de la Rasilla del Moral: The Zero Years of Spanish International Law 1939-1953

Ignacio de la Rasilla del Moral (Brown Univ. - Watson Institute for International Studies) has posted The Zero Years of Spanish International Law 1939-1953 (in Les doctrines internationalistes durant les années du communisme réel en Europe, Emmanuelle Jouannet & Iulia Paris eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

Conceived as a contribution to the historiographical turn in international law and within this area to the study of national traditions of international legal thought, this works begins by explaining the mermaid’s song of the axis imperial temptation that characterized Spanish international law from 1939 to 1945. In this context, the role played by the reception of Carl Schmitt’s work, both among political and legal theorists with a marked internationalist orientation within the Falangist intelligentsia will be firstly examined. While the intellectual reception of Schmitt was instrumentally aimed at fashioning the theoretical legitimization of the new authoritarian regime, it also mirrored the acute climax of intellectual fascistization of Spain’s combative counter-revolutionary elites between 1939 and 1942. This period of fascist mimesis, that is epitomized by the Franco regime’s foreign policy orientation towards the Axis powers during World War II, is subsequently studied through the influence exerted by the book Reivindicaciones de España and other similar works of neo-colonialist credentials produced by Spanish international lawyers at the time. Secondly, this works examines the Spanish transition from autarchy to international realignment with the West in the period 1945 to 1953. In this context, it is explored how the nationalist reaffirmation of a culture grounded in Catholic conservatism and traditionalism fostered the adoption of a marked thematic orientation towards natural law and the recuperation of the Siglo de Oro’s Salamanca school all in a climate of severe intellectual repression and organically nationalist directed scientific work in Spain. A retrospective attention is paid to the contribution of Spanish authors to the establishment of Padre Vitoria as a founding father of the discipline during the inter-war years and to the related existence of a line of imperialist continuity in Spanish foreign policy vis-à-vis its ancient colonies in both periods. This attention to the revival of natural law and historico-legal studies, which was part of a broader Spanishification on ideological and spiritual grounds that affected the society as a whole at the time, will be preceded by an analysis of some characteristic elements of the internationalist intellectual production regarding Soviet foreign policy and Marxism. Thirdly, conceived in the form of an epilogue, the final part of this essay does, in its turn, place itself in the early 60ies at a juncture when the ideological spiritual model previously dominant in the academy was gradually giving way to the implicitly conservative technocratic model that would prevail in that decade. Influenced by a growing domestic intellectual dissent, this period would witness a short-lived return by the Spanish doctrine to the history of the early 20th century that is epitomized in the launching of a scientific project under the title of Notes for the history of Spanish internationalist thought. Yet, despite this precious precedent, the contemporary Spanish international legal academy still suffers from what even the most sympathetic observer would term an Orpheus-like syndrome vis-à-vis its own international lego-historical doctrinal evolution in the 19th and 20th centuries.