Source: http://www.allenzhertz.com/2012/03/treaty-obligation-from-reformation-to_8822.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 16:03:54+00:00

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Audi Alteram Partem: 1-2. Treaty Obligation from the Protestant Reformation to 1919: Parts 1-2 "Introduction" and "Treaty as a Legal Source"
1-2. Treaty Obligation from the Protestant Reformation to 1919: Parts 1-2 "Introduction" and "Treaty as a Legal Source"
Twentieth-century international law places special emphasis on the treaty as a legal source and insists that treaty obligations are legally binding. However, Cambridge University Professor of International Law Clive Parry (1917-1982) significantly told his students that the moral or "natural law" requirement to keep treaty promises was in the 19th century commonly considered to be binding in honour alone. He also argued that before 1914 publicists and diplomatists tended to exclude treaties from the ambit of international law which, he said, was then perceived to be primarily customary. This study will test the validity of Parry’s thesis via an examination of treaty obligation from the 16th-century Protestant Reformation to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference that brought an end to the First World War. Particular attention will be paid to the meaning of “honour” and its significance for the European States' system that gave rise to the law of nations.
Also on this website is an earlier published study showing that, in the Middle Ages, the moral or "natural law" requirement to keep treaty promises was binding in canon law by virtue of the pope’s jurisdiction over solemn oaths, then invariably used to guarantee the fulfilment of agreements. As Christians, treaty-breaking kings were subject to the papal court “by reason of sin,” in this instance the very grave canonical offence of perjury. However, in the early 16th century the Protestant Reformation destroyed Christendom’s legal unity, thereby setting the stage for the gradual development of the classical system of international law. As in the Middle Ages, lawyers continued to intone pacta sunt servanda (agreements are to be kept). But the post-medieval framework lacked a legal remedy for breach of treaty. Here, it will be demonstrated that for four hundred years, the moral or "natural law" requirement to keep treaty promises was deemed to be binding in honour alone.
Part 2 reviews classical international law’s assessment of the treaty as a legal source. Part 3 shows that, before the First World War, treaties were not always accepted as an integral part of international law. Part 4 explains why treaties were not seen as legally binding, and describes how international law governed treaties via pacta sunt servanda as a moral or "natural law" requirement. Part 5 illuminates the State’s moral personality with reference to both personification and treaties as “contracts of kings.” Honour is identified as one of the principal features of pre-1914 European civilization and international relations in Part 6. Part 7 portrays the “old diplomacy” as a milieu focusing on honour. Part 8 shows what kings, prime ministers, philosophers and lawyers had to say about treaties binding in honour. The honour of treaties as seen in Britain and the USA is the subject of Parts 9 and 10 respectively. Part 11 recalls that, before 1914, all treaties were a “gentlemen’s agreement” -- an expression which only made sense in public international law after 1919, i.e. as a specific exception to the new rule that treaties are normally binding in law. Part 12 treats the “new diplomacy” that arose during the First World War and discusses the rise of the legal paradigm. Finally, Part 13 highlights the law-centered order inaugurated by the 1919 Paris Peace Settlement which created conditions supporting twentieth-century discourse about treaties as legally binding.
The law-making treaty is by far the most important source of general international obligation, and the term ‘international legislation,’ which has been freely applied to this process of law-making by treaty, is doubtless justified both by the close analogy to the legislative processes of domestic law and by the importance and volume of its achievement.
absence of permanent international arbitral or judicial institutions to support anything like the current focus on inter partes litigation.
Early exponents ignore treaties as legal source?
The proof for the law of nations is similar to that for unwritten municipal law; it is found in unbroken custom and the testimony of those who are skilled in it. The law of nations, in fact, as Dio Chrysostom well observes, ‘is the creation of time and custom.’ And for the study of it the illustrious writers of history are of the greatest value to us.
