Introduction
The subject of International Relations (IR) and what it comprises has a history of extensive contestation. Depending on one’s perspective IR may range from international regimes, organisations, and alliance-making to domestic determinants of foreign policy. However, if one’s perspective takes the state as its vantage point, then, as this article argues, the foremost attribute of the international is shared language, in which states communicate with one another thereby defining in mutually agreeable terms new norms and institutions. Language is not a neutral medium and reservoir of readily available and neutral meanings; instead, it is a sword with which political battles are waged.Footnote 1 International politics starts with concepts, which political actors use to describe the state of world affairs, institutions, and policies in a light favourable to their cause.
Unless a state is a revolutionary power or a recognised hegemon, it has no ability to manipulate international linguistic conventions freely because other agents would not deem such an act acceptable or even comprehensible. As with other social and political domains, international politics comprises a number of rules regulating conventional speech acts. Thus, a change in a political status quo would implicate successful attempts at amending linguistic conventions by legitimate means. The politics over language in world affairsFootnote 2 may seek various illocutionary and perlocutionary effects and employ rhetorical instruments accordingly.Footnote 3 This article, however, limits its focus to a specific set of speech acts that bring about transformations of political reality at the level of commonly used language.Footnote 4 In other words, such speech acts are about the ontology of international relations. To the extent that universal international conventions and declarations constitute international law recognised by most states, it can be safely argued that these also contain examples of shared linguistic conventions.Footnote 5
With these underlying assumptions this article ventures to ask when, how, and why ‘international community’ was admitted into conventional vocabulary of international law and diplomacy, thereby marking a shift in recognised ontology of interstate world.Footnote 6 This is a question of a conceptual change that occurs in a peculiar linguistic domain regulated by the multitude of sovereign states, whose primary concern is national interest and sovereignty itself.Footnote 7 Hence what counts as a conceptual novelty in this specific domain might not appear as such in other domains (for instance, in philosophy or in the discipline of international law) and, thus, may add little to respective theories of international community.Footnote 8 Nevertheless, the process of conceptual appropriation and adaptation effecting a conceptual innovation in diplomacy and international law is indispensible to our understanding of political underpinnings of the interstate community and the types of speech acts this concept renders legitimate.
The central argument of this article is that the concept of international community was accepted to a shared interstate language as a result of debates over international institutions, which were to acquire ‘universal’ character (for example, mediation and arbitration), at the Hague Conferences (May–July 1899 and June–October 1907). Diplomatic recognition of international community was thus predicated on justification and arguments defending new legal practices and institutions. Commissive and directive speech acts that the constitution of these institutions entailed also required a set of assertive speech acts concerning the reality in which these institutions were to function and which ideals they were designed to answer to. This reality was asserted in the preamble of the Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, 1899, that formally recognised the existence of ‘society of civilised states’. As no one has monopoly on enforcement in international politics, diplomatic assertions of this kind should have been consensual for the asserted reality to be recognised and enacted by all participants of the conferences. However, this result, similarly to bills adopted by legislative assemblies, was conditioned by a prior heated debate in which alternatives had to be discarded, original proposals amended, and arguments offered to persuade diplomatic delegations to agree to the Final Act of the Conference.
Raising the question of how international community was recognised by states, rather than theorists, and enacted in international law can prove illuminating with respect to claims concerning the nature of international community that have been made in debate so far. Nowadays, international community is omnipresent in discussion of international politics and, as a rule, it carries a heavy normative, teleological, and political baggage.Footnote 9 This omnipresence and normativity are exactly the reasons that provoke a range of critical responses to the idea of international community. Critics reasonably argue that the overuse of the term led to a deplorable state when it is so ambiguous and contradictory that it obfuscates more than it clarifies.Footnote 10 Furthermore, international community is endowed with nearly fully-fledged agency, as any random Internet search for phrases such as ‘international community acts; feels; believes; intervenes; can or cannot’ would testify. As such, it may imply a degree of shared interests, values, and institutions, falling short of the idea of world state, which realist theories have a difficult time accepting. For these theories international community is nothing more than utopia or a rhetorical instrument to conceal national interests that are presented as a common good.Footnote 11
Shifting focus to the shared interstate language and to a conceptual change that brought about the reality of international community can bring these heterogeneous responses to the problem of international community together in a meaningful debate about the contested ontology of the international. On the one hand, understanding conceptual change politically offers a critical perspective on communitarian thinking; on the other, it invites realist thinking to consider the use of language and transformation of conventions. Language, concepts, and ideas have primarily been the subjects of various strands of constructivist theories and discursive approaches in IR.Footnote 12 This article will demonstrate that these phenomena equally matter to the realist theories that hold power-maximising and egoistic states as the main unit of analysis.Footnote 13 Attempts have been made before to study rhetoric as a sort of window-dressing device instrumental to achieving actors’ (hidden) goals.Footnote 14 In contrast, this article focuses on rhetorical struggles over justification and definition of the world populated by states.Footnote 15 Legitimation and explanation are necessarily parts of policy, not least because they may signpost what constitutes the limits of legitimate state action.Footnote 16
Given that a final joint assertion of an international conference is an outcome of prior debates, the article’s main thrust will be in scrutiny of rhetorical uses of ‘international community’ and ‘society’ at the Hague Conferences. It is these debates that help us answer the remaining questions of why and how international community was collectively asserted in the context of jealously preserved state sovereignty of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To answer these questions, the article constructs a model of conceptual innovation in diplomatic linguistic convention.
First, this model posits that a final assertive speech act that transforms a diplomatic linguistic convention and interstate ontology is an outcome, or a climax, of conceptual change.
