made as to the value of colonies: that they provided important outlets for population; that the possession of themgave important opportunities for protable trade which otherwise would not be available; that control over the sources of raw materials in colonies added to a nations security in time of war and gave it im- portant advantages in times of peace. 47 Clark concluded that colonies 44 J.A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (New York: James Pott & Co., 1902), pp. 5152. Hobson did not think, however, that the economic motive was the chief cause of imperi- alism. Rather, he emphasized the causal role of the non-economic factors of patriotism, adventure, military enterprise, political ambition, and philanthropy and argued that the motor power of Imperialism is not chiey nancial: nance is rather the governor of the imperial engine, directing the energy and determining its work: it does not consti- tute the fuel of the engine, nor does it directly generate the power. Finance manipulates the patriotic forces which politicians, soldiers, philanthropists, and traders generate. Ibid., p. 66. 45 Quoted Davis and Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire, p. 9. 46 Bonn, The Crumbling of Empire, p. 333. 47 Grover Clark, The Balance Sheets of Imperialism: Facts and Figures on Colonies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), p. v. He comments on the moral dimensions of colo- nialism when he says of early colonial activity: What they were after was trade, or loot, or both and in many cases they were none too scrupulous about the methods they used to get what they wanted. Ibid., p.6. Clark describes an anemic little clerk, the British colonist, Cecil Rhodes, as a quite unscrupulous but vastly interesting and able empire builder . . . Grover Clark, A Place in the Sun (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1936), p. 33. 360 Alternative explanations might have been protable before 1800 but were certainly not so after 1880, and each of these claims is essentially fallacious. For the eight decades preceding the new drive for colonies which started in the 1880s, the governments as such spent considerably more on expansion than they received directly from it. These losses ulti- mately fell on the taxpayers. But private interests were making good prots on trade with the overseas territories, and the governmental expenditures were much less than they came to be later. Perhaps the private prots roughly equaled the governments losses. In any case, between 1800 and 1880, the balance for the people as a whole in the colony-holding countries was not large on either the debit or the credit side of the ledger. Since 1880, however, the cash costs to the countries which have used force to get or keep control of colonies unquestionably have been very substantially more than any possible cash prots derived from the trade with the territories controlled. 48 Focusing on the period from 1878 to 1934, Clark provides exten- sive empirical support for his claims that colonialism does not pro- vide prot, resources, or benets from migration but actually sows instability and war as countries compete for these prizes. Clark ends his book with a call to keep political control of the colonies since independence would probably lead, especially in Africa and the Pa- cic, to chaos but to open colonies to trade in order to insure real equality of economic opportunity in the colonies for the nationals of all countries. 49 Britains Labour party, after World War II, held that colonialism mainly beneted capitalists. As John Strachey, a post-war Secretary of State for War argued, Exactly contrary to the popular prejudice, a nation is likely to-day [sic] to be strong or weak in inverse ratio to imperial possessions. 50 In France, Raymond Aron stressed eco- nomic reasons for French withdrawal from Algeria in La Trag edie algerienne and LAlg erie et la R epublic, published in 1957 and 1958. Despite the ostensible importance of colonies to the French econ- omy, Aron argued, the war in Algeria was a diversion of resources from France while the withdrawal of young men from the French economy to ght the war tightened the labor market, and led to 48 Clark, Balance Sheets of Imperialism, p. 3. 49 Ibid., p. 18. Clark approved of the Mandate system but thought it did not do enough to protect and promote free trade. 50 Quoted in Louis, Imperialism at Bay, p. 34. 361 Argument and change in world politics growing inationary pressure. He said France could simply buy the oil it needed and did not have to physically control the Saha- ran oil supplies. It is the currency of payment, not sovereignty on the drilling sites or on the pipelines that is essential. 51 Similarly, RaymondCartier publishedmanyarticles inParis-Matchinthelate1950s questioning the economic wisdom of colonies. In Black Africa, France pays. It assumes for the metropolitan bud- get the salaries of the governors, administrators, magistrates, police. It takes on the costs of meteorology, the geographic service, the radio stations . . . of principal airports. It completely covers the military ex- penses which have risen up to 50 billion [Francs per year] for all the overseas territories. It covers currency shortages, the budget decits, subsidizes in growing proportions the majority of colonial projects. 52 Thus, practical arguments were a feature of colonial and anti-colonial discourse. Strategic, balance-of-power arguments were also common. During the Cold War, for example, some argued that decolonization posed an increased risk of political instability for the colonizer. But beginning in the late nineteenth century colonialism was less and less considered a legitimate means to the ends of prot and security. As notedinchapter 7, beliefs about what it was goodandright todointerms of economic exploitation were already divided at the middle part of the twentieth century. A 1946 opinion poll asked, Should we administer our colonies above all for the prot of France, or above all for the prot of the indigenous populations? Asking the question illustrates that the economic motive for colonialism was already denormalized. French opinion was roughly evenly divided, with 31 percent saying for the prot of France, 28 percent for the prot of the natives, and 25 percent for the prot of both. 53 Non-economic arguments in favor of colonialism religious and civ- ilizing missions based on the presumed inferiority of non-Europeans were also delegitimized at the same time that the ideas of self- determination and sovereignty were more widely believed and ap- plied. This is why colonizers did not continue to use the same meth- ods of imprisonment, mutilation, and massacre that they had in the past employed with great success to control and intimidate. Thus, colonialism ended not because it was less protable or because the 51 Quoted in Silver, Framing a Balance Sheet, p. 14. 52 Quoted in ibid., p. 32. 53 Paul Clay Sorum, Intellectuals and Decolonization in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), p. 16. 362 Alternative explanations material balance between colonizer and colonized changed. Colonial- ism was no longer legitimate for economic, military, or civilizing reasons. Alternative explanations for South Africas exit from Namibia What accounts for South Africas withdrawal from Namibia in 1990? SWAPO began its armed struggle in 1966 and South Africa began a war against Angola in 1975 that featured several large-scale assaults. 54 At the peak of its regional military engagement, the South African Defence Force (SADF) occupied one-third of Angolan territory as it fought SWAPO and conducted a campaign of military destabilization over the entire Southern African region. A negotiated settlement to South Africas war in Angola, brokered in 1988 by the United States and the Soviet Union, included South African withdrawal from Namibia. This case thus exemplies the complex relationships among economic, strategic, and normative factors and indicates the limits of an ethical argument explanation. South West Africa/Namibia was both extremely protable and costly to maintain. South African foreign policy meant that it was increasingly overextended in the region, while international sanctions weakened the South African military. South Africas wars against Angola and SWAPO eventually ground to a stalemate, and though South Africa had nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, it did not escalate their use. Economics of occupation Was it reasonable, in purely economic terms, for South Africa to hold on to South West Africa/Namibia after the UN revoked South Africas mandate in 1966? Though economic statistics regarding Namibia were generally withheld after 1966, South Africa included the gures for Namibian mining in statistics for South African mining the occupation does appear to have been protable. First, Namibia provided an outlet for South African goods, making it valuable to South Africas private sector when economic sanctions against South Africa were anticipated 54 See in Colin Leys and John S. Saul, et al., Namibias Liberation Struggle: The Two Edged Sword (London: James Currey, 1995); Peter H. Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia (London: James Currey, 1988); Dennis Herbstein and John Evenson, The Devils Are Among Us: The War for Namibia (London: Zed Books, 1989). 363 Argument and change in world politics andthen imposed. Second, South Africa exploitedNamibias signicant mineral resources, the most protable of which were diamonds and uranium. Specically, Namibian diamond production accounted for 22 percent of the South African De Beers corporations after-tax pro- ts in 1978. Third, labor was cheap in Namibia due to the suppression of black wages, increasing the prot margin of Namibias most lucrative sector, the mining industry. Was occupation of Namibia overly expensive? Because gures detailing the full costs of the occupation were never published by South Africa, it is difcult to know whether costs outweighed prots and how the costbenet ratio changed over time. For example, the South West Africa administrations spending on police and defense for 19871988 were, respectively, R136 million and R191.9 million. 55 But the share of the total South African defense budget spent on Namibia is unknown and not likely ever to be known. South Africa also subsidized expenditures for the South West African Territorial Force and the administration of the territory of Namibia. The occupation of Namibia cost R1.7 million per day in the mid 1980s while the cost of killing a single SWAPO insurgent has risen to R600,000. 56 In 1988, the war in Namibia cost South Africa $1 million (R2.15 million) per day, not including the subsidy to the Namibian government which Pretoria put at $400 million a year (R860 million). 57 The total cost of the twenty- three-year war against SWAPO was some R8 billion ($3 billion). 58 Fortunately for South Africa, the SWA/Namibian mining industry subsidized their occupation of Namibia through taxation. For example, from 1 April 1987 to 31 March 1988, R255 million of the R600 million in Namibian government revenue that came from taxes and duties came from the mining industry. Much of that money, R130 million, came from diamond production. 59 Lead, zinc, silver, copper, and tin mined in Namibia were all taxedat 40 percent; diamonds were taxedat 60 percent; and taxation for uranium was a sliding scale, rising to as much as 70 percent. Prots remained substantial, however, because of low wages. 55 Africa South of the Sahara 1991 (London: Europa Publications Limited, 1990), p. 749. 56 Christopher Coker, South Africas Security Dilemmas (New York: Preager, 1987), p. 45. 57 Africa Research Bulletin, Political Series 25 (15 December 1988), 9062. 58 Susan Brown, Diplomacy by Other Means: SWAPOs Liberation War, in Leys and Saul, Namibias Liberation Struggle, pp. 1939: 37. 59 Africa South of the Sahara 1991, p. 749. 364 Alternative explanations Was South Africa exhausted or over-extended? Three elements of potential exhaustion and overextension must be con- sidered: the South African militarys loss of life during the decades of occupation and war; the resource drain of occupation at a time when South Africa faced international sanctions; and South Africas self-encirclement as the region responded to its destabilization policies. While it should not be difcult to determine, it is hard to know whether the South African military was increasingly drained by the occupation of SWA/Namibia and the Angolan war. The South African government appeared to systematically under-report the deaths result- ing from combat, malaria, and other causes. An SADF archivist inter- viewed shortly after the conicts ended claims that no overall tally of casualties in Namibia and Angola were ever made because they were too few to count. He continued, no one believes me when I say that, but its true. There were just too few to count. 60 Indeed, the ofcial SADF gures were confusing. Thus, the South African public never had complete gures, even after the war ended, although unofcial gures for combat related deaths totaled 715 for all South African forces, in- cluding police, SADF, and SWATF. 61 Whatever the real number of deaths and injuries due to combat, dis- ease, and accidents, white casualties were obviously a concern for South African decisionmakers, and the SADF took several measures to de- crease casualties and to convince the public that the numbers were low. To decrease their dependency on white South African troops, and to keep white South Africans, especially those in the part-time services, away from the brunt of the ghting in Namibia, South Africa increas- ingly relied on black Namibians and on non-white soldiers from South Africa. The Namibianization of the occupation forces in South West Africa began in the early 1970s. In the mid-1970s, South Africa organized bantustan (black homeland) based units linked to the eth- nic homelands in Namibia, and in 1980 South Africa formally estab- lished the South West African Territorial Force (SWATF), an indigenous army designed to take over the brunt of the repression inside Namibia. South Africa introduced compulsory service for all Namibians in 1981. The SWATF was rapidly mobilized to a force of 20,00024,000, and grew to 35,000 in early 1989, with duties in both Namibia and Angola. 62 As 60 Interview with the author, Pretoria, 27 May 1991. 61 Brown, Diplomacy by Other Means, p. 37. 62 Free at Last?, Washington Notes On Africa (Spring 1989), p. 2. 365 Argument and change in world politics one white South African noted, deaths of black troops, who now carry the brunt of the ghting, are hardly ever reported since 1976 it has been ofcial SADF policy not to reveal their names or provide statistics. 63 By 1986, South Africa claimed that SWATF provided 51 percent of all SouthAfricancommandedsoldiers inNamibia andthe SADFnotedthat the expansion of SWATF resulted in a gradual decline in the call-up of Citizen Force members for service in the SWA operational area. 64 SWAPO and South Africa made conicting claims regarding casual- ties, but both sides agree that South African losses grew. 65 In early 1977, the South African Defence Ministry reported 33 security force casual- ties in Namibia since April 1975. 66 In 1982 the SADF said 77 troops were killed in action in Namibia, 149 died of other causes, and 259 deaths were accidents. 67 The SADF claimed that 30 members of the security forces in Namibia were killed in 1985 and that 32 were killed the follow- ing year. 68 In late 1985, the South African government said 560 South African lives had been lost in Namibia since the late 1970s. 69 SWAPO gures suggest a much higher rate of casualties. In 1984 SWAPOs Peo- ples Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) claimed to have killed 71 SADF and SWATF troops in May, June, and July alone. 70 In the month of August 1988 alone, PLAN reported that they killed 113 enemy sol- diers, woundedmany others, andcapturedor destroyedSouth African military vehicles in twenty separate military actions. 71 63 Gavin Cawthra, Brutal Force: The Apartheid War Machine (London: International Defence & Aid Fund for Southern Africa, 1986), p. 178. 64 Republic of South Africa (RSA), White Paper on Defence and Armaments Supply 1986, p. 18. Mark Phillips, The Nuts and Bolts of Military Power: The Structure of the SADF, in Jacklyn Cock and Laurie Nathan, eds., Society at War: The Militarization of South Africa (New York: St. Martins Press, 1989), pp. 1627: 26; Cawthra, Brutal Force, pp. 199204. 65 Over 10,000Namibianpeople were killed(1percent of the population), andover 100,000 ed the country to neighboring states, mostly, approximately 72,000, to Angola. Tony Weaver, The South African Defence Force in Namibia, in Cock and Nathan, eds., Society at War, pp. 90102: 90. 66 RSA, White Paper on Defence 1977, p. 7. 67 Note that for 1982, SWAPO gures for total deaths are less than SADF gures, as- suming that SADF gures for deaths by accidents and other causes are actually combat deaths. PLANclaimed that over 2,000 enemy soldiers were wounded and 466 killed. The SADF also claimed to have killed a thousand PLAN combatants though only 157 were accounted for by reports of specic actions. Reported in Namibia a Nation Under Siege, Resister, no. 27 (AugustSeptember 1983), 1213: 12. 68 Reported by the End Conscription Campaign, Militarization Facts and Figures, p. 3. 69 Coker, South Africas Security Dilemmas, p. 29, citing The Times (London) report of 18 September 1985, is imprecise about the dates that these gures cover, but the context suggests that these were SADF deaths since 1978. 70 Cawthra, Brutal Force, p. 179. 71 News from the Battleeld, The Combatant (August 1988), 1921. 366 Alternative explanations The SADF did admit many casualties due to accidents in operational areas, including occupied southern Angola; between January 1979 and June 1983 accidents claimedthe lives of 647 servicemenandinjuredover 3,000. As Christopher Coker notes: Only 107 were reportedkilledin ac- tion. These gures seem highly suspect. Either the South African army is unusually accident prone or else casualties in the eld have been deliberately disguised as accident statistics. 72 Interviews with white South Africans after South Africas withdrawal from Namibia and An- gola indicate that some soldiers injured in battle were instructed to lie about the cause of their injuries: a common excuse for the loss of limbs was for individuals to say that they had been in an auto accident in South Africa. 73 Was SWAPO increasingly effective? SWAPO claims about SADF and SWATF casualties may have been exaggerated to bolster morale or be- cause of incomplete information on the fate of South African wounded. Nevertheless, it appears that in several engagements during the 1980s in both Angola and Namibia, South Africa lost more troops than ever be- fore even though the SWATF and the 32 Battalion (primarily composed of mercenaries), took over more of the direct ghting with SWAPOs military arm, PLAN. South African casualties probably grew for three reasons. First, South Africa faced increasingly active and effective military opposi- tion from SWAPO. Second, the very repressiveness and horror of South Africas occupation of Namibia seemed to increase SWAPOs determi- nation. 74 Third, the policy of recruiting black Namibians into SWATF and the SWA police met with increasing resistance: for example, in January 1981, 5,000 Namibian refugees arrived in Angola to avoid conscription. 75 Namibian resistance to conscription meant that more SADF troops were brought into operational areas from South Africa. Was South Africa overextended? After 1974, South Africa conducted a regional destabilization strategy which gradually prompted the state to mobilize large numbers of its white citizens and also increased the pressure for international sanctions against South Africa. When the Portuguese government fell in a military coup in April 1974, the new Portuguese government immediately began negotiations with the liber- ation movements in Angola andMozambique, leading to independence 72 Coker, South Africas Security Dilemmas, p. 44. 73 Interviews by the author in Johannesburg, May 1991. 74 Coker, South Africas Security Dilemmas, p. 42. 75 Cawthra, Brutal Force, p. 202. 367 Argument and change in world politics for both in 1975. While South African Prime Minister Vorster said pub- licly that South Africa had nothing to fear from a black government in Mozambique, ofcials also said that South Africa had lost its cordon sanitaire, was under total onslaught, and ought to respond with a total strategy. 76 Under the total strategy, South Africa began a program of regional destabilization and war, which eventually led to self-encirclement and contributed to South Africas economic stress. No direct military threat was perceived: [T]he military threat to the R.S.A. nds its only ac- tual physical expression in the existence of armed elements of banned political organizations accommodated in neighboring states. They at- tempt to inltrate the R.S.A. for the purposes of terrorism, sabotage and subversion with a view to overthrowing the existing order. 77 South Africa would use all available means military, psychological, economic, political, sociological, technological, diplomatic, ideological, cultural etc. to eliminate the threat posed by communism, the ANC, and its supporters. 78 South Africa tried diplomacy and economic embrace to inuence the new regimes in Angola and Mozambique. 79 Also in 1974, South Africa suggested the creation of a greater Ovambo Bantustan (African home- land) straddlingthe AngolaSouthWest Africa border whichcouldhave reduced South Africas problems with what they believed to be the most militant element of SWAPO, the northern Namibian Ovambo peo- ple, and isolated the largest component of SWAPO military strength. It would also have decreased Angolan territory. 80 Diplomacy failed. 76 ColinLegum, SouthernAfrica: The Secret Diplomacyof Detente, inColinLegum, ed., Africa Contemporary Record, 19741975 (New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1975), vol. VII, pp. A3A15: A7. 77 RSA, White Paper on Defence and Armament Production, 1975, p. 7. The total strategy con- cept is drawn from Andr e Beaufre, a French strategist. Andr e Beaufre, An Introduction to Strategy (New York: Preager, 1965). As one observer notes: when one looks at the total strategy in depth and in relation to Beaufres writings, it appears to have very little au- thenticity of its own. Total strategy. . . is essentially Beaufre writ large in the particular counter-revolutionary context of contemporary South Africa. Philip H. Frankel, Preto- rias Praetorians: CivilMilitary Relations in South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 2970: 46. Also see Steven Metz, Pretorias Total Strategy and Low- Intensity Warfare in Southern Africa, Comparative Strategy 6 (1987), pp. 437469. 78 RSA, White Paper on Defence 1977, p. 4. The White Paper also says that it is important to achieve understanding by governments and citizens of other countries of the RSAs internal policies and the western humanistic tradition upon which they are based. p. 9. 79 Africa Contemporary Record, 19701971, vol. III, pp. A11A17; Legum, Southern Africa: The Secret Diplomacy of Detente, p. A9. 80 Robert S. Jaster, The Defence of White Power: South African Foreign Policy Under Pressure, (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 69. 368 Alternative explanations For Angola and Namibia, the total strategy meant almost continuous use of military force. South Africa also sponsored the Mozambican National Resistance (MNRor Renamo) against Mozambique, even after signing an agreement to halt support for the MNR in 1984. Against Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe, South Africa mixed relatively lost-cost military actions, including air and ground raids against suspected terrorists, with economic incentives and economic coercion. The total strategy because it involved total military and economic mobilization put tremendous stress on the South African military, economy, and society both directly, as the government mobilized, and indirectly, as the international community sanctioned South Africa for its regional aggression and apartheid. White males were drawn out of the economy for military service, the industrial sector was pushedto de- velopweapons, andpublic support for the occupationgraduallywaned. Ironically, South African foreign policy thus helped to undermine the apartheid system it was designed to save. 81 Between 1975 and 1990, South Africa more than doubled its full-time military forces by increasing conscription rates. 82 In 1977, the national service period for white conscripts was increased from one to two years in order to respond to the decision to wage war in Angola and meet the determined resistance of the Namibians. By the early 1980s, one of every ten white South African males was in the armed services at any one time. 83 Full-time forces were supplementedbypart-time Citizen forces and commandos who were regularly called to do up to three months of border-camp service in the operational areas of Namibia and Angola. 84 The entire white male population of apartheid South Africa was subject to military service from ages 16 to 65. 81 Neta C. Crawford, The Domestic Sources and Consequences of Aggressive Foreign Policies: The Folly of South Africas Total Strategy, Working Paper, no. 41 (Centre for Southern African Studies, University of the Western Cape, South Africa, 1995). 82 South Africas full time (permanent force) military in 1965 was 26,500, with 13,500 in the Citizen Force and 51,500 in the Commandos. In 1970 full time military was 43,800, with 26,550 in the Citizen Force and 58,000 in the Commandos. IISS, The Military Balance, for 19651966 and 19701971. 83 M. Brzoska, South Africa: Evading the Embargo, in Michael Brzoska and Thomas Ohlson, Arms Production in the Third World, eds. (London: Taylor & Francis, 1986), pp. 193214: 194. 84 The average number of camps per member [of the CitizenForce], over a periodof three years, was 2.09 (authorized number 3) while the average number of days of service over a period of three years was 87 (authorized number is 120 days in two years). RSA, White Paper on Defence and Armaments Supply 1986, p. 5. 369 Argument and change in world politics All white males must register for military service at 16, while still in school. They are then liable for service in the full-time force. Those who do not make a career in the permanent force are required ei- ther before or after tertiary education to render two years of national service . . . After this they are placed in the part-time citizen force for twelve years, during which time, they must serve up to 720 days in annual 30-, 60- or 90-day camps. Then they are placed in the active citizen force reserve for ve years andmay be requiredto serve 12 days a year in a local commando unit until the age of 55. Finally, they are placed on the national reserve until they are age 65. 85 In June 1979, SADF 8,000 reservists were deployed to Namibia to track down SWAPO forces. 86 By 1988 there were 175,000 in the Citizen Force and150,000 inthe Active CitizenForce Reserve. Between1980 and 1990, there were also 90,000 to 140,000 commandos serving part time. 87 Mobilization of all SADF full- and part-time forces in the mid-1980s would perhaps have totaled between 500,000 and 1 million men, and would rapidly bring the economy to its knees. 88 Finally, to reduce dependency on white soldiers, South Africa gradually integrated its military during the 1970s, and by 1986, almost one quarter of full-time SADF forces (24 percent) were either black (12 percent), coloured (11 percent), or Indian (1 percent). 89 Other militaries in the region mobilized to keep pace with the South African threat. 90 South Africas regional aggression and its occupation of Namibia provoked an international response. The UN Security Council adopted a voluntary arms embargo against South Africa in August 1963, calling upon all states to cease forthwith the sale and shipment of arms, ammunition of all types and military vehicles to South Africa. 91 In response, South Africa developed an indigenous military produc- tion base, and in 1968, South Africa established foundations for the Armaments Development and Production Corporation of South Africa (Armscor), several companies closely afliated and coordinated by the state to ensure that the weapons needed by the SADF were produced 85 Phillips, The Nuts and Bolts of Military Power, p. 18. 86 Jaster, The Defence of White Power, p. 93. 87 IISS, The Military Balance (London: Brasseys) for the years 19801990. 88 Phillips, The Nuts and Bolts of Military Power, p. 19. 89 RSA, White Paper on Defence and Armament Supply 1986, p. 17. 90 Of course the governments of Angola and Mozambique were ghting South African supported guerrilla forces, which also caused them to increase their military forces. 91 UN Security Council (SC) Resolution 181, 7 August 1963. See Neta C. Crawford, How Arms Embargoes Work, in Neta C. Crawford and Audie Klotz, eds., How Sanctions Work: Lessons From South Africa (New York: St. Martins, 1999), pp. 4574. 