One thing I remember hearing about this book before picking it up was that it was long, dense, and scholarly. Apart from being scholarly (which is a fact), I don't know where these assertions came from -- literally, I can't track down offhand whatever review I read. Oh well.
In any event, "The Internationalists" is lively and conversational, without sacrificing rigor or occasional solemnity. I found it much more readable than a lot of pop nonfiction books that market themselves as "pageturners" -- maybe because it moves between illustrative stories as necessary, rather than exhaustively documenting what Kennedy had for breakfast on such-and-such a day or whatever. This book moves between a large number of interesting historical episodes -- from Hugo Grotius's somewhat slapstick prison break, to George W. Bush's ill-fated steel tariffs, to the career of the brilliant Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt -- in order to illustrate its thesis: that the change from an international system that glorified wars of conquest to one that forbade it was planned, theorized, and formally put into place by the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact that renounced the use of war -- even if those changes were only systematically put into practice after the end of the Second World War.
The book starts by explaining the previous international system of conflict -- what the authors call the "Old World Order" -- which was first formally described by the prodigious 17th-century lawyer Hugo Grotius, although much of it had been a matter of informal practice since time immemorial. The fundamental idea of the Old World Order is that war is a legitimate way of settling international grievances. If you are a sovereign ruler, and some other country breaks a treaty with you (or owes you money, or attacks you first, or offends your honor in some abstract way, or whatever), and you decide that peaceful means of dispute resolution aren't working, you are within your rights to send your army marching in to extract whatever repayment you see fit, be it in cash or territory or slaves or anything else. As long as you formally declared the war, your guys can't be tried for murder or arson or robbery for what they do on the battlefield, nor vice versa. Furthermore, anything your guys get their hands on before the peace treaty's signed is legally theirs, and any land you get ahold of is your country's sovereign territory. No questions asked. And -- this is a key rule of the pre-1928 order -- countries that weren't involved in the war were
obligated to trade equally with both sides; any showing of commercial favoritism was tantamount to joining the conflict themselves. Importantly, all these rules applied whether your reason for starting the war was remotely legitimate or not -- after all, who could possibly adjudicate the matter? And they had important knock-on effects: since war was legitimate, so were treaties signed under threat of war, so gunboat diplomacy was permissible
de jure as well as
de facto.
These rules tended to favor large, centralized states, which could more easily defend themselves from invasion, and it encouraged exactly the kind of rabidly expansionist, mercantilist imperialism that in fact prevailed for most of the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
The fulcrum of the book, of course, is the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which officially altered this fundamental architecture of international law. The Kellogg-Briand Pact is extremely short. The actual content is as follows, in full:
ARTICLE I
The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.
ARTICLE II
The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.
This treaty was signed by a very long list of states in 1928, including all the major participants in World War II. If you re-read that sentence it should be pretty clear why the Kellogg-Briand Pact is usually considered a dismal failure. However, the authors of this book argue that it actually was successful in immediately and substantially changing the underlying rules of international conflict -- even if it took another world war to shake out all the kinks in the new system.
In my opinion, one of the most interesting parts of the book is the description of how the years 1928-1939 were a kind of transitional period, in which scholars, governments, and international organizations all struggled to figure out how to operate in a world where war is illegal. For example, it quickly became clear to academics that if aggressive war was illegal, you couldn't also stick to the premise that commercial discrimination among warring parties wasn't allowed -- otherwise, how could you lawfully pressure other countries not to go to war? This change in the international order was accepted by governments, but only slowly: the US, which was trying to stay out of World War II, was too skittish at first to give favorable treatment to the Allies, instead favoring silly workarounds like the cash-carry policy (under which military equipment would only be sold to countries that could come pick it up themselves and pay in cash -- which everyone knew only Britain had the naval resources to do). Eventually the US explicitly sold some decommissioned battleships to the UK under extremely flimsy pretenses (you could use boats for non-military purposes! theoretically!), and when the world didn't come crashing down from that we finally got the courage to pass the Lend-Lease Act, which explicitly offered favorable terms for munitions to Allied countries only.
Similarly, when Japan invaded Manchuria and set up the puppet state of Manchukuo, the US and the League of Nations got to try out diplomatic non-recognition for the first time ever. There was some trial and error -- they figured out that it's feasible to refuse to take Manchukuo passports, but more trouble than it's worth to refuse to deliver the mail. On the other hand, Japan didn't exactly back down, and when Italy illegally invaded Ethiopia the League lost their nerve and only responded with the tepidest economic sanctions. It wasn't until the end of World War II and the establishment of the United Nations that more consistent systems of international sanction were established.
Nevertheless, as the authors convincingly show, the imprints of the 1928 "Peace Pact" are everywhere. While the world map in 1908 is almost unrecognizable, the world map of 1928 -- apart from changes caused by decolonization and the peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union -- is virtually identical to today's. And this in spite of an intervening world war that made the conflict from 1914-1919 look like a friendly hockey match. During the reconstruction of Europe, borders were carefully switched back to where they stood in May of 1928, when conquest was made illegal. And any borders that were fuzzy in 1928 -- little clusters of rocks in the South China Sea, say, or imprecisely mapped areas of what was then British India -- are still hotspots of conflict, since there's now no way of legally determining their ownership without the consent of everyone concerned. The prosecutions at Nuremberg were under the auspices of the 1928 Pact: Göring went to the gallows for assisting an illegal invasion, and for the murders and atrocities carried out in the course of an aggressive war that the international community had
already agreed was illegitimate -- because Germany had signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact.
So, this is the formalist answer to the question of why war has declined so drastically since World War II: because you're not allowed to do it anymore. Which seems a bit silly, but in the period after WWI, at least some people were interested in changing the way things worked, and WWII was a powerful enough event that they were actually able to cement those changes and build a substantially new and different international system, in which you're
not allowed to just pour over someone's border and take their stuff. Which is pretty cool, actually.
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