{"title":"The Great War and International Law: German Justifications of Prevention and Pre-emptive Self-Defence","authors":"I. Hull","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198865308.003.0010","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Isabel V. Hull uses the German declarations of war in 1914 to examine three issues: 1) the role of customary international law (CIL) in statesmen’s decision to go to war (using Germany as an example); 2) the assumptions that state actors held a jus ad bellum; and, especially, 3) how they distinguished self-defence, prevention, pre-emption, and aggression. Hull uses not the claims of jurists, but the arguments and actions of civilian and military leaders, i.e. those who actually made the decisions for war. With this, she continues Anuschka Tischer’s and Hendrik Simon’s examination of the question whether there was a transformation of war discourses in (early) modernity that led to overcoming the need to justify war. The chapter confirms that, even as Germany began a ‘preventive war’, the European state consensus held that, on the continent, preventive war was illegal, pre-emptive war was severely restrained, and genuine self-defence – meaning both fending off armed attack against one’s territory, independence, or sovereignty, and defending the treaty-structure that guaranteed the inter-state order – was the only justification for war acceptable to the community of states.","PeriodicalId":303490,"journal":{"name":"The Justification of War and International Order","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2021-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"The Justification of War and International Order","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198865308.003.0010","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Isabel V. Hull uses the German declarations of war in 1914 to examine three issues: 1) the role of customary international law (CIL) in statesmen’s decision to go to war (using Germany as an example); 2) the assumptions that state actors held a jus ad bellum; and, especially, 3) how they distinguished self-defence, prevention, pre-emption, and aggression. Hull uses not the claims of jurists, but the arguments and actions of civilian and military leaders, i.e. those who actually made the decisions for war. With this, she continues Anuschka Tischer’s and Hendrik Simon’s examination of the question whether there was a transformation of war discourses in (early) modernity that led to overcoming the need to justify war. The chapter confirms that, even as Germany began a ‘preventive war’, the European state consensus held that, on the continent, preventive war was illegal, pre-emptive war was severely restrained, and genuine self-defence – meaning both fending off armed attack against one’s territory, independence, or sovereignty, and defending the treaty-structure that guaranteed the inter-state order – was the only justification for war acceptable to the community of states.
伊莎贝尔·赫尔(Isabel V. Hull)以1914年德国宣战为例,考察了三个问题:1)习惯国际法在政治家决定参战中的作用(以德国为例);2)假设国家行为者持有战争法;特别是,他们如何区分自卫、预防、先发制人和侵略。赫尔没有引用法学家的观点,而是引用了文职和军事领导人的观点和行动,即那些真正做出战争决定的人。在此基础上,她继续了Anuschka Tischer和Hendrik Simon对这个问题的研究,即(早期)现代性中是否存在战争话语的转变,从而克服了为战争辩护的需要。这一章证实,即使德国开始了一场“预防性战争”,欧洲国家一致认为,在欧洲大陆上,预防性战争是非法的,先发制人的战争受到严格限制,真正的自卫——既意味着抵御对自己领土、独立或主权的武装攻击,又意味着捍卫保证国家间秩序的条约结构——是国家共同体唯一可以接受的战争理由。