Second, it suggests that the use of ‘society of civilised nations’ in the text of Convention (1899) was not a terminological aberration, instead it signalled a conceptual change. This claim derives from several observations: the term ‘society of civilised nations’ used in the Convention was the first legal recognition of the status of states as members of a wider collective entity; thereafter, this term was used consistently in diplomatic assemblies and international organisations (such as the League of Nations and the United Nations); the term was used interchangeably with ‘international community’ in the debates to express one concept; the concept of international community was explicitly defined with these terms and used recurrently in rhetoric justifying new institutions.Footnote 17
Third, the model emphasises the status and roles of conference participants. Certain members of diplomatic delegations at the Hague performed a ‘dual’ role of academic jurists and diplomats. The article argues that the conceptual change was produced by a state-sanctioned ‘epistemic community’ assembled at the Hague Conferences.Footnote 18 It thus emphasises how instrumental a specific professional community can be in producing a change in an otherwise conservative diplomatic rhetoric.
Fourth, the model assigns critical importance to interventions by members of epistemic community to the debates at the conference as rhetorical means to alter the existing convention and win approbation for their proposals, the outcome of which was the recognition of international community. The presence of this particular epistemic community explains why the concept of international community prevailed over its historical alternatives, such as alliance or concert.
Fifth, to understand novelty and polemical meaning of the arguments at the conference made by academic jurists the model suggests their contextualisation in relevant professional and political debates. This final element is central to explaining why a particular term (or set of terms) was keenly taken up and used by the audience.
The fourth and fifth elements of the model also signify space and time where political struggle takes place. The analysis of these interventions illuminates the types of professional battles and philosophical assumptions that infiltrated into diplomatic debates and were eventually appropriated in conceptual change. To analyse this process the article utilises rhetorical and contextualist approaches developed in political theory and intellectual history.Footnote 19 More specifically, this article draws on Skinner’s approach to rhetoric and conceptual change.Footnote 20
At the Hague Conferences ‘innovating ideologists’, to use Skinner’s term, were academic professors-diplomats seeking to persuade other delegations, and thus states, to accept institutions of mediation and obligatory arbitration. Given that this project met opposition in the media and by some delegations at the 1899 conference (for example, Germany), they had to present their case in a favourable light with the best rhetorical and conceptual tools available.Footnote 21 The Hague Conferences thus became rhetorical battlefields in which anxieties about arbitration were mitigated while the ultimate moral value of new institutions was amplified by reference to values and concepts imported from elsewhere. The advocates of mediation and arbitration tried to capitalise on conventional, although not uncontested, arguments about international community in their professional field to persuade the diplomatic opponents.
Accordingly, the article will proceed in an ‘unfolding’ manner by detailing the first assertive speech acts about international community; then by identifying the epistemic community assembled at the Hague; outlining rhetorical strategies of international community protagonists at the conferences and semantic dimensions of the concept they chose to enact; and finally by contextualising the conference argumentation in the relevant disciplinary contexts.
First diplomatic assertions of international community
It is now a commonplace to maintain that the system of international governance underwent a series of structural changes in the nineteenth century from the balance of power to the Vienna system and to an unprecedented rise of internationalism and emergence of genuinely international society.Footnote 22 Any such progression to internationalism is necessarily a rough approximation as the first half of the nineteenth century also saw a growing intensity of monarchical relations.Footnote 23 This article maintains that we can provide more specific evidence of actors’ self-recognition as members of international community by identifying relevant changes in a shared diplomatic language. Thus, our task is to establish whether and when states, through their representatives, collectively asserted the existence of international community/society and the meaning they could possibly attach to this shared concept.
The reputation of the nineteenth century as the century of growing internationalism indeed is premised on a fair number of multilateral agreements and international conventions that mark a clear difference with the classic European international law based mainly on bilateral treaties. While far from undermining the structures of international governance, such as European Concert and great power management, the new collective agreements were based on a much wider international participation and required more cooperative efforts.Footnote 24 Among such efforts one could list the congresses of Vienna (1815), Paris (1856), and Berlin (1878); the Congo Conference in Berlin (1884–5); humanitarian Geneva conventions of 1864, 1906, and 1929; finally, and somewhat outstandingly, as it was not provoked by a war, was the International Peace Conference held at the Hague in 1899.Footnote 25 Most of the diplomatic documents adopted at the above-mentioned conferences reflected an old understanding of agency as that of individual sovereigns by referring to them as ‘high contracting parties’. The terms portraying the collaborating parties as one collective entity capable of acting on its own were virtually absent.Footnote 26
This diplomatic custom was transformed with the adoption at the Hague Conference of the Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes. This convention marked a significant change in diplomatic language of formal agreements. The preamble to the Convention used a novel statement in which participating ‘Powers’ recognised ‘the solidarity uniting the members of the society of civilized nations (la société des nations civilisées)’.Footnote 27 This assertion was followed by a rhetorical proclamation of the extension of ‘the empire of law’ and agreement to institute ‘a tribunal of arbitration’. As such, it signalled an appeal to new grounds of legitimacy for international agreements.
