Response to Schwöbel-Patel

Abstract

The meticulous, searching and generous engagement that Christine Schwöbel-Patel has afforded The Humanity of Universal Crime is one that any writer hopes for.1 Her queries, astute and important, open up issues critical to the relationship between law, power, societal organization and transnational politics. I am grateful for her close and sincere reading and for the important questions she brings to the book’s weaknesses. My short answer to all of them is ‘yes, absolutely’. Fortunately, any possibly long answers to her questions are significantly more difficult, at worst insufficient, yet at best generative of further objections, uncertainties and inquiries. First, on ‘Origins and Outliers’. Schwöbel-Patel rightly notes that my book ‘demand[s] an answer to the Nuremberg question’. Equally well taken is her observation that we can see traces of both the lenses of ‘inclusionary Eurocentrism’ and ‘exclusionary Eurocentrism’ in the project that was the Nuremberg Trials (as long as we consider them isolated from the Tokyo Trials and the Singapore War Crimes Trials,2 that is). Maybe I can begin by taking up a conjecture Schwöbel-Patel offers, namely that the Nuremberg Trials reacted to mass atrocities during which ‘Europeans had displayed the type of barbarism reserved in the imagination of European theorists only for non-Europeans’–a conjecture she herself instantaneously invalidates as ‘morally indefensible’. Bringing the lens of ‘exclusionary Eurocentrism’ to this conjecture may help deepen Schwöbel-Patel’s point. In the book, I use the phrase to capture historical visions of international law as contracted in scope such that it orders relations between European (or Euro-American) powers while excluding non-European states and peoples from the law’s protection, its recognition and obligations. Once we stretch and soften this conception somewhat, we could put forward the thesis that Nuremberg’s ‘exclusionary Eurocentrism’ raised above the threshold of international law mass atrocities unleashed by a European power on European peoples—while historical mass violence by Europeans, not least by the Germans, against peoples in the Global South have remained, to this day, below such a threshold.