Transcript for the Piece Audio version of RN Documentary: Law and Peace Part I

Script: Law and Peace.

Music:

FX: expectant buzz of the delegates.

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May 1899. The Hague in The Netherlands. One hundred delegates from twenty-four nations have come together for three months. Diplomats rub shoulders with lawyers who sit next to generals and naval commanders. Baron de Staal, the head of the Russina delegation and the chairman of the conference stands up and begins his opening speech.

Reading:
It is not for us to enter into the domain of Utopia. In the work we are about to undertake we must consider what is possible; we must not devote ourselves to the pursuit of abstractions. Without sacrificing any of our future hopes, we must remain in the land of reality, sound its very depths, so as to lay foundations and build on a practical basis.

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We must remain in the land of reality he says. But the effects of an international conflict echo far and wide in every direction. There can no longer be indifference. Everything must be done to stop it. The issues claim attention more than ever?.

Reading:
(The effects of an international conflict in any quarter of the globe echo far and wide in every direction. That is why third parties cannot remain indifferent to such a conflict. They must bring their powers of conciliation into play to stop it. These truths are not new. At all times there have been thinkers to suggest them, statesmen to apply them;)
but they claim our attention more than ever at the present time, and the fact that they have been proclaimed by an assembly such as ours will mark an important date in the history of mankind. Peace is the crying need of the nations, and we owe it to mankind, we owe it to the governments which have entrusted us with their powers and in whose care is the welfare of their people, we owe it to ourselves to do a useful work by specifying the method of employing some of the means of assuring peace?

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This is the first Hague peace conference. And it was to change the International landscape forever.

Geoffrey 7a
Public opinion was very excited about the 1899 conference. Of course, there were international conferences of all sorts before that but this the first time there had been an international diplomatic conference which states had sent official representatives to try to do something and therefore it was a big step forward over anything that happened before.

Arthur 2a
The idea of international law as what they called the gentle pacifier of the nations came about as a result of the industrial revolution and the armaments race and that started a range of conferences on humanitarian aspects on the peaceful settlement of disputes which finally came to the fore in the Hague peace conference of 1899 which was more or less the conclusion of a century of debate.

Intro:
Radio Netherlands presents Law and Peace. Part I. The presenter is Chris Chambers.

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The First Hague Peace Conference was a unique affair. It wasn?t initiated to settle a dispute but nations had come together to discuss the rules of war and ways to avoid future wars. Of course, one could say that it failed abysmally. After all fifteen years later the world would become embroiled in the most destructive war ever known but it did sow the seeds for future developments in International Law and co-operation and as anyone who works in this field will tell you it?s a very slow and painstaking process.

Arthur 6a
It?s a long and winding road as it?s so often been described. The interesting thing of course is that the idea of humanitarian law goes back to the philosophers of the classical times. To the Greek world and not just the Western world. It was only at the first Hague Peace Conference that they started to consider things seriously at a political level.

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This is Dr. Arthur Eyffinger a legal historian and the author of numerous books on the history of International Law and together with the writer Professor Geoffrey Best, a renowned lecturer on International relations, they will guide us through this embryonic and crucial period in International co-operation. The main players, the hopes, the failures and the successes.

Geoffrey 10a
The lawyers who were there in 1899 and of course many states had an International lawyer as their diplomatic representative?.they were hard men. They were all realists in a tough world which still took the fact of war as an inevitable part of the international system and therefore as an inevitable part of something which should be mitigated if it could be. It?s not until after 1945 and the era of the UN and of a much more widely diffused international humanitarianism that you find lawyers coming into the business who have not grown up in a world where war is accepted as an inevitable fact of international life but who now believe that it is a practise that can actually be abolished. They therefore have what I would call a softer approach to the business on the table. 1899 isn?t like that. There are no unrealistic lawyers there.

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I saw prevailing throughout the Christian world a licence in making war of which even barbarous nations should be ashamed. Men resorting to arms for trivial or for no reasons at all, and with arms once taken up no reverence left for divine or human law, as if a single edict had released a madness driving men to all kinds of crime.

