Modern history

In the Orbit of the League of Nations: International Law Debates and Networks in the Interwar Period

Dietmar Müller

The transition from multiethnic empires to nation-states in Europe after World War I led to a multiplication of states and actors in the field of international law, a process whose scope has not yet been fully appreciated. In particular, the contribution of Eastern Europe to the development of international law and international organizations in the interwar period – through the proliferation of new states as well as international regional conflicts and new diplomats and international law experts – has been largely neglected as a cohesive structure of effects. Against the background of the professionalization of foreign offices – through the infusion of lawyers that began taking place since the 1890s in Western and Central Europe, such as France, Germany, and Great Britain – the appearance of new states at the international level must be seen as an enormous challenge to elites.¹ In addition, the regional elites were also confronted with problems of the new state authority in factual terms, such as territorial demarcation, separatism, and the minority protection system.² In these fields, the diplomats and international law experts of the new nation-states were challenged by political emigrants, minority representatives and lobbyists, and legal activists. By focusing on the new constellation of states in Eastern Europe, a hitherto largely neglected aspect comes into view. Small states – as all the states of East-Central and South-eastern Europe, with the exception of Poland, understood themselves – were greatly interested in international law as an authority above purely bilateral power politics, just as ethnic minorities were interested in improving their situation beyond national politics and jurisdiction. For different interests, the diplomacies of small states and representatives of ethnic and religious minorities invested considerable effort in international law and international organizations. These are not mere parallels but highly intertwined developments, for the many new states in Eastern Europe were also the ones that had the highest proportion and number of ethnic and religious minorities in their territories in Europe.³ This constellation caused debates in several aspects of international law and helped to create networks of legal activists, which provide ample material for a transregional legal and diplomatic history of Europe in the interwar period.

Parallel to the new constellation of states in Eastern Europe, the League of Nations (LoN) was founded and quickly installed itself as a hub of interaction in the field of diplomacy and international law. This field consisted of a number of organizations and commissions of the LoN itself, a large number of new non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and several established and new legal associations and institutes. However, the LoN became firmly settled as a field only through the daily interaction of the aforementioned actors since, by seeking to influence the legal agenda of the LoN, they confirmed the relevance of this international organization anew every day.

1 The League of Nations as a Legal Field

A research perspective focused on the actions of actors in organizations orbiting the LoN does not have a well-established tradition. For a long time, the LoN was approached and judged primarily from its less-than-glorious end. Accordingly, it was seen as a failed attempt to secure peace under international law and to institutionalize it permanently through the prevention of and ban on war as well as an unsuccessful collective security system based on peaceful dispute settlement procedures in the Council of the LoN, the International Court of Justice, and other arbitration and settlement bodies.⁴ Only recently, under the paradigm of transnationalism, has the history of international organizations been written increasingly from the perspective of the actors, which allows a view to be taken that looks beyond the failures of the LoN.⁵

At the same time, historians of international history have pointed out the danger of overestimating the importance of transnational interactions within and between international organizations.⁶ For it would be tantamount to nominalism to believe that every person who works in international organizations is also a liberal internationalist. Such a rash overestimation reveals the confusion of what may be desirable in comparison to what can actually be proven through historical work. Basically, the action of persons in the field of international politics must be questioned in relation to national contexts and to personal positions and imprints. Such a biographical basis for action opens up the possibility of analysing transnational interactions in the tension fields between ideals and interests, between resources and restrictions on action, and between different diplomatic, professional, and legal activist logics of action.

With reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of field and capital varieties, the French school of sociology of law has provided a theoretical approach for an integrated analysis of international law, legal actors, and international organizations.⁷ In the legal-sociological conceptualization of the object of study, Bourdieu calls not for the legal system per se to be considered but for specific and specialized parts of it to be examined.⁸ Some of his students have focused on the parts by analysