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The Legacy of Vattel’s Droit des gens: Contexts, Concepts, Reception, Translation and Diffusion

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The Legacy of Vattel's Droit des gens

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Abstract

This chapter provides an outline of the various dimensions of Vattel’s influence on different topics, through different channels, in geographical and linguistic areas and on academic disciplines. The name Vattel has been a byword for different doctrinal positions in international law, political thought as well as in International Relations and this is how his legacy has so far tended to be understood. This chapter proposes a historical and methodological reassessment of the most common associations and the, at times, opposed (mis)understandings of Vattel’s ideas. Starting from a biographical sketch of Vattel’s own contexts, his early publications and diplomatic career, it explains how some of his central concepts became carriers of other notions in the complex and enduring reception history of the Droit des gens. This introductory chapter also sets the scene and provides a framework within which the contributions to the topic of Vattel’s legacy provided in the other chapters of the book are placed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina, L’eterno ritorno del Droit des gens di Emer de Vattel (secc. XVIII–XIX), L’impatto sulla cultura giuridica in prospettiva globale (Frankfurt: Max Planck Institute, 2017) reconstructs the long publishing history of Vattel’s Droit des gens and its contexts.

  2. 2.

    What these transformations amounted to, and what theoretical and practical responses they generated is captured by Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), esp. 1–156.

  3. 3.

    A recent volume edited by Vincent Chetail and Peter Haggenmacher, Vattel’s International Law from a XXIst Century Perspective/Le Droit International de Vattel vu du XXIe Siècle (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2011)—with a mix of chapters in French and English—is of undisputedly scholarly quality, yet tends to commit itself to an understanding of Vattel’s significance that is restricted to the field of international law today. Likewise, does another classic study by Emmanuelle Jouannet, Emer de Vattel et l’émergence doctrinale du droit international classique (Paris: Pedone, 1993) and further back F. Stephen Ruddy, International Law in the Enlightenment: The Background of Emmerich de Vattel’s Le Droit des gens (New York: Oceana, 1975). Cf. the more comprehensive account by Frederick Whelan, “Vattel’s Doctrine of the State”, History of Political Thought 9 (1988), 59–90.

  4. 4.

    A special issue of the journal Grotiana 31(1) (2010), guest edited by Béla Kapossy, includes six highly interesting contributions to Vattel scholarship. Their focus, differently from the presently proposed volume, is mostly on the issue of military intervention and sovereign integrity and the different, indeed contradictory, ways in which Vattel has been seen over time as limiting or expanding justifications for foreign intervention. Simone Zurbuchen, “Vattel’s Law of Nations and Just War Theory”, History of European Ideas 35 (2009), 408–417; Jennifer Pitts, “Intervention and Sovereign Equality: Legacies of Vattel”, Just and Unjust Military Intervention: European Thinkers from Vitoria to Mill, ed. Stefano Recchia and Jennifer M. Welsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 132–153 have also engaged with his topic in a highly refined manner.

  5. 5.

    A slightly earlier book-length publication, Réflexions sur l’impact, le rayonnement et l’actualité de “Le droit des gens, ou Principes de la loi naturelle appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des Nations et des Souverains” d’Emer de Vattel: à l’occasion du 250ème anniversaire de sa parution, ed. Yves Sandoz (Brussels: Bruylant, 2010) addresses the publication, influence and enduring relevance of the Droit des gens in its three different parts. Yet, most contributions stay at the level of unrevised conference papers and communicate a collection of notes or preliminary observations, rather than that they form finished pieces of research that open up bigger issues.

  6. 6.

    Apart from the present work, see Antonio Trampus’s forthcoming, The Constitutionalism of Emer de Vattel: Good Government, Small States and International Politics, as well as a number of earlier publications, leading up to the present volume, including: Koen Stapelbroek and Antonio Trampus, “Commercial Reform Against the Tide: Reapproaching the Eighteenth-Century Decline of the Republics of Venice and the United Provinces”, History of European Ideas 36 (2010), 192–202; “Vattel’s Droit des gens und die Europäischen Handelsrepubliken im achtzehnten Jahrhundert”, Der Moderne Staat und “le doux commerce”: Staat, Ökonomie und internationals System im politischen Denken der Aufklärung, ed. Olaf Asbach (Baden-Baden: Nomos), 2014, 181–204; Antonio Trampus, “Il ruolo del traduttore nel tardo Illuminismo: Lodovico Antonio Loschi e la traduzione italiana del Droit des gens”, Il linguaggio del tardo Illuminismo (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, 2009); “Vattel’s Droit des gens in Italy: The Doctrinal and Practical Model of Government”, War, Trade and Neutrality: Europe and the Mediterranean in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Antonella Alimento (Milan: FrancoAngeli 2011); and Koen Stapelbroek, “Universal Society, Commerce and the Rights of Neutral Trade: Martin Hübner, Emer de Vattel and Ferdinando Galiani”, COLLeGIUM: Studies Across Disciplines in Humanities and Social Sciences 3 (2008), 63–89.

