• DOI:10.1080/01916599.2020.1722725
• Corpus ID: 214425740

Establishing expansion as a legal right: an analysis of French colonial discourse surrounding protectorate treaties

@article{Yoon2020EstablishingEA,
  title={Establishing expansion as a legal right: an analysis of French colonial discourse surrounding protectorate treaties},
  author={Jong-pil Yoon},
  journal={History of European Ideas},
  year={2020},
  volume={46},
  pages={811 - 826}
}

• Jong-pil Yoon
• Published 6 February 2020
• Law
• History of European Ideas

ABSTRACT This essay analyses French literature on protectorates that was published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Firstly, I examine French understanding of protectorates with a focus on contrasting views about whether or not a protectorate treaty warrants the intervention of the protector in the internal affairs of the protected. In doing so, I attempt to delineate specific ways legal scholarship engaged with the ideological construction of a supposedly uncivilized other. Then I move on to trace the development of a type of argument employed by the French to justify their colonialism that had to do with protectorate treaties. In the discussion, I explain the particular role the ‘violation’ argument played within French colonial discourse, both in the absence of the ‘territorium nullius’ argument, and in the face of critics of empire. Lastly, I place under scrutiny the relationship between the ‘violation’ argument and the distinction of two kinds of coercion – coercion of a state, and coercion of its representative.