HAGUE CONFERENCES

The Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907 were the product of a paradox. On the surface the nineteenth century seemed to have addressed successfully the escalation of war in the Revolutionary/Napoleonic Era. The reconstructed Europe that emerged from the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) did not seek the utopian solution of ending war altogether. Instead it addressed warmaking in contexts of limitation and projection. Domestically, the midcentury conflicts from the Crimea in 1853–1856 to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 could be legitimately characterized as "cabinet wars" in the traditional style. Fought for definable, understandable purposes, interfacing force and negotiation, they were ultimately settled on terms acceptable not only to the participants, but the other Great Powers as well.

the war matrix

To limitation, the European states increasingly added projection: directing aggressive impulses outward in an emerging age of imperialism. The British historian and journalist A. J. P. Taylor's comment that World War I might have been averted had Austria-Hungary possessed an extra-European empire has aged better than most historical one-liners. Great-power rivalry was more often defused than exacerbated by frictions generated by territory disputes involving unfamiliar places.

Imperialism's stakes might be high, but even the most belligerent governments did not perceive them as mortal. In disagreements over such geographically remote flecks on the map as Penjdeh, which engaged British and Russian diplomats in 1887; and Fashoda, which took Britain and France to the brink in 1898, there was always room for negotiation. The Great Game remained a game.

Imperialism's wars also directed public belligerence and military aggressiveness beyond Europe's frontiers. The remote locations provided an aura of glamour to what was usually a hard and bloody slog. The enemies were usually sufficiently alien in culture and appearance to make their annihilation a matter for scorekeeping rather than regret. The disparities of force made the final outcomes comfortably certain. In an era when mass spectator sports were just beginning to emerge, imperialism's conflicts provided an opportunity for readers of newspapers with headlines such as "Boers sabered by moonlight" to support their chosen "team."

Beneath this relatively comfortable surface, however, stress points multiplied as the century progressed. Arguably beginning with the writings of Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), visibly developing in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), was an increasing tendency in Europe's armies to abstract the nature of conflict. War was projected as existential, embodying no limits and tending to develop unchecked its capacities for violence and destruction. This process of reification was enhanced by the rise of general staffs, whose self-defined reason for being was to diminish war's apocalyptic impact by systematic planning. The synergistic development of military technology after 1871, in particular a network of increasingly effective weapons from magazine rifles to heavy artillery, further encouraged projections of mutually destructive total war. Finally, the spiraling expenses of keeping pace with Europe's escalating arms race were increasingly understood as mere harbingers of the costs, human and material, a general European war would incur.

initiatives

Imperialism's conflicts were also showing uncomfortable aspects, suggesting the transition from the state wars of the nineteenth century to the total wars of the twentieth. Civilian infrastructures were increasingly targeted as part of military operations. "Pacification" increasingly denied distinctions between combatants and civilian populations. Violence acquired an ideological dimension, with European troops and their local auxiliaries indiscriminately smiting enemies understood as symbolizing not merely the "other," but the alien, set apart by unbridgeable chasms of culture and race.

Across Europe, developing grassroots peace movements called attention to these manifestations, but they were handicapped by their identification with intellectuals, radicals, and women. The first concrete step toward addressing the upward spiral of violence in warmaking came from the unlikely source of Imperial Russia. On 24 August 1898, Tsar Nicholas II (r. 1894–1918) issued an imperial rescript (decree) calling for an international peace conference. On a pragmatic level, the Russian government sought international recognition for its recent commercial and political gains in China. Nicholas and his advisors, however, were also concerned with recent Western technical advances Russia could match only at disproportionate expense. A Polish banker, Jan Bloch, published The Future of War (1899), which predicted a mutual attrition that would ultimately destroy the old European order. Nicholas had met with Bloch personally and was sufficiently concerned to raise the argument that something must be done at the highest levels.