The society of nations was not a concept unknown to the scholars of international law and the wider debate on international politics,Footnote 28 but it was one of the first assertive speech acts in which states collectively recognised the reality of the society of (civilised) nations thus indicating a change in an otherwise conservative diplomatic vocabulary. The novelty of institutions and practices established by the Convention has already been registered and appraised by the contemporaries and later commentators.Footnote 29 This article argues that besides novel proposals for institutional reform it was a notably innovative rhetorical move: treaty preambles and opening articles under the old regime justified agreement over treaty subjects by customary reference to peace and friendship between individual monarchs, which were deemed essential to tranquillity in Europe as a whole.Footnote 30 The rhetorical move of the 1899 Convention added an extra dimension to the self-conception of ‘the civilised world’: while previously, states or monarchs were bundled together by legal instruments emphasising their independent character, on this occasion an international collective entity appeared as existing prior to an international contract which was made in its name.Footnote 31
To a degree, this rhetorical move was directed against the past practice. With a great number of states, including the United States, represented at the conference, the event was fundamentally different from the post-Napoleon great-power management system.Footnote 32 While the great powers managing European affairs referred to themselves as a ‘concert’ or ‘alliance’, the new assembly transcended the confines of the exclusive club by asserting a more inclusive, albeit not universal, concept of society/community.Footnote 33 For this reason the language of self-identification employed in a discourse of great power management had to be replaced with more inclusive terms underscoring solidarity. This interpretation is empowered by hindsight and must not mislead one into thinking that a change from alliance among independent sovereigns to a society/community of nations was in any way predetermined. A wider representation of nations at the event, some with overseas colonies, supplies only a part of the answer as to why a conceptual change occurred. The other part consists in the nature of the event, and in the role played by participating diplomats and experts.
Epistemic community at the HagueFootnote 34
In contrast to earlier somewhat arcane diplomatic congresses and royal summits, the Hague Conference of 1899 appeared to be a qualitatively different event and venue. During the conference, the Hague was home not only to numerous diplomats from a record number of countries (26), but also to a number of journalists, peace activists, and public figures. Conference deliberations originally were not meant to depart from the diplomatic norm of secrecy. But reports on the conference in the media and discussion of its progress in the city and abroad turned it into a site of public debate, or rhetorical battlefield, on the prospects of definitive peace and disarmament rather than a mere diplomatic negotiation.Footnote 35 Thus, the arguments that conference participants addressed to each other had also to be dovetailed to the sentiment and expectations of a wider international audience, even if the latter was even more hazily understood then than now.
The conference was special on yet another count, which sheds light on the nexus of theory and practice in bringing about conceptual change. As Arthur Eyffinger states, the Hague Peace Conference was ‘the first major clash of the intellectual and political spheres, represented by the legal and diplomatic disciplines’.Footnote 36 The composition of diplomatic delegations was indeed outstanding. Together with professional diplomats, such as the Russian ambassador in London De Staal or Sir Julian Pauncefote, the British ambassador in Washington, the delegations commissioned by participating powers also included acclaimed experts in international arbitration and academic discussion of ‘international law’. It is not accidental that an editorial in The Times remarked scornfully on the idea of the conference as ‘pleasing only to theorists and professors’.Footnote 37
Thus, the ranks of legal scholars at the conference included Baron von Stengel and Philipp Zorn (Germany); professor Heinrich Lammasch (Austria-Hungary); professor Chevalier Edouard Descamps (Belgium); professor and foreign ministry juristconsult Louis Renault (France); a councillor and professor Fyodor Martens (Russia), professor Tobias Asser (Netherlands);Footnote 38 history professor Andrew White and an expert in international law Frederick W. Holls (United States).
Not only did these delegates hold similar academic posts, most of them contributed to the work of the Institute of International Law and published in the same academic journals such as Revue and Institute’s Annuaire. This ensured a degree of familiarity outside the conference with the arguments made by participants’ academic peers and diplomatic counterparts. Moreover, some of them are reported as having more personal ties with each other.Footnote 39
Broad representation of practicing and academic lawyers had a major impact on the working of the conference and implications to rhetoric, arguments, and terminology used in the final documents and session minutes. Some of these lawyers, together with other prominent scholars, such as John Westlake, later joined the Permanent Court of Arbitration founded in the Hague and contributed to further dissemination of new terminology in the legal practice. However, the academic background of participating scholars should not be overstated, many of them (for example, Renault, White, Martens) were also professional diplomats, which in cases such as Martens’ compromised their authority in legal scholarship.Footnote 40
This community entertained a heterogeneous set of views on the nature of international law. While some were staunch protagonists of international law, others did not believe international law existed at all. As Martti Koskenniemi pointed out, it was quite ironic that Germany appointed Stengel and Zorn as members of its delegation. For the former was known for depreciating peace projects, while the latter was sceptical of the whole idea of international law.Footnote 41 Such a spectrum of views explains the absence of consensus over the basic understanding of international law. Hence, justification of proposals put before the conference could not be based merely on a supposition that they were rooted in international law.
Participation of international and public law experts, who held diverse views on the subject, reflected in the character of the event that became a peculiar rhetorical ‘double game’. A dual role of experts as academics and diplomats explains the rhetorical and conceptual means they chose to use in debates. As will be demonstrated below, they drew on conventional and novel arguments in debates on international law and adjusted such use to the concerns of diplomacy. The dual role of speaking agents meant that in deploying a specific argument they had to take into consideration the rules of using particular concepts in their professional field in order to make the arguments sound meaningful to peers and at the same time to professional diplomats, not all of whom were enthusiastic about compromising on sovereign rights in favour of new institutions. Thus, the innovation in the debate was a contingent outcome of rhetorical interventions that sought to persuade a particular epistemic-diplomatic community assembled at the Hague and, to a much lesser degree, not to disenchant international public opinion. For this reason conventional disciplinary arguments made at the conference did not result in a new knowledge or concepts pertinent to the field of law and political thought. However, they conditioned the scope and nature of diplomatic appropriation of new concepts with subsequent translation of appropriated concepts into collectively asserted interstate reality.
