Handed down through history as a remnant of the 1789 Revolution, French universalism is based on a belief that to be treated equal and be free, citizens … The appeal of any hegemonic power to universalism, thus necessarily implies that it becomes purged with a “slave morality.” If this logic is established, all protests can, according to Balibar, “turn into legitimation since, against the injustice of the established order, protest appeals not to something heterogeneous to that order, but to identical principles.”11 Balibar relates his analysis to the period of Enlightenment but claim it to constitute a general principle, even in non-democratic societies. Boaventura de Sousa-Santos, Toward a New Common Sense, 252. 13. Hanke states later that even when the “[i]mpatient conquistadores champed at the bit while intricate discussions were held concerning the applicability to the Indians of the Aristotelian doctrine of slavery.” “The crown continued to listen to those idealists who had been responsible for the experiments [of making peaceful, farming settlements in America]and even for a time suspended conquest in America while its justice was being debated at Valladolid” (174). One first step in this direction is to stop treating human rights as if they were a valuable goal with imminent values in themselves. If Francisco de Vitoria is said to be the forerunner of international law,16 Bartolomé de las Casas is often said to be the forerunner of modern human rights. As mentioned before, Lewis Hanke argues that the King was preoccupied with the Christian foundation of the conquest. However, the ambition is also to understand what kind of institution or discourse or what kind of agency that makes it possible to activate transnational or cosmopolitan arguments. Ditlev Tamm) Copenhagen: DJØF Publishing House, 2010, “Towards a New Europe? So the type of agency, conferred on the Indians here, is not direct agency and thus not political autonomy. But, contrary to what Marx believed, the ‘dominant ideas’ cannot be those of the ‘dominant class’. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. It is not only a battle for and against human rights; it is a battle about the right understanding of human rights and especially their role within a community. Regarding the misunderstanding of the papal bull, see Bartolomé de las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, 26. (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. What we need to understand the function of human rights is therefore what Etienne Balibar has called “a politics of universalism.”, A “politics of universalism” investigates the political mechanisms within universalism; it asks questions about the relations between subjectivity and power within specific contexts. Lewis Hanke notes that as late as 1557, 6 years after the trial a note was sent to one of the members, Friar Melchor Cano, to ask him to immediately send his decision, Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice, 129. They are not governed by any law, do not cultivate friendships and do not have any organized community. Law number 4 said that all Indians should be rehearsed in their knowledge of Christ every 14 days, law number 10 said that all Indians must have a Christian burial and law number 17 that all sons of caciques who were under the age of 13 should go for 4 years to the Franciscans to learn about God. It focuses mainly on the arguments made by Bartolomé de las Casas and on the reasons why the King allowed las Casas’ fierce critique of the conquest to be published in a period of otherwise severe censorship. This article is inspired by Etienne Balibar's idea of “politics of universalism,” “political autonomy,” and “equaliberty.”. These are barbarians in an absolute sense and according to Aristotle it is legitimate to try to subordinate them. Nordic Perspectives on Law and Humanities, Ed. Las Casas’ speech was so long that the court afterwards commissioned one of the members to make a resume of his main points. Who is there who would want the gospel preached to himself in such a fashion? Bartolomé de la Vega, “Summary of Sepúlveda's position”, in Bartolomé de las Casas, trans. He spoke for one whole day and argued mainly, referring to Aristotle's idea of natural slaves, that the Indians “are barbaric, uninstructed in letters and the art of government, and completely ignorant, unreasoning, and totally incapable of learning anything but the mechanical arts; that they are sunk in vice, are cruel, and of such a character that, as nature teaches, they are to be governed by the will of others.”17 Bartolomé de las Casas in turn spoke for 5 days, reading his In Defense of the Indians that was intended to show how Sepúlveda was wrong both in law and in fact.18 Las Casas argued that native Americans were human beings, capable of reason and culture and that they lived according to a structured social order. Please, subscribe or login to access full text content. Any global political theory must start by asking whether there are in fact universal moral values, and this chapter addresses precisely this question. Boaventura Sousa-Santos for instance explains that the essence of human rights is that “We have the right to be equal whenever difference diminishes us; we have the right to be different whenever equality decharacterizes us.”27 Human rights are thus not just emerged in universal self-evidence, the very universalism itself will be negotiated in every new situation of application. Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 2002), According to Hanke, the discussions on the problems of America reveal “both the highly developed individualism of the Spaniards and a deliberate, imaginative, and courageous attempt by the crown and the Spanish people to shoulder the heavy burdens placed on Spain by her political and ecclesiastical dominion in America” (10). It was already an exceptional situation that the court afterwards commissioned one of the barbarian Indians of America were on... 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