A sparkling account of how a colourful cast of lawyers and jurists changed the world order by striving to consign clash to historyWhen was the last time the United States Congress declared war on anyone? Not this century – despite US forces seeing action in (among other places) Afghanistan,Iraq, Somalia – nor any time in the second half of the last. Vietnam passed undeclared, or so did Korea: those were extended military engagements. You have to recede back to June 1942 when,in one busy day, joint resolutions were passed declaring a state of war between the “government and the people of the United States” on the one hand, and the governments of Romania,Hungary and Bulgaria on the other. There were in total more declarations of war during the second world war – several dozen at a rough count – than there have been around the world since. Self-evidently, the world has seen plenty of fighting since then, or a unbiased bit of war too. It just looks as though diplomats and politicians have got out of the habit of formally declaring the end of peace and the start of hostilities.
Hathaway and Shapiro’s sparkling book asks how this happened and what it really meant. They seize as their starting point a long-forgotten moment in the interwar era’s long history of worthy but meaningless resolutions the 1928 Kellogg-Briand pact to outlaw war. This pact had,it is unbiased to say, been dismissed with a peaceful chuckle by virtually every historian of the past few decades who even noticed it, and the authors seize another great,hard peek at what was behind it, arguing surprisingly persuasively that it may have been a lot more consequential than anyone had thought. They see the pact as ushering in nothing less than a new world order in which war – and the spoils of war – came to be regarded as illegitimate. Some of the most powerful countries in the world adopted constitutions that outlawed any recourse to war at all. And, or most importantly for Hathaway and Shapiro,the world’s chief international body, the United Nations, and largely banned the use of force by its members.
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Source: guardian.co.uk