No state could afford to ignore the Russian initiative in the context of growing public anxiety about the risks of future war. Just what was to be done, however, remained obscure. Other governments—including the United States, making its debut on the great-power stage in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, pressed for clarification. The Russians replied with an eight-point list. The specifics of its first half proposed a freeze on the size and budgets of armed forces with a view to eventual force reductions, and the banning of weapons and technologies more advanced than the ones in use. The second half called for codifying and revising the laws of war—or more accurately, the laws governing the conduct of war.

It was the second half that dominated discussion when the conference finally met at The Hague in 1899. The participants—Russia included—showed from the beginning a general unwillingness to take any concrete initiatives on arms limitation, let alone arms reduction. War remained the last resort of states, as it had been the final argument of kings. If the peace movement could not be ignored nationally or internationally, cultures of belligerence were no less widespread and no less influential in the Western world. Considered as a disarmament conference, The Hague was a failure. The meeting did, on the other hand, produce a spectrum of statements addressing behavior in war and binding on the "high contracting parties": a Convention on the Law and Customs of War on Land, another on maritime war, and separate declarations prohibiting the discharge of explosives from balloons, the use of projectiles diffusing asphyxiating gas, and the use of expanding bullets, more commonly known as dumdums.

Little of the material in these formulations was new. Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, the "laws of war" existed as custom, as principle, as national laws and military regulations, and not least in religious teachings. In a culture whose defining passion was classification, this was unacceptably vague. In 1856 the Declaration of Paris codified maritime law. In 1868 an international conference at St. Petersburg banned weapons that unnecessarily aggravated suffering. The Brussels Conference of 1874 denied belligerents unlimited power to injure an enemy.

intentions and results

The Hague's documents had a common intention: to collate and rationalize the laws and customs of war, defining them more precisely and mitigating their severity as far as possible. Article 1 of the annex to the Convention on Land Warfare, for example, defined belligerent status as requiring a chain of command, a distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance, arms carried openly, and operations conducted "in accordance with the laws and customs of war." Articles 5 through 20 establish the rights and responsibilities of prisoners of war—including a clause stating "any act of insubordination" warrants adopting "such measures of severity as may be necessary." Article 22 reiterates that the right to injure an enemy is not unlimited. Article 23 prohibits, among other things, refusing to take prisoners, and destroying enemy property unnecessarily. Articles 25–28 forbid bombarding undefended towns and require taking "all necessary steps" to spare public buildings in a bombardment zone—unless they are being used for military purposes.

The Convention recognized the right of spontaneous armed resistance to invasion, and granted such resisters belligerent status if they observed the laws and customs of war. It required occupiers to respect, "unless absolutely prevented," the laws of the occupied territory. Like all international law, however, that of The Hague was weighted heavily in favor of sovereign states. Punishment for violations was vague and limited: a few references to responsibility and a few more to compensation. The Conventions' mitigating aspects were nevertheless sharply challenged by armies and governments masking fears of weakness beneath assertion of state sovereignty. Germany in particular took a lead in that criticism, prefiguring its behavior in 1914–1918. In 1907 a second Hague Conference clarified a spectrum of disputed issues, most of them involving naval war. A third conference was intended for within eight years of the second.

World War I intervened. For four years the assumptions and principles of the Hague negotiators were tested to the point of destruction. Yet despite being honored as much in the breach as in the observance, despite being regularly challenged on pragmatic and principled grounds, the Law of the Hague has shaped the conduct of two world wars and dozens of lesser conflicts, extending into the twenty-first century. The robust common sense of its fundamental principles may be anything but utopian. When acted upon, the Hague Conventions provide correspondingly workable ground rules that even the most ideologically motivated combatants in practice find sufficiently welcome to denounce their absence.

See alsoArmies; International Law; Pacifism; Science and Technology.

bibliography

Best, Geoffrey. Humanity in Warfare. New York, 1980.

Roberts, Adam. "Land Warfare: From Hague to Nuremberg." In The Laws of War. Constraints on War in the Western World, edited by Michael Howard, George J. Andreopoulos, and Mark R. Shulman, pp. 116–139. New Haven, Conn., and London, 1994.

Dennis Showalter