Scott Shapiro, professor of law and philosophy at Yale Law School, discussed his collaboration with colleague Oona Hathaway, “The Internationalists,” at the 2018 Savannah Book Festival.
The book chronicles the story of the Kellogg-Braind Pact, a treaty signed by world leaders in 1928 in an attempt to outlaw war.
“Most people have never heard about it,” Shapiro said. “The people who have heard about it think that it’s among the most ridiculous things…the idea that you could end war by signing a piece of paper strikes many people as the height of foolishness.”
Shapiro admitted that both he and Hathaway initially thought the same. However, throughout the course of their research, they discovered that outlawing war turned out to be transformative.
“It represented a hinge in history where one world order ended and another began,” Shapiro explained.
Before 1928, in what is called the Old World Order, war was a legitimate way in which states enforced their rights against one another and economic sanctions were thought to be illegal. After 1928, however, war becomes illegitimate and criminal and economic sanctions become the routine way to enforce international law.
“Today, we view war as the consummate breakdown of the system,” Shapiro said. “In the Old World Order, war was the system.”
States also had rights which gave the right of war value. The first was the right of conquest, a way to right the wrongs. The next was they had the right to threaten to go to war, the practice that we now know as gunboat diplomacy. The third right was immunity to prosecution. Finally, neutral states, states who were not engaged in war, were under a strict duty of impartiality, meaning that if they were to favor one side over another, that would be considered an act of war.
This transition into the Modern World Order by way of the Kellogg-Briand pact happened because of one man, Salmon Levinson, a Jewish bankruptcy lawyer from Chicago. He never gave much thought to international relations until World War I when the stock market shut down.
Levinson began to develop his thoughts on the legality of war and contacted important politicians, including the Chair of the Foreign Relations committee. This culminated in the meeting in Paris on August 27, 1928 when the 15 most powerful nations met to outlaw war.
“It was, at the time, the most subscribed to treaty in history,” Shapiro said. “It was so momentous that it was dangerous…What the Kellogg-Briand Pact did was take out a linchpin of the Old World Order.”
In 1931, Japan, who had signed the pact, invaded Manchuria and eventually conquered it. The problem for the rest of the world and, in particular Secretary of State Henry Stimson, became how to enforce the prohibition of war after renouncing it. “It would be absurd to use war to reinforce the prohibition of war,” Shapiro said.
Levinson, a Yale classmate of Stimson’s, had sent him an article he had written entitled “Sanctions of Peace” in which he proposed that states should no longer have the right of conquest. What states should do if other states engage in conquest is to not recognize that conquest, that is, not trade with them or assign any sovereign rights to that state.
Stimson turns these ideas into the Stimson Doctrine which the League of Nations also adopts. “This was an unbelievable revelation in the way the world works,” Shapiro said. “Within four years of signing this piece of paper, virtually the entire world renounces what hitherto had been one of the most ancient rights of sovereignty which is conquest.”
World War II essentially becomes a clash over world orders. “It’s a war over war,” Shapiro said.
After the allies win the war, the question became what to do with the Nazis and Imperial Japan who waged the war. The solution was the Nuremberg trials. “The American officials were able to shoehorn the charges of the Holocaust into Nuremberg simply by saying the charges of the Holocaust was related to aggressive war.” With these definitive acts, the entire international system reverses itself in a short period of time because of the Kellogg-Briand Pact
One of the things Hathaway and Shapiro wanted to do was see the effects of these changes in the rules. Using a territorial acquisitions data, they traced the process of conquest from 1816 to 2014. They discovered that before 1928, the average state could expect to suffer a conquest once in 40 years. Afterwards, a state could expect to suffer a conquest once or twice in a thousand years.
There has been a sudden proliferation of states because states can be small and weak. However, the downside to the New World Order is, if weak states can survive, than so can failed states, which are breeding grounds for terrorism and for insurgencies that don’t respect national borders. “One the one hand, the outlawry of war between states has virtually, not completely, eliminated interstate war. But it has created pressure for intrastate wars…largely civil wars brought about by the fact that states don’t have to be strong in order to survive,” Shapiro said.
“There is a lot of ideas in the book but at the end, it’s a book about people,” Shapiro concluded. “They were ordinary people with extraordinary ideas and they were able to change the world. I hope that it’s an inspiration that it’s possible for us to have agency in the world.”
Elena Burnett is the Editor-in-Chief of District. She’s a writing major who will graduate in 2019.
