Civilisation, Barbarism and The Making of Latin America's Place in 19th-Century International Society

541318
research-article2014
MIL0010.1177/0305829814541318Millennium: Journal of International StudiesSchulz
MILLENNIUM
Journal of International Studies
Conference Article
Civilisation, Barbarism and

the Making of Latin
Americas Place in 19thCentury International
Society
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2014, Vol. 42(3) 837859
The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829814541318
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Carsten-Andreas Schulz
University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
The present study revisits the position accorded to Latin American states in the conventional
account of the expansion of international society. Drawing on English School theory and legal
history, it develops a critique of the standard of civilisation, contending that the boundaries
of international society were much more malleable and diffuse than the conventional narrative
suggests. The argument is illustrated with reference to the historical experience of Latin
American states: despite the profound impact that European colonisation had on the region, the
marginalisation of Latin American states within international society was commonly framed in
civilisational terms. Rather than taking their western identity and thus membership for granted,
the paper demonstrates the role that civilisational rhetoric played in the making of Latin Americas
place in the heterarchical international order of the long 19th century. The article concludes by
discussing some implications for theorising the evolution of international society.
Keywords
standard of civilisation, expansion of international society, English School, civilisational analysis,
Latin America, hierarchy
Introduction
According to the orthodox narrative of the expansion of international society told by
Hedley Bull, Adam Watson and others the 19th century marked a watershed in the
transformation of an originally European into a global international society.1 European
1. Most importantly, Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, eds, The Expansion of International
Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
Corresponding author:
Carsten-Andreas Schulz, Nuffield College and DPIR, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 1NF, UK.
Email: carsten.schulz@nuffield.ox.ac.uk
Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at University of Limpopo Turfloop Campus on March 25, 2016
838
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(3)
overseas expansion began in the early 15th century. But it was not until the long 19th
century, the period between the French Revolution and the outbreak of the First World
War, that the West drew together the different parts of the world, and by doing so, created the global international order we know today.2 More recently, the English School
orthodoxy has come under considerable criticism, as revisionist authors question the
narratives Eurocentric bias and its neglect of colonialism as a fundamental institution of
international society. The present study builds and extends upon this literature by examining the protracted experience of Latin American states with international society.
Central to the English School orthodoxy is the belief that international society was as an
outgrowth of 17th-century Europe, and therefore deeply rooted in western civilisation.3
Following this logic, the historical evolution of international society is conceptualised in
terms of a binary distinction between the members of international society on the one hand,
and those who were gradually admitted into what was once an exclusively European club
on the other. The admission of new members was mediated through the so-called standard
of civilisation, according to which the expansion of international society was quintessentially a confrontation between the West, defined as European and of European-descent,
and the more heterogeneous rest.4 By the turn of the 19th century, it is argued, the standard of civilisation emerged as an explicit legal principle, requiring non-western societies
to accept western norms and institutions before they qualified for full membership.
In contrast to this formal-legal conception, this study posits that, firstly, the standard
of civilisation needs to be understood as part of a wider civilisational discourse that
rationalised inequalities in international society. This necessarily shifts the question of
admission to one of international standing and the political consequences this entailed.
Secondly, from this it also follows that formal recognition as part of the family of civilised states does not necessarily imply membership in the core of international society.
Rather, the argument supports the view that conceives of the international realm as stratified. Anarchy, defined as the absence of a supreme governing authority above the state,
does not preclude the possibility of hierarchy in international relations.5 However, contrary to attempts to devise a single hierarchical ordering of states, the findings suggest
that 19th-century international society was heterarchical, in the sense that it comprised
2. The case for the 19th century as global historical turning point is made by Barry Buzan and
George Lawson, The Global Transformation: The Nineteenth Century and the Making of
Modern International Relations, International Studies Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2013): 62034.
3. See Barry Buzan, Culture and International Society, International Affairs 86, no. 1
(2010): 33940; Jacinta OHagan, Conceptualizing the West in International Relations:
From Spengler to Said (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); and The Question of Culture,
in International Society and its Critics, ed. Alex J. Bellamy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005); John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western
International Theory, 17602010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
4. Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of Civilisation in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1984).
5. Helen Milner, The Assumption of Anarchy in International Relations Theory: A
Critique, Review of International Studies 17, no. 1 (1991): 76; David A. Lake, Hierarchy
in International Relations, Cornell Studies in Political Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2009), 4551.
839
Schulz
different dimensions of stratification.6 Because of the multiple hierarchies at work, civilisation was mobilised not only against non-western political communities, but within
Europe and the West itself.
The analytical shift towards civilisational rhetoric is crucial for understanding the
making of Latin Americas place in 19th-century international society. Latin America
has received only scarce attention from the English School.7 This is unfortunate on
two counts. For one, it neglects an early and crucial stage in the evolution of modern
international society: what Mayall described as the first of the three great waves of
modern state creation.8 The consequence being that the English School has missed
the history of opportunity to explore the rich international history of the region. For
another, the Latin America forcefully illustrates how cultural determinism has limited
the analysis of the English School. Considered by European elites as white settler
societies modelled on European peoples, ideas and institutions, the English School
categorises Latin America as being part of the West.9 The terms of the debate were
set by Watson: What really and decisively made the settler states of the Americas
consider themselves, and be considered, members of the European family was that
they were all states on the European model, inhabited or dominated by people of
6. Barry Buzan and Mathias Albert, Differentiation: A Sociological Approach to International

Relations Theory, European Journal of International Relations 16, no. 3 (2010): 318;
Jack Donnelly, Rethinking Political Structures: From Ordering Principles to Vertical
Differentiation and Beyond, International Theory 1, no. 1 (2009): 636; and The
Differentiation of International Societies: An Approach to Structural International Theory,
European Journal of International Relations 18, no. 1 (2012): 153, 57; Gerry J. Simpson,
Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 17, 5661. See also Edward Keene, The
Standard of Civilisation, the Expansion Thesis and the Nineteenth-Century International
Social Space, Millennium 42, no. 3, (2014): 651-673.
7. The most comprehensive, although problematic, treatment remains Adam Watson, New
States in the Americas, in Expansion of International Society, eds Hedley Bull and
Adam Watson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). More recent accounts include Mikulas
Fabry, Recognizing States: International Society and the Establishment of New States
since 1776 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4978. On the case of Cuba, see
Gerard Aching, On Colonial Modernity: Civilization Versus Sovereignty in Cuba, c.
1840, in International Relations and Non-Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism,
and Investigations of Global Modernity, ed. Robbie Shilliam (London: Routledge,
2011). On Haiti, see Cristian Cantir, Fear of a Black Planet: The Haitian Revolution in
International Society (paper presented at the International Studies Association Annual
Convention, San Francisco, 36 April 2013). Reus-Smit discusses Latin American independence, but takes a critical stance towards the English School in Individual Rights
and the Making of the International System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), 302.
8. James Mayall, Nationalism and International Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 64; see also Reus-Smit, Individual Rights, 1923.
9. OHagan, Conceptualizing the West, 114.
840
European culture and descent;10 they were rather boorish and provincial members,
perhaps, but that was no great matter.11
The view that the colonial legacy of Latin American states facilitated their admission into international society is not without merit. As in the case of the United States,
and with the only notable exception of Haiti, most states were diplomatically recognised by the European powers during the first years of independent statehood.
Furthermore, unlike China, Japan or the Ottoman Empire, 19th-century legal scholars
did formally regard Latin America as integral part of international society. However,
what this view misses is that Latin American states, at times, fell short of the requirements of civilised life. Viewed from the core of international society, political instability in Spanish America, and racial and cultural heterogeneity, more generally,
undermined the standing of Latin America within the family of civilised states.
In what follows, the study first revisits the English School debate on the evolution of
international society. The review sets the stage for a critique of Gongs standard of civilisation. The argument suggests that rather than treating the standard of civilisation as a
western-defined legal principle, it should be seen as part of a wider civilisational discourse
that was ubiquitous in the 19th century. The importance of this analytical shift is illustrated
with the experience of Latin American states following independence in the early 19th
century. The discussion demonstrates that the position of Latin America in international
society was far more uncertain than Watson suggests. Elites in 19th- and early 20th-century
Latin America were deeply concerned about the place of their societies in the family of
civilised nations. This is reflected by the way in which civilisational rhetoric was
employed to make sense of Latin Americas place in the world. As an ideal, civilisation
provided the ideological justification for the promotion of European-style modernisation
and nation-building promulgated by Latin American elites often with deleterious implications for non-white and indigenous populations in the region. The study concludes that
accounts of the standard of civilisation, which maintain that non-western countries were
barred from entry into international society until they adopted western norms and institutions, understate the important contradictions that existed within the West itself.
Revisiting the Expansion Story