As for those persons who rank under the law of nations, the particular compacts of two or more States, concluded by leagues and treaties of peace, to us their notion appears very incongruous. For although the law of nature in that part of it concerning the keeping of faith, doth oblige us to stand to such agreements; yet the agreements themselves cannot be called laws, in any propriety of speech or of sense. Besides they are almost infinite in number, and commonly are settled only for a time. Nor do they any more constitute a part of law in general, than the covenants and bargains of particular subjects with each other, do belong to the body of the civil law of the kingdom: but they are rather to be esteemed the subject and the concern of history.
The stipulative law of nations has its equivalent in the private law of citizens, because it has its origins in their agreements. Therefore just as the private law for citizens, derived from agreements entered into between themselves, is considered as having no value at all as civil law for a certain particular state, so also the law for nations, derived from agreements entered into with other nations, it seems cannot be considered as the law of nations.
The different engagements into which States can enter, produce a new kind of law of nations which is called ‘conventional’ or ‘of treaties’. Since it is evident that a treaty only binds the contracting parties, the conventional law of nations is not at all a universal law, but rather a particular law. All that can be done with this subject matter in a treatise on the law of nations, is to provide the general rules which States must respect with regard to their treaties. The details of the different agreements which are concluded among specific States, and the resulting rights and obligations, are matters of fact which belong to the realm of history.
Treaties fare better with empiricists?
Although Vattel was widely read on both sides of the Atlantic, natural law was even then beginning to lose its stranglehold. Voltaire “derided Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel and other natural lawyers as bores, mediocrities and imitators.” Dutch jurist Cornelius van Bynkershoek (1673-1743) pointed to the future in tempering naturalism with a positivism that sought international custom in recent State practice rather than in the examples from antiquity that studded Grotius’ writing.
The rule of custom may be learned from the almost unbroken practices in treaties and edicts, for sovereigns have often made such regulations [about contraband] by treaties with a view to a possible outbreak of war, and also by edicts after war has broken out. I said ‘almost unbroken practices’, for one or two treaties which vary from the general usage do not alter the law of nations.
Everyone knows that treaties are the archives of nations; that they embody the title deeds of all the peoples, the reciprocal engagements which bind them, the laws which they have imposed upon themselves, the rights which they have acquired or lost.
by comparing the treaties that the powers of Europe have made with one another, we discover certain principles that have been almost universally adopted by all the powers that have made treaties on the same subject. [...] Analogy often forms the basis of decisions in the affairs of nations. It is no more than the application of what has been determined by treaty or custom in certain cases, to other cases which resemble them.
All this body of old conventions, composing the vast and voluminous collection called the corps diplomatique, [which] forms the code or statute law, as the methodized reasonings of the great publicists and jurists form the digest and jurisprudence of the Christian world.
After the Napoleonic Wars, German public lawyer Johann Ludwig Klüber (1762-1837) ranked treaties first among legal sources. Conceding the absence of treaties common to all European States, he followed Mably and Martens in asserting that international law could be distilled from identical treaty provisions and derived by analogy based on the principles expressed therein.
only formal and definite foundations... are to be found in the treaties, by which states, acting in pairs or in groups, have agreed to be bound in their relations with each other, and in such principles of international action as have found their way into the statutes or the established judicial precedents of enlightened individual states. More and more international conventions [sic] come to recognize in their treaties certain elements of right, of equity, and of comity as settled, as always to be accepted in transactions between nations.
Against this background, many jurists remained comfortable with a tradition that deprecated treaties as a source of international law. This is significant because, in the period before the First World War, the treaty’s juridical defects directly limited the ability of States to develop international law and create general permanent institutions like the League of Nations, the United Nations and the World Court.
Did Europe and Britain differ on treaties?
These enemies and rivals of the naval power of Great Britain have entered into treaties, laying down certain rules which they wish to have observed, and to the observance of which they think they have a right to compel Great Britain, though no party to them.
British critique of treaties as legal source?
Learned and industrious men... may collect from the great numbers of treaties which have been concluded among civilised nations the usual subjects of stipulation, and may, by arranging and classifying the rules so stipulated, produce a systematic work, binding and obligatory upon the contracting parties, so far as the treaties out of which it is compiled are still in existence or force; and such a compilation may, no doubt, be otherwise useful historically. But it is vain to maintain that in this way any code of international law can — consistently with sound legal principle or accurate logical deduction — be reared up or created, such as to be binding upon the nations who are not parties to the treaties, or even upon the contracting parties, after those treaties have expired from lapse of time, or ceased, from other legitimate causes, to be legally obligatory.
