THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD (08-31-22)

THE INTRODUCTION TO GLOBALIZATION

Defining Globalization over the years

 Progress (more on tangible, improvement of technology)
 Development (not necessarily involved in tangible, mostly not seen of the naked eye,
changes 
 Integration (more of a simulation, sharing to the rest of the world, vice versa,
transference or movement) Interrelation

THOMAS LARRSON (2001)

 The process or world shrinkage, of distances getting shorter, things moving closer
 It pertains to the increasing ease with which somebody on one side of the world can
interact to mutual benefit with somebody on the other side of the world

Globalization: Example; Online class, we are bound to communicate even if students and
teachers are in different places through advance technology

MARTIN KHOR
 Occurring through and with regression, colonialism, and destabilization
 Globalization as colonialism 

CLASSIFICATION IN DEFINITION
 Broad and inclusive - can include variety of issues but does not shed light on the
implications due to its vagueness
 Narrow and exclusive - better justified but can be limiting due to their application adhere
to only particular definition 

OHMAE (1992)
 Globalization means the onset of borderless world 
 Broad and inclusive

ROBERT COX
 The characteristics of globalization trend include the internationalizing of production, the
new international division of labor, new migratory movements from south to north, the
new competitive environment that accelerates their processes, the internationalizing of
the state… making states into agencies of globalization 
 Narrow and Exclusive

RITZER (2015)
 Globalization is a transplanetary process or a set of processes involving increasing
liquidity and the growing multidirectional flows of people, objective, places, information
 as well as the structures they encounter and create that are barriers to, or expedite,
those flows
 Narrow and Exclusive    
                
ROBERTSON (1992)
 In his article, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, defined globalization as
the “Understanding of the world and the increased perception of the world as a whole”
 Broad and Inclusive

ALBROW AND KING (1990)

 Defined as “all those processes by which the people of the world are incorporated into a
single world society. This means that peoples around the globe live in a borderless
community
 Narrow and Exclusive

METAPHORS OF GLOBALIZATION
Solidity refers to barriers that prevent or make difficult the movement of things;
Hard to influence
Liquidity Refers to the increasing ease of movement of people, things, information,
and places in the contemporary world, E.g., stock market, unstoppable
social media uploads; easy to influence/ adaptive
Flows Are movement of people, things, places and information brought by the
growing “porosity” of global limitations (Ritzer, 2015); E.g., patronizing
foods introduced by the foreign cultures; transference

THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD (09-07-22)

HOMOGENEITY Increasing sameness in the world
Homo means “one”
Cultural imperialism
EXAMPLE (Strong country giving goods to weaker countries with open
hearts)
- Christianty brought by spaniards
- Americanization (Furniture and/or american styled interior
designs)
HETEROGENEITY creation of various cultural practices, new economies, and
political groups because of the interaction of elements from
different societies in the world
HETERO means “two or more culture”

THE FIVE CORE CLAIMS OF MARKET GLOBALISM

1. Globalization is about the liberalization and global integration of Market
 > anchored in the neo-liberal idea of self-regulating market as the normative
basis for a future global order 
2. Globalization is inevitable and irreversible
> The market-globalist perspective sees globalization as the spread of
irreversible market forces driven by technological innovations that make the
global integration of national economies inevitable. As a matter of fact, market
globalism is always interlaced with a belief that markets have the capacity to use
new technologies to solve social problems
Globalism is inevitable (you cannot simply go back in time)
3. Nobody is in charge of globalization
> This claim highlights the semantic link between ‘globalization-market’ and
adjacent idea of leaderlessness’
> Robert Hormats (1998) opined that “The great beauty of globalization is that no
one is control’ This only means that no individual, no government or no institution
has the control over globalization
4. Globalization benefits everyone
> This lies at the heart of the market globalism and represents a ‘good’
phenomenon
> Globalization provides great opportunities for the future, not only for our
countries, but for all others, too
> the opening up to international trade of the world’s most populous regions and
opportunities for more developing countries to improve standards of living
5. Globalization furthers the spread of democracy in the world
> Francis Fukuyama (2000) stressed that there exists a clear correlation between
the country’s level of economic development and successful democracy. 

