The Internationalists

How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World

Oona A. Hathaway, Scott J. Shapiro

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501109881
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

"An original book…about individuals who used ideas to change the world" ( The New Yorker )—the fascinating exploration into the creation and history of the Paris Peace Pact, an often overlooked but transformative treaty that laid the foundation for the international system we live under today. In 1928, the leaders of the world assembled in Paris to outlaw war. Within the year, the treaty signed that day, known as the Peace Pact, had been ratified by nearly every state in the world. War, for the first time in history, had become illegal. But within a decade of its signing, each state that had gathered in Paris to renounce war was at war. And in the century that followed, the Peace Pact was dismissed as an act of folly and an unmistakable failure. This book argues that the Peace Pact ushered in a sustained march toward peace that lasts to this day.A "thought-provoking and comprehensively researched book" ( The Wall Street Journal ), The Internationalists tells the story of the Peace Pact through a fascinating and diverse array of lawyers, politicians, and intellectuals. It reveals the centuries-long struggle of ideas over the role of war in a just world order. It details the brutal world of conflict the Peace Pact helped extinguish, and the subsequent era where tariffs and sanctions take the place of tanks and gunships. The Internationalists is "indispensable" ( The Washington Post ). Accessible and gripping, this book will change the way we view the history of the twentieth century—and how we must work together to protect the global order the internationalists fought to make possible. "A fascinating and challenging book, which raises gravely important issues for the present…Given the state of the world, The Internationalists has come along at the right moment" ( The Financial Times ).

PART I

OLD WORLD ORDER

ONE

HUGO THE GREAT

On the night of February 24, 1603, three Dutch ships reached the mouth of the Johor River off the Strait of Singapore. They dropped anchor in the olive-green waters and waited. The next morning, the men woke to a wondrous sight: The Portuguese great-ship Santa Catarina had arrived during the night and was moored right beside them.¹

The Santa Catarina was a gigantic carrack, a U-shaped boat with towering fore- and aft-castles, designed to be invulnerable to smaller ships. It rode high in the water, allowing for a daunting number of cannons as well as ample room for cargo. To give a sense of scale, the Victoria, the carrack in which Magellan circumnavigated the world, weighed 85 tons.² The Santa Catarina weighed 1,500.³ It was able to transport nearly a thousand people: seven hundred soldiers, one hundred women and children (some were probably family members, others captured natives to be sold as slaves), and assorted crew.⁴

At eight in the morning, the captain of the fleet, Jacob van Heemskerck, ordered his crew to attack, instructing them to fire only at the carrack’s mainsails. It was important to avoid puncturing its hull, he warned, “lest we destroy our booty by means of our own cannonades.”⁵ The attack was one-sided. The Santa Catarina was nearly three times larger than any of Van Heemskerck’s ships, but its enormous size made it cumbersome to maneuver. It also had too many people and the confusion on deck made coordination impossible. Nor was the crew practiced in naval warfare. The Portuguese did not choose their bombardiers on the basis of skill or experience; they auctioned the positions off to the highest bidders. What was a great way to raise money turned out to be a lousy way to keep it.⁶

The battle was over by six-thirty in the evening. The Santa Catarina’s sails were in tatters, and the ship was in danger of crashing into the shallow rocks on the eastern shore of Singapore Island. The Portuguese captain, Sebastiano Serrao, surrendered to Van Heemskerck, thereby setting into motion a series of events that would change the world.

GOOD PRIZE

By the time Van Heemskerck returned to the Netherlands in 1604, the United Amsterdam Company, the trading corporation that had sent him to the East Indies, no longer existed. It had been acquired by the newly formed Dutch East India Company. The supreme legislative body of the Dutch Republic, the States-General, had granted the Dutch East India Company a monopoly to avoid damaging competition among Dutch traders. Having towed the Santa Catarina all the way back from Singapore—twelve thousand nautical miles—Van Heemskerck delivered it to his new employer in Amsterdam.⁷

