The world-state is impossible

B.M. Telders on the world-state  While lecturing, during the 80s of the previous century, in the history of the law of nations at the University of Amsterdam I came upon the thesis of B.M. Telders, The State and the Law of Nations. HEGEL'S doctrine of the law of nations, an endeavour towards its justification, of 1927. Though written in an earlier period of the history of the law of nations, i.e., that of the League of Nations, its theory, in my opinion, is still actual. I decided to have it translated into English because I never found it cited in international literature on the subject. My then student Astrid Klein Sprokkelhorst, already a professional translator, accepted the burden of the translation of a text, written in a heavy philosophical, even in Dutch difficult to understand style of the hegelian parlance. I would write an introduction, destined to introduce the author of the book and to give a summary of its content. Financial support for my project I received from the " Prof. Mr. B.M. Teldersstichting" and from the "Legatum Visserianum" at the University of Leiden. T.M.C. Asser Instituut was willing to serve as publisher. Unfortunately T.M.C. Asser Instituut and I could not come to an agreement about the introduction that I had written. In the meantime I had left the university and was busying myself with totally different subject-matters. As a result the project came to a standstill. From time to time I looked into it, but with many very much altered circumstances I could no longer conceive of a possibility to publish the translation. Of late I have the opportunity to spend again time on the subject, while interest with the public might be rising too. Telders wrote about the possibility of the world-state, at the moment the alternative for the dominant hegemony to think of. I must confess that I do not feel able to formulate a plan acceptable for a regular publisher. On the other hand I regret that the anglo-saxon reading and academic public has not to its disposal the eminent translation that hides in my library. So I decided to scan the original and put it on the Internet (which sounds easier than it happens to be and costs me a lot of time). For the moment I withhold the complete text as well as my introduction, because I have to bring it up to date. Maastricht, zaterdag 18 april 2009 Summary of the thesis of Telders In 1927 B.M. Telders took a doctor's degree on a thesis called "THE STATE AND THE LAW OF NATIONS. Hegel's doctrine of the Law of Nations, an endeavour towards its justification." The book is written against the background of an integrationist strain in international thinking which, at the time, was already very strong, but which has become even more dominant after the Second World War. Since ± 1973 this way of thinking, however, had to change places again with a protectionism based on the sovereignty of the national state, a new international pluralism. It seems to me that the aforesaid integrationalism has knocked its head exactly against the factor which for Hegel constituted the impossibility of the existence of the world-state. However, the book of Telders which treats this factor is unknown in the international literature; one never finds it cited. Maybe the reason for this is that the book is written in Dutch, maybe it is because it is hidden in the collected works of Telders. Be this as it may it seems to me that the thesis which Telders defended and which he upheld till the end of his short life is still fresh and that it is worthwhile to examine it at short distance. It contains the germs of explanation, if not the explanation itself, of our present situation. Telders' study, however, is not in the first place an empirical analysis of the international situation of our time. It presents itself as an "endeavour towards a justification of Hegel's doctrine of the law of nations". Its main objective, of course, is the re-installment of Hegel in the ranks of those who analyze our present situation. Hegel, now, is not just another thinker in the field of international law or international politics. He has a unique place in the history of the doctrine of international law (chapters I to IV): his method is not empirical, but systematic (it is about logical necessity); his concept of sovereignty consumes the concepts of Bodin and Vattel (and here) and places them at a higher level. One cannot say that Hegel's method is not historical, it is only not "empirical" in the empiricist way of thinking. This doctrine of the law of nations of Hegel is first reconstructed by Telders (chapter V), which does not only mean succinct explicitation of it, but also elaboration and correction. Hegel's doctrine of the law of nations is a somewhat scattered part of his philosophy and a part which is not thought entirely to the end. In particular, it does not say explicitly why the world-state cannot be and why, therefore, it cannot develop, as it does not show how the law of nations, as "werdendes Recht" or "Recht an sich", is to be imagined. Telders expands on Hegel's doctrine in bringing it more into a system and in completing it by answering the question why the world-state cannot be, while at the same time developing his (own) theory of the gliding scales of positivity of the law of nations. (Hegel limits himself to the mere proposition that the law of nations is "Recht an sich" or "gelten sollendes Recht".) Eventually, Telders indeed comes to speak of the actual international situation of his time, but only with a view to verify the theory of Hegel (chapters VI to VII). What he says comes largely down to the following: the League of Nations is not the world-state in statu nascendi. And this not only because the League is conceived defectively, but because an organization like the League, - i.e., for that matter, also the United Nations, - is simply not able to develop into the world-state. This, too, is not due to the fact that organizations like the League of Nations or the United Nations are organizations like they are, i.e. leagues - so that it could seem as if Telders only denies the league of nations the capability of evolving into the world-state, while the world-state could come into existence via another way - but to the fact that the world-state cannot exist and therefore cannot develop (also not along another way than by evolving out of a league of nations). The world-state is unique and it cannot develop, because it cannot know its own identity. And because the world-state cannot exist, international law cannot be perfect law. Lacking the executive power of the state, it will always be a half-grown law, in German called "werdendes Recht". Not that it is totally non-positive. It has a penchant towards positivity, it permanently remains in a state of striving towards positivity, without being able ever to reach the ultimate state of positivity. Consequently, or, which is only the reverse of the medal, international law will always depend on the will of the sovereign state. That, according to Telders, is the pure hegelian theory of international law. Telders, then, is clearly addressing himself to the "unionists", the enthusiasts for the League of Nations. The enthusiasts are the people who follow the line of thought of Paul Vinogradoff. In his "Historical types of international law" Vinogradoff had developed a historical typology of international law in which the type of "collective organization" is the last one. Collective organization, to be sure, can comprise the organization of a world peace force (a world police force, as Telders law-professor at Leyden, C. van Vollenhoven propagated) or a world economic organization (for example, the New International Economic Order or UNCTAD). Telders could not think of the last form, he only thought of the world-state as the world peace organization. Meanwhile, his theory is a very able and adequate synthesis of the all too down to earth realism of the pluralists on one side and of the largely unfounded idealism of the supporters of the law of nations as perfect law. While proving that international law as perfect law cannot exist, it gives a plausible and realistic theory of what we actually designate as international law in bringing to the fore the value of "werdendes Recht". While showing that there is a gliding scale of positivity in the law of nations as it is applied, he made imaginable how, nevertheless, the law of nations is able to work effectively to a certain degree. On the other hand, historically Telders could not think further than a world-unity in the form of a league of nations, a lawyer's construction, and, as a substance of the world-state, a world-police organization. With his lawyer's eye he was not able to visualize a world-unity, come about by force of a world-hegemony. The juridification of the world had been already gone too far and had persisted too long, and, for that matter, Telders was perhaps too much infected with the typical Dutch internationalism, to conceive of a world in purely political terms. This must be the reason why he did not apply Hegel's theory of international law to the political world outside the League of Nations. A self-limitation like this is not inherent in Hegel's theory of international law. Hegel did not know of any existing leagues of nations. He lived in a Vattelian world, although he had seen the rise and fall of Napoleon. One could apply his theory to any existing legal structure of the world, but also to a much more informal structure than that of the League of Nations, for example, that of a world-hegemony formed by a tacit consent of most of the nations to the hegemony of one of them. In the period after the Second World War, and especially after the retreat of the USSR from the Cold War, this largely is the position of the United States of America. It would, therefore, be very interesting to apply Hegel's theory to this situation to see to what kind of problems this leads for the USA as the world leading power.   Ton Lenssen, Amsterdam, 1989.