‘International community’ in diplomatic rhetoric
Novel phraseology at the Hague Conference of 1899
The Convention for Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, in which the term ‘society of civilized nations’ first appeared, was a product of the Third Commission of the Conference that focused solely on the issues of dispute settlement and institutions of international arbitration. Hence, our task is to establish who might have introduced the term and in which specific argumentative contexts it could have enjoyed the power of persuasion. The draft of the preamble to the Convention, in its final reading, reported by the Commission was adopted without discussion in the ninth plenary meeting of the conference (28 July 1899). The earlier version of the whole Convention was read at the seventh meeting (25 July), but no changes were made to the phrase of interest. Thus, the introduction of the new term can only be explained by reference to the discussions held within the Commission. The Commission was presided over by Léon Bourgeois, who was to play a key role in advocating the cause of the League of Nations and become the President of its Council thereby providing for knowledge transfer to a more institutionalised and inclusive organisational setting. The Committee of Examination that worked on the formulations included among others Descamps, Pauncefote, Lammasch, Martens, Zorn, Holls, and Asser. Descamps, who worked on the plan for international arbitration for the Inter-Parliamentary Union (est. 1889), was appointed a rapporteur of the Commission.Footnote 42
In his opening speech at the second meeting of the Committee of Examination on 29 May, Chevalier Descamps overviewed proposals for the organisation of mediation, international commissions of inquiry, and arbitration, and seemingly set a rhetorical trend by commending them as having ‘great value to the general welfare of humanity as well as to the individual welfare of the various members of the international community (la communauté internationale)’.Footnote 43 The work of the committee started with analysis and reaction to the original Russian proposal for a draft of the convention. However, the Russian delegation promptly presented an alternative proposal for a draft, supplemented shortly with explanatory memoranda for individual articles as a reaction to other delegations expressing interest at the first meeting of the commission in making the court of arbitration the subject of discussion (Pauncefote transmitted a copy of the alternative draft to the Marquees of Salisbury, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on 7 June 1899). The Russian explanatory note used a rather novel diplomatic rhetoric that aimed at persuasion by making reference to ‘la communauté internationale’. More specifically, the term appears in an explanation of articles V and X concerning mediation and obligatory arbitration. In defence of the institution of mediation the Russian note maintains that it must be a ‘response to that real community of material and moral interests which creates an international union among the various States’. The note further commented on the existing practice of not offering mediation by neutral states and suggested it should be corrected because the effects of wars are ‘incalculable upon all the States constituting the international community’.Footnote 44 As such, the threat of consequences of war to ‘international community’ is a central theme of the Russian argument.Footnote 45 Nonetheless, the argument did not fail to emphasise that mediation, which must be the duty of neutral powers to offer, should respect the independence of sovereign states.
Drawing on the Treaty of Berne on the Postal Union (1874), the Russian proposal suggested application of the principle of obligatory arbitration to a number of treaties that were considered to have a ‘universal character’. Among these treaties it singled out ‘treaties providing for the international protection of intellectual and moral interests, whether of particular States, or, in general, of the whole international community’.Footnote 46 The Russian explanatory note also included an element of a fashionable evolutionary interpretation of the interests and formation of international community – with the increase in communication between states it envisioned that ‘a great number of their moral and material interests will lose their exclusively national character, and will be raised to the height of interests of the whole international community’.Footnote 47 This is an instance of a common train of thought in theoretical jurisprudence, which at the time appeared unconventional in diplomatic contexts. Only half a century later such theories would find their way into diplomacy through the approach that people like Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman took to European solidarity and integration.
Authorship
The authorship of the Russian note belongs to Martens who used nearly identical phrases in his comments on the achievements of the conference upon his return to St Petersburg. He compared this international event to ‘states uniting together into a great society of mutual insurance against a criminal will and enemies of the state order’.Footnote 48 Although this was not yet a morally and politically superior actor, collective interests were presented as superior and essential for progress,Footnote 49 which was largely in correspondence with Martens’ internationalist sympathies.Footnote 50
Descamps and Martens seem to have been the key users of the novel vocabulary that helped to portray their agenda in a commendable light and overturn allegedly particularist aspirations of the opponents. Speculations surrounding single origin and authorship, and hence intentionality, of conceptual innovation would inevitably be inconclusive. Descamps by the time of the conference had built reputation of an authority on the subject of international arbitration. This was partly due to the project he prepared for the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which was published as ‘Essay upon Arbitration’ in Revue Footnote 51 (the publication was known at least to Asser [editor] and Martens [a member of ‘editorial board’] well before the conference). The extracts from this essay were distributed among the delegates so that they could better acquaint themselves with the subject of prospective discussions. In this essay Descamps makes use of both ‘international community’ (la communauté internationale) and ‘international society’ (la société internationale) in advocating the idea of international arbitration and arguing for conditionality of state sovereignty upon membership in international society. However, in this article Descamps cites Martens’ own treatise on international law published in 1882 and translated into French in 1883. In this treatise Martens developed a theory of international obschenie (‘intercourse’)Footnote 52 and its law, although it was rendered into French as droit de la communauté international.Footnote 53 Thus, Descamps could not have been unaware of this basic conceptual underpinning of Martens’ theory of international law.
