A Century of Anarchy?

Is what we got used to call the international community sliding back into anarchy as it prevailed in the era preceding the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand-Pact, and the establishment of the UN? In his impressive study Hendrik Simon demonstrates that this would be a wrong conclusion both with a view to our understanding of "the long 19th Century" and of what perhaps may be called the dialectical trinity of war, order, and peace in general. Simon's study opens up a new way of looking at the history of, and the issues at stake in, more recent aspirations to come to grips with the interplay between war and order. * Lothar Brock, Goethe University Frankfurt and Peace Research Institute Frankfurt *
It says a lot about societies what attitude toward violence they practice and accept. Throughout history, every use of international force has been accompanied by its justification. Breaches of international law are made to appear legal. Hendrik Simon's book helps to understand this paradox. Refuting the widespread proposition that states had a “free right to war” before 1920, it opens a view into the plurality of normative and political legitimation claims of interstate violence with unprecedented analytical acuity. Hendrik Simon's impressive study at the intersection of law, politics, and history serves to self-enlighten our society. * Miloš Vec, University of Vienna *
This book confronts a central myth of International Relations head-on: the myth that there existed a free right to go to war in the 19th century which was then replaced by legal restrictions of war in the 20th century. Simon shows that war was in need of justification, both legally and politically, throughout the 19th century and played a crucial role in the establishment of the modern international order. The myth of a free right to go to war was peddled by a small group of German militarists and perpetuated by realists and liberals alike - who used it to support their claims of anarchy and progress respectively. This is a carefully researched, rich and wide ranging, critical study highly recommended for all scholars interested in international relations, international law, and the history of the 19th century. * Beate Jahn, University of Sussex *
This exhaustively-researched study, located at the intersection of International Relations and International Law, turns an established orthodoxy on its head: The European 'long 19th Century', Hendrik Simon suggests, was not the pre-liberal era of an undisputed sovereign liberum ius ad bellum, but rather the precursor of a norm-governed international order. It was primarily significant voices in late Prussian and Imperial Germany's legal and political circles that struggled to superimpose the myth of the “free right to conduct warfare” upon a wider European reality that had decisively moved beyond it. Grounded in a genealogy of war justifications, the constructivist analysis takes the reader on a historical tour de force from the Vienna Congress, via the Eastern Question, Italian and German unification, to World War I, generating a striking revision of the standard argument in IR and IL. * Benno Teschke, University of Sussex *