The Justification of the Law of the Sea in Early Modern Europe.

摘要

The dissertation investigates the origins of contemporary international society through the lens of the seventeenth century free seas debate. My inquiry focuses on the interplay between normative beliefs and political institutions in the formulation of states' legal claims and their international adjudication. I illustrate how ideas on the role of the individual in the political community and theories of government legitimacy are not only evoked in the justifications presented (i.e. , the reasons given for the appropriateness of certain actions), but determined the institutions regarded as legitimate actors on the world stage and the mechanisms used to evaluate competing claims. After linking the evolution of the law of the sea to the transformation of these philosophies, I trace the justifications made in early modern Europe by Spain, Portugal, the United Provinces, and England in their claims to sovereignty over the sea. The attendant shift in justification from one based on Catholic scholasticism to one that draws upon the humanist ideals of the Reformation, I claim, reflects the existence of a fundamental change in the underlying principles, institutions, and adjudicating mechanisms of international society.;The result of this shift is the increasing role played by state power as a determinant for behavior - the defining characteristic of Hobbesian state of anarchy frequently employed as a metaphor for the international system. The prominence of power in post-Westphalian international society is accompanied by the development of domestic and international institutions that can be seen as having their intellectual foundations in post-Reformation understandings of the individual and his relationship to the political community. Sovereignty and challenges to it as the basis for state behavior in early modern Europe, I argue, could only be established given the presence of a certain set of philosophical prerequisites. The movement from a God-centered mental universe to one based on the individual provided that basis. By concluding with this understanding of change within international society, I suggest a more prominent role to be played by domestic political theories and institutions than has previously been recognized in the literature.