Iboux- Translations Into English q4334

Grotius never envisaged the possibility of a war that had as objective to promote or universalize the very “human natural law”. To him, human rights and religious faith were a achievement of each man and of each nation, and a war waged in the name of “natural laws” would be a contradiction all by itself, such as the Crusades, which he abominated, despite being himself a ionate Christian. Almost two centuries later, Immanuel Kant recognized the existence of the same contradiction in the path for his project of a universal “perpetual peace”. In the beginning of the 21th century, the contradiction identified by Grotius and Kant gained much more vigor and reach, with the multiplication of states in the international system and with the end of the Cold War ideological bipolarity. After 1991, many believed in the victory of the “European cosmopolitanism”, but already in the beginning of the 21th century everyone noticed that the international system remains the same, but even more complex and heterogeneous from the ethnic, cultural and religious perspectives. This new amplified universe without the communist threat, the great Western powers decided to transform the issue of “respecting human rights” into the new major ethical principle that legitimizes their old “civilizing wars”.

The   economic   occupation   of   American   lands   constitutes   an   episode   of   the   European   commercial   expansion.   It   is   not   about   population   displacements   caused   by   demographic   pressure  –  like  what  happened  in  Greece  –  or  great  movements  of  peoples  determined  by   the   rupture   of   a   system   whose   balance   was   maintained   by   force   –   like   the   German   migrations   towards   western   and   southern   Europe.   The   European   internal   trade,   which   was  soaring  since  the  11th  century,  had  reached  a  high  degree  of  development  in  the  15th   century,   when   the   Turkish   invasions   started   to   progressively   hinder   the   Eastern   supply   lines   of   high   quality   products,   even   of   manufactures.   The   reestablishment   of   such   lines,   bying   the   Ottoman   obstacle,   constitutes   beyond   a   shadow   of   a   doubt   the   greatest   accomplishment  of  the  Europeans  in  the  second  half  of  this  century.   The   discovery   of   American   lands   is,   basically,   an   episode   of   this   great   work.   In   the   beginning   it   seemed   like   a   secondary   episode.   And   indeed   it   was   to   the   Portuguese   during   the  whole  of  a  half  of  century.