What can be argued with a degree of certainty is that Descamps’ pronouncement together with Martens’ explanation were among the early, if not the first, deployments of the term ‘international community’ in formal diplomatic rhetoric at the conference. Later at the conference it was Descamps who made the interests and value of international collectivity, expressed with both terms ‘society of nations’ and ‘international community’, the spearhead of rhetoric defending the achievements of the Third Commission and, more specifically, international institutions. Descamps, as the rapporteur of the commission, prepared and delivered a final report – praised by other delegates, such as Pauncefote – on the draft of the Convention to the seventh plenary session of the conference on 25 July. He inserted the appeal to solidarity among ‘the society of civilized nations’ into the preamble of the Convention thereby making it a justification of ensuing legal clauses.
Words as swords
This section demonstrates how the use of a concept could help to defend a policy proposal and what makes such a use political. Diplomats at the Hague were concerned with a display of unanimity, which they thought would be essential for the promulgation of new international norms. Therefore, rhetorical battles could not have been waged with a zero-sum game scenario in mind. Instead, members of epistemic community had to persuade the opponents to sign the final document by leaving room for a compromise and offering such definitions for novel institutions that would take into account, however partially, the alternative and even opposing views on international law and politics. It does not mean that the result of debates needs to fully satisfy a recalcitrant party, for this would lead to zero or little change. An institutional or normative change indicates that one argumentative position eventually prevailed, even if at the expense of certain parts in original proposals. The outcome of rhetorical struggle then means that a conceptual innovation would not be a complete rupture with an earlier linguistic convention; instead it is likely to integrate adaptation to and extension of past conceptual apparatus.
As noted above, novel diplomatic terms ‘the society of nations’ and ‘international community’ were used to justify reform proposals. They were political tools that helped to advocate an institutional change and defend the scope of authority of these new institutions. Therefore, the change in shared diplomatic language, which would mean recognition by states of a new ontology, was part and parcel of power struggle over policy. Thus, taking language as epiphenomenal would be misleading as the debates at the conference were about definitions and policy justifications.
The terms in question were used to justify the institutions of mediation and arbitration perceived by some, in their original formulation, as encroachment on sovereign power. The original Russian proposal contained the idea of obligatory arbitration. It appeared to be one of those ideas that could have driven the conference into a political gridlock. From the very start the German delegation expressed concerns with anything that could compromise on state sovereignty. Thus, they were reluctant to accept the idea of founding an international ‘court’; also the German delegate Zorn opposed the idea of obligatory arbitration.Footnote 54 Enormous efforts had to be put into persuading Dr Zorn and German government to eventually agree with the proposal.Footnote 55 The price for a final consensual version of the Convention draft was that the idea of obligatory arbitration was dropped.
Thus, rhetorical persuasion of opposition and justification of ‘new’ international institutions was key to diplomatic negotiations and the outcome of the conference. This is where the epistemic and diplomatic powers converged most conspicuously. In the original Russian explanatory note, the concept of international community explained the need for, if not demanded, institutions of international arbitration. Following the stage of negotiations in which original proposals were amended, Descamps’ final report uses more common and acceptable justifications for novel institutions. In this report the concept of international community/society is used in such a way as to underscore that new institutions do not threaten sovereignty and to capitalise on the standard of civilisation discourse maintained by both old and new colonial powers.
For instance, ‘good offices and mediation’ were justified with ‘the ties which bind the members of an international society composed of civilized States one with the other’.Footnote 56 Offering such offices (Art. III of the draft), in Descamps’ argument, is ‘a duty belonging, under certain conditions, to the society of civilized States’.Footnote 57 The latter is yet another example encapsulating diplomatic and scholarly reasoning as not only it assures participants in preserved discretion of the states to enjoy such duties, it also overrides an old suspicion that such an act may be perceived as unfriendly by parties in conflict, that is, the idea that Russian delegate Martens associated with theoretical propositions in Johann Caspar Bluntschli’s works.Footnote 58 As a result, an obligatory part was virtually lifted.
In terms of conceptual use and innovation a more important argument is in Descamps’ presentation of the final part of the Convention concerning international arbitration, which states:
The society of civilized nations (La société des nations civilisées) recognizes the existence of legal principles and rules set to a common standard international law. Under the requirements of this law each State retains its autonomy, in accordance with its primary and unchangeable inclination to live its own life … But at the same time, it recognizes that it is bound to the other States in the international community (la communauté internationale). The farther law progresses, and the more it enters into the society (société) of nations, the more clearly arbitration appears woven into the structure of that society.Footnote 59
This argument illustrates two simultaneous processes: a conceptual innovation in diplomatic vocabulary – represented by the terms ‘the society of nations’ and ‘international community’, – and adaptation of novel vocabulary to the existing political and social conceptions of sovereign state and the rights of colonisation. The latter is a crucial condition for an innovation to be accepted by a wider audience and to exercise justificatory power. Some may have doubted the existence of international community, which implicates the law of community, but hardly any colonial power would have denied the distinction between ‘the society of civilised states’ and the rest. Furthermore, this report emphasises the independent and sovereign nature of states that are bound to the idea of an autonomous ‘organic’ life thereby underlying the scope of the society of nations.
On this point Descamps’ stance becomes even clearer in his further comments on the authority of the proposed court of arbitration. Thus, he opined with a pacifying tenor that ‘the organization of the Court does not present insurmountable obstacles, provided we become imbued with the idea that the international community is a society (la communauté internationale est une société) of coordination and not of subordination’ and for this reason the new ‘instrument of international justice preserves the character of a free tribunal among independent States’.Footnote 60 Thus, the final justification of proposed institutions succeeded in portraying a new situation with a combination of old and new terms by neutralising the aspects of novel vocabulary that could be taken as encroaching on sovereignty and utilising the positive connotations of conventional terms.
