Even
when they understand America’s
westward expansion as a process offoreign policy and imperial development, students remain reluctant to abandon
entirely the edifice of American “isolation.” In part this is justified, given
the highly ideological emphasis on political “non-entanglement” put forward by
many American statesmen into the early twentieth century. Many Americans
contrasted their nation’s “republican” foreign policy with the “Old Diplomacy”
of Europe, allegedly dominated by power and self-interest. U.S. expansion, its
defenders claimed, served to expand the “Empire of Liberty” or at least represented
the divinely ordained fulfillment of “Manifest Destiny.” The implication is
that even when the United States became an overseas empire in 1898, it followed
different rules and acted for different motives than Europe. While I push
students to consider what makes U.S. foreign relations unique, it is important
to emphasize the continuities as well. The history of international law helped
me to make this connection by linking America to a broader vision of empire as
a “civilizing” and “humanitarian” mission.
Early
in the semester, we read
John Quincy Adams’s 1841 address on the Opium War.
Adams is the perfect messenger for this theme of transatlantic imperial
continuity because he is so often associated with its opposite. As secretary of
state, he authored most of the Monroe Doctrine, that quintessential statement
of American hemispheric separation and anti-colonial sentiment.
Adams
begins his speech by noting that determining the justness of the Opium War is
not merely important to Britain and China but is “of deep interest to the whole
human race” (303). He proposes the Law of Nations as the best arbiter of the cause.
In so doing he reveals two important facets of this law. First, Adams admits
that there is no single, universal, agreed-upon code, but rather the existence
of “a system of Rules, varying according to the character and condition of the
parties concerned” (306). Thus he distinguishes the law between “Christian communities” from that
governing “our intercourse with the Indian tribes of our own Continent” (307).
There is “another Law of Nations between us, and the woolly headed natives of
Africa; another with the Barbary Powers and the Sultan of the Ottoman empire…”
(307). International law, in other words, is circumscribed by race, nation,
religion, and culture.
Adams
then sidesteps what he has just said and claims that there is in fact a General
Law of Nations, applicable to all. Citing Vattel (though ultimately disagreeing
with him), Adams argues that all nations must recognize the equality of all
others, and must balance self-interest with the need to “contribute to the
happiness of all” (312). By refusing to open its ports fully to British trade,
and by requiring the “ko-tow,” China “utterly denies the equality of other
Nations with itself” (313). This “enormous outrage upon the rights of human
nature…should cease” (313). Thus Adams sides with England on the grounds of
humanity:
“I cannot forbear to express the hope that Britain, after
taking the lead in the abolition of the African Slave trade and of slavery; and
of the still more degrading tribute to the Barbary African Mahometans, will
extend her liberating arm to the farthest bounds of Asia…” (313)
Thus
the principles of equality and selflessness become the rationale for a war of
drug-pushing and empire! While Adams’s views were somewhat out of place in his
time (and the address was not published for nearly seventy years, by the Massachusetts
Historical Society), they are nonetheless useful pedagogically.
Viewed
from a modern perspective, Adams’s sophistry is plain. Students are tempted to
dismiss international law altogether as a mere rationalization of power. But
this would be too easy. Rationalization—whether through public speech or
private self-justification—is necessary for the consistent expression of power.
And the American myth of selflessness and Right makes it especially important
in this country. Adams is worth reading because his appeals to universal
principles foreshadow the later legal justifications for empire in the late
nineteenth century.
To
understand the American imperial expansion of the 1890s in light of European colonialism,
we devoted a later class to the legal concept of civilization in the
late-nineteenth century. I assigned
Gordon Chang’s “Whose ‘Barbarism’?
Whose ‘Treachery’? Race and Civilization in the Unknown United States-Korea War
of 1871” in
order to emphasize the rhetorical importance of “civilization” at the time, and
to highlight its contested nature. But I argued that the concept of
civilization was not
merely rhetorical,
but was inscribed into the legal expression of colonialism. For instance,
“uncivilized” or partially civilized states often were forced to grant
extraterritorial jurisdiction to foreign powers. Granted, the definition of
civilization was fuzzy. We discussed how international law treatises defined
civilization sometimes in terms of religion (with Christian=civilized, on the
model presented by John Quincy Adams), sometimes in terms of race (Francis
Lieber claimed “Internationalism is part of a white man’s religion”),
and more generally in terms of behavior. As Gerrit Gong has explained, Japan
became “civilized” in international law treatises in part when its diplomats
adopted Western practices, but also because its victory over China in 1894-95
marked it as an imperial power. American leaders did not fail to understand the
linkage between imperial power and civilizational status.
The civilizing mission also figured directly in legal
documents. We read
excerpts from the
General Act of the Congress of Berlin (1885) that
set out legal rules for the colonial partition of Central Africa. Signatories
promised to “watch over the preservation of the native tribes, and to care for
the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being…”
Notably, an American delegate attended the meeting—surprising on its face,
considering America’s anti-colonial rhetoric and lack of African colonies. But
the class understood that this was made possible by the way that the Congress
explained colonialism as a civilizing project that seemed to fulfill many of
the traditionally “republican” aspects of American foreign policy: it committed
the signatories to free trade in the region, emphasized neutrality, and
guaranteed openings to missionaries and scientific expeditions. In short, the
Berlin Congress reveals late-19
th century European colonialism as
rationalized in ways quite compatible with how Americans understood their own
imperial expansion.
Establishing
this history of colonialism through law helps to prepare the class to
understand the American imperial expansion of 1898 not as an “aberration” to
past US practice, nor as an exceptionally American event. Other types of
sources help to substantiate this, of course, including
this cartoon. But the legal background is especially useful. It also helps to explain why the
US found law so essential to the development of its empire in the early 20
th
century, a subject of my next post.