DYNAMICS OF LOCAL AND GLOBAL CULTURE

PERSPECTIVE 
Cultural Differentialism
Cultural Hybridization
Global convergence
Emphasizes that cultures are essentially different and
are superficially affected by global flows
Emphasizes the integration of local and global cultures 
(Combination of two or more cultures)
Globalization (global and local) - creating a 
According to Gereffu, the global economy can be studied
at different levels of analysis
Macro level This includes the international
organizations and regimes that establish rules and norms
for the global community
 THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD (09-14-22)
MARKET INTEGRATION

The students are expected to: 

 Explain the role of international financial institutions in the
creation of a global economy
 Identify the attributes of global corporations
G 

Globalization and Labor Market Integration in Late Nineteenth - and Early Twentieth -
Century Asia
By: Gregg Huff and Giovanni Caggiano

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, globalization swept through Asia, transforming
its product and labor markets. By the 1880 s steamships had largely replaced sailing vessels for
transport within Asia as well as to Western markets, and shipping fares had begun to fall
sharply. Also already underway was the mass migration of Indian and Chinese workers,
principally from the labor-abundant areas of Madras in India and the provinces of Kwangtung
(Guangdong) and Fukien (Fujian) in Southeastern China, to land-abundant but labor scarce
parts of Asia. Indian and Chinese labor inflows to these countries constituted the bulk of two of
three main late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century global migration movements, the other
being European immigration to the New World. Immigration to Southeast Asia was almost
entirely in response to its growing demand for workers which, in turn, derived from rapidly
expanding demand in core industrial countries for Southeast Asian export. 
Studies by Latham and Neal (1983) and by Brandt (1985, 1989) establish the
development of an integrated Asian rice market beginning in the latter part of the nineteenth
century (see also, .Myung, 2000), Furthermore, a series of articles and books by Williamson and
his co-authors reveal internationally integrated commodity markets and relative factor price
convergence in conjunction with pre-World War II globalization (Wiliam, 2000, 2002; O’Rourke
and Williamson, 1999; Hatton and Williamson, 2005). But in contrast to work on product market
integration, the possible emergence of an integrated Asian labor market has attracted less
attention. In part this reflects the lack of Asian wage data. As Harley (2000, p. 929) observes,
“Analysis of the low-wage periphery, which is most relevant to modern [globalization] debate, is
restricted by data availability”. This article makes available for the first time the data needed to
test for labor market integration over a large part of Asia.
The article has two main aims. One is to analyze whether as part of pre-World War
II globalization an integrated Asian market for unskilled labor existed to encompass
Asia’s chief emigrant-sending regions of South India and Southeastern China and the
principal Southeast Asian receiving countries for Indian and Chinese immigrants. Out
metric for integration, following both econometric works on GDP convergence and Robertson’s
recent analysis of integrated labor markets, comprises three complementary criteria; (1) that
wages do not diverge from a common trent (2) that over time wage dispersion does not
increase; and (3) that a correction mechanism pushes wages towards equilibrium relationship
aftershocks. It can be misleading, as Robertson (2000, p. 728) warns, to rely on price as a
criterion for integration. Markets are integrated if adjustment mechanisms operate to correct
deviations from a wage differential or “gap”.
Second, the article aims to compare wage trends in the area of Asia from South India to
South China and including Burma, Malaya and Thailand with an industrial core of the global
economy, defined as the United Kingdom, United States, Germany and France. Were unskilled
labor markets in Asia and the industrial core similarly affected by globalization such that in these
two parts of the world wages followed a common trend? Or, in contrast to commodity markets,
was globalization in Asia and the industrial core associated with a drifting apart of real unskilled
wages?
We argue that by the late nineteenth century South India, Southeastern China and the
three Southeast Asian countries had become integrated and constituted a unified labor market.
Furthermore, Asian evidence reveals a period of real wage convergence prior to the 1930’s. But
labor market integration that characterized Asia, and also obtained in the industrial core,
stopped at the geographical frontiers of each of these two regions. Unlike Asia’s export of
primary commodities, flows of Asian labor hardly penetrated either the core industrial countries,
or the wider Atlantic economy. The pre-World War II labor market pattern was, instead, one of
strong divergence between Asia and the world’s rapidly developing and industrializing core
economies.

THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD (09-21-22)

3 ECONOMIC SYSTEMS
Primary Sector Extracts raw materials from natural environment
Ex. Farmers
Secondary Sector Gains raw materials and transforms them into manufactured
goods; manufacturing firms 
Ex. petroleum refinery
Tertiary Sector involves services than goods
Doing things that making things
Ex. Education, transportation
INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS
Bretton Woods System > established due to sufferings of world’s major economies
because of World War I, great Depression in 1930’s and World
War II;
5 ELEMENTS OF BW SYSTEM
 Expression of Currency in terms of gold or gold value to establish a par value
 Official Monetary Authority in each country (central bank or national treasury)
 Establishment of an overseer for the exchange rates thus, IMF was founded
 Eliminating restrictions on the currencies of the member states in
international trade
 US dollar became the global currency
GENERAL AGREEMENT OF TARIFFS AND TRADE (GATT) An international organization for
liberalization of trade that grew out of Bretton Woods System
and primarily focuses on tariff reduction to any international
trading system
> Tariff = Tax

WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION (WTO) Its operations are premised on the neoliberal idea
that all nations benefit from free and open trade, and it is
dedicated to reducing and ultimately eliminating barriers to
such trade.
> Every nation is able to participate to world trade

TRADE-RELATED ASPECTS OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS (TRIPS) Is an

international legal agreement between all the member
nations of the World Trade Organization (WTO). it sets down
minimum standards for the regulation by national
governments of many forms of intellectual property (IP) as
applied to nationals of other WTO member nations; This
involves intangible ideas, knowledge and expressions that
require use to be approved by the owners
AGREEMENT ON TRADE-RELATED INVESTMENT MEASURES (TRIMS) Are rules that
apply to the domestic regulations a country applies to foreign
investors, is often an industrial policy. These are a range of
operating or performance measures that host-country
governments impose on foreign firms to keep them from
having a distorting effect on trade goods and services.

INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND It deals with exchange rates balances of payments,

international capital flows, and the monitoring of member
states and their macroeconomic policies

WORLD BANK  (WB) Helps poorer nations or to the government; It provides funds
to government-sponsored or guaranteed programs in so-
called Part II (member states that are middle-income or
creditworthy poorer nations)

EUROPEAN UNION (EU) This organization was designed to enhance European

political and economic integration by creating a single
currency (the euro), a unified foreign and security policy, and
common citizenship rights and by advancing cooperation in
the areas immigration, asylum, and judicial affairs
ORGANIZATION OF PETROLEUM EXPORTING COUNTRIES (OPEC) It is a multinational
organization that was established to coordinate the
petroleum policies of its members and to provide member
states with technical and economic aid

FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT (FDI) It involves investments by one firm in another firm that
exists abroad in a different nation-state, with the intention of
gaining control over the latter’s operation.

MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS (MNC) A firm that has the power to coordinate and
control operations in more than two countries, even if it does
not own them 
> Global companies

INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS ORGANIZATION (ISO) An international institute of technical

standards that sustain and vindicate the quality assurance of
the goods and services available in the global market
VIDEO LECTURE

INTEGRATION is a state of affairs or a process involving attempts to

combine separate national economies into larger economic
regions

2 TYPES OF MARKET INTEGRATION

Negative Integration reduces non-tariffs and tariff barriers to trade as a main tool
for integrating markets

Positive Integration adjusts domestic policies and institutions through the

creation of supranational arrangements
SUPRANATIONAL ARRANGEMENTS is a type of multinational political union where
negotiated power is delegated to an authority by
governments of member states.
The government of governments

