Peace Movements, Civil Society, and the Development of International Law

Oxford Handbooks Online

Peace Movements, Civil Society, and the Development of International Law

Cecelia Lynch
The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law
Edited by Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters

Print Publication Date: Nov 2012 Subject: Law, History of Law, International Law, Civil Law
Online Publication Date: Dec DOI: 10.1093/law/9780199599752.003.0009
2012

Abstract and Keywords

The impact of peace movements on the development of international law over the course of the 19th and early
20th centuries was significant, especially in advancing norms of equality of status, and in advocating for and
legitimizing international organizations. This chapter relates the impact of peace movements and other civil society
actors on the development of international law beginning in the early 19th century and culminating with the
creation of the United Nations in 1945. During this period, civil society actors, including peace movements, had
considerable success in influencing international legal norms, the development of institutions, and the negotiation
of treaties regarding arbitration, humanitarianism, and arms control. The discussion focuses on ‘Western’, and
especially Anglo-American, peace activists from the Global North. Legal norms promoted by these actors included
constraints on States’ rights to wage war and the requirement that States attempt to resolve conflict peacefully
before using force.

Keywords: international organization, peace movements, civil society, United Nations, humanitarianism, arms control

1. Introduction

The impact of peace movements on the development of international law over the course of the 19th and early
20th centuries was significant, especially in advancing norms of equality of status and in advocating for and
legitimizing international organization. This chapter relates the impact of peace movements and other civil society
actors on the development of international law beginning in the early 19th century and culminating with the
creation of the United Nations in 1945. During this period, civil society actors, including peace movements, had
considerable success influencing international legal norms, the development of institutions, and the negotiation of
treaties regarding arbitration, humanitarianism, and arms control. The (p. 199) establishment wing of peace
movements linked with the movement for the development and codification of international law, which developed
and strengthened enormously, especially in the US and Europe, during the 19th century. More grassroots and
radical peace movement groups linked peace to anti-imperialism and abolitionism. Both of these movement trends
had memberships that extended beyond the growing numbers of legal experts to include a variety of civil society
groups, religious and secular, and these expanded exponentially in the period before, during, and after the First
World War.

While the primary focus of this chapter of necessity concerns ‘Western’ and especially Anglo-American peace
activists from the ‘Global North’, it also incorporates wherever possible actors from other parts of the world,
including Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Much of Asia and Africa remained colonized by Westerners until after the
Second World War, but activists such as Mahatma Gandhi influenced other groups and individuals around the
world during the period. Because most Latin American and many Caribbean nations were liberated from colonialism

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in the 19th century (after the Haitian Revolution), their representatives often collaborated with peace-movement
activists from other parts of the world to place measures for disarmament and arbitration on the agendas of
international organizations, including the League of Nations. African activists and intellectuals also articulated
cosmopolitan norms of democracy and independence, which intersected with developing human rights law and
justifications for decolonization. Finally, Japan developed a peace movement in the early part of the 20th century,
which also linked to activists from Western States through transnational peace networks.

The story of the intersection between these civil society actors and international law is, therefore, one of efforts to
achieve several intertwining and sometimes contradictory goals: taming sovereign States and reducing their ability
to wage war, democratizing foreign policy, expanding free trade, but also challenging great-power imperialism.
Kantian universalist, Whig-progressivist, critical-Marxist, and religious politics informed each other, and sometimes
clashed, as the following narrative demonstrates.

Legal norms promoted by these actors included constraints on States’ rights to wage war and the requirement that
States attempt to resolve conflict peacefully before using force. Over time, these norms were embodied in treaties
and agreements such as the Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907), the Covenant of the League of Nations (1919),
the Pact of Paris (1928) (also known as the Kellogg–Briand Pact),1 and the Charter of the United Nations (1945).
Additional norms promoted by peace movements include the constitutive principles of universalism (the notion that
all (p. 200) political actors should participate in decisions about peace, security, and the improvement of
international life), and equality of status (the notion that they should do so on an equal basis and that rights should
be granted to and obligations binding upon all) that provide the foundation for 20th-century universal international
organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. But while all groups promoted equality of
status, they differed on whether to advocate immediate or more gradual abolition in the 19th, and decolonization in
the 20th century. As a result, ideas about how to achieve peace could conflict with demands for independence or
liberation, highlighting the different dimensions of the question of equality of status. Finally, and as a partial
outgrowth of these earlier movements, civil society actors during the period were at the forefront of articulating
norms underpinning the post-1945 development of international human rights and humanitarian law.

2. Civil Society Actors and the Philosophical Bases of International Law

Despite the ethical and programmatic differences among civil society actors, they were similar in that they all
attempted to achieve particular moral goods, for some partially and for others entirely, through new international
legal norms, treaties, and codes. This use of international law, for better or worse, differs from its use merely to
achieve a ‘practical association’ of States; for example,to guide behaviour without any assumption of a more
overarching common purpose.2 Indeed, some might argue that such a practical association always embeds
purposeful norms that cannot evade moral connotations. In this view, the content of the moral code becomes
extremely important. These actors created a space for ethical debate by providing reasons to legitimize certain
types of action and delegitimize others.3 These reasons were contested within peace movement and other civil
society groups as well as between these groups and government officials. The new legal procedures and
institutions created over the course of this period demonstrates the constitutive nature of modern international law,
that is, the role of social agents along with State representatives in articulating, legitimizing, and implementing it.