Although some elements were already present in earlier English School writings,12 it
was only in The Expansion of International Society,13 edited by Hedley Bull and
10. Hedley Bull, The Emergence of a Universal International Society, in The Expansion
of International Society, eds Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1984), 122; Bull and Watson, Expansion, 18; quote from Adam Watson, The Evolution of
International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis (London: Routledge, 1992), 268.
11. Watson, New States in the Americas, 139.
12. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 3rd edn
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002 [1977]), 2638. Note that some of its traits were also present
in Wights System of States of the same year. Wight, however, emphasises the dual nature
of international society, in which forms of exclusion co-existed with notions of a universal
community of mankind, see Martin Wight, Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester University
Press, 1977), 11052. I thank the anonymous reviewer for drawing attention to this.
13. Bull and Watson, Expansion.
841
Schulz
Adam Watson, that the orthodox account was developed in full. Their narrative begins
with the emergence of an anarchical society of states in Europe, continues with the
spread of this order to the rest of the world due to European economic and military
dominance, and ultimately concludes with the transformation of the originally
European into a global international society. Before western expansionism, there was
no international society that was global in scope, but rather a number of regional
societies, each with its own distinctive rules and institutions, reflecting a dominant
regional culture.14 As the authors make clear, it was never the case, before Europe
unified the globe, that relations between states or rulers that were members of different regional international systems [sic] could be conducted on the same moral and
legal basis as relations within the same system, for this basis was provided in part by
principles that were culturally particular and exclusive.15
Culture is of central importance to the English School narrative.16 In the first place,
cultural solidarity is thought to be an important source of (regional) order: We must
assume, as Wight put it, that a states-system will not come into being without a degree
of cultural unity among its members.17 In much the same vein, Bull argues that historically existing international societies were largely founded upon a common culture or
civilisation, defined by a common language, a common epistemology and understanding of the universe, a common religion, a common ethical code, a common aesthetic or
artistic tradition.18 For Bull, this cultural or civilisational foundation raises important
questions about the stability of modern international society, which has expanded beyond
its originally European core.
The western origins of international society are closely intertwined with the power
relations that its diffusion entailed. In this context, it was Gongs treatment of the
standard of civilisation that set the terms of the debate.19 In an influential book based
on his doctoral thesis written in the 1970s under Hedley Bulls supervision, Gong suggests that the expansion of international society was not only about European economic
and military dominance, but a confrontation between civilizations and their respective
culture systems.20 In short, non-western peoples had to comply with a certain western
standard in order to gain full membership in international society. Although rather
vague at first, Gong argues that in the course of the 19th century the standard developed
into an explicit legal doctrine based on the tripartite classification of peoples into civilised, barbarous and savage whereas only the first enjoyed the full rights
14. Ibid., 1.
15. Ibid., 6.
16. OHagan, The Question of Culture, 209; see also Iver B. Neumann and Jennifer M. Welsh,
The Other in European Self-Definition: An Addendum to the Literature on International
Society, Review of International Studies 17, no. 4 (1991): 3289.
17. Cited in OHagan, The Question of Culture, 211; see also Buzan, Culture and International
Society, 1.
18. Bull, Anarchical Society, 15.
19. Gong, Standard of Civilisation.
20. Ibid., 3, 44, 97; quote in Gerrit W. Gong, Standards of Civilization Today, in Globalization
and Civilizations, ed. Mehdi Mozaffari (London: Routledge, 2002), 78.
842
and obligations of international law.21 Membership, in this sense, was conditional on a

certain degree of homogenisation, requiring non-European countries to undergo profound political and social reform and, importantly, to accept the rules and principle of
international society.22
The orthodox narrative has attracted considerable attention lately. As a result there is
now a much better understanding of the historical evolution of international society.23
Apart from reassessing individual cases, this revisionist scholarship has focused on what
Neumann and Welsh called the unspoken presuppositions of the conventional narrative.24 Accordingly, the conventional view is overly Eurocentric,25 portraying international society as a teleological force for good until its foundations were undermined by
the revolt against the West. By focusing on how non-Western societies accepted more
progressive elements, such as diplomacy and international law, the orthodox account
downplays the Janus-faced nature of international society.26 Thus, revisionist critics
object that the evolution of modern international society was marked by the imposition
of colonial rule, the exploitation of non-European peoples, and the negation of the rights
of indigenous communities.27 Viewed from the perspective of indigenous peoples, as
21. Gong, Standard of Civilisation, 4, 240. The distinction goes back to James Lorimer, The
Institutes of the Law of Nations: A Treatise of the Jural Relations of Separate Political
Communities, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1883), 101. In fact, Lorimer makes a strong
case for the continuing importance of natural law. On the difficulty of characterising 19thcentury legal scholars as either positivist or naturalist, see Martti Koskenniemi, The
Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 18701960 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 4.
22. Bull, The Emergence of a Universal Interantional Society, 1202.
23. Examples include Yannis A. Stivachtis, The Enlargement of International Society: Culture
Versus Anarchy and Greeces Entry into International Society (London: Macmillan, 1998);
Barry Buzan and Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez, International Society and the Middle East: English
School Theory at the Regional Level (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Barbara
A. Roberson, Law, Power and the Expansion of International Society, in Theorising
International Society: English School Methods, ed. Cornelia Navari (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009); Shogo Suzuki, Japans Socialization into Janus-Faced European
International Society, European Journal of International Relations 11, no. 1 (2005): 137
64; and Civilization and Empire: China and Japans Encounter with European International
Society (London: Routledge, 2009); Neil A. Englehart, Representing Civilization:
Solidarism, Ornamentalism, and Siams Entry into International Society, European Journal
of International Relations 16, no. 3 (2010): 41739.
24. Neumann and Welsh, Addendum, 329.
25. For instance, John Anthony Pella, Expanding the Expansion of International Society: A
New Approach with Empirical Illustrations from West African and European Interaction,
14001883, Journal of International Relations and Development 17, no. 1 (2014): 915.
26. Suzuki, Civilization and Empire, 215.
27. Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005); Paul Keal, European Conquest and the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples: The Moral Backwardness of International Society (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003); Lauren A. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal
843
Schulz
Epp reminds the reader, the expansion of international society was a violent history of
exclusion and homogenisation, often going hand in hand with the disregard for indigenous treaty-rights, as exemplified by the westward expansion of Canada and the United
States.28 Hence, for Halliday, the institutions of international society did not spread in a
peaceful way, but through what the author terms coercive diffusion: the political, economic and cultural subjugation of non-European peoples.29 That is to say, what the orthodox account called expansion merely conceals the fact that European colonialism was
a major driving force in the development of international society. The point is well made
in Keenes critique of the Grotian tradition.30 Rather than promoting the peaceful existence of states, international society contained a dualistic mode: one based on the toleration of difference, the other following a totalising logic, namely civilisation. As Keene
puts it, [a]t the same time as the Westphalian system of equal and mutually independent territorially sovereign states was taking shape, quite different colonial and imperial
systems were being established beyond Europe, predicated above all on the division of
sovereign prerogatives across territorial boundaries and the assertion of the rights of
individuals, especially to property.31
The recent revisionist literature has provided a necessary corrective of the orthodox
account. But a note of caution is needed here: Eurocentrism as a theory of history should
not be confused with Eurocentricity as neglect of the non-European world. It is simply
not the case that the English School has failed to engage with colonialism and its historical legacy.32 Quite the contrary, their account is one of the few approaches outside postcolonial theory where these questions feature prominently. After all, the consequence of
the rapid break-up of the British Empire was a central concern for the British Committee
on International Relations, out of which the English School eventually emerged.33
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
Regimes in World History, 14001900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);