FORMS OF INTEGRATION

PREFERENTIAL AGREEMENT Involves lower trade barriers between those

countries, which have signed the agreement
FREE TRADE AREA reduces barriers to trade among member countries
to zero, but each member country still has
autonomy in deciding the external deciding rate of
tariff for its trade with non-member countries
CUSTOMS UNION in this form, countries agree to abolish tariff and
non-tariff barriers to trade in goods flowing
between them
COMMON MARKETS allow for free movement of labor and capital within
the member countries
ECONOMIC UNION is the highest form of economic integration

GLOBAL INTERSTATE SYSTEM

 “Global Interstate System” is a system of competing and allied states around the
world
 The word “global” refers to the interaction networks in which people live, whether
these are spatially small or large around the world. “Interstate” explains the
connections and operations between states, and “system” means that these
policies and settlements are interacting with one another in important ways;
interactions are two ways, necessary, structures, regularized, and reproductive.
o Competing and allied ness; bounded by interstate system, policies
o Global = networks of people; which people live
o Interstate = connection
o System = policies and settlements
 Systemic interconnectedness exists when lives of the people in the jurisdiction
and of others are significantly affected and influenced through the interactions,
this is pivotal for social continuity and/or social change
o  Pivotal to social continuity
 o Jurisdiction; you cannot simply impose rules and regulation to another
nations, important to create a policy that will be followed by nations
 This system imposes a check and balance of power such that no state-system
would be able to monopolize the world economy, production in focus to the
factors of production cannot be constrained to a degree of political monopoly
o Fair economic activities

GLOBAL CONTEMPORARY GOVERNANCE

o Government is on a state basis; Philippine government
o How other nations are being ruled to maintain peace and order
 Globalization is a rich and broad concept and may be defined in various perspectives. It
cannot be denied that globalization has made a tremendous impact on the sovereign
state. Fowler and Bunck (1996) emphasized that a sovereign state has a territory, the
people, and the government.

ELEMENT OF THE STATE

People > body of inhabitants; more or less numerous (not so many
for the state to sustain its people, not too little to defend their
state in times of aggression)
Territory > where you can impose the rules; drawing imaginary lines
in the end points of land mass
Government > agency of control
Sovereignty > supreme power to govern its people
 Any state admitted as a member of the United Nations will be upon the decision of the
General Assembly as recommended by the Security Council, The United Nations
membership requirements are
 (1) the state must be a peace-loving state which accepts the obligations contained in the
present Charter, and
 (2) in the judgment of the Organization, it must be able and willing to carry out these
obligations.
 Chapter 2, Article 4 of the United Nations Chapter states that only sovereign states can
become members of the United Nations. Although all UN members are fully sovereign
states at the present, Belarus, India, Philippines, and Ukraine- four of the original
members- were not independent at the time of their admission in the organization.
  Even from the seventeenth century, the legal framework of a sovereign state has served
as a definitive ground for political governance and economic system.
 Sovereignly has been constitutionally used both on national and international levels. The
intercontinental spread of capital and the formation of global markets have eventually
substituted the fragmented national economies
 Sovereign states are experiencing increased difficulties in supplying regulatory and
redistributive public goods and establishing and enforcing property rights in the face
relatively open trade, rapid information-technology advances, and considerable
financial deregulation
  Moreover, both market relations and political discontent with economic policies have
virtually become “borderless”
 The Rome statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) upholds the principle of
complementarities and recognizes that states do not have to collaborate with the court
unless they have raffled the statue, However, this is only part of the picture. 
 The establishment of special hybrid courts in Cambodia, East, Timor, Lebanon, and
Sierra Leone means that states no longer see sovereign state law alone as sufficient
means of punishing serious war crimes
 The decisions of international judges and prosecutors now permeate and shape the
domestic criminal law of these countries. William Burko-White further asserts that the
ICC has become part of a system of multi level global governance through its alteration
of state preferences and policies and its deterrence of future crimes through judicial
and prosecutorial pronouncements.

