World Policy Journal
Volume XX, No 3, Fall 2003

World Law with a Human Face
Karl E. Meyer ^*

 

Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
Margaret Macmillan
New York: Random House, 2001

"A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide
Samantha Power
New York: Basic Books, 2002

Toward a Just World: The Critical Years in the Search for International Justice
Dorothy V. Jones
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002

As anybody teaching international relations knows, one can never ignore what magazine editors call the "MEGO factor," MEGO being the acronym for My Eyes Glaze Over. A quintessential MEGO topic is "The Future of Foreign Aid," with "Understanding World Law" and "How Diplomats Negotiate" trailing only a little behind. It is thus a token of the literary skill and stamina of these three writers that their books readably address the densest of international relations subjects: the making of treaties and the enforcement of global covenants meant to deter humanity’s otherwise incorrigible addiction to violence.

Each volume employs the same essential strategy of using individual lives as the armature on which to build a narrative. Margaret Macmillan not only brings to the fore the giants who shaped the imperfect peace signed at Versailles, but also such forgotten secondary figures as the seductive Queen Marie of Romania and Prime Minister Eleutherios Venizelos, "the greatest Greek statesman since Pericles." For her part, Samantha Power rescues from obscurity, among others, the indefatigable Polish-born lawyer, Raphael Lemkin. Before dying penniless in 1960, Lemkin coined the word "genocide" and against all probabilities secured global recognition for what had been a crime without a name. The Genocide Convention he promoted was in turn finally ratified by a reluctant U.S. Senate, thanks in part to 3,211 speeches by another half-for-gotten hero, Wisconsin’s William Proxmire, who delivered a shaming prod every day the Senate sat during a 19-year period. (Senator Proxmire, it should be noted, was the Democrat elected in 1957 to fill the seat vacated by the death of the too-well-known Joseph R. McCarthy, and served four terms before retiring.) And finally, in a tour de force, Dorothy V. Jones exhumes from musty annals such totally forgotten figures in the quest for international justice as Sarah Wambaugh, a ladylike alumna of Radcliffe College who became the world’s reigning expert on organizing plebiscites, which she did in South America during the 1920s and a decade later in the Saar Basin, squeezed between Germany and France. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book with so much new, curious, and important detail.

That individual lives can enliven the telling of history has long been grasped by writers, starting with Plutarch. Few have had more success in this craft than the late Barbara Tuchman, notably in The Guns of August (1962), The Proud Tower (1966), and A Distant Mirror (1978). In a thoughtful paper presented at a conference in Washington on "Telling Lives," Tuchman thus described why she used people as her prism:

As a prism of history, biography attracts and holds the reader’s interest in a larger subject.... If I seem to stress the reader’s interest rather more than the pure urge of the writer, it is because, for me, the reader is the essential other half of the writer.... I never feel my writing is born or has an independent existence until it is read. It is like a cake whose only raison d’être is to be eaten. Ergo, first catch your reader. Secondly, biography is useful because it encompasses the universal in the particular. It is a focus that allows both the writer to narrow his field to manageable dimensions and the reader to more easily comprehend the subject. Given too wide a scope, the central theme wanders, becomes diffuse, and loses shape. One does not try for the whole but for what is truly representative.

Hers was wise advice, and the books under consideration amply illustrate her point. Obviously, focusing on outsize figures risks turning history into a chronicle of celebrities who are either unduly glorified or become the target for gleeful mudballs, faults ubiquitously apparent in television docudramas. Conversely, in dealing with lesser lives, in "seeing history from below," there is the antipodal risk of mistaking the nail for the hammer. Our three authors nimbly skirt these pitfalls.

Judging the Paris Peacemakers
On its face, Margaret Macmillan, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, is retelling the thrice-told story of the six-month Paris Peace Conference, from January to July 1919. Yet Macmillan, an Oxford Ph.D. and the great-granddaughter of David Lloyd George, has outdone her predecessors, from Maynard Keynes’s influential Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) to Harold Nicolson’s valuable Peacemaking, 1919 (1933). Not only has she mined seams of untapped memoirs, diaries, and state papers, but she has the topical advantage of dealing with matters that are now the stuff of the evening news.

Today’s Middle East, with its slapped-together mosaic of invented nations was created in Paris by three tired, distracted potentates who decided early on that they knew better than the experts in their entourage. "Diplomats," in Lloyd George’s view, "were invented simply to waste time." These were the Big Three—Prime Minister Lloyd George, Premier Georges Clemenceau, and President Woodrow Wilson—who as victors in the "War to End All Wars" met daily for most of six months to parcel out the territorial spoils of three crumbled empires, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman. Sometimes the Big Three determined wisely, sometimes disastrously, and too often impulsively. Records kept by interpreters were hit-or-miss, and frequently the Big Three could scarcely remember what they had already decided or promised.