Hautefeuille will take a single treaty or a batch of treaties, and finding in them certain stipulations, will conclude that these clauses are declaratory of the common law [of nations]. The reasonable conclusion is exactly the opposite. The stipulations were introduced because without them the common law [of nations] would take a different disposition. It would be as reasonable to assert that the statute book is the source of the common law [of England], where as a general rule, its enactments are in derogation of that law. Instead of the conventional law of treaties being the common, it is, in fact, the exceptional law of nations.
No single treaty can have the value of a well established custom as a guide to our knowledge of the law of nations, either in itself, or as interpreted by the international consciousness of a particular epoch. A treaty indicates only what the parties to it have consented to hold as the relations subsisting between themselves at the period of contracting it, and, inasmuch as this consent may have been brought about, not by the coincidence of reason and ultimate will, but by violence and selfishness on the one side, and fear or stupidity on the other, it is quite possible that a treaty may not have the value even of an isolated and temporary instance of international understanding. It may never have been carried out at all, either on the ground that one of the parties to it promised what was impossible, or what he had no intention of performing, except under the continuance of the compulsitor with which he had agreed to dispense.
There is a great difference of opinion among writers of International Law as to whether treaties are properly speaking part of that law. The common English view is that most treaties merely register a bargain between the contracting parties, each surrendering something to the other, in order to gain from the other something else he deems more important. On the other hand, a school of Continental publicists exalt treaties into a corpus of International Law, ascribing to them, or rather to a number of them arbitrarily selected because they set forth special views, a transcendental and altogether fictitious importance.
Some treaties, but very few, become after a greater or less time, Sources of Law. But the vast majority of treaties are valueless as evidence of what the law is, though they may be of the highest importance as creating new political arrangements or removing old subjects of contention.
1. Clive Parry, “Foreign Policy and International Law,” in British Foreign Policy Under Sir Edward Grey, ed. Sir Francis Harry Hinsley (Cambridge, 1977), 89-110, 558-559.
4. Manfred Lachs, “Pacta Sunt Servanda,” in Encyclopedia of Public International Law, dir. Rudolf Bernhardt, vol. 7 (Amsterdam-New York, 1984), 364-371; Arnold Duncan, Lord McNair, The Law of Treaties (Oxford, 1961), 493-494.
5. Oscar Schachter, “Entangled Treaty and Custom,” in International Law at Time of Perplexity: Essays in Honour of Shabtai Rosenne, ed. Yoram Dinstein and Mala Tabory (Dordrecht, 1989), 717-738.
6. Statute of the International Court of Justice, Article 38(1)(a).
7. Sir Robert Y. Jennings, The Progress of International Law: An Inaugural Lecture (Cambridge, 1960), 27; but see also Jennings, “Treaties as ‘Legislation’,” in Jus et Societas: Essays in Tribute to Wolfgang Friedmann, ed. Gabriel M. Wilner (The Hague, 1979), 159-168.
8. Custom was sometimes called the “common law” of nations, see James Reddie, Inquiries in International Law Public and Private, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1851), 234.
9. Charles S. Edwards, Hugo Grotius the Miracle of Holland: A Study in Legal and Political Thought (Chicago, 1981), 71-113.
10. Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres, in Classics of International Law, ed. James Brown Scott, vol. 2: On the Law of War and Peace Three Books, trans. Francis W. Kelsey et al. (New York, 1925), Bk. I, Ch. 1, § 14(2):44.
11. Antonio Truyol y Serra, “Geschichte der Staatsvertäge und Völkerrecht,” in Internationale Festschrift für Alfred Verdross zum 80. Geburtstag (München and Salzburg, 1971), 509-522, at 513; Clive Parry, “Of Treaties,” in Multum Non Multa: Festschrift für Kurt Lipstein aus Anlaß Seines 70. Geburtstages, ed. Peter Feuerstein and Clive Parry (Heidelberg-Karlsruhe, 1980), 221-239, at 225-226.