THE CONTEMPORARY ARTS (09-24-22)

An International Civilization? Empire, Internationalism and the Crisis of the Mid-twentieth
Century 
By Mark Mazower
On March 7, 1934, an unusual event took place at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Twenty thousand people attended a meeting there to hear speeches making the Nazis; first
year in power and denouncing the regime. The rally was organized as a mock trial and was
advertised in the press as the ‘Case of civilization against Hitler’, with indictment, witnesses and,
eventually, judgment delivered by a Minister of the Community Church of New York City.
‘Hitlerism denounced as a crime against civilization’, ran the headline in the New York Times the
following day. Organized principally by the American Jewish Congress, the meeting anticipated
Nuremberg in its consciousness of the power of what the scholar Louis Anthes calls ‘publicly
deliberative drama’. It looked forward, too, to the Cold War in its evocation of a joint Judeo-
Christian civilization ranged against the threat of totalitarianism. But in its emphasis on that
common ‘civilization’ it looked backwards, to the concept that lay at the heart of the claim to
world leadership that Europeans had been advancing since at least the early nineteenth
century.
It was really after the defeat of Napoleon that the concept of a European civilization
became fundamental to new understandings of international order and new techniques of
international rule. In France, Guizot abandoned the Enlightenment project of fitting Europe into a
scheme of universal history for the [Herderian] task of tracing the continent’s own cultural roots.
As he put it in his history of civilization in Europe: ‘civilization is a sort of ocean, constituting the
wealth of a people, and whose bosom all the elements of the life of that people, all the powers
supporting its existence, assemble and unite’. It was just possible, thought Guizot, to locate
among the various civilizations of the world a specifically European variant: ‘It is evident,’ he
wrote, ‘that there is a European civilization; that a certain unity pervades the civilization of the
various European states…’
 In Britain, John Stuart Mill suggested by contrast that there was but a single model of
civilization but this too-in his 1836 essay on ‘Civilization’ - he located it in Europe since ‘all [the
elements of civilization] exist in modern Europe, and especially in Great Britain, to a more
eminent degree… than at any other place or time. Whether one believed like Mill that civilization
was singular and hierarchical, or plural and historically relative-and as time went on Mill would
win out over Guizot - what came to be seen as self-evident was civilization’s location in Europe.
One fertile intellectual elaboration of this belief was-as we have learned from the work of
Martti Koskenniemie and Antony Anghie-the new discipline of (mostly positivis) international
law. As a generalization and adaptation of the values of the Concert  of Europe, international
law was designed as an aid to the preservation of order among sovereign states, and its
principle were explicitly stated as applying only to civilized states-much as Mill saw his principles
of liberty as applying solely to members of ‘a civilized community’. In 1845 the influential
American international lawyer Henry Wheaton had actually talked in terms of the ‘international
law of Christianity’ versus ‘the law used by Mohammedan Powers’: but within twenty or thirty
years, such pluralism had all but vanished. According to the late nineteenth century legal
commentator, W.E. Hall, international law ‘is a product of the special civilization of modern
Europe and forms a highly artificial system of which the principles cannot be supposed to be
understood or recognized by countries differently civilized… Such states only can be presumed
to be subject to it as are inheritors of that civilization.
Thus conceived, international law faced the issue of the relationship between a civilized
Christendom and the non-civilized world. States could join the magic circle through the doctrine
of international recognition, which took place when ‘a state is brought by increasing civilization
within the realm of law’. In the 1880s James Lorimer suggested there were three categories of
humanity-civilized, barbaric and savage and thus three corresponding grades of recognition
(plenary political; partial political; natural, or mere human). Most Victorian commentators
believed that barbaric states might be admitted gradually or in part. Westlake proposed, for
instance, that: ‘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’. Others disagreed:
entry ‘into the circle of law-governed countries’ was a formal matter, and ‘full recognition’ all but
impossible.
The case of the Ottoman Empire exemplified this ambivalent process. Of course,
European states had been making treaties with the sultans since the sixteenth century. But