370 Alternative explanations Table 8.1 Numbers in the armed forces of Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, 19751990 Angola Mozambique South Africa a Rhodesia/Zimbabwe b 1975 30,000 20,000 50,000 15,000 1976 35,000 21,000 59,000 17,000 1977 47,000 26,000 67,000 17,000 1978 47,000 25,000 78,000 24,000 1979 47,000 30,000 70,000 38,000 1980 47,000 30,000 70,000 94,000 1981 53,000 30,000 78,000 74,000 1982 54,000 30,000 78,000 50,000 1983 54,000 32,000 77,000 46,000 1984 60,000 34,000 97,000 46,000 1985 66,000 35,000 95,000 46,000 1986 70,000 65,000 90,000 45,000 1987 74,000 65,000 102,000 45,000 1988 107,000 65,000 100,000 45,000 1989 100,000E 71,000 103,000 49,500 1990 100,000E 72,000 77,400 56,400 E: estimated. a Full-time military. b Zimbabwe became a majority rule government in early 1980. The gures noted prior to 1979 are for the armed forces of the white controlled government. Sources: Figures for 19751977 are taken from the US Arms Control and Disar- mament Agency, World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers, 1987; for 1978 1988 from World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 1989, (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Ofce, 1987, 1990; for 19891990 from Interna- tional Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 19891990, and 1990 1991 (London: Brasseys, 1990). by South African industries or procured abroad. In the mid-1970s, in anticipation of a mandatory UN arms embargo, South Africa increased its procurement schedule and domestic production, saying, The RSA must, as far as practicable, be self-sufcient in the provision of arms and ensure their continued production. 92 In 1977, the UN Security Council condemned South Africa for its acts of repression and attacks on its neighbors, arguing that the military build-up by South Africa and its persistent acts of aggression against the neighboring States seriously disturb the security of those states. It also declaredthat the acquisitionby SouthAfrica of arms and 92 RSA, White Paper on Defence 1977, p. 9. 371 Argument and change in world politics related mat erial constitutes a threat to the maintenance of international peace and security. 93 The Security Council imposed a mandatory arms embargo on South Africa, prohibiting exports of weapons, ammunition, military vehicles and equipment, paramilitary and police equipment, and spare parts, while also prohibiting states from granting licensing arrangements to manufacture military equipment in South Africa. When the SADF moved into South African townships, and increased regional military aggression, the UN Security Council passed a resolu- tion in December 1984 requesting that all states refrain from importing South African produced arms, ammunition, and military vehicles. If South Africa wanted to remain at war in Namibia and Angola, with the UN arms embargo in place, it had to increase its domestic arms production. Before 1963, South Africa spent 70 percent of its mil- itary budget on arms procurement overseas, most of it from the UK. But by 1984, almost 100 percent was spent within South Africa for lo- cal arms production. 94 By 1990, South Africa had 975 private contrac- tors engaged by Armscor. 95 Arms procurement and military industry became an enormous drain on the South African economy during the 1970s and1980s: The absorptionof scarce resources (capital, labour and foreign exchange) and the crowding out of non-military public and private investment andof non-military R&Dnot only exacerbatedmany of the existing structural problems in the apartheid economy. . . but also contributed to the underdevelopment, declining productivity and poor international competitiveness of the civilian economy. 96 Table 8.2 shows the growth in ofcial expenditures for acquisitions by Armscor. 97 While the embargo, and arms production to counter it, strained the South African economy, South Africas tightly linked military and foreign policies toward Angola and Namibia led to military overexten- sion. In 1975 South Africa articulated increasing alarm over the actual and potential military collaboration between SWAPOguerrillas and the 93 UN SC Resolution 418, 4 November 1977. 94 Signe Landgren, Embargo Disimplemented: South Africas Military Industry (London: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 9. Also see William Cobbett, Apartheids Army and the Arms Embargo, in Cock and Nathan, eds., Society at War, pp. 232243. 95 RSA, Brieng on the Organization and Functions of the South African Defence Force and the Armaments Corporation of South Africa, Limited 1990, p. 66. 96 Peter Batchelor and Susan Willett, Disarmament and Defence Industrial Adjustment in South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 48. 97 It is unlikely that the clandestine purchase of armaments is included in ofcial South African government gures. 372 Alternative explanations Table 8.2 South Africas expenditures for arms acquisition Year ending Millions of Rand a 1967 23 1969 52 1971 68 1973 102 1975 296 1977 689 1979 921 1980 1,178 1981 1,235 1982 1,450 1983 1,591 1984 1,571 1985 1,865 1986 2,463 1987 2,300 1988 2,743 1989 4,845 a Not in constant Rand. Source: RSA, Brieng on the Organization and Functions of the South African Defence Force and the Armaments Corporation of South Africa, Limited 1990, p. 66. Angolan independence movements. South Africa saw Angola, domi- nated by the Marxist MPLA, as a haven for the ANC and SWAPO and as a launching pad for Soviet aggression. Fighting among three ma- jor independence movements in Angola the MPLA, UNITA and the FNLA also threatened South African economic interests in Angola, particularly the Calueque dam on the Cunene River. SADF invadedAngola in July andAugust 1975, saying, South Africa responded to a call from the workers in the CaluequeRuacana scheme to protect them. . . This military intervention was then extended in or- der to deect the effects of the Angolan civil war from the northern border of South-West Africa and inhibit SWAPO efforts to capitalize on the unstable situation in the southern region of Angola. 98 The ini- tial invasion was small, involving about 500 SADF troops taking up 98 RSA, White Paper on Defence 1977, p. 6. 373 Argument and change in world politics positions near the hydroelectric installations along the Cunene River, and disarming UNITA, FNLA, and MPLA troops. 99 By late August, South Africa occupied a strip of territory 50 km (c. 31 miles) deep along the border. In September and October of 1975, the SADF esca- lated and moved up the Angolan coast while Zairean and FNLA troops attempted to crush the MPLA from the north. In response, Cuba sent just under 500 military instructors in October to assist the MPLA, and in November sent 650 troops to help the MPLA turn back the invaders. Thus, despite coming within 100 miles of the capital, South Africa was forced to retreat. The SADF columns had outrun their supply lines while the MPLA forces were rapidly reinforcing themselves with heavy arms. 100 Western support, particularly covert assistance from the US Central Intelligence Agency, was not enough to ensure a quick SADF or UNITA victory in Angola. By December, SADF forces were suffering what they considered signicant losses. SADF retreated in early 1976, but the invasion became the prototype for the basic pattern of South African be- havior towardAngola over the next tenyears: frequent small-scale sabo- tage, periodic large-scale militaryincursions, the occupationof southern Angola, and military support of UNITA. 101 It is unlikely that UNITA could have survived without South African government support in the form of weapons, vehicles, and fuel: From a demoralized band of 3,000 men who ed into the bush [in 1976], UNITAs leader Jonas Savimbi claims to have built a force of 30,000 who are active in every province up to the tenth parallel. 102 In addition, former FNLA guerril- las were trained by South Africa and organized into the 32 Battalion which later became a permanent 4,000 member element of the SADF. 103 99 Christopher Coker, South Africa: ANewMilitary Role in Southern Africa 19691982, in Robert Jaster, ed., Southern Africa: Regional Security Problems and Prospects (New York: St. Martins Press, 1985), pp. 142150: 143. 100 Cawthra, Brutal Force, p. 147. 101 The relationshipfromthe mid-1970s tothe late 1980s betweenSouthAfrica andUNITA was quite close. UNITA, an indigenous organization, grew to depend quite heavily on South African weapons, training and logistical support. In some cases, as documented by Phyllis Johnson and David Martin, Apartheid Terrorism: The Destabilization Report, The Commonwealth Secretariat (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), SADF forces performed covert sabotage missions in Angola but left evidence to suggest that it was UNITAs work. 102 Coker, South Africa: A New Military Role in Southern Africa 19691982, p. 145. 103 Robert S. Jaster, The 1988 Peace Accords and the Future of South-Western Africa, Adelphi Papers, no. 253 (Autumn 1990), pp. 1011; Coker, South Africas Security Dilemmas, p. 39. 374 Alternative explanations SouthAfrica intensiedits military effort inAngola, attempting to de- feat the Angolan government and crush SWAPO, but the bush war, as they called it, suffered from both the UN arms embargo and the Cuban military presence. In June 1980 and August 1981, SADF launched large- scale military incursions into Angola and occupied Cunene Province. 104 Cuban military assistance to Angola increased so that by late 1983, when South Africa launched another effort, Operation Askari, Cuban aid was able to make a difference in the battle for Cuvelai, Angola. The SADF lost at least ten aircraft, including four sophisticated Mirage ghter aircraft. This was a signicant blow given the inability to replace any Mirage lost from their already small inventory because of the arms embargo. 105 Moreover, the embargo led to a spare parts shortage: of the fewer than 70 sophisticated French Mirage aircraft in the South African arsenal, in the late 1980s, more than half of the aircraft were grounded due to the lack of spare parts. 106 After invading Angola again in 1983, South Africa, under the Lusaka Accords of February 1984, agreed to withdraw from Angolas Cunene province by the end of March. But South Africa never completely with- drew. In July 1984, South Africa admitted that it had halted withdrawal on the rationale that SWAPO, which had not been part of the agreement, was still operating in the region. Escalation and stalemate Between 1985 and 1988, there were numerous military clashes between the Angolan military and UNITA anti-government guerrillas and the SADF. Moreover, the scale of South African operations in support of UNITA, including sabotage, increased. 107 In 1985, the United States Congress repealedtheClarkAmendment banningUSaidtoUNITA, and in 1986 US military support resumed. Since South Africa hadbeen fund- ing UNITA, this amounted to a subsidy of South African foreign policy: 104 Coker, South Africa: A New Military Role in Southern Africa 19691982, p. 144. Coker, p. 143, argues: Although these operations have been described as raids the termis somewhat misleading. Most recentlytheyhave amountedtofull-scale invasions involving armoured cars, ghter bombers and large detachments of troops. 105 In 1980 there were six Canberra B and six Buccaneer bombers with 32 Mirage F1AZ ghters in the arsenal; by 1987 there was one less Canberra, six Buccaneer, and 15 Mirage F1AZ. IISS, Military Balance for 19801981 and 19871988. 106 Coker, South Africas Security Dilemmas, pp. 3334. 107 Angola blamed over 3,000 acts of sabotage from 1976 to June 1987 on the economically vital BuengelaRailwayonSADFandUNITA. SeeJohnsonandMartin, ApartheidTerrorism, pp. 129, 130 and Cawthra, Brutal Force, p. 159. 375 Argument and change in world politics US aid to UNITA was $15 million in 1986, and again in 1987. 108 Despite external assistance, neither South Africa nor UNITA was able to defeat Angolas Peoples Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola (FAPLA). The turning points were two battles: for UNITA occupied Mavinga in 1985, and the siege of Cuito Cuanavale from 1987 to 1988. When Angola lost a bid to oust UNITA from Mavinga in the fall of 1985, due to the intervention of South African forces, the Angolans purchased sophisticated aircraft and radar from the Soviet Union and in May 1986 Angola received the new equipment. South Africa remained in south- ern Angola, and the US sent sophisticated anti-aircraft equipment to UNITA. 109 In August 1987, FAPLA began a counter-offensive against UNITA forces in Mavinga, and SADF forces sought to take Cuito Cuanavale because it was the site of an important Angolan aireld. The battle for Cuito lasted months, but the Angolans held. The SADF sent in 3,000 men and perhaps 2,000 SWATF troops to support the estimated 10,000 well-trained UNITA forces already in Mavinga. 110 SADF encircled the Angolan military, and FAPLA retreated to their base in Cuito Cua- navale about 200 miles fromthe border fromOctober to December 1987. South Africa continued to incur (as well as inict) substantial losses during this period. . . FromSeptember to November, South Africa listed thirty-ve SADF members killed in combat: a record for any like pe- riod in the war. Another twenty-six died from cerebral malaria. 111 In November 1987, South Africas head of state, P.W. Botha, visited a base in southern Angola to boost the morale of SADF forces. In December SouthAfrica rejecteda UNresolutionfor SouthAfrica to withdrawfrom Angola and the siege continued. In March 1988, Cuba sent 15,000 fresh troops. But instead of staying in rear positions as was characteristic of past deployments, the Cubans 108 In1988, US assistance to UNITArose to $3045 million; in1989, aidwas $5060 million; in1990, aidwas $6580million. U.S. Still Fuels War inAngola,WashingtonNotes onAfrica, Spring 1990, pp. 1011; US Aid to Unita . . . The Beginning of the End? Washington Notes on Africa, Winter 1990, pp. 46. 109 On US andSoviet assistance, to UNITAandthe MPLArespectively, see GeraldBender, The Eagle andthe Bear inAngola,The Annals of the AmericanAcademyof Political andSocial Science 489 (January 1987), 123132; Michael McFaul, Rethinking the Reagan Doctrine in Angola, International Security 14 (Winter 1989/90), 99135. 110 South Africa never had more than 9 000 troops inside Angola, although most sources claim the number was closer to 3 000. Thomas Ohlson, The Cuito Cuanavale Syn- drome: Revealing SADF Vulnerabilities, South African Review 5 (Braamfontein: Raven Press, 1989), pp. 181190: 185. 111 Jaster, The 1988 Peace Accords, p. 18. 376 Alternative explanations participated in the counter-attack which ultimately turned the battle in Angolas favor. Angolas anti-aircraft defences made the loss of irreplaceable aircraft costly for the South Africa air force, and armoured cars were stopped with anti-tank missiles. 112 SADF troops were driven to defensive positions around the Calueque dam in Southern Angola. On 27 June, a SADF commander led an assault on Cuban troops and killed 150 men. The Cubans retaliated with an air assault on the Calueque position, killing twelve SADF members. Moreover, SWATF forces mutinied and 360, mostly black soldiers, were imprisoned because they refused to ght. A senior SADF military commander said of the 1988 confrontation and Cuban build-up: This was more than we could handle. Had the Cubans attacked [Namibia] they would have overrun the place. We could not have stopped them. 113 SADF claimed that only fty-two whites died in the entire operation. The war inside Namibia also grew in intensity and scale, but the ratio of the opposing military forces appears to have been rather lopsided. Portraying its military actions in Southern Africa as peacekeeping, anti-terrorism, and training, South Africa justied attacks against Namibian refugee camps during 1978 and 1979 as against SWAPO supporters and members. AMay 1978 SADF attack on Kassinga refugee camp in southern Angola left over 600 Namibians dead, and nearly half of those killed were children. 114 In March 1979, South Africa attacked SWAPO camps in Zambia, and Angola reported numerous small-scale incursions by South Africa in 1979. 115 In 1979, the SADF said, The protection of South-West Africa and her peoples against terrorism remains a priority task which has been one of the most important activities of the SA Army in the past year . . . The operational task in SWA also affords an important opportunity for members of the SA Army to acquire practical experience in that type of warfare which, in fact, serves as a very important rounding off of the SA Armys training 112 Johnson and Martin, Apartheid Terrorism, p. 147. 113 QuotedinJaster, The 1988Peace Accords,p. 23. This assessment appears tobe aslight exaggeration. First, the Cubans clearly stated that they were not interested in crossing the border between Angola and Namibia and they never did so. Second, while the disposition of South African forces in the March 1988 battle is not clear, it seems that if Cuban and Angolan forces had crossed the border, there were sufcient troops and equipment to at least have produced a stalemate at the border. But such a battle would have cost even more white South African lives. 114 Cawthra, Brutal Force, 149; Johnson and Martin, Apartheid Terrorism, p. 140. The Angolangovernment reportedthat 700 men, women, andchildrenwere killedat Kassinga. UN, Namibia Bulletin, no. 3 (September 1978), p. 11. 115 UN, Namibia Bulletin, no. 3 (October 1979), pp. 1316. 377 Argument and change in world politics program. 116 One British mercenary, Trevor Edwards, deserted after serving for nine months in the SADF 32 Battalion: Our main job is to take an area andclear it. We sweepthrough it andwe kill everything in front of us, cattle, goats, people, everything. We are out to stop SWAPO and so we stop them getting into the villages for food and water. But half the time the locals dont know whats going on. Were just fucking them up and it gets out of hand. Some of the guys get a bit carried away. And SWAPO still get by us and cross the cut-line between Angola and Namibia. Its not as if we are stopping them. 117 SWAPOs military presence in the region was small, with fewer than 2,000 guerrillas in 1980, but grew to between 6,000 and 8,000 troops during the mid 1980s. 118 Estimates of South African forces commit- ted to Namibia vary but the number seemed to sharply increase in the late 1970s and 1980s. In 1977, there were an estimated 53,200 SADF in Namibia; in May 1979 SWAPO testied in the UN that there were about 75,000 SADF troops and personnel in Namibia. 119 In 1982 Defence Min- ister D.F. Malan admitted that there had been a ftyfold increase in the number of South African troops in Namibia and South Africa since 1975. 120 By 1986, the UN estimated that South Africas total occupation was more than 100,000 troops in Namibia, comprising mercenaries, additional reinforcements that are frequently airlifted into the Territory, as well as locally recruited elements and an increasingly armed white settler community. 121 Throughout the 1980s, SWAPO claimed modest military successes, which South Africa persistently denied. SADF also denied UN reports that it was engaged in violent repression inside Namibia, although a South African Air Force song, to the tune of Ghost Riders in the Sky, captures thefeelingandSADFstrategy: TheBillyBoys wereloadingup, One dark and windy night, Six bombs each, Mark 82s, It was a fearsome 116 RSA, White Paper on Defence and Armaments Supply 1979, p. 18. Abbreviations are in the original. 117 Quoted in Nick Davies, The Guardian (London), 29 January 1981. Reprinted in UN, Namibia Bulletin, no. 1 (1981), pp. 2932: 29. 118 Coker, South Africas Security Dilemmas, p. 30. 119 UN, Namibia Bulletin, no. 2, ( July 1977), pp. 1819; UN, Namibia Bulletin, no. 2, ( July 1979) p. 20. 120 UN, The Military Situation in and Relating to Namibia (New York: United Nations, 1983), p. 5. This is an odd number. 121 UN, The Military Situation in and Relating to Namibia (New York: United Nations, 1987), p. 2. 378 Alternative explanations sight, To strike at dawn, that was their task, Against the Swapo swine, To Kill the commies in a group, Before they cross the line . . . The bombs were right on line, The Swaps were taken by surprise, Death came so quick and fast, No more would they terrorize, Theyd met their end at last . . . 122 The UNreported evidence of terrible brutality committed in Namibia by SADF, SWATF, and the 2,000 to 3,000 mercenaries from Western nations ghting for South Africa. A former member of the SADF, Bill Anderson, told the United Nations in 1976 of SADF activities in Namibia. His unit had been involved mostly in sweeping areas of suspected guerrillas and in guarding the northern Namibian border. Orders had been given to capture every male over the age of puberty and to kill those who ran away. His batallion [sic] had captured between 200 and 300 men. The prisoners were kept blindfolded, with their hands tied tightly behind their backs. They were frequently assaulted, punched, burnt with cigarettes or had sand stuffed into their mouths by men of all ranks, even in the presence of senior ofcers. The interrogations themselves were conducted in special tents and were accompanied by various forms of torture, include [sic] water torture and electric shock. 123 Could South Africa have won the war in Angola and kept Namibia if it had used all its military might? South Africa lost its conventional military edge because the UN arms embargo made it difcult to replace equipment. For example, losses of twenty-two aircraft in battle and an- other twelve due to accident or error between 1974 and 1989 were large given the small size of its total inventory. 124 On the other hand, despite the UN embargo, South Africa successfully pursued the development of nuclear weapons during the 1970s and 1980s to offset its numeri- cal disadvantage in Africa. 125 Because South Africa was unwilling to use its six nuclear weapons, its declining conventional military capa- bilities were thus signicant. Ultimately, the arms embargo meant that South Africa was far enough behind in military technology to help turn the balance in Angolas favor when, in the late 1980s, Soviet weapons 122 Excerpt of The BillyBoys Song, words byRickCulpan. DickLord, Vlamgat: The Story of the Mirage F1 in the South African Air Force (Weltevreden Park, South Africa: Covos-Day Books, 2000), pp. 269270: 269. 123 UN, Namibia Bulletin, no. 1, (April 1977), pp. 910. 124 Lord, Vlamgat, pp. 267268. 125 David Fig, Sanctions and the Nuclear Industry, in Crawford and Klotz, eds., How Sanctions Work, pp. 75102. 379 Argument and change in world politics and thousands of Cuban military forces were pumped into Angola at the request of the Angolan government. Thus, the combination of South Africas relative military isolation and the increased quality of Angolan arms led to a shift in the balance of forces. But South Africa did not use all its military capabilities. For exam- ple, why did South Africa forgo using its nuclear weapons? Were the constraints strategic there were few or no military targets worth the expenditure of an expensive nuclear weapon or normative/political, specically, the fear of international approbation, increased isolation, and sanctions? Negotiating Namibian independence In the 1960s and early 1970s South Africa discussed Namibia with UN representatives. In April 1977, Britain, France, West Germany, and the United States formed a Contact Group to negotiate with South Africa over Namibia. Under intensied pressure, South Africa accepted UN Security Council Resolution 435 of 29 September 1978 which called for the withdrawal of South Africas illegal administration from Namibia and the transfer of power to the people of Namibia with the assis- tance of the UnitedNations. . . Resolution435 also establisheda United Nations Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) to supervise indepen- dence elections. The Contact Group initiative foundered when South Africa added more conditions to its withdrawal. Still seeking interna- tional legitimacy for the occupation, South Africa also reformed its gov- ernment of South West Africa by agreeing to elections for a Constituent Assembly. South Africa sponsored the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (DTA) and SWAPO boycotted the December 1978 elections. The inter- national community called the unsupervised elections illegal, and not surprisingly, the DTA won. Thus, as one scholar noted, South Africa managedtogive the appearance of co-operatingwiththe Contact Group and moving the negotiations forward, while in fact avoiding rm com- mitments and blocking progress. 126 In 1981, the Reagan administration proclaimed a new US policy toward South Africa, constructive engagement. The Reagan admin- istration opposed sanctions against South Africa, and Contact Group efforts dissolved into trilateral negotiations, as the chief State Depart- ment ofcer on Africa, Chester Crocker, began talks with Angola and 126 Jaster, The 1988 Peace Accords, p. 12. Also see Jaster, The Defence of White Power, pp. 106108. 380 Alternative explanations South Africa. In 1984 South Africa signed separate agreements to cease military operations against Angola and Mozambique but soon ab- rogated both. The Reagan administration began openly supporting UNITA, eventually convincing the Congress to repeal the Clark Amend- ment in 1985, and proposed a linkage strategy: South Africa would agree to withdraw from Namibia if and when Cuban troops aiding An- gola withdrew. The Angolan government briey withdrew from US mediated negotiations in early 1986 but returned to the bargaining ta- ble in mid July 1987. The Soviets joined the diplomatic effort, and in May 1988 Cuba entered the negotiations. In late July 1988 the parties agreed in principle that South Africa would leave Namibia and that Cuba would withdraw its troops. From the point when Cuba joined the negotiations and agreed to linkage, much of the bargaining was over the pace of Cuban withdrawal from Angola and the timing of Namibian independence. 127 There were no SWAPO representatives at the negotiations. In December 1988, the Brazzaville Protocol agree- ment to end the war between Angola and South Africa was formally signed. Implementation of the agreement was not awless, nor did peace im- mediately follow in Angola and Namibia. Indeed, one of the largest battles in the war in Namibia occurred in early April 1989: SWAPO troops returning to Namibia were attacked by the SADF and more than 200 SWAPO ghters died. Demobilization nevertheless contin- ued and elections were held under UN supervision. SWAPO won a majority and Namibia became independent on 21 March 1990 under a SWAPO government. 128 One member of a South African psychological action (propaganda) team deployed in Namibia, said I dont under- stand how SWAPO won the independence elections in 1990 no one we met in the villages said they supported SWAPO. 129 However, the Namibian government publicly expressed concern that plots uncov- ered to overthrow the SWAPO government in 1990 were orchestrated by South Africa. 130 Indeed, in 1991 Nico Basson, a white South African 127 See Gerald J. Bender, Peacemaking in Southern Africa: the Luanda-Pretoria tug-of- war, Third World Quarterly 11 ( January 1989), 1530; and Gillian Gunn, A Guide to the Intricacies of the Angola-Namibia Negotiations,CSIS Africa Notes, no. 90 (8 September 1988). 128 The transition was also not without bitterness: In some predominantly white suburbs around Windhoek [Namibias capital], residents are ying the swastika, according to Mark Verbaan, Namibia: Opening a New Chapter,Africa Report 35 (MayJune 1990), 2528: 26. 129 Interview with the author, 27 May 1991, Pretoria, South Africa. 130 Africa Research Bulletin, Political Series, 27 (August 1990), 9804. 381 Argument and change in world politics who worked for the South African-backed Democratic Turnhalle Al- liance, described SADF efforts to inuence the 1989 election, inltrate SWAPO, and sabotage the UN forces supervising the transition process in 1989. 131 Ethical argument At many points in the history of South West Africa/Namibia, it has seemed as if brute force rather than ethical argument was decisive. Yet ethical argument played a role throughout, shaping the material and normative constraints felt by South Africa. First, sanctions by West- ern governments whose interest in South Africas mineral wealth would have argued against embargos were imposed primarily as a consequence of ethical arguments made by the international anti- apartheid movement. These sanctions placed military and economic constraints on South Africa and hastened South Africas overextension. The oil and arms embargoes were particularly harmful, exacerbating the military constraints South Africa faced in Angola and Namibia. 132 Again, sanctions were put inplace as a consequence of normative beliefs held by anti-apartheid activists who made successful ethical arguments and would have been unlikely, even unthinkable, fty or one hundred years earlier when dominant normative beliefs favored colonialism. 133 Second, South Africa faced increasingly effective resistance inside Namibia, in part because SWAPO was able to use ethical arguments to mobilize the international community in support of their struggle for independence. The UNs recognitionof SWAPOas the sole andauthen- tic representatives of the Namibian people meant that South Africa never felt sufciently condent to ban SWAPOs legal political pres- ence in Namibia. 134 And without nancial and material support from the UN and others, SWAPO would have found it much more difcult to ght the apartheid regime. Third, although most of the political ferment in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s concerned apartheid, there were ethical arguments inside South Africa about policy toward Namibia and South Africas 131 Christopher S. Wren, South African Describes Army Namibia Plot, The New York Times, 1 July 1991, p. A7. 