The 1648 Peace of Westphalia typifies the “modern” starting point of state sovereignty and humanitarian intervention within conventional historical treatments of International Relations (IR) theory. The treaties ending the Thirty Years’ War signaled the dawn of an international society after medieval Latin Christendom with new diplomatic arrangements that assigned legitimate autonomy to specific European states independent of Roman imperial and papal authorities. The ideological archetypes of Westphalia for IR theory during the twentieth century were contemporaries, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) the realist and Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) the rationalist. Each of them powerfully envisioned a modern form of international relations: Hobbes accented sovereign political independence and international anarchy between states whereas Grotius affirmed a worldwide association of states absent a global authority yet still regulated by norms of universal law to justify war and intervention.

This chapter examines the historical and normative contribution of Latin American theologians and religious actors attentive to the neoliberal underside of the human rights breakthrough associated with the Carter administration and the Trilateral Commission. By tilting the axis to the global South, this chapter charts the emergence of an alternative liberationist discourse and praxis of human rights for the Catholic Church in Latin America centered on the concrete struggles of oppressed peoples and the preferential option for the poor. In contrast to the global human rights politics of the 1970s, the liberationist praxis of human rights critically analyzed socioeconomic inequalities as part of the Church’s effort to resist the overreaching powers of the national security state and the global market. The chapter turns to the case of El Salvador from the 1970s to the 1990s and the examples of Archbishop Óscar Romero and theologian Ignacio Ellacuría to illustrate this alternative liberationist praxis of human rights. Their life-giving opposition to structural violence embedded in old and new forms of colonialism injuring poor campesinos brought them into direct conflict with the moral doctrine of human rights from the global North linked to US interventionism supportive of national securitization and later neoliberal policies.

This introductory chapter presents the Valladolid junta in imperial Spain (1550-1551) as an alternative starting point for the history of international legal thought instead of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Unlike Westphalia’s myth of equal states recognizing independence from the emperor and papacy within Europe, the Valladolid debate addressed the controversial question of legitimate infidel polities outside Europe. By focusing on native peoples on the colonial margins of transatlantic Christendom, the chapter reframes international relations from the periphery rather than strictly Europe. A more interesting story emerges, revealing that Christian-infidel relations and its discourse of infidel rights was an ambivalent predecessor to a modern international relations marked by recognition of independent sovereign states and colonial subjugation of less civilized ones. Accordingly, the chapter accomplishes two tasks: it reconsiders the Westphalian myth by examining the international politics of Thomas Hobbes attentive to his influential idea of the state of nature; it also treats significance of theology and the Church for affirming world order - the normative basis of international society - especially among sixteenth-century Spanish Dominicans associated with Valladolid critical of papal and imperial tyranny.

Beginning with their Master General, Cajetan, Spanish Dominicans precipitated and outlined the theological parameters for thinking about infidel dominium of peoples outside Europe as a matter of restitution and salvation. This pairing of justice and evangelization opposed the long-standing idea and practice of missionary war in the theocratic conception of world order that linked conquest and preaching and was being defended by Spanish theocratic royalists and the “modern” theology of John Mair. In 1535, after Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca, Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo Soto, and Bartolomé de las Casas drew from the inspirational example of the first Dominican missionaries to the New World and began formulating an unprecedented scholastic theological conception of world order. Appealing to Scripture, the apostolic tradition, Thomistic moral theology, Roman law, and canon law, their account of world order contained a discourse of natural subjective rights for all persons made in the divine image, attentive to restoring the injustices suffered by the Amerindians of the New World. The originality of the Spanish Dominicans, with Vitoria’s Relectio de Indis at the center, lay in their articulation of infidel rights over and against unjust European claims of expansionary religious wars waged by emperors and popes alike.

The culmination of the clash between two conceptions of infidel dominium and world order expressed itself most dramatically at the Valladolid junta of the Spanish imperial court. This debate put on perspicuous display two opposed ethics of evangelization embedded in the theology and canon law of the Latin West: an apostolic method of peaceful preaching and a coercive method of missionary war. Las Casas and Sepúlveda, respectively, took up these two approaches with startling results. Drawing on biblical and theological legal sources, both deployed natural law and the law of nations to advance their political arguments concerning Christian-infidel relations, thus signaling the ambivalent ideological tone of international relations in the West. Whereas Sepúlveda defended the justice of Spanish imperial dispossession of native peoples through war, Las Casas radically accounted for Amerindian claims of just war against European aggressors. By turning to Valladolid in depth, the unique scholastic theological and juristic contributions of Las Casas and the Spanish Dominicans appear with greater salience for international legal thought. Additionally, the understated ideological vestiges of Sepúlveda’s Spanish imperial humanism for early modern and modern European expansion also come into sharp relief.

