Camilo Barcia Trelles on Francisco de Vitoria: At the Crossroads of Carl Schmitt’s Grossraum and James Brown Scott’s ‘Modern International Law’

Abstract

Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950) undertook a re-interpretation of the modern origins of the discipline of international law, placing Vitoria at its pivot, as the Spanish international law professor Camilo Barcia Trelles (1888–1977) had done before. Barcia’s work had a strong influence on some of the seminal pieces on international law and geopolitics that Schmitt wrote in the period from 1941 to 1950. This was the case for Schmitt’s historical mythology of the opposition between sea and earth and its juridical consequence, his doctrine of the Grossraum, which had as its basis Barcia’s account of the Monroe Doctrine, and also of Schmitt’s critique of the ‘discrimination of war’ formalized in the Kellogg–Briand Pact. According to Barcia, the exclusion of European powers from the American continent by the United States as a rising hegemon was transformed – thanks to its domination of the sea – into the global reach of a world police power. Barcia did not agree with Brown Scott’s transformation of international law through American liberal internationalism into ‘modern international law’. While Brown Scott and Schmitt were competing for two opposing vernaculars of the discipline in search for a new definition and to shape it, Barcia was instrumental in the opposed efforts of these two apparently very dissimilar representatives of international law by ushering Vitoria into their service.

The Cradle of International Law: Camilo Barcia Trelles on Francisco de Vitoria at The Hague (1927)

“…According to José Maria Beneyto, it gave Carl Schmitt ammunition to construct a historical vision of European international law that countered the liberal-universalist agenda of the Anglo-American powers and buttressed his Grossraum theory. 44 For many international lawyers, European and others, the differences of opinion between Scott and Barcia Trelles about the nature and provenance of the American system, and relative roles of the United States and Spain therein, were of secondary importance. They did not prevent Barcia Trelles's Hague lecture from becoming, much like Scott's books, a classical point of reference for international lawyers exploring the beginnings of the 'science of international law'.…”