and, importantly, Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and
Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Roger Epp, At the Woods Edge: Toward a Theoretical Clearing for Indigenous Diplomacies
in International Relations, in International Relations Still an American Social Science?
Toward Diversity in International Thought, ed. Robert M.A. Crawford and Darryl S.L.
Jarvis (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), 312.
Fred Halliday, The Middle East and Conceptions of International Society, in International
Society and the Middle East: English School Theory at the Regional Level, eds Barry Buzan
and Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1013, 1819.
Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society, 2939.
Ibid., 97; see also Jrg Fisch, Internationalizing Civilization by Dissolving International
Society: The Status of Non-European Territories in Nineteenth-Century International Law,
in The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the
First World War, eds Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 2545.
Ian Clark, Legitimacy in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 36.
The case is made by Ian Hall, The Revolt against the West: Decolonisation and its Repercussions
in British International Thought, 194575, The International History Review 33, no. 1 (2011):
4364; a more critical stance is taken by William A. Callahan, Nationalising International
Theory: Race, Class and the English School, Global Society 18, no. 4 (2004): 30523.
844
To some extent, Bull and Watson even allude to the idea of transformative encounters
between West and the rest. Yet despite being aware that the evolution of international
society cannot be separated from its geographical spread,34 the impact of non-Europeans
on this simultaneous process is simply not part of their narrative. Ultimately, Bull and
Watsons approach is self-consciously Eurocentric: Because it was in fact Europe and
not America, Asia, or Africa that first dominated and, in so doing, unified the world, it is
not our perspective but the historical record itself that can be called Eurocentric.35
The Standard of Civilisation as Civilisational Discourse

The self-conscious Eurocentrism of the expansion story seems increasingly out of
touch with todays zeitgeist and hardly defensible in light of the insights gained from
revisionist scholarship. However, an important but often neglected aspect is the way in
which admission into international society has been conceptualised. Wight is exceptional in this regard, in that he recognises the dual nature of international society, where
a predominately European inner circle was nested within a more universal transEuropean penumbra.36 More generally, however, there has been a tendency to apply a
rigid binary distinction between members and outsiders of international society.37 Not
only does this view underestimate the extent to which international society was stratified,
it also draws on predefined civilisational boundaries that mark off the presumed members of international society from those outside it. This view suggests that the international order consisted of two groups: on the one side, the West defined as European
and European settler societies; on the other, the rest, political communities who had to
comply with Western standards that were externally defined and alien to their own culture and value system. The important point is this: if we accept the revisionist view that
colonialism and inequality were central components of international society, then those
subject to unequal relations can no longer be treated as outsiders.38
The move away from membership towards rank or position within international
society requires rethinking the standing of the so-called standard of civilisation.
Within the discipline of IR, Gerrit Gongs treatment has become a standard reference
34.
35.
36.
37.
Bull and Watson, Expansion, 6.

Ibid., 2.
Wight, Systems of States, 124.
Hence the debate on whether the Ottoman Empire acceded international society with the
Treaty of Paris in 1856. Gong asserts that the Sublime Porte was outside international
society until the abolition of the capitulations by the Treaty of Lausanne, Standard of
Civilisation, 312; Stivachtis disagrees, see Culture Versus Anarchy, 87. For a critical
appraisal, see A. Nuri Yurdusev, The Middle East Encounter with the Expansion of European
International Society, in International Society and the Middle East: English School Theory
at the Regional Level, eds Barry Buzan and Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), 719.
38. The point seems implied in the more recent assessments of the system/society distinction,
see Barry Buzan, From International to World Society? English School Theory and the
Social Structure of Globalisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 108;
Pella, Expanding the Expansion, 93; Reus-Smit, Individual Rights, 1519.
845
Schulz
in the debate on the evolution of international society.39 What is more, the argument
has been extended to contemporary world politics, as a growing number of authors
suggest that democracy, the protection of human rights and the principles of liberal
market economics, among other things, constitute a new standard of civilisation for
the post-Cold War order.40
The more recent wave of civilisational analysis in IR provides important insights to
reassess the standard of civilisation.41 As Hall and Jackson point out, rather than
conceptualising civilisation in essentialist terms as thing-like entity defined by
essential attributes this scholarship argues for treating civilisations as processes, and
in particular, as ongoing processes through which boundaries are continually produced
and reproduced.42 This conceptual move shifts the focus towards the social construction of civilisational identities and, importantly, to the way in which civilisational discourse is employed to frame actors identities. In other words, how ideas about
civilisation are mobilized politically to create, maintain, or shift socially significant
boundaries.43 Jacksons basis is the case of Germany in the 20th century: having been
branded the enemy of western civilisation during two preceding world wars, public
discourse in Germany and the United States framed the country as integral part of an
39. Gong, Standard of Civilisation; see also Boris Barth and Jrgen Osterhammel,
Zivilisierungsmissionen: Imperiale Weltverbesserung seit dem 18. Jahrhundert (Konstanz:
UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2005).
40. Jack Donnelly, Human Rights: A New Standard of Civilization?, International Affairs 74,
no. 1 (1998): 123; Robert H. Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of
States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 290; Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society,
12044; Roland Paris, International Peacebuilding and the Mission Civilisatrice,
Review of International Studies 28, no. 4 (2002): 63756; Bruce Mazlish, Civilization
and its Contents (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 104; Brett Bowden,
The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 2009); Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, 310;
Mark Mazower, Paved Intentions: Civilization and Imperialism, World Affairs 171, no. 2
(2008); Simpson, Outlaw States, 246; Yannis A. Stivachtis, Civilization and International
Society: The Case of European Union Expansion, Contemporary Politics 14, no. 1 (2008):
7189, and Democracy, the Highest Stage of Civilised Statehood, Global Dialogue 8,
no. 3/4 (2008); Ian Clark, Democracy in International Society: Promotion or Exclusion?,
Millennium 37, no. 3 (2009): 56381 (567).
41. See, for instance, Said Amir Arjomand and Edward A Tiryakian, eds, Rethinking Civilizational
Analysis (London: Sage, 2004); Martin Hall and Patrick T. Jackson, Civilizational Identity:
The Production and Reproduction of Civilizations in International Relations (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., Civilizations in World Politics: Plural
and Pluralist Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2010).
42. Martin Hall and Patrick T. Jackson, Introduction: Civilizations and International Relations
Theory, in Civilizational Identity: The Production and Reproduction of Civilizations
in International Relations, eds Martin Hall and Patrick T. Jackson (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), 6.
43. Peter J. Katzenstein, A World of Plural and Pluralist Civilizations: Multiple Actors,
Traditions, and Practices, in Civilizations in World Politics: Plural and Pluralist
Perspectives, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein (London: Routledge, 2010), 6.
846
ancient cultural community and close western ally shortly after the Second World
War.44
The ideal of civilisation did not demarcate a clear boundary between the West
and the rest. The colonisation of predominately white and Catholic Ireland was
rationalised by the very same civilisational rhetoric that was also invoked to justify
British rule over India.45 The civilisational self-confidence of John Stuart Mill is well
known. As he wrote in 1859: To suppose that the same international customs, and the
same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilised nation and
another, and between civilised nations and barbarians, is a grave error, and one which
no statesman can fall into.46 Ireland, in Mills view, was not part of civilised humanity: I myself have always been for a good stout despotism, for governing Ireland like
India.47
The ubiquity and ambiguous nature of the civilisational discourse is also evident in
Towns insightful discussion of the political status of women.48 Arguing that the 19thcentury standard required the exclusion of women from political life, Towns convincingly demonstrates the malleability of civilisational ideas and the way that these were
played out within the West and, to a lesser extent, between western and non-western
states. Nor was civilisation only invoked to justify imperial rule as debates surrounding Britains bombardment of Canton in 1856 demonstrate. According to Phillips,
[t]hroughout the 19th century, and even under the lengthening shadow of European
imperialism, he writes, civilization contained multiple meanings, some of which
served to aid and abet imperial violence, while others worked to arrest or at least
temporarily inhibit and frustrate imperial enterprises.49 This was not an isolated
case, as similar arguments were made during the Second Boer War of 18991902.
While supporters of the war portrayed the Boer republics, and in particular Krugers
44. Patrick T. Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the
West (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006).
45. Eileen P. Sullivan, Liberalism and Imperialism: J.S. Mills Defense of the British Empire,
Journal of the History of Ideas 44, no. 4 (1983): 6056, 10; Duncan Bell, Empire and
International Relations in Victorian Political Thought, The Historical Journal 49, no. 1
(2006): 28198 (283); Bruce Nelson, Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
46. John Stuart Mill, A Few Words on Non-Intervention, in The Collected Works of John
Stuart Mill, vol. XXI, ed. John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984
[1859]), 118; see, Beate Jahn, Barbarian Thoughts: Imperialism in the Philosophy of John
Stuart Mill, Review of International Studies 31, no. 3 (2005): 599618 (605); and Jennifer
Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
47. Cited in Sullivan, Liberalism and Imperialism, 606.
48. Ann Towns, The Status of Women as a Standard of Civilization, European Journal of
International Relations 15, no. 4 (2009): 681706.
49. Andrew Phillips, Saving Civilization from Empire: Belligerency, Pacifism and the Two
Faces of Civilization during the Second Opium War, European Journal of International
Relations 18, no. 1 (2012): 527 (10).
847
Schulz
Transvaal government, as backwards and despotic, critics condemned Kitcheners

