This is an excerpt from The Praeter-Colonial Mind: An Intellectual Journey Through the Back Alleys of Empire by Francisco Lobo. You can download the book free of charge from E-International Relations.

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On the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings on the Normandy coast, US President Joe Biden reminded his European allies gathered in Omaha Beach the reasons why his and their forebears undertook this gallant feat of arms eight decades prior: ‘To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators is simply unthinkable. If we were to do that, it means we’d be forgetting what happened here on these hallowed beaches’. What happened there exactly? A lot of American soldiers, as well as fighters from other nations including the UK, Canada, and France, stormed the beaches of Normandy in order to breach the impregnable ‘Fortress Europa’ lying behind Hitler’s Atlantic wall. They succeeded at an enormous human cost, but ‘Operation Overlord’ would go down in history as one of the largest, most successful, military actions on record. Furthermore, D-Day brought about something in addition to the beginning of the end of World War II. Something else happened in those ‘hallowed beaches’ that would define our lives to this day. It was the tangible consolidation of the normative commitment that the Allies had vowed to uphold a few years before with the Atlantic Charter of 1941.

In characteristically praeter-colonial fashion as they had to accommodate the colonial and the post-colonial in the same declaration of principles, the Allies committed to political freedom, self-determination, free trade and freedom of navigation, and a lasting peace made possible first by disarmament and, more importantly, by ‘a wider and permanent system of general security’ (NATO 2018, para. 15). Such a system would come to be known as the United Nations, founded a little over a year after D-Day and one of the most salient legacies of World War II.

Almost a decade later, in 1954, an acclaimed writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, William Golding, would publish his famous novel Lord of the Flies (Golding 2023). His notoriously realistic portrayal of human nature as a deposit of savagery and cruelty buried under a thin veneer of civilization waiting to come out at the first opportunity has become shorthand for chaos and pessimism about the prospects of peace among people (Bregman 2021). Like Sawyer, the folksy redneck from the TV series Lost, remarked ominously as he waved a knife at another man: ‘Folks down on the beach might have been doctors and accountants a month ago, but it’s Lord of the Flies time now’.

What people usually forget about Golding’s story is that the kids who descended into anarchy did manage to lay out some rules while living on the island, at least for a while. It all began with the discovery of a seashell, or conch, that they blew to call everyone for an assembly where important matters would be discussed. Beyond its primary musical attributes, the conch shortly after started to be used as a symbol of authority to signify that whoever held it had the right to speak at the gathering, a simple convention, but a very human one at that. In the hallowed beaches of Golding’s fictional island, just like in Normandy, a human society found meaning and purpose where beasts would only see water, blood and sand. That they would later descend into that beastly level is a cautionary tale of what can happen to us if we do not uphold the sanctity of our conventions and institutions. For this, the construction of defenses to fend off the drivers of war is key, as stated in the UNESCO constitution referred to before (‘since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed’). In this chapter I will focus on the edifice of defenses erected in the minds of men and women, and that have come to be known as the ‘rules-based international order’. In a post-colonial world born out of the death throes of colonialism after World War II, the praeter-colonial mind seeks to make sense of these rules and institutions that stand both as a legacy of colonialism and at the same time a vehicle to overcome it.

What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

For as long as there have been laws – that is, ever since people decided that a seashell or a tablet of stone or a piece of paper would mean something more than its purely physical attributes – there have been people who understand them, people who know how to work them. In other words, for as long as there have been laws, there have been lawyers. Lawyers like to talk about the law, as it is their trade. But what lawyers really love to do is talk about lawyers.

Send Lawyers, Guns and Money, a song by Warren Zevon, is about a man who gets in trouble overseas and asks his family to send ‘lawyers, guns and money’, in that specific order. Maybe this is for the sake of the rhyme. But maybe it is because people want to give laws and institutions a chance to work the way they are intended before resorting to more coercive methods.

And not just people; even countries, when they include law among the so- called ‘instruments of national power’ (Weber 2019) – alongside military means, economic and financial pressure, and the like – are signaling that they also want to give law a chance. However, this begs the question: why put so much trust in the law in the first place? What has the law ever done for us?

It might help to recall that many foundational concepts and principles of modern law, both domestic and international, come from the Romans. To which the post-colonial attitude, unilluminated by the faculties of the praeter- colonial mind, may raise the question: what did the Romans ever do for us? The legendary scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian perfectly answers this question when the leader of a Jewish rebel group during the times of Jesus asks: ‘All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a freshwater system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?’ A tribute to this classic of British comedy was released in 2016, when Patrick Stewart led a similar scene taking place at a fictional British government cabinet meeting after Theresa May suggested that the UK should withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights:

Okay. Okay. But, apart from the right to a fair trial, the right to privacy, of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom from discrimination, freedom from slavery, and freedom from torture. And degrading treatment. And protecting victims of domestic violence.........

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