132 Neta C. Crawford, Trump Card or Theatre: An Introduction to Two Sanctions Debates, pp. 324; How Arms Embargoes Work, pp. 4574; and Oil Sanctions Ag- ainst Apartheid, pp. 103126, in Crawford and Klotz, eds., How Sanctions Work. 133 Audie Klotz, Norms in International Relations: The Struggle Against Apartheid (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 134 Leys and Saul, Namibias Liberation Struggle, p. 14. 382 Alternative explanations other neighbors. Ultimately, opinion about South African foreign policy inside white South Africa became divided in the 1980s even as the government attempted to silence dissenters and discredit their arguments. 135 White South African males began to resist conscription in larger and more vocal numbers, although some just quietly refused to appear for their national service or yearly Citizen Force camps, and some left the country, ostensibly to pursue higher education. The End Conscription Campaign (ECC) formed in South Africa in 1983 mobilized white males of draft age in South Africa and was supported by human rights, religious, womens, and student groups. As resistance to conscription grew, ECC activists were detained and police raided the homes and ofces of ECC members. The army formed a unit to track down draft resisters in 1987, and in 1988 the government banned the ECC. 136 In August 1988, just two weeks before the banning, the ECC organized a public announcement by 143 white males of their refusal to serve in the SADF. The ECC engaged in political education campaigns about South African foreign policy: immediately after formation in 1983 the ECC embarked on a No War in Namibia campaign. 137 In addition, the Committee on South African War Resistance, formed in 1978, published a four part series focusing on South Africas occupation of Namibia in its journal Resister. 138 In September 1989, 771 conscripts publicly refusedto serve inthe SADF. 139 The Deputy Minister of Defence accused the ECC members of being weak: lacking in the moral bre to defend the country against Russia and its surrogates. 140 135 During the 1980s, activists from all racial groups were subjected to government ban- ning, detention, harassment, and assassination. For example, in 1985 the Congress of South African Students was banned. In 1988 alone, 528 students, scholars, and teachers were detained, while about 570 trade unionists, workers, and community political orga- nizers were detained. From 1976 through the rst six months of 1988 18,675 people were detained under security legislation and an estimated additional 40,996 were detained un- der state of emergency regulations from 21 July 1985 to December 1988. David Webster and Maggie Friedman, Repression and the State of Emergency: June 1987 March 1989, South African Review 5, (Braamfontein, SA: Raven Press, 1989), pp. 1641. 136 Laurie Nathan, Marching to a Different Beat, in Cock and Nathan, eds., Society at War, pp. 308323. 137 The best account of the ECC through 1988 is Nathan, Marching to a Different Beat. The white anti-conscription movement is chronicled in the periodical, Resister: Journal of the Committee on South African War Resistance, published in Britain until 1991. Also see Out of Step: War Resistance in South Africa (London: Catholic Institute of International Relations, 1989). 138 The series began in Resister, no. 27 (AugustSeptember 1983). 139 We Say No to the SADF: National and International Registers Launched, Resister, no. 64 (First Quarter 1990), 67: 7. 140 Quoted in Nathan, Marching to a Different Beat, p. 317. 383 Argument and change in world politics Between 1975 and 1978, on average some 1,750 conscripts failed to report for national service induction. In 1985, 7,589 conscripts failed to report, 50 percent of the number to be inducted. The government said later that most of these no-shows were accounted for, but stopped an- nouncing induction gures for subsequent call-ups. The 1986 Defence White Paper atly stated that the objections of churches to national ser- vice will result in the Defence Force being reduced to inefciency. 141 In a government brochure describing national service commitments for white males, the role of the anti-conscriptionmovement was minimized. The brochure states that the reduction of the initial national service pe- riod announced by the State President on 7 December 1989, was the nal result of an investigation which was launched on our own initia- tive earlier in the year and not in any way due to pressure frominformal pressure groups. 142 Thus, the ethical arguments of the war resisters who did not have to make arguments which could have led to govern- ment harassment, abuse, and arrest contributed to the weakening of South Africas military capabilities. In addition, there appeared to be increased desertion among SADF troops serving in Namibia. In 1981, of the 577 held in SADF detention centers, 519 were serving sentences for refusing to serve in the eld or for going absent without leave. 143 Moreover, SADF conscripts were known to be deliberately vandalizing military equipment in operational areas. 144 Finally, the anti-war movement in South Africa had some success in changing white opinion. White support for South Africas policy of attacking terrorist/guerrilla bases in neighboring states declined. In 1982, 81.1 percent of white South Africans agreed with this policy. In May 1988, a poll showed 63 percent of whites supporting attacks and by January 1990, 58.7 percent thought South Africa should attack such bases. The intensity of white support also declined, with 60 percent of those who denitely agree with the policy in 1982 and 1984 declining to 23.9 percent denitely agreeing in 1990. 145 Thus, my analysis of the South West Africa case throughout the book has shown the limits of an ethical argument explanation. Yet it also demonstrates that what some call material factors namely the 141 RSA, White Paper on Defence and Armaments Supply 1986, p. 7. 142 RSA, SADF brochure, National Service, p. 12. 143 Coker, South Africas Security Dilemmas, p. 44. 144 Ibid., p. 45. 145 Andr e Du Pisani, What Do We Think? A Survey of White Opinion on Foreign Policy Issues, No. 5 (Johannesburg: The South African Institute for International Affairs, May 1990), p. 10. 384 Alternative explanations economic benets of occupation, the costs of sanctions, more effective resistance in Namibia andAngola, andSouth Africas declining military capability were affected by ethical argument. As bad as the German and South African rule of South West Africa was, if there had been no ethical argument, the situation would likely have been much worse for the inhabitants of the region. Counterfactuals The strength and limits of an explanation are often tested by comparing the actual turn of events to counterfactuals. 146 If key conditions had been different could colonialismhave survived the twentieth century as a legitimate institution? I briey discuss three counterfactuals. First, if Germany had won World War I, how would the world be different with respect to colonialism? There would certainly have been no League of Nations since the League idea came out of the Anglo- American community that won the war. Without the victory of the Western allies, there would also likely have been no German or Turkish territories to dispose of in some way or another. Further, without a League and captured territory, there would have been no Mandate system, no International Labor Organization, and no dominant powers with populations interested in championing self-determination and institutionalizing those beliefs. The fact that Germany lost World War I, and had its colonies stripped from its possession, contributed not only to the Mandate system, but to Germanys post-war grievances. A German colonial lobby formed after World War I to protest the peace settlement persistently called for recol- onization and both private and government resources were devoted to persuading Germans of the values of colonies. They argued that they neededlivingspace andthat their former Africancolonies, the League mandates, had been stolen from them and should be returned. 147 During the mid-1930s, the Nazi government raised what became known as the Colonial Question. Germany argued that Britain had exaggerated or lied about their ill-treatment of South West Africans 146 I thank Jon Mercer for reminding me of the importance of explicitly discussing coun- terfactuals. Auseful introductionis PhilipE. Tetlock andAaronBelkin, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 147 See Wolfe W. Schmokel, Dream of Empire: German Colonialism, 19191945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964). 385 Argument and change in world politics and others and used ofcial government publications to counter the colonial guilt lie. When the Nazis and Italians raised the Colonial Question to British diplomats in the 1930s, there was a serious dis- cussion of the issues in Britain, although the British ultimately, for several reasons, decided against returning the colonies to their former colonial masters. Some argued that return would break up British lines of communication on the African continent. The British public was also against returning the colonies. Further, ethical arguments supposing that a change in the language spoken in the mandated territory would harm education efforts implied the Africans right to self-determination. According to the Labour Party, this might well put back the clock of advancement for the indigenous population for a generation, and that population has a moral right to veto them which the Labour Party should uphold. 148 In the House of Commons Debate on the question on 7 December 1938, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Malcolm MacDonald, assured the House that both the wishes of the inhabitants of the territories and of the House itself would have to be considered before any decision was taken. 149 What if Germany, Italy, andJapanhadwonWorldWar II? The German Reich was explicitly bent on re-establishing German colonial territory, and Germanys place in the sun, and there is good evidence to believe the German government would have undertaken new colonization if it hadbeensuccessful inthe war. Further, in1939, the Germangovernment undertook planning for a colonial empire that included, among other things, a reliance on forced labor. 150 Germany, Italy, and Japan also took territory and established colonies during the war. If the Axis powers had won, the League of Nations, already essentially ended at the outset of World War II, would likely not have had a successor in the formof the United Nations. There would have been no United Nations Trusteeship System and no Declaration on Non-Self-Governing Territories. Further, if the Nazis had won, Nazi Germanys racist beliefs would probably not have been so thoroughly discounted in the West. Both of these counterfactual scenarios highlight the key conditions of democratic normative beliefs and culture. Specically, the outlines of 148 Labour Party, The Demand for Colonial Territories and Equality of Economic Opportunity (memorandum, March 1937), p. 48 quoted in D.J. Morgan, The Ofcial History of Colo- nial Development, Vol. 1: The Origins of British Aid Policy, 19241945 (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 21. 149 Morgan, The Ofcial History of Colonial Development, vol. I, p. 21. 150 Schmokel, Dream of Empire: German Colonialism, 19191945, pp. 137184. 386 Alternative explanations the colonial policies and practices of Germany, Italy, and Japan were little different from those of Britain or France. The differences were in their domestic political orders. The defeat of Germany and its al- lies by more democratic states who were willing and able to impose their democratic norms on the conquered ensured the triumph of po- litical liberalism, specically the greater articulation and extension of democratic normative beliefs and practices in both the core democ- racies of the West and in those powers relations to their colonies. The necessity to articulate the principles at stake in the two wars solidied and heightened the commitment to democracy and self- determination in the victorious states. The contradictions andhypocrisy of colonialism by self-proclaimed democracies were also highlighted and heightened by the wars. The cluster of principles and normative beliefs that fed into the evolving practice and emergent norm of de- colonization principles of equality, self-determination, nationalism, democracy, human rights, non-intervention, and anti-racism gained broader persuasive power as they were increasingly applied in the heart of the colonial powers, the mother countries, and as these ar- guments were generalized beyond the privileged members of colonial society. Would the colonizers have remained had colonial resistance move- ments beenless effective? Most anti-colonial resistance movements were never great military threats to colonial powers. But they did raise the ethical stakes by posing the problem of how the colonial power would respond. Andthe political effectiveness of anti-colonial movements was signicant. They articulated ethical dilemmas, publicized colonial gov- ernment atrocities, and humanized the colonized in the eyes of the col- onizer. Moreover, to the extent that anti-colonial movements were able to force concessions such as unionization, political representation, and judicial reform, they were an integral part of the decolonization process. Less effective anti-colonial movements would thus likely have meant a longer life for colonialism. How ethical arguments undermined colonialism Practitioners of colonialism made arguments in favor of the practice based on religious/philosophical, practical, scientic, and identity be- liefs. The core of these arguments contained a sharp distinction between Europeans and outsiders and the belief in Western European religious, economic, cultural, biological, and scientic superiority. Yet there were 387 Argument and change in world politics always Europeans, and of course Native Americans, Africans, and Asians, who questioned the beliefs and practices of colonialism, and in particular its most harsh elements, slavery and forced labor. In- deed, the main arguments about colonialism between 1492 and 1900 concerned the ethics of its two primary constitutive practices, slavery and forced labor, rather than any serious questioning of colonialism itself. The ethical explanation for decolonization stresses two consequences of ethical argument. First, ethical arguments fostered growing disbelief in the normality, legitimacy, and necessity for slavery and colonialism, ultimately nurturing what became a widespread normative distaste for colonial empire among the political elites and mass public of colonial powers. Slavery and colonialism depend logically on a belief in human inequality while arguments about the rights of humans are cumula- tive and expanding by the nature of their content. Specically, there was no logical limit to applying human rights and self-determination arguments once people began to believe, at least in principle, in human equality. What is the logicalconnectionbetweenthe endof slaveryandforced labor, and decolonization? The cluster of principles and normative be- liefs that fed into the evolving practice and emergent behavioral norm of decolonization are: equality, self-determination, nationalism, democ- racy, human rights, non-intervention, and anti-racism. What these nor- mative beliefs have in common is respect for the other and non-violent relations that is their core value. These values were extended(oftenim- perfectly and sometimes hypocritically) from sovereigns to individual humans in the core with increased democratization for white males, to the idea of universal human freedom (the abolition of slavery) to other historically weak groups (women and minorities) and states (decolo- nization and non-intervention). Earlyadvocates of colonial reformandlater proponents of decoloniza- tion called on colonizers to act in ways that were consistent with their (evolving) identities, including their newly discovered empathy with the other, colonial subjects. Ultimately, persuasive ethical arguments caused a shift in opinion on the issue of the legitimacy of colonialism among non-colonial powers, and then reformers and anti-imperialists inside the colonial powers. Later, the non-colonial states pressuredreluc- tant colonial powers into granting their colonies independence. Ethical arguments about reforming colonialism harnessed the emotions of em- barrassment andshame onthe part of colonizers. Andethical arguments 388 Alternative explanations (as well as practical and identity arguments) were used by the colonized to mobilize their peers to resist it. 151 Second, persuasive ethical arguments changed the economic and po- litical context for colonialism: bymakingslaveryillegitimate, persuasive ethical arguments increased the costs of colonialism and decreased its prots; and by making aspects of colonial rule illegitimate, persuasive ethical arguments decreased the willingness of domestic populations in the metropole tosupport colonialism. Specically, because of persuasive ethical arguments, two important constituent practices of colonialism, slavery and forced labor, became increasingly suspect (they were defa- miliarized and delegitimized) as colonial powers democratized. Nor- mative beliefs and ethical arguments helped anti-slavery movements outlawslavery andregulate forcedlabor. As the colonizer hadto pay for labor, some of the costs of colonialismincreased and the greater expense was used as evidence that colonialism was no longer in the economic interests of great powers. The belief systems and practices surround- ing and supporting colonialism as the dominant practice among great powers were thus modied by the changing view of the normality of its constitutive and related practices. Further, persuasive ethical arguments shifted colonial actors concep- tions of their interests andalteredthe capabilities of the colonizers as the growing normative revulsion for empire and its constitutive practices was accompanied by domestic resistance to the burdens of empire. 152 The domestic populations of colonial powers increasingly resisted the taxes and conscription required to maintain colonial holdings. The source for this domestic revulsion and resistance among the publics of the colonizers was the sense that empire was not right and certainly not worth the torture, repression, and vast sums of money required to maintain it. Domestic resistance to empire was not new what was perhaps new in the twentieth century was the role of international media and thus the extent to which the publics of colonizers were aware of the techniques their governments used to sustain empire. What was also new was the unwillingness of colonial publics to use violence, es- pecially genocide and torture, to maintain empire. And it was no longer glorious for colonizers to die for empire because of these new identity 151 Hendrik Spruyt, The End of Empire and the Extension of the Westphalian System: The Normative Basis of the Modern State Order, International Studies Review 2 (Summer 2000), 6592. 152 This discussion should not be taken to mean that public sentiments in favor of, or against, colonialism were the same among all European colonizers. 389 Argument and change in world politics and normative beliefs. Thus, the ability of colonial powers to impose colonialism declined as the balance of belief shifted from supporters of colonialism to supporters of reform and decolonization. There was no longer an international consensus on the virtues of maintaining colonial rule. It also became harder to mobilize domestic populations for colo- nial occupation at the same time as resistance inside the colonies in- creased, altering the capabilities of actors in the colonialanti-colonial equation. It was no longer possible, as the great powers had done in the late nineteenth century with their embargo on shipping arms to Africa, to deny support to anti-colonial movements. Mainstream liberals and socialists were willing, and frequently eager, to supply anti-colonial movements with money, and sometimes weapons. The greater legitimacy and international support for anti-colonial inde- pendence movements led to stronger guerrilla movements and le- gal challenges to colonial rule as outsiders sent aid to independence forces. How and why did new normative beliefs come to be applied to colo- nial subjects? There were two catalysts for the shift toward recognizing a principle and then a right to self-determination in the colonies: the end of slavery and the articulation, by colonial subjects, of their rights. Both of these catalysts fostered a long-term movement toward the human- ization of the other, in this case, those who were different from those with military power: the growing acknowledgment by states and so- cieties that all individuals, regardless of their citizenship, race, religion, or other dening characteristics, are entitled to basic protections of life, property, and contract. 153 Perhaps as important as the end of slavery was the fact that West- ern educated members of the colonial empires were able to press their case themselves, in increasing numbers after World Wars I and II, us- ing the language and the legal justicatory modes of the colonizers. This is not the same as the argument that European nationalism spread to the colonies and infected indigenous peoples with national aspira- tions. Nor is it to say that anti-colonial ethical arguments originated in 153 Ethan Nadelmann, Global Prohibition Regimes: The Evolution of Norms in Interna- tional Society, International Organization 44 (Autumn1990), 479526: 483. Moreover, as the historian Michael Adas has argued, the very brutality of World War I contributed to the sense that the so-called civilized nations were not so civilized. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), ch. 6. 390 Alternative explanations the West. 154 Rather, the publics and political elites of the great powers foundit increasingly difcult to argue that the subject races were inca- pable of self-government not yet able to standby themselves when clearly intelligent and articulate members of those peoples fought with Europeans during the world wars and then came to Europe to present their own case, in the language of the colonizers and from within the logic of their dominant belief systems of Christianity, democracy, and free markets. Thus, the identities of both the colonizer and the colo- nized were reconstructed through anti-colonial arguments made by the colonized and the colonizer became more receptive to decolonization arguments. Emotions, specically, empathy and identication, were also impor- tant in the decolonization process but their causal role is deeply inter- twinedwiththe role of arguments. 155 As long as the colonizer couldhate and disdain the colonized, it was easier to maintain beliefs in European superiority and the right, indeed obligation, to replace the political, so- cial, and economic systems of the colonized with those of the colonizer. The belief in European superiority also interfered with the colonizers ability to appreciate and empathize with the victims of slavery, forced labor, mutilation, and torture. Decolonization became possible only in an era when the beliefs about colonial subjects were reassessed. The ethical arguments that challenged colonial beliefs about the colonized would likely not have been as persuasive had not the colonizer begun to feel differently about the colonized; the colonizer would likely not have felt differently about the colonized had they maintained their belief in European superiority. The process of institutionalizing normative beliefs in international treaties and the procedures of international organization was also ex- tremelyimportant. Once certainnormative beliefs were put intopractice and institutionalized, for instance by translating the belief into colonial law or by making a practice subject to the international oversight of the Permanent Mandates Commission, the colonial world was changed. 154 Robert H. Jackson, The Weight of Ideas in Decolonization: Normative Change in International Relations, in Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 111138: 112, 119, 134. 155 I am not the rst to point out the importance of emotions in this context. Ethan Nadelmann argues that norms emerge and are promoted because they reect not only the economic and security interests of dominant members of international society but also their moral interests and emotional dispositions. Nadelmann, Global Prohibition Regimes, p. 524. 391 Argument and change in world politics Thus, endingslaverychangedthe economic andpolitical context of colo- nialism; the articulation and implementation of good labor practices in the colonies after World War I enabled labor to appeal unfair practices, and it lowered barriers to labor organizing; and the articulation and implementation of the normative belief in sacred trust and develop- ment eventually led to a greater role for colonial subjects in their own government, creating sites where native critics of colonial policy could make their arguments heard and affect other colonial practices. This was a sort of ethical boot-strapping: successful ethical arguments led to institutionalization of new normative beliefs, and when the standard operating procedures of colonialism changed, the social movement mo- bilization for decolonization became easier. This is not to say, as Robert Jackson does, that there is an irreversibil- ity about these political norms. 156 Nor is it to argue, as Jackson does, that the normative ideas of self-determination not only preempted colonialism but also precluded its reform into international trusteeship, say, or associate statehood. 157 He suggests that as an indication of the preemptive character of anti-colonial ideas, colonial institutions and policies are not only untenable but even unthinkable. 158 Rather, as the humanitarian intervention debate of the early and mid- 1990s shows, ethical arguments can support a variety of institutions and practices including the reinstitution of colonialism or the Mandate System. For example, advocates of humanitarian intervention have argued that humanitarian interventions to save the failed states of the world are in the self-interests (in terms of economic gains and global stability) of the great powers. 159 Similarly, historian Paul Johnsons proposedsolutionto the problems of corrupt government andeconomic disaster is international trusteeship managed by the civilized coun- tries: The Security Council could commit a territory where authority has irretrievably broken down to one or more trustees . . . empowered not merely to impose order by force but to assume political functions. He suggests that the mandate of the trustees would usually be of limited duration 5, 10, 20 years . . . and their ultimate object would be to take constitutional measures to insure a return to effective self-government with all deliberate speed. But the mandate may 156 Jackson, The Weight of Ideas, p. 137; also see pp. 113, 138. 157 Ibid., p. 115. 158 Ibid., p. 138. 159 Gerald B. Helman and Steven R. Ratner, Saving Failed States, Foreign Policy 89 (Winter 19921993), 320. 392 Alternative explanations last 50 years, or 100. 160 He argues: The only satisfaction will be the unspoken gratitude of millions of misgoverned or ungoverned people who will nd in this altruistic revival of colonialism the only way out of their present intractable miseries. 161 Johnson attempts to make his argument persuasive in a context where colonialism is thoroughly delegitemized by painting a picture of past colonialism as a benevolent institution, reluctantly initiated by colonizers (who thought they were doing good), and maintained for the purpose of obtaining trade and spreading civilization and stability. They [the Europeans] could not trade without stability, and to get stability they had to impose it. So they built little forts, which became bigger and eventually turned into the nucleus of colonies. European colonialism in its origins was to some extent a reluctant and involuntary process. 162 But Johnsons argument is less persuasive now than it might have been during the 1960s. What has changed over the last one thousand years is the growth of the belief in human equality. Yet, decolonization did not become the be- havioral normsimply because of the endof slavery or the presence of In- dians, Asians, and Africans in the midst of the imperial powers. Rather, it was the arguments that were framed, extended, or sparked by these events, and the contradictions these arguments exposed (between the rhetoric of self-determination that was so widely proclaimed during the world wars and the actual conditions of the people in the colonies) that led to a growing recognition and inuence of ideas about the equality of the other that formed the core of the decolonization regime. 163 Social movements denormalized and delegitimized both slavery and colonial- ism. The publicity efforts of the social movements, as well as press cov- erage, were crucial in this process. Reformers both inside the colonies and in the metropole exposed and publicized the colonial condition, especially the facts that imprisonment, censorship and torture were im- portant elements of maintaining colonialism and suppressing indige- nous movements. 164 They were able to reframe these practices from 160 Paul Johnson, Colonialisms Back And Not a Moment Too Soon, New York Times Magazine 18 April 1993, pp. 22, 4344: 44. 161 Ibid., p. 44. 162 Ibid., p. 43. 163 As M.J. Bonn said: The democracies of the West had become genuine democracies; they realized the incongruity of vast empires ruled by democracy. Imperialism, as a missionary creed, did not appeal to the masses any longer. Bonn, The Crumbling of Empire, p. 153. 