State Sovereignty in Question: The French Jurists between the Reorganization of the International System and European Regionalism, 1920–1950

Abstract

In the aftermath of the First World War, specialists in international law, who had up till then been relatively marginalized, saw their role and their influence considerably increase within public debate. Juridical methods, after all, seemed to be increasingly of general use, as much for the settling of international differences as for the elaboration of new procedures designed to preclude any future resort to arms (the birth of the League of Nations in 1919, the Geneva Protocol for the peaceful settlement of international disputes in 1924, the Kellogg-Briand pact renouncing war in 1928, and so on). The jurists appeared in the end to have imposed the idea in political circles that ‘law could become the realistic and effective science of international government’.¹ In this sense, we might speak of a ‘second birth’ of international law in the aftermath of the First World War, notably by the creation, following that of the Institut de Droit international in 1873, of several institutions that aimed to pursue this discipline, such as the Union juridique internationale (1919), the Institut des hautes études internationales (1921), The Hague Academy of International Law (1923) or the Académie diplomatique internationale (1926).²