12. Preface to Codex iuris gentium (1693), in Leibniz: Political Writings, trans. Patrick Riley, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1988), 165-170.
13. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Herbert W. Schneider (Indianapolis-New York, 1958), Part 2, Ch. 30, 276-277.
14. Henry Wheaton, History of the Law of Nations in Europe and America from the Earliest Times to the Treaty of Washington, 1842 (New York, 1845), 105; possibility of “all or most peoples” agreeing to a conventional law of nations raised by Johann Wolfgang Textor, Synopsis juris gentium, in Classics of International Law, ed. Ludwig von Bar, vol. 2: Text of 1680 trans. John Pawley Bate (Washington, 1916), Ch. 1, §§ 21 and 24:6-7.
15. Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations, Eight Books, ed. Basil Kennett, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1710), Bk. II, Ch. 3, § 22:121-123.
17. Christian Wolff, Jus gentium methodo scientifica pertractatum, in Classics of International Law, ed. Otfried Nippold (Oxford, 1934), Vol 1: Facsimile of 1764 Latin Ed.; Vol 2: Trans. Joseph H. Drake, Prolegomena, § 23:18.
18. Emmerich de Vattel, Le Droit des gens ou principes de la loi naturelle appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des nations et des souverains, in Classics of International Law, Facsimile of 1758 ed., intro. Albert de la Pradelle & trans. Charles G. Fenwick (Washington, 1916), vol. 1, Préliminaires, § 24:13 (French); vol. 3, Introduction, § 24:8 (English); though rejecting the treaty as a legal source, Vattel studded his work with countless treaty references, see Vattel, Le Droit des gens ou principes de la loi naturelle appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des nations et des souverains, vol. 3: Notes et General Analytical Tables, by M.S. Pinheiro-Ferreira (Paris, 1838), Introduction, § 24:22-23.
19. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 2 (New York, 1969), 459.
20. J.L. Brierly, The Law of Nations: An Introduction to the International Law of Peace, 6th ed., ed. Sir Humphrey Waldock (Oxford, 1963), 36-37.
21. Cornelius van Bynkershoek, Qaestionum juris publici libri duo, in Classics of International Law, Facsimile of the 1737 Latin ed., intro. J. de Louter and trans. Tenney Frank (Oxford, 1930), vol. 2: Trans., Bk. I, Ch. 2:20-21.
22. Ibid., Bk. I, Ch. 10:67; for refusal to rest the law on a handful of treaties, see Bk. I, Ch. 12:79-80.
23. Gabriel Bonnot de Mably’s Droit public de l’Europe, fondé sur les traités (1747) is more descriptive than prescriptive, see Oeuvres complètes de l’Abbé de Mably, vols. 7-10 (Toulouse-Nîmes, 1793); “public law of Europe” was used for Europe’s States’ system or constitution, i.e. for something geographically narrower and more political than “natural” or “international law,” see Frederick Gentz, On the State of Europe Before and After the French Revolution, trans. John Charles Herries, 2nd ed. (London, 1803), 365, n. A; “questions affecting the great public law of Europe” were for the five Great Powers sitting alone, see Foreign Secretary Lord Malmesbury, Apr. 18, 1859, Lords, Parl. Deb., 3rd ser., vol. 153:1836.
24. Droit public de l’Europe, in Oeuvres de Mably, vol. 7:219.
25. Ibid., 219-220; Mably’s work is not what would be regarded today as a legal study, but rather an historical commentary on post-1648 political and trade treaties, see Sir F. H. Hinsley Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations Between States (Cambridge, 1963), 166.
26. Georg Friedrich von Martens, A Compendium of the Law of Nations, Founded on the Treaties and Customs of the Modern Nations of Europe, trans. William Cobbett (London, 1802), Introduction, § 8:11.