164 On transnational social movements see Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Ac- tivists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks inTransnational Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). 393 Argument and change in world politics being understood as necessary and ultimately benevolent and repre- sent them as horric, counterproductive, and alien to the values and identity of Europeans. Anti-colonial arguments had been made for centuries before the twentiethcentury process of decolonization began; what made those arguments persuasive to more people were changes in the culture of the metropole. Military repressionandcrude exploitationwere increasingly distasteful to colonizers because, and to the extent that, the culture of those societies had become more democratic. But, this is only part of the causal story; without a shift in the interests and capabilities within the colonial powers (partially driven by these shifting normative beliefs) formal colonialism would probably not have given way to decoloniza- tion. This is why it is so important to understand how normative beliefs and ethical arguments can become institutionalized and change the eco- nomic and political context. Was it primarily the delegitimation of colonialism that led to decolo- nization or did ethical arguments contribute to changing assessments within the colonial powers of the values they assigned to empire, and hence to changing the very interests of the imperial powers? Or did eth- ical arguments and normative beliefs play little independent role, with most of the impetus for decolonization borne by the changing interests and capabilities of the colonizers? As Nadelmann has argued, It is dif- cult and often impossible to determine whether those who conform to a particular norm do so because they believe the norm is just and should be followed, or because adherence to the norm coincides with their other principle interests, or because they fear the consequences that ow from defying the norm, or simply because conforming to the norm has become a matter of habit or custom. 165 The ethical argument explanationfor the endof colonialismpasses the tests I proposed in chapter 2 for demonstrating the causal importance of normative belief and ethical argument. First, there is the temporal test. Normative beliefs should be raised and ethical arguments should be given and found persuasive before practices are changed. Years, if not several decades, of ethical argument preceded changing colonial prac- tices. Indeed one of the ndings of this book is just how long it takes to alter deeply embedded, widespread, taken for granted social practices. Second, after an ethical argument succeeds, that is, convinces a suf- cient number of people so that a once taken for granted practice is no 165 Nadelmann, Global Prohibition Regimes, p. 480. 394 Alternative explanations longer a given, one would expect a (not necessarily universal) congru- ence between the normative beliefs that underpinned the ethical argu- ments and the behavior. In other words, if slavery and forced labor are found to be wrong, they should no longer be widely practiced. Indeed, although it took decades, both slavery and colonialism were largely eliminated. Where they do continue to exist, these practices are either not tolerated, as in the case of slavery and unmodied colonialism, or the institution has been modied, as with colonialism, so that it does not have the same features as the older institution. Even where colonies re- main, they have political institutions which involve signicant political participation for the colonized and some form of self-government. The third test is whether normative beliefs that underpin ar- guments for changing a practice are used in arguments about cor- rect behavior, and those who use them are not ignored or mocked. This occurred in the case of colonialism with the normative belief in self-determination initially expressed by Woodrow Wilson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and other leaders of this generation. International leaders of the next generation, for example, Prime Minister Churchill (a for- mer colonial minister), who balked at the application of the Atlantic Charter to British colonies, felt bound not only to use the words of self-determination, but to help institutionalize the process of decoloni- zation by consenting to elements of the UN Charter that applied to non-self-governing territories. By the early 1960s, even the colonial powers were unwilling to vote against anti-colonial resolutions at the UnitedNations andthe prime minister of Britainwas compelledtomake a speech about the independence wind of change blowing through Africa. Fourth, we can believe that normative beliefs and ethical arguments have some causal force if, when their prescriptions for behavior are not adhered to, those who out them attempt to justify their (non-normal) behavior on ethical or practical grounds. South Africa for decades tried to do this at both the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. That South Africa felt compelled to make its arguments about South West Africa on ethical grounds showed the dominance of partic- ular normative beliefs and the importance of the process of argument. A fth test, that normative beliefs should be linked with other nor- mative beliefs, and become part of the arguments used to advance these other beliefs a test for coherence was certainly satised. Anti-slavery, human rights, and self-determination beliefs were dis- cussed together, with each normative beliefs reasoning being used to 395 Argument and change in world politics legitimize the other normative beliefs. This cluster of beliefs became a rich, deeply intertwined, discourse of both argument and law. The clus- ter of normative beliefs associated with decolonization were linked in arguments and increasingly applied to UN resolutions and actions that supported human rights in colonial and newly independent states. If normative beliefs were unimportant, and ethical arguments unpersua- sive, then no one would bother using them as the foundation for other normative beliefs or ethical arguments. Sixth, if ethical arguments and normative beliefs have power, we should expect the use of international sanctions, by the majority of the international community, to change the behavior of those who violate the normative prescriptions, or to punish those who support such norm violators. Sanctions were used against violators of the anti-colonial nor- mative prescription. For example, an arms embargo and other sanc- tions were put in place by states and international organizations against South Africa because of its occupation of Namibia. In addition, as UN and OAU sanctions against Portugal and South Africa demonstrated, sanctions were not only discussed and approved, they were applied. 166 Still, there were no signicant international sanctions against China for its occupation of Tibet, at least by 2001. Finally, since we would never expect rational actors to behave con- trary to their interests, ethical arguments may be viewed as causally important whether, and to the extent that, actors with incentives to vio- late normative prescriptions act counter to their interests and follow the new normative prescriptions, or re-frame their interests in light of coming to hold new normative beliefs. For this last test to be valid three conditions should hold: states (or the inuential elites that shape gov- ernment policies) should know their interests (or at least believe they do); actors should not have been compelled by other (non-normative) circumstances, such as a change in their ability to pursue their interests because of, for example, sanctions; andactors must not have foundsome other way of achieving the same ends, while not technically violating the normative prescriptions that followed from ethical arguments. 167 166 Sanctions were not universally applied by members of the international commu- nity. See Landgren, Embargo Disimplemented; George W. Shephard, ed., Effective Economic Sanctions (New York: Preager, 1991); and Crawford and Klotz, eds., How Sanctions Work. 167 Of course if actors change their behavior due to sanctions imposed by others acting from normative convictions, then an ethical explanation is appropriate. Similarly, if actors change their means for achieving the same ends, they may have done so as to appear in compliance with normative beliefs. 396 Alternative explanations The rational interest test is, of course, problematic because actors un- derstanding of their interests change as their normative beliefs change. As implied above, we might better ask about the degree to which actors understanding of their interests change as a consequence of normative beliefs. This simple interest test of the effectiveness of normative ar- guments do actors act counter to their interests? ought not to be seen as putting a rm barrier or making a dichotomy between the normative and the self-interested behavior of actors. Nevertheless, for the sake of clarity, I will consider the interest versus normative belief argument in its pure form here. Colonial powers frequently acted against their interests and often could not demonstrate their economic interests were being met in any given colonial enterprise. Further, those interests were as much ethi- cal, cultural, and religious as they were economic. Still, if one takes a narrow interpretation of interests as economic or strategic, there is some evidence that normative beliefs and ethical arguments on occa- sion trumped material interests. Certainly, the greatest colonial power inthenineteenthandtwentiethcenturies, actedagainst its perceivedin- terests by outlawing the slave trade and peacefully withdrawing from several of its colonies. British elites openly and privately discussed their fears that ending slavery or decolonizing might hurt themeconomically. Yet they did both anyway. I have throughout emphasized the mechanisms of argument and change. Yet we must also ask more generally why some arguments are persuasive, and others not. In the context of decolonization, I have shown how advocates of change (and somewhat unwittingly, the prag- matic reformers) overcame the extrinsic andintrinsic constraints on suc- cessful argument. But change did not go as far as it could have gone. Specically, some argue that neocolonialism the informal penetration and control of weaker states by the great powers and multinational cor- porations based in the former colonial powers is such an effective means of extraction that the colonizers simply shifted from one method of exploitation to another. In other words, the colonizers gave up on for- mal empire without muchresistance because theyfounda more efcient and less distasteful (to their publics) method of domination. However, if neocolonialism was recognized by the political and business leaders of colonial states to be efcient, why didnt all great and small powers immediately move to set up neocolonial relations and withdraw from colonies the moment they had established the means for informal con- trol? Raising or framing the condition of neocolonial relations shows 397 Argument and change in world politics both the penetration of normative beliefs about self-determination and the discursive and institutional limits of those beliefs as they developed historically. In other words, to ask why decolonization was limited in most ways to the granting of political control is to articulate the extent to which the belief in self-determination, understood as a political and physical right, has penetrated our understanding of relations between peoples. Decolonization was limited primarily to the political realm because the emphasis of the decolonization process, as it developed out of the anti-slavery and colonial reform movement and the League of Nations Mandate system, was on decolonizing bodies and granting political representation. As Antonio Cassese argues, the term alien domination or subjugation does not contemplate economic exploita- tion. Rather alien subjugation, domination, and exploitation cover sit- uations in which one Power dominates the people of a foreign territory by recourse to force. 168 Neocolonialism has not escaped critique. It is just that the challenge is relatively weak at the rst stages of a meta-argument framing eco- nomic relations between former colonies and colonizers as exploitation, andthendenormalizinganddelegitimizingunequal relations. Free mar- ket capitalism is still the dominant belief system, or as Antonio Gramsci would say, it is hegemonic. In fact, capitalist beliefs and culture have obviously grown stronger with the end of Soviet style communism and the weakening of European and non-aligned movement experiments in socialism. Before economic relations between former colonizers and their former colonies can signicantly change, both the ethical and prac- tical arguments of those who argue against neocolonialism will have to become more persuasive. Persuasive ethical arguments that change complex social systems must rst reframe the dominant practice. Re- formers arguments must denormalize and delegitimize the dominant practice. Activists must also propose an alternative and work to change the balance of political power that supports the dominant practice. But ultimately their success depends on gradually institutionalizing new normative beliefs. This is hard work, it may take decades or even cen- turies, and the ripple effects of argument and change may go in direc- tions unanticipated by reformers. 168 Antonio Cassese, Self-determination of Peoples: A Legal Reappraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 99. 398 9 Poiesis and praxis: toward ethical world politics Violence is for the morallyinfallible. If youare convincedthat youalone have truth, there is little recourse but to threaten, intimidate, bribe or coerce those who disagree with you if they do not come around to your view or ultimately if these methods are unavailing, to use force. That, more or less, is what we see on the international scene today. 1 While the last decade of the twentieth century was characterized by the reconguration of worldpolitics with the endof the ColdWar, it was also markedby arguments about humanitarianinterventions (e.g. Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo) and the failure to intervene (Rwanda). In some cases, most dramaticallyinRwanda where a genocide occurredbefore the eyes of the world in 1994, the failure to undertake humanitarian intervention prompted, for some, remorse and a desire to act more quickly. Remorse was heightened when General Romeo Delaire of Canada, who com- manded the UN force in Kigali prior to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, said that a force of 5,000 trained soldiers could have prevented much of the killing. On the other hand, some fear that easing the legal and political path to humanitarian interventions will lead to more interven- tions undertaken for self-interested or strategic reasons. The legitimacy and conduct of humanitarian intervention the threat or use of military force to protect or promote human rights is thus likely to remain one of the central problems of world politics. At issue is the future of millions of people who, if not rescued by the international community, or some benevolent power, may be left to suffer or die at the hands of brutal dic- tators or genocidal aggressors. Or perhaps the subjects of humanitarian 1 Robert Holmes, On War and Morality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 288. 399 Argument and change in world politics intervention will be rescued but still suffer under the inept, if benev- olent and paternalistic, guiding hand of their saviors who set up short or medium-term governments to save failed states. Humanitarian in- terventions may slide down the slippery slope to humanitarian occu- pations and state building. 2 It is thus crucial to ask how the recourse to humanitarian intervention will be decided and how such interventions will be conducted. Although the change from analysis to prescription and from colo- nialism and decolonization to issues of humanitarian intervention may seemabrupt, I take up these questions for several reasons. First, debates about humanitarian intervention are in many ways a continuation of arguments about colonialism and decolonization. When scholars, poli- cymakers, andcitizens propose interveningtosave failedstates or tohalt humanitarian disasters, they may do so because they fear the instability that can result from such crises. But interveners also often articulate a moral or religious obligation to act to protect others. 3 The impulses and arguments in favor of humanitarian intervention are thus not dissimi- lar to colonial arguments: advocates of humanitarian intervention pose justications that recall the civilizing mission of colonialism, while the subjects of these interventions also often articulate uneasiness with their conduct, likening them to recolonization. As President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe said at the Millennium Summit: If the new millennium, like the last, remains an age of hegemonic empires and conquerors do- ing the same old things in new technological ways, remains the age of the master race, the master economy and the master state, then I am afraid we in developing countries will have to stand up as a matter of principle and say, Not again. 4 Second, decolonization and humanitarian interventions are histori- cally linked through the mandate and trusteeship systems and speci- cally through United Nations activismin the transition fromSouth West Africa to Namibia. Namibia is perhaps the prototype case of the inter- national community taking an activist role in preventing human rights abuse, sending troops to protect human rights, and using its capacity to build states. 2 Ernst B. Haas, Beware the Slippery Slope: Notes toward the Denition of Justiable Intervention, in Laura Reed and Carl Kaysen, eds., Emerging Norms of Justied Interven- tion (Cambridge: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1983), pp. 6387. 3 See Cecelia Lynch, Acting on Belief: Christian Perspectives on Suffering and Violence, Ethics & International Affairs 14 (2000), 8397. 4 QuotedinBarbara Crossette, U.N. MeetingEnds WithDeclarationof CommonValues, The New York Times, 9 September 2000, A1. 400 Poiesis and praxis The UNs role in South West Africa evolved over the course of four decades from witnessing, documenting, and publicizing South African abuse, to assisting Namibias independence movement, to determin- ing the structure and process of the transition from South African oc- cupation and rule toward independence. In 1967 the UN essentially set up a shadow government of Namibia when the UNGA passed a resolution creating the UN Council for South West Africa, and the UN began to give signicant resources to SWAPO. In 1978, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 435 which set up a transition assis- tance group to assist with new elections when they should occur. In 1982, the UN drew up a Settlement Plan which contained the princi- ples for a Constituent Assembly in Namibia and for a Constitution. The UN also developed an informal checklist for the impartial gover- nance of Namibia during what would be a period of transition from the illegal government of South Africa to the legal government of Namibia. In 1989 the UN Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) was nally created and put in place to supervise elections and a tran- sition to democracy for Namibia. Concrete planning for decoloniza- tion and state-building thus occurred over the course of about seven years. The plans included a code of conduct for the elections, agreed to by all parties, and plans for the demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration of about 30,000 former combatants, restructuring of the police force, and democratization. UN assistance for elections for de- colonization was not new; what was new was the complexity of the mission the UN Special Representative and UNTAG were engaged in the detailed logistics of the demilitarization of South West Africa at the same time that it set up a shadow government, provided hu- manitarian assistance, and supervised elections. Before the UN forces arrived in 1989 there was a terrible clash between South African forces and SWAPO. Demilitarization and a more or less peaceful democratic transition were guaranteed by the UNTAG military presence which numbered about 8,000 in total, from 110 countries, functioning as civil- ian police monitors, election supervisors, and military personnel in UNTAG in 1989. UNTAG was considered a success and a model: SWAPO wanted help, the world provided it, and elections were de- clared free and fair with the new government taking over peacefully in 1990. Third, the possibility and practice of humanitarian interventions raises the question of how to reconcile clashing normative beliefs. Specically, the development of Western theories of sovereignty, as 401 Argument and change in world politics well as the long history of colonialism and the struggle for decolo- nization, generated a deserved respect for the legal and political con- cepts of self-determination and non-intervention. On the other hand, the development of human rights norms which helped to create the conditions for decolonization elevates the status of the individ- ual in world politics and challenges the inviolability of sovereignty as a legal protection for states which violate human rights. Some even argue that states vitiate their sovereignty when they violate the social contract by allowing or engaging in human rights abuses. Humanitarian intervention thus pits powerful normative beliefs and international legal conventions against each other: state sovereignty and the rule of law may be violated to protect or promote individual rights. Fourth, the discussion in the preceding chapters about the uses of eth- ical argument, emotion, and strategic political action to abolish slavery, curb forced labor, and end colonialism illustrates how nascent beliefs may become dominant and how an informal international polity may coalesce to govern specic issue areas and change dominant practices. Arguments and beliefs make the world as much or more than economic factors or a drive for power. I showed that normative beliefs shaped colonial practice and ethical arguments were used to uphold colonial- ism. I also showed how colonial reformers and anti-colonial activists deployed ethical (as well as practical and scientic) arguments to un- dermine the practices and ultimately the legitimacy of colonialism; new normative beliefs were institutionalized in international organizations and colonies, further undermining colonial practice. When the majority of states, expressing and acting on the political will of those who sought to end slavery and colonialism, changed their practices and developed new laws, they both purposely and inadvertently reformed world pol- itics. It is possible to do so again with regard to the related problem of humanitarian intervention. This chapter develops a framework for a poiesis and praxis of eth- ical argument using discourse ethics and thus marks a sea change in the tone and substantive focus of the book from analysis to sugges- tions for practical action. Poiesis is the Greek word for the process of making something, and praxis is the utilization of theoretical knowl- edge in a practical activity. I propose a discourse ethical approach to the problem of humanitarian intervention. Specically, I suggest that interested actors consciously conduct an ethical argument on the ques- tions of when the resort to humanitarian intervention is just, and how 402 Poiesis and praxis such interventions shall be conducted, using techniques based on dis- course ethics. The aim is to develop a convention on humanitarian intervention. But before proceeding to a discussion of how humanitarian interven- tion may be usefully addressed through discourse ethics, I establish a role for both ethics and ethical argument in world politics. I then turn to the question of why ethical arguments, which might clash with self- interests narrowly dened, are sometimes appealing. I then review dis- course ethics, suggesting how it might be used to address the problem of humanitarian intervention. Potential for ethical praxis There are at least three conicting arguments widely heard about the potential of international ethics. 5 Realists argue that there are noethics in international life moralityis a g-leaf for interests. Humanrights have purely instrumental value in the political culture; they provide a useful tool for propaganda, nothing more. 6 The ethics of international life is the ethics of the dominant powers; the strong do as they will, the weak as they must, and morality is the product of power. 7 The preceding chapters on the role of normative beliefs and ethical arguments were intended to persuade you that such a view is, at the least, questionable. Asecondview, heldby liberals, asserts that morality is already woven intothe fabric of international politics. Amore ethical worldorder is pos- sible, if onlywe practice our politics inline withuniversallyvalidnorms. There are such things as universal human rights which ought to be pro- tected and extended. 8 Indeed, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights unselfconsciously rests on naturalist foundations: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights . . . Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person. 9 As Ken Booth argues, just because many Western ideas were spread by commerce and the Gatling 5 This section is a substantially revised version of Neta C. Crawford, Postmodern Ethical Conditions and a Critical Response, Ethics & International Affairs 12 (1998), 121140. 6 Noam Chomsky, Humanitarian Intervention, Boston Review 18 (DecemberJanuary 19931994), 36: 5. 7 Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis, 19191939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (New York: Harper & Row: 1964), p. 81. 8 See for example, Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); John Vincent, Human Rights and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 9 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Articles 1 and 3. 403 Argument and change in world politics gun, it does not followthat every idea originating in the West, or backed by Western opinion, should therefore simply be labeled imperialist and rejected. There are some ethnocentric ideas and individual human rights is one of them for which we should not apologize. 10 The problem, from this perspective, is getting others to recognize rights and to put justice above the narrowly dened interests of states. Poststructural andcritical theorists argue that whether or not we think that there are ethics in international life, or that there ought to be, there are no rmgrounds for any particular ethical belief; ethics is contextual. Critical theorists questionthe foundations of belief eventhe possibility of providing ahistorical, timeless, and decontextualized foundations and disagree with both liberals and realists, arguing that although people and states do act on the basis of moral convictions and norma- tive beliefs, there is nothing objective or timeless about those beliefs. 11 J urgen Habermas argues that Enlightenment faith in reason has been profoundly shaken by its own logic. After a century that, more than any other, has taught us the horror of existing unreason, the last remains of an essentialist trust in reason have been destroyed. Yet modernity, now aware of its contingencies, depends all the more on a procedural reason, that is a reason that puts itself on trial. The critique of reason is its own work: this double meaning. . . is due to the radically anti-Platonist insight that there is neither a higher nor a deeper reality to which we could appeal . . . 12 As Habermas notes, Under the ethnomethodologists microscope even the most ordinary features of everyday life become something strange. 13 Since there are no universally valid foundations for nor- mative beliefs, it is not clear why one cultures answers to problems 10 Ken Booth, Human Wrongs and International Relations, International Affairs 71 ( January 1995), 103126: 113. 11 While there are signicant differences among them, feminist, postmodern, poststruc- tural, and critical theoretical perspectives share a critical attitude toward positivism, natu- ralism, anduniversalism, assertingthat our understandings of the social andnatural world are social constructions. Following from Nietzsche, Horkeimer, and Foucault, these theo- rists are post andcritical inthe sense of questioning the promise of the Enlightenment. For introductions, see Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992); David Couzens Hoy and Thomas Mc Carthy, Critical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Jim George, Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)Introduction to International Relations (Boulder: Lynn Reinner, 1994). 12 J urgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. xli. 13 J urgen Habermas, Reconstruction and Interpretation in the Social Sciences, in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 2142: 42. 