SOURCE PUBLICATION: Karin SCHNEIDER (ed.), Mächtekongresse 1818-1822. Digitale Edition (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2018), ISBN 978-3-9504783-0-3

 

(image: Metternich, painted by Lawrence (1815); source: Wikimedia Commons)

Description:

Die Kongresse von Aachen (1818), Troppau (1820), Laibach (1821) und Verona (1822) sind Ausdruck und Ergebnis einer im Vergleich zum 18. Jahrhundert neuen Konzeption von Außenpolitik: An die Stelle von zwischenstaatlicher Rivalität und Machtpolitik trat eine in diesem Ausmaß bisher nicht praktizierte zwischenstaatliche Kooperation. Die Erfahrungen aus den Napoleonischen Kriegen hatte gezeigt, dass nur ein gemeinsames Vorgehen der europäischen Mächte zu einem dauerhaften Frieden führen würde. Die auf dem Wiener Kongress (1814/15) verhandelte politische und territoriale Neuordnung Europas war das Resultat dieser zwischenstaatlichen Zusammenarbeit. Auf völkerrechtlicher Ebene wurde diese Kooperation zwischen 1813 und 1818 durch ein komplexes System verschiedener Allianzen abgesichert und erfuhr als Europäisches Konzert einen gewissen Grad an Institutionalisierung. Dieser strukturelle Wandel in der Außenpolitik erforderte eine verdichtete Kommunikation zwischen den Staaten. In Aachen, Troppau, Laibach und Verona trafen die Mächtevertreter in der Nachfolge des Wiener Kongresses zusammen, um kollektiv über offene Fragen von europäischem Interesse zu beraten, Krisen abzuwenden beziehungsweise einer Lösung zuzuführen und Ruhe und Frieden in Europa zu garantieren. Die hier edierten Protokolle und anderen Schriftstücke aus dem Österreichischen Staatsarchiv (Link zum Teilbestand im Archivinformationssystem) zeigen die offizielle Lesart der Verhandlungen und sind entsprechend quellenkritisch zu betrachten. Dennoch geben sie einen Einblick in die Grundlagen und die Funktionsweise des Europäischen Mächtekonzerts im Spannungsfeld zwischen außenpolitischen Erfordernissen und innenpolitischen Zwängen, persönlichen Überzeugungen und politischen Kompromissen.

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ADVANCE ARTICLE: Nicholas MULDER, 'A Retrograde Tendency’: The Expropriation of German Property in the Versailles Treaty (Journal of the History of International Law/Revue d'histoire du droit international)

 

(image source: Brill)

Abstract:

This article explores how the Versailles Treaty was shaped by the effects of economic warfare 1914–1919. The First World War was in part an Allied economic war waged against the Central Powers in conditions of advanced economic and financial globalization. This was reflected in the treaty’s expropriation mechanisms, which were used to take control of German property, rights, and interests around the world. Whereas Articles 297 and 298 of the treaty legalized wartime seizures, the Reparations Section of the treaty also contained a provision, paragraph 18, that gave the Allies far-reaching confiscatory powers in the future. The article places these mechanisms in a wider political, legal and economic context, and traces how they became a bone of contention among the former belligerents in the interwar period.

(Read more with Brill; DOI 10.1163/15718050-12340136)

ADVANCE ARTICLE: Hans BLOM & Mark SOMOS, 'Public-Private Concord through Divided Sovereignty: Reframing societas for International Law' (Journal of the History of International Law/Revue d'histoire du droit international) (OPEN ACCESS)

(image source: Brill)

 Abstract:

Grotius is the father of modern international law. The indivisibility of sovereignty was the sine qua non of early-modern conceptual innovation in law. Both statements are axiomatic in the mainstream literature of the last two centuries. Both are profoundly and interestingly wrong. This paper shows that Grotius’ systematisation of public and international law involved defining corporations as potentially (and the VOC actually) integral to reason of state, and able to bear and exercise marks of sovereignty under certain conditions. For Grotius, some corporations were not subsumed under the state’s legal authority, nor were they hybrid ‘company-states’. Instead, states and such corporations, able and forced to cooperate, fell under dovetailing natural, international, and municipal systems of law. The paper reexamines Grotius’ notion of international trade, public debt, private corporation, and public and private war through the reassembled prism of these dovetailing laws and the category of societas that underpins Grotian associations. It is argued that although formulated around the new East India trade, the actual reality of legal pluralism was available to Grotius in the Dutch trade experience of the sixteenth century.