(p. 201) Immanuel Kant is frequently invoked to describe the relationship between civil society and international
law, especially regarding how the development of cosmopolitan ethics can foster peaceful legal norms. Kant's
understanding of the institutionalization of a republican peace and its relationship to ‘perpetual peace’ relies on the
combination of political and moral action. Coming from a long tradition that understands human nature as inherently
flawed, and writing during the period of Enlightenment thinking that espoused human reason as able to overcome
moral and political flaws to engender human progress, Kant saw the creation of republics (which allowed
participation and the use of reason at the domestic level) leading to the creation of an international law of nations
to solidify peace at the global level. Both would be made possible by the use of ethical reason by enlightened
peoples, who would connect with each other in a zone of peace that would gradually enlarge as others saw its
benefits until it encompassed the world.4 This type of Kantian ‘cosmopolitanism’ is often viewed as the basis for
civil society attempts to create a League of Nations in the early 20th century.5 The primary criticism of Kantian
cosmopolitanism is that it is based on deontological ethics that reject consequentialist arguments for ‘doing good’
and promoting international law in favour of principled ones. Deontological ethics formed the basis of Kant's moral

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reasoning, which he called the categorical imperative, asserting both that one must act according to principles that
can be universalized, and that human beings, having the power to reason, must be respected as ‘law-giving
beings’ in and of themselves. According to proponents of cosmopolitanism, therefore, respecting others and acting
according to principles capable of being universal can lay the foundations for peaceful relations among peoples.

In the early 20th century, Edward H Carr was the principle critic of this type of cosmopolitanism, arguing that it
promoted a false harmony of interests based on liberal assumptions that what was good for some was good for all.
In particular, Carr criticized the civil society groups that promoted the League of Nations and international law as
being unrealistic ‘utopians’.6 But a more sophisticated critique of Kantian cosmopolitanism was offered by West
African thinkers in the 1940s, who coupled (p. 202) the promotion of humanism and democracy with an
unbending adherence to equality of status between individuals of every race as well as between colonial powers
and colonies.7

In the narrative that follows, I demonstrate the complexity of the currents of thought and action that made up 19th
and early 20th century civil society activities in favour of international legal norms and institutions. I suggest that
the content of norms promoted during these periods emanates from constitutive processes that contain significant
moral tensions and contradictions for the movements and actors involved. This narrative highlights not only the
moral agency of these actors, but also the constitutive processes at play in which States (government officials),
and historical trends (material and ideational) shaped their group identities, programmatic goals, and successes
and failures.8

As a result, I argue that the non-state actors who promoted international legal norms and institutions ‘cannot be
easily classified within either the ideal-typical Kantian moral paradigm that keeps them in a deontological
straightjacket’, or the utopian nomenclature of liberal harmony.9 Instead, these actors formed an integral part of the
struggle for norms and mechanisms for peace-through-law that also embraced and reflected often contradictory
tendencies as well as bargaining with States.

3. Peace Movements and International Law in the 19th Century10

From the 19th century to 1945, peace activism moved from origins in Anglo-American non-conformist Protestantism
to a broader demographic that split into working-class versus free-trade activism in the 1930s and 1940s, to the
beginnings of a non-sectarian humanitarianism during the Crimean and US Civil Wars, to a renewed (p. 203) push
for peace through law (in the Hague Peace Conferences), social justice (through progressivism), and socialism
(through the trade-union movement) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to the movements for universal
international organization, arbitration, and disarmament from the League to the UN. Consistent with the constitutive
framework outlined above, it is important to emphasize that the origins and development of peace movements
occurred in conjunction with varying national and international events and trends. Peace movements were affected
by sociological developments in each period and their consequent interaction with other types of domestic issues
and movements; their goals and composition were often transformed by wars and international economic rivalries,
and they were spurred on by nascent attempts at institutionalized international cooperation. All of these, in turn,
influenced the content of movements’ efforts to shape international law and organization. Movements broadened in
their sociological composition throughout the 19th century, gradually expanding from origins in Anglo-American
Protestant nonconformism to include secular, radical, and internationalist elements. National and international
security concerns also affected the movements in both countries, influencing their growth, decline, ability, and
desire to promote specific kinds of normative standards and institutional mechanisms for the maintenance of
peace. From the late 19th century on, and especially during the inter-war period, civil society actors interacted
(through demonstrations as well as bargaining) with government officials to promote legal norms and institutions.

The centre of transnational peace activity was located in Britain and the US, with additional links to other parts of
Europe (Germany, France, Russia, Switzerland), Japan and elsewhere in Asia, parts of Latin America, and parts of
Africa and the Middle East. Much more needs to be written about local-transnational interactions on peace in the
‘non-Western’ parts of the world. While non-party organizations were typical of the US and Great Britain, peace
affiliations with political parties occurred for a time in France. Russian peace activism was best exemplified by
Tolstoy, who influenced Gandhi and many activists in Europe and the US.11 Women's activism produced
transnational peace links between the West, Japan, and abolitionist. Later, pan-African groups demanding

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decolonization intersected with peace organizations and brought together activists from the Caribbean, the US,
and the African continent.

3.1. Movement Foundations and Growth in the First Half of the 19th Century

In the United States, three peace societies were founded separately in New York, Massachusetts, and Ohio
between August and December 1815. All three fused into the (p. 204) American Peace Society under the
leadership of William Ladd in 1827. In Britain, William Allen founded the London Peace Society in June 1816.These
societies organized in the aftermath of significant transnational events: the American Revolution and War of 1812
(with Britain), the French Revolution and the attempted French hegemony in Europe led by Napoleon, and the
Haitian Revolution and the rise of anti-slavery activism by slaves, former slaves, and white sympathizers.

