Principles and Pragmatism in State Succession: Bargaining in the Economic Affairs Commission of the Tartu Peace Conference

Abstract

The conventions of legal argumentation have the tendency to reinforce the notion that the development of international law is a principled affair. This article will examine the elaboration of one particular treaty – the Tartu Peace Treaty signed between Estonia and Soviet Russia in 1920 – in order to see to what extent it lends support to the idea that treaties grow out of principles. The Tartu Peace Treaty perfectly illustrates the point that the contents of a treaty can be entirely indeterminate with regard to their underlying principles. My conclusion is not that, in this case, pragmatism triumphed over principles: that the negotiating parties refrained from debates over abstract principles and took the more pragmatic route of finding an array of concrete solutions. Whilst it is true that the end result – the Treaty as it finally stood – was detached from any single foundational idea, it was not obtained by putting principles aside. The Tartu Peace Conference rather offers us a particularly good example of how principles can be used as rhetorical ploys.