Thus one reads with almost dread fascination Macmillan’s autopsy on the remaking of the Arab Middle East. Here is the historian Arnold Toynbee, describing an encounter with the British prime minister: "Lloyd George, to my delight, had forgotten my presence and had begun to think aloud. ‘Mesopotamia...yes...oil...irrigation...we must have Mesopotamia; Palestine...yes... the Holy Land...Zionism...we must have Palestine; Syria...h’m...what is there in Syria? Let the French have that.’" He had his wish, and it thus transpired that the three antagonistic Ottoman provinces, Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul, were stapled together in a makeshift, play-it-by-ear manner.

As Macmillan reports, this happened in part because Clemenceau, by now an aging tiger, had failed to grasp the strategic importance of Mosul oil, and in part because Britons overestimated their imperial skills as nation builders. It seemingly never occurred to Col. Arnold Wilson, the British officer who promoted this merger, that there were no Iraqis per se, that history, geography, and religion pulled them apart. Wilson proposed making Mesopotamia a formal British protectorate, but his superiors opted instead for indirect rule, as practiced in the princely states of India and in Egypt. "What we want," candidly observed an official in the India Office in London, "is some administration with Arab institutions which we can safely leave while pulling the strings ourselves; something that won’t cost very much, which Labour can swallow consistent with its principles, but under which our economic and political institutions will be secure."

Working to modify this illusionist arrangement was the only woman then to play a major role in Middle East diplomacy, Gertrude Bell, a fluent Arabist, who tirelessly lobbied to give Iraqis themselves a greater voice. But like all Britons involved, she was trapped in Iraq’s lethal labyrinth, with its omnipresent ambushes. Macmillan succinctly describes what happened after the Paris peacemakers decamped, and it has a familiar, melancholy ring:

For the Arabs, 1920 remains the year of disaster: Palestine gone, then Syria, Lebanon and finally Mesopotamia. In the summer of 1920, rebellions broke out over about a third of Mesopotamia, up and down the Euphrates valley and in the Kurdish areas of Mosul. Bell, who had long since come around to the view that Mesopotamia must have self-government, had warned of this. Arnold Wilson, with whom she was no longer on speaking terms, blamed it all on outside agitators and the influence of his namesake’s Fourteen Points. Railway lines were cut and towns besieged; British officers were murdered. The British reacted harshly, sending punitive expeditions across the land to burn villages and exact fines. In a new but very effective tactic, their aircraft machine-gunned and bombed from the air.... The events in Mesopotamia shook the British government badly. "We are at our wits’ end," said Churchill, "to find a single soldier."

Once again, the frantic British improvised, this time turning to the Hashemite prince Feisal, recently deposed by the French from ruling Syria, to whom they had more or less promised a throne. Thus a wobbly country known as Iraq emerged in 1921 after a stage-managed coronation under a new flag, both the handiwork of Gertrude Bell. The colonial stigma was never expunged, Iraq failed to congeal, and to this day it remains a confederacy of angry beehives, ready to swarm afresh when poked.

And yet Iraq was but one of a dozen deadly legacies bequeathed by the peace-makers of Paris. My only real quarrel with Macmillan is her excessive magnanimity in a too-brief conclusion that in effect says that whatever their blunders the Big Three did their best: "They could not foresee the future and they certainly could not control it. That was up to their successors." Sure, but what did they bequeath those immediate successors? When he left Paris, Woodrow Wilson said to his wife Edith, "Well, little girl, it is finished, and, as no one is satisfied, it makes me hope we have made a just peace; but it is all in the lap of the gods."

Making every generous allowance for the political pressures on the Big Three, the gods were not to blame for decisions too casually made that shortly led to a tragic invasion (the disastrous Greek campaign in Smyrna); to privation, civil strife, and hyperinflation (in Germany and Central Europe); to the rise of Italian Fascism (the mishandling of the Fiume dispute); and to Japan’s aggressions in China (the bad Shantung decision)—all detailed passim in these pages. By contrast, the 1815 Congress of Vienna, whatever its blunders, gave Europe a century without a general war. In 1945–46, the Big Three’s agreements at Yalta and Potsdam, whatever their moral and political deficiencies, kept the Cold War cold, led to the Marshall Plan, NATO, the European Union, and yes, a viable United Nations. By the measure of its predecessor and successors, the Paris Peace Conference was demonstrably a bad show.