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This was actually written almost four centuries ago by the Dutchman Hugo de Groot, or Grotius as he was known. He?s considered one of the fathers of International law. Before him the laws of war were virtually uncharted territory. As the Roman general Marius had said, ?In the din of arms I cannot hear the voice of the laws.?

Geoffrey 16a
Grotius and his like were important in forming the tone of educated, elite public opinion and we can see in the way in which wars were conducted that they had their effect. When wars were over they mulled over what had gone on in the war. For example prisoners of war or wounded. It had become established practice in the eighteenth century that you didn?t kill prisoners of war but you tried to keep them in tact. Wounded ones could be exchanged, you arranged exchanges called cartels. There were understood signs like white flags and so on. They lay down all kinds of ideal procedures for armies of occupation that the wives and daughters of citizenry, women should be respected and the religious institutions of occupied countries shall be left in tact and armies shall not loot but shall simply take what is necessary for their immediate subsistence. Now we know from the history of war this never happened. That armies then and later and still go overboard when they are occupying territory and have got helpless civilians around them. And the law books by Grotius and Vattel and co paint a rather unrealistic picture. This is idealism.

Arthur 4a
Grotius produced a kind of handbook which was spectacular in its approach. It was told to the nations and to the scholars that there was a law which went back to the idea of the Greek philosophers. A law which held good for all people. This was the law of nations. Grotius, in a very solid legal structure conceived a notion when it was legitimate to start a war, on what conditions and by whom. And the same once they had started war was with the up keeping of all the social standards of humanity. A very secular set of rules which were independent of the religion and the creed of the politicians and the nations. He came up with a very effective set of rule. Very pragmatic. The idea was in the air but he put it in a way which appealed to all and sundry in those days. And that made the difference.

Arthur 5a
So Grotius managed to come up with a set of rules which would help these nations. In practise it never did in the early stages and it is only at about 1850, so something like two centuries later that the idea of humanitarian law finally started to make a headway. Finally men started to appreciate that unless a formal set of rules was developed which were binding on the nations we would never make any headway. It had to be a very strict set of rules.

Geoffrey 2a
Conflict is part of the natural state of affairs as it?s part of the psychology of human beings. The world of states is a society of a kind which tries to find means of co-existence in which states can do business with each other and promote their general interest of trade and increasing mutual prosperity. At the same time an enormous amount of grit remains in the system of international relations because of national prejudices, racial, national and religious difference and so on. And so it is a perpetual struggle between this tendency towards anarchical behaviour on the one side and social organisation on the other.

Reading
The humanising of war! You might as well talk of humanising hell. As if war could be civilised! The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility. Hit first, hit hard, and hit everywhere.

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The great British admiral Lord Fisher and words he uttered at the 1899 Hague Peace conference. It shows the mountain delegates had to climb and highlights clearly the prevailing attitude of military men which would lead directly to the catastrophe of World War I. And it wasn?t as though that war came out of the blue. It was felt even before the Hague conference that humanity was heading towards an unprecedented conflict.

Arthur 9a
One of the most interesting things is a book which appeared by a conglomerate of authors both military and scholarly in 1893 in London. It was called the War of 189-. Actually what they told the world at the time in 1893 was that what was a major menace to the world now was a world war. And actually they came up with what actually was about to happen. And then they said it will all start with the attempted assassination of the Crown Prince of Bulgaria. He will be killed and from it will start a war because the German emperor will get at it. Then the French can?t keep aloof. Then the British will be involved. This war will be the beginning of a completely new way of waging war because it will not be a war which will be waged on land and at sea but in the air as well. And they started to elaborate on the war ships with illustrations. Intriguing. This will be a completely, complete disaster to European society. All this was predicted 20 years before and even so of course the nations didn?t bother to listen.

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The late 1800s saw a massive build up of armaments by all the big European powers. The German Kaiser Willem II being its biggest advocate. A peace movement had also started which had a growing popular appeal but the idea for a peace conference came from a rather unexpected source.

