Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I War as law enforcement (to 1600)
- PART II New forces stirring (1600–1815)
- PART III War as state policy (1815–1919)
- PART IV Just wars reborn (1919–)
- 8 Regulating war
- 9 Farewell to war?
- 10 New fields of battle
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Table of cases
- Table of treaties
- Index
8 - Regulating war
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I War as law enforcement (to 1600)
- PART II New forces stirring (1600–1815)
- PART III War as state policy (1815–1919)
- PART IV Just wars reborn (1919–)
- 8 Regulating war
- 9 Farewell to war?
- 10 New fields of battle
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Table of cases
- Table of treaties
- Index
Summary
[A]s the law seeks to exert control, militant States are not slow to seek the prizes of war, while evading the penalties. And to make war under another name is an easy way of evasion. The God Mars operates, as it were, in mufti.
Julius StoneIn reaction to the manifold horrors of the Great War of 1914–18, the statesmen and people of the world showed a commendable determination to place legal restrictions on future resorts to war, to replace the anarchic Hobbesian world with a more regulated order. In particular, the drafters of the Covenant of the League of Nations sought to reinstate the idea, which had prevailed in the just-war era preceding the seventeenth century, that peace was the general condition of international life, and war the exception, requiring some kind of specific justification. A somewhat bolder initiative was the Pact of Paris of 1928, which purported to prohibit completely the resort to war ‘as an instrument of national policy’. At the same time, however, the world remained in many respects in thrall to nineteenth-century ways of thinking. Legal thought in particular remained shackled to positivist conceptions of war inherited from the previous century. The result was that the League Covenant and the Pact of Paris attempted to reduce the frequency of war without altering its basic legal character. That strategy would become the source of a good deal of frustration.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- War and the Law of NationsA General History, pp. 285 - 313Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005