A century of anarchy? War, normativity, and the birth of modern international order

This remarkable product of scholarship offers a genealogy of nineteenth-century discourses about war and the alleged freedom of states to wage it as they saw fit. Hendrik Simon demonstrates that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the so-called anarchy of European politics from the French Revolution to the post-First World War era was a fiction. Beginning with the Congress of Vienna, European diplomats and lawyers were committed to imposing constraints on the use of force and successfully narrowed and sharpened the justifications for war. Simon's revisionist account is compelling and has important implications for the substance and theory of international law and International Relations (IR). It also demonstrates the power of historical understandings to shape current thinking and practices.

Simon develops three arguments about the normative status of war in the nineteenth century. He rejects the established belief that states had a free right to war (liberum ius ad bellum). This was neither a well-accepted legal doctrine nor evident in state practice. Throughout the century, states were required and felt compelled to provide justifications for their resorts to force. Simon documents the emergence of liberum ius ad bellum and how some tried to read it ex post facto as a dominant discourse. It had diverse roots in law and political theory, but it did not emerge as a coherent doctrine until the late nineteenth century. German nationalist opinion was anti-international law and regarded its constraints on the use of force as a means of defending the status quo and denying Germany its place in the sun. To a certain extent, post-unification German nationalist jurists and historians invented the free right of war, in their effort to pioneer a Sonderweg [special pathway] for their country. It never gained acceptance outside these circles, which were keen to establish anarchy as the norm and thus justify their approach to Germany. Finally, Simon explores how IR realists gave the liberum ius ad bellum doctrine its mythic status.

Simon's genealogy relies on careful readings of a wide range of key legal, philosophical and historical texts. He begins with the French Revolution and proceeds through the Congress of Vienna to the unification of Germany and Italy, and the subsequent debates between realist and liberal thinkers. Niccolò Machiavelli and Emmanuel Kant lurk in the background of the rhetorical struggle between those intent on allowing states to behave as they want and those wanting to rein them in, especially regarding the use of force. Simon documents how liberals drew on Kant in the hope of limiting—if not outlawing—war, and realists invoked Carl von Clausewitz, among other writers, to argue that war had always been the norm and would remain so. While the intellectual and political dividing lines were clear, national ones were more blurred, as some non-Germans were rather bellicose and some Germans supportive of the liberal project.

The leadership of the Kaiserreich did not claim a free right to make war. In 1914, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg was careful to offer legal defences for Germany's declarations of war and for its invasion of neutral Belgium. However, German claims of necessity overriding any law were clearly rooted in the doctrine of liberum ius ad bellum, and Germany's decision to go to war in 1914 must be viewed as an expression of the Sonderweg that this legal doctrine helped to pioneer.

Stepping back from his historical analysis, Simon engages the longstanding debate about the relevance of international law to international practice. At one extreme, there are those who maintain that it shapes and constrains the foreign policies of states. At the other, there are those who describe it as non-binding and at best a source of useful rationalizations. Simon does not challenge the claim that justifications of war are often built on lies. However, he insists that norms would be meaningless if they were non-binding. Norms that are accepted in principle have important consequences even when they are violated.

Simon's rich narrative encourages us to reflect on the ways that paradigms attempt to create useful myths. Realism did this successfully with anarchy, ignoring the robust nature of European society for much of the nineteenth century and the development and increasing acceptance of international laws and norms limiting the use of force in Europe. Violence against non-Europeans was, of course, another matter. Liberalism and Marxism created their own myths. As Simon shows, from the interwar period to the present, some liberals have paradoxically been willing to confirm the realist narrative of the liberum ius ad bellum to construct their own narrative of teleological progress of international law. The more general point, which Simon's book makes most effectively, is that, cleverly packaged and sold, these myths can pass as history. When they do, they benefit the paradigm in question. In the case of realism, they have the potential to become self-fulfilling and to realize the nasty and brutish world they describe as the norm.