scorched earth campaign and the detention of civilians in concentration camps as
methods of barbarism.50
It is worth recalling at this point that Gong considered the standard the result of a transition from natural law to positivism, during which ideas of civilisation became moulded
into an explicit legal doctrine that defined the boundaries of international society.51 While
Gong alludes to the discretionary nature of the standard,52 its relation with international
law is important: first because the deliberative nature of law allows for the identification of
specific criteria; and second, because it renders the standard of civilisation an integral part
of a foundational institution of international society.53 Yet while the formalist take seems to
be widely accepted within IR,54 historians of international law have highlighted the ambivalent nature of the standard. The point is succinctly made by Koskenniemi:
No stable standard of civilization emerged to govern entry into the community of international
law The existence of a standard was a myth in the sense that there was never anything to
gain. Every concession was a matter of negotiation, every status dependent on agreement, quid
pro quo. But the existence of a language of a standard still gave appearance of fair treatment
and regular administration to what was simply a conjectural policy.55
The argument is somewhat different from the explicit legal principle outlined by Gong.
Late-19th and early-20th century international lawyers did not universally recognise the
existence of such a principle. Gong draws on Schwarzenberger, who first described the
standard in an article published in 1955. According to the latter, European political and
economic dominance entailed a civilising process that transformed the respublica christiana (the universal community of Christianity) into a universal world society. Once the
international legal order was detached from its theological foundation, state recognition
merely depended on whether its government was sufficiently stable to undertake binding
commitments under international law and whether it was able and willing to protect adequately the life, liberty and property of foreigners.56 At first sight, Schwarzenberger
seems to follow the view of a gradually expanding international society. Yet the standard
50. See, for instance, Andrew Thompson, Imperial Propaganda during the South African
War, in Writing a Wider War: Rethinking Gender, Race, and Identity in the South African
War, 18991902, eds Gregor Cuthbertson, A. M. Grundlingh, and Mary-Lynn Cuthbertson
(Athens, GA: Ohio University Press, 2002), 314.
51. Gong, Standard of Civilisation, 5, 240; Gong, Standards of Civilization Today, 7880.
52. Gong, Standard of Civilisation, 21, 100.
53. Anghie, Imperialism, 5665.
54. Kalevi J. Holsti, Taming the Sovereigns: Institutional Change in International Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 155; Suzuki, Japans Socialization,
1401.
55. Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer, 1345, emphasis in original; see also Liliana Obregn, The
Civilized and the Uncivilized, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International
Law, eds Bardo Fassbender et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 9356.
56. Georg Schwarzenberger, The Standard of Civilisation in International Law, Current Legal
Problems 8 (1955): 21234 (220).
848
of civilisation, thus conceived, applies to European and non-European states alike. This
was more commonly known as the minimum standard of treatment, which was enforced
against smaller states in Europe, Asia and, predominantly, Latin America throughout the
19th century.57
Lassa Oppenheim, for instance, considered the debate on whether international law
extended to Christian civilisation only, or as far as humanity itself, as unproductive.
In the authors view, states were civilised once willing and able to meet their international obligations.58 At the same time, however, his work illustrates the difficulty of categorising the members of international society along civilisational lines. In what can be
regarded as an early account of the expansion story, Oppenheim identified different
stages in which the international community expanded: from Europe, to the Americas,
over the inclusion of the Ottoman Empire, to the acceptance of the ancient powers of
East Asia.59 But Oppenheim also alludes to the difficulties of making a final judgement
about the place of Persia, Siam, China, Korea and Abyssinia: These are certainly civilised States, and Abyssinia is even a Christian State, yet he maintains that their civilisation has not yet reached that condition which is necessary to enable their Government
and their population in every respect to understand and to carry out the command of the
rules of International Law.60 The fundamental contradiction was aptly captured by John
Westlake: Our international society exercises the right of admitting outside states to
parts of its international law without necessarily admitting them to the whole of it.61
Oppenheims comments on Abyssinia and other seemingly civilised states suggests
that a wholly different logic than civilisation was at work here: namely, racial prejudice. As Bell explains, the dichotomy between civilisation and barbarism was but one
possible conception of global order, and one that was riddled with contradictions and
ambiguities:
The binaries were complemented, supplanted, and occasionally undermined by other attempts
to classify and order the world. This often resulted from the difficulties faced incorporating
liminal societies, those that fell awkwardly between the categories of civilized and barbarian.
China, Japan, Russia, the Ottoman empire, the newly independent republics of Latin America,
even the countries of southern Europe all presented difficulties and generated debate.62
All this does not dispute that civilisational language was employed to justify inequality
in 19th-century international society. But it warrants a note of caution not to treat the
57. Charles Lipson, Standing Guard: Protecting Foreign Capital in the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 1619; Martha Finnemore,
The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2003), 25. For a bibliographical overview, see Michael Tomz, Reputation
and International Cooperation: Sovereign Debt across Three Centuries (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2007), 11415.
58. Lassa Oppenheim, International Law: A Treatise (London: Longmans, 1905), 301.
59. Ibid., 304.
60. Ibid., 33.
61. Cited in Simpson, Outlaw States, 238.
62. Bell, Empire, 283, emphasis added.
849
Schulz
standard of civilisation as an explicit principle that neatly distinguished the members

from the outsiders of international society.
The Making of Latin Americas Place in International

