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Richard Ned Lebow, A century of anarchy? War, normativity, and the birth of modern international order, International Affairs, Volume 101, Issue 3, May 2025, Pages 1138–1139, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaf090
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Extract
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.