These first peace societies, however, represented primarily a nonconformist Christian attempt to enter the political
realm. Although technically non-sectarian, they included traditional Christian pacifists, primarily Quakers, and thus
employed Christian arguments in favour of peace. Historically, they are important because they moved anti-war
sentiment into public debate. According to Peter Brock, this new Christian activism in the form of peace societies
(instead of rejecting participation in the political realm) represented a new phase for Nonconformists and other
Protestant churches in the 19th century.12 These societies eventually learned of each other's existence. They
were ‘surprised and delighted’ by this knowledge, and after a time began to initiate mutual contacts.13

The efforts of the British and American peace societies between 1814 and 1816 represented, then, an organized
but non-institutionalized expression of anti-war sentiment that was not replicated on the European continent until
1830.14 The primary questions debated by early 19th-century movements included whether opposition to all war
was required by Christian ethics. This debate brought into the open a fundamental division that would plague all
Anglo-American peace movements thereafter. Pacifist opposition to war took the form of ethical opposition to all
killing, while many who opposed war on a more selective basis, later to be called pacifists and some to become
internationalists, promoted a Whiggish-functionalist belief in international progress and reform.15

The London peace group attempted to spread its ideas on the continent, but the US society concentrated on
proselytizing and disseminating tracts to religious congregations at home. However, despite the fact that
movements tended not to target political institutions, they did begin discussing and debating methods of reversing
and transcending the ‘custom of war’.16 Both pacifists and other antiwar society members agreed even at this
stage on the need to renounce wars of aggression; their joint call of opposition to the customary character of war
represented a nascent, vaguely formulated aspiration, and the beginnings of action to influence international legal
(p. 205) norms. They acted primarily for themselves and not to influence governments; neither governments nor
the Concert of Europe took much notice of the peace societies.17

Both ‘radicals’ and ‘free traders’ challenged the religious nature of peace societies, and the broader composition of
civil society activity for peace also gave rise to a series of international peace conferences in the 1840s. These
congresses provided a forum for the articulation and debate of a wide range of normative projects (including the
idea of a congress of nations), some of which would endure to become the precursors to 20th-century plans for
global international organization.

The radical movement for peace arose as part of new forms of social activism in the 1830s. In particular, attention
to issues of social and economic ‘justice’ came from the abolitionist movement in the US and labour organizing in
Britain. William Lloyd Garrison's New England Non-Resistance Society, founded in 1838, sent emissaries to Britain to
recruit working-class Chartists to the methods of non-resistance, although with only limited success.18 Likewise,
labour activism for peace began to spread to the United States: in 1846 Elihu Burritt founded the League of Human
Brotherhood, an international organization that attempted to attract a working-class membership.19 The league
experienced considerable organizing success on both sides of the Atlantic. However, the older groups’ leadership
was more conservative and less inclined to challenge political structures, which limited cooperation between them
and the Garrisonians, who embraced a radical rejection of government, and the British worker's movement, who
engaged in overt political organizing.20 These attempts to merge issues of human rights, social justice, and peace
continued throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, but their effects on the development of international law tended
to be piecemeal rather than united.

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In addition to differences in methods and influence on international norms and conventions, civil society groups
also engaged in vociferous debates over free trade during this period. The Quaker John Bright became the first
persuasive proponent within the movement of the liberal belief in free trade that was taken up by Richard Cobden.
This belief rested on three assumptions: that peace and prosperity were indissolubly linked, that both were possible
to attain for all levels of the citizenry, and that both could only be attained by eliminating barriers to transnational
(especially commercial) exchange.21 Working-class radicals lost additional ground vis-à-vis (p. 206) free-traders
because of the changing economics of agriculture reflected in the domestic legal landscape in Britain. After repeal
of the Corn Laws in 1846, which had previously protected domestic agricultural producers against foreign exports,
it was clear that the free traders had won.22 This explicit linking of free trade and peace characterized the
dominant peace activity of the 1840s in Britain. It also resulted in the co-optation of British working-class radicalism
by the middle-class concern with prosperity through tariff reduction, which in turn affected the course of peace
activity by diverting demands for peace based on economic equality to peace based on the promise of future
prosperity.23 After 1840, Cobden himself began to speak of free trade and peace as one and the same cause.

The coalition of mid-century peace forces on both sides of the Atlantic, however, also began to organize
international peace congresses in the 1840s. These congresses were designed to spread the faith more widely
and, in particular, to encourage continental Europeans to engage more actively in the discussion of how to attain a
pacific world. In effect, their significance lies in the fact that they debated and articulated, over a six-year period,
plans for international institutions that embodied norms of arbitration, adjudication, and, to a lesser extent,
universalism.

At the first International Peace Congress, held in London in 1843, delegates agreed on resolutions advocating
arbitration clauses as a means of settling international disputes and a ‘high court of nations’ to keep the peace in
Europe.24 The Brussels Congress of 1848 and the Paris Congress of 1849 emphasized the need for international
arbitration mechanisms and the creation of some type of international court. Other proposals, however, such as the
arguments for a congress of nations (a project continually pushed by Elihu Burritt, who was originally inspired by
William Ladd's writings of the 1820s), could not overcome the opposition of Europeans.25 Likewise, delegates easily
agreed upon the need for disarmament and reductions of weapons expenditures at the 1843 congress, but by
1848 and 1849 disarmament held different meanings for Anglo-Americans, revolutionary sympathizers, and
advocates of the European status quo. Although the majority of British and US delegates could not sanction
attempts to change oppressive domestic regimes through (violent) revolution, they registered ‘ringing
denunciations’ of British and French foreign policy in Tahiti, China, and Afghanistan for engaging in bloody
repressions of non-European peoples.26

(p. 207) The peace congresses did not receive much, if any, official notice, and their proceedings and plans
were ridiculed by those segments of the press who did pay attention.27 Still, they represented the first public
discussions and agreement by various movement factions (religious pacifists, members of Burritt's League, and
centrist peace society members) to institutionalize the international legal norms of conflict resolution through
arbitration. In addition, the discussion (without agreement) of disarmament obligations attendant upon all States and
the condemnation of the control and repression of territories and peoples outside of Europe represented a further
step toward the recognition of the responsibility of all States in ensuring peace (an aspect of the norm of
universalism) and the rights of peoples to determine their own fate in international society (an aspect of the norm of
equality of status).

