A Century of Anarchy?

Overview & Synopsis

In the beginning there was anarchy—but was there? The nineteenth century is (mis)understood as a century in which states were free to wage war against each other whenever they deemed it politically necessary. Not until the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the UN Charter was this ‘free right to go to war’ (liberum ius ad bellum) gradually outlawed. The dark times of anarchy were over. Lighter times dawned—and, with them, ‘radical transformations’ of international law and politics. This story of progress is widely shared. But it is puzzling. For a ‘free right to go to war’ has never been empirically proven. By outlining a genealogy of modern war justifications and drawing on multiple political and normative discourses, A Century of Anarchy? argues that this ‘right’ actually never existed (Part I). Rather, it was an invention by realist legal scholars in Imperial Germany who argued against the mainstream of European liberalism (Part II). Paradoxically, this now forgotten Sonderweg reading was universalized in international historiographies after the World Wars. But the characterization of nineteenth-century international relations as anarchic is as inaccurate as it is widespread: in addition to deconstructing the myth of liberum ius ad bellum, this book traces the political and theoretical roots of the modern prohibition of war in the ‘long nineteenth century’ (1789–1918). The latter is not to be understood as the anarchic photo-negative of the modern international order governing the use of force. It was the era of its birth.