Description
The concept of Jus Gentium, which dates back to ancient times, is anachronistically translated into English as the rights of nations. Despite a revival in the seventeenth century, the concept has barely surfaced in international theory, with the exception of the various reflections of/on Hugo Grotius, and more recently in the work of John Rawls. Central to each is the defence of the sovereignty of nation states, which is routinely conflated with 'the people'. In this paper, I turn to the only anarchist reflection on this topic (Proudhon 1861, 1862, 1863). Proudhon's aim in reviving the theory of jus gentium was to depict right, and rights, as emergent agreements between plural and overlapping peoples sustained by the relational force (both material and ideational) that emerges from the interaction within and between these plural and complex social groups, in anarchy. His explicitly relational and anti-'absolutist' account of the emergence of collective force and collective consciousness, and of the nature of political subjectivity, was deployed against the doctrine of 'state soveriegnty', and to provide a conceptual genalogy of 'the range of rights', from interpresonal to international and back again. Central to this formulation was the fickle foundationlessness of the rights of peoples. State sovereignty was, he argued, the antithesis of the right of peoples, and was routinely destroyed by the people too. Only anarchy, or a decentralised federation of plural 'natural groups', could guarantee the mutual autonomy of individuals, individuals in groups, and groups as individuals. I explore the ontological claims Proudhon makes here and the political programme he articulates to defend them, and I close the paper by showing how this account moves us beyond the liberal constraints of Rawls' The Law of Peoples, to an account of politics better suited to our contentious post-colonial times.