Yet the belief that peace and harmony could be attained by prosperity brought about by liberal economic policies
gained the upper hand with those newly called internationalists, who convinced many pacifists in both countries of
their logic. Richard Cobden attended the second International Peace Congress, which promoted a liberal political-
economic agenda. Free-trade rhetoric increasingly suffused the British movement, particularly after 1846, and
Cobden strengthened the explicit link between notions of liberal harmony and peace activism by publicly crediting
the nonconformist peace testimony with influencing the broader repudiation of war that he himself did much to
popularize.28

As a result, peace groups increasingly tended to support the international status quo against revolutionary
movements of the late 1840s. Cobden and other liberals in the movement, for example, ‘had little sympathy … with
the contemporary movements for national liberation on the continent’, because they feared that the breakup of
States into smaller political units would worsen nationalism and hamper free trade.29 However, neither strict

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pacifism nor Cobden's brand of free-trade liberalism were able to survive the mid-century wars fought by Britain
and the United States. These tendencies would be supplemented by yet new sociological-intellectual currents in
the latter part of the century that nonetheless continued to provoke discussion and debate of international legal
and institutional mechanisms to ensure peace. These new currents would demonstrate that agreement on norms of
arbitration and the observance of legally sanctioned rules of State conduct did not automatically go hand in hand
with free-trade notions of harmony. Moreover, the increasing critique of imperialism and colonization in the late
19th century would also challenge both economic liberalism (in the form of free trade and ‘free’ access to raw
materials) and lay the foundation for legal moves in favour of self-determination and equality of status.

(p. 208) 3.2. Mid-century Transformations and Competing Norms

The mid-century wars shattered the fragile unity among the original religious peace groups, the small radical
components, and the then dominant free-trade leadership. For Britons, the Crimean War, which broke out in 1854
and involved Britain in a major European war for the first time in forty years, roused patriotic fervour, while some
peace activists’ attempts to stop the war once it had begun discredited the movement.30 After 1857, with
nationalism and imperialism on the rise, both Cobden and the Quaker liberal John Bright, the leaders of the then
more-or-less fused free-trade and peace movements, lost their seats in Parliament.31

In the United States, the war with Mexico seemed to improve the peace movement's status during the 1840s, but
the Civil War fifteen years later, like the Crimean War for the British, had the effect of seriously curtailing peace
activism and decimating the membership of peace societies. The American Peace Society, fearful of losing its
raison d’être, refused to take a position for or against slavery, while the conflict itself made many who had
previously believed war to be an unmitigated evil conclude that force provided the best means of eliminating
slavery and the danger of breaking apart the union. Moreover, in addition to the negative effects that involvement
in war produced for the individual movements in each country, the Civil War caused a breach of the heretofore
amicable communications between the British and the American peace societies: the British could not approve of
the majority of the US peace workers’ endorsement of the war.32

This mid-century peace activity occurred in the US in the midst of strong social justice and human rights moves in
favour of abolition. Abolitionists also created strong cross-Atlantic ties (the British had banned the slave trade half a
century earlier), but the work of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and numerous other anti-slavery
advocates in the US brought the tension between peace and social justice into the open. In addition, the ‘crucial
role of African-Americans in the abolitionist movement’, which is often overlooked,33 needs to be recognized to
understand both the tensions between peace and social justice and the relationships between activists across
continents on both issues.

This period ‘cleansed’, in a sense, the movements of their early faith in the power of Christian values and public
opinion to achieve national and international peace. It forced many, in the United States especially, to rethink the
boundaries of what they had previously considered to be absolute pacifism, a dilemma (p. 209) that would arise
anew during the 1930s. The experience of devastating wars also compelled movement activists who began to
reorganize peace efforts in the latter part of the century to replace their faith in the power of public opinion and
free trade with more insistent demands for legal and institutional supports for peace.

At the same time as strictly ‘peace’ movements were in decline, civil society humanitarian efforts to relieve
suffering in wartime took off. Nicholas Onuf traces the composition and constitutive nature of 19th-century
humanitarianism in ‘Humanitarian Intervention: The Early Years’. As Onuf explains, 19th-century humanitarianism
resulted from the intersection of state and non-state agency, intersecting with the ideological trends and external
events that shaped the peace activity (and its decline) discussed above.

[H]umanitarian sentiments drew their sustenance from a potent combination of evangelical and utilitarian
beliefs and practices—a Protestant ethic, as it were. They also combined with Romantic tendencies so
much in evidence at that time to reinforce imperialist, nationalist and orientalist beliefs and practices. In
turn, all of these beliefs fed a sense that humanitarian concerns demanded action, whether by
governments or against them.34

Nevertheless, these reformist sensibilities gave way in the latter part of the century to yet another ideological

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development in social Darwinism. According to Onuf, it was in this context of ‘an international relations increasingly
conducted on Darwinist premises’, that modern humanitarianism in the form of the Red Cross was born.

