When the Governments of the World Agreed to Banish War (original) (raw)
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Nonfiction
- Sept. 21, 2017
Aristide Briand, Myron T. Herrick, the U.S. ambassador to France, and Frank B. Kellogg, in the French Foreign Office, August 1928.Credit...Bettmann, via Getty Images
THE INTERNATIONALISTS
How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World
By Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro
Illustrated. 581 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30.
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.”
The Yale law professors Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. 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, catalyzed 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 organizations that regulate so many aspects of our daily lives.” Oh, and it led to “the replacement of one international order with another.”
That is a lot of credit to give to a treaty that, until now, pretty universally has been dismissed as inconsequential. Hathaway and Shapiro deserve medals of intellectual valor 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, as witness events from Afghanistan to Syria. But cross-border conflicts between internationally recognized 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 great-power 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 cooperate than to fight.
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