The historian’s art consists in conveying how those in the past perceived their present and imagined their future. The history of arms control before 1914 reveals more about what statesmen expected from the future than how that future unfolded. To the British Foreign Office, the limitation of naval armaments was a realistic possibility, and a way of removing a significant contention with an increasingly erratic and aggressive Germany. To understand how these statesmen perceived their world, the historian must seek a fuller comprehension of the strategic situation, and the tools at the disposal of policy-makers. While the diplomacy of the pre-war era has been exhaustively studied, as have many of the tools of policy-making, such as naval strategy and war planning, one crucial element remains neglected – international law.
Without this foundational knowledge of law, our understanding of treaties – from arbitration and arms agreements to alliances, guarantees of state neutrality, and rules of war – reflexively reverts to commonplace misunderstandings about how law functioned. In turn, if historians fail to grasp how statesmen expected law to work, then arguments built around key treaties lose critical theoretical foundations. Mistaken impressions about international law arise honestly, as often international lawyers, comfortable working within their discipline, assume an understanding of core legal concepts and omit them in their discussions. But the absence of discussion of these core concepts has left historians to speculate about the nature of law. When candidly expressed, historians’ misconceptions significantly undermine the validity of their claims.
More often, historians equate the international legal system with its domestic counterpart by focusing on legislative, judicial, and executive institutions. Thus, when analyzing a treaty, historical accounts often seek evidence of a world court or international police powers for enforcement, and assume that no treaty could function as law in their absence. In discussing disarmament at the First Hague Peace Conference, Arthur Marder judged “[t]here was no possible means of guaranteeing that such a self-denying ordinance would be observed, except perhaps through an army of international inspectors, and this would lead to friction.”1 Similarly, a leading historian of arms limitation, Merze Tate, wrote “[i]n the European society of the nineteenth century, without an international executive to enforce engagements on recalcitrant states, disarmament was impossible.”2 In reality, statesmen were perfectly comfortable working without such a safety net.
What the layman seeks in courts and cops, the international lawyer metes out in prose and cons. Beneath the florid language of treaties lay assumptions of political costs and power relationships. By going to the trouble of formalizing an agreement in a treaty, vested with symbolic significance and an aura of permanence, statesmen increased the political costs of violations, making breaches less likely. Yet violations remained possible and good lawyers anticipated them. While law could not eliminate the possibility of violations, it could make behavior more predictable.
Additionally, law could enshrine national interests. Under sweeping statements of universal humanitarian sentiment, more often than not lurked cold calculations of national interest. Well-crafted treaties betrayed little of these calculations, appearing more as moral platitudes than diplomatic bargains. Within all treaties lay estimations of power, questions of who could enforce what obligations under which set of circumstances; and legal instruments provided a veneer of legitimacy to these machinations. Law is a struggle for power, and states engaged in treaty-making to legitimize their national interests. “[T]he majestic equality of the laws … forbid rich and poor alike to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”3 Law functioned as an element of foreign policy-making, employing recognized diplomatic practices for resolving disputes and pursuing national interests. International law, as understood and practiced by statesmen in the nineteenth century, functioned without powerful legal institutions.
This book aims to correct some of these misassumptions about international law and its role in foreign policy decision-making. In doing so, it argues that law was employed by statesmen in order to advance national goals, and, when utilized pragmatically, recognizing its limitations, law could contribute to national security. The Foreign Office acted rationally by acknowledging that law alone could never guarantee security, but in the words of one statesman, could serve as “an obstacle, though not a barrier.”
Arms limitation presents a unique case study, highlighting an effective role for law in strengthening national security. Unlike prior studies of arms limitation, the focus here is squarely upon rational state interest, rather than popular pacifist movements or other non-state actors. As the emphasis will be on British interests in arms limitation, the primary emphasis will be on naval rather than land armaments. Several scholars in the recent past have studied the European land arms races, including David Stevenson and David Herrman. Stevenson’s work, Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe 1904–1914, provided limited coverage of international legal issues relating to arms control and discussed the 1907 Hague Conference, but retained a focus on the continental land armaments race.4 Herrman also exclusively covered the land arms race and did not concentrate on arms control.5 Jonathan Grant’s Rulers, Guns, and Money: The Global Arms Trade in the Age of Imperialism should also be mentioned. Grant shifted away from the core European great power competitio...