Inspired by the example of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), national red cross
societies and many other organizations throughout the liberal world join governments in treating natural
disasters as humanitarian emergencies warranting concerted intervention.35

Onuf also points out that this type of ‘emergency intervention’ required a legal framework, first outlined by Henri
Dunant's successful efforts to bring governments together to negotiate a treaty in 1864.36

Thus, in Onuf's narrative, mid-19th century humanitarian intervention was a product of the fusion of romanticism,
utilitarianism, religious and secular movements, and Darwinism, which soon intersected with the growing
Progressivism of the late 19th century: ‘Progressive movements in liberal society learned how to construct
longstanding but despised social conditions into humanitarian emergencies warranting intervention within the
law.’37

(p. 210) 4. Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Activism, the World Court, and Universal International
Organization

The last decade of the 1800s and the first two decades of the 1900s are often referred to as the progressive era,
one characterized by a ‘search for order’,38 when ‘the gospel of expertise and efficiency merged with economic
regulation, social control, and humanitarian reform to become a conspicuous part of the public life of both
countries’.39 Many progressive reformers joined forces with older, bourgeois peace groups to work for arbitration,
and increasingly added disarmament and the development of international organization to their peace
programmes.40 The most significant new push during the late 19th century, however, was the move by
international legal specialists in favour of the codification of international law. During this period, movements began
to have a more direct impact on State policies regarding accepting and institutionalizing two legal norms: conflict
resolution through arbitration, as demonstrated by the establishment in 1900 of the Permanent Court of Arbitration
(PCA) and later in 1920 of the Permanent Court of International Justice,41 and universal participation in and
responsibility for decisions about peace and security, as demonstrated by debates over plans for a league of
nations.

In the last decades of the century, peace activism first appeared to take up where it had left off in the 1850s: the
decline of the quasi-pacifist and radical wings of the two movements (begun in the 1840s with their co-optation into
free-trade liberalism), combined with the fact that both Britain and the United States were major players on the
world stage, gave a greater voice to the growing number of establishment internationalists who emerged as leaders
of the movement, especially in the United States.42 This revival of peace activism also appears at first glance to
confirm the hold that liberal economic norms, including free trade, held over peace groups. Yet both Britain and the
United States were also caught up in a new competition that affected security relations. The imperialist rivalries of
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, attested to by Britain's leading role in the scramble for Africa and the Boer
War, and the Spanish–American War waged by the United (p. 211) States again reinforced the complexity of
efforts for peace. Peace groups co-existed uneasily with nationalist claims, although a number of internationalists in
both countries resolved the dilemma by justifying their own country's imperialism in the name of a ‘civilizing
mission’ of spreading liberalism and democracy to ‘backward peoples’.43 These sentiments were reinforced by
some elite internationalist leaders such as General Jan Smuts of South Africa as the peace movement became more
transnationalized.

Consequently, renewed imperialist policies during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, accomplished with the
collaboration of governments and militaries (as well as corporations and missionaries) caused rifts in the peace
movement and encouraged the Left in many European countries to cultivate an increasingly antiwar stance, which
it would maintain during the lead-up to the First World War as the Anglo-German naval race heated up and
hostilities on the European continent became more pronounced.

Renewed imperialism also occurred in the midst of the rise of progressivist notions of progress and rationalist
models of problem-solving. Progressivism and its impact on politics, including foreign affairs, is open to a wide
variety of assessments and interpretations.44 David S Patterson, for example, points out that for elite leaders of the

45

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movements in this era, the equation of peace with free trade was at its apex.45 The trends towards
professionalization of many occupations (for example, teaching, medicine, law, and social work) did little at first to
negate the growing elite establishment influence on the movements—indeed, well-connected spokespersons were
most often seen as a boon to the cause. In Britain, establishment activists who felt that the traditional peace
societies were ‘too closely identified with Nonconformist pressure groups’ joined the American-led International Law
Association to further projects for international arbitration among elite classes of lawyers and public officials.46
Nevertheless, many progressive reformers made new connections between peace and economic and social
needs, both at home and abroad, connections that engendered a distinct unease with liberal notions of harmony.
Many progressives, who worked to reform domestic economic and political practices, extended their concerns
about the exclusionary aspects of turn-of-the-century liberal society (the concern with the unemployed and
marginalized by the settlement house movement imported into the United States from Britain by Jane Addams;
suffragists’ efforts to end the exclusion of women from political participation in both countries) (p. 212) into their
peace activities on the international level. The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), for
example, was suspicious of laissez-faire economic policies, and also worked to democratize decision-making on
security issues.47

Moreover, a left-wing critique of war was also, once again, growing in influence during the progressive era.
Although socialists were not consistently concerned with foreign policy issues during the latter half of the 19th
century, the birth of the Labour Party in Britain and the activism of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) engendered a
more developed critique of war in the UK,48 while socialists in Europe refined their critique of war and US union
organizers and radical pacifists did the same across the Atlantic. Despite the differences in the analysis of
economic practices on the part of establishment liberals, progressive reformers, and the socialist Left, all
movement components, however different their analyses of the causes of war, worked to legitimize norms that
constrained States’ right to wage war and institutionalize mechanisms for engendering inter-state cooperation.

