The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World

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To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. There were extremists on both sides of the debate. There were some who openly favored a German victory, and others who advocated an immediate U.S. declaration of war on Germany. These, however, tended to be irrelevant. The vast majority of Americans hoped that Great Britain would win, but were equally determined that the United States stay out of the war. The real debate was between those who believed that extending direct military and economic aid to Great Britain would make actual U.S. entry into the war less likely, and those who argued that it would increase the chances of U.S. involvement.

It is likely no coincidence that Grotius’s new theory favored sovereigns and their trading companies,” Hathaway and Shapiro note. Well, yes. International law is the superstructure for the system of geopolitical relations. In writing his law of war, Grotius claimed to be deducing from the principles of natural law the proper rights of states. But he was clearly inducing from the actual actions and ambitions of powers like the Netherlands a set of rules that legalized their behavior. Ideas like Grotius’s mattered because they provided a coherent rationale for what was happening in the world willy-nilly. Grotius made the world safe for imperialists. As the death toll in Gaza grows, many of the victims children, the double standards of imperialist realpolitik are laid bare. For our ruling classes, some lives are worth more than others. It is economic, political and military alliances which decide what atrocities get talked about and where. You only need to compare the different voting blocs in the UN resolutions on some recent conflicts, or how mainstream media across the world has covered them. Even better, let’s look at the two-faced responses of just a few of our esteemed world-leaders:

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NCSS.D2.His.1.9-12. Evaluate how historical events and developments were shaped by unique circumstances of time and place as well as broader historical contexts. We appreciate Professor Yearwood’s robust engagement with our book. While we disagree with the vast majority of his objections, which focus primarily on the empirical analyses we set out in chapters 13 and 14, we accept his critique on three points. The conflicts now happening give us a view of what capitalist barbarism looks like. Our alternative, the only one possible no matter how distant it may seem, must remain socialism. No war but the class war to end the system that produces such atrocities. Dyjbas The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro (review)

Menand, Louis (2017-09-11). "What Happens When War Is Outlawed". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X . Retrieved 2017-11-13. Hathaway, Oona; Strauch, Paul; Walton, Beatrice; Weinberg, Zoe (2019). "What is a War Crime". The Yale Journal of International Law. 44: 54–113 – via digitalcommons.law.yale.edu. [28] Finnemore, Melody. "Oregon State Bar Bulletin June 2008 – Planting the Seeds: An Early Interest in the Law Takes Root in Classroom Law Project's Programs". Oregon State Bar. The inside story of Biden’s foreign policy team and their struggle to restore America’s global influence in the aftermath of Trump Sweeping and yet personable at the same time, The Internationalists explores the profound implications of the outlawry of war. Professors Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro enrich their analysis with vignettes of the many individuals (some unknown to most students of History) who played such important roles in this story. None have put it all together in the way that Hathaway and Shapiro have done in this book.”

In response, John Mearsheimer took a realist perspective to provide a counterpoint to the story advanced in Internationalists. “No realist believes that law is irrelevant and power is all that matters. Every sensible realist understands that power doesn’t always explain everything and law matters a great deal because you still need institutions to run the world,” he said. “However,” he continued, “when vital interests are at stake, great powers will always violate the law.” While this outcome set the country on the path of unilateralism, the U.S. was hardly isolated from interwar world politics. Under Wilson’s Republican successor Warren G. Harding, it hosted the Washington Naval Conference, the most important arms control conference of the era, and one of the most comprehensive of all time. The Federal Reserve, created under Wilson, collaborated closely with the Bank of England, Banque de France and the Bank of the Netherlands to stabilize the post-war global financial system through massive austerities. NCSS.D2.His.5.9-12. Analyze how historical contexts shaped and continue to shape people’s perspectives. With this legacy behind us, what form could internationalism take today? One answer might lie with an initiative proposed in 2018, the Progressive International. Launched by former Greek finance minister and economics professor Yanis Varoufakis, with the support of US Senator Bernie Sanders, the Progressive International calls on the Left to counter the ‘Nationalist International’ that is being constructed by ‘Viktor Orbán in the North [and] Jair Bolsonaro in the South, Rodrigo Duterte in the East [and] Donald Trump in the West’. The cast is appropriately international. Many of the characters are barely known outside scholarly circles, and they are all sketched in as personalities, beginning with the seventeenth-century Dutch polymath Hugo Grotius, who is said to have been the most insufferable pedant of his day. They include the nineteenth-century Japanese philosopher and government official Nishi Amane; the brilliant academic rivals Hans Kelsen, an Austrian Jew, and Carl Schmitt, a book-burning Nazi; the American lawyer Salmon Levinson, who began the outlawry movement in the nineteen-twenties and then got written out of its history by men with bigger egos; and the Czech émigré Bohuslav Ečer and the Galician émigré Hersch Lauterpacht, who helped formulate the arguments that made possible the prosecution of Nazi leaders at Nuremberg and laid the groundwork for the United Nations.