The Phoenix of Colonial War: Race, the Laws of War, and the ‘Horror on the Rhine’

Abstract

AbstractThe article explores the demise of the ‘colonial war’ category through the employment of French colonial troops, under the 1918 armistice, to occupy the German Rhineland.It traces the prevalence of – and the anxieties underpinning –antebellumdoctrine on using ‘Barbarous Forces’ in ‘European’ war. It then records the silence ofpostbellumscholars on the ‘horror on the Rhine’ – orchestrated allegations of rape framed in racialized terms of humanity and the requirements of the law of civilized warfare. Among possible explanations for this silence, the article follows recent literature that considers this scandal as the embodiment of crises in masculinity, white domination, and European civilization.These crises, like the scandal itself, expressedantebellumjurisprudential anxieties about the capacity – and implications – of black soldiers being ‘drilled white’. They also deprivedpostbellumlawyers of the vocabulary necessary to address what they signified: breakdown of the laws of war; evident, self-inflicted European barbarity; and the collapse of international law itself, embodied by the VersaillesDiktattreating Germany – as Smuts warned, ‘as we would not treat akaffirnation’ – as a colonial ‘object’, as Schmitt lamented.Last, the article traces the resurgence of ‘colonial war’. It reveals how, at the moment of collapse, in the very instrument embodying it, the category found a new life. Article 22(5) of the League of Nations Covenant (the Covenant) reasserted control over the colonial object, furnishing international lawyers with a new vocabulary to address the employment of colonial troops – yet, now, as part of the ‘law of peace’. Reclassified, both rule and category re-emerged, were codified, and institutionalized imperial governance.