Central Eurasia In Global Politics: Conflict, Securi And by Mehdi Parvizi Amineh; Henk Houweling

Show description

Every nation is therefore bound by natural law to cultivate the land, which has fallen to its share. . Those peoples, such as the ancient Germans and certain modern Tartars, who, though dwelling in fertile countries, disdain the cultivation of the soil and prefer to live by plunder, fail in their duty to themselves, injure their neighbors, and deserve to be exterminated like wild beasts of prey. . Thus while the conquest of the civilized empires of Peru and Mexico was a notorious usurpation, the establishment of various colonies upon the continent of North America might, if done within just 9 He has to be “civilized off the face of the earth,” as Charles Dickens commented on a group of Zulus on display in London in 1853.

Pp. 85-86) For Grotius and those who follow in his footsteps, the rights of individuals in the state of nature are modeled on the rights of the sovereign state: It is evident that private persons held the right of chastisement before it was held by the state. ” 30 • Amineh & Houweling connection: the state inflicts punishment for wrong against itself, not only upon its own subjects but also upon foreigners; yet it derives no power over the latter from civil law, which is binding upon citizens only because they have given their consent; and therefore, the law of nature, or law of nations, is the source from which the state receives the power in question.

The common currency of western public diplomacy thus has a long pedigree. Lawyers of the Church of Rome at the time of “discoveries” could not accept the arrogance of the moderns. Scholars in the tradition of Christian Medieval natural law explicitly rejected the right of preemptive warfare against peoples overseas, or to conquer their lands, let alone the right to exterminate such peoples. To quote the Dominican Cajetan, criticizing the lawyers that served the interests of overseas commerce: Some infidels do not fall under the temporal jurisdiction of Christian princes either on law or in fact.