This chapter concludes the book by revisiting its key findings and by reflecting on their meaning from a broader perspective. The first half of the chapter consists of a summary of the rise and fall of the classical doctrine of civil war as explained in the preceding chapters. The second half assesses the overall legacy of the classical doctrine in the light of modern legal theory, and observes how the classical law was hardly better able to overcome the problems of indeterminacy and recognition than current principles are. Yet this does not mean that the classical doctrine would have been meaningless, as its practical utility may have been based precisely on its limited effectiveness and inevitable ambiguity.

This chapter explores the golden era of the classical doctrine of civil war, which lasted until the middle of the nineteenth century. Its focus is on the Spanish American revolutions and the emergence of the law of neutrality in the context of civil wars. The several case examples illustrate how the familiar questions and disputes from the previous chapters persisted and developed in state practice throughout the period. In addition to the Spanish American revolutions, the chapter also discusses the impact of European and American revolutionary ideologies on international movements and illustrates the significant practical limitations of the classical doctrine: while it stemmed from the practice of the transatlantic world, elsewhere in the world it often seemed absent or selectively applied to deny the legal standing of indigenous and colonial insurgents, or to legitimise local rebellions within Oriental empires.

The decline of the classical doctrine of civil war in state practice began right after the American Civil War, when the concept of belligerent recognition had barely been coined in the legal literature. There were several reasons for this. First, after the abolition of privateers in the 1856 Declaration of Paris, the maritime powers had essentially deprived future insurgents of their primary weapon at sea, the privateer. Second, developments in the law of neutrality after the Geneva arbitration raised the prospect of state responsibility towards belligerents for neutral states. Third, as indeterminate pragmatism became a diplomatic norm, new legal vocabularies began to develop that were seemingly independent of questions of formal recognition. New, deliberately ambiguous approaches to recognition emerged, especially in the Latin American insurgencies, such as the recognition of insurgency doctrine.

In this chapter, early efforts at legal codification relevant to submarines are seen in the work of learned societies, such as the Institut de Droit International and the International Law Association, as well as in discussions leading to the conventions adopted at the two Hague Peace Conferences. However, submarines were not specifically addressed but fell within a category of belligerent warships; an early proposal to ban submarines as weapons being unsuccessful. Discussions at this time concerned passage in territorial waters and straits, and particularly the rights and duties of belligerents and neutrals. International law on navigational rights in territorial waters was unsettled as World War I began. The critical role of submarines during World War I prompted States to adopt laws that specifically addressed submarines, including requirements to surface in the territorial sea. The chapter reflects on these emergent laws regulating submarines in both times of war and peace.

This chapter examines legal developments in submarine regulation taking into account the political context existing prior to World War II, including tensions in the Pacific with Japan’s aggression against China. Notably, States adopted the 1936 London Protocol on Submarine Warfare seeking to align requirements for submarines with obligations imposed on surface warships. Tensions in the 1930s also prompted Turkey to initiate a revision of the legal regime governing the Turkish Straits, leading to the Montreux Convention and the near complete prohibition of submarine passage in these waters. With the outbreak of World War II and unrestricted submarine warfare, questions emerged as to the viability of rules set out in the 1936 London Protocol. States also moved to revise laws of neutrality with more targeted consideration of submarines. The chapter thus reflects ongoing legal developments concerning navigational rights of submarines in territorial waters and the regulation of submarines during armed conflict.

In assessing international law governing submarine warfare, we consider how peacetime rules from the law of the sea apply in an armed conflict and focus on the law of neutrality and the law of armed conflict (international humanitarian law). The allocation of rights and duties within different maritime zones continues, albeit with some modifications, during an armed conflict. Most notably, the law of neutrality establishes how those rights and duties change depending on a State’s status as a belligerent or neutral. The use of submarines during armed conflict is also governed by the law of naval warfare and they are largely subject to the same rules that restrict surface warships in relation to targeting, as well as the means and methods of warfare. While submarines are predominantly governed as warships, we note how operational limitations of submarines may affect the interpretation of some rules.