404 Poiesis and praxis of international ethics should be privileged. Post-structuralists suggest that we come to hold particular beliefs both through the operations of power (a view not dissimilar from E.H. Carrs analysis) or through the process of building a social consensus. In other words, we argue about our beliefs, provide evidence, and occasionally change our minds. None of these views is dominant, and thus, the status of ethics in contemporary world politics is ambiguous and paradoxical. As real- ists charge, world politics is frequently characterized by the nasty and the brutish to the point where some suggest that the phrase inter- national ethics is an oxymoron. Conversely, as liberals suppose, in- ternational law has become characterized by substantive propositions about how we ought to act. Specically, the principles of respect for self-determination, non-intervention, and the rule of law were codied in international law starting in the late 1800s. 14 The content of inter- national law has thus enabled its process, fostering the conditions for non-coercive relations among states and respect for individual humans. As Steven Lukes argues, The principle that human rights must be de- fended has become one of the commonplaces of our age even as hu- man rights are violated virtually everywhere. 15 We notice and are disturbed by those violations. But, as critical theorists suggest, many scholars and activists are in- creasingly uncertain about how to ground liberal propositions. The shoring up of the legal-normative foundations for the sovereign state system occurred just as states came under increasingly obvious assault in the practical realm of day-to-day inter-state interactions (via, for example, the globalization of nancial ows, powerful multinational corporations, the internationalization of information, the media, and cultural expression, and transnational social movements) and as state sovereignty was thoroughly denaturalized by critical and constructivist approaches to international relations theory. 16 The end of colonialism put Western cultural arrogance on notice. We are troubled not solely 14 Dorothy V. Jones, The Declaratory Tradition in Modern International Law, in Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel, eds., Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Dorothy V. Jones, Code of Peace: Ethics and Security in the World of Warlord States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 15 Steven Lukes, Five Fables About Human Rights, in Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley, eds., On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993 (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 1940: 20. 16 Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State and Symbolic Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber, eds., State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 405 Argument and change in world politics by injustice, but also by theoretical scruples about the universality of any given view of justice and human rights as a basis for intervention. The relationship between the theory and practice of human rights is problematic. 17 Foundations are under assault even as human rights foundationalism serves to undermine the sovereignty of states in prin- ciple and in practice. This is similar to what Antonio Cassese has noted about the effects of believing in self-determination: The ascendancy of international norms governinghumanrights has forcedthe traditionally rigid, pure-statist regime to recognise individuals as legal subjects . . . 18 Advocates thus nd it necessary to defend the notion of universal hu- man rights so self-evidently proclaimed after World War II against relativism and critical theory. 19 Perhaps in the past it was possible to unselfconsciously argue the primacy of sovereign states and that might makes right, possible to assert that our creator endowed us with certain rights, but, due to the self-consciousness of the postmodern perspec- tive, we no longer uncritically accept such assertions. Yet even critical theorists take an ethical stance when they deny the legitimacy of systems of exclusion. 20 The appeal of human rights and ethical arguments Realist, liberal, andcritical perspectives sit uneasilyside byside inworld politics. Some scholars attempt to reconcile this cacophony through an appeal to intuition. For instance, as Richard Rorty notes, human rights foundationalism is outmoded. 21 Why then is the human rights realm so resilient against critique? Rorty, building on the work of Eduardo Rabossi, argues that we are now a human rights culture and sug- gests that we can accept this cultural fact without trying to ground it in something natural. Rorty says the most philosophy can hope to do is to summarize our culturally inuenced intuitions about the right thing to do in various situations . . . We see the formulation of such 17 Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley, Introduction, in Shute and Hurley, eds., On Human Rights, pp. 218: 3. 18 Antonio Cassese, Self-determination of Peoples: A Legal Reappraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 165. 19 Michael J. Perry, Are Human Rights Universal? The Relativist Challenge and Related Matters, Human Rights Quarterly 19 (August 1997), 461509; Thomas M. Frank, Are Human Rights Universal? Foreign Affairs 80 (JanuaryFebruary 2001), 191204. 20 Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 10. 21 Richard Rorty, Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality, in Shute and Hurley, eds., On Human Rights, pp. 111134: 116. 406 Poiesis and praxis summarizing generalizations as increasing the predictability, and thus the power and efciency, of our institutions, thereby heightening the sense of shared moral identity which brings us together in a moral community. 22 Habermas also appeals to intuition as a ground for nor- mative belief moral philosophy concerns itself with clarifying the everyday intuitions into which we are socialized. 23 Situating human rights and morality in historical context and arguing that human rights discourse is generalization that summarizes our intuitions is both a relief and profoundly unsatisfactory. It is a relief to stop searching for foundations and recognize that they are historically based. But to replace foundations, e.g., Judeo-Christian commandments and the Kantiancategorical imperative to treat others as ends andnot means, and the recourse to universal reason with intuition does not solve the problem of what to do. What if our intuitions are quite harm- ful to some individuals or classes of people? What if intuitions con- ict? Moreover, using the word intuition glosses over the complexity of ethical reasoning, its situatedness in the experiences of individuals and cultures (whether that culture is of epistemic communities, for- mal organizations, bounded political communities such as nations and states, civilizations, or global), and the relationship of ethical reasoning to ethical argument. For example, liberal intuitions about humani- tarian intervention can be traced. Specically, decolonization laid the groundwork for current arguments about humanitarian intervention by extending the idea of respect for sovereignty from the Western core to the global level, while it also limits sovereignty by elevating the sta- tus of human rights. The discourse about humanitarian intervention takes the shape it does, and is deeply problematic, because it occurs in the context of a decolonization regime that stresses sovereignty and self-determination. It is useful then to adopt only part of the argument about intuition. We can recognize that the contemporary era is characterized by belief in human rights. And we can, in order to act, stop searching for rm grounds for human rights other than that most of us believe in them. But we should probably not look to intuition as a pseudo-ground for 22 Ibid., p. 117. 23 J urgen Habermas, Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justica- tion, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 43115: 48. Moral intuitions . . . instruct us on how best to behave in situations where it is in our power to counteract the extreme vulnerability of others by being thoughtful and considerate. J urgen Haber- mas, MoralityandEthical Life: Does Hegels Critique of Kant Applyto Discourse Ethics, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, pp. 195215: 199. 407 Argument and change in world politics human rights, or any other normative beliefs, even as we recognize that this is exactly what we are, in part, doing. It is still worthwhile to try to articulate good reasons for human rights and other normative beliefs. This means recognizing that functional utility arguments (e.g., community works better when there are egalitarian ethical standards, and there is less social unrest if we treat all well) and reciprocity (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) are two good reasons for human rights, and for ethical action more generally, but that they are not the only grounds. The preceding analysis of colonial arguments and the explanation of the role of argument in decolonization illustrate that the grounds of particular normative beliefs are historically contingent, specic to cultures, and that we hold certain normative beliefs because we learned they are good, or we later came to be persuaded of their goodness. If we struggled to articulate the grounds of our intuitions, we might well be able to say what it is we have learned and why we think those things are convincing. In the future, if we are open to persuasion, we may well believe that something else is good. Intuition is thus another word for socialization, empathy, and conviction. While one can stress the process of ethical argument, we must still account for the persuasive appeal of particular ethical arguments and normative beliefs. Why would individuals nd normative beliefs about equality and human rights appealing so much so that they are sometimes willing to forgo the advantages of exploitation and even sometimes bear the costs of working for change? What makes ethical arguments persuasive? There are at least three possible reasons why hu- man rights beliefs are appealing (beyond the viewthat we are obliged to believe in human rights) which are not mutually exclusive: coherence, self-interest, and practical-emotional. The coherence view suggests that egalitarian normative beliefs are attractive because they are part of a larger belief systemthat individuals and groups hold. To hold human rights beliefs is to be consistent with the web of other philosophical/religious, identity, normative, and prac- tical beliefs that individuals have become convinced are good. There is nothing particularly unique about human rights beliefs in this view; they are merely consistent with other beliefs and rules. A self-interest explanation suggests that human rights beliefs are ap- pealing because individuals conceive of themselves, regardless of their actual position, as potential objects of discrimination and unequal treat- ment. Thus, humans support equal rights, even if they would benet 408 Poiesis and praxis from inequality, because they recognize that but for the grace of god (or luck), they too could be in an inferior position. The sense of con- tingency is initiated and bolstered by egalitarian beliefs there is no divine right or biological superiority that counterbalance the greed, arrogance, and solipsism that are left once inferiority of the other can no longer be used to justify and legitimize inequality. Principles of justice and fairness that all could live with follow. 24 The practical-emotional view says that individuals nd normative beliefs about equality and human rights appealing because humans live in community and, in fact, usually crave positive contact with others. 25 Our sociabilityis bothpractical andemotional: alone we cannot fend for ourselves emotionally or physically, nor can we continue our species and achieve many of our goals. The most efcient and emotion- ally satisfying way to run community may be consensually, or at least democratically; efcient because non-democratic forms require coercion (or brain-washing), andsociallysatisfyingbecause humans, for the most part, appear to prefer social harmony over prolonged acrimony. Repres- sion might be desirable for self-interest reasons (it may bring the op- pressor wealth and power) but it is undesirable for emotional reasons, which explains why oppressors go to such great lengths to deny, even to themselves, that they are oppressors. Thus, democratic norms may be appealing over the long run because they satisfy community/social interests in harmonious relations. Humans may prefer to feel they are taking others into account just as they wish others to take their views into account. It may simply feel better. 26 Carried to a conclusion one might argue that humans are inherently other regarding. As I argued above, much of what led to the end of slavery and the delegitimization of colonialism was ethical argument. Another element was the empathyelicitedbythe victims andcritics of these practices. The subjects of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid participated in their own humanization in the eyes of the oppressor and those who actively and passively supported oppressors. Slave narratives, novels, plays, media accounts of atrocities, all brought the reality and the humanity of the oppressed other into sharper emotional focus. One could not hear 24 See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations. 25 This is not a communitarian argument, though communitarians might nd it compat- ible with elements of their views. 26 On other aspects of emotion in world politics, see Neta C. Crawford, The Passion of World Politics: Propositions on Emotion and Emotional Relationships, International Security 24 (Spring 2000), 116156. 409 Argument and change in world politics and be persuaded by ethical arguments that took the other into account as deserving of good treatment and agency if the image of the other was extremely negative. I am inclined to this third view but think all three coherentist, self-interest, and practical-emotional may account for the ever-widening appeal of human rights and democratic norms. Decisions about how to act in international politics are permeated through and through with normative assumptions, assertions, and eth- ical arguments, but the place of ethics in international politics is am- bivalent and paradoxical, while the appeal of ethical arguments is not clear. Charismatic and religious authority are no longer invested with the same legitimacy they once were, brute force no longer makes right, yet we cannot always agree on the substance of normative beliefs in order to act. Under modern conditions of life none of the various ri- val traditions can claim prima facie general validity any longer. Even in answering questions of direct practical relevance, convincing reasons can no longer appeal to the authority of unquestioned traditions. 27 It is hard to know which grounds, if any, are correct, and then how to make decisions. If there are no rm a priori logical grounds for international ethics, or we cannot agree on the substance of ethics in world politics, how can actors legitimately decide what to do when faced with ethical dilemmas? Discourse ethics: deciding how to decide The way to proceed in a pluralist world where ethical beliefs clash, even beliefs about the existence and foundation of ethics, is to agree on legitimate procedures for decisionmaking. The turn to discourse, which includes but is not limited to communicative ethics, is in part a move from a substantive to a procedural conception of moral and political theory. Rather than providing values grounded in an account of human nature or reason, discourse based approaches offer a set of procedures that, if followed, would yield principles legitimating social practices andinstitutions. 28 Procedure does not guarantee a consensual outcome, but it does make violent conict over the outcome less likely. 27 J urgen Habermas, Morality, Society and Ethics: An Interview with Torben Hviid Nielsen, in J urgen Habermas, Justication and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 147176: 151. 28 J. DonaldMoon, Practical Discourse andCommunicative Ethics, inStephenK. White, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Habermas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 143164: 143. 410 Poiesis and praxis Perhaps the most fully articulated views of discourse ethics are found in the scholarship of Habermas, building on the work of Karl-Otto Apel, and in the arguments of Iris Marion Young, writing from a feminist perspective. 29 I use Habermas understanding of discourse ethics as a starting point, criticize it, and modify it for use as a praxis of world politics. The starting point for discourse ethics is the belief that for decisions and normative beliefs to be followed, they must be justied they must be seen to be normatively good, they must be done for good reason, and all those affected by a decision must consent on some level. For Habermas, only those norms deserve to be valid that could meet with the approval of those potentially affected insofar as the latter participate in rational discourses. 30 The approval develops through a process of dialogue. Only when [a] decision emerges from argumentation, only when it comes about in accordance with pragmatic rules of discourse, do we consider the resulting norm justied. One has to make sure every- one concerned has had a chance to freely give his consent. Argumenta- tionis designedto prevent some fromsimplysuggestingor prescribing to others what is good for them. . . [T]he rules of discourse themselves have a normative quality, for they neutralize imbalances of power and provide for equal opportunities to realize ones interests. 31 Normative validity andlegitimate decisions are arrivedat throughcom- municative action where participants seek consensus. Habermasian discourse ethics occurs in an ideal speech situation where interlocutors hope to come to an uncoerced understanding: only the force of the better argument convinces. Communicative action pre- sumes that actors attribute the same meaning to particular expressions, that what they say is comprehensible/understandable to the hearer, that their propositions are true, and that their propositions are right in the 29 Karl-Otto Apel, Is the Ethics of the Ideal Communication Community a Utopia? On the Relationship Between Ethics, Utopia, and the Critique of Utopia, in Seyla Benhabib and Fred Dallmayr, The Communicative Ethics Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995), pp. 2359; Habermas, Discourse Ethics; Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Also see Christian Reus-Smit, The Constitutional Structure of International Society and the Nature of Fundamental Institutions, International Organization 51 (Autumn 1997), 555589. 30 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 127. Habermas argues that law works either through coercion and fear of sanction, or because people want to obey when they believe the law is right. 31 Habermas, Discourse Ethics, p. 71. 411 Argument and change in world politics sense of being basedon norms (normative beliefs) that can be redeemed, that is, shown to be valid. Further, one assumes that participants are sin- cere, and that they are ready to take on the obligations that result from reaching consensus. 32 Discourse ethics also entails the universal ex- change of roles in which participants come to understand each other through a dialogue where interlocutors listen to each other. 33 But, before all this can occur, certain preconditions should obtain. First, the argument must be minimally logical (coherent). Second, as- suming some relief from pressure to act, the procedure must allow ac- tors to test validity claims and question any assertion, while interlocu- tors must give reasons for disputing a proposition. Third, the structure of the situation must rule out all external or internal coercion other than the force of the better argument and thereby neutralize all motives other than the cooperative search for truth. 34 Every competent subject must be allowed to participate, to bring any assertion into the discourse, and to express their attitudes, desires, and needs. 35 Habermasian discourse ethics also entails ve basic categories of rights within legal communities. First, each person is owed a right to the greatest possible measure of equal liberties that are mutually compatible. Second, rights are guaranteed to those who are members of a particular community, with the community determining member- ship. Third, individuals are guaranteed equal treatment; those who feel their rights have been infringed upon must be able to make a claim against the community. Fourth, citizens must have basic rights to partic- ipate in processes of opinion and will formation. Fifth, these civil rights imply that there are basic rights to the provision of living conditions that are socially, technologically, and ecologically safeguarded, insofar as the current circumstances make this necessary if citizens are to have equal opportunities to utilize [their] civil rights. 36 Of course, Habermas recognizes that not all action is communicative. With strategic action, actors seek to inuence the behavior of another by means of the threat of sanctions or the prospect of gratication in order to cause the interaction to continue as the rst actor desires. 37 Speech is not always ideal because real human beings are driven by other motives in addition to the one permitted motive of the search for truth. 38 The problem of democratic politics becomes one of expanding 32 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, pp. 45, 19. 33 Habermas, Discourse Ethics, p. 65. 34 Ibid., p. 89. 35 Ibid., p. 89. 36 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, pp. 122125. 37 Habermas, Discourse Ethics, p. 58. 38 Ibid., p. 92. 412 Poiesis and praxis the scope of communicative action and prescribing limits for strategic action. Critique of pure discourse ethics It is common to dismiss discourse ethics as utopian. Recognizing that world politics is already characterized by argument, on the other hand, creates room to consider the possibilities of discourse ethics. Taking discourse ethics seriously, however, entails recognizing that the pro- cess has both practical and discursive limits, some of which may be overcome. First, logistics must be taken into account. Discourses take place in particular social contexts and are subject to the limitations of time and space . . . Topics and contributions have to be organized. The open- ing, adjournment, and resumption of discussions must be arranged. 39 Someone, or all participants, must set agendas, organize discussion, and end arguments; and we know that the process of agenda setting itself has substantive consequences. Thus, Habermas notes: Because of all of these factors, institutional measures are needed to sufciently neutralize empirical limitations andavoidable internal and external interference so that the idealized conditions always already predisposed by participants in argumentation can at least be ade- quately approximated. . . [A]ttempts at institutionalization are subject in turn to normative conceptions and their goal, which spring spon- taneously from our intuitive grasp of what argumentation is. This as- sertion can be veried empirically by studying the authorizations, ex- emptions, and procedural rules that have been used to institutionalize theoretical discourse in science or practical discourse in parliamentary activity. 40 Second, discourse ethics may be inefcient andslow, andbetter suited to developing normative consensus over a long period of time, rather than for making quick decisions in contexts that require immediate ac- tion. But political issues often seem quite urgent and many actors are involved. How can we slow the effects of war, poverty, or social unrest while we deliberate? Part of the solution may lie in organizing discourse so that large numbers of actors work in caucuses and several caucuses work at once. To speed future deliberation, scholars of international ethics might also make it their job to revisit the past and constantly reevaluate how humans acted in particular ethical dilemmas. Lessons 39 Ibid., p. 92. 40 Ibid., p. 92. 413 Argument and change in world politics of the past cannot be applied like a cookie cutter, but the habits of con- textually based reasoning will aid deliberation. Pre-discourse, or what scholars of mediation call pre-negotiation, is vital in instances where actors who dont share the same understanding of events and the good, must develop a shared vocabulary. Urgency is less an issue for ethical worldpolitics than one might think because almost all have already agreed that certain situations deserve immediate action: specically, genocide and wars of aggression. What remains inthose cases is to agree that the events beingobservedare actu- ally genocide or aggression, and certainly this process of interpretation can be painfully slow as those who do not want to act, or simply dis- agree, contest the interpretation. In categories of urgent cases, majority rule may have to sufce as a guide to action. Third, Habermas presupposes that all actors confer the same meaning on linguistic expressions. The world. . . is constituted only for an inter- pretation community whose members engage, before the background of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld, in processes of reaching under- standing with one another about things in the world. 41 Habermas also suggests that The condition for the truth of statements is the potential agreement of everyone else. 42 This assumption, problematic even in contexts where the background consensus is wide and deep, is even more difcult to sustain in the context of discourses among commu- nities that hold different belief systems. Discourse ethics among those who do not share a lifeworld thus requires pre-discourse, where the meaning of terms and the background for beliefs is agreed upon, and so actors agree on truth (or at least the terms of the debate and the scope of disagreement). Fourth, Habermas emphasizes that practical discourse and commu- nicative action rest on our shared background assumptions the life- world and on the authority of archaic institutions that we take for granted. The lifeworld forms both the horizon for speech situa- tions and the source of interpretations, while it in turn reproduces itself only through ongoing communicative interactions. 43 If Habermas is right about the dependence of practical arguments on a background consensus, when interlocutors lifeworlds are narrow, we can expect 41 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 14. 42 J urgen Habermas, Vorstudien und Ergazugen zur Theorie des Kommunkativen Handelns (Frankfurt: Surkamp, 1984), p. 107 quoted in William Outwaite, Habermas: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 41. 43 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 22. 414 Poiesis and praxis little creativity from actors searching for solutions. Are lifeworlds rich enough for us to critique dominant practices and nd creative solutions to them? If one believes in essential identities, our points of view will be narrow and our interests narrowly conceived. But as feminist theo- ries of identity and difference suggest, all subjects are mutually and multiply constituted. 44 Further, it is possible for humans to empathize and take other roles to understand different points of view. This is quite unlike Beitz arguments, based on Rawls, that interna- tional justice based on principles that all actors would derive in an orig- inal position (under a veil of ignorance) would require interlocutors to step outside identities. 45 Participants in an argument, even if they did not know their social position, could not climb out of their cultural life- worldcontext without abandoning their linguistic communicative com- petence. Habermasian practical discourses depend on content brought to themfromoutside. It wouldbe utterly pointless to engage in practical discourse without a horizon provided by the lifeworld of a specic so- cial group and without real conicts in a concrete situation in which the actors consider it incumbent upon them to reach a consensual means of regulating some controversial social matter. 46 Fifth, while Habermas wants all those potentially affected by a norm to have a chance to speak, his formulation of discourse ethics neverthe- less restricts participation in deliberation. On the one hand, Habermas says that humans have a basic right to living conditions that make it pos- sible for them to use their civil rights. This is a signicant condition that has radical implications for democratic participation. But, Habermas does not take into account other restrictions on who can speak. Speci- cally, discourse takes place within communities, andthose communities determine group membership. People who are displaced, or for some reason dened as outside a community, at least in Habermas formula- tion, have no right to participate. International politics must nd ways to accommodate the speech of the millions who are internally and in- ternationally displaced. Further, Habermas argues, [e]very subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in a discourse. 47 Competence 44 Jane Flax, Displacing Woman: Toward an Ethics of Multiplicity, in Bat-Ami Bar On and Ann Ferguson, eds., Daring to Be Good: Essays in Feminist Ethico-Politics (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 143155: 145. 45 Rawls, A Theory of Justice; Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations; Rawls, The Law of Peoples with The Idea of Public Reason Revisited. 46 Habermas, Discourse Ethics, p. 103. 47 Ibid., p. 89, emphasis added. 