following the Crimean War the empire was declared as lying within the ‘Public law of Europe’ - a
move which some commentator then and now saw as the moment when international law
ceased to apply only to christian states but which is perhaps better viewed as a warning to
Russia to uphold the principles of collective consultation henceforth rather than trying to dictate
unilaterally to the Turks. 
In fact, despite its internal administrative reforms, the empire was never regarded in
Europe as being fully civilized, the capitulations remained in force, and throughout the
nineteenth century the chief justification of the other Powers for supporting first autonomy and
then independence for new Christian Balkan states was that removing them from Ottoman rule
was the best means of civilizing them. We can see this clearly in contemporary attitudes
towards the military occupation of Ottoman territory by European armies. After the Franco-
Prussian War, international lawyers had devised the notion of belligerent occupation-a state of
affairs in which a military occupant interfered as little as was compatible with military necessity
in the internal affairs of the occupied country so as not to prejudice the rights of the former ruler
of that territory who was regarded as remaining sovereign until a peace statement might
conclude otherwise. Belligerent occupation was, in other words, a compact between so-called
civilized states not to unilaterally challenge each other’s legitimate right to rule. In the case of
Ottoman territory, the Powers felt no such inhibitions: the Russians in Bulgaria in 1877, the
Habsburgs in Bosnia the following year, and the British in Egypt in 1882 all demonstrated
through their extensive rearrangement of provincial administrations, that although they would
allow the Ottoman sultan to retain a fig-leaf of formal sovereignty, in fact the theory of belligerent
occupation did not apply in his lands. Thirty years lates, the Austrians [in 1908] and the British in
[in 1914] went further: on both occasions they unilateral declared Ottoman sovereignty over the
territories they were occupying at an end, suggesting that whatever had or had not been agreed
at Paris in 1856, by the early twentieth century, the Ottoman empire was regarded once again
as lying outside the circle of civilization. [The fact that it was a Muslim power was certainly not
irrelevant to this, In 1915, when the French and Russians prepared a diplomatic protest at the
mass murder of Ottoman Armenians, their initial draft condemned the massacres as ‘crimes
aggainst Christendom’. Only when the British mentioned that they were worried over the
possible impact of such a formulation on Indian Muslim opinion was the wording changed to
‘crimes against humanity.
If the Ottoman Empire was, as it were, semi-civilized, then sub-Saharan Africa-site of the
main European land-grab in the late nineteenth century-was savage. European and American
lawyers extended the notion of the protectorate-originally employed for new European states
such as Greece-to the new colonial situation, ostensibly as a way of shielding vulnerable non-
European states from the depredations of other European Powers, but more urgently, in order
to avoid complications among the Powers which might trigger off further conflict. In the
increasingly radicalized world-view of late nineteenth century European imperialism,
protectorates might be a way of slowing down social transformation-in the interests of ‘native
customs’ - as much as they were of introducing it. ‘Much interest attaches to legislation for
protectorates, in which the touch of civilization is cautiously applied to matters barbaric, ‘wrote a
commentator in the Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation in 1899. Yet the concept
of civilization remained vital. The treaty that followed Berlin Colonial Conference of 1884-84,
which marked the attempt to diplomatically manage the Scramble for Africa, talked of the need
to initiate the indigenous populations into the advances of civilization.’
In this way, Victoriam international law divided the world according to its standard of
civilization. Inside Europe-and in other areas of the world colonized by Europeans-there was the
sphere of civilized life this meant-roughly-the protection of property; the rule of law on the basis-
usually-of codes or constitutions; effective administration of its territory by a state; warfare
conducted by a regular army; and freedom of conscience. The fundamental task of international
law in this zone was to resolve conflicts between sovereign states in the absence of an
overarching sovereign. Outside this sphere, the task was to define terms upon which
sovereignty -full or partial-might be bestowed. It was thus the non-European world that the
enormity of the task required in acquiring sovereignty could best be grasped. There, too, the
potential costs- in terms of legalized violence-of failing to attain the standard of civilization were
most evident.
 The laws of war, codified by the Great Powers at length at the end of the nineteenth
