alternative explanations. The Treaty of Westphalia was a legal instrument exemplifying the absolutist sensibility; the Hague Peace Conferences were an ambivalent fight, narrowly won by the forces of progress; and the Paris Treaty, redefining the borders of Europe, constitutes the capstone of progress in international law so far; the ‘old’ international law stands for regression; the ‘new’ international law stands for progress; being a monist is a part of the open-minded and splendid conception of the world, regardless of the international norms that you may admit in your national legal order; being dualist means that you support an absolute conception of sovereignty and you are thus an absolutist; and so on. Along these lines, international law’s victories and defeats can be recounted rather tautologically, in much the same way as the Manichean struggle. The mystified binary opposition becomes the interpretative device to understand almost any social or political decision. This hides terrible inter- pretative pitfalls. For one thing, the manifestations of a phenomenon can be mistaken for its causes. Thus, the eruption of the Great War is explained as the product of the resistance of absolutist governments to democratic internationalism. Surely, historical analysis does support the argument that some absolutist regimes did undermine specific efforts in international organization. Identifying absolutism, however, as the main agent for these events is a slightly different matter. As demonstrated above, Xxxxxxxxxx in his writings mystifies the role of absolutist ‘resistance’: he vests it with mythical proportions and specific cultural and political traits. Resistance becomes a recurrent interpretative device in order to explain failures of the past and of the present – and to legitimate one’s political agenda. This is the moment in the argument of Xxxxxxxxxx when his commitment shifts radically: from a commitment to the humanist agenda of democracy to the formalized interpretative device of absolutism versus democracy, a lens through which interpretations are made, judgments are passed, and agendas are legitimated. Resistance averts our attention from the incoherence or the lack of genuine transformative potential in interwar liberal argument itself. Third, the naturalized, formalized opposition masks relationships of domination produced by the liberal project itself. Scholars of ideology critique describe this function as ‘dissimulation’, whereby “relations of domination are masked, o...
alternative explanations