415 Argument and change in world politics includes communicative competence that is beyond agreement about the language itself the ability to produce grammatically correct sen- tences. Competence also includes the ability to reason in the ways that are recognized as reason. So, Young argues, Habermas retains vestiges of a dichotomy between reason and affectivity. He rather rmly sep- arates discourse about feelings from discourse about norms. 48 Those who are radically different in their beliefs, understanding of causality, and even in their view about the utility of language versus other forms of expression to persuade, may not be able to effectively argue with others. The different will not necessarily be denied access to arguments; rather, they will not be understood, and they may even be dismissed out of hand. 49 Adominating or hegemonic discourse provides a regime of truth, a means of assessing not only whether statements are true or false but also whether they have any meaning at all or are mere nonsense. 50 Moreover, others will not always be able to speak with persuasive force. Specically, the very young and those understood to be mentally ill are not generally considered competent, although experience tells us that they can often participate in discourse. Further, on the occasions when individuals are intoo muchphysical or emotional painto thinkor speak, they cannot effectively participate. Thus, it wouldperhaps be better to think of communicative capability or capacity rather than competence, turning competence criteria from a restriction into an exhortation to enhance the capacities of both speak- ers and hearers. The capacity of interlocutors to listen and understand each other, vital in situations where interlocutors are equally powerful, is even more important when a weaker party needs a more powerful partys assistance (e.g. intervention and foreign aid). Along these lines, Richard Rorty argues that our desire to promote human rights changes because our feelings about the other change: most of the workof chang- ing moral intuitions is being done by manipulating our feelings rather than increasing our knowledge. 51 Rorty suggests that the emergence of the human rights culture seems to owe nothing to increased moral knowledge and everything to hearing sad and sentimental stories. 52 48 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, p. 118. 49 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientic Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1972). 50 James F. Keeley, Toward a Foucauldian Analysis of International Regimes, International Organization 44, 1 (Winter 1990), pp. 83105: 91. 51 Rorty, Human Rights, p. 118. 52 Ibid., pp. 118119. 416 Poiesis and praxis Dialogue encourages the telling of these stories in their complexity, and helps ensure that assistance is welcome. Sixth, discourse ethics must take political power intoaccount. 53 Power is ubiquitous in politics, whether we dene it as the ability to use phys- ical force to coerce others, the ability to command instant authority, the power of shared beliefs, or the capacity to set agendas. Indeed, as I have emphasized, recognizing power is crucial to understanding the process of political argument as it really occurs. Political argument does not occur on a level playing eld, and when change occurs due to political argument, it is because the balance of belief, andthe authorityassociated with it, has shifted. A discourse ethical approach has to avoid the pitfall of taking dis- course out of its political context. In other words, discourse ethics that stresses dialogue between two others can be depoliticizing if hearing sad and sentimental stories yields a person-to-person or case-by-case response to problems when what is required are institutional changes designed to level the playing eld. However, in discourse ethical sit- uations, power differences are less important if all actors assertions are open to tests of their validity. As soon as I am able to ques- tion the basis of your arguments, the power differential has been at least partially bridged. Discourse ethics practiced as part of ethic of care, as discussed below, may prevent the process from losing sight of larger political, economic, and social contexts, and mistaking per- sonal responsibility for institutional responsibility. In addition, as long as some are unable to be heard because of lack of access to media and relevant institutional fora where opinions are shaped and poli- cies set, then the conditions for discourse ethical politics have not been met. Seventh, discourse ethics seems, at least on the surface, to be too rational. Indeed, the process depends on actors being able to listen to each other and to dispassionately withstand probing and testing of their validity claims. How can those who have little or no trust in others ever hope to engage in discourse ethical dialogue? Indeed, if empathy and other emotions play a crucial role in determining our ability to under- stand others, and our willingness to help them, then those of us who wish to increase the scope for argument must work to increase em- pathy. Rorty suggests this is done through sentimental education that sufciently acquaints people of different kinds with one another so 53 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, pp. 132168. 417 Argument and change in world politics they are less tempted to think of those different from themselves as only quasi-human. 54 Rorty also regards the provision of basic needs as crucial. Security and sympathy go together . . . The tougher things are, the more you have to be afraid of, the more dangerous your situation, the less you can afford the time or effort to think about what things might be like for people with whom you do not immediately identify. Sentimental education only works on people who can relax enough to listen. 55 Though there is little reason to infer this from Rortys own words, his argument should not be used to say that the poor are unt to engage in dialogue or that they cannot feel empathy for others. Rather, Habermas and Rortys arguments should be read as an obligation to increase the capacity of all to engage in dialogue. Aspects of globaliza- tion that increase contact among cultures, that allow us to comprehend the beliefs, poetry, and agency of others, increase the background of empathetic understanding. 56 However, if discourse ethics is to work in situations where actors have a history of violent conict and ethnocen- tric disregard for the other, much more emotional work must be done to increase the capacity of interlocutors to listen to each other. The prob- lems of competence/capacity, power, and standards of rationality and reason, require institutional guarantees of access for all speakers. Finally, Habermas (at some points) seems to suppose that the goal of discourse ethics is the agreement of all on the best solution. There is also the possibility that in searching for single best solutions, interlocu- tors will become mired and pass up sub-optimal solutions that could avoid stalemate. As Beitz argues, actual agreement of everyone con- cerned is too stringent a requirement to place on the justication of moral principles. 57 It is impossible to eliminate all difference of opin- ion and understanding, though this is not necessarily bad. Habermas argues that because there will be areas where all affected cannot agree, we will tend to agree to norms that are least constricting, and that tol- erant diversity will result. The more abstract the agreements become, the more diverse the disagreements with which we can non-violently live. 58 This outcome wouldideally encourage respect for difference but it is not clear where boundaries begin and end. 54 Rorty, Human Rights, pp. 122123. 55 Ibid., p. 128. 56 Of course other aspects of globalization do just the opposite, as difference, and even some cultures, are overwhelmed and sometimes obliterated by the march of mainly Western ideas, commodities, and practices. 57 Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, p. 19. 58 J urgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 140. 418 Poiesis and praxis Because the standard, almost rote, critique of discourse ethics is that it is too utopian for domestic contexts, much less for world politics, most of these issues are not discussed by scholars of world politics, or even by political theorists. Yet, as suggested above, many criticisms of discourse ethics can be answered. Can discourse ethics be applied to world politics? Discourse ethics and world politics The analysis of colonialism and decolonization shows that though eth- ical argument is ubiquitous and consequential, world politics does not followdiscourse ethics. But some have suggestedthat it can andshould. J urgen Haacke argues that discourse theory targets precisely those questions [with] which students of international politics are perenni- ally confronted: how do we and how can we address interpersonal, in- tergroup, intersocietal, or interstate conicts that inevitably arise given the plethora of competing views, values, identities, interests, and needs espoused by humanity. 59 Similarly, Thomas Risse argues that true rea- soning, or the logic of arguingina Habermasiansense, is alreadyevident in world politics. 60 Andrew Linklater proposes to use discourse ethics andanethics of care tocreate social relations that are more universalistic, sensitive to cultural difference, and less unequal. 61 Despite these assertions, it appears on the surface that discourse ethics is particularly ill-suited for international politics. Characteristics that might allow for discourse ethics in domestic politics do not appear to be in place in world politics. Authority in domestic politics is found in both legitimate procedures and in established institutions that derive their authority through either their acceptance as part of the lifeworld or through their connection to other taken-for-granted institutions. Habermas assumes that there is a background consensus for domestic politics the lifeworld and archaic institutions undergirding commu- nicative action and discourse ethics but international politics is surely characterized by different lifeworlds and few archaic institutions. Inter- national ethics inthe current era occurs ina context of anarchy nominal sovereign equality among states and the absence of an enforcer and 59 J urgen Haacke, Theory and Praxis in International Relations: Habermas, Self- Reection, Rational Argumentation, Millennium 25 (Summer 1996), 255289: 261. 60 Thomas Risse, Lets Argue! Communicative Action in World Politics, International Organization 54 (Winter 2000), 139. 61 Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community. 419 Argument and change in world politics real inequality and hierarchy. Moreover, force is omnipresent in inter- national politics. Like all argumentation, practical discourses resemble islands threatenedwithinundationina sea of practice where the pattern of consensual conict resolution is by no means the dominant one. The means of reaching agreement are repeatedly thrust aside by the instru- ments of force. 62 And, nally, some see the possibilities for peaceful coexistence and discourse slipping further away in the post-Cold War world where the great divisions among humankind and the dominat- ing source of conict will be cultural. 63 How could discourse ethics work in the context of anarchy; clashing civilizations that regard each others lifeworlds as irrational; a dearth of accepted, legitimate, and effective institutions; unequal power and ability among states to par- ticipate in speech and to act; and the constant possibility of recourse to force? Yet world politics is closer to the conditions for discourse ethics than it appears at rst glance. As Beitz argues, the international realm is coming more and more to resemble domestic society in many of the fea- tures usually thought relevant to the justication of (domestic) political principles. 64 World politics already depends as much on the process andcontent of arguments as oncoercionandrelations of military power. But there are differences between argument as a mode of persuasion, either of the other or of third parties, and the much less common form of discourse ethical argument as a search for understanding, consensus, or as a form of social or public reasoning. How could actors in world politics begin to apply discourse ethical processes? The content of international law has increasingly provided for the possibility and even occasionally the reality of non-coercive relations among states. Respect for individual human rights has grown. So has respect for sovereign states. In fact, sovereign equality as a normative belief, and the decreasing legitimacy of the use of force, already enables states and some non-state actors to engage in argument and potentially indiscourse ethics. The primaryconditionof ideal speech, freedomfrom coercion, is thus partiallypresent inthe dominant ideologyof worldpol- itics. And, in the twentieth century, individuals and states established 62 Habermas, Discourse Ethics, p. 106. 63 Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer 1993), pp. 2249: 22. 64 Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, p. 8. 420 Poiesis and praxis international institutions that serve as venues for argument for states and peoples. 65 These venues, such as the UNGeneral Assembly, though they certainly embody global inequalities of wealth and military power, are at least formally equal and organized to facilitate speech among the representatives of all states. Ironically, sovereignty may also cover the violation of rights if governments characterized by widespread and systemic human rights abuses at home sit on international com- missions and at the United Nations, and make use of the democratic procedures of those bodies. Because sovereignty is valued and non- democratic states are allowed to participate in international delibera- tions, democracy at the international level may not be mirrored at the domestic level. International institutions thus only potentially provide a framework for the procedural guarantees necessary to overcome the obstacles dis- cussed above in implementing discourse ethics. Therefore, it is vitally important for the process of discourse ethics that states not be the only interlocutors. Non-governmental organizations, social movement orga- nizations, and cultural exchanges are already also venues for discourse. Further, epistemic communities create and maintain regimes of truth and, to a certain degree, follow discourse ethics. Discourse ethics is possible in world politics among representatives of states andcivil society. There are, even under anarchy, incentives to be honest and fair. To be taken seriously in their future interactions have their statements and commitments be seen as credible interlocutors have an incentive to be sincere, truthful, and willing to follow through (pacta sunt servanda) withthe actions requiredby the consensus achieved through their discourse. Moreover, the diversity of perspectives in world politics is a strength, rather than an obstacle, in the process of deliberation. Though humans share elements of a commonhistory, theydo not share anunderstanding of that history; nor do all humans agree on a set of values and goals for the present and future. A dearth of perspectives (lifeworlds) is not an immediate concern at this historical moment. Because, in most matters, states and people acting in world politics cannot rely on the illusion of preexisting consensus, the need for procedural versus substantive (rule based) morality among states and people is more blatantly obvious in 65 Of course argument among the representatives of states occurred prior to the twentieth century. 421 Argument and change in world politics worldpolitics thanindomestic politics. It is precisely because we cannot rest on preexisting agreement that democracy in the form of discourse ethics is vital. Andbecause we cannot assume that we knowwhat others mean by their statements in world politics, and that their values and interests are the same, we must be particularly attentive to their speech and also be willing to make our arguments transparent. Meanwhile, other international institutions such as global news me- dia, globally available culture, and more frequent and genuine interac- tions among people, help to produce the empathy that facilitates role taking and also the background of shared experiences and assumptions on which discourse can rest, at least for a moment. (This is not un- problematic: the BBCs and CNNs views still come primarily from the West.) Because sovereign equality is presumed (though not actual) and the overt hegemonic imposition of norms is illegitimate, there is more room for the operations of discourse ethics than ever before in world politics. Finally, consensus does not always have to be achieved, nor should it necessarily be the goal. As the history of worldpolitics andinternational law indicates, there are ways for states to act together without consen- sus, and without using sanctions. There are also ways to allow varia- tions in behavior. This is done by striving to develop principles rather than immediately moving to develop law and institutionalizing proce- dures. As Cassese argues, international principles serve an important function. When States cannot agree on denite and specic standards of behaviour because of their principled, opposing attitudes, but need, however, some sort of basic guideline for their conduct, their actions and discussions eventually lead to the formulation of principles. 66 Interna- tional legal principles, such as self-determination, according to Cassese, have both a high degree of generality and abstraction and they reect the dominant culture. Cassese argues: In this respect principles are a typical expression of the present world community, whereas in the old community relatively homogenous and less conictual specic and precise rules prevailed. Principles, being general, loose and multifaceted, lend themselves to various and even contradictory applications, and in addition are susceptible to be- ing manipulated and used for conicting purposes. On the other hand, 66 Principles do not differ from treaty or customary rules simply in that they are more general and less precise . . . Rather, principles differ from legal rules in that they are the expression and result of conicting views of States on matters of crucial importance. Cassese, Self-determination of Peoples, p. 128. 422 Poiesis and praxis principles have great normative potential and dynamic force: among other things, one can deduce from them specic rules, to the extent that these rules are not at variance with State practice. 67 Hard cases Two questions must be addressed: who can participate in discourse ethics andhowshouldactors proceedif they cannot come to agreement? Discourse ethics requires democratic practices among interlocutors and implies that collectivities, in order to be legitimate in discourse ethical practice, are themselves democratic. What if potential participants are not democratic intheir internal structure andprocess? Non-democracies can and do participate in institutions which at least formally ascribe to discourse ethical principles. But ought they be allowed to do so? Are interventions into the internal life of states in instances where the right to life is not at issue ever justiable? Ethical issues, which arise in specic historical contexts and have unique features, cannot be (and are not usually) decided in the ab- stract. We cannot know for certain how to act in a situation without considering its particulars, and we are always confronted by new sit- uations. However, it seems foolish and impractical to throw every- thing into the category of to be decided and renegotiated. One sus- pects that some things ought to be taken for granted such as the protection of the right to participate in decisions if all actors want to guarantee their ability to speak regardless of their particular in- dividual status and if we would like to respond to urgent problems within a time period that allows for decisions to have some possibil- ity of being relevant. Thus, there are guides to action on even the hard cases. In the rst hard case, what if actors cannot come to agreement? What if, after an attempt at discourse, actors cannot agree even on general principles? What if one side refuses to engage in dialogue and uses force to get their way? In some cases, it may be ne to decide not to act. But inaction may have dire consequences for those who cannot control others but are still affected by their actions. In these situations, we may have to act somehow if inaction would threaten our well-being or our existence. What can be done? The rst answer is simply to try harder. Agreement maynot seempossible unless interlocutors reasonbackward to what they can agree on and then forward to the particulars of the 67 Ibid., pp. 128129. 423 Argument and change in world politics problem. Only then may it be possible for them to agree on something. In some cases they may have to go even further, to the realm of possible futures where imagination is another realm of experience. The hard cases then demand a form of dialogue, and, in particular, a form of listeningthat is not possibleuntil participants inarguments havelearned to listen empathetically. 68 The presumption must be against the use of force. Taking democracy seriously also means that we must learn to accept, at least for the moment, outcomes we dont like if the practice does not affect us directly. This does not mean that everything is allowed and ought to be praised. Culture can be torture and authenticity the means of maintaining oppressive power structures. 69 Ethical argument is at work when novelists, human rights organizations, and politicians publicize female circumcision, call it genital mutilation, and elicit our help in stopping the practice. We must also accept that others will nd it impossible to accept outcomes they dont like and will continue to argue with their opponents. It is not ethical to sanction those one dis- agrees with, as a rst resort. If interlocutors cannot come to a normative consensus, it may be more fruitful to shift to other kinds of argument, such as practical or scientic arguments. In the case of female circumci- sion/genital mutilation, a scientic argument against the practice would stress potential and likely medical consequences of such a procedure, while practical arguments would emphasize the opportunity costs of using public health moneys to treat people for the complications of an elective surgical procedure. If actors do not behave according to discourse ethical principles, then it may be just to engage in strategic action and sanctions. Taking dis- course ethics seriously that is, only those norms deserve to be valid that meet or couldmeet withthe approval of all affectedintheir capacity as participants in a practical discourse thus has implications for the legitimacy of interlocutors. Non-democratic states are not legitimate in- terlocutors. That is, if the laws of a state are not derived democratically because participants are systematically denied the opportunity to par- ticipate in discourse, these states are not t for communicative action with other communities. Does this mean that non-democratic states should be left out of inter- national deliberations? In theory, yes. In practice, non-democratic states 68 See Flax, Displacing Woman; David Campbell, Politics Without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics, and the Narrative of the Gulf War (Boulder: Lynn Rienner, 1993). 69 Booth, Human Wrongs, p. 115. 424 Poiesis and praxis should be the subject of strategic action sanctions, bargaining, threats, and incentives rather than communicative action. As Beitz argues, unjust institutions do not enjoy the same prima facie protection against external interference as do just institutions, and in fact, other things equal, interference with unjust institutions might be justied when it has a high probability of promoting domestic social justice. 70 Yet this does not mean total isolation or embargo is always appropriate. Non- democracies may be allowed to participate in institutions that follow discourse ethical procedures with certain conditions attached to their participation. Democratic states that seek to sanction other states ought to be able to justify and convince their own populations, and those of other democratic states, that sanctions are appropriate. Further, in line with the obligation to provide living conditions for people to prac- tice their civil rights, sanctions must include humanitarian exemptions and direct aid to those persons who are most vulnerable. Discourse should simultaneously proceed with those parts of the community that are democratic and therefore legitimate. Humanitarian intervention and discourse ethics International law, including the UN Charter, building on the tradition of respect for sovereignty articulated in the Treaty of Westphalia, pro- hibits the use of force by states, except in self-defense. Humanitarian intervention seems to be prohibited as well. 71 Yet interventions that are at least nominally motivated for humanitarian purposes are conducted and may well seem imperative in some situations. Is it ever appropriate to intervene with military force to promote or protect human rights val- ues? Is it legitimate for international society to impose normative beliefs inside a community, for instance to promote human rights or forms of economic life? In the context of a decolonization regime, the only instances that seem to warrant interventions into the domestic affairs of others are those where a state or group within the state is depriving its citizens of the right to life, andtheir ability to speak. The UNandother bodies have provided assistance or even conducted plebiscites, referenda, and elec- tions sothat people couldformindependent states andbeginthe process of self-determination. On the other hand, while there is great sympathy 70 Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, p. 121. 71 Simon Chesterman, Just War or Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 425 Argument and change in world politics for the idea of preventing or halting grave human rights abuses, es- pecially genocide, there is similarly skepticism about the possibility of disinterested humanitarian interventions. As Hans Morgenthau said, it is futile to search for an abstract principle which would allow us to distinguish in a concrete case between legitimate and illegitimate intervention. 72 He argues that, All nations will continue to be guided in their decisions to intervene and their choice of means of intervention by what they regard as their respective national interests. 73 If communities, like individuals, have rights to the greatest possible extent as long as their actions do not harm others, then intervention is warranted only when one communitys actions infringe upon the rights of other communities to determine their lives. It follows that states that use force against other states andpeople ought tobe stopped: aggression justies intervention. Should it matter if the aggression occurs within state boundaries? International law is ambivalent on this point, as is in- ternational practice. The genocide in Rwanda in 1994 occurred without humanitarian intervention to halt it, and intervention to halt Serbian aggression in Bosnia (a region of Yugoslavia) was very slow in coming. Humanitarian intervention in Somalia by the US and UN in 1993 oc- curred but then went sour, with the interveners becoming combatants. Andinterventionby West Africantroops inSierra Leone inJanuary 1999 to halt a civil war was characterized by terrible brutality on the part of the intervening forces. Humanitarian intervention thus poses a complex set of problems. What is the difference between humanitarian assistance and interven- tion. When is humanitarian intervention warranted? How can human- itarian interventions be implemented so that they at least do no harm and hopefully do some good? What are the limits of humanitarian inter- vention? In addressing these questions actors face difcult conceptual tasks as well as tensions andcontradictions between intentions andcon- sequences. And this is not to mention the political dilemmas of securing the will to intervene and mounting adequate force. The main theories of world politics leave us ill-prepared to address issues of humanitarian intervention. Realists, stressing self-interested actors seeking power, argue that truly humanitarian interventions are impossible: so-called humanitarian interventions must be a cover or justication for state interests. States should only intervene when vital 72 Hans Morgenthau, To Intervene or Not to Intervene, Foreign Affairs 45 (April 1967), 425436: 430. 73 Ibid., p. 430. 