In view of seventeenth-century Protestant humanist transformations, this concluding chapter returns to the Spanish Dominicans and their scholastic-juristic view on the law of nations as a normative resource for thinking about international society. Their Thomistic attention to the rationality of the universal law of nations as positive human law enabled political recognition of non-European polities, the lawful occupants of the Indies. This contrasted with an imperial-humanist jurisprudence that provincialized natural law and the law of nations under European civilizational hierarchy to justify dispossession of inferior peoples. The chapter especially charts the evolution of Las Casas’s thinking through his interaction with the theologians at Salamanca. His eclectic synthesis of Thomistic theology, canon law, Roman law, and humanism to buttress indigenous occupation exemplified a radical scholastic brand of legal humanism that complicates static ideological categories in the history of international legal thought. By placing Las Casas in conversation with his Dominican confreres, a normative view of the law of nations grounded in Christian theological convictions emerges. It accounts for the independence and interdependence of all peoples, and the indispensable role of justice and solidarity in promoting world order under a Christian ethic of loving one’s neighbors.

The question of rights for non-Christians emerged out of a theocratic papalist conception of world order during the medieval crusades typified by the canon lawyer Sinibaldo Fieschi (later Pope Innocent IV). It then informed the dominant and ambivalent legal view of Christian-infidel relations in Latin Christendom represented in very different ways by both Innocent IV and his creative commentator, Polish jurist Paulus Vladimiri. This chapter considers the political translation of Innocent’s canon legal opinion on Christian-infidel relations to support the Iberian cause of missionary war in spreading the faith through Crown and Empire across the Atlantic. Theocratic world order, as articulated by Spanish royal jurists and conquistadors like Juan López de Palacios Rubios and Hernán Cortés, chiefly rested its justification for European expansion on the right of punishing infidels for their violation of natural law, the sin of idolatry above all. Infidels had dominium, in principle, but Europeans could claim superior jurisdiction over them when they presented obstacles to the spreading of religion and civilization.

Much of the conceptual and historical repository for international legal thought emerging out of seventeenth-century humanist lawyers and natural philosophers was gleaned from early modern Spanish sources based on the encounter with the New World. That initial contact, incursion, and subjugation of native peoples through Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, and many other so-called travelers, along with their indigenous allies, would culminate legally and politically for the imperial conscience at the Valladolid junta. If Westphalia, even in a demythologized sense, represents a crucial ideological turning point for the dominant story of modern international relations, it is a story that cannot ignore the historical significance of Valladolid in the development of the idea and practice of world order.

How did European thinking about interactions with peoples of the Indies move from Christian-infidel relations to an identifiably modern form of international relations? This chapter explores the preceding question by looking at the emergence of Protestant empires during the seventeenth-century and the ascendant neo-Stoic Christian legal humanism structuring new ideas of world order and providential commerce. It considers the growing ideological displacement of the legal category of the infidel, and the associated crime of idolatry, in the political context of the Indies, East but especially West. This chapter also addresses normative ideas about the savage that developed in the infidel’s wake. Although there were important differences between the Iberian empires and the new English and Dutch empires, there were also continuities. This chapter considers those similarities between Spanish religious thinkers and representative international thinkers on natural law and the law of nations such as Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, Samuel Purchas, New England Puritans, and John Locke. What does the colonization of North America look like in light of Valladolid’s legacy from a century earlier?

Many citizens of our global society have placed a utopian hope in human rights since the collapse of other twentieth-century political utopias. Nevertheless, the political doctrine of human rights has its strong critics. Postcolonial, Islamic, East Asian, and Marxist thinkers have indicted human rights, in various ways, as the latest brand of Western imperialism masquerading under the banner of universal equality. In response to this Occidentalism, certain scholars have strengthened their claims about the distinctively Western origins of human rights. These intellectual histories are unabashedly apologetic and committed to preserving the singular legacy of universal rights that the West has bequeathed to the rest of the world. Theirs is a secular liberal narrative, which presents the Western idea of human rights as a logical progression away from its religious roots toward a political humanism culminating in modern democratic revolutions, the abolition of the slave trade, and the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

However, any secularist narrative of human rights that writes off or downplays the importance of historical religious traditions risks losing necessary critical resources for promoting this very attractive, yet deeply contested, doctrine. The law and religion scholar John Witte Jr. has drawn attention to at least three major oversights that result from ignoring the unique contribution of religion to the discourse and practice of rights, which is like cutting off rights from its source. “Without religion,” Witte claims, “human rights become infinitely expandable … become too captive to Western libertarian ideals,” and, finally, “the state is given an exaggerated role to play as the guarantor of human rights.” The corresponding dangers associated with a purely secular human rights project admit of hyperindividualism, neocolonialism, and totalitarianism, however disguised. Witte has described a growing human rights hermeneutic emerging out of various religious traditions resistant to these corrosive effects on individuals and societies.

It is widely acknowledged that the horrendous loss of innocent life during the twentieth century set the awful stage for the development of the UN declaration. Less known, however, was the vision of Christian love promoting equal rights for believers and unbelievers born out of the crucible of brutal enslavement and the oppression of indigenous peoples in the New World during the Spanish conquests of the sixteenth century.