Symposium: International Law and the First World War International Law before 1914 and the Outbreak of War

• von Bernstorff, Jochen 1

Abstract

This contribution builds on the assumption that the largely unregulated employment of force practised by Europeans outside of central Europe in the last decades before World War I, between 1914 and 1918, for the first time developed its full destructive potential in a catastrophic war between industrialized Western countries. It focuses on justifications for war and intervention in the three decades before World War I, differentiating between order-related and ontological justifications. Both categories of reasons were used to justify violent measures in the context of Western imperialism and nationalism before the war, leading to an ever more permissive ius ad bellum regime. What was generally being treated as a unified regime of the use of force (ius ad bellum and in bello ) was in fact a complex and increasingly unstable Western-dominated discursive practice differentiating between the objects of violence through various argumentative techniques. European and US international lawyers and politicians differentiated between the use of force between, first, the great powers (core); second, between themselves and other sovereign states in their respective strategic and economic zones of influence (semi-periphery) and, third, between violence and war vis-à-vis peoples living on territories that they did not recognize as independent sovereign states (periphery). This differentiation followed the projection of military and economic power in the context of Western imperialism. Only by taking these underlying discursive structures into account, the legal debates around aggression and extreme violence also during World War I and in Versailles can arguably be fully understood. Despite various attempts to ban or institutionalize interstate violence after 1919, both order-related and ontological justifications for the use of force remained an influential discursive structure of 20th century international law.

• 1University of Tübingen, Germany