426 Poiesis and praxis interests are at stake, in which case the resort to humanitarian inter- vention is likely to be rare. Liberals who believe that humans have other attributes besides self-interest namely empathy, benevolence, and a respect for human rights grant the possibility of humanitar- ian interventions, but have difculty theorizing the who, what, where, when, why, and how of humanitarian interventions. Liberals want to do good, and they try, but they are troubled by the difculty of doing so, in part because the historical context of colonialism and decoloniza- tion makes any intervention suspect. Constructivists, emphasizing the historical and social construction of institutions and practices, can tell us that the practice and problems of humanitarian intervention are not new, but the meaning of humanitarian intervention is not necessarily constant. Constructivists and poststructuralists can help us contextu- alize the present understanding of humanitarian intervention, and can show us how we got to where we are in terms of law and institutions. But constructivists have little to say about what to do. If theories of world politics are unsatisfactory, can theories of moral- ity and ethics help us decide the questions of when to act and how to conduct humanitarian intervention? Utilitarian ethical approaches offer one possibility: we couldsimply decide that humanitarianinterventions ought to be undertaken when the benets of action outweigh the costs and risks of inaction. But how do we know the benets of action, and what if costs and risks are very high? How are we to value the inde- pendence of a people, their right to live without fear of massacre, and against the cost of lives sent to preserve their rights? And what of the opportunity costs of action? Which things should we forgo at home so that others can live? Howshall we measure the costs of inaction? Would we feel right letting others suffer if the material costs of action outweigh the benets? If utilitarianism is decient, perhaps a deontological approach that starts with universal normative beliefs could offer guidance. However, there is insufcient agreement within and among states about interna- tional ethics beyond the bare minimum principles of non-intervention except in cases of genocide and aggression. Yet even in the case that would most clearly seem to warrant humanitarian intervention genocide the duty of a particular response is not entirely clear. The 1948 Genocide Convention, which denes the crime of genocide, states that perpetrators of genocide shall be punished after the fact. But the Convention does not articulate a clear method to prevent or halt genocide. Rather, Article 8 of the Genocide Convention says: 427 Argument and change in world politics Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide . . . 74 Further, it appears that there were very few, if any, instances of humanitarian intervention to prevent genocide ei- ther before or after the Genocide Convention came into force. It is difcult to recall a single clear international effort to prevent or halt genocide in the last century where some other motive for interven- tion was not also at work. If genocide is an undisputed instance jus- tifying humanitarian interventions, why are interventions to halt it so rare? Nor is there a consensus, beyond the problem of genocide, within the activist community about the other sorts of crises that are the legitimate triggers for humanitarian intervention. Does inept government, civil war, or famine warrant humanitarian intervention? International law would seem to prohibit such interventions. Further, even if they were allowed, what if the intervened upon dont want such help? Moreover, some principles conict. More troubling, there are fundamental ontological and ethical prob- lems that destabilize the discussion of humanitarian intervention. As attractive as they are, deontological approaches beg the question of why we shouldndparticular rules persuasive enough to be boundby them, and not some other rule. What is the good? How shall we seek to do good? How do we decide in cases where we disagree? Who is the rele- vant we who decides and acts? What is any one persons obligation to another? 75 Humanitarian intervention is thus a real conundrum for theorists. Moreover, the practice of humanitarian intervention and it will not stop even as diplomats and scholars try to sort out the problems is ex- tremely complex, involving many different actors with sometimes con- icting views of the aims and best methods for conducting humanitar- ian interventions. The subjects of humanitarian intervention are rarely asked what they would like, and sometimes when they are able to be heard, because in fact they have been speaking all along, we do not listen. Finally, humanitarian interventions sometimes make situations worse, while interventions that fail to take into account the wishes of 74 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Approved and proposed for signature and ratication or accession by General Assembly resolution 260 A (III) of 9 December 1948, entry into force 12 January 1951, Article 8. 75 StanleyHoffman, Duties Beyond Borders (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UniversityPress, 1981). 428 Poiesis and praxis the intervened upon, which do not even allow that they have agency, are of questionable legitimacy and likely also to face serious practical problems. This last feature of the practice of humanitarian intervention, the fail- ure to treat the intervened upon as if they were active agents, links colonialism and present-day humanitarianism. Often the impetus for humanitarian interventions was and is increased empathy for the other. When we think of the other as more like us, it is not acceptable that we should let thembe subject to the ills we could prevent, such as genocide, starvation, and bad government. But, from the perspective of the inter- vened upon, there is also a strong element of arrogant paternalism (not dissimilar to the paternalism that supported colonialism) in the drive to promote liberal markets, human rights, and democracy through foreign aid, trade policy, economic sanctions, and military interventions. Feminist scholars have developed ideas about an ethic of care that might help us sort out exactly when and howto intervene to help others in a way that is welcome and not idiosyncratic. 76 Joan Tronto, taking an anti-naturalist, anti-essentialist perspective, argues that care is both a practice and a disposition aimed at maintaining, continuing, or repair- ing the world. 77 She says, What is denitive about care . . . seems to be a perspective of taking the others needs as the starting point for what must be done. 78 Tronto emphasizes that perceptions of needs can be wrong. Even if the perception of the need is correct, how the care-givers choose to meet the need can cause new problems. 79 An ethic of care, she argues, requires us to be attentive, responsible, competent, and re- sponsive in care giving. Addressing the criticism that this is a private morality which leaves in place political and structural obstacles to care, Tronto argues that conceiving of morality and politics fromthe perspec- tive of an ethic of care has revolutionary implications for social relations in that we will see how care, primarily done by the weak, is currently organized to suit the powerful. If the challenge is to heighten regard for others over self-interest narrowly dened, and to broaden the concep- tion of community to include others who seem quite different, then an ethic of care is well suited to solving moral problems. 76 Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Sarah Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Poli- tics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). 77 Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 104. 78 Ibid., p. 105. 79 Ibid., pp. 107108. 429 Argument and change in world politics An ethic of care could be useful then in promoting an attitude that arrests the potential paternalisminthe discourse andpractice of human- itarian intervention. Specically, those who would be intervened upon by great powers must be part of any discourse about potential humani- tarian intervention. As Michael Shapiro argues, an ethics of encounter must necessarily recognize that we cannot know the other and must not attempt to x their identities with our narratives. We must be open to their understanding of themselves. 80 As important as this dialogue might be, as Fiona Robinson suggests, the ethics of care demands that we ask not only should we intervene in this or that crisis. Rather, moral attention needs to be paid to develop- ing an understanding of the moral relations which exist, and the moral decisions that are constantly being taken, both before andafter the ques- tion of humanitarian intervention actually arises; this in turn demands a critical analysis of the social relations which exist within societies, and between societies in the global context. 81 In other words, humanitarian crises do not generally arise, full blown and out of nowhere. Rather, the everyday foreign policies of states and the individual actions of citizens may promote conditions that lead to the violation of human rights or help prevent them. States which violate human rights, like all states in the international system, have allies or at least regular economic interac- tions with other states. Human rights violators need guns, fuel, training in the techniques of torture, and so on. They also need or would like, external recognition of their legitimacy as a government. This is exactly what the great powers oftenprovidedtogovernments suchas Indonesia, Chad, South Africa, the Sudan, and Cambodia during the Cold War. As one African observer of the Senegalese human rights case against the former dictator of Chad, Hissene Habr e, remarked: Hissene Habr e was received and honored in Paris as a head of state and ally. France never regarded him as a dictator. This case is much more complex than the role of Habr e. There is the role of France that supported him. There is the role of the United States that supported him. If we are to judge Hissene Habr e, we have to also judge those who supported him. 82 Fol- lowing that logic backwards along the causal chain, if we are to prevent 80 See Michael J. Shapiro, The Ethics of Encounter: Unreading, Unmapping the Imperium, in David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro, eds., Moral Boundaries: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999), pp. 5791. 81 Fiona Robinson, Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory, and International Relations (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), p. 146. 82 Babacar Sine, quoted in Norimitsu Onishi, African Dictator Faces Trial Where He Once Took Refuge, The New York Times, 1 March 2000, pp. A1 and A3: A3. 430 Poiesis and praxis abuses, we must prevent the active and passive support of those abuses. Holding an attitude of care entails holding a long view of how our ac- tions andinactions affect the life possibilities of others. Citizens may put pressure on their governments to withdraw support from those coun- tries which engage in torture, expulsions, and murders. This is a step short of comprehensive and formal international sanctions that may obviate the need for later humanitarian interventions. A convention on humanitarian intervention It is precisely because we cannot agree on substance even in the case of genocide, where the Genocide Convention of 1948 prohibits geno- cide and says states ought to act to prevent it, but provides no clear guidance on how to halt or prevent genocidal acts that I propose a procedural method for moving forward which borrows from and mod- ies discourse ethics. Bearing in mind the problems and promise of discourse ethics and an ethics of care, I propose that interested actors fromall over the globe begin a discourse ethical dialogue with the object of developing a convention on humanitarian intervention. There have been attempts at developing guidelines for humanitarian intervention before and others have proposed working to develop a consensus. 83 My call differs from those efforts in stressing a discourse ethical procedure. The procedural aim must be to conduct a discourse with all poten- tial actors who will then develop an approach to deciding questions of humanitarian intervention. The substantive aim would be to establish general procedures for avoiding humanitarian crises and, when nec- essary, conducting humanitarian interventions. As it is now, there are some general and specic guidelines on the conduct of humanitarian interventions developed by UN agencies, non-governmental organiza- tions, and some governments, but there is no global framework, in part because the legality of humanitarian intervention is questionable. Without getting deeply into the substance which must be decided through a global discourse any convention probably has to answer at least the following questions. What are the causes of humanitarian cri- ses? How can humanitarian crises be prevented? What is a humanita- rian interventionversus a political intervention? What kinds of human- itarian crises demand an international response? What are the limits of 83 See Richard Caplan, Humanitarian Intervention: Which Way Forward? Ethics & International Affairs 14 (2000), 2338: 3134. 431 Argument and change in world politics humanitarian intervention, for example, can state building properly be consideredhumanitarianintervention? Whocanlegitimatelycall for hu- manitarian interventions? Who shall be consulted when the need arises to intervene? Who, specically which organizations, are authorized to undertake humanitarian interventions? What shall be the nature of le- gitimate humanitarian intervention practice; is deadly force acceptable and in what instances? When elements of humanitarian interventions go awry, how shall those responsible be identied and treated? The authors of the convention will not be able to devise one size ts all answers to these questions. They must devise a set of principles that is exible enoughto suit the kinds of instances the international commu- nity agrees ought to be the objects of humanitarian intervention. While each case will be unique, there are two generic scenarios that the au- thors of a convention should consider addressing: preventing genocide; halting ongoing genocide. The irony of using discourse ethics to develop a protocol for the use of force to protect others rights, is obvious. But this irony heightens the necessity of such an approach. Without a conversation open to all and where all presuppositions and arguments are open to challenge, humanitarian intervention may become a practice that resembles colo- nial interventions. In other words, humanitarian intervention violates discourse ethical principles and this is precisely why a discourse ethical practice must be usedto decide whenforce canor must be used. Without a wider and sustained conversation, truly humanitarian interventions, already rare and deeply contradictory in theory and practice, may be- come more rare, while interventions under the rubric of humanitarian intervention may proliferate, despite the fact that such interventions are about something else, such as promoting a political or economic form of life preferred by the powerful. Thus it is crucial that a con- vention on humanitarian intervention should not be drawn up only by representatives of likely interveners. All peoples should participate in the discourse, including non-state actors. Indeed, those who are subjects of humanitarian intervention are already speaking. The issue is whether they are heard. Such an open dialogue will be emotional and political; the scars of colonialism have not healed, while the failures of recent hu- manitarian interventions have perhaps only deepened those wounds. A convention would take years to accomplish, and no doubt more than one humanitarian crisis will arise before a convention is achieved. What could a long, probably simultaneously emotional and legal- istic, discourse do to help in cases of urgent humanitarian crises? 432 Poiesis and praxis A world-wide discourse on humanitarian intervention could have sev- eral important benets, many of whichwouldoccur before a convention is articulated. Dialogue could help actors see the consequences of their actions, in the long chain of events, which help create humanitarian crises (such as great powers sending arms to authoritarian regimes to promote the interests of the great power), and help actors avoid, prevent, or halt those actions. Avoiding the crises that lead to humanitarian interven- tions by being attentive to the ways that external actors are setting the groundwork for crises or failing to act to discourage early abuse would clearly be better than intervening after the fact. The process of reaching agreement on the language of a covenant would help articulate and shape the international normative beliefs that must be claried before crises can even be identied. Discourse leading to a convention on humanitarian intervention couldhelp actors develop thecontext tounderstandcomplexcrises anddevelopbetter causal mod- els for dealing with them. The discourse might also help actors decide which features of crises frame it as humanitarian, and allow them to respond more quickly than the years it took to help Bosnian Muslims. Finally, the process of dialogue could contribute to creating the respect for difference necessary to making world politics more ethical. Greater legitimacy might be attached to interventions if the entire international community were part of the discourse that leads to a convention on humanitarian intervention. In sum, this approach melds principle with process, emotion with reason. Devising a convention on humanitarian intervention is clearly an enormous challenge. To add to the complexity, a convention on human- itarian intervention must provide for its own revision. Still, we already have a head start on the content of such a convention. Discourse ethics and the critical perspective of an ethics of care/encounter imply a very narrow scope of just interventions. Murder justies intervention and sanctions. Political repression only justies sanctions against states if those who are repressed call for them not intervention. Because comprehensive economic sanctions may have enormous consequences both intended and unintended, we must also consider comprehensive international sanctions as a form of intervention. Inept government, or the urge to save failed states, does not justify compre- hensive sanctions by states. Sanctions and intervention to change eco- nomic organization or political arrangements that we simply disagree with (such as no-growth economies or anarchist political organization) 433 Argument and change in world politics thus ought not to be permitted. Sanctions that cost lives to promote po- litical and economic systems are not acceptable; political and economic forms of life that cost life justify sanctions and intervention. Persuasion ought to be the rule. On the other hand, if individuals and groups do not wish to participate or interact with regimes that they nd abhorrent, no laws should force that interaction. Conversely, those who would avoid contact should allow others to interact. Each side may seek to persuade the other to change their policy. Realizing ethical world politics In those instances when we must interact with others and we nd our- selves in conict over ends or means, if we do not at rst see an obvious way to act in matters that concern all of us, we can use discourse ethical principles to nd that way. Yet, in many ways, world politics is very far fromconditions of communicative action, discourse ethics, andanethics of care. My arguments about the importance of the table on which argu- ments rest and are understood, specically the ways the background of culture andpreexistingbelief constrainandenable the persuasiveness of arguments, showwhy normative change is often slow, incremental, and path-dependent. Yet the history of colonial reform and decolonization suggests that ethical arguments are already an important part of the process of world politics. Decolonization is a necessary precondition for discourse ethics in world politics, but it is certainly not sufcient. Movement toward ethical world political relations would be helped by an ethical discourse on humanitarian intervention, the next frontier of ethical world politics. And, despite many problems, there are signs that world politics is moving in the direction of realizing discourse ethics and an ethic of care. Anarchy the absence of hierarchy in the con- text of international organizations, transnational contact, local activism, and traditions of international law that constrain the use of force, pro- vides opportunities to deliberate. World government is not necessary for discourse ethics to work. Anarchy and the clash of civilizations are a virtue, not an obstacle to the development of ethical world politics. Because no one can presume understanding, it is obvious that we must work toward it. But some conditions of world politics do have to change to allow greater scope for discourse ethics and ethical world politics. Most im- portantly, taking discursive democracy seriously as the foundation of ethics in world politics means that human needs rise to the top of the 434 Poiesis and praxis agenda they are not solely a matter of benevolence but crucial to le- gitimacy. A procedural commitment to ethics implies that the world community has obligations to promote the capacity of its members to participate in deliberation on issues that affect them. Both discourse ethics and the ethics of care underscore the importance, indeed our obligation, to better the material conditions of the least well-off, and to increase the sensitivity of the already well-off so that all are able to par- ticipate in the construction of their communities and able to empathize enough with the other to know when and how they are to act in a caring way. The ways that the actions of the well-off directly and indirectly hurt the poor and weak must be claried and corrected. It is not enough to say that the poor or the different have the right to speak, we must remove the economic and institutional obstacles to their participation. As we lower the material andinstitutional barriers todiscourse ethical dialogue, wemust alsolower thebarriers of arrogance, hostility, andfear. To be in an ethical relation with another is to be in an emotional and other-regarding relationship: the other deserves and has our tolerant respect and sympathy. We need to start in an ethical relation in order to have discourse ethics, and discourse ethics allows us to maintain and deepen the ethical relation. Discourse ethics is certainly difcult and not easily achieved within households, much less within states or across boundaries of culture and political systems. Yet taking argument analysis, discourse ethics, and the skepticism of critical perspectives seriously expands the possibil- ities for ethical world politics. Little of the discourse ethical dialogue that I advocate will be easy and much of it will be extremely difcult, especially when it comes to questioning cherished assumptions, chang- ing comfortable ways of being in the world, and making real changes in relations of power. Consistent with the postmodern literary theorists analytical emphasis on discourse as a social construction that materi- ally reproduces the worlds norms, hierarchies, and values, argument analysis and discourse ethics emphasize how our arguments can, with difculty and persistence, change the world. 435 Appendix. African decolonization Current country Colonizer at Method of name independence Date decolonization Algeria France 1962 Guerrilla war and negotiated independence. Angola Portugal 1975 Guerrilla war and negotiated Portuguese withdrawal followed by long civil war and South African intervention. Benin France 1960 Self-governing territory in 1958. Negotiated transitiongranted independence. Botswana Britain 1966 Negotiated transitiongranted independence. Burkina Faso France 1960 Self-governing territory in 1958. Negotiated transitiongranted independence. Burundi Belgium Trust 1962 UN supervised referendum in 1961 decided against monarchy; separated from Rwanda in 1962. Cameroon France and 1960 Former French Trust Territory Britain Trust 1961 Cameroun united in 1961 with British Trust Territory after UN supervised plebiscite in 1961. Canary Islands Spain Became an autonomous community of Spain with two legislatures under 1978 constitution. Cape Verde Portugal 1975 Negotiated transition. (cont.) 436 African decolonization Continued Current country Colonizer at Method of name independence Date decolonization Central African France 1960 Self-governing territory in 1958. Republic Negotiated transitiongranted independence. Chad France 1960 Self-governing Territory in 1958. Negotiated transitiongranted independence. Comoros France 1975 Voted to remain French in 1958; Plebiscites in 1974; three main islands voted for independence and declared it unilaterally. In 1976, one island voted to remain French. Congo Belgium 1960 Negotiated transitiongranted independence. Djibouti France 1977 In a May 1977 referendum, inhabi- tants overwhelmingly voted to become independent, leading to independence in June. Egypt Britain 1922 Protectorate terminated in 1922 and Egypt was declared sovereign; Britain only gradually withdrew. Out in 1956. Equatorial Spain 1968 UN-supervised referendum on Guinea independence in 1968, followed by UN-supervised general elections. Eritrea Italy/ 1993 Occupied by Italy 18851941; Britain/ British occupation/Trusteeship, Ethiopia 19411952; Guerrilla war against Ethiopia and referendum in 1993. Ethiopia Italy 1941 Italian Occupation 19361941 opposed by the League of Nations. Gabon France 1960 1958 Referendum granted self-government. Gambia Britain 1965 Negotiated and granted independence. Ghana Britain 1957 Negotiated and granted indepen- dence. British Togoland voted for union with the Gold Coast in 1956 (UNGA Res. 944 (X)) (cont.) 437 Appendix Continued Current country Colonizer at Method of name independence Date decolonization Guinea France 1958 Negotiated transitiongranted independence. Guinea-Bissau Portugal 1974 Guerrilla Movement Ivory Coast France 1960 1958 Referendum granted self-government. Kenya Britain 1963 Negotiated transitiongranted independence. Lesotho Britain 1966 Negotiated transitiongranted independence. Liberia private 1847 Settled by US born African- Americans. a Libya Italy 1951 British and French admin. 19431951, then negotiated transitiongranted independence. Madagascar France 1960 Major rebellion in 1947; 1958 referendum granted self-government. Malawi Britain 1964 Negotiated transitiongranted independence. Mali France 1960 Negotiated transitiongranted independence. Mauritania France 1960 1958 Referendum granted self-government. Morocco France 1956 Guerrilla war and negotiated independence. Mozambique Portugal 1975 Guerrilla war and negotiated Portuguese withdrawal followed by long civil war. Namibia South Africa 1990 Guerrilla war and negotiated Mandate South African withdrawal. UN supervised elections in 1989. Niger France 1960 1958 Referendum granted self-government. Nigeria Britain 1960 British territory of Northern Cameroon decided to join Nigeria in 1961 UN supervised plebiscite. Rwanda Belgium 1962 UN supervised referendum in Trust 1961 decided against monarchy; separated from Burundi in 1962. Sao Tom e Portugal 1975 Granted independence. and Principe (cont.) 438 African decolonization Continued Current country Colonizer at Method of name independence Date decolonization Senegal France 1960 1958 Referendum granted self-government. Sierra Leone Britain 1961 Negotiated transitiongranted independence. Somalia Italy, Britain 1960 Negotiated transitiongranted Trust independence. South Africa Britain 1910 Granted white settlers self-government, followed by long struggle for majority rule which succeeded in 1994. Sudan Britain 1956 Negotiated transitiongranted independence. Swaziland Britain 1968 Negotiated transitiongranted independence. Tanzania Britain Trust 1961 Negotiated transitiongranted independence. Togo France Trust 1960 UN supervised elections in 1958 UNGA Res 1182 (XII). Tunisia France 1956 Guerrilla war and negotiated independence Uganda Britain 1962 Negotiated transitiongranted independence. Walvis Bay South Africa 1994 Negotiated transition to Namibia. Western Sahara Spain/ Africas last colony. Morocco Morocco and Mauritania invaded in December 1975; Mauritania withdrew in 1979; Polisario declared Saharan Arab Democratic Republic; ceasere in 1991. UN referendum and settlement is stalled. Zambia Britain 1964 Negotiated transitiongranted independence. 