The international order: sovereignty vs. jus gentium

Despite the perplexing timidity revealed by his sudden vacillations – all the more unexpected on account of the assertiveness previously displayed – Vitoria's decision to endow the Indian republics with all the attributes defining the perfect commonwealth still stands; and it automatically postulates over and above the secular order exemplified by the state an additional entity: the international order. As a consequence two forces are brought into endless confrontation. One is the respublica or civitas, a perfect community which tends toward total independence; the other is mankind, constituting aliquo modo a universal respublica which antedates the partition of the globe. Correspondingly, there come into existence several forms of jus aiming at as many individual well-beings and whose overlapping prerogatives must be harmoniously reconciled one way or another, for such is the price exacted by the universal good.

The unfolding pattern is interesting in the extreme, its apparent circularity notwithstanding. In the beginning there existed a universal society. It was, in a sense, destroyed; and in its stead the nation-state, protected by the formidable defenses which sovereignty gives it, emerged as the consummate embodiment of the natural order. No sooner, however, has the order of the state in this fashion been raised to a position of unquestionable supremacy in the realm of earthly affairs than Vitoria with seeming perversity affirms its subordination to a still more telling form of fellowship – the international order – tracing the ancestry of its ideals to the universal society of man's prehistory.