Through the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, peace groups and civil society activists reflected
contemporary events and ideological struggles in their attempts to influence international legal norms. They
broadened their sociological base as other domestic social movements grew and found common ground in the goal
of promoting peace through arbitration, although they differed on support of workers’ rights and abolition. In the
1840s and 1850s, the dominant theme in peace-group activism encouraged the notion of a harmony of interests
between the promotion of individual prosperity and international peace and the concomitant promotion of both civic
rights among States and rights to private property, with trade on the international level occurring among property
owners according to a free-market regulation of supply and demand. The link between free trade and peace also
encouraged a status quo conception of international order with movement leaders arguing against intervention in
support of revolutionary movements on the continent. The decimation of the mid-century movements, however,
was accompanied by the rise of the humanitarian in the Crimean and US Civil Wars, with a new motive for making
the conduct of war more humane and less debilitating for non-combatants through agreement on international legal
standards and codes. At the turn of the century, progressive reformers merged with peace, social justice, and
international humanitarian groups. This reintegrated, albeit problematically, radicals, reformers, and liberal
internationalists into increasingly transnational collaborations for peace.

(p. 213) Thus, as a result of the changing sociological composition of groups interested in peace, the developing
concern with humanitarianism both on the domestic and transnational levels, and the new competition between
States for colonies and prestige, the mix of norms and institutions that civil society activists attempted to
internationalize evolved. As new actors struggling for additional rights on the domestic level became interested in
the peace issue (including abolitionists, labour unions, settlement house workers, and suffragists), civil society
actors increasingly reflected a concern with ‘humanizing’ international relations and with ensuring the participation
of all peoples and political entities in decisions affecting their welfare. Because of these concerns, civil society
actors were also influential in the period just before the First World War in bringing about the creation of the World
Court. At the turn of the century, the Darwinian struggle among the Great Powers for colonies and influence left a
great number of new civil society activists uneasy with, and many openly critical of, founding international legal
norms on rights to ownership and control of resources, people, and territory. As a result, some began to question
the ‘civilizing effects’ of empire, and most concentrated their peace efforts on promoting international order
through universalist civic rights and creating an international judiciary and legislature for discussing and resolving
disputes. Many saw the two international congresses at The Hague in 1899 and 1907, which resulted in the

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creation of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), as the first tangible institutional fruits of their efforts; some new
critics of old notions of harmony also saw in these mechanisms the means by which imperialism might be
delegitimized, subject peoples granted rights as participants in international society, and peaceful change made
possible. The role of civil society activists in the eventual creation in 1920 of the World Court was significant: some
argue that the Second Hague Conference of 1907, at which the idea of such a court was discussed (although not
yet realized), was ‘a meeting that the powers would not have spontaneously convoked without considerable
pressure exerted on them’.49

At the same time, movements for peace increasingly became transnationalized, a trend that would continue before
and especially after the First World War. Internationalists, peace and non-violence activists from South Africa,
Japan, and India, for example, broadened the movement's base, sometimes reinforcing Western legal norms of
paternalism and other times introducing new models of action and challenges for international law. General Jan
Smuts, South African diplomat and proponent of global international organization through both the League and the
United Nations, was in the first category. In addition to his work in favour of arbitration, Smuts was an important
figure in the design of article 22 of the (p. 214) League Covenant and the Mandate system. This system assigned
designations of ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ to different territories, allegedly according to their level of development (Smuts was
instrumental in placing South West Africa in the ‘C’ or ‘least-developed’ category).50 The Mandate system
remained a difficult issue for peace groups throughout the inter-war period, with some groups criticizing its
imperialist assumptions and others arguing that it was a necessary step in the cause of self-determination.

Other areas of the world also exhibited peace activism. The Women's International League strove to create ties
across Europe, including German, Austrian, and Swiss as well as Japanese activists after the First World War. In
Japan, peace activism had also taken root in the late 19th century, although on a smaller scale than in Europe and
the US. Japan's first peace group, Nihon heiwa-kai, was founded in 1889, and the writer Uchimura Kanzō, who
became a pacifist after the 1894–95 war against China (which he had originally supported), ‘is often considered
Japan's most distinguished pre-World War II pacificist’, who ‘spoke out consistently against war and militarism until
his death in 1930’.51 First in South Africa and later in India, Mahatma Gandhi practised and refined his method of
non-violence, known as satyagraha, in order to achieve rights of representation, economic justice, and eventually
total sovereign independence. Gandhi's actions had a significant impact on peace activists in the ‘Global North’,
who debated whether and how they could be implemented in Europe. Gandhi's nonviolent actions in favour of
Indian independence from Britain also ignited debates among peace activists regarding the limits of self-
determination in legal norms of equality of status.

4.1. From the League of Nations to the United Nations

Civil society actors are now given credit for creating plans for global international organization that became
influential vis-à-vis governments. For example, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and other
groups’ proposals appear to have influenced Wilson's 14 Points as well as the content of the Charter of the
League.52 These actors during and after the First World War played a significant role in ensuring that the normative
foundations of their projects would provide new standards of diplomacy and guides for State foreign policy
practice, in the form of (p. 215) mechanisms for arbitration, arms control treaties, and the development of
international courts.

