The Internationalists Quotes

“On lawyering: When the law is on your side, pound the law; when the facts are on your side, pound the facts; when neither is on your side, pound the table”
― Oona A. Hathaway, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World

“THE LEGAL STATUS OF WAR”
― Oona A. Hathaway, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World

“From at least the fifteenth century, sovereigns who went to war published “manifestos” setting out their “just causes.” The first known war manifesto was written for Maximilian I, soon to be the Holy Roman Emperor, to defend his resort to arms against Charles VIII on the grounds that the French king stole his wife, Anne of Brittany. The first line declares “there is no one who would not know that the French are roosters.”
― Oona A. Hathaway, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World

“Some may ask whether outcasting—“the alternative to war,” as David Cohen put it—is really much better than the war it replaced. After all, states may still be coerced into joining agreements—if not by threat of physical force (which, in the New World Order, would trigger a duress defense) then by threat of economic force (which would not). The outlawry of war and the system of law that has grown up around it are grounded in the principle that the physical destruction of war is uniquely harmful. Political theorist Judith Shklar famously argued that cruelty—“the deliberate infliction of physical, and secondarily emotional, pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in order to achieve some end, tangible or intangible, of the latter”—is the greatest evil.95 Outcasting replaces this evil with exclusion from the benefits of community membership. Like force and threats of force, outcasting constrains choices. But it does so without the cruelty and destruction that normally accompany war.”
― Oona A. Hathaway, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World

“Indeed, China has shown that it is willing to flout many of the rules of the system, using its outsized military to intimidate its neighbors. Meanwhile the United States has responded by sending its own massive air force and navy to push back against the Chinese claims. In this clash of military titans, how could legal niceties matter? But stepping back, it is possible to see that the power struggle is taking place against a backdrop of law. Why were islands so worthless for hundreds of years? Because barren territory that was difficult to defend against conquest was more trouble than it was worth. Why did these islands become so valuable? Because the law changed. Not only did conquest become illegal (and thus defending islands unnecessary), but the new law of the sea gave states control over hundreds of miles of ocean and seabed resources surrounding islands. China and the other coastal nations scrambling to establish claims to the islands are doing so because they are pursuing their interests as determined by law.”
― Oona A. Hathaway, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World

“Russia’s seizure of Tajikistan in 1868, for example, was not reversed until the unraveling of the USSR in 1991. Similarly, the U.K.’s seizure of present-day Nigeria in 1885 was not reversed until 1960.19 Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, land that was seized was generally recognized as legally obtained and retained by the conquering state. Might, after all, made Right. Then, in 1931, states began to refuse to recognize conquests. Forceful transfers of land still occurred, but for the first time they went unrecognized. Even more remarkable, with the exception of Taiwan, all the unrecognized transfers of territory between 1928 and 1949 were later reversed.”
― Oona A. Hathaway, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World

“Schmitt denounced outlawry in the same building in which Shotwell had proposed it. It is absurd, Schmitt claimed in his lecture at the Hochschule für Politik, for states to renounce war. As nice as it sounded—and it was dangerous in no small part because it sounded so nice—outlawry is an impossibility. To think that war can be outlawed is to misunderstand politics. Politics presupposes the very possibility of war. A state that outlaws war outlaws itself. This claim sounds just like the sort of crude militarism one would expect from a Nazi. But Schmitt was not a Nazi at this point and, although he would later join the party, he was no ideologue of National Socialism. His objection was not founded in a glorification of violence, but rather on a dark, but deep, vision of politics. According to Schmitt, the world of politics (or as he calls it, following the German, “the Political”) is not defined by its subject. Political disputes can break out over any issue. What defines the Political is its intensity: The more intense the struggle, the more political the dispute. “The political,” Schmitt wrote, “is the most intense and extreme antagonism.”
― Oona A. Hathaway, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World

“It is tempting to regard the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as a lawless act for which there can be no justification or excuse. For Americans, December 7 remains “a date which will live in infamy,” in the words of President Roosevelt. But the devastating strike on the United States was not lawless. Japan was simply following the law of nations that U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships had introduced in 1854. What Japan failed to recognize, however, was that those rules had been renounced in 1928. The United States itself had only recently come to terms with the complete transformation in the legal order initiated by the Pact—it finally embraced the new understanding of neutrality with the passage of the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, only six months before Pearl Harbor.”
― Oona A. Hathaway, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World