In pursuing this rhetorical strategy experts-diplomats already operate with a new concept of international community. This follows from the attempts to supply the concept with definitions, to connect it to other concepts, such as international law, and determine the nature of connection. In addition to tying up a novel concept with conventional ideas about colonisation and state sovereignty, the protagonists significantly innovated by building on a fashionable evolutionary argument that saw a greater community of interest emerging among states and thus better served the purpose of justifying new institutions. The former part was necessary to enlist support of the sceptics, the latter innovated by making comprehensible the idea that the confines of a limited society of states could be transcended in future. All these rhetorical moves indicate that theoretical arguments and the concept of community were effectively imported into diplomatic context to perform an important political role. None of these were accidental as the concept was central in jurisprudence to the understanding of international law and institutions and implied a theory of the interrelationship between law and society.Footnote 61
This also explains why it was the concept of international community, rather than something else, that proved more instrumental to justification of new institutions. To overcome the particularism of sovereignty and at the same time ensure support of zealous defenders of sovereign rights, the protagonists of ‘internationalist’ agenda had to capitalise on the conceptual apparatus that had already been customarily used in the law of nations discourse. In traditional diplomacy and the law of nations discourse the terms that described forms of political union and collective existence were ‘amicitia’ (friendship) and ‘societas’ (partnership, alliance).Footnote 62 If one chose to advocate new international institutions on the basis that they answer to common good and collective existence, then these would be the key concepts the application of which could be modified to describe and justify more comprehensive institutional arrangements.Footnote 63
This is exactly what ‘innovating ideologists’ did by drawing on the concept of society, connecting it to ‘the society of civilised nations’, placing it into an ‘evolutionary’ perspective and describing an international reality with the term ‘international community’. Another reason for the preference of ‘international community’ is endogenous to the epistemic community itself: at the time it was becoming a constitutive concept for the whole field of international law. For protagonists the use of this concept reflected a stance in the debate on international law qua law, but this will be dealt with in detail in the last section of the article.
One key effect of the chosen rhetorical strategy was that novel vocabulary brought about a conceptual change in an otherwise conservative discourse of diplomacy and international politics: it recognised and reified international community. Not only was novel vocabulary adopted by diplomats, the concept also received sovereign ratification as it was inserted into the text of the Convention.Footnote 64 As already intimated, this newly asserted reality of international community implied only the willingness to develop common rules thus falling short of imagining such international community as an abstract entity capable of independent action. Therefore, the first asserted self-conception of a situational ensemble of states as international community was nothing more than recognition of having vaguely defined interests (for example, maintenance of peace) in common. At the same time, the possession of such conception was already sufficient to make judgements contrasting community to individual sovereign states with the aim of persuading the latter to a desirable course of action.
Conceptual reaffirmation and the Hague Conference of 1907
The second Hague Conference of 1907 is key to identifying whether an innovation became a linguistic convention. In many rhetorical aspects the second conference followed suit while in others it substantially innovated. In contrast to the 1899 conference, the term ‘international community’ was already widely used in various commissions, which testifies to the consistency in using the appropriated concept. Among the more active users were the American delegation, which ostensibly saw in this vocabulary an opportunity to promote the interests of commercial republics, and Luis Renault, a key rapporteur of several commissions and a participant of the first Hague Conference. It is possibly due to his consistent use of ‘international community’ that the reference to the term became a common rhetorical device of the conference as a whole. Similarly to Descamps, Martens, and others, Renault was no stranger to juridical discourses and can be said to have been a protagonist of international community.Footnote 65
At the second Hague Conference Renault picks up the motto of rhetorical arguments made in 1899 and in later commentaries. Supported obviously by the convocation of the new conference and continued commitment to further development of international norms, the evolutionary argument about international community continued to be in vogue. In 1907 it was developed even further to associate progress with institutionalisation as a way of increasing legitimacy for the latter. Renault’s remark in his opening speech as the rapporteur of the First Commission on the draft of the Convention on international prize court (a project that did not materialise) bears an example of such an argument:
Finally, we think that it is not a matter of indifference, for the orderly development of international relations, to have created this first permanent judicial organism, which, in a limited but singularly important field, provides for the needs of the community of States. Could this community bring its conscience more and more to think of its duties as well as of its rights, international relations will gain the security needful for them.Footnote 66
Building on a gradualist developmental idea, this argument indicates an attempt to picture community of states as possessing subjectivity, that is, to portray it as an entity that is capable of knowing itself and its interests. This idea did not seem odd to the delegates of the second conference as they commonly justified and explained various proposals by reference to the ‘interests of community of nations’.Footnote 67 In terms of ongoing conceptual innovation this was a further step in the affirmation of a new actor whose interests were made an important factor in moral justification of one’s policy. The growing weight of this factor and the power of rhetoric capitalising on it are corroborated by recurrent appeals to moral authority of community in proposals to modify certain norms and practices and exerting pressure on the opponents.Footnote 68
Furthermore, in his report made on behalf of Second Subcommission of the Third Commission, in the meeting of 27 July, Renault argued that the conference sought to discover means to avoid violations of duties by neutral powers ‘to insure to all peoples the tranquillity to which they have a right in the international community’.Footnote 69 Although the understanding of community as an exclusive association had manifested itself before, this is still an important twist of the argument as it suggests that entitlement to a certain good/right can be conceived of only within a framework of some international community. The rhetoric of the first conference was slightly different because its speakers were still trying to discern traces of the community of interest in allegedly existing laws. Whether the understanding that the collective good prevails over the individual sovereign good and that the collective in this context also means the universal became parts of the conventional appeal to international community was still a matter of debate beyond the walls of the conference. However, the scrutiny of novel diplomatic arguments, which conditioned the adoption of new international conventions, demonstrates how in the course of two diplomatic conferences international community started to acquire agency and moral power.