Society
As the following section will illustrate, the stark dichotomy between members and outsiders, in combination with the emphasis on culturally defined boundaries, is not helpful
for understanding the place of Latin America in international society. The new states of
Latin America emerged from the Atlantic Revolutions that shook the international
order of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.63 While the French Revolution plunged
Europe into a major war, the European empires in the Americas were almost completely
dismantled within a few decades: the United States declared its independence from
Britain in 1776, closely followed by the slave-led Haitian Revolution of 1791. The crisis
then spread to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies after France invaded the Iberian
Peninsula in 1808. In Spain, Napoleon forced the king and his heir, Ferdinand VII, to
abdicate while installing his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte, on the throne. The imprisonment of the royal family led to the establishment of self-governing juntas throughout
the Spanish empire. First loyal to the Spanish crown, tensions between royalists and
autonomists escalated following the defeat of Napoleon and the reinstatement of the
Bourbon monarchy. Civil wars turned into wars of independence and the definitive
breakaway of the rebellious provinces from Spain. After the decisive defeat of Spain at
the Battle of Ayacucho in 1824, only Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanish
control as the last remnants of a formerly vast empire.
The cases of Haiti and Brazil were variations on this theme. The independence of
Haiti was the result of a successful slave-revolt that culminated in independence in 1804.
To an important extent, the events in Saint-Domingue were an outgrowth of the French
Revolution, as the slaves of the Pearl of the Antilles demanded the end of slavery and
recognition of the newly won liberties of the French Revolution.64 The rebellion in
Frances most prosperous colony had major international ramifications, drawing Britain
and Spain into a long military conflict over the control over the island. Crucially, the
Haitian Revolution led to the first free black state, even though the new republic remained
isolated internationally during the first decades of its existence. Britain and the United
States were willing to deal with the black Jacobins in exchange for commercial favours,
but the latter withheld recognition until 1862. Haiti was only (conditionally) recognised
by France in 1825 in exchange for 150 million francs (and fully in 1838 after the
63. See, Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2006); Rafe Blaufarb, The Western Question: The Geopolitics
of Latin American Independence, American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 74263.
64. Frank Moya Pons, Haiti and Santo Domingo, 1790c. 1870, in The Cambridge History of
Latin America: From Independence to c. 1870, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), 239; Robbie Shilliam, What about Marcus Garvey? Race and the
Transformation of Sovereignty Debate, Review of International Studies 32, no. 3 (2006):
379400 (3913).
850
indemnity was renegotiated).65 Brazil and the Spanish American republics, in turn, would
not recognise Haiti until the 1860s. In part, this was because of the fear that a successful
slave-rebellion could encourage similar revolts on the American continents. But the massacre of the islands white population also heightened racial anxieties in Europe and the
Americas,66 converting Haiti into a symbol of Jacobin zeal and the dangers of black
emancipation. The wider implications are apparent in the Ostend Manifesto, leaked in
1854, in which US diplomats called for the annexation of slave-holding Cuba to prevent
the Spanish colony from becoming an Africanized second St. Domingo [Haiti], with
all its attendant horrors to the white race, and suffer the flames to extend to our own
neighbouring shores, seriously to endanger or actually to consume the fair fabric of our
Union.67 By contrast, Haitian officials sought to mobilise European support for their
cause by referring to an explicit civilisational rhetoric that emphasised their Enlightenment
legacy and the ability of blacks to prosper.68 Given the Haitian experience, it is difficult
to agree with Watson that race was not considered a barrier to formal statehood in the
first half of the nineteenth century.69
Race and racial prejudices also played a role in the Brazilian case. The history of its
independence begins with the evacuation of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro under
British protection in 1807. In 1821, Joo VI returned to Portugal, leaving his son behind
as regent of Brazil. However, after the Portuguese Cortes demanded also the return of the
prince, popular pressures forced Pedro I to declare independence in 1822 in order to
preserve Braganza rule in Brazil. The newly proclaimed Brazilian empire swiftly
defeated loyalist forces and successfully subdued ensuing regional rebellions, thus
avoiding the fragmentation that Spanish America underwent after independence. The
preservation of the Braganza monarchy provided the new regime with sufficient resources
and legitimacy that the new republics in South America often lacked vis-a-vis domestic
opposition. Braganza rule furthermore facilitated international recognition so that by
1826 its independence was recognised by Portugal and Britain, in the latter case in the
form of an anti-slave trade treaty.70
Monarchical rule and Brazils comparatively smooth transition into independent
statehood provided its elite with a sense of superiority over their barbarous neighbours
65. Moya Pons, Haiti and Santo Domingo, 261; Shilliam, What about Marcus Garvey?, 395.
66. Richard Gott, Latin America as a White Settler Society, Bulletin of Latin American
Research 26, no. 2 (2007): 26989 (279); see also Philippe R. Girard, Caribbean Genocide:
Racial War in Haiti, 18024, Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (2005): 13861.
67. Cited in Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century
America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), 967.
68. Cantir, Fear of a Black Planet: The Haitian Revolution in International Society.
69. Cited in ibid., 8; the point is forcefully made by Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of
World Politics.
70. See Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave
Trade Question 18071869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 667; Edward
Keene, A Case Study of the Construction of International Hierarchy: British Treaty-Making
against the Slave Trade in the Early Nineteenth Century, International Organization 61,
no. 2 (2007); Fabry, Recognizing States.
851
Schulz
in Spanish America.71 But Brazil, too, was facing considerable challenges. First of all,
Brazil inherited from Portugal a treaty regime that provided for the preferential access of
British goods to its domestic market. Adding insult to injury, Britain also insisted on the
continuation of the much-resented Office of the Judge Conservator until 1844, which
effectively excluded British subjects from Brazilian jurisdiction.72 Although the institution seemed to have been of little practical importance, for Britain, it was a necessity
justified by the concern that Brazil would prove unable to administer justice. For Brazils
aristocracy, however, it was an anomaly and an insult to their dignity as it placed the
tropical monarchy on par with less civilised peoples.73 Brazil is an intriguing reminder
that extraterritorial jurisdiction was not only exercised by the West against the rest,
but could be found within the West itself.
Furthermore, the traditional emphasis on issues of economic dependency and Brazilian
monarchical rule misses the fact that the country was regarded as backwards and exotic.74
Brazils tropical climate was one reason, slavery and the presence of a large non-white
population another. Thus, even more noxious than the Judge Conservator was the slave
trade, which pitted the economic interests of Brazils landed elite against the British
navy, which, following the Aberdeen Act of 1845, suppressed the abominable trade
even within Brazilian waters including its rivers and ports. Although the slave trade
had ceased by the 1850s, within Brazil, slavery became increasingly seen as an anachronistic institution that negated the empire its rightful place in the community of states.75
However, rather than framing the issue in humanitarian terms, abolitionists such as
Joaquim Nabuco argued that slavery would hold back civilisation in the country, among
other things, by discouraging white immigration.76 Although racial boundaries were
never wholly fixed in Brazil, following the abolition of slavery in 1888, and under the
influence of scientific racism (after all, Arthur de Gobineau, one of its founding fathers,
had been a French diplomat in Brazil) the debate shifted away from slavery to the consequences of Brazils non-white majority. As Skidmore notes, Brazilian intellectuals
71. Ori Preuss, Brazil into Latin America: The Demise of Slavery and Monarchy as
Transnational Events, Luso-Brazilian Review 49, no. 1 (2012): 96126 (97).
72. The most comprehensive treatment remains Alan K. Manchester, British Preeminence in
Brazil, its Rise and Decline: A Study in European Expansion (Chapel Hill, NC: University
of North Carolina Press, 1933), 209.
