ABSTRACT

An inexcusably brief adventure into the seeming infinity of philosophical engagement with ‘the event’ serves to focus the argument of this chapter, an argument that the imperative quality of the event as and in modernity provides the force of international law. The chapter also has its own generative event, an event that makes possible the modern notion of event generally, and that event is one of the more improbable deaths of God – ‘improbable’ because it was effected by a scholastic theologian of the sixteenth century, Francisco de Vitoria. With Vitoria, that epochal event fuses with his being at the origin of international law. Manuals of the trade would consign Vitoria’s contribution to international law to the preliminary and the peripheral, and this in favour of a later contender, most often the ubiquitous Grotius. Even Vitoria’s relegation of the deity has been trumped by the succès de scandale of Grotius in proclaiming that the discovering of natural law ‘would take place though we should even grant, what without the greatest Wickedness cannot be granted, that there is no God … ’ (Grotius 2005: 89; cf. Stumpf 2004: 163-64, n. 52). The point of the comparison with Grotius, however, will be that Vitoria accommodates an essential quality of international law, a quality aligned with the force of the event, and a quality suppressed in the reception of Grotius in standard-issue accounts of the subject. The allure of Vitoria for present purposes is that he straddles the sharp

divide between a medieval world supposedly under ‘the tyranny of Heaven’ (cf. Milton 1949: 236) and a secularized modernity. The same could be said of Grotius, but Grotius has been received and reduced in a way that provides

a template for a modern international law the force of which derives solely from the sovereign and secular nations out of which it dependently emanates. That derivation meant, in Vattel’s stark formulation from the eighteenth century, that the society of nations was to have no overarching commonality, and this to such a complete extent that none of its members ‘yield … rights to the general body’, each sovereign state being ‘independent of all the others’ (Vattel 1916: 9; cf. Cavallar 2002: 306-17). The definitive or primary type of politico-legal formation is thence the sovereign principality or state, ultimately the nation state. Vitoria has proved resistant to relegation in any such terms. What such resistance reveals is a contradiction in that standard scheme, a contradiction that does not dissolve the scheme but, rather, goes to constitute it. And it is in his accommodating the divide between the medieval and the modern that Vitoria preserves this constituent contradiction, and in so doing centres the force of international law not just on the assertion of a sovereign statehood but also on the quality, the communal quality, of the international. Further, it could and will be said that the force of international law ultimately inheres in the fusion of these two forceful sources – the force of the singular nation state or of other subjects of international law, and the force of the community of the international. And, so the argument runs, it is in and as the event that we can, as it were, find this intrinsically contradictory yet combinative force of international law. This is the way in which that modest agenda will now be followed. First,

I will instance and abruptly theorize the constituent contradiction just mentioned, the contradiction that is international law and its force. Next, that force is transposed to the quality of the event, and pointedly to what can thence be seen as the event of international law. Then we come to the engagement with Vitoria. This focuses on how his thought initiates and makes both possible and imperative such an ‘eventful’ idea of international law. Admittedly, and to an extent, this is an anachronistic exercise. The terms and language of international law as such emerged after Vitoria’s time, yet this very anachronism serves to reveal what was involved yet denied when the constituent forces of international law were combined and one of those forces, that emanating from the international, effectively denied.