The Second World War posed an existential crisis for the League of Red Cross Societies. This chapter explores how the League attempted to fulfill its primary task of coordinating the work of National Societies when the movement was at war with itself, and when the Red Cross principles were flouted by the belligerent militaries and ignored by their National Societies. By focusing on the League, rather than the ICRC, the chapter broadens our understanding of the Red Cross movement during the conflict. The war illuminated some of the strengths as a network but also exposed some of its latent weaknesses. The chapter shows how, far from being a hiatus in the League’s history, the war years were critical in shaping the wider development of Red Cross humanitarianism. They accentuated the importance of American leadership for the League but also accelerated thinking over the League’s involvement in international relief efforts and sharpened its ambitions to leadership over matters relating to civilian populations in times of war. Both these factors were vital to the way the League legitimised its place within the Red Cross movement and the trans-Atlantic approach taken to articulating the role of the Red Cross in the post-war world.

The servants in Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction, increasingly complex, allow her to represent, variously, Irishness (Donovan and his daughters in The Heat of the Day), the paid companion’s difficulties in living intimately with an employer (in several short stories), a housekeeper who maintains family memories with its furniture (Matchett in The Death of the Heart), and even a murderer who resents his position as a flunkey (Prothero in ‘The Disinherited’). These portrayals allow explorations of class loyalties, predicaments, and resentments, as well as subtleties of Irishness and Irish neutrality during the Second World War. This chapter examines paid companions, Irish help and their informal relationships with their employers, and morally forceful servants who contribute to the advancement of plot. Bowen’s servants often prompt their employers’ confrontation with the reality of their moral, social, or historical circumstances; by doing so, they can expose or puncture their employers’ illusions about their respective worlds.

This chapter examines the foundations of Sarah Wambaugh’s political thought and attempts to reconstruct her world view. Wambaugh’s avid support for the League of Nations was premised on her understanding of it as a new scientific way of conducting international politics. Key to her faith in political science, and later forming a key part of her prescriptions for the plebiscite, was her belief in the importance of neutrality, a concept of international law then in flux. Alongside neutrality, the concept of public opinion was also in flux, with debates as to its relationship to democracy and expertise. The chapter points to the way in which public opinion and perceptions were also integral to her later normative prescriptions for the plebiscite, and ends with an examination of Wambaugh’s own public relations campaign for American entry to into the League of Nations.

The federal courts ultimately came to the nation’s rescue. In 1794, the Supreme Court abruptly reversed course and decided that federal judges could adjudicate cases arising from captures made by French privateers operating from the United States. British officials were initially skeptical about vindicating their sovereign’s rights through the courts, but they came to embrace litigation as a useful weapon in their global struggle with revolutionary France. French diplomats resented judicial interference with privateering, and they demanded that executive branch officers intervene in proceedings to defend France’s prerogatives under treaty and international law. But the Washington administration refused. The courts, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, were “liable neither to controul nor opposition from any other branch of the Government.” Judges continued to have doubts about their role in resolving international legal disputes, but they came to accept responsibility for establishing American sovereignty. This tale of judicial ascendancy might seem at odds with our usual understanding of the courts as the “least dangerous branch” of the early federal government, but the truth is that American policymakers deliberately sought to make the courts supreme, at least at sea.

In 1793, war between France and Great Britain plunged the United States – and the federal courts – into crisis. As the French Revolution reverberated around the Atlantic, the impetuous French foreign minister, Edmond-Charles Genet, launched privateering attacks against British commerce from the United States. The Washington administration tried to prevent Americans from dragging the nation into war, but partisan rivalry and a lack of federal law enforcement power stymied its efforts. Desperate to demonstrate the nation’s sovereign bona fides in the face of British complaints, the administration turned to the courts for help. It asked federal judges to resolve difficult and highly consequential legal disputes that the political branches were unable or unwilling to address. But the judges were not the acquiescent handmaidens in foreign affairs that modern commentators imagine. They balked at violating longstanding principles of international law, and they were wary of compromising the judiciary’s own institutional integrity by intervening in the affairs of state. In the midst of an international conflict of unprecedented scope, the founders’ confidence that the federal courts would ensure the nation’s peace and security seemed to have been mistaken.

This chapter refutes three interrelated feminist objections to Heidegger’s thought. Section 6.1 argues that the analytic of Dasein should not be seen as the elaboration of an implicitly masculine exemplar, but rather that it is the articulation of a structural essence, which can and has been productively employed by feminist philosophers. Section 6.2 suggests that far from erasing the issue of gender at an ontological level, Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein’s neutrality speaks to an anti-essentialist critique of binary gender. Finally, Section 6.3 offers an interpretation of authenticity as a form of genuine self-understanding – similar to Sandra Lee Bartky’s notion of developing a ‘feminist consciousness’ – which can work to critique and transform role-based relations and ‘inauthentic’ understandings prescribed by das Man. The aim of this chapter is thus to demonstrate that far from being inimical to feminist theorizing, Being and Time can be a fruitful resource for furthering feminist projects.