On Seeing No Evil
Samantha Power’s "A Problem from Hell" takes its title from a remark by former secretary of state Warren Christopher as he struggled (successfully) to find reasons to do as little as possible about the genocidal murder of Bosnian Muslims in former Yugoslavia. Power, currently director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, had been a war correspondent in Bosnia, and she was baffled by the limp U.S. response. To determine why America’s human rights policy had seemingly failed, she undertook this full-court study of the U.S. response to the genocidal slaughter of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I, of Jews by Nazi Germany before and during World War II, of fellow Cambodians by Pol Pot in the 1970s, of Iraqi Kurds by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, and of Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus by militant Hutus in 1994.

Her disconcerting conclusion is that Washington’s consistent policy of nonintervention in the face of genocide flows not from failure but from a ruthlessly effective policy of deliberate inaction: "No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on." Power’s explanation for why this should be so has a sad ring of truth:

It is in the realm of domestic politics that the battle to stop genocide is lost. American political leaders interpret society-wide silence as an indicator of public indifference. They reason that they will incur no cost if the United States remains uninvolved but will face steep risks if they engage. Potential sources of influence—lawmakers on Capitol Hill, editorial boards, non-governmental groups, and ordinary constituents—do not generate political pressure sufficient to change the calculus of America’s leaders.

As if to confirm her thesis, human rights became a tack-on extra in President George W. Bush’s long laundry list of justifications for invading Iraq, and only assumed more importance after America’s embarrassing failure to find the weapons of mass destruction that were the ostensible principal casus belli. This earlier downplaying of Saddam’s atrocities recalled the past equivocation about Saddam Hussein’s gassing of Kurdish villages when the Iraqi regime was being courted by Washington during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, as documented in Power’s account.

Indeed, what distinguishes her book is its detailed and devastating chronicle of bureaucratic infighting, beginning with the senior Henry Morgenthau’s futile struggles to galvanize a U.S. response to what he called "race murder" in Ottoman Turkey. In 1915, on the claim that Armenian Christians composed a pro-Russian fifth column during World War I, the Turkish leadership authorized "arbitrary arrests, terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage, and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them"—in the horrified words of Morgenthau, then the U.S. envoy to Turkey, in a cable to Washington. (This crime against humanity had its antecedents in the 1890s, compellingly recalled in an important new book by Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, HarperCollins, 2003.)

After the war, the Paris Big Three promised to create an Armenian republic, but faced with serious Turkish opposition and possible loss of access to Gulf oil, they and their successors simply shelved the idea. In 1920, a young Armenian named Soghomon Tehlirian avenged his own slain family by killing the former Turkish leader, Pasha Talaat, an architect of the 1915 genocide. As the assassin faced trial in Berlin, a 20-year-old Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, asked his law professor in Lvov why the Armenians had not had Talaat arrested on murder charges. There was no law under which the Turk could be tried, the professor patiently explained: "Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens. He kills them and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing."

"It is a crime for Tehlirian to kill a man, but it is not a crime for his oppressor to kill more than a million men?" Lemkin rejoined. "This is most inconsistent." At issue is the matter of "state sovereignty," which Lemkin refused to believe was a license to kill millions of people. The paradox took on personal urgency in 1939 when Lemkin escaped from Poland (as most of his relatives did not) before Hitler’s legions swept into Warsaw. Once in America, while working for the War Department, Lemkin struck on the right term for the crime without a name: "genocide." Over time, Lemkin’s tireless campaign bore results in the adoption in 1948 of the Genocide Convention which, however, was not ratified by the United States for another 40 years, and then only with a Jesse Helmsian smoke bomb tied to it—a "sovereignty package" effectively immunizing the United States from its provisions.

This emblematic story, with its profound Talmudic overtones, provides the thread for Power’s narrative. It also illuminates my own reservations about what seems on her part an excessive enthusiasm for militant interventionism à la this spring’s Operation Iraqi Freedom. The problem is that George W. Bush’s doctrine of preemptive war effectively denies other nations the state sovereignty that the United States fiercely claims for itself. To take the Lvov law professor’s example, Washington retains the right to kill everybody else’s chickens while putting a barbed legal wall around its own henhouse. It is a position profoundly at odds with a tradition of international law that Americans took the lead in nurturing, as described in Dorothy V. Jones’s Toward a Just World.

The Monster in the Forest
No struggle in the past century was at once nobler or more quixotic than the campaign propelled by Americans to hold individuals accountable for crimes against humanity and the laws of war. The same might be said of a parallel campaign to punish or censure abusers of human rights and to seek peaceful means of resolving disputes between sovereign nations. These were spears, frail and inadequate ones, worthily yet vainly aimed at the monster in the forest, the world’s aggressive and despotic sovereign states, as much a menace to their own citizens as to their neighbors.