27. Ibid., Introduction, § 3:3-4.
28. Ibid., Bk. II, Ch. 2, § 5:63.
29. Letters on a Regicide Peace, in The Works of Edmund Burke (New York, 1859), vol. 2: 254.
30. “A Discourse on the Law of Nature and Nations,” in The Miscellaneous Works of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, vol. 1 (London, 1846), 341-387, at 384-385.
31. Jean-Louis Klüber, Droit des gens moderne de l’Europe, vol. 1 (Paris, 1831), § 3:5-6.
32. Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, El Derecho internacional codificado, trans. José Diaz Covarrubias (Mexico City, 1871), Introduction, 3-4; Bk. I, § 13:69.
33. Paying less attention to treaty law per se than to the “principles of law established by the great international conventions,” Wilson taught (1891-1894) international law to Princeton students, see The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link (Princeton, 1966-1994), [hereinafter cited as PWW], vol. 7:5-7, 453-457; vol. 8:381-383.
34. The State (New York, 1889), §§ 1216-1217, reproduced in PWW, vol. 6:280-281.
35. J.G. Starke, Introduction to International Law, 10th ed. (London, 1989), 16, 18, 35-36.
36. Act of the Congress of Vienna, signed between Austria, France, Great Britain, Portugal, Prussia, Russia and Sweden, 9 June 1815, The Consolidated Treaty Series, [hereinafter CTS], ed. Clive Parry (Dobbs Ferry, New York, 1969-1981), vol. 64, 453-493; Krystyna Marek, “Contribution à l’étude de l’histoire du traité multilatéral,” in Festschrift für Rudolf Bindschedler (Berne, 1980), 17-39; Paul Reuter, Introduction au droit des traités (Paris, 1972), 14.
37. CTS, vols. 27-29; H.G. Pitt, “The Pacification of Utrecht,” in The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 6: The Rise of Great Britain and Russia, 1688-1715/25, ed. J. S. Bromley (Cambridge, 1970), 446-479.
38. Quoted by Manley O. Hudson, International Tribunals: Past and Future (Washington, 1944), 109; Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field, signed at Geneva, 22 August 1864, in CTS, vol. 129:361-367; USA accession 1882.
41. Lawrence’s Wheaton, 736-819; Wheaton said the 1713 Utrecht Treaty established “free ships free goods” as the inter se rule for Britain, France and Holland until “swept away from the European code of public law” by the 1792 war with Revolutionary France, see Enquiry into the Validity of the British Claim to a Right of Visitation and Search of American Vessels Suspected to be Engaged in the African Slave-Trade (Philadelphia, 1842), 22.
42. Charles Jenkinson, 1st Lord Liverpool, Discourse on the Conduct of the Government of Great Britain in Respect to Neutral Nations, Written in the Year 1758 (Edinburgh, 1837), 1801 preface, 5; “free ships free goods”refuted by John Charles Herries, in Gentz, On the State of Europe, May 1802 translator’s preface, viii-xciii, and 366, n. A.
43. Reddie, Inquiries, 234-236, 259.
44. Sir William Vernon Harcourt, Letters by Historicus on Some Questions of International Law (London-Cambridge, 1863), 77-78; for a successful argument that treaties are the “exceptional” law of nations, see Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, The Development of International Law by the International Court, 2nd ed. (London, 1958), 377-379.
45. James Lorimer, The Institutes of the Law of Nations, vol. 1 (Edinburgh-London, 1883), 37.
46. Thomas Joseph Lawrence, Essays on Some Disputed Questions of International Law (Cambridge, 1884), 25; for the 19th century debate on the treaty as source of international law, see Sir Travers Twiss, The Law of Nations, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1884), 164-174.
47. Thomas Joseph Lawrence, The Principles of International Law, 3rd ed. (Boston, 1905), § 68: 97.
48. Ibid., § 68:100; for Russian jurists, see G.I. Tunkin, Theory of International Law, trans. William E. Butler (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 91-93.
49. William Edward Hall, A Treatise on International Law, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1895), 7-13.
50. John Westlake, International Law, Part 1: Peace, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1910), 14, 16, and Chapters on the Principles of International Law (Cambridge, 1894), 83.

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