Taylor, Owen (2014) International law and revolution. PhD Thesis. SOAS, University of London. http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/20343 Copyright © and Moral Rights for this PhD Thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non‐commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This PhD Thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder/s. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. When referring to this PhD Thesis, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the PhD Thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full PhD Thesis title", name of the School or Department, PhD PhD Thesis, pagination. INTERNATIONAL LAW AND REVOLUTION OWEN TAYLOR Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD 2014 Law Department SOAS, University of London 1 Declaration for SOAS PhD thesis I have read and understood regulation 17.9 of the Regulations for students of the SOAS, University of London concerning plagiarism. I undertake that all the material presented for examination is my own work and has not been written for me, in whole or in part, by any other person. I also undertake that any quotation or paraphrase from the published or unpublished work of another person has been duly acknowledged in the work which I present for examination. Signed: ____________________________ Date: _________________23/10/2014 2 ABSTRACT: This thesis aims to provide an investigation into how revolutionary transformation aimed to affect the international legal order itself, rather than what the international order might have to say about a revolution. This study also hopes to illuminate the potential limits that the legal form offers to revolutionary praxis. Revolutionary praxis is taken to constitute action taken in pursuit of the social aspirations first born in the modern era alongside the expansion of the capitalist mode of production that envisaged a world free of the exploitation of man by man and the relentless pursuit of profit. This thesis takes as a central concern the deep connection between the form of law and capitalism, which implies that law as it is currently recognised would not survive the demise of capitalism, and that therefore revolutionary legal praxis would have as its ultimate aim the overthrowing of the current system of international legal relations. Such practice would simultaneously aim to reveal the law as complicit in and constitutive of capitalist oppression, thereby disenchanting the liberal legalist aspirations of the progressively inclined members of the profession. In order to examine this basic thesis, Soviet and Third World relationships to international law are considered. The Soviet relationship was explicitly couched as revolutionary praxis, although it did not see law as the prime location of such activity. The Third World also aimed at radically overhauling international relations, but did so with a far greater investment in the form of law as a vehicle for this aim. The thesis concludes that although the prime reason for the failure of both Soviet and Third World’s international legal engagement could be considered in some sense as ‘force of arms’, that this was entwined with and supported by the ‘force of law’. The law’s internal logic proved inimical to revolutionary praxis, which offers a substantial caution to any attempt to ‘use’ international law to pursue anti-capitalist activity. 3 CONTENTS: Acknowledgements ................................................................................................... 7 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 9 Foreground: Revolutionary Times? .......................................................................... 10 Critical Times; Critical Scholarship ............................................................................ 12 Whither the Critic? ................................................................................................... 14 A Note on Methodology ........................................................................................... 15 The Structure of the Thesis ...................................................................................... 17 Why Law Anyway? .................................................................................................... 20 Chapter 1: Revolution and Revolutionary Praxis ....................................................... 21 I: Introduction ............................................................................................................... 21 II: Revolution: Meaning; Concepts; History .................................................................. 24 i) Concepts and History: ...................................................................................... 25 III: Revolution as Modernity/Progress/History ............................................................ 29 i) The Contrast of Pre-Modern Revolution .......................................................... 32 ii) The Contemporary Return to Pre-modern Revolution .................................... 35 IV: Modern Revolution – Political and Social; Bourgeois and Proletarian ................... 38 V: Revolutionary Agency .............................................................................................. 42 i) Agency and Structure ....................................................................................... 44 ii) Praxis ................................................................................................................ 49 VI: Conclusion: .............................................................................................................. 51 Chapter 2: International Law and International Legal Praxis ..................................... 55 I: Introduction ............................................................................................................... 55 II: The Ambiguous Promise of International Law ......................................................... 58 i) No Reason of Principle .......................................................................................... 60 ii) Conventional Accounts of Ambiguity ................................................................... 61 III: The Politics of Law and Fundamental Legal Indeterminacy .................................... 62 i) Critiques of Legal Discourse .................................................................................. 62 ii) The Indeterminacy of International Legal Argument ........................................... 64 iii) Third World and Feminist takes on the Law ........................................................ 68 IV: Pashukanis and the Commodity Form Theory of Law ............................................ 70 i) Exchange Relations and the Law ........................................................................... 71 4 ii) Capitalism and the Gravity of Law ........................................................................ 74 iii) Capitalism and Public and Administrative Law .................................................... 75 iv) The Dominance and the Force of Law ................................................................. 77 V: The Brutal Heart of Law ........................................................................................... 80 i) The Dull Compulsion of Economic Relations ......................................................... 81 ii) Brutal Law and Legal Nihilism ............................................................................... 83 VI: Revolutionary Praxis in Law .................................................................................... 85 i) Beyond Disenchantment ....................................................................................... 87 ii) Confronting Essential Legal Relations .................................................................. 89 VII: Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 92 Chapter 3: The Soviet Relationship to International Law .......................................... 95 I: Introduction ............................................................................................................... 95 II: Background – Revolution, Foreign Policy and the Law ............................................ 99 i) Revolutionary Reality ............................................................................................ 99 ii) Revolutionary Legality ........................................................................................ 103 III: The Soviet ‘Approach’ to International Law .......................................................... 106 i) Early Soviet International Law – Transitional International Law ......................... 110 IV: The View From Without ........................................................................................ 113 V: Common International Legal Practice? .................................................................. 116 i) The View from Without Redux ............................................................................ 118 ii) The absence of Pashukanis’s General Theory .................................................... 121 VI: Understanding the Soviet ‘Approach’