ABSTRACT
Hague and the Hague system 7.1 The Hague Peace Conference on the law of war and arbitration (1899) 65 7.2 The establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (1899) 68 7.3 The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize since 1901 72 7.4 The Latin American states decide to join the Hague system (1901) 75 7.5 The second Hague Peace Conference of 1907 78
Figure 7.1 The Permanent Court of Arbitration at the end of the twentieth century 71 Figure 7.2 Nobel Peace Prize winners since 1901 73 Figure 7.3 The Central American Court of Justice 1907-17 77 Figure 7.4 Two courts proposed in 1907 that remained ineffective 80
The calling of the first Hague Peace Conference
Three weeks after Bismarck’s death in 1898, at a time when Germany was flourishing economically but isolated internationally, the Russian Tsar Nicholas II sent a circular letter to the states accredited to his Court, in which he invited governments to a multilateral conference on problems of world peace and disarmament. He regarded the steady increase in weaponry as a threat to peace. His mention of humanitarian objectives could not conceal Russia’s self-interest, as the burdens of the arms race were exhausting the Russian treasury. Germany reacted negatively, but the US accepted the invitation. In early 1899 the Tsar sent a second circular letter, in which he outlined the two objectives of the proposed conference as being to set a limit on the progressive increase in arms, and to discuss the prevention of armed conflict through the peaceful means of settlement at the disposal of modern diplomacy such as arbitration and mediation. He mentioned eight issues, including ‘the freezing of military effectiveness and budgets; the prohibition of
new types of arms; the restriction or prohibition of explosives, bombs dropped from balloons and submarine torpedo-boats, the extension of the attainments of the 1864 Geneva convention to the area of naval warfare; the revision of the unratified 1874 Brussels Declaration on the laws and customs of war; and, lastly, the acceptance of the principles of mediation and optional arbitration as a means of preventing or settling international disputes, and the establishment of a model and uniform practice in these respects’ (Eyffinger 1996, 42). This agenda setting linked up with the debates about arbitration and with previous agreements, among them the Declaration of Brussels. In 1874, at a meeting in Brussels, 12 states including the great powers had attempted to conclude a treaty concerning the laws and customs of war on land. Given the reluctance of the powers to hamper their own freedom of action so soon after the Franco-Prussian war, they were unable to frame a convention but did produce the Declaration. This influenced the instruction manuals for the use of armies in the field that some governments issued and it served as a draft for the Tsar’s initiative (Lyons 1963, 305). In 1899 this initiative resulted in 26 states sending their representatives to The Hague. This city was chosen for various reasons, among them the wish to avoid a great power’s capital, the family ties between the Romanovs and the House of Orange, Dutch neutrality, and the Dutch tradition of international law from Hugo Grotius to the successful conferences on private international law in The Hague in 1893 and 1894 presided over by Tobias Asser.
