Vol. 20 No. 9 (September, 2010)
pp.509-512
MEETING THE ENEMY:
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM AND INTERNATIONAL LAW, by Natsu Taylor Saito.
Reviewed by Patrick Schmidt, Department of Political
Science,
I do not have to go out on a limb to assume that the
substantial majority of those in academia were pleased to see the end of the
George W. Bush administration, and a significant percentage of those likely
looked for President Obama to usher in a policy sea-change, doing much to return
equanimity and mutual respect to America’s international engagements.
In MEETING THE ENEMY, Natsu Taylor Saito leaves no doubt about her place
in the former camp, but the life of this book is her effort to put short-term
changes of tone into historical relief.
In so doing she puts herself at odds with the latter camp: to Saito, it
will never be enough for the
The primary preoccupation of this book is to chronicle and critique the origins and development of international law, revealing the ways that the entire intellectual foundations of American and Western thinking have brought the world to the perilous condition it is in today. Saito puts the problem starkly at the conclusion of chapter 8:
“If…one sees extant problems of global instability – ongoing wars, ecological disintegration, and the growing disparities in income or social well-being – as incapable of being resolved by the current international regime, perhaps even as caused by the policies and practices of ‘civilized’ states, a different story will have to be told, and lived by, that challenges both the contemporary framework of international law and the precepts of American exceptionalism.” (p. 228)
That is, even though the Introduction and first chapter
invoke the post-2001 politics of the War of Terror, the recent behavior of the
The bulk of the book – Chapters 2 through 8 – substantiates
the role of this understanding of exceptionalism in the American project.
The central conceptual narrative in this history is not international law
qua international law but colonialism.
From the development of European colonialism, the need to justify
conquest resulted in the rehearsal of tropes about civilization and savages,
cementing the terms of international law today.
Thus, the long journey of American Indians drives Chapters 3 through 5,
which retell how the belief in the Manifest Destiny of Americas enabled white
Americans to build an empire without concern (and sometimes with overt
malevolence) for indigenous peoples.
Slavery and
The histories likely least familiar to readers (such as the Philippines) form the bridge between Saito’s vision of America and the rise of the 20th century global legal order, which is the subject of Chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 7’s more tightly focused progression from the Hague Peace Conferences to the United Nations at mid-century contrasts with the looser tour of international economic and legal instruments in Chapter 8. Yet, the arc remains one of colonialism, for however rapidly the European powers shed their colonial holdings, the precepts of that system became part of the American approach to international law, in which Western values would be imposed on the Other while the United States asserted the right to act unilaterally in the interests of civilization.
There are natural tensions in the argument Saito advances.
From the Introduction and the first chapter the reader might detect and
share an investment in international law, with the attendant hope that the
Some abstraction is on display in Chapter 9’s concluding discussion of prescriptions. However much a reader might find themselves persuaded that an assumption of the superiority of Western civilization is laced through contemporary international law, the final chapter offers a bucket of cold water. What can anyone do to provoke wholesale change in a centuries-old conceptual frame? Perhaps not much, barring more imagination or optimism than most readers will muster. All that seems available are general, jargon-laced calls to “unleash the liberatory potential of alternative systems of world order” (p.245) by suspending “the notion of universality and its concomitant division of humanity into the ‘civilized’ and the Other,” (p.238), thus giving “room for all voices and a multiplicity of perspectives” (p.241).
Yet, don’t judge this book by the final chapter but rather by the diagnosis of the problem. Students of both American history and law should find thought-provoking the extent to which the traditional zones of “domestic” and “foreign” policy blend, chapter-by-chapter, into one unified account about the dominance of racist, Otherizing, colonializing ambitions. That narrative folds into the wider argument about Western legal traditions, drawing on episodes and discussions that implicate everything from political philosophy to development economics. In total the book makes it difficult if not impossible to ignore the historic continuities between international politics today and the overt racism of a century ago. Though not well suited for younger undergraduates, MEETING THE ENEMY is likely to generate substantial discussion and reflection beginning at the advanced undergraduate level.
Some of those discussions may dwell (as they often do) on
the things that grate. The passages
setting the socioeconomic backdrop for the historical episodes are sometimes
breezy to the point of being contestable.
Even accepting that Saito’s presentation of American historical episodes
is avowedly critical, there is still too little space for charitable or
exculpatory counter-interpretations (Chapter 7’s mention of
Despite these criticisms, MEETING THE ENEMY is a far cry from a polemic. Saito has produced a synthesis that is thought-provoking and challenging, and it provides a welcome attempt to place the contemporary moment in the “war on terror” into a much longer historical frame. Most of all, like all good critical scholarship, [*512] scholars and students can look to this book as a way to interrogate one’s commitments about the American project. If readers find Saito’s work at all persuasive, they will come to appreciate her intended inflection for the book’s title and dust jacket, which become less ambiguous after encountering the page facing the book’s Introduction. There is placed the classic quote: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
*********************
© Copyright 2010 by the author, Patrick Schmidt.