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The Peace Movement and Grassroots International Law

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Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law, Volume 24 (2021)

Part of the book series: Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law ((YIHL))

Abstract

Humane is a history of humanitarian law, primarily focused on the American role in this history. It chronicles the lost cause of the abolition of war in favour of a body of law that facilitated the entrenchment of war. This chapter joins Humane in drawing further attention to another facet of the American influence on international legal thought of the nineteenth century: the Anglo-American peace societies’ vision for an international legal order. However, while Humane is particularly focused on the American hegemonic role in the history of IHL, this chapter considers the history of the peace movement as a counter-hegemonic tale in light of the threat it posed to the legal and political order of the day. The peace societies were, at least symbolically, more inclusive. Their transnational organization and emphasis on arbitration conveyed their avid preference for the judiciary and the legislature over the executive branch. They challenged the unyielding control of national governments—Cabinets and Foreign Ministries—on international affairs, seeing them as carrying the brunt of the blame for war in general. Eventually, the Institut paradigm, which dismissed their model, and made national governments the sole subject of international legal normativity, won and became the conventional model of international law. This retelling of the peace society history from a jurisprudential vantage point joins Humane’s critique on how the campaign to end all wars went astray and brings to the fore another lost facet of the peace societies’ cause: that of an alternative model of international law.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    de Vattel defined the war of his enlightened era “public war”. [P]ublic war is that which takes place between nations or sovereigns, and which is carried on in the name of the public power, and by its order. This is the war we are here to consider:—private war, or that which is carried on between private individuals, belongs to the law of nature properly so called. de Vattel 1758, para 2; de Vattel 1797, para 200.

  2. 2.

    Rousseau 1762.

  3. 3.

    Ibid., p. 11.

  4. 4.

    Ibid., p. 12.

  5. 5.

    Moyn 2021, p. 45.

  6. 6.

    See Lieber 1863.

  7. 7.

    Venzke and Heller 2021.

  8. 8.

    Benvenisti and Lustig 2020, p. 31.

  9. 9.

    Ceadel 2017, p. 496.

  10. 10.

    Tyrrell 1978, p. 75.

  11. 11.

    Nicholls 1991, p. 351; Cain 1979, p. 229.

  12. 12.

    Sluga 2013.

  13. 13.

    Hippler 2006, p. 180.

  14. 14.

    Moyn 2021, p. 47, cf. p. 21.

  15. 15.

    For further analysis of the earlier stages of the peace movements, see Abrams 1957, p. 361; Beals 1931; Curti 1929; Hinsley 1963; Van der Linden 1987; for an early literature review, see Wittner 1987, p. 355.

  16. 16.

    Moyn 2021, p. 20.

  17. 17.

    See, e.g. “MR. HENRY RICHARD, M.P., told the gentlemen who entertained him at the Grand Hotel in Paris the other day, that he was ridiculed as a Utopian, and there is undoubtedly a sense in which his tour on the Continent may be spoken of as a sort of Quixotic attempt to draw the warlike nations of Europe, by silken cords, into a league of peace.” The Leeds Mercury 1874, p. 8.

  18. 18.

    Moyn 2021, p. 35.

  19. 19.

    Protocol of The Peace Congress at Brussels 12 September 1848, Second Session, pp. 15–16.

  20. 20.

    See, e.g. Association for the Reform and Codification of the Law of Nations Summary of the Proceedings 1875, 1, 9–19.

  21. 21.

    Report of the Proceedings of the 1850 Peace Congress, p. vii.

  22. 22.

    Phelps 2013, p. 82.

  23. 23.

    Cobden 1870, p. 849.

  24. 24.

    Advocate of Peace (1847–1884) NOV. AND DEC., 1849, Vol. 8, No. 12/13 (NOV. AND DEC., 1849), pp. 133, 146.

  25. 25.

    For an elaborate discussion of these practices, see Phelps 2013.

  26. 26.

    Ibid.

  27. 27.

    Phelps 2013, p. 36.

  28. 28.

    Ceadel 2007, p. 27.

  29. 29.

    Burritt 1848.

  30. 30.

    Burritt undated.

  31. 31.

    Beals 1931, p. 63.

  32. 32.

    Lambert 2016, p. 129.

  33. 33.

    The Times (1848) To The Editor of The Times, 14 April 1848; Pickering and Tyrell 2000, p. 191.

  34. 34.

    Kihlberg 2020.

  35. 35.

    Ibid.

  36. 36.

    Report of the Proceedings of the 1849 Congress held in Paris, p. 11.

  37. 37.

    Brock 1991, p. 35.

  38. 38.

    Hinsley 1963, p. 100.

  39. 39.

    Brock 1991, p. 129.

  40. 40.

    Hippler 2006, p. 181.

  41. 41.

    Brown 1855, pp. 58–59.

  42. 42.

    Mazower 2012, p. 34.

  43. 43.

    Manuel 1956; Debout 1979; Beecher 1976.

  44. 44.

    Mazzini 2009, pp. 43–44.

  45. 45.

    Report of the Proceedings of the 1849 Congress held in Paris, p. 11.

  46. 46.

    Nicholls 1991, p. 360.

  47. 47.

    Tolstoy 1888, p. 109.

  48. 48.

    Phelps 2013, p. 186.

  49. 49.

    Rolin-Jaequemyns 1873; Fiore 1911.

  50. 50.

    Moyn 2021, p. 84.

  51. 51.

    For recent assessments of the St. Petersburg Declaration, see Schäfer 2018, p. 501; Kolb and Milanov 2018, p. 515; Crawford 2018, p. 544.

  52. 52.

    Holland 1876.

  53. 53.

    Ibid. at 8.

  54. 54.

    Ibid.

  55. 55.

    Declaration Renouncing the Use, in Time of War, of Certain Explosive Projectiles (St. Petersburg Declaration) 1868, 138 CTS 297.

  56. 56.

    Benvenisti and Lustig 2020, pp. 154–155.

  57. 57.

    Opening speech, Actes de la Conférence de Bruxelles de 1874, sur le projet d’une convention internationale concernant la guerre (Librairies des Publications Législatives, A. Wittersheim and Cie., Paris), Protocol no. 2, at 3, 7, 14–15.

  58. 58.

    The German Ambassador to Belgium believed someone in the French Government had leaked the protocols to Gambetta, who published them in his journal La République Française. Letter from Friedrich von Perponcher-Sedlnitzky, German Ambassador to Belgium, to Bernhard von Bülow, State Secretary of the Foreign Office (24 August 1874) (folder R 901/28963 No. 8, the German Foreign Office, National Archives in Berlin).

  59. 59.

    This is the title of the first chapter in Koskenniemi 2001. As stated in article 1 of the Statute of the Institute, its purpose was “De Favoriser le progrés du droit international, en s’efforçant devenir l’organe de la conscience juridique du monde civilisé.”

  60. 60.

    Benton and Ford 2016, p. 21.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Doreen Lustig

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  1. Doreen Lustig
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Law/Public Law, Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Heike Krieger

  2. International Studies Division, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), Mexico City, Mexico

    Pablo Kalmanovitz

  3. Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Eliav Lieblich

  4. Manchester International Law Centre, The University of Manchester, School of Law, Manchester, UK

    Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi

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Lustig, D. (2023). The Peace Movement and Grassroots International Law. In: Krieger, H., Kalmanovitz, P., Lieblich, E., Mignot-Mahdavi, R. (eds) Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law, Volume 24 (2021). Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-559-1_6

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