More specifically, inter-war movements differed from their 19th- and early 20th-century predecessors in their direct
experience of worldwide, cataclysmic war, conducted with enormously destructive weapons such as submarines,
poison gas, and aeroplanes that for the first time directly targeted civilians. After the First World War, faith in State
security practices and traditional forms of diplomacy was at a low never before seen, resulting in a widespread
willingness to criticize government policies and put forth detailed alternatives that were based on principles of
international law and organization. Consequently, inter-war movements no longer expressed qualms about
disarmament: arms reduction, either unilateral or multilateral, became the primary focus of many civil society
actors for more than a decade. Disarmament supplanted even the progressive-era push for codification of
international law in the eyes of many activists, because they believed that merely codifying existing practices in
international law—particularly the foundational respect for States’ sovereign rights and the concomitant disregard
for the ‘self-determination of peoples’—would assist in perpetuating an unjust status quo. These movements,
therefore, promoted the League, international law, and principles of universal participation and equality of status to

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restrain Britain, France, the United States, and other powers. Inter-war peace movements and their supporters by
and large believed that international legal norms and institutions had to possess the capacity to control, in addition
to reform, States’ war-prone tendencies. Both the experience of imperialism and that of the pre-First World War
alliance system had convinced many peace activists that Great Power concordats needed to be replaced with
universal responsibility for maintaining peace and equality of treatment at the international level.

Peace movements promoted international legal norms and mechanisms for disarmament and arbitration, through
the principle of equality of status, in a number of ways. First, peace activists expected the newly created League of
Nations to represent all States, and if possible all peoples, and toward this end worked for self-determination and in
some cases independence of colonies as well as the inclusion of both the Soviet Union and Germany in the
League. Second, they differed from pre-First World War activists in their concentrated and relatively unified stance
in favour of the principles that all States should disarm, and that trade in arms should be controlled, even though
they argued among themselves about unilateral versus multilateral disarmament. Arbitrating conflict had been the
leitmotif of the 19th-century peace movements, and although peace groups in the immediate pre-First World War
era agitated against the Anglo-German arms race, disarmament as a movement goal finally gained an equal footing
with arbitration in the aftermath of the Great War. The continuing development of weapons of mass destruction
during the inter-war period, particularly the bomber and various chemical weapons, encouraged the perception
that civilization could not survive another war and fuelled the fire for disarmament.

(p. 216) These developments each had important implications for movement activism. 19th-century activism can
be seen as a struggle among those who would prioritize universalist legal norms and their institutionalization, those
who would stress founding peace on rights to private property and free trade, and those who believed that peace
could only be attained through social justice and equality of individuals, groups, and nations. By the end of the First
World War, the focus had coalesced around plans to internationalize participatory institutions (and their
concomitant rights) in the belief that peace required universal participation and equality of status—norms that, it
was believed, would allow for peaceful change rather than legitimize an unjust status quo. Peace and other civil
society actors believed that these norms, when institutionalized through a league of nations, would also replace
the management of conflict by either unstable alliances or Great Power machinations. By the inter-war period,
agreement on the use of liberal economic institutions to foster peace had disintegrated, but accord on what might
be called the republican compromise—institutionalizing norms of universalism, both in terms of rights to
participation and in terms of obligations—was quite strong. Thus, in addition to working for recognition of the rights
of Germany and the Soviet Union to full membership in the League of Nations and the principle of equality of status
in armaments, inter-war movements promoted the recognition of parity in the naval arms race between the United
States and Britain (with something less than parity for Japan), and obligatory arbitration of conflict on a basis of
juridical equality. In place of liberal mechanisms such as free trade, then, was a stronger push for building on the
creation of the League to institutionalize arbitration and arms control in multilateral form.53

Peace movements made an impact during the period because many groups could legitimately claim to represent
thousands and in the case of the League of Nations societies, hundreds of thousands of adherents, which
increased their chances of being heard in the press, parliaments, congress, and League organizations.54 Peace
groups engaged in transnational collaboration to promote the Geneva Protocol of 1925,55 and after its failure,
French and US groups decided to push for the Pact of Paris of 192856 as a second-best option to a more
comprehensive League of Nations ban against aggressive war. Nevertheless, civil society actors compromized
and agonized over legal norms and principles throughout the period. The Pact of Paris of 1928, for (p. 217)
example, outlawed ‘aggressive war’, but was a product of compromise between activists who did not want to go
outside of the League of Nations machinery and States that insisted on so doing. It is interesting that this pact,
which has been vilified as naïve and inconsequential, remains one of the major pillars of international legal controls
on States’ war-making prerogatives.

From the London Naval Conference of 1930 to the World Disarmament Conference several years later, campaigns
grew in numbers and in transnational representation. Women's peace groups spearheaded the collection of
millions of signatures to pressure governments to reduce armaments at the London Naval Conference, the third of
three conferences (after Washington in 1922 and the Coolidge Conference in 1926) to attempt to control the
weaponry of the three major naval powers of the time.

The series of naval disarmament conferences between the US, Britain, and Japan achieved only limited movement

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objectives. As a result, peace activists worked still harder to demonstrate a transnational show of support for the
World Disarmament Conference of 1932–1934, which took place at the League of Nations in Geneva. However, the
World Disarmament Conference, which was to be the culmination of peace movement work to get rid of the most
destructive forms of weapons, ended in failure (due in part to the rise of Hitler in Germany). As successive
aggressions by Japan, Italy, and Germany succeeded each other in the 1930s and peace movement fissures
deepened, it appeared that movements’ efforts to institutionalize legal controls on war had failed. The failures of
the World Disarmament Conference, followed by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the Spanish Civil War, the
Anschluss, and eventually Munich, split the movements in most countries.

