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 passionate 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,
bypassing 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.