Geoffrey 5a
The story is slightly curious. The actual stimulus to it came from a suggestion by the Tsar, the Tsar of Russia that the arms race was becoming an intolerable and shameful nuisance and an intolerable burden on the economies of states and disreputable in that it symbolised the dedication to war and violence to an international society that ought to have got beyond that. Now when he made that suggestion in 1898 of course it was viewed with suspicion because inevitably people asked what are the Russians up to, what are they going to get out of this.

Arthur 7a
Russia at some stage perceived that they couldn?t keep up pace with the accelerating armaments industry in Germany. They had to spend so much on armaments that they couldn?t find the resources to upgrade their infrastructure. So what they were looking for actually was a kind of moratorium. Five to ten years of absolute peace in Europe to improve on their infrastructure and then start again with the armaments.

Geoffrey 5b
On the other hand there was a tradition in Tsarist Russia, and I cannot quite explain this, of interest in the improving the laws of war. In 1868 there had been a very small diplomatic conference in St. Petersburg to agree to ban the development of a particularly nasty new sort of weapon, the explosive projectiles which would do enormous damage to the human body when it hit it. And that 1868 declaration of St. Petersburg is the first in the long line of attempts to limit the nature of weaponry and its modern counterparts you will find in the law relating to land mines and the law relating to the use of incendiary weapons like napalm and poison gas. Now I can?t quite explain why it was Russia, which was in its internal arrangements by no means a very humane society, and why this particular interest in humanity in warfare should have shown there but that is a fact.

Arthur 7b
So the outcome was that at some stage the foreign ministry in St. Petersburg invited all the nations to a conference which was supposed to be held of course in St. Petersburg. It was to discuss all the outstanding issues of war and peace. Now, with all this scepticism all over Europe the first thing that came to mind, why St. Petersburg? And the Germans said why not Berlin, and the French said obviously Paris. No the British said we have London available, so that?s the best place. And this is what happens all the time and this is why the capitals of second rate nations in the political domain being neutral nations like Switzerland, Belgium, Scandinavia and the Netherlands became centres of diplomacy.
So why did it come to the Hague?
The first option was Geneva but then Emperor Cissi had been killed by anarchists in broad daylight and so that was not the place to go to. Then they turned to Scandinavia and they were perfectly disinterested. Then they turned to Brussels and King Leopold loved the idea and for that very reason his parliament was opposed to it. And then as a kind of afterthought they said what is this other neutral nation, isn?t that the nation that is still linked to the Romanovs because the Dutch King William II was married to Anna Pavlovna who?d been a sister and daughter to Tsars. Then they came to say isn?t that the land of Hugo Grotius. Isn?t that that land with a great parliamentary tradition and that nation that is very accessible from all quarters of the world by rail and from Rotterdam harbour. So, as a kind of afterthought they came to The Hague.

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An afterthought maybe but it had far reaching consequences. In the hundred years since of course, the city has become a global centre of international law and relations, a judicial capital. It?s been described as the city of security and peace. It boasts a whole host of courts and tribunals. Among them the Permanent court of arbitration, The International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
May 1899 is when it all began and there?s an enormous public expectation. The world?s media has descended upon the city together with the leading figures in the Peace Movement. The Peace Apostles as they were known. Its undisputed leader was the grand Austrian Baroness Bertha van Suttner.

Reading
The Baroness is the best propagandist I know; clear and logical in argument, graceful and dignified in manner. Her soft musical voice is so persuasive that the most hardened sinner is not proof against it. I have seen a man walk into her salon as a Jingo and come out as a man and a brother. One good German who called today had evidently swallowed a ramrod, but he disgorged after a short interview, and he, too, retired a better and a wiser man.
She now finds herself sought out by the mighty of the land. Surrounded by brilliant uniforms at an official reception in the Royal Palace, she is a centre of attraction. The young queen of Holland is sympathetic and gracious. The minister of War offers his congratulations, and men whose swords have been steeped by blood confide to her that for many years past they have held her opinions and prayers for the realisations of her ideals.

Arthur 10a
She was one of the very few people active in the peace movement who was as the Germans would say Salon Fe. She was accepted by politicians. She was the central figure in all the social things that went on in The Hague. She was a major figure in her days and even to the present day she is on the flipside of the Austrian euro.