  7. 7.

    Isaac Nakhimovsky, “Carl Schmitt’s Vattel and the Law of Nations Between Enlightenment and Revolution”, Grotiana 31 (2010), 141–164. Famously, Cornelis van Vollenhoven, De drie treden van het volkenrecht (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1918) turned “Vattelian international law” into a shorthand explanation for the degeneration of international law and the outbreak of warfare. On Vollenhoven’s project and the nascent Dutch “Gidsland” perception under the header of a “Grotian tradition”, see Johanna K. Oudendijk, “Van Vollenhoven’s “The Three Stages in the Evolution of the Law of Nations”: A Case of Wishful thinking”, Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 48 (1980), 3–27. Recently, Emmanuelle Tourme-Jouannet, “The Critique of Classical Thought During the Interwar Period: Vattel and Van Vollenhoven”, Vattel’s International Law from a XXIst Century Perspective, 133–150. See also below.

  8. 8.

    Indeed a careful analysis of the legal, political and philosophical faultlines in the Vattel reception may reveal shifts in meaning and interpretation that go much beyond the ideological. In this sense, Simone Zurbuchen, “Emer de Vattel on the Society of Nations and the Political System of Europe”, System, Order, and International Law: The Early History of International Legal Thought from Machiavelli to Hegel, ed. Stefan Kadelbach, Thomas Kleinlein and David Roth-Isigkeit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 263–282 has underlined that the mainstream notion of Vattel as a founding father of positivism is fundamentally misconceived. Nakhimovsky, “Carl Schmitt’s Vattel and the Law of Nations” has perceptively noted how recently historians, building upon Schmitt and Koselleck, understood Vattel’s project in different terms from contemporaries until the early nineteenth century: of actively and successfully separating the law of nations from natural law to regulate war and create international order (before degenerating into terror), rather than (failing to) ground international society and political order upon shared moral conceptions. Vattel’s system, closer to his own context, was not seen to easily justify foreign interventions as instantiations of the voluntary law of nations .

  9. 9.

    See the chapters by Malt, Stapelbroek and Trampus. We should mention the monograph by Stéphane Beaulac, The Power of Language in the Making of International Law: The Word Sovereignty in Bodin and Vattel and the Myth of Westphalia (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2004), which deals with semiotic aspects of texts in the construction of the field of international law and Vincent Chetail, “Vattel et la sémantique du droit des gens: une tentative de reconstruction critique”, Vattel’s International Law from a XXIst Century Perspective, 385–434.

  10. 10.

    This is the risk of philosophically exposing or correcting errors and misinterpretations, see Theodore Christov, “Liberal Internationalism Revisited: Grotius, Vattel, and the International Order of States”, The European Legacy 10 (2005), 561–584. One way of overcoming is, is to argue that Vattel deliberately planted the seeds of ambiguity in his work, see Ian Hunter, “Vattel’s Law of Nations: Diplomatic Casuistry for the Protestant Nation”, Grotiana 31 (2010), 108–140.

  11. 11.

    The introduction of Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, ed. Béla Kapossy and Richard Whatmore (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008) contains a concise biography of Vattel’s life and career. The standard work on Vattel’s life and career remains Édouard Béguelin, “En souvenir de Vattel”, Recueil de travaux offert par la Faculté de Droit de l’Université de Neuchâtel à la Société Suisse des Juristes (Neuchâtel: Attinger, 1929), 35–176.

  12. 12.

    See the chapter by Szymanski. Until now, Vattel’s diplomatic career in relation to the Droit des gens is best explained by Andre Bandelier, “De Berlin à Neuchâtel: la genèse du Droit des gens d’Emer de Vattel”, Schweizer im Berlin des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Martin Fontius and Helmut Holzhey (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), 45–56.

  13. 13.

