‘This is an Account of Failure’: The Contested Historiography of the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899, 1907 and 1915

Abstract

The Hague conferences of 1899, 1907 and the one not held in 1915 occupy an uncomfortable place in the history of war, peace, and diplomacy. Siloed in a range of sub-disciplines, historians often evaluate the conferences in terms of their relative ‘success’ or ‘failure’. Where diplomatic historians generally marginalise the political relevance of the conferences in explaining the march to global war in 1914, legal historians mobilise The Hague as a point of origin for the expansion of international humanitarian and human rights law and the law of war. Peace historians prefer to explain the relative weakness of pre-1914 transnational peace activism, whilst historians of global governance describe The Hague as a starting point for twentieth century multilateralism. Rarely do these histories speak to each other, which leaves their largely oppositional findings floating freely, untethered to either each other or the complex context in which The Hague’s conferences, conventions, and institutions evolved. In response, this analysis argues for the historical need to re-tether these Hague developments to the context of the time in which they first appeared, thus helping to shape a more nuanced understanding of their on-going political and legal relevance as well.