Geoffrey 8a
Now Bertha van Suttner would stand as a representative of peace. Now all added to the general excitement surrounding the 1899 conference but I don?t think she influenced it. What she did influence was the Norwegian millionaire manufacture Alfred Nobel, the man who invented dynamite to set up the Nobel Peace Prize. This is an interesting reflection of the contradiction at the heart of the pursuit of International peace. Here is the inventor of dynamite founding a peace prize, how do you account for this because he believed that the more powerful an explosive was developed the less likely people were to use it. As well as developing dynamite he did found the peace prize and Bertha van Suttner hoped that she would be the first winner of it and she wasn?t. The first winner was the aged Henri Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross Movement who was still just alive at the turn of the twentieth century. Bertha van Suttner got it in 1905 and she was the first woman to get it certainly.

Arthur 10b
Her work on the social misery of the 1870s and 1880s entitled ?Die Waffen Nieder?, ?Lay Down Your Arms? was a major thing. When she died it had been translated into sixteen languages and it was the right book at the right moment. And it had a major appeal to the imagination of the people all over the world. The outcome was that politicians started to appreciate that they couldn?t ignore her and this is another major thing of the period around the peace conference. Public opinion finally started to make headway in the minds of politicians. They couldn?t ignore public opinion anymore.

Geoffrey 7b
That conference in 1899 is frightfully interesting. It was the first occasion on which an international diplomatic conference had been the magnet for what we now call non-governmental organisations and the newspaper world. And that?s why The Hague became filled with newspaper men and peace activists. The most prominent newspaper man was a British journalist called W. T. Stead. He had a rather mixed reputation for being a sensation monger. He conducted a number of remarkable investigations in which he went undercover to see if he could buy an underage prostitute in London and wrote all this up in his newspaper and then got prosecuted for it. But he made a good deal of money and did some good in the world. He was also a peace activist. He started a newspaper that he ran during the period of the conference which was a good many weeks with news from The Hague. This was the first occasion on which the press had homed in on an international diplomatic conference and they weren?t allowed in. They were frightfully cross, the pressmen were cross at not being allowed into the conference but very sensibly they were kept out because when the press are in as they have been ever since the diplomats are under pressure to produce something that can be written about favourable and hopefully at home. At 1899 conference there was no pressure to suggest any legislation that was not realistic.

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So what was discussed and what was the outcome?
The conference was split into three commissions. The first to discuss disarmament issues and modern weaponry, the second looked at the rules and customs of war and humanitarian topics and the third was to look into ways to settle disputes through arbitration. The first was not surprisingly a failure.

Geoffrey 9a
The point was nobody would agree to stop pursuing the invention of weapons which might give them a great advantage in a conflict. You cannot do that. States somehow or other will not do that and the history of arms control in our own times illustrates the enormous continuing difficulty in getting states to agree to forgo something which might give them an enormous military advantage. The disarmament commission therefore got nowhere. A French negotiator said the verb to disarm is a verb with no first person present and with no future tense.

Arthur 6b
In 1899 in The Hague there was a convention which was almost perfect to ban chemical weapons. There was just one nation, all agreed, all participating powers, 25 agreed with the exception of the United States. The representative, the delegation of the US at that time maintained that we are a civilised nation, we will never use these kind of means to wage war. Now this is what they found in Vietnam sixty, seventy years later of course.

Geoffrey 9b
But then there was the commission on the laws of war. Now this did produce something of great importance. The states were able to agree that it was in their mutual interest to see if they could bring up to date this public international customary law which had developed in the law books and put it into statutory form. There were by then enormous quantities of international law books which said here is the law of war and this is how states behave in war. But none of it was statutory. None of it had got into an international treaty. 1899 was when for the first time states tried to put most of this into a treaty. And so you get the Declaration on the laws of land warfare. The Hague declaration is of enormous importance in the history of war making. It provides the basic laws of war under which the First and Second World Wars were fought on land. It said almost nothing about war in the air because that hadn?t yet been developed but in 1899 that?s when the basic laws about prisoners of war, occupation of enemy territory and the means and methods of combat were laid down and the most important part of it I think comes in the preamble. There was inserted a clause devised by one of the Russian delegates a man called Martens and it reads like this. And in this you will hear echoes of the current law of human rights?.

