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In
A Century of Anarchy?: War, Normativity, and the Birth of Modern International Order, Simon challenges the German
Sonderweg understanding of the nineteenth century and deconstructs the myth of the 'free right to go to war', drawing on political and normative discourses to outline a genealogy of modern war justifications.
List of contents
- Setting the Scene
- 1: Introduction: A Century of Anarchy, a Right to War?
- 2: Thesis and Antithesis: Why States Justify War
- Part I. Justifying War in the Nineteenth Century: A European Discourse
- 3: On the Threshold of Modernity: From Revolutionizing to Reordering War
- 4: Birth of an International Order
- 5: Between Might and Right: Justified Wars and Multiple Normativities
- 6: The Promise of 'Peace through Law' in the Shadow of War
- Part II. Emergence of a Myth: A German Sonderweg?
- 7: Recht zum Krieg: A Clausewitzian Tradition
- 8: A Hegemonic Discourse? On Mainstream(s) and Myth(s)
- 9: Antinomianism: The Kaiserreich's Politics of Justifying War
- 10: Old Order, New Order: Historiography between Anarchy and Progress
- Conclusion
- 11: War, Normativity, and the Birth of Modern International Order
About the author
Hendrik Simon is a postdoctoral researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) and Lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt. He was Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Advanced International Theory/University of Sussex (2017), at the University of Vienna (2018, 2016), at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History Frankfurt (2015-16) and at the Cluster of Excellence 'Normative Orders' (2011-12). Publications include The Justification of War and International Order. From Past to Present (OUP 2021; co-edited with Lothar Brock); and 'The Myth of Liberum Ius ad Bellum. Justifying War in 19th-Century International Legal Theory and Political Practice', 29 European Journal of International Law (2018).
Summary
In A Century of Anarchy?: War, Normativity, and the Birth of Modern International Order, Simon challenges the German Sonderweg understanding of the nineteenth century and deconstructs the myth of the 'free right to go to war', drawing on political and normative discourses to outline a genealogy of modern war justifications.
Additional text
This exhaustively-researched study, located at the intersection of International Relations and International Law, turns an established orthodoxy on its head: The European 'long 19th Century', Hendrik Simon suggests, was not the pre-liberal era of an undisputed sovereign liberum ius ad bellum, but rather the precursor of a norm-governed international order. It was primarily significant voices in late Prussian and Imperial Germany's legal and political circles that struggled to superimpose the myth of the “free right to conduct warfare” upon a wider European reality that had decisively moved beyond it. Grounded in a genealogy of war justifications, the constructivist analysis takes the reader on a historical tour de force from the Vienna Congress, via the Eastern Question, Italian and German unification, to World War I, generating a striking revision of the standard argument in IR and IL.