    Isaac Nakhimovsky, “Vattel’s Theory of the International Order: Commerce and the Balance of Power in the Law of Nations”, History of European Ideas 33, 157–173; Ben Holland, “The Moral Person of the State: Emer de Vattel and the Foundations of International Legal Order”, History of European Ideas 37 (2011), 438–445; and Koen Stapelbroek, “Universal Society, Commerce and the Rights of Neutral Trade: Martin Hübner, Emer de Vattel and Ferdinando Galiani”, COLLeGIUM: Studies Across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 3 (2008), 63–89.

  14. 14.

    Vattel, Droit des gens, Preface.

  15. 15.

    “Somnium Scipionis” (“Scipio’s Dream”) in Cicero, De republica.

  16. 16.

    Journal de Commerce (1759), 141–142.

  17. 17.

    Vattel declared his adherence to Wolff’s principles in the Preface.

  18. 18.

    See Emer de Vattel, Questions de droit naturel et observations sur le Traité du Droit de la nature du M. le Baron de Wolff par M. de Vattel (Bern, 1762).

  19. 19.

    See Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Nakhimovsky, “Vattel’s Theory of the International Order”. Indeed, the reviewer of the Journal de Commerce too in 1759 criticised Vattel for what he deemed an attempt to politically justify the British abuses of the neutrality of trade.

  20. 20.

    Emer de Vattel, Le loisir philosophique ou Pièces diverses de philosophique, de morale et d’amusement (Genèva, 1747) and his Poliergie ou mélange de literature et de poësie. Par M. de V.*** (Amsterdam, 1757).

  21. 21.

    The first five essays of Vattel Le loisir philosophique. The recent English re-edition by Liberty Fund (2008), prepared by Béla Kapossy and Richard Whatmore, entitled The Law of Nations has done a lot to make the Droit des gens available to a wider audience. Next to a republication of the text as it was published in London in 1797, the Liberty Fund edition includes the text of three minor essays written by Vattel in the late 1740s. These provide insight into the context of Vattel’s early thinking and form an access point for positioning him as a thinker among his contemporaries. The same editors published a full translation of a collection of Vattel’s early moral, literary and political works as an article in History of European Ideas in the same year Emer de Vattel’s, “Mélanges de littérature, de morale et de politique (1760)”, History of European Ideas 34 (2008), 77–103. A number of chapters in this volume also engage with these essays in order to shed new light on the character of Vattel’s work in his actual context.

  22. 22.

    Vattel Le loisir philosophique, passim; Vattel, Poliergie passim.

  23. 23.

    Vattel, Questions de droit naturel.

  24. 24.

    Vattel Poliergie, notably the essays reflecting on ancient and modern moral philosophy.

  25. 25.

    Journal de Commerce (1759), 5.

  26. 26.

    Journal de Commerce (1759), 141.

  27. 27.

    Journal de Commerce (1759), 152–155.

  28. 28.

    For a discussion of these relations Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace, 192 and Journal de Commerce (1759), 137–141. See also Richard Devetak, “Law of Nations as Reason of State: Diplomacy and the Balance of Power in Vattel’s Law of Nations”, Parergon 28 (2011), 105–128.

  29. 29.

    Nakhimovsky, “Vattel’s Theory of the International Order”.

  30. 30.

    See also the chapters by Alimento and Stapelbroek, as well as Bruno Arcidiacono, “De la balance politique et de ses rapports avec le droit des gens: Vattel, la “guerre pour l’équilibre” et le système européen”, Vattel’s International Law from a XXIst Century Perspective, 77–100.

  31. 31.

    E.g. Vattel, Droit des gens, book III. See Zurbuchen, “Vattel’s Law of Nations and Just War Theory”.

  32. 32.

    Nakhimovsky, “Vattel’s Theory of the International Order” and Stapelbroek, “Universal Society, Commerce and the Rights of Neutral Trade”.

  33. 33.

    Vattel, Droit des gens, book I, par. 31, 34. While Vattel has too often been seen as an international lawyer, his underlying constitutional thinking was conceptually innovative and ought to be compared to the language of the constituent that was present in his contemporary Rousseau’s writings. See Joel I. Colón-Ríos, “Rousseau, Theorist of Constituent Power”, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 36 (2016), 885–908; and from there Theodore Christov, “Vattel’s Rousseau: ius gentium and the Natural Liberty of States”, Freedom and the Construction of Europe, ed. Quentin Skinner and Martin van Gelderen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 167–187.

  34. 34.

    Vattel, Droit des gens, book I, par. 31.

  35. 35.