Following standard procedure, the Dutch East India Company and Van Heemskerck filed a lawsuit before the Amsterdam Admiralty Board to secure rights to the ship and its cargo.⁸ The suit alleged the following facts: The company “had sent a fleet of eight ships to the East Indies under the command of [Jacob van Heemskerck] in order to trade with the inhabitants in the usual fashion.”⁹ When Van Heemskerck arrived in the Indies, however, he discovered that the Portuguese government had designed an extensive terror campaign to drive out the Dutch, who were threatening Portugal’s monopoly over the Asian spice trade. The commander of the mission, Captain André Furtado de Mendonça, had led an armada of warships to Bantam in Java in an effort “to destroy all Dutch ships and their crews.”¹⁰ He had also punished the natives who had granted the Dutch “access to their harbors and markets,” by attacking them as well.¹¹ His mission laid waste to Ambon, one of the largest of the Spice Islands (today the Maluku Islands in Indonesia), and “brutally tyrannized the poor inhabitants.”¹² Van Heemskerck also discovered that the Portuguese in Macao, China, had murdered seventeen sailors from another Dutch expedition. One of the men who stayed behind from Van Heemskerck’s previous voyage to set up trading posts in the Spice Islands “was captured by the Portuguese and quartered alive by means of four galleys.”¹³

Outraged by these atrocities, Van Heemskerck and his crew prepared to retaliate against the Portuguese. After spending months looking for a carrack to capture, they found one on the morning of February 25, 1603, conveniently moored beside them. And not just any carrack, but the treasure ship Santa Catarina.¹⁴

After the lawsuit was filed, the Admiralty Board sent out notices summoning all claimants to contest the seizure and they repeated the process every fortnight for the next six weeks. Nobody responded, of course: The Portuguese owners of the Santa Catarina were halfway around the world and never saw the notices. On September 9, 1604, the Admiralty Board issued its opinion declaring the seizure to be “good prize” and ordering it to be “auctioned off in its entirety and the proceeds to be divided among the plaintiffs.”¹⁵

News of the Santa Catarina’s capture spread quickly and the auction of its cargo attracted interest from all over Europe. At the public sale in Amsterdam, merchants marveled at the legendary riches of Ming Dynasty China. The ship’s bounty included over seventy tons of gold, over a thousand bales of raw Chinese silk, chests filled with colored damask, atlas (a type of polished silk), taffetas, large quantities of gold thread, robes and bed canopies spun with gold, silk bedcovers and bedspreads, sixty tons of porcelain dishes, substantial amounts of sugar, spices, gum, and musk (a crucial ingredient in perfume), wooden beds and boxes, some lavishly adorned in gold, and a bejeweled throne, which one awestruck observer described as a “wonder.”¹⁶

The expedition yielded a staggering profit. Proceeds of the auction amounted to 3.5 million guilders, or 37.5 metric tons of silver. In English currency, it converted to £300,000—more than 60 percent of the average annual expenditures of the English government at that time.¹⁷ The Dutch East India Company awarded Van Heemskerck 1 percent of the sale and the crew split 3 percent. The company kept the rest.¹⁸

HUGO GROTIUS, CORPORATE LAWYER

Even though they had won the case, the company directors were nevertheless concerned. Their shareholders complained about the seizure. They had invested in a trading company, they protested, not a freebooting operation. The decision of the Admiralty Board did little to quell the criticism, for its reasoning was a jumble.¹⁹ To address these worries, and perhaps to clear the way for future captures of this kind, the directors sought a lawyer who could offer a better public defense of Van Heemskerck’s actions.²⁰ The assignment was offered to an ambitious and talented young man named Hugo Grotius.²¹

Grotius was an inspired choice. Born in Delft, Holland, on Easter Sunday 1583, Grotius—the family name in Dutch is de Groot (literally, “the Great”), but he preferred the Latinized “Grotius”—was a renowned child prodigy. When only eight years old, he wrote such expert Latin verse that one of his poems was presented to Prince Maurice, the military leader of the Dutch Republic, as a gift.²² At eleven, he matriculated at State College (soon to be Leiden University). His professors there were so impressed that one of them composed a poem comparing the adolescent Grotius to his country’s most famous man of letters, Erasmus. “Am I deceived?” the professor gushed. “Or was our Erasmus even so great?”²³ At age fifteen, Grotius accompanied a diplomatic mission to the French court. According to legend, Henry IV of France was so overwhelmed by Grotius’s erudition that he dubbed him “the Miracle of Holland” and presented him with a gold pendant bearing the royal likeness.²⁴ Grotius stayed in Paris for five more months and received a doctorate in law from the University of Orléans.²⁵

He was licensed to practice law shortly after returning to Holland. A silverpoint drawing by the Dutch engraver Jacques de Gheyn commemorates the event.²⁶ The caption states that Grotius is fifteen, but he looks no more than twelve. De Gheyn was clearly aiming to capture his subject’s legendary precocity, depicting his youthful face with a conspicuously furrowed brow, but the effect is more comic than dramatic.²⁷ Grotius’s friend Daniel Heinsius later noted that Hugo never had a childhood. “Others were men after a long time, but Grotius was born a man.”²⁸

