Colonialism and Empire Flashcards
The UN
Can be regarded regarded as the culmination of the entire constitutive process, a culmination that both reveals the limitations of the notion of international order and points beyond it towards a new notion of global order. The UN functions as a hinge in the geneology from international to global juridical structures.
Hans Kelsen
As early as the 1910s and 1920s, Kelsen proposed that the international juridical system be conceived as the supreme source of every national juridical formation and constitution. the limits of the nation-state, he claimed, posed an insurmountable obstacle to the realization of the idea of right.
The Hobbesian variant focuses
primarily on the transfer of the title of sovereignty and concieves the constitution of the supranational sovereginity entity as a contractual agreement grounded on the convergence of prexisting state subjects. A new transcendent owner, primarily concentrated in the hands of the military is, according to this school, the only means capable of constituting a secure international system.
Lockean Variant
When the transfer toward a supranational center is accomplished, networks of local and consitutionally effective counterpowers rise up to contest and/or support the new figure of power.
Theorists associated with a world-systems perspective argue
That from its inception, capitalism has always functioned as a world economy, and thereofre those who clamor about the novelty of its globalization today have only misunderstood its history.
Other theorists - globalization
Other theorists are reluctant to recognize a major shift in global power relations because they see that the dominant capitalist nation states have continued to exercise imperialist somination over the other nations and regions of the globe.
the concept of Empire is presented
as a global concert under the direction of a single conductor and in order to achieve these ends, the single power is given the necessary force to conduct, when necessary “just wars”.
Postmodernity - notion of right
Should be understood in terms of concept of Empire. One symptom is the renewed interest in and effectiveness of the concept of “just war”.
The new paradigm is defined by
The definitive decline of the sovereign nations states, by the deregulational of national markets. The new paradigm is both system and hierarchy, capitalized construction of norms and far reaching production of legitimacy, spread out over world space. some call this “government without govenance”.
Previous transitional perspectives focused attention on
The legitimating dynamics that would lead toward the new order.
The paradigm shift is denied by
the recognition that only an established power, overdetermined with respect to and relatively autonomous from the sovereign nation states, is capable of functioning at the centre of the new world order.
Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus
All teach us that empire is formed not on the basis of force itself but on the basis of the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace - empire is not born of its own will but rather it is called into being and constituted on the basis of its capacity to resolve conflicts.
The imperial process of constitution
tends to directly or indirectly penetrate and reconfigure the domestic law of nation state, and thus supranational law powerfully overdetermined domestic law.
Symptom of the transition between supranational to overpowered domestic law.
The development of the so-called right of intervention. This is commonly conceived as the right or duty of the dominant subjects of the world order to intervene in the territories of other subjects in the interest of preventing or resolving humanitarian problems.
