New from Cornell University Press:
A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War, by
Isabel V. Hull (Cornell University). A description from the Press:
A century after the outbreak of the Great War, we have forgotten the
central role that international law and the dramatically different
interpretations of it played in the conflict’s origins and conduct. In A Scrap of Paper,
Isabel V. Hull compares wartime decision making in Germany, Great
Britain, and France, weighing the impact of legal considerations in
each. Throughout, she emphasizes the profound tension between
international law and military necessity in time of war, and
demonstrates how differences in state structures and legal traditions
shaped the way in which each of the three belligerents fought the war
Hull
focuses on seven cases in which each government’s response was shaped
by its understanding of and respect for the law: Belgian neutrality, the
land war in the west, the occupation of enemy territory, the blockade,
unrestricted submarine warfare, the introduction of new weaponry
(including poison gas and the zeppelin), and reprisals. Drawing on
voluminous research in German, British, and French archives, the author
reconstructs the debates over military decision making and clarifies the
role played by law—where it constrained action, where it was
manipulated to serve military need, where it was simply ignored, and how
it developed in the crucible of combat. She concludes that Germany did
not speak the same legal language as the two liberal democracies, with
disastrous and far-reaching consequences. The first book on
international law and the Great War published since 1920, A Scrap of Paper is a passionate defense of the role that the law must play to govern interstate relations in both peace and war.
A few blurbs:
"Over the last decade, with wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the laws of armed conflict have become matters of popular
and public interest. Despite the growth of international humanitarian
law, much of the law with which we still operate dates from the fifteen
years just before the First World War and was applied within it. A Scrap of Paper
is the first book to pay sustained attention to the subject of
international law in the First World War since 1920. It is not only a
timely book, it is an
overdue one, and its impact on the study of the war will be important
and game-changing. Isabel V. Hull has the linguistic range and scholarly
tools to tackle the subject in the truly comparative fashion that its
complexity demands."—Sir Hew Strachan
"Isabel V. Hull's passionate narrative of the role of international law
in the decision-making processes in Berlin and London during the First
World War opens a strikingly original perspective on the consciousness
of the wartime actors. This was a war waged also by legal arguments. In
the end, the inability and unwillingness of Imperial Germany to defend
its case in legal terms crucially undermined its war effort. This is not
only superb history, but also the most powerful defense of the role of
law in international crisis that I have read, and as such is of obvious
contemporary relevance."—Martti Koskenniemi
More information is available here.