A portrait painted only a few months later shows a different person. Jan van Ravesteyn’s circular panel depicts a handsome teenager, elfin in appearance, with rosy cheeks and a hint of a smile. He is clean-shaven, still too young for the fashionable Van Dyke beard he would later grow. Posed in partial profile, he is relaxed, full of hope and promise. But like so many others before and after him, Grotius would soon discover that practicing law can be frustrating and disappointing. “You know not, my worthy Heinsius,” the young lawyer wrote to his friend, “how much time the ungrateful practice robs me of. In no case has the fruit repaid the cost of the work done.”²⁹ Grotius described himself as a “vulturiolus togatus,” a vulture in a gown.³⁰ He would have preferred to spend his time on literary pursuits. In this area, too, Grotius distinguished himself at an early age. At eighteen, he completed a biblical play, Adam the Exile, which became a critical hit and helped inspire the great English poet John Milton to write Paradise Lost. Milton considered Grotius one of his heroes.³¹

In 1601, Grotius was named official historian for the State of Holland. The eighteen-year-old was chosen over Dominicus Baudius, a prominent scholar more than twice his age who, after losing to Grotius, was appointed Extraordinary Professor of Rhetoric at Leiden.³² Baudius probably did not object to finishing second to Grotius. In a letter written five years later, Baudius confessed how he had been so intimidated when the Miracle of Holland unexpectedly showed up at one of his lectures that he got lockjaw.³³ Afterward, he begged Grotius’s forgiveness for having given such a poor performance.

Hugo the Great was a rising star in Dutch public life, with powerful friends and an even more powerful mind. The Dutch East India Company would be well served by hiring this illustrious and connected polymath. And Grotius would be well served, too. Grotius was nothing if not ambitious and a high-profile case would increase his public standing and accelerate his political career.³⁴

Grotius had a personal stake in the case as well. The maiden name of his paternal grandmother was Elselinge van Heemskerck.³⁵ In justifying the capture of the Santa Catarina, Grotius was not only defending a powerful trading company—he was defending his own cousin.

PIRATES AND SOLDIERS

To satisfy the anxieties of their shareholders, the directors of the Dutch East India Company probably expected Grotius to write a short pamphlet pleading the company’s case.³⁶ The favorable opinion of the Admiralty Board was only a few pages long. Surely Grotius would not need much more space? The case, however, turned out to be far more complicated than the brief and embarrassing Admiralty Board opinion suggested. Once he untangled the issues, Grotius knew that a short pamphlet defending the seizure—and setting the stage for more like it—would not do.³⁷ In the end, Grotius spent the next two years composing a lengthy treatise on the laws of war, totaling 163 folios of neatly written, concise Latin. The English translation runs just shy of five hundred pages.

The legal case turned on an apparently simple question: Was Van Heemskerck a pirate? After all, he attacked a foreign ship that had done him no harm; and after overpowering it, he plundered its treasure and kidnapped its passengers. Isn’t this exactly what pirates do? The stakes here were high: If Van Heemskerck was a pirate, then the riches he transported from Singapore, and which the Dutch East India Company sold at an astounding profit, had in fact been stolen goods.

The legality of Van Heemskerck’s actions would have been easily settled had he been a soldier fighting in a naval battle. Soldiers in war were permitted to attack enemy ships and seize their cargo as prizes. But Van Heemskerck was no soldier: He was a private merchant working for a trading company. And though the Dutch Republic was indeed at war, it was at war with Spain, not Portugal.³⁸ Furthermore, its conflict with Spain was a civil war. Beginning in 1568, the Protestant northern provinces of the Netherlands had rebelled against their Catholic overlord, King Philip II of Spain. The Dutch Republic, as the breakaway provinces would later be called, declared itself an independent nation, but no other European state had acknowledged it. Indeed, England and France, the republic’s two closest allies, refused to recognize its representatives as full ambassadors in their courts.³⁹ To justify the capture and defend his cousin, then, Grotius had to square a legal circle. He had to explain how Van Heemskerck was not engaged in piracy when he attacked and seized the Santa Catarina.⁴⁰

Grotius’s solution to this dilemma was radical: Van Heemskerck had the same legal powers as a soldier at war because he was, in fact, at war. Though he was not fighting with t...