73. Ribeiro to Palmerston, 16 June 1834, FO 13/115; Law Officers Opinion, 30 September
1834, FO83/2237; and Palmerston to Ribeiro, 13 November 1834, FO 13/115.
74. Leslie Bethell, O Brasil no Mundo, in A Construo Nacional: 18301889, vol. 2, ed. Jos
Murilo de Carvalho (Madrid: Mapfre, 2012), 156.
75. Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, The Emperors Beard: Dom Pedro II and the Tropical Monarchy
of Brazil, trans. John Gledson (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004); Preuss, Brazil into Latin
America, 99.
76. Thomas E. Skidmore, Racial Ideas and Social Policy in Brazil, 18701940, in The Idea of
Race in Latin America, 18701940, eds Richard Graham et al. (Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press, 1990), 89; Jos Murilo de Carvalho, As Marcas Do Perodo, in A Construo
Nacional: 18301889, vol. 2, ed. Jos Murilo de Carvalho (Madrid: Mapfre, 2012), 26; on
the ideology of racial whitening, see George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800
2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 11751.
852
became concerned that heavy miscegenation and the resulting racially mixed population
had predestined them to perpetual third-class status as a nation.77 The result was an
ideology of whitening, according to which racial mixing, aided by white immigration,
would lead to the disappearance of blacks in the foreseeable future and thus to the solution of its problems. It was only after 1914 and analogous to similar developments in
Spanish America that racial miscegenation came to be seen in a more positive light, as
epitomised by Gilberto Freyres The Masters and the Slaves of 1933, which notably
influenced Brazils 20th-century ideology of racial democracy.
By contrast, independence and its aftermath had devastating consequences for Spanish
America. In the first place, the long and protracted wars against royalist forces wreaked
havoc on the emerging states economies. Whereas per capita incomes at the end of the
18th century were roughly comparable to North America,78 the wars of independence led
to a drastic reduction in trade, the virtual collapse of the fiscal system, and the large-scale
destruction of vital infrastructure. With governments unable to repay the debt incurred
during the early years of independence, the region experienced its first debt crisis in the
1820s.79 The result was that Spanish America stagnated economically for almost half a
century until growth picked up again around the 1870s, largely driven by the export of
agricultural produce. Furthermore, not only were manufacturing and mining severely
affected by war, but economic recovery and the development of an incipient industrialisation were, similar to Brazil, thwarted by Spanish Americas integration as a peripheral
or semi-formal part of the British Empire. But this was not the outcome of structural
imperatives; nor was it the result of unequal treaty relations as in the case of Brazil.
British diplomacy made the opening of Latin Americas ports a precondition for diplomatic recognition, which, tellingly, was extended in the form of treaties of amity, commerce and navigation, starting with the United Provinces of the River Plate (todays
Argentina) and Gran Colombia (encompassing todays Ecuador, Colombia, Panama and
Venezuela) in 1825.80 But in the end it was Spanish American elites, strongly influenced
by Enlightenment thought and pressed by economic crisis, who deliberately chose free
trade over mercantilism, which they associated with colonial rule and Spanish economic
decadence, and which was often implemented in spite of considerable domestic
opposition.81
Perhaps even more damning was the legitimacy crisis that the breakdown of the colonial order created in Spanish America. Independence did not lead to the establishment of
77. Skidmore, Racial Ideas and Social Policy in Brazil, 7.
78. Leandro Prados de la Escosura, The Economic Consequences of Independence in Latin
America, in The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America, eds Victor BulmerThomas and John H. Coatsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 497502.
79. Frank G. Dawson, The First Latin American Debt Crisis: The City of London and the 1822
25 Loan Bubble (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).
80. Fabry, Recognizing States, 60.
81. See Nils Jacobsen, Liberalismo Tropical: The Career of a European Economic Doctrine
in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, in Economic Doctrines in Latin America: Origins,
Embedding and Evolution, eds E.V.K. Fitzgerald and Rosemary Thorp (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in
the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980).
853
Schulz
politically consolidated states.82 Rather, with only a few exceptions such as Chile, the
wars of independence were followed by renewed civil war over the political balance
between the new capitals and their hinterland, economic policies, and the role of the
Church, which had formed a central pillar of the Spanish colonial order.83 This further
exacerbated economic hardship and led to the break-up of vast colonial viceroyalties into
numerous smaller states, largely created along former administrative boundaries.84
Political instability had important international ramifications: First, under the minimum standard of treatment, civilised states had the responsibility to protect the life and
property of foreigners who resided within their territory. Because Spanish American
states were often unable to meet this international obligation, foreign powers, most
importantly Britain and France, intervened militarily on numerous accounts. Most interventions took place in the form of naval blockades, such as during the Pastry War (1939)
and the Venezuelan Crisis (19023). Only a few notable exceptions led to outright military occupation, as in the case of Mexico, where Napoleon III established a monarchy
headed by the Habsburg prince Maximilian in the 1860s. Maximilians execution in 1867
by order of Benito Juarez, a Zapotec from the state of Oaxaca and first indigenous president of Mexico, caused uproar in Europe, and strengthened the belief that the country
would continue to live in barbarism under the rule of a vengeful savage.85 But these
interventions had very little to do with a clash between western and non-western civilisations, as Gong would have it.86 The case is well illustrated by Lord Palmerston remarks
from 1850:
These half-civilised governments, such as those in China, Portugal, Spanish America, require a
dressing-down every 8 or 10 years to keep them in order. Their minds are too shallow to receive
an impression that will last longer than some such period, and warning is of little use. They care
little for words and they must not only see the stick but actually feel it upon their shoulders
before they yield to that only argument which brings them to conviction, the argumentum
Baculinum.87
Second, political instability reinforced pre-existing cultural and racial stereotypes, which
hardened in the course of the 19th century. These prejudices drew mainly from two
sources: the first related to ideas about Spanish despotism, the so-called Black Legend,
82. See, for instance, Miguel A. Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin
America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).
83. Frank Safford, Politics, Ideology and Society in Post-Independence Spanish America, in
The Cambridge History of Latin America: From Independence to c. 1870, ed. Leslie Bethell
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3849.
84. David Bushnell and Neill MacAulay, The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth
Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 226.
85. Mercedes de Vega, ed., Historia de las Relaciones Internacionales de Mxico, 18212010.
V. Europa (Mxico: Secretara de Relaciones Exteriores, 2011), 162, 184. Note that the
United States was generally supportive of Juarez.
86. Gong, Standard of Civilisation, 3, 97.
87. Cited in Matthew Brown, Introduction, in Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture,
Commerce and Capital, ed. Matthew Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 19, emphasis in
original.
854
dating back to the anti-Spanish propaganda of the Dutch Revolt of the 16th century; the
second, to the writings of 18th-century European naturalists who described the flora,
fauna and, by extension, peoples of the New World as degenerated and effeminate.88
Taken together, these ideas were invoked to call into question the civilisational standing
and ability of creoles to self-rule. As the last-born children of civilisation [derniers-ns
de la civilisation], Tocqueville argued, Spanish and Portuguese Americans relied upon
the guidance of their older brothers.89 A similar culturalist tone also underpinned US
foreign policy towards the region. As John Quincy Adams made clear to Henry Clay in
1821:
Arbitrary power, military and ecclesiastical, was stamped upon their education, upon their
habits, and upon all their institutions. Civil dissension was infused into all their seminal
principles. War and mutual destruction was in every member of their organization, moral,
political, and physical.90
Spanish American independence was secured but this did not imply full membership in
the family of civilised nations. As The Times editorial from 21 March 1829 summarised
the predicament: political instability provided proof that Spanish America was too
