Performing Sovereignty: Civilisation and Savagery in the New and Old
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Performing sovereignty: Civilisation and savagery in the New and Old Worlds. A Dissertation Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. University of Sheffield. Xavier Mathieu Department of Politics Faculty of Social Sciences August 2015 ii Contents Summary………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…v Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………………….…………………..ix Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………...1 The traditional (or minimalist) understanding of sovereignty………………………………………………3 Post-colonial approaches and the idea of ‘civilised sovereignty’……………………………….…………5 Domestic and international constructions of civilised sovereignty…………………………….………..7 Re-assessing sovereignty in an intercultural world…………………………………….………………………10 From sovereignty to international relations: broader implications……………………….…………..13 Case-studies and methodology…………………………………………………………………………………….……14 Thesis outline……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……20 Chapter 1: Revealing civilised sovereignty: achievements and limits of (post-colonial) analyses of sovereignty in IR…………………………………….23 Introduction...........................................................................................................................23 Re-producing Eurocentric blindness: conventional approaches to sovereignty....................26 Constructivist approaches: sovereignty as a universal social construct................................31 Revealing the discursive and normative nature of sovereignty………………………………………….35 Civilised sovereignty in the construction of unequal intercultural relations………………………39 Domestic and international hierarchies, internal and external colonial frontiers………….…..42 Chapter 2: Sovereignty as a performative concept…………………………..47 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….....47 Contesting the dichotomy nature/culture to denaturalise reality……………………………………..48 Applying performativity to sovereignty: de-naturalising sovereign foundations ……………….54 Establishing reality: reiterative discourses and the ‘reality effect’ of sovereignty………………58 Concluding remarks……………………………………………………………………………………………………….....62 Chapter 3: The writing of the ideal French state: a perfect civilised sovereignty……………………………………………………………………………………..65 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………65 The meaning of sovereignty and its monarchical ‘nature’………………………………………………….69 Justifying the authority of the king: God and justice through the sovereign monarch……….74 Portraying the sovereign king: a father protecting the public good……………………………….....83 France as the embodiment of (a perfect) civilised sovereignty…………………………………....……87 Concluding remarks…………………………………………………………………………………………...............…93 iii Chapter 4: Sovereign doubts: civilisation and savagery disrupt the colonial frontiers.……………………………………………………………………….….97 French encounters with the Amerindians……………………………….………………………………………...98 Civilisation in America: perceptions of the Amerindian social order……………………………..…102 Savagery in Europe: France in the state of nature……………………………………………………………106 Performing the troubles of the kingdom………………………………………………………………………...108 Attacking the current king, preserving the institution of (sovereign) monarchy……………...111 Losing sovereignty: the threat of the state of nature………………………………………………….…..113 Concluding remarks………………………………………………………………………………………………………..117 Chapter 5: (Re-)establishing the sovereign, creating a familiar – but inferior – Other………………………………………………………………………….….121 Writing the Amerindians as familiar but inferior Others………………………………………………….123 A familiar Otherness: the Amerindians and evolutionary theories…………………….……………132 The League as an internal Other responsible for the lack of civilisation of the kingdom…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………137 Concluding remarks………………………………………………………………………………………………….…….141 Chapter 6: The triumph of sovereignty: naturalising the sovereign/colonial frontier……………………………………………..………..….145 From the Amerindian ‘state of nature’ to French sovereignty…………………………………..……146 The French kings as civilised and sovereign rulers……………………………………..……………………151 Concluding remarks………………………………………………………………………………………………….…….156 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..……………..159 Re-assessing sovereignty and its role as an organising principle of our international society…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….161 Implications beyond sovereignty: from international to intercultural relations?...............164 Analytical choices and limitations of the thesis…………………………………………………………….…170 Future directions…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….173 Concluding remarks………………………………………………………………………………………………………..176 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………....178 Archives……………………………………………………………………………………………………….....................178 Primary sources (published)……………………………………………………….......................................183 Secondary sources…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..187 iv Summary This thesis explores how sovereignty is performed through appeals to the concepts of civilisation and savagery. In the discipline of International Relations (IR), most scholars still consider sovereignty as a largely unproblematic (if now socially constructed) concept. Following post-colonial scholars this thesis argues that a compelling understanding of the concept requires a questioning of its universality and objectivity. Sovereignty needs to be re-connected to the cultural context and to the civilisational values that contribute to its emergence. Although they have rightly pointed at the Western origin of the concept of sovereignty post-colonial scholars have rarely engaged with how the civilised and sovereign identity of Western states is produced. In order to provincialise European sovereignty, they have focused their research primarily on the external side of the construction of civilised sovereignty. In other words, their interest has lain in the relations between the Western sovereign states and the ‘uncivilised’ Rest that was denied sovereignty. References to the contemporaneous internal construction of Western civilisation and sovereignty have been scarce and underdeveloped. What is missing is an explanation of how the Europeans dealt with their own civilisational doubts and how they constructed their own civilised sovereignty at the same time as they were denying it to others. Indeed, this specific focus has engendered a disconnection between the analysis of the ‘domestic’ task of statecraft and the ‘international’ affirmation of sovereignty. This thesis offers a non-Eurocentric approach to sovereignty that captures both the internal and international dimensions of ‘writing civilised sovereignty’. It reveals the inherent ambiguities and unexpected similarities of the process of statecraft in both spheres. Such a re-integration of the domestic ‘colonial encounter’ of the West with its own Others is important for our understanding of sovereignty. First, it shows how v sovereignty must be seen as a site of political struggle irrespective of where (or upon whom) it is claimed. In particular, the construction of sovereignty is attached to the differentiation of the civilised with the savage. As such, sovereignty is inextricably and as much bound to savagery as it is to civilisation: actors claiming sovereignty require the presence of a savage that can in turn threaten their very claim and from whom they must differentiate themselves. Second, considering the ‘internal’ side along the ‘external’ one enables the identification and comparison of two colonial frontiers, i.e. two demarcations between the civilised and the savage. One is performed ‘inside’ the sovereign state and one ‘outside’ of it. These two frontiers function in similar ways and have the same purpose: allocating an indisputable sovereignty to the representatives of the Western state. Because they separate the civilised from the savage, these frontiers are crucial political tools in the legitimation of claims to sovereignty. Finally, and interlinked with the above, juxtaposing the ‘internal’ and ‘international’ processes of statecraft reinforces the critique of the image of the sovereign state as unitary and culturally uniform (an image that mainstream IR strives to preserve). This thesis thus questions the usual and common-sense association between sovereignty and independence and argues that sovereignty promotes (at best) the independence of the sovereign elite adhering to the values considered as civilised in the West. Through the analysis of more than 300 archival sources, I demonstrate how the sovereign agency of the West and the task of statecraft require an appeal to civilisational superiority that can only be established through the identification of familiar (yet degenerated or underdeveloped) similarities between the civilised West and the savage non-West. The discourses of sovereignty in fact represent a resolution of civilisational ambiguities in order to (re)produce the illusion of a unified, civilised and sovereign Self. The theoretical conclusions of this thesis are informed by an extensive exploration of claims to sovereignty in 16 th century France. This focus is justified for two reasons: the Age of Discovery is usually taken as the beginning of the modern practice of colonialism (and thus the extension of European sovereignties to new territories) and in Europe claims to sovereignty strengthened and were more often successful during that period. In essence, then, this thesis provides a richer understanding of sovereignty and of its role