The political and intellectual origins of the 1868 St Petersburg Declaration.

Today, conflict and ‘law’ are inseparable. The ‘Hauge Laws’ regulate conflict, proscribing weapons which cause unnecessary suffering, as well as the targeting of civilians. These proscriptions can be traced to the 1868 preamble to the St Petersburg Declaration prohibiting explosive projectiles (Declaration), where they were first enumerated in an international treaty.[1] However, the Declaration is limited, particularly in its refusal to apply its protections to colonial wars.[2]

The Declaration succeeded in limiting arms, where similar attempts in 1816, 1832 and 1859-70 failed.[3] This is because its text satisfied two major conflicting political and intellectual philosophies of the time, military realism, and humanitarianism. These philosophies were shaped by diverse conceptions of modernity, legalism, racialised colonialism and nationalism, which spread in tandem with the growth of mass media and communicative technology.

This project will ask how the Declaration came to be formulated at the time, and in the manner that it was. Current scholarship mainly analyses the Declaration as a ‘staring point’ for developments in humanitarianism and international law.[4] In contrast, my research will study the intellectual and political debates which characterised its drafting, placing these in a transnational context. I shall research individual members of the drafting commission, who go almost undiscussed in current literature on the Declaration. This original ‘transnational’ focus on the political and intellectual origins of the Declaration, and the novel incorporation of individual drafters into the narrative of its creation, will provide a fresh perspective into how international humanitarian norms first emerged.

My driving questions are: Considering Russia possessed the most advanced explosive projectiles, why did it call a convention to prohibit them? Why did the attendant states agree to this, and why were certain states invited or excluded? Why did the Prussian representative try to broaden the Declaration’s prohibitions, despite pressure from a powerful Prussian lobby opposing legalistic restrictions on war? Why did Britain’s representative attempt to narrow the Declaration and prevent its application to colonies? And, to account for the criticisms that scholarship on humanitarianism has been unduly Eurocentric, how did Latin American and Asian influences shape the development of the humanitarian ideas within the declaration?[5]

I hypothesise that these questions can be answered by considering the growth (facilitated by technology and media innovations) of two antagonistic transnational phenomena. 1) The development of a web of actors in law, media and ‘global’ society (including Asia and Latin America) who, after the Crimean war, gained the political capital to effectively advocate for humanitarian and legal parameters to be placed on conflicts. This created the environment which allowed the Declaration to be proposed and for some delegates to push to codify new humanitarian ideals. 2) The parallel development of anti-legalist, ‘nationalist military realism’ and racialised colonialism, which inspired delegates to limit the Declaration through textual alterations and the exclusion of states from negotiations. The Declaration succeeded by incorporating elements of both positions, contrary to other disarmament proposals in 1816, 1832 and 1859-70.[6]

My position challenges paradigms which suggest that international legal norms were constructed solely by unitary states to maximise their relative military and economic power, without considering morality or ideology.[7] However, to account for this position, I will consider whether Russia designed the Declaration purely to prevent an economically damaging arms race and whether the Prussian calls to widen the treaty reflected an attempt to undermine it by broadening it unrealistically.[8] I expect the answers to these contentions to be no.

These hypotheses shall be tested using archival research and literature reviews. I shall scrutinise the letters and journals of delegates from Prussia, Russia and Britain. Then, I shall place them within a transnational context using recordings of the Declaration’s negotiations in combination with diplomatic letters, parliamentary proceedings, newspaper debates, the Red Cross archives, and the meeting records of ‘peace societies’ and other humanitarian groups. In studying developments in technology, modernity, legalism, colonialism and humanitarianism, I shall review and discuss secondary literature.

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[1] Georg von Martens, New General Collection of Treaties, Conventions and other Remarkable Transactions (Göttingen, 1873), pp.450-473.

[2] Ibid., p.472.

[3] Scott Keefer, The Law of Nations and Britain’s Quest for Naval Security International Law and Arms Control: 1898 – 1914 (E-Book, 2016), pp. 16-17.

[4]  See James Crossland, War, Law and Humanity The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853–1914 (London, 2018).

[5] Maartje Abbenhuis, ‘Review of JAMES CROSSLAND. War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853–1914. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.’ American Historical Review, (2020), p.621.

[6] Keefer, Quest, p.16-17.

[7] See description of Morgenthau/Realism in Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge, 2001), pp.439-440.

[8] See Keefer, Quest, p.40.