    On Vattel and “small state theory”, Maurizio Bazzoli, Il piccolo Stato nell’età moderna. Studi su un concetto della politica internazionale tra XVI e XVIII secolo (Milan: Jaca Book, 1990), 1151; Small States in International Relations, ed. Christine Ingerbritsen (Reykjavik: University of Iceland Press, 2006); and Domokos Kosary, Les “petits Etats” faceaux changements culturels, politiques et économiques de 1750 à 1914 (Lausanne: HU Jost, 1985).

  36. 36.

    Vattel, Droit des gens, Preliminaries, par. 18.

  37. 37.

    Nakhimovsky, “Carl Schmitt’s Vattel and the Law of Nations”.

  38. 38.

    Nakhimovsky, “Vattel’s Theory of the International Order”.

  39. 39.

    See the chapter by Carrera. In addition see Vincent Chetail, “Sovereignty and Migration in the Doctrine of the Law of Nations: An Intellectual History of Hospitality from Vitoria to Vattel”, European Journal of International Law 27 (2016), 901–922.

  40. 40.

    Vattel, Droit des Gens, book III, par. 110.

  41. 41.

    Richard Whatmore, Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 103–118, 257–260.

  42. 42.

    Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace.

  43. 43.

    See the chapters by Alimento and Stapelbroek. We refer to the Luzac edition and the parts published in the Memoires French foreign-ministry campaign series that was a spin-off from the Observateur Hollandois .

  44. 44.

    See the chapter by Malt.

  45. 45.

    See the chapters by Szymanski, Clerici and Ieva. See Walter Rech, Enemies of Mankind: Vattel’s Theory of Collective Security (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2013); Isaac Nakhimovsky, “The Enlightened Prince and the Future of Europe: Voltaire and Frederick the Great’s Anti-Machiavel of 1740”, ed. Béla Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky and Richard Whatmore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 44–77.

  46. 46.

    Cornelis van Vollenhoven, De drie treden van het volkenrecht. On Schmitt and Koselleck and recent interpretative “oscillations”, see Nakhimovsky, “Carl Schmitt’s Vattel and the Law of Nations”; Béla Kapossy, “Rival Histories of Emer de Vattel’s Law of Nations”, Grotiana 31 (2010), 5–21. On the practical diplomatic usage of Vattel in justifying and rejecting war, see Jennifer Pitts, “International Relations and the Critical History of International Law”, International Relations 31 (2017), 282–298.

  47. 47.

    Richard Whatmore, “Vattel, Britain and Peace in Europe”, Grotiana 31 (2010), 85–107. In the Dutch Republic, the vision of Frederick II and shared by Johan Heinrich Gottlob von Justi was taken up as a wake-up call that the Republic need to be reformed, see Koen Stapelbroek, “The International Politics of Cameralism: The Balance of Power and Dutch Translations of Justi”, Cameralism Across the World of Enlightenment: Nature, Happiness and Governance, ed. Ere Nokkala, Nicholas B. Miller and Dominik Hünniger (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

  48. 48.

    See William Ossipow and Dominik Gerber, “The Reception of Vattel’s Law of Nations in the American Colonies: From James Otis and John Adams to the Declaration of Independence”, American Journal of Legal History 57 (2017), 521–555; Vincent Chetail, “Vattel and the American Dream: An Inquiry into the Reception of the Law of Nations in the United States”, The Roots of International Law/Les fondements du droit international, ed. Vincent Chetail and Pierre-Marie Dupuy (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2013), 251–300. Against mythical “originalism”, Brian Richardson, “The Use of Vattel in the American Law of Nations”, American Journal of International Law 106(3) (2012), 547–571.

  49. 49.

    For an explanation of the Peace of Utrecht (1713) as constitutive of an international (commercial and political) order, see Koen Stapelbroek and Antonella Alimento, “Trade and Treaties: Balancing the Interstate System”, The Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth Century: Balance of Power, Balance of Trade, ed. Antonella Alimento and Koen Stapelbroek (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 1–75.

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  1. Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Koen Stapelbroek

  2. Ca’ Foscari University Venice, Italy

    Antonio Trampus

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Correspondence to Koen Stapelbroek .

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  1. Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Koen Stapelbroek

  2. Ca’ Foscari University Venice, Italy

    Antonio Trampus

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Stapelbroek, K., Trampus, A. (2019). The Legacy of Vattel’s Droit des gens: Contexts, Concepts, Reception, Translation and Diffusion. In: Stapelbroek, K., Trampus, A. (eds) The Legacy of Vattel's Droit des gens. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23838-4_1

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