Chapter 2 considers how Italian emigrants navigated the arrival of war during the period of Italian neutrality from August 1914 to May 1915. The immediate effects of the war in 1914 were felt most amongst those in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium and France, many of whom suddenly lost their jobs. Not content to remain unemployed and risk living in a war zone, a mass exodus to Italy began. By October 1914, half a million Italian emigrants had returned to Italy from across Europe. They faced grave difficulties upon arrival, primarily in finding employment, leading to instances of serious public unrest. The chapter also considers the experiences of the 3,000 garibaldini, Italian volunteers in the French Army, half of whom were Italian emigrants already living in France and half of whom were volunteers from Italy and elsewhere, including six of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s grandsons. Finally, the chapter analyses the immediate response of Italian emigrant communities to Italy’s declaration of war against Austria-Hungary on 23 May 1915 and entry into the war alongside Britain, France and Russia.

The treatment of the law of war and neutrality during the interwar era was dominated by two trends. Scepticism was voiced at the relevance and utility of these fields in light of poor compliance during the First World War and the emergence of jus contra bellum. This did not prevent others from engaging with the most pressing issues, including the challenges posed by technological developments (submarines, asphyxiating gases and military aviation); the protection of civilian populations, especially against the risks of aerial bombardment; and the need to expand the application of the law of war in cases of insurrection and civil war. Later events show that the international community did not address these challenges satisfactorily. Initiatives failed due to ‘technological determinism’ and concern for national interest. However, several developments clearly foreshadowed the transition from a law of coexistence to one of co-operation that would come to fruition with the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Indeed, many of the fundamental tenets of modern international humanitarian law emerged, as the law of war began to afford more importance to the rights of the individual.

The chapter examines the development and changing nature of the laws and customs of war in Old Regime Europe. It focuses on land warfare, scrutinising the received idea that the waging of war in this age was characterised by a growing moderation and by the improvement of troops’ conduct and discipline. The chapter surveys the major principles and doctrines of the jus in bello and the use thereof made by European players. In doing so, it draws on state and military practice as well as scholarly – legal and military – literature. Subjects which are covered include the theoretical conceptualisation of the laws of war, status in war and neutrality – limited to its terrestrials aspects – the emergence of new legal constraints regarding the treatment of prisoners of war and civilians, siege warfare and use of weapons, the treatment of enemy possessions and occupation.

Between the mid-fifteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, norms on maritime warfare by both private and public actors developed through the intensification of maritime trade networks, European colonial and commercial expansion in other continents, the growing ascendancy of the sovereign state, and the emergence of a distinctive legal scholarship on topics of the law of nations. Although even among European political actors, there was still no general consensus on precise and binding norms governing maritime warfare, the building stones of a normative framework were gradually established which would be integrated from the later seventeenth century onwards into a more consistent body of international law. Prize courts played a crucial role in promoting the principles of such a legal framework, as did state practice on key issues such as blockade, contraband and neutrality.

This chapter offers a discussion on the laws of war, or jus in bello, as the previous one. However, it provides an exclusive focus on maritime warfare. Old Regime Europe was marked by the expansion of permanent state battlefleets and the strengthening of naval administrations. At the same time, a complementarity between public and private forms of maritime warfare, notably privateering, persisted as one of the defining aspects of naval warfare. The chapter deals with the specificity of waging war at sea and related legal issues. It draws both from state-military practice and from the specialised legal literature that started to appear at the time. Subjects which are covered include the main rules of naval warfare, privateering, the treatment of prisoners of war, the bombardment of coastal cities, prize law and the role of admiralty courts. Particular attention is devoted to the issue of maritime neutrality. Indeed, the recurrent tension between the respective rights and duties of neutrals and belligerents assumed great relevance in this period, being often dealt with in international treaties and legal scholars’ treatises.

Impartiality as a property of government is central to many of the major constitutional concerns of liberal democracy. This essay tersely considers the nature and implications of impartiality in three main areas: the rule of law; the distinction between the right and the good; and freedom of speech. Because of constraints of space, each of the discussions in this paper is no more than a sketch of the complex matters that are at issue in debates over impartiality.