Marten?s Clause Reading:
Until a perfectly complete code of the laws of war is issued, the Conference think it right to declare that in cases not included in the present arrangement , populations and belligerents remain under the protection and empire of the principles of international law, as they result from the usage established between civilised nations, from the laws of humanity, and the requirements of the public conscience.

??..Now if that means anything it means the same respect for the common interests of humanity as promotes the international law of human rights which has become a big complication for the laws of war in our own times and in the Marten?s Clause in 1899 you find the beginnings of this idea that the conduct of war by belligerents is not just limited by the strict rules that they have laid down but also by a certain code of common humanity which ought to go beyond that. And whether it has been effective or not is a matter on which historians of war continue to argue.

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So the first commission was an abject failure. The second a moderate success but the third commission looking into the use of abitration to settle disputes and to everyone?s surprise actually succeeded.

Reading
You could have heard a pin drop in the conference. Members looked at one another in blank amazement, and not a few felt that, for the first time, they were face to face with serious business put forward by practical statesmen in grim earnest.

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The words of the British journalist and Peace Activist William Stead describing the announcement that the delegates had agreed to set up a Permanent Court of Arbitration.

Geoffrey 5c
The biggest thing that came out of it was a convention to set up procedures for arbitration between states and that was the most useful thing that came out of it because arbitration was in the air and plenty of states were willing to do it provided they were not compelled to do it. And the great devil in the pack was the touchiness of states about their sovereignty of being told to do something by someone else. The Germans were especially prickly about this. Anything suggesting that the state of Germany should be driven to agree to submit to any external process seemed to them dishonourable and humiliating. But all states were touchy about this and so that the setting up of the arbitration convention in 1899 very carefully had to make clear that it was all to be voluntarily but it worked because there were plenty of causes that states could agree did not require recourse to war and so arbitration went on with added vim as a very successful part of the machinery of international relations.

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This court has been in operation ever since. And was the first of many courts and tribunals that have over the course of the twentieth century found their home in The Hague. To the general public this Permanent Court of Arbitration is almost unknown, getting very little media attention, but it does serve a hugely important role.

Geoffrey 6a
The world is still full of conflict and threatened wars between states yes, but at the same time many of these states are actually engaged in peaceful processes at the Hague either in the arbitration tribunals or in the international court at The Hague in sorting out difficulties of a commercial and private character which do not require?.the whole business of international trade depends on the successful workings of an international legal system and of courts to enforce it and that is going on the whole time. Don?t overlook that when looking at the dark side of the picture which is the continuing failure of states to manage their political and sometimes one now has to say religious relations.

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This court opened in 1901 in modest but dignified quarters in the centre of The Hague. The Dutch government did not want to squander money on what might prove to be a flash in the pan but the court was a success and it was soon realised that a larger residence was needed. And this is where the richest man in the world came into the picture.

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The Peace Palace is the most holy building in the world because it has the holiest end in view. I do not even except St. Peter?s, or any building erected to the glory of God, whom, as Luther says, we cannot serve or aid. He needs no help from us. The highest worship of God is service to man.

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Andrew Carnegie, who?d made his fortune from the iron and steel industries in 1903 gave a huge sum of money to build what would become known as the peace palace, an extraordinary building that opened in 1913. Of course, a Peace Palace opening just a year before the beginning of the First World War came to be seen as a sad and pathetic irrelevance and all the hopes of that 1899 conference and the following one in 1907, also in The Hague turned to ashes in the cataclysm of a war like no other. The media lampooned this temple of peace depicting signs for sale and for rent. However, it did over time become a symbol of man?s desire to find order in disorder. In the second part of ?Law and Peace? I?ll be looking inside what must be one of the strangest and eclectic buildings in the world and looking further into the legacy of that first Hague Peace Conference that started it all and led ultimately to the United Nations and to the inscription that lies engraved at the UN headquarters in New York:

Reading:
They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.

Outro:
Law and Peace Part I was produced and presented by Chris Chambers. This has been a Radio Netherlands presentation.

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