Conflicting selves in international law

Abstract

Abstract taken from Dissertation Abstracts International, vol 49, no 11, May 1989, p. 3497-A:

Legal categories were created to justify colonial rule. In the ideological instance of the discourse, these legal categories were universalized in order to be represented as a refiection of the values of humankind. However, the resistance of non-Europeans, in this case Namibians, to domination, on the one hand, and the response of European powers to the nationalists, on the other, are used to demonstrate the ideological nature of the law and the fallacy of the claims made by most international legal theorists. The disjuncture between the universalism of legal claims and the practice of decolonization is established in order to show that, for the colonial powers, self-determination is yet another metaphysical construct which maintains their domination

This thesis has relied chiefly on the official discourse. The materials used are drawn from testimonies of early European publicists and theorists, as well as the participants and creators of the international regimes of domination: the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference and the 1920 Geneva Congress, finally, the 1944 San Francisco United Nations Conference