Dissident Voices 295
the solidarist lawyers were prepared to hold intervention to be lawful: eco-
nomic and humanitarian.
In the economic sphere, the immediate issue was whether states should be
permitted to isolate themselves eco nom ical ly from the rest of the world. Th e
positivists had no diffi culty answering this question in the affi rmative. It is
the sovereign right of each state to devise its own economic policies as it
chose, without any right of interference by other states. It has been observed
that the partisans of both the liberal and the nationality schools were simi-
larly supportive of the principle of nonintervention. Natural lawyers reached
much the same conclusion, holding the right to engage in trade to be no
more than an imperfect right, meaning a “right” that cannot be enforced
through coercive means.
Th e concrete case that presented itself in the nineteenth century was that
of China, where the government was reluctant to open the country to trade
with the rest of the world. Positivist writers regarded this as a simple exer-
cise of sovereign prerogatives. China may not be acting wisely, but it was
within its legal rights. Th e solidarists tended to dissent on this point, insist-
ing that countries that shut themselves off from the wider world thereby vio-
late their duties to humanity at large.
Th e solidarist position on this topic was expressed most forcefully at the
beginning of the twentieth century by the French writer Albert Geouff re de
La Pradelle. He appealed, as a fundamental principle, to the sociable nature
of humankind and to the “duties of solidarity vis-à- vis other men,” which
arise directly out of this. China’s economic isolation policy, he insisted, was
a breach of that duty. He likened China to a miser, hoarding his riches to the
injury of his fellow men and thereby committing a crime against the global
po liti cal economy in general. Especially reprehensible was China’s refusal to
allow the exploitation of its mineral wealth, which injures the world at large
by depriving it of needed resources. In an interesting image, he compared
China to a blind man with sturdy limbs and Eu rope to a paralytic with
sound eyesight. “Just as a blind man does not have the right to refuse his
limbs to a paralytic who off ers to guide his way,” he contended, “China does
not have the right to refuse Eu rope access to its mines.”
La Pradelle readily conceded that his position was contrary to the main-
stream position of international lawyers, with its heavy stress on “the
fundamental doctrine of the in de pen dence of States.” But he condemned