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Young, Iris Marion, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 456 Index Abelson, Robert, 48 Abingdon, Earl of, 198 abolition movement, 160161, 162, 168, 176184, 389 Aborigines Protection Society, 183, 202, 240241, 243, 325 accountability, 105, 246247, 266 Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves (1807), 188 Adas, Michael, 390n Adderly, Charles, 360 Adedeji, Adebayo, 137 Africa, 205221 decolonization, 436439 in 1880, 206 in 1914, 219 Africa Squadron, 166, 184 African Association, 202, 241242 African National Congress, 331 agent, 2, 343 Aix-la-Chapelle treaty (1818) 185 Alexander VI, Pope, 140, 141, 145, 155 Algeria, 320, 325, 328, 356 Alker, Hayward, 12n, 20, 28n, 40n, 85n, 119n All Colonial Peoples Conference (1945), 304 Alvarez, Sonia, 61 American Colonization Society, 183 analogy, 5n, 18, 2122, 26, 79, 99, 102, 114, 196, 198199 Anderson, John, 298 Angola, 220, 320, 328, 351, 363, 367368, 369, 371, 380, 381 Cuban assistance to, 374, 375, 376377, 380 Cuban withdrawal from, 381 Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA) 373, 374 National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), 373374 Peoples Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola (FAPLA), 376 South African invasions of, 372379 Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), 373, 374, 375376 Anstey, Roger, 165n, 181 anti-colonial movements, 179, 293, 295, 304306, 325, 345347, 387390 anti-colonial resistance, 139140, 142143, 202, 216218, 251, 271, 293, 320321, 323, 345, 350, 355, 387 Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, 241, 252254, 258, 262n, 277, 287288 Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines Friend, 241 Anti-Slavery Society, 176, 178, 240, 357 Antislaving Act (1818), 188 Apel, Karl-Otto, 411 apprenticeship, 161, 183, 191 Aquinas, Thomas, 143 Archimbaud, L eon, 25 argument dened, 14 formal analysis of, 16, 119120 informal analyis of, 16, 119125 purpose of, 2930 scope of, 3132 Aristotle on argument, 1516, 27, 120n on slavery, 142, 151, 171 Armed Forces Movement, 329 Aron, Raymond, 325, 354n, 361362 associative reasoning, 5n, 17, 197 457 458 Index Atlantic Charter (1941), 296298, 395 Atlee, Clement, 308 Australia, 251, 321 Axelrod, Robert, 93, 94, 132 Azikiwe, Nnamdi, 296 balance sheet memorandum, 352353 Balfour, Arthur, 252, 253n Banda, Hastings, 304 Bandung Conference (1955), 306, 317 Barlow, Arthur, 276 Bebel, August, 233 Beer, George, 254 behavioral norms, 86, 9193 Beitz, Charles, 415, 418, 420, 425 Belgian Congo, 205, 242245, 207, 339 belief, 6, 910, 3757, 81 change of, 5355, 7576 foundations of, 4345, 404 mass and elite, 5557 belief systems, 4953, 6970, 72, 81 contingent beliefs, 5152, 71 core beliefs, 71, 121 role beliefs, 5152, 72 Benedict, Ruth, 58, 59 Benezet, Anthony, 172, 174, 176, 177, 195, 247 Berat, Lynn, 143, 246n Berlin West Africa Conference (188485), 201n, 202, 207210, 212, 213, 215, 249, 263, 268n Betanzos, Domingo de, 149, 150 Betts, R.F., 344345 Bismarck, Otto, 207, 208, 221, 222 Blum, Douglas, 51 Blyden Edward, 217218, 301 Boas, Franz, 307, 308 Boer War, 245246, 435 Bolvar, Sim on, 187, 355 Bolland, O. Nigel, 156157 Bondelswartz (or Bondelswarts), 229 rebellion (1922), 276281 Bonn, M.J., 349, 360 Booth, Ken, 61, 403404, 424 bootstrapping, 106, 392 Botha, P.W., 376 Botswana, 331, 369 Boulding, Elise, 62 Brazzaville French Africa Conference (1944), 300, 323 Brazzaville Protocol (1988), 381 British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 183184 Brussels General Act (1890), 211, 263 see also Conference of Brussels Bryan, William Jennings, 238 Bull, Hedley, 63, 67, 345346 B ulow, von, 230231 Burma, 321 Burundi, 339 Bustamante, Alexander, 321 Buxton, Charles, 110, 253254 Buxton, Thomas Fowell, 186n, 240, 248 Buxton, Travers, 253 Caledon Proclamation (1809), 193 Camus, Albert, 325 Canada, 161, 321 capabilities, 103104, 389390, 392, 394 Carr, Edward Hallett, 83, 93, 403, 405 Cartier, Raymond, 325 Casement, Roger, 244 Cassese, Antonio, 6970, 106, 311, 398, 406, 422423 Castlereagh, Lord, 181 casuistry, 120n Cawthra, Gavin, 374 Central African Republic, 339 Cerrato, Alonzo L opez de, 150, 151, 155, 156 Chamberlain, Joseph, 190, 242 Chamberlain, Muriel E., 264, 286, 322, 347348 change, 1, 75, 80, 103104, 435 Charles V, 148149, 151n, 152 Chomsky, Noam, 403 Churchill, Winston, 277, 295, 296298, 310, 395 civilization, 208, 247 Clark, Grover, 360361 Clarkson, Thomas, 177, 178, 247 Clemenceau, Georges, 258 Cobb, Roger, 70, 75n Cobb, T.R.R., 171172 coercion, 15, 31, 130, 417, 420 Cohen, Joshua, 8385, 127 coherence, 44, 52, 79, 110113, 408 Coker, Christopher, 375n colonial conscripts, 250251, 294, 350351n Colonial Development Act (1929), 295 Colonial Development and Welfare Act (1940), 295, 298 colonialism causes of, 136, 360n dened 131132, 135137 economic arguments about, 325, 350355, 356357, 358363 Columbus, Christopher, 140, 144 Commission on International Justice and Goodwill, 194195 Committee of Twenty-Four, 318n Commonwealth, 322 Index 459 communicative action, 411412, 313, 414, 425 compensation for emancipation, 170 Conference of Brussels (188990), 211, 212, 216, 242 Congo Reform Association, 202, 244245, 325 Congo reform movement, 242245 Congress of Verona (1822), 185 Congress of Vienna (1815), 184185 Conservative Party, 322 content, 2728, 71, 81, 85, 113, 122, 343 see also meaning Convention Peoples Party, 345 Coombes, Annie, 241 Cooper, Frederick, 239, 284, 322323, 343 Coreld, F.D., 291 Cortez, Hernando, 144145, 146n Corwin, Arthur, 185 Council of Fourteen, 152156 Council of the Indies, 148, 150, 151n, 152 Council on African Affairs (CAA), 304306, 331 counterfactuals, 385387 courts of mixed commission, 185186 Covenant of League of Nations, 260263, 266 Article 1, 262263 Article 22, 261262, 273274 Article 23, 262 Cranborne, Lord, 294, 297, 310 Crocker, Chester, 381 Crummell, Alexander, 217 Cuba, 186, 237 culture, 6, 5778 dened, 69, 6468 framing, 7273 global, 6768, in international relations theory, 5964 as lifeworld, 6871 Curtin, Philip, 186187 Curzon, Lord, 251 Dagnino, Evalina, 61 Dallmayr, Fred, 69n Davis, Lance, 352 De Gaulle, Charles, 300 Declaration on Granting of Independence to Colonial Territories and Peoples (UNGA Resoution 1514), 317 Programme of Action for the Full Implementation of, 319 decolonization, 320325 dened, 8n, 136138 deconstruction, 101103 Delaire, Romeo, 399 delegitimation, 101, 102103 democratization, 386387, 394 denormalization, 100, 101, 102 Der Derian, James, 28 Dernberg, Bernhard, 234, 235 Diagne, Blaise, 250, 258, 323 Diaz, Bartholemew, 205 discourse ethics, 410425 capacity, 416, 418, 435 competence, 412, 415416, 418 critique of, 413419 hard cases and, 423425 humanitarian intervention and, 425434 non-democracies and, 421, 423, 424425 pre-discourse, 414 rights entailed, 412, 418, 434435 urgency, 413414 Dolbens Act (1788), 161 Domenach, Jean-Marie, 328 Doty, Roxanne Lynn, 20, 65, 70, 123, 131 Douglass, Frederick, 179 Doyle, Michael, 347 Drescher, Seymour, 169170, 191 Du Bois, W.E.B., 185n, 242, 249, 258, 304, 306, 395 Duffy, Gavan, 119120, 121 Duignan, Peter, 192, 200n, 246, 349 Dumbarton Oaks Conference (1944), 309 East Timor, 3, 320, 324325, 341342 Eden, Lynn, 66 Edwards, Trevor, 378 effective occupation, 208210 Elbourne, Elizabeth, 192, 195196 Elder, Charles, 70, 75n Elster, Jon, 41n Eltis, David, 166, 167, 170 Emancipation Act (1833), 161, 182 emotions, 2527, 36, 38, 78, 98, 104, 115, 241, 388, 391, 408, 416, 432, 433, 435 empathy, 102, 118, 195, 198, 204, 388, 408, 409410, 415, 418, 422, 424, 427, 429 encomienda, 144, 150, 151, 152, 155, 156, 191 epistemic communities, 24, 36, 66, 68, 71 Equiano, Olauda, 179 Escobar, Arturo, 61, 71 ethic of care, 417, 419, 429430, 433, 435 ethical argument dened, 67, 14, 24, 41, 82 disingenuous uses, 98, 100, 125126, 255, 267 emotion and, 26, 115, 117118, 409 failed, 234235 practical argument and, 100n process of, 85, 109, 122123 460 Index ethical argument (continued) receptivity to, 112117, 408409 tests for, 123124, 394397 ethical explanation, 119124, 126127, 129 objections to, 124130 role of ethics, 8385, 403406 Ethiopia, 336, 337, 339 Evangelista, Mathew, 5n exhaustion thesis, 349350, 354356 falsiability, 129 fear, 3031 Federking, Brian, 119120, 121 Ferdinand, King of Spain, 146 Ferry, Jules, 214, 358 Ficht, Johan, 72 Fieldhouse, D.K., 346n, 347, 351, 357 Fi evez, Leon, 201 Finnemore, Martha, 35, 43n, 80, 87, 97, 102104, 107n Flax, Jane, 415 Florini, Ann, 94 Folliet, Joseph, 248 forced labor, 159, 190197, 220221, 283284, 301 arguments for, 192193 reform, 193197, 264265 see also encomienda and repartimiento Foucault, Michel, 43, 47n, 54, 99n, 131, 201202 Fourth Committee, United Nations, 334, 335 Fox, Richard, 68, 73, 76 Foyle, Douglas, 41n, 56 framing, 1922, 35, 99, 102, 122, 266, 265, 267, 333, 341 Fran cois, Curt von, 224, 225226 Franke, Thomas, 317n Frankel, Philip, 368 French Equatorial Africa, 301n, 323 French Indochina, 232, 328 French West Africa, 301n, 323, 350n Freud, Sigmund, 60 Gallagher, John, 203, 214, 291 Galtung, Johann, 62 Gandhi, Mahatma, 285 Gann, L.H., 192, 200n, 246, 349 Gardenfors, Peter, 44, 54 Gelpi, Christopher, 87, 9394 genocide, 339, 339, 399, 414, 426, 427428, 429, 431, 432 Genocide Convention (1948), 427428, 431 George, Alexander, 4647 George, Lloyd, 256 Gerig, Benjamin, 347348n Ghana, 321, 324, 354 Gibbon, Edward, 349 Girault, Arthur, 323 Gladstone, William, 203 Goering, Heinrich, 222 Gompers, Samuel, 239 Government of India Act (1935), 286 Gramsci, Antonio, 398 Granville, Lord, 202, 222 Grigg, Edward, 288 groupthink, 7475 Guam, 237 Guinea-Bissau, 320, 328 Haacke, J urgen, 419 Haas, Ernst, 400 Haas, Peter, 66 Habermas, J urgen, 29, 33n, 34n, 69, 404, 407, 410413, 414416, 418420 habit, 44, 58, 88, 92, 93, 102, 109, 111, 394 Habr e, Hissene, 430 Haddad, Deborah, 20 Haddon, Alfred, 307 Hale, James, 272, 287 Hall, H. Duncan, 268n, 272 Hargreaves, J.D., 349350 Harris, Raymond, 175 Hastings, Warren, 161n Herbst, Major, 275, 277, 278279 Herder, Johann, G., 7172 Herero, 222223, 226227, 229 Heyrick, Elizabeth, 159, 178 Hitler, Adolf, 307 Hobbes, Thomas, 1213, 83 Hobson, J.A., 252, 359360 Hofmeyr, Gisbert, 276, 279 Holmes, Robert, 399 Holsti, Ole, 45 Homer-Dixon, Thomas, 19, 119n Horne, Lena, 305 Horton, John Africanus, 217218 Howard, Michael, 346n, 347 Hull, Cordell, 309310 human rights, 388, 402, 403, 405, 406407, 408410, 426, 427, 430 humanitarian intervention, 114, 392, 399403, 425434 proposed convention on, 431434 humanitarianism aggressive, 201202, 203, 235, 237, 285 reformist, 190, 202, 203, 235, 239246, 393 humanization, 388, 390, 409410 Huntington, Samuel, 60, 6263, 420 Index 461 Hunton, Alpheus, 305, 306n, 331 Hurley, Susan, 405406 Husserl, Edmund, 69 Huttenback, Robert, 352 Huxley, Julian, 307 hypocrisy, 98, 100, 102, 110, 115, 128, 302 ideal speech, 29, 36, 411, 412, 420 ideas, 4950, 81, 344, 345 identity argument, 5, 6, 14, 2426, 194195, 343 identity beliefs, 25, 4243 political identity, 114 India, 251, 285286, 322, 331, 334 Indian National Congress, 331, 345 indirect rule, 220221 Indonesia, 325, 329, 341 innovation, 7476 institutionalization, 2829, 91 of normative belief, 99, 101, 105109 of anti-slavery, 184188 of colonial reform, 268, 286 of anti-colonial beliefs, 316, 391392 Instrument of Obedience and Vasalage (1573), 155 instrumental argument see practical argument instrumental beliefs, 28, 4142 Inter Caetera (1493), 140141 interests, 4950, 80, 81, 83, 91, 9495, 103, 108, 115, 118, 124, 125, 396397, 403, 404, 408409, 426, 427 International Court of Justice, 330, 335, 336337, 338339 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), 318 International Labor Organization (ILO), 266, 267, 275, 284 interpretation, 128129 intuitionism, 406408, 416 Iraq, 3, 262, 263, 282n, 283, 295 Isabella, Queen of Spain, 146, 247 Jackson, Robert, 95, 140, 390391, 392 Jacobson, Harold, 294, 315, 316 Jaja of Opoba, 215, 240 Jamaica, 321322, 354 James, William, 307n Janis, Irving, 7475 Jennings, Lawrence, 170 Jepperson, Ronald, 6364, 112 Jervis, Robert, 46, 72, 104 Johnson, Alistair Iain, 62 Johnson, James, 217218 Johnson, Paul, 392393 Joint Declaration on Colonial Policy (1943), 298 Jones, A. Creech, 322 Jones, Dorothy, 68, 246 Jonson, Albert, 18, 121 Judd, Dennis, 355 justication, 12, 125126, 128, 298, 310, 411 Kant, Immanuel, 407 Karapin, Roger, 19, 119n Kariko, Daniel, 228, 229 Katzenstein, Peter, 39n, 6364, 112 Keck, Margaret, 104, 109n Keeley, James, 416 Kennedy, John F., 121 Kenya, 339 Kenyatta, Jomo, 304 Keohane, Robert, 86n, 93 Khong, Yuen Foong, 18, 22 Kier, Elizabeth, 58, 61, 65, 66, 73, 129130 Klein, Martin, 171, 196, 199 Klotz, Audie, 87 Kratochwil, Friedrich, 40, 86, 107n Kuhn, Thomas, 47n, 52n, 100n Kuwait, 3 Labour Party (British), 252, 296, 322, 361, 386 Lacoste, Robert, 359 Laffey, Mark, 4950, 113 Lakatos, Imre, 129n Lamine Gu eye law, 301 Las Casas, Bartolom e de, 8, 151158, 247 Lasswell, Harold, 11 Lausanne, Institute of International Law (1888), 210, 211, 212 Laws of Burgos (1512), 145146 League Against Imperialism, 325 League of Nations, 249250, 251n, 265266, 309, 333n Assembly of, 266, 277 Council of, 265266, 281 see also Mandate system learning, 5355, 72 legitimacy and legitimation, 3335, 79, 99, 102, 246, 246, 341, 424425 legitimation crisis, 3435, 292n Leites, Nathan, 47n Lenin, V.I., 257, 296 Leopold, King of Belgium, 207, 242245, 343 Lesotho, 369 Leutwein, Theodore, 224226, 229, 233 LeVeen, Phillip, 187 Lev-Strauss, Claude, 308 462 Index Levy, Jack, 2122, 55 Lewy, Guenter, 114 L eygues, Georges, 201 Leys, Colin, 382 Liberia, 205, 336, 337 Liberman, Peter, 357 lifeworld, 6871, 73, 117, 414415, 419 Linklater, Andrew, 406, 419 Linlithgow, Lord, 295 Livinston, David, 208 Lloyd, Christopher, 164, 165, 186 Logan, Rayford, 304 logic, 17, 27, 102, 113, 388, 412 Loi Cadre (1956), 324 London Missionary Society, 193 L opez de Salecedo, Diego, 147 Luard, Evan, 37, 39, 63, 8081 L uderitz, Adolf, 207, 222 Lugard, Frederick, 267, 284285, 348, 359 Luis, Wm. Roger, 260, 262, 288n Lukes, Stephen, 405 Luow, Eric, 333 Lusaka Manifesto, 339 Lynch, Hollis, 305n MacDonald, Malcolm, 295, 386 MacLean, John, 49 MacLeish, Archibald, 305 Macmillan, Harold, 345346n, 352353 Madagascar, 323, 324 Malan, D.F., 378 Malet, Sir Edward, 201, 208209 Mandate system, League of Nations, 8, 260290, 312, 333n effects of, 282286 agreements, 264265 supervision process, 267 territories of, 263 forced labor, 271 Mandelbaum, Michael, 132 Manley, Michael, 251n Manley, Norman, 251n, 321 Manseld, Lord, 160161 Marable, Manning, 260 Marshall Plan, 306 materialism, 43, 7679, 84, 344 Mauritania, 320 Mauritius, 161, 182 Maxwell, Kenneth, 351352 McKinley, William, 237, 238 Mead, Margaret, 58, 60, 62 meaning-content, 2728, 73, 113, 414 Mefford, Dwain, 21 Melian dialogue, 139, 225n Mercer, Jon, 385n meta-argument, 1923, 35, 40, 73, 78, 101, 102, 116, 122, 180, 341 metaphor, 5n, 18, 73 metonym, 5n, 18 Midgley, Claire, 178 Miers, Susanne, 190n Miller, William Lee, 11 Monroe Doctrine, 256 Montesinos, Antonio, 145, 151 Montesquieu, 172173 Montezuma, 146n Moon, J. Donald, 410 moral interests, 103 Morel, E.D., 243244, 249, 252 Morgenthau, Hans, 1213, 93, 426 Morocco, 320 Morris, Abraham, 276 Morris, Thomas, 189 Morrison, Herbert, 297 Mozambique, 220, 320, 328, 351352, 367368, 371 Mozambiquan National Resistance (Renamo), 369 Mueller, John, 96, 97 Mugabe, Robert, 400 myths, 58, 73 Nadelmann, Ethan, 9596, 97, 138, 390, 391n, 394 Nama, 222236 Namibia elections, 381382 ethical arguments and, 382385 United Nations assistance, 400401, see also South West Africa Nardin, Terry, 122 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 303306 nationalism, 7172, 345 natural law tradition, 143 Nazi colonial policy, 385386 racial theories, 307308 neocolonialism, 137, 353, 397398, 400 New Laws of the Indies for Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians (1542), 149150, 152 New Zealand, 251, 321 Nkrumah, Kwame, 304, 321 Non-Self-Governing Territories, Declaration on, 284, 314 Noothout, Johann, 232 normalize, 99 Index 463 normative belief, 20, 4041, 85 distinguished from behavioral norms, 8698 meta-normative 90 types, 8990 scope, 90, 93 normativity, 92, 110 norms, 4041 see also behavioral norms Nyerere, Julius, 3 Obichere, Boniface, 215 operational code, 4647 Ordinances about the Good Treatment of the Indians (1526), 148 Organization of African Unity, 319320n organizational culture, 66 Ormsby-Gore, W., 267, 284 Ortz, Tom az, 148 Oviedo, Gonzalo Fern andez de, 146147, 148149, 151, 153, 154 Pagden, Anthony, 151 Paine, Tom, 173 Palau, 340 Palmerston, Lord, 168169 Pan-African Conferences, 242, 255, 257260, 302, 303, 304 Pan-Africanism, 218, 251n, 301306 Paris Peace Conference, 252, 255, 259260 Payne, Rodger, 21 Paz, Matias de, 145 Perham, Margery, 346 Permanent Court of International Justice, 266n Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC), 8, 250, 265273, 274275, 277282, 312, 314, 315, 333n, 391 questionnaires of, 269272, 335 persuasion, 4, 6, 1416, 22, 3033, 118 persuasiveness, 7, 26, 3233, 3637, 53, 78, 79, 85, 111, 112117 Philippines, US occupation of, 237239 philosophical beliefs, 3040 plebiscite, 320, 324325, 326327, 340341, 425 Pleven, Ren e, 300 political opportunity structures, 105, 204, 290, 292 polygenism, 212213 Portugal, 141, 328329, 351352, 354, 356, 367 positive law tradition, 140 practical argument, 5, 6, 14, 23, 343 practical inference, 24, 27 see also syllogism practical reason, 1112, 15, 16 pragmatic reforms, 104, 127128, 189, 196, 397 Price, Richard, 89 principles, 422423, 432 pro-colonial lobbies, 213214 procedural turn, 410, 421422, 435 process, 12, 910, 14n, 27, 109, 122 protability of colonialism, 3, 4, 105, 190n, 200, 347348, 351354, 356357 of forced labor, 197198 of slavery, 167171, 197198 of slave trade, 164165, 167, 180181 public opinion, 322, 325, 328329, 384, 389 Puerto Rico, 237, 341 Pye, Lucien, 6061 Quakers, 176177, 178 Quevedo, Juan de, 148 racism, 212, 260, 306309, 330 Ranger, Terrence, 217 rational account of role of norms, 9395 rational actor theory, 8585, 117, 125, 129, 170171, 396 rationality, 4, 1213, 3739, 43, 44, 78, 79, 81, 83, 117, 353, 417418 Raymond, Gregory, 87, 89 reason, 10, 12, 15, 1819, 28, 73, 7879, 117118, 416, 433 receptivity, 112117 reconstruction, 103 reformist discourse, 250 Rehobeth rebellion, 281n Reiter, Dan, 6, 47, 72 religious arguments about colonialism, 138, 140141, 142, 145, 146, 149, 362 about slavery, 174175, 180, 198, 199 repartimiento, 155156, 191 representation, 1923, 99 see also framing Republic of Congo, 324 Requirement, The (1513), 146147, 155, 246 resilience of beliefs and behavioral norms, 109111 Resolution 2621, UNGA (1970), 319 Revision of the General Act of February 26, 1885 and of the General Act and Declaration of Brussels of July 2, 1890, Convention on (1919), 263 Rhodes, Cecil, 360 Rhodesia, 318, 321, 371 Rio de Oro, 220, 320 see also Western Sahara 464 Index Risse, Thomas, 12n, 419 Robeson, Paul, 304, 305, 306 Robinson, Fiona, 430 Robinson, Ronald, 203, 214, 291 Rohrbach, Paul, 227228, 233, 248 role, 4243, 52, 82, 111 Romulo, Carlos, 306 Roosevelt, Franklin, D., 296297, 300, 303 Roosevelt, Theodore, 213, 236237, 238n Root, Elihu, 238 Rorty, Richard, 44, 406407, 416, 417418 Rosen, Stephen Peter, 61 Ross, Marc Howard, 92 Round Table, 257 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 173 Ruis, Francisco, 148 Rusk, Dean, 121 Russell, Richard, 42 Russett, Bruce, 62 Ruventlow, Graf, 233 Rwanda, 339 Ruanda-Urundi, 363, 313 Saar, 324n Sahlins, Marshall, 7778 Sampson, Martin, 66 San Martn, Jos e de, 187, 355 sanctions, 20, 41, 92, 104, 106, 110, 123, 125, 138, 293, 318, 319, 396, 412, 422, 424, 425, 431, 433434 against South Africa, 363364, 369, 370372, 375, 379, 380, 382, 396 Sarraut, Albert, 289290, 358 Sartre, Jean Paul, 325 Saul, John, 382 schema theory, 48, 53 Schlieffen, Graff, 229, 230 scientic arguments, 56, 14, 24 Scott, Michael, 331, 334, 335 Scramble for Africa, 215 Select Committee on Aborigines, 240 self-determination, 261, 263, 296297, 315, 322, 337338, 362, 387, 388, 393, 395, 398, 403, 405, 406, 422 post-World War I, 250252, 256 United Nations debates on, 315316 Sep ulveda, Juan Gin es de, 8, 151, 152153 Shapiro, Michael, 70, 430 Sharpe, Granville, 174, 175, 183n Sherman, William, 147, 150n, 157 Shute, Stephen, 405406 sideways reasoning, see associative reasoning Sierra Leone, 183n, 186, 205, 217 Sikkink, Kathryn, 43n, 91, 97, 102, 103, 104, 107n, 109n Silvan, Donald, 20 Simon Commission, 286 Simon, Herbert, 38 Simon, Pierre-Henri, 328 Sine, Babacar, 430 slave revolts, 168 slavery, 162190 anti-slavery arguments, 172175, 179180, 181, 182 economics of, 161171 injustice of, 84 Native American Indian, 147150, 155, 157, 163 pro-slavery arguments, 171172, 175176, 180181 Smith, Adam, 168, 173, 189, 358 Smith, Anthony, 71 Smith, Steve, 45 Smuts, Jan, 257, 274, 276277, 330, 331, 333, 340 Snow, Alpheaus Henry, 254n Snyder, Jack, 126, 129n, 349n social Darwinism, 212213, 227228, 248, 203, 306309 social movements, 5, 29, 37, 57, 76, 116n, 393 Solow, Barbara, 159 Somalia, 339 South Africa, 245246, 251, 321 anti-war movement in, 383384 arguments regarding South West Africas status, 330334 Armscor, 372, 373 casualties in Angola and South West Africa, 365367, 376 Committee on South West Africa War Resistance, 383 End Conscription Campaign, 383 invasion of Angola, 372379 South African Defence Force (SADF) 363, 365, 366367, 369371, 373379, 382, 383384 total strategy, 368370 see also South West Africa South West Africa, 8, 207, 221236, 329340 Contact Group, 380 Constructive Engagement, 380 Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (DTA), 380, 382 Development of Self-Government for Native Nations in South West Africa Act (1968), 337338 disputed status, 330334, 338339 Index 465 economic value of, 363367 German extermination policy, 230 as Mandate, 273282 mineral wealth of, 339, 364 Namibianization, 365 Peoples Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), 366, 367 Security Council Resolution 435, 380, 401 South West African Affairs Act (1949), 334 South West Africa National Union, 336, 337 South West African Peoples Organization (SWAPO), 330, 336, 337, 340, 363, 364, 366, 372, 375, 377, 378, 381, 383, 401 South West Africa Territorial Force (SWATF), 364, 365, 367, 376377, 379 United Nations Council for South West Africa, 337 United Nations Special Committee on, 317n, 336 United Nations Committee on, 335336 United Nations Trusteeship Council and, 333334 Spain, 141, 161, 355, 356 Special Committee on Colonialism, UN, 317318n Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries, 318 Stalin, Joseph, 296 Stanley, Henry Morton, 207 Stanley, Oliver, 298299 Starn, Orin, 68, 73, 76 Stephen, James, 175 Strachey, John, 361 strategic action, 412, 413, 425 structure, 2, 80, 115 Sublimus Deus (1537), 149 Sudan, 339 Sukarno, Achmed, 306 Sumner, William G., 110111 suppression of slave trade, 166167, 184187, 188189 Swaziland, 369 syllogism, 5n, 1617, 2728 Sylvan, Donald, 20 table for argument, 116117, 125 Taft, Robert, 238 tamemes, 144, 149150 Tannenwald, Nina, 89 Tanzania, 339 Tarrow, Sydney, 116n Taylor, A.J.P., 291 Taylor, Charles, 128 Temperly, Howard, 166n Temporary Slavery Commission, 196 Tetlock, Philip, 51n Th eodoli, Alberto, 266, 279280 Thiers, Adolphe, 170 32 Battalion, 367, 374, 378 Thompson, Janice, 40n Thorson, Stuart, 20 Thucydides, 83, 139 Tibet, 3n, 341342 Togo, 262, 324 Togoland, 324 topoi, 23, 109, 121, 125, 141, 341 topos, 68 Toulmin, Stephen, 16n, 18, 121 Tour e, Samori, 216 treaties of protection, 215, 222224, 247, 264n Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), 141 Treaty of Utrecht (1713), 163 Treaty of Washington (1862), 189 Tronto, Joan, 429 Trotha, see von Trotha Truman, Harry, 331 Truman Doctrine, 306 Trusteeship Council, United Nations, 312314, 333334 questionnaire, 312 Trusteeship system, United Nations, 284, 293, 309 territories of, 312, 313 Truth, Sojourner, 179 Tucker, Seth, 119120, 121 Tunisia, 320, 325 Turley, David, 174n Turner, Nat, 179 Turner, Scott, 67 Uganda, 339 unanticipated effects, 104105, 189n, 190, 196, 202, 204, 265, 285, 288, 397, 398, 402 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientic and Cultural Organization), 308309 Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), 318 United Nations (UN), 293294 Committee on Information, 315, 318n San Francisco conference on, 310 466 Index United Nations Charter, 310, 311, 314, 395, 425 Chapter XI, 284, 333 Chapter XII, 311 United Nations Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG), 380, 401 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), 314n, 317, 403 Vasquez, John, 56n, 62 Vattel, E., 143144 Verba, Sydney, 38, 60 Vertzberger, Yacoov, 22, 48, 60, 64, 67, 70, 71, 73 Victoria, Queen of England, 242 Vietnam, 320, 325, 356 Vitoria, Francisco de, 143, 149, 156, 218, 247 Von Eschen, Penny, 303, 306n, 331332 Von Trotha, Lothar, 229231, 343, 356 Vorster, B.J., 338339 Walker, R.B.J., 60 Walker, Stephen, 4546 Wallace, Henry, 305, 306 Walton, Douglas, 17, 28n Walton, E.H., 280 Waltz, Kenneth, 13 Walzer, Michael, 82, 98, 100, 102, 249 Watson, Adam, 63 Weber, Max, 38, 47n, 55 Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842), 189 Weingast, Barry, 39 Weldes, Jutta, 4950, 113 Wendt, Alexander, 1, 63, 64, 112, 114n Western Sahara, 220, 341 White, Walter, 303 Wilberforce, William, 174n, 177, 180, 181, 247248 Williams, Eric, 165166 Williams, George Washington, 242243 Wilson, Heather, 315316 Wilson, Woodrow, 238n, 249, 254, 255, 256257, 260261, 395 Witboi, Hendrik, 222226, 231, 233 Woolman, John, 176, 177, 247 World War I, 250251, 323, 324n, 350n World War II, 294301, 350n, 386 Wright, Georg Henrik von, 90 Wright, Quincy, 131, 247248, 264, 288, 348 Wright, Ronald, 58 Xuma, A.B., 331 Yalta (1945), 310 Yergan, Max, 305 Young, Iris Marion, 411, 416 Zambia, 339 Zimbabwe, 369, 371 CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 69 Bill McSweeney Security, identity and interests A sociology of international relations 68 Molly Cochran Normative theory in international relations A pragmatic approach 67 Alexander Wendt Social theory of international politics 66 Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp and Kathryn Sikkink (eds) The power of human rights International norms and domestic change 65 Daniel W. Drezner The sanctions paradox Economic statecraft and international relations 64 Viva Ona Bartkus The dynamic of secession 63 John A. Vasquez The power of power politics From classical realism to neotraditionalism 62 Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett (eds.) Security communities 61 Charles Jones E. H. Carr and international relations A duty to lie 60 Jeffrey W. Knopf Domestic society and international cooperation The impact of protest on US arms control policy 59 Nicholas Greenwood Onuf The republican legacy in international thought 58 Daniel S. Geller and J. David Singer Nations at war A scientic study of international conict 57 Randall D. Germain The international organization of credit States and global nance in the world economy 56 N. Piers Ludlow Dealing with Britain The Six and the rst UK application to the EEC 55 Andreas Hasenclever, Peter Mayer and Volker Rittberger Theories of international regimes 54 Miranda A. Schreurs and Elizabeth C. Economy (eds.) The internationalization of environmental protection 53 James N. Rosenau Along the domestic-foreign frontier Exploring governance in a turbulent world 52 John M. Hobson The wealth of states A comparative sociology of international economic and political change 51 Kalevi J. Holsti The state, war, and the state of war 50 Christopher Clapham Africa and the international system The politics of state survival 49 Susan Strange The retreat of the state The diffusion of power in the world economy 48 William I. Robinson Promoting polyarchy Globalization, US intervention, and hegemony 47 Roger Spegele Political realism in international theory 46 Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber (eds.) State sovereignty as social construct 45 Mervyn Frost Ethics in international relations A constitutive theory 44 Mark W. Zacher with Brent A. Sutton Governing global networks International regimes for transportation and communications 43 Mark Neufeld The restructuring of international relations theory 42 Thomas Risse-Kappen (ed.) Bringing transnational relations back in Non-state actors, domestic structures and international institutions 41 Hayward R. Alker Rediscoveries and reformulations Humanistic methodologies for international studies 40 Robert W. Cox with Timothy J. Sinclair Approaches to world order 39 Jens Bartelson A genealogy of sovereignty 38 Mark Rupert Producing hegemony The politics of mass production and American global power 37 Cynthia Weber Simulating sovereignty Intervention, the state and symbolic exchange 36 Gary Goertz Contexts of international politics 35 James L. Richardson Crisis diplomacy The Great Powers since the mid-nineteenth century 34 Bradley S. Klein Strategic studies and world order The global politics of deterrence 33 T. V. Paul Asymmetric conicts: war initiation by weaker powers 32 Christine Sylvester Feminist theory and international relations in a postmodern era 31 Peter J. Schraeder US foreign policy toward Africa Incrementalism, crisis and change 30 Graham Spinardi From Polaris to Trident: The development of US Fleet Ballistic Missile technology 29 David A. Welch Justice and the genesis of war 28 Russell J. Leng Interstate crisis behavior, 18161980: realism versus reciprocity 27 John A. Vasquez The war puzzle 26 Stephen Gill (ed.) Gramsci, historical materialism and international relations 25 Mike Bowker and Robin Brown (eds.) From Cold War to collapse: theory and world politics in the 1980s 24 R. B. J. Walker Inside/outside: international relations as political theory 23 Edward Reiss The Strategic Defense Initiative 22 Keith Krause Arms and the state: patterns of military production and trade 21 Roger Buckley US-Japan alliance diplomacy 19451990 20 James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel (eds.) Governance without government: order andchange inworldpolitics 19 Michael Nicholson Rationality and the analysis of international conict 18 John Stopford and Susan Strange Rival states, rival rms Competition for world market shares 17 Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel (eds.) Traditions of international ethics 16 Charles F. Doran Systems in crisis New imperatives of high politics at centurys end 15 Deon Geldenhuys Isolated states: a comparative analysis 14 Kalevi J. Holsti Peace and war: armed conicts and international order 16481989 13 Saki Dockrill Britains policy for West German rearmament 19501955 12 Robert H. Jackson Quasi-states: sovereignty, international relations and the Third World 11 James Barber and John Barratt South Africas foreign policy The search for status and security 19451988 10 James Mayall Nationalism and international society 9 William Bloom Personal identity, national identity and international relations 8 Zeev Maoz National choices and international processes 7 Ian Clark The hierarchy of states Reform and resistance in the international order 6 Hidemi Suganami The domestic analogy and world order proposals 5 Stephen Gill American hegemony and the Trilateral Commission 4 Michael C. Pugh The ANZUS crisis, nuclear visiting and deterrence 3 Michael Nicholson Formal theories in international relations 2 Friedrich V. Kratochwil Rules, norms, and decisions On the conditions of practical and legal reasoning in international relations and domestic affairs 1 Myles L.C. Robertson Soviet policy towards Japan An analysis of trends in the 1970s and 1980s
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