Commenting in the late 1930s on the emerging global order, Elias (2012 [1939]: 426) stated that the ‘incipient transformation of Oriental or African people in the direction of Western standards represents the more recent wave of the continuing civilizing movement that we are able to observe’. The attitudes and behaviour of the ruling groups in non-Western societies had come to resemble the outlook and conduct of the global establishment that had brought non-European peoples into ‘line with their own standards’ (Elias (2012 [1939]: 425). Any countervailing tendencies resulted from the possibility that British colonial rule in India might suffer the fate of all past political systems that overextended their power (Elias (2012 [1939]: 300). Such propensities that Elias noted in passing accelerated in largely unexpected ways in the aftermath of the Second World War as nationalist organizations in non-Western countries struggled for sovereign independence, often contesting Western values and restoring ‘traditional’ ethics in the process. As part of that resetting of the relations between the Western global establishment and non-Western outsiders, nationalist leaders opposed one of the main symbols of colonial domination – the standard of civilization.

The changing mood was reflected in the writings of Western international lawyers who condemned the standard as anachronistic and ‘insulting’ to the rising number of non-Western states (Gong 1984: 84). Some directed their aim at earlier jurists such as James Lorimer with his ‘picturesque descriptions’ of advanced peoples who complied with global principles of reciprocity and of backward groups who could not be trusted to observe international law (Lauterpacht 1947: 31– 2). They contended that ‘modern international law knows of no distinction, for the purposes of recognition, between civilized and uncivilized States or between States within and outside the international community of civilized States’ (Lauterpacht 1947: 31–2). That development was evidence of what Elias described in other contexts as the process in which the ‘group charismatic belief of established groups and its imposition on outsider groups gradually loses its power and conviction and finally disappears’ – or as the process in which the ‘collective self-praise’ of some groups and the concurrent ‘collective abuse’ of others become more muted as power relations shift (Elias 2009: 75).