A scholar in residence at Chicago’s Newberry Library and an associate in the history department of Northwestern University, Dorothy Jones, in her finely wrought narrative, describes the people and events that shaped that campaign. It began, fittingly, in 1899 at a peace conference in the Netherlands, homeland of Hugo Grotius, the legal scholar who in the seventeenth century first sought to tame the sovereign monsters of Europe. There were quarrels from the outset at the conference held in The Hague as to whether aggrieved peoples—the Boers, Armenians, and other dissidents—should address the delegates. Nevertheless, this halting first step established The Hague as the symbol, as well as center, of the movement toward world law.

As if on their Sunday best behavior, proud Western sovereigns gathered at The Hague to sign successive conventions and to dedicate the Permanent Court of Justice. From The Hague there flowed a procession of rules and treaties defining acceptable norms for nations at war, one of the earliest (1899) being a declaration binding signatories not to use poison gas. Among the 20-odd signatories was Germany, whose armies became the first to use chemical weapons, at Ypres in 1915.

World War I confirmed the limitations of The Hague conventions, and so hopes were now vested in the League of Nations, whose creation was meant to redeem the seamier compromises at the Paris Peace Conference. Jones is excellent at evoking the forgotten characters of the Geneva-based League: the stork-necked Lord Robert Cecil, the witty Spaniard, Salvador de Madariaga, and Sweden’s Hjalmar and Ake Hammar-skjold, respectively the impressive father and uncle of Dag, the martyred U.N. secretary general. Yet the League was doomed from the beginning by the American boycott and by the reluctance of the weakened great powers to use its vaunted machinery, as confirmed by its handwringing when Japan devoured the Chinese province of Manchuria after a staged railway explosion in 1931.

All this is noted by Jones. Still, out of the frustrations and failures of the interwar years grew the American and British determination to establish what became the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals to try war criminals. For the first time, leaders of a sovereign state were held accountable for crimes against the peace (i.e., violating the much derided Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war), for violating the laws of war (i.e., the Hague conventions), and for crimes against humanity (the slaughter of Jews, dissenters, and other stigmatized persons). On all this our author offers this reflective passage:

So what was this law under which the defendants in the war crimes trials were charged and tried? It was a law whose boundaries were always in dispute, outside and inside the courtroom. It was a law of custom as well as treaty, of authoritative writings as well as judicial findings and arbitral decisions. Since the end of World War I, it has been a law in quickened process of development, yet the development was frequently stymied by entrenched concepts, particularly with regard to the prerogatives of sovereignty. Like prevailing ideas in economics and politics, the concepts embedded in international law could not keep up with the rapid changes of the twentieth century that were bringing the states of the world into ever closer contact where they shared danger and distress, as well as opportunity.

Regrettably, Jones’s book stops short of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, which demonstrated the efficacy of these international norms, so often the focus of scorn and sneers. Few deny that the Helsinki human rights provisions armed dissenters with a moral authority that eventually proved lethal to the Soviet bloc. Yet what gave leverage to various Helsinki watch groups was the act’s provision that each signatory could scrutinize the compliance of other signatories. In short, the United States was as subject to inquiry and criticism at biennial review conferences as any other party to the Final Act. It was a reciprocal abridgement of the pure theory of state sovereignty, and that was its overriding merit.

Flash forward to summer 2003. In a move without precedent, the Bush administration suspended all future U.S. military assistance to 35 countries because they declined to exempt American citizens from prosecution by a still-unborn International Criminal Court. Among the culprits were key countries like Brazil, Colombia, and South Africa, and many nations that supported the U.S. action against Iraq, including the Baltic republics. Richard Dicker, a director of Human Rights Watch in New York, commented: "I’ve never seen a sanctions regime aimed at countries that believe in the rule of law rather than ones that commit human rights abuses." It is a truly astonishing turn in American foreign policy. Washington is using its powerful leverage to impose its wishes on another country while at the same time immunizing itself from international accountability for criminal acts. This sets a precedent for any rogue regime determined to flout prohibitions of genocide and other war crimes so painstakingly elaborated in a century of international law. By thus exempting itself from the reciprocal scrutiny, the Bush administration, one hopes inadvertently, provides legal aid and political comfort to the monsters at large in the forest.

Slaying those monsters remains humanity’s greatest, noblest unfinished task. Too great, one hastens to add, for a single super-power to accomplish. It will require a joint effort, based on a clearer understanding of our past successes and failures. These three exemplary volumes provide a much needed, and accessible, database.

*Karl E. Meyer is the editor of this magazine and the author, most recently, of The Dust of Empire: The Race for Mastery in the Asian Heartland (Public Affairs, 2003).