imperfectly civilized for self-government, though too powerful for foreign restraint.91
Latin American elites, by contrast, were highly receptive to the civilisational discourse
that emanated from Europe. Its appropriation was particularly evident among Latin
American jurists, perhaps the most important being Andrs Bello, for whom political
consolidation was crucial to complete civilization.92 In the 1840s, Bellos polemic with
88. See Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 17501900,
trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010 [1973]); Anthony
Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500
c.1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); James Muldoon, The Americas
in the Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth Century
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest
of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
89. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Dmocratie en Amrique, vol. 2 (Paris: Gosselin, 1835), 4367.
90. Cited in Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 4.
91. The Times, 21 March 1829, 2.
92. Liliana Obregn, Between Civilization and Barbarism: Creole Interventions in International
Law, Third World Quarterly 27, no. 5 (2006): 81532 (823); see also Louise Fawcett,
Between West and Non-West: Latin American Contributions to International Thought,
The International History Review 34, no. 4 (2012): 679704; Ivan Jaksic, Andrs Bello:
Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001); Liliana Obregn, Completing Civilization:
Creole Consciousness and International Law in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, in
International Law and its Others, ed. Anne Orford (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006); and Arnulf Becker Lorca, Universal International Law: Nineteenth-Century
Histories of Imposition and Appropriation, Harvard International Law Journal 51, no. 2
(2010): 475552.
855
Schulz
Jos Victorino Lastarria over the civilisatory merits of Spanish colonisation inspired
similar debates elsewhere in Spanish America.93 The question became even more relevant in the context of the Mexican-American War (18468) and the doctrine of the manifest destiny in the United States, which negated the rights of Native Americans and
Mexicans to their lands on the grounds that they were deemed unfit to self-government.
Such beliefs were not exclusive to the United States. To quote Palmerston once more
(1857): I have long felt inwardly convinced that the Anglo-Saxon Race will in Process
of Time become Masters of the whole American Continent North and South, by Reason
of their superior Qualities as compared with the degenerate Spanish and Portuguese
Americans.94 By contrast, in Latin America, elites scorned the fact that they were put in
the same category as their non-white fellow countryman, which is one reason why the
racialised idea of latinidad was so warmly embraced. The other, related reason, of course,
was the growth of anti-American resentment in response to US expansionism. In fact, the
relations between Latin America and the United States were more protected than this
suggests, as the notion of a Western Hemisphere that stood aloof from Old World politics
found widespread appeal in the region.95 However, when Jos Mara Torres Caicedo
warned that the Latin American race could be absorbed by the Anglo-Saxon North, it
reflected to an important extent a deeper concern of elites in Latin America about their
place in international society.96
For the jurist Carlos Calvo the problems of Latin Americas place in international
society arose from the absolute ignorance in Europe of our state of civilisation and progress, which gave way to European interventionism in the region.97 The case has been
extensively studied by Obregn:
Nineteenth-century Creoles argued that, if the civilization of Europe was unified and perfected,
theirs was left half-way or lacking after the end of Spanish colonial domination. The Creoles
national mission was to do everything necessary to complete the civilization that the Spanish
colonizers had brought with them More than a consequence of colonization, the Creoles
will to civilization was self-imposed, one of the factors they knew to be essential to the
recognition of their new nations as sovereign states and as members of the so-called community
of civilized nations, as well as for national and regional advancement.98
93. Juan Maiguashca, Historians in Spanish South America: Cross-References between Centre
and Periphery, in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, eds Stuart Macintyre, Juan
Maiguashca, and Attila Pk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4679.
94. Cited in Schoultz, Beneath the United States, 70.
95. Arthur P. Whitaker, The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1954).
96. Arturo Ardao, Gnesis de la Idea y el Nombre de Amrica Latina (Caracas: Centro de
Estudios Latinoamericanos Rmulo Gallegos, 1980), 81, 103; Charles A. Jones, American
Civilization (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2007), 20. Hence the unease
of postcolonial scholars with the notion of Latin America as continuation of colonial inequality, see Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 42,
578.
97. Cited in Liliana Obregn, Noted for Dissent: The International Life of Alejandro lvarez,
Leiden Journal of International Law 19, no. 4 (2006): 9831016 (990).
98. Obregn, Completing Civilization, 2523.
856
In a sense, then, elites in Spanish America felt compelled to deal with a similar
stigma of civilizational backwardness that Zarakol identified in Turkey following
the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.99 By the mid-19th century, civilisational
rhetoric became a staple in political discourses throughout the region. Especially the
writings of the French historian and statesman Franois Guizot, which struck a chord
with a local elite that tried to make sense of political instability, economic backwardness and, although far less explored in the literature, a perception of falling behind
within international society. Nothing exemplifies this better than Facundo, written
by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento,100 who would later become president of Argentina
(186874). Written during his exile in Chile in 1845, Facundo was a thinly veiled
polemic against Juan Manuel de Rosas, a military strongman from the province of
Buenos Aires who dominated Argentine politics between 1829 and 1852. Sarmientos
writings developed an enormous political and intellectual legacy. For Sarmiento,
Argentinas problems stemmed from the confrontation between two different societies: one cultured and civilised, represented by the city of Buenos Aires that was
firmly oriented towards Europe; the other, barbaric and American, which he associated with the gaucho, the mix-blood inhabitants of Argentinas vast plains.
The work is riddled with orientalist images that equate the gaucho with the nomads
of the Asian steppe.101 But more importantly, it was written to delegitimise Rosas
and the federalist cause domestically, while appealing to a European audience and
explicitly Guizot, then Foreign Minister of France from whom he expected more
support in the defence of civilisation in South America.102 After the fall of Rosas in
1852, the group of public intellectuals surrounding Sarmiento took it upon themselves to modernise Argentina according to a European template, which dominated
Argentinas oligarchic republic until the extension of suffrage in 1912.103 Sarmiento
himself promoted European immigration to Argentina and played an important role
in the Conquest of the Desert, the aggressive military against the countrys indigenous population that opened a vast swath of lands for cattle farming, the basis of
Argentinas economic boom of the late and early 19th century. The role that civilisational discourse played in Argentinas history is particularly revealing: Argentina
was not admitted into the family of civilised states because it was or was perceived as a white settler society, as Watson argued, quite the contrary, Argentina
became a white settler society because Argentine elites were concerned that their
country would not live up to certain civilisational ideals.
99. Aye Zarakol, After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 150.
100. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, trans. Kathleen Ross
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003 [1845]).
101. Carlos Altamirano, El Orientalismo y la Idea del Despotismo en el Facundo, Boletn del
Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana Dr. Emilio Ravignani 9 (1994).
102. Sarmiento, Facundo, 2245.
103. Paul W. Drake, Between Tyranny and Anarchy: A History of Democracy in Latin America,
18002006 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 127.
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In fact, the pacification of the frontier in Argentina and Chile followed strikingly
similar patterns to the westward expansion of Canada and the United States.104 The
native inhabitants of the Southern Cone resisted Spanish conquest and integration
into colonial society. Unable to subdue the Mapuche by force, Spain recognised their
autonomy in the Treaty of Quillin of 1641, effectively defining the Bio-Bio River as
the southern border of the Spanish Empire.105 The fragile truce was brokered through