What were they doing? Situating conference rhetoric within the relevant contexts
The terms ‘la communauté des nations’, ‘la communauté internationale’, and ‘international community’ employed at the Hague Conferences started to gain popularity already in the 1870s–1880s.Footnote 70 This is when the nascent professional community of international law seemingly came to possess and consciously use the concept of international community. Thus, the task for the remainder of the article is to establish conventionality or novelty and, thus, polemical nature of rhetorical arguments employed at the Hague Conferences. In order to understand what speakers did in performing their dual roles one needs to place these arguments within a wider debate on the nature of international politics, international law, and peace.Footnote 71 Jurists, who drafted the Convention and defended the need to establish new international institutions, tried to persuade not only their diplomatic counterparts at the conference but a wider professional community and – given that some deliberations contrary to the original plans became public under the pressure of peace activists – international public opinion.
One of the bottom-line conceptual cleavages at the conferences concerned the prospects of international law, institutions, and their role in conflict prevention and resolution. Theoretical responses to this problem, as follows from the works participants published well before the conferences, were similarly heterogeneous supplying contending interpretations of the foundations and nature of rules, which the new institutions were/were not supposed to be erected upon. Therefore, the concepts and arguments used at the conferences can be explicated by reference to the stance of their authors in the grand nineteenth-century disciplinary and political debates.
Even before the first Hague Conference commenced, it had received some bad press in Germany, the UK, and elsewhere. One popular opinion was that the conference would assemble to discuss ‘utopian ideas’ and make impractical plans for creating ‘United States of Europe’.Footnote 72 Besides suspecting the conference proposals being visionary, it was held that any measures possibly infringing on national interests would be doomed to fail. Thus, Martens during his diplomatic tour around European capitals had to explain in the interview to The Times that he saw his mission as ‘not connected with the Utopian ideas of eternal and permanent peace’, yet he was still hopeful about the results ‘because this will be the first occasion in which the civilized nations of the world have met together, in a time of peace … to legislate on their mutual relations’.Footnote 73 Descamps entertained the same idea when preparing his report for the first conference. Already in his ‘Essay’ he warned that progress is not to be confused with ‘fantasies’ or ‘utopias’, which he compared to chimeras; whereas progress, he asserted, is a natural development. He opined that that ‘l’empire du droit’ is gradually strengthening and allowing for the establishment of international arbitration, which in itself manifests the development and evolution of ‘la société internationale’.Footnote 74 This – in understanding of protagonists – was different from utopias that imagine the world government legislating and enforcing peace. It is one of the reasons why in the report to the conference Descamps emphasised that international community is a society of coordination rather than subordination.
The latter argument signposts a milestone development in debates on international law. Much of the debate hinged on the question of whether international law is law ‘properly so called’. The debate was provoked by the negative qualification supplied by John Austin (1863) who argued that all law is by command, hence international law should rather be called international morality.Footnote 75 His view gained currency in the English universities,Footnote 76 but as such the idea that only sovereign can be the source of law was popular also elsewhere (for instance, Zorn was one of its exponents).Footnote 77 Even newspapers reporting on the conference doubted the powers of ‘all the professors of international law’ to bring about a significant result because ‘[t]he world is not governed by theories of international ‘law’ so-called, although there is neither law-giver nor sanction.’Footnote 78
The academic delegates at the Hague Conferences in one way or another represented possible reactions to Austin’s proposition. Thus, what they did with their rhetorical moves could be assessed against three types of generic responses to the problem of international law. And these responses constitute the epistemic context for the experts at the Hague. The first response is based on the supposition that society exists among nations, although it is of different nature than that among individuals. As long as one believes there is a society, then, it is argued, one cannot but acquiesce to the fact that society is governed by rules, rule-following generates rights and obligations and so on. An American jurist Henry Wheaton was among those who attempted to logically deduce international law from a constitutive concept of international society.Footnote 79 The second response is not fundamentally different but explains the (im)maturity of international law by the logic of development. Analogy is central to this line of thinking as defenders of international law believed that society of societies can follow the model of individuals who are capable of perfecting their relations over time through ‘intercourse’ thereby developing rights and obligations within the state.Footnote 80
The use of such analogy becomes fundamental to further juridical thinking. For if individuals are capable of perfecting their lives by founding political societies, by developing norms, culture, and a certain ‘standard of civilization’, why can we not think along the same lines about the relations among nations? Such theories were soon formulated: among them was an argument made by Bluntschli who believed that mankind ‘in its complete development, it must reveal itself as one person. The organization of humanity is the Universal State.’Footnote 81 It is his theory that Martens labelled as utopian and distinguished from his own theory of limited international community of civilised states.Footnote 82
A third response consisted in grounding the defence of international law in ‘sociology’ of international ‘intercourse’. If one is prepared to see international community as imperfect and remotely distant from a political organisation, then ‘sociology’ would be able to endlessly provide evidence of such ‘intercourses’ and shared interests. Lassa Oppenheim, a contemporary of the Hague Conferences, offered a response of this kind by positing the existence of ‘international community’ and its law of nations. He defined community as an interest in creating a ‘constant and manifold intercourse’ (that is, a view consonant with that of Descamps, Martens, and Renault) and redefined law as ‘law between’ rather than ‘law above’ states.Footnote 83 Furthermore, he identified the limit of its development in the evolvement within states themselves, which would make the world state redundant.Footnote 84 Importantly, this community could exist only among ‘civilized states’.Footnote 85
These arguments make up a context against which conceptual and rhetorical innovation at the Hague must be judged. Martens’ theory of ‘international intercourse’ is similarly ‘sociological’ in the sense that it focuses on the ways ‘obschenie’ between states develops and recognises ‘society of states’ only as a loose association. As such it is distinguished from the utopian projects of eternal peace and projects based on the idea of representation, however limited, such as the one developed by Bluntschli, since these projects would destroy the order of obschenie of independent sovereign states.Footnote 86 It was this principle that reflected Martens’ creed of ‘practicality’, which he articulated at the Hague. Its opposition to utopian projects secured proximity with Descamps’ views and served to persuade sceptics in the statist camp. After all, the institution of the Court of Arbitration was seen by Martens, Descamps, and Westlake as an inherently practical enterprise as it reflected the precedents of arbitration already arranged by states. However, the concept of international community that this epistemic community introduced into diplomatic language of states’ self-identification – by carving a place between a narrow Austian conception of law and the theories described as utopian – had to be also restricted and limited in scope for both epistemic and diplomatic reasons.
