Pact with problems
Lawyers make a brave but ultimately failed bid to rehabilitate the much-derided Kellogg-briand deal, argues Max Boot
The Kellogg-briand Pact of 1928, also known as the Paris Peace Pact, does not have a good reputation, for obvious reasons. Designed to renounce war “as an instrument of national policy”, it was negotiated by the French foreign minister Aristide Briand and the American secretary of state Frank Kellogg just three years before the Japanese invasion of China and 11 years before the Nazi invasion of Poland – the two acts of aggression that combined to create the greatest war of all time. Henry Kissinger called the Kellogg-briand Pact “as irresistible as it was meaningless”, while George Kennan described it as “childish, just childish”.
Yale law professors Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro contend in their provocative new book, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, that the naysayers are wrong. They claim that while “it did not end war between states”, the Kellogg-briand Pact did mark “the beginning of the end”. More than that, “it reshaped the world map, catalysed the human rights revolution, enabled the use of economic sanctions as a tool of law enforcement, and ignited the explosion in the number of international organisations that regulate so many aspects of our daily lives”. Oh, and it led to “the replacement of one international order with another”.
Hathaway and Shapiro deserve medals of intellectual valour for even daring to make a case that is so at odds with what almost every other expert in the field of international relations believes. But, sadly, their thesis, while backed up by many erudite, carefully footnoted pages, is not persuasive. “There are some ideas so absurd only an intellectual could believe them,” George Orwell wrote. The notion that the Kellogg-briand Pact was a raging success is one of them.
The Internationalists is an attempt to explain a well-known phenomenon – the decline of interstate war over the past 70 years. War itself has hardly disappeared, but cross-border conflicts between internationally recognised states are less frequent than they used to be. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the exception that proves the rule.
Many reasons have been given for this development. They include aversion to the bloodletting of two world wars; the decline of racism, which once justified wars of colonial conquest; the development of nuclear weapons, which make a greatpower conflict less likely; the rise of American dominance, which has been employed to stop aggression like Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait; and the spread of democracy and free trade, which make states more likely to co-operate than to fight.
Hathaway and Shapiro claim that the 1928 Kellogg-briand Pact was the pivotal factor in catalysing this complex change in international relations, but their own narrative suggests otherwise. While they contend that 1928 was the dividing line between the Old World Order, in which wars of conquest were acceptable, and a New World Order, in which they are not, their book shows that there was a more gradual trend over the centuries.
The Internationalists ably charts this transformation in the legal arena, beginning with the publication in 1625 of the Dutch legal theorist Hugo Grotius’s landmark study The Law of War and Peace in Three Books. Grotius
Pacifism blinded the West to the growing Axis threat and made war more likely
held that war was only permissible as a “response to the violation of rights”, and he listed war crimes – “poison, treacherous assassination and rape” – that were never allowed. Thus were born the modern laws of war. As Hathaway and Shapiro note, subsequent “international treaties protected the wounded and medical personnel (First Geneva Convention, 1864); prohibited the use of fragmenting, explosive and incendiary small arms ammunition (St Petersburg Declaration, 1874); banned explosives from balloons, asphyxiating gas and dum-dum bullets (First Hague Convention, 1899); and proscribed pillage, the execution of surrendering soldiers and prisoners of war and forcing civilians to swear an allegiance to a foreign power (Second Hague Convention, 1907).”
They all suffered from a lack of enforcement and did little to make wars less frequent. That only changed after the Second World War, when the United Nations Security Council was created to uphold international law, and a Cold War between nuclear-armed states imposed some stability on international politics. Crunching the data, Hathaway and Shapiro conclude: “Not until 1948, after a war in which 70 million people died, did the frequency of conquest decisively fall – a reflection of the new international institutions created after 1945 and, perhaps, the concurrent emergence of nuclear weapons.”
What does any of this have to do with the Kellogg-briand Pact? The authors make much of the fact that the Nuremberg prosecutors tried to convict the Nazi defendants of violating the 1928 treaty by waging a war of aggression. They are evidently saddened that the Nuremberg judges embraced another theory. No defendant received “the death penalty simply for waging aggressive war”, they note. “Only those who committed war crimes or crimes against humanity would be hanged.”
By the end of The Internationalists Hathaway and Shapiro are forced to acknowledge that the Kellogg-briand Pact was not nearly as important as they claimed in the beginning. They call it a “speed bump” on the road toward making war less legitimate, with the Second World War being “the stop sign”. Even to call the 1928 treaty a “speed bump” may be overly generous, but if that’s an accurate description, then it hardly justifies the claim that it “remade the world”.
More accurate, but less sexy, would be to assert that revulsion against war, building for centuries, spiked after the First World War. That sentiment produced great literature like All Quiet on the Western Front and also empty blather like the Kelloggbriand Pact, but did not succeed in making war less likely. Quite the opposite: pacifism blinded the West to the growing Axis threat and made war more likely.
Only after 1945 did the West acknowledge that it would take more than lofty promises to keep the peace. Harry Truman, Dean Acheson and George Marshall deserve far more credit for keeping the peace than do the justly forgotten Aristide Briand and Frank Kellogg. ■ © NYT 2017