century, were designed to minimize the severity of conflicts between civilized states. But where
no reciprocity of civilized behavior could be expected, European armies were taught they need
not observe them-or indeed in some various versions-any rules at all. Britain’s General J.F.C.
Fuller noted that ‘in small wars against uncivilized nations, the form of warfare to be adopted
must tome with the shade of culture existing in the land, by which I mean that, against people
possessing a low civilization, war must be more brutal in type; The 1914 British Manual of
Military Law, too, emphasized that ‘rules of International Law apply only to warfare between
civilized nations… They do not apply in wars with uncivilized states and tribes.’ After all,
savages were impressed only by force; fanaticism could only be stopped only through an
awesome demonstration of technological superiority. ‘A shell smashing into a putative
inaccessible village stronghold is an indication of the relentless energy and superior skill of the
well equipped civilized foe. Instead of merely rousing his wrath, these acts are much more likely
to make [the fanatical savage] raise his hands in surrender.’ These were the words of Colonel
Elbridge Colby,  an interwar US advocate of air power in colonial in surgeries (and  father of
William Colby, a future director of the CIA and architect of  the Advanced Pacification Campaign
in Vietnam).
Until well after the First World WAr, it was axiomatic that ‘international law is a product of
the special civilization of modern Europe itself.’ The United States was, by the century’s end,
regarded from this point of view as a European power, if not of the first rank. But Washington-
which had stood on the sidelines during the carve-up of Africa, had achieved a special
relationship to international law following the war with Spain. Through the Roosevelt Corollary, it
toughened up its reading of the Monroe Doctrine, while at the same time encouraging the pan
American codification of international law as a way of enshrining its own regional hegemony.
Siam was admitted to the Hague conferences as a mark of respect; but in China, where the
Boxer Rebellion was put down with enormous violence-on the grounds that it was ‘an outrage
against the comity of nationals’-the unequal treaties remained in force, It was only Japanese
who seriously challenged the nineteenth century identification of civilization with Christendom.
Having adhered to several international conventions, and revised their civil and criminal codes,
they managed to negotiate the repeal of the unequal treaties from 1894 onwards, as well as to
win back control over their tariffs, and their victory over Russia in 1905 simply confirmed their
status as a major Power. Not surprisingly, the Young Turks-desperate to repeal the humiliating
capitulations- could not hear enough of the Japanese success.
The Japanese achievement confirmed that the standard of civilization being offered by
the Powers was capable of being met by non-Christian, non-European states. But the Japanese
achievement was also unique. After the ending of the Russo-Japanese war, the Second Hague
Conference of 1907 talked of ‘the interest of humanity, and the ever progressice needs of
civilization.’ But could civilization (with a capital C) really ever be universalized, and how far
could it be extended? Many had their doubts. German and Italian jurists essentially ruled out
any non-European power receiving full recognition; the prominent Russian jurist de Martens was
equally emphatic. As for the empire-builders, in Africa, in particular, as well as in the Pacific,
many liberals and Gladstonians came to terms with imperialism at century’s end-as Saul Dubow
has recently reminded us- because they though in terms of a kind of an imperial
cosmopolitanism or commonwealth, in which individual peoples might preserve their own
distinctive cultures. Where necessary, of course, civilized powers had to rule others to ensure
this. 
The idea of trusteeship, which was-with a slightly different coloration-to become the
lynchpin of the League of Nations system of colonial rule, expressed a similar caution about the
exportability of (European) civilization. Unilaterally abrogating Ottoman sovereignty in Egypt in
December 1914, the British proclaimed that they regarded themselves as ‘trustees for the
inhabitants’ of the country. Their unilateralism was only one sign of the death of the old Concert
and its values. Blazing a trail that others would follow in the wars of the coming century, they
tone up one of the fundamental axioms of the late-nineteenth century European order-that the
basic legitimacy of the sovereign ruler would always be respected- and replaced it with a new
understanding in which sovereignty inherited, not in the head of state, but in the people or
nation. What Nehal Bhuta has recently-in the case of Iraq-called the doctrine of ‘transformative
occupation’ thus makes its appearance.