In this way international community was asserted and legitimised as a diplomatic concept, as such it referred to a loosely defined corresponding ‘reality’. As concepts, especially novel, are always contested, the principle of ‘practicality’, which the conference rhetoric more or less consistently observed, was successfully abandoned by some of the influential commentators of these diplomatic events. This can be partly explained by reference to the arguments that introduced the concept in the first place: they brought along a peculiar combination of ‘sociological’ observation and beliefs in the evolution of interstate intercourse and norms.Footnote 87 The Hague Conferences themselves were placed by their commentators within this progressive framework as one of its stages ultimately leading to a representative world organisation.Footnote 88 Some of the delegates, for example, Frederick Holls, considered it as a type of modern Magna Carta and an illustration to the idea of the world federation.Footnote 89 This further development shows that once the concept is admitted to a specific linguistic domain it ceases to be the property of its authors and original context and becomes a tool in subsequent rhetorical battles.
Conclusion
This article explored the problem of the international from the perspective of language, rhetoric, and concepts that describe and legitimise its configurations. It was argued that international community became a key concept of international affairs as a result of power struggle that unfolded at the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907. For this reason alone the Hague Conferences should be given due credit and re-established within the range of constitutive diplomatic events alongside the Paris Peace Conference (1919) and the San Francisco Conference (1945).
The focus on conceptual innovation and its association with a particular political setting offers several further insights. It confirms a precept of conceptual history that concepts are always contested while those that enjoy consensual understanding and application reflect the perspective of winners in a rhetorical-political battle and do so only until they are effectively challenged by a new contender. Understanding concepts of the international as temporary products of power struggle engages with the realist interpretation of power politics on at least two counts.
Firstly, it highlights that there need not necessarily be a contradiction between international community and a statist perspective on international politics. With the case of international community this article demonstrated that states (through their diplomatic representatives), as key actors in international politics, constructed the reality of international community through sovereign and collective assertive speech acts. This conceptual innovation was limited because a peculiar diplomatic-epistemic community at the Hague could not afford to embrace the ideas of central authority, subordination, organs of community, and, hence, its agency.
Secondly, given that states as sovereign actors are able to assert new realities, which subsequently shape their understanding of what it means to be a state, and given that such assertions are the results of power struggle at the institutionalised sites of diplomatic and public debates, it is instructive for realist thought to direct attention to rhetorical power struggles that eventually change the world we live in. It is in this context that a power/knowledge nexus in theory and diplomacy acquires an entirely new meaning. The work of this nexus could further be illuminated with the model of conceptual innovation, spelled out in this article, in the context of debates over new concepts of the United Nations, such as ‘development’ and ‘Responsibility to Protect’.
Looking at the power/knowledge nexus as reflected in rhetorical tactics that aimed to stretch the meaning of ‘society of nations’ and ‘international community’ poses further questions about the English School’s central distinction of society and community.Footnote 90 Diplomatic rhetoric demonstrates how amenable these two terms are to redescription and inversion, which makes any stable linkage of strictly distinguished terms to corresponding ‘substantial’ criteria (that is, norms) look highly problematic. At the same time, contributions to the Hague Conference so strongly asserted the idea of international society that one is tempted to see the foundations of the English school thinking in diplomatic deliberative assemblies as much as in the Grotian intellectual tradition.
Finally, the rhetorical arguments deployed at the Hague Conferences associated it so strongly with the ideas of progress and the co-constitution of law and society that they may be acted upon in future diplomatic debates to transcend the limits of the concept set up originally by state representatives. In fact, the evolutionary arguments together with the interpretation of the Hague Conferences as first signs of institutionalisation of community provided grounds to transcend the limited concept and endow community with agency already in popular and scholarly debates of the twentieth century. This new and largely teleological concept of international community prompted a vision that saw the elements of community’s agency in contemporary political developments (that is, further diplomatic conferences and projects for the League of Nations or the UN), while preserving it within the range of moral authorities that could be used to justify changes in international order.
Acknowledgements
I would like to deeply thank all participants of political theory research seminars at the University of Jyväskylä and European University at St Petersburg, the conference panels on international thought at the International Studies Association (2015) and History of Concepts Group (2014) who kindly commented on earlier versions of this article. I am particularly grateful to Lucian Ashworth, Alexey Bessudnov, Nicholas Onuf, and Sergei Prozorov for their close reading and inspirational suggestions. All remaining errors are mine.
Funding
This project was supported by the Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher Grant (No. 257129).