(read more with Brill: DOI 10.1163/15718050-12340170)

ADVANCE ARTICLE: Paulo Emílio VAUTHIER BORGES DE MACEDO & Brenda Maria RAMOS ARÁUJO, 'A Man against a War: Rui Barbosa and the Struggle against a Thought' (Journal of the History of International Law/Revue d'histoire du droit international)

 

(image source: Brill)

Abstract:

This article aims to demonstrate that Rui Barbosa’s role at the Hague Peace Conference of 1907 and his speech at the Buenos Aires Law School, in 1916, are a continuum. On both occasions, he not only defended the same principles, the rule of law over force and the juridical equality of nations, and mainly, fought the same enemy: a doctrine, the ‘Borussian militarist doctrine’. From the standpoint of a contextualist historiography, this text recreates that struggle. This work employs the inductive method of approach as well as primary and secondary bibliographical sources.

(Read further with Brill; DOI  10.1163/15718050-12340147)

ARTICLE: Kostiantyn GOROBETS, 'The International Rule of Law and the Idea of Normative Authority' (Hague Journal on the Rule of Law XII (2020), nr. 12, 227-249)

 

(image source: Wikimedia Commons)

Abstract:

Domestic and international jurisprudence exist and develop as two ‘pocket universes’ in a sense that they belong to the same fabric of reality, but at the same time many concepts shift their meaning when moved from one pocket to another. This is of a paramount importance for the idea of the rule of law, which in domestic setting was forged in the flame of civil wars and struggles against the rulers. This history and such struggles are something international law has never known, and thus any direct transplantation of the domestic images of the rule of law to international realm are doomed to fail. This entails a need in deconstructing the rule of law. Its core meaning (‘laws must be obeyed’), brings a normative claim relevant to any legal order. The idea of the (international) rule of law appears to be linked to the idea of authority of (international) law. There are differences of the structures of authority in domestic and international law as authority can be mediated or unmediated. Mediation of authority, typical for domestic law, presupposes the existence of officials that are functionally and institutionally differentiated from the subjects of law. Authority of international law is by and large unmediated because of its horizontal nature. Such reconstruction allows to reframe the central concern of the international rule of law enquiries. Instead of trying to fit it to the procrustean bed of domestic theories, international legal scholarship must focus on defining conditions under which international law’s claim to authority is realisable.

(read the article: DOI https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40803-020-00141-3) 

ADVANCE ARTICLE: Wouter DE RYCKE, "Legislating Utopia. Louis Bara (1821–1857) and the Liberal-Scientific Restatement of International Law in the Nineteenth Century Peace Movement" (Journal of the History of International Law/Revue d'histoire du droit international)

 

(image source: Brill)

Abstract:

This article deals with the contribution of one exponent of the first generation of institutional pacifist internationalism to the rise of ius contra bellum. Traditionally associated with events from the late nineteenth century onwards, this significant paradigm shift knew an extensive prehistory. Legal scholarship has long dismissed the ‘peace friends’ of the mid-century as either not legalistic or solely focussed on arbitration. The article will argue that this longstanding bias has precluded a profound engagement with legal discourse within the early international peace movement. It will do so through a contextual legal analysis of the works of Louis Bara, a young Belgian lawyer who won first prize for his lengthy and controversial peace essay at the famous Paris peace conference of 1849. This neglected jurist articulated an enduring popular desire to develop a liberal international legal project, which both the peace movement and international law as a discipline increasingly internalized.

(read more with Brill; DOI 10.1163/15718050-12340146 

DATABASE: King George III's topographical collection, 18 000 maps (British Library/Flickr)

(image source: Flickr)

The British Library has most generously put King George III's topographical collection at the public's disposal. 18 000 digitized maps are now accessible.

See more on Flickr.

(source: British Library)