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8 J. Hist. Int'l L. 1 (2006)
Building the Palace of Peace: The Hague Conference of 1899 and Arms Control in the Progressive Era

handle is hein.journals/jhintl8 and id is 7 raw text is: Building the Palace of Peace: The Hague Conference of 1899 and Arms Control in the Progressive Era Scott Andrew Keefer* Heidelberg, Germany There is now to be built by a thousand intellects the invisible palace of law and justice under whose protecting roof the whole civilized world shall live together in peace. Walther Schiicking, 1912' Introduction Arms control became a focus of international law in the late nineteenth century, espe- cially with the peace conference held at the Hague in the summer of 1899. However, the marginal tangible successes at the Hague have obscured the contributions of turn of the century lawyers in formulating some basic issues in this field. Previous authors have noted the contribution of these early efforts to qualitative arms control, that which regulates specific types of weapons, such as poison gas, despite failure to achieve quantitative arms control, or across the board reductions in army strength.' More gener- ally, experts acknowledge the role of the Hague Conference of 1899 in the progressive codification of international law, despite the failure of the disarmament agenda.3 The international lawyers of the late nineteenth century achieved greater accomplish- ments by advancing discourse on disarmament and arms control. Scholars provided the terminology and key issues of verification, forms of limitation, exchange of information, and confidence building measures. This contribution allowed more focused debate in the twentieth century. Additionally, international lawyers raised questions of the ap- propriate formats for success in arms control negotiations - bilateral and multilateral, as well as formal and informal, and their limitations. In this manner, their efforts provided a bridge between the philosophical writings of William Penn, Abb6 de Saint-Pierre, Immanuel Kant, and Jeremy Bentham, on the one hand, and the concrete achievements of the twentieth century in the wake of the Great War. * Fulbright Junior Research Fellow 2004-2005, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. The author wishes to thank the German-American Fulbright Commission and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law for their invaluable support and guidance. I Walther SchOcking, The International Union of the Hague Conferences, xi (trans. Charles Fenwick 1918). 2 See Detlev F. Vagts, The Hague Conventions and Arms Control, 94 AJIL 31 (2000). 3 Jorg Manfred Mtssner, Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907, in Rudolf Bernhardt, ed. Encyclopedia of Public International Law, Vol. II, 671, 677 (1992). Journal of the History of International Law 8: 1-17, 2006. 02006 Koninklijke Brill NV. Printed in the Netherlands.

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