periodic parlamentos, or peace talks, and ritualised gift exchanges, all of which suggests that, in practice, the lack of a common culture did not impede mutual understanding about the conduct of international relations. While the extent of treaty
relations with the Mapuche was exceptional, similar arrangements became increasingly common in the course of the 18th century, especially along the strategic frontier where Spain competed with Britain and France for supremacy.106 Independence
in Latin America then led to a deterioration of the rights of indigenous peoples, as
local elites embraced European notions of nationhood and pushed for the privatisation
of communal lands. More often than not, this implied either rural pauperisation or
integration through civilisation.107 The limited reach of the Chilean nation-state
became particularly apparent in 1860, when French adventurer Orlie-Antoine de
Tounens declared himself King of Araucania and Patagonia, supported by some
Mapuche tribes in an abortive attempt to form a defensive alliance against the
encroaching Chilean state.108 While claiming to inherit the boundaries of the Spanish
empire, Chile did not abide to its treaty obligations and, by mid-19th century, began
to recruit German-speaking settlers for the colonisation of Mapuche territory.
104. The now-classic statement of this connection is Charles Alistair Michael Hennessy, The
Frontier in Latin American History (London: Edward Arnold, 1978).
105. In contrast to the literature on indigenous peoples in North America, there is relatively little
analysis of treaty-making in Latin America. For the colonial period, see Abelardo Levaggi,
Diplomacia Hispano-Indigena en las Fronteras de Amrica: Historia de los Tratados
entre la Monarquia Espanola y las Comunidades Aborigenes (Madrid: Centro de Estudios
Constitucionales, 2002). On the Southern Cone, see Kristine L. Jones, ed., Warfare,
Reorganization, and Readaptation at the Margins of Spanish Rule: The Southern Margin
(15731882), vol. 3 part 2, The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); David J. Weber, Brbaros: Spaniards and
their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005),
178220.
106. Alan Adelman and Stephen Aron, From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States,
and the Peoples in between in North American History, The American Historical Review
104, no. 3 (1999), 81441 (817); Weber, Brbaros, 800.
107. Florencia E. Mallon, Indigenous Peoples and Nation-States in Spanish America, 1780
2000, in The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History, ed. Jos C. Moya (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 289. On Mexico and the Northern frontiers, see Alan
Knight, Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 19101940, in The Idea of Race
in Latin America, 18701940, eds Richard Graham et al. (Austin, TX: University of Texas
Press, 1990), 79.
108. Jos Bengoa, Historia del Pueblo Mapuche: Siglo XIX y XX (Santiago, Chile: Ediciones
Sur, 1985), 1869; Jones, Warfare, 1778.
858
The ensuing revolt was struck down by the Chilean army following the War of the
Pacific, but not fully resolved until the early 1880s, after which the Mapuche population was resettled in isolated reservations all in the name of civilisation.
Conclusion
While elites throughout Latin America drew on the example of the United States, the
similarities should not be overstated. With only few exceptions, such as the relatively
autonomous communities of the Amazonian Basin, the Southern Cone or Mexicos
north-western frontier, most indigenous peoples were integrated into Latin American
societies through a centuries-long process of racial and cultural mestizaje. They were
politically disenfranchised and economically marginalised, but the vast majority was not
displaced by immigrants from Europe.109 Moreover, the United States may have challenged many Old World rules and institutions,110 but its entry into and position within
international society fits much better with the pattern described in the orthodox account
of the expansion story. The Latin American case was different because of the liminal
standing that these states came to occupy. Latin American states were surely part of international society, but they were never admitted into its inner core. Latin America is not a
region of white settler states nor were these societies regarded as such, which, in practice and contrary to Watsons remarks, mattered a lot.
The experience of Latin American states illustrates the pitfalls of treating the standard of civilisation as an explicit legal doctrine that neatly separated the members from
the outsiders of international society. By contrast, the argument here suggested that the
standard of civilisation was part of a wider and highly ambiguous discourse that was
employed to legitimise inequality in a heterarchical international society. By drawing the
fundamental boundaries of international society in civilisational terms, that is as a confrontation between the West against the rest, both the orthodox account of the expansion of international society and more recent revisionist critics have missed the complex
nature of hierarchy in 19th- and early 20th-century international society. The new states
of Latin America were not outsiders of international society. Certainly, the deep imprint
that European colonisation left on these societies facilitated their recognition as independent states. Their standing, and the political consequences that this entailed, however,
was not determined by their essential western attributes. Race and racial prejudices
played an important role in this regard, so did the appropriation of civilisational discourse by local elites.
In the end, the making of Latin Americas place in 19th-century international society
calls into question the binary distinction between insiders and clear outsiders. The consequence of the increased interactions on a global scale was that, unlike in previous
centuries, the position of political communities cannot be adequately described as either
109. Most of Latin America did not experience what James Belich termed hyper-colonization in
Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 17831939
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 518.
110. David Armstrong, Revolution and World Order: The Revolutionary State in International
Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 423.
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members or non-members of the (originally European) international order in a meaningful sense. From this it also follows that the focus of analysis in the evolution of international society needs to shift away from identifying particular historical moments in
which non-western countries entered international society, and move towards a better
understanding of inequality therein. Furthermore, this suggests that rather than expanding, international society was transformed during the long 19th century, which raises
the question of how the norms and institutions changed during this processes and the role
that people outside the core of international society played therein. An example was the
principle of sovereign equality which, despite antecedents in European legal thought,
was not recognised by the 19th-century European international society. It was the marginalised rest and, importantly, Latin American elites, who made a strong case for sovereign-equality, and the rights of states that emerged from decolonisation (for instance,
at the Second Hague Conference) that ultimately contributed to the transformation of
global international society.
Acknowledgements
For helpful comments and suggestions, the author would like to thank Barry Buzan, Louise
Fawcett, Edward Keene, and the anonymous reviewers. Earlier versions were presented at the 1st
European Workshops in International Studies (EWIS) 2013, and the Millennium Annual
Conference 2013.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.
Author Biography
Carsten-Andreas Schulz is a doctoral candidate in International Relations at Nuffield College,
University of Oxford.

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541318

MIL0010.1177/0305829814541318Millennium: Journal of International StudiesSchulz

Civilisation, Barbarism and

Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(3)

6. Barry Buzan and Mathias Albert, Differentiation: A Sociological Approach to International

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Revisiting the Expansion Story

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and obligations of international law.21 Membership, in this sense, was conditional on a

Regimes in World History, 14001900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);

Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(3)

The Standard of Civilisation as Civilisational Discourse

Bull and Watson, Expansion, 6.

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Transvaal government, as backwards and despotic, critics condemned Kitcheners

Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(3)

standard of civilisation as an explicit principle that neatly distinguished the members

The Making of Latin Americas Place in International

Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(3)

Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(3)

Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(3)

Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(3)

Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(3)

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