In retrospect, however, one of the major achievements of inter-war civil society activism was laying the normative
foundations for the continuation of international organization in the form of the United Nations.57 The peace
movement was also becoming increasingly transnational in the 1930s, not only in women's groups and the League
of Nations societies, but also in transnational faith-based peace activism. Mary Church Terrell, a long-time member
of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in the US, who worked for racial inclusion in
the WILPF and other organizations, described the International Assembly of the World Fellowship of Faiths in 1937
in London. In addition to Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, the assembly included delegates from the East Indies,
Ceylon, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, India, and Mexico, as well as the US and Britain.58 All of these groups
continued to advocate for universal international organization as war loomed, and also after it broke out in 1939–
41.This push by peace activists across most of the political spectrum in favour of a continuation of global
international organization (p. 218) also resulted in representation at the San Francisco Conference of June 1945.
Civil society groups were included in many of the forums of the League, but their organizational work in favour of a
United Nations (although they tended to oppose granting veto power to the new Security Council, disagreed on
Mandates, and wanted stronger measures against military and economic conflict), and their efforts resulted in the
creation of new official channels for civil society input as consultative organizations to the UN Economic and Social
Council (a status that has continued in greatly expanded form to this day).

Moreover, post-First World War civil society groups increasingly included transnational humanitarian concerns
such as the ‘traffic in women and children’, the opium trade, the effects of reparations, and the blockade of
formerly enemy countries, at the forefront of their work. Equality of status continued to be an international norm
promoted on the individual and group as well as national levels: anti-slavery activists realized the coming into
force of the Slavery Convention (1926),59 US and Latin American activists worked to delegitimize American actions
in occupying and controlling Haiti (from 1915 to 1934) and peace movements as a whole continued to debate the
merits of the Mandate system versus self-determination and independence of colonies.

Regarding imperialism and colonization, while the more establishment wing of the Western peace movement
favoured eventual ‘self-determination’, others inspired by Mahatma Gandhi began to experiment with nonviolent
activism; others inspired by pan-Africanist writers and activists such as William Edward Burghardt DuBois as well as
African intellectuals demanded decolonization and the overturning of imperialist policies towards what would
eventually become ‘the Third World’.

5. Conclusion

The examples of 19th- and early 20th-century non-State moral action discussed above emanated first from civil
society organizations in Britain and the US, but soon had transnational components that increased in strength
particularly in the 20th century. Their projects for international law were shaped primarily by liberal principles and
legal norms, in both the democratic theory and economic senses of the term liberalism. Yet struggles over the
meaning of justice and equality of status infused these movements as well, intersecting with 19th-century workers’
rights and (p. 219) abolitionist organizations and 20th-century socialist and (to a lesser extent) communist parties
and self-determination efforts. Non-state actors have gradually become adept at using legal norms to push for a
variety of actions, including an expansion of legal institutions, mechanisms, and procedures (the League of
Nations, the Permanent Court of International Justice, the UN, the International Court of Justice, the ICC) and the
extension of norms, charters, and treaties to cover new areas from human rights to humanitarian relief, from just
war principles to war crimes and charges of genocide.60

This narrative of civil society activism to promote international legal norms and institutions cannot, I assert, be

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analysed as static or as fitting into a single ideological paradigm. For example, if we label such activism as simply
liberal or utopian, as Edward H Carr did, then we miss the constitutive nature of law, historical developments, and
both state and non-state activism. Rather, as I have argued elsewhere, Kantian ethics—in their conceptual,
deontological form rather than the practical form described by Kant in ‘Perpetual Peace’61—provide an extremely
limited understanding of constitutive processes of civil society influence on the development of international law.
The result of this narrative of civil society influence is not deontological moral action, but contextualized ethical
contestation and normative development.62

Of course, some groups and individuals, in hindsight, negotiated their goals better than others within this context of
rapidly evolving political circumstances. But moral and pragmatic struggles over content, procedure, law, and
policy merged together during the 19th and 20th centuries. This history of peace movement and civil society
activism is significant for understanding the resulting legal principles and norms, such as the equality of sovereign
States, the reduction of arms, and the peaceful resolution of disputes, and institutions such as the PCIJ, the ICJ, the
League, and the UN. It is also significant because these norms and institutions, particularly the meaning of equality
of status and further developments in international law, continue to be negotiated by civil society actors and
governments today.

Bibliography

Recommended Reading

Birn, David The League of Nations Union, 1918–1945 (OUP Oxford 1981).

Brock, Peter Pacifism in Europe to 1914 (Princeton University Press Princeton 1968).

Carr, Edward H The Twenty Years’ Crisis (2nd edn Harper and Row New York 1964).

Ceadel, Martin Pacifism in Britain, 1914–1945 (OUP New York 1980).

(p. 220) Chatfield, Charles For Peace and Justice: Pacifism in America, 1914–1941 (University of Tennessee
Press Knoxville 1981).

Comité de coordination du RDQ Au service de l’Afrique noire. Le Rassemblement démocratique africain dans la
lutte anti-impérialiste (Les Impressions rapides Comité de coordination Paris 1949).

Cooper, Sandi E (ed) Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: The Crisis of Ideas and Purpose (Garland
New York 1976).

Cortright, David Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (CUP Cambridge 2008).

DeBenedetti, Charles Origins of the Modern American Peace Movement, 1915–1978 (KTO Press Millwood NY 1978).

Doyle, Michael ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part I’ (1983) 12 Philosophy and Public Affairs 205–35.

Doyle, Michael ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part II’ (1983) 12 Philosophy and Public Affairs 323–53.

Hinton, James Protests and Visions: Peace Politics in Twentieth-Century Britain (Hutchinson Press London 1989).

Hobsbawm, Eric Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution (The New Press New York 1999).

Kant, Immanuel The Metaphysics of Morals (M Gregor intr and trans) (CUP New York 1991).

Kant, Immanuel The Moral Law: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (HJ Paton intr and trans) (Routledge
London 1991)

Kuehl, Warren Seeking World Order: The United States and International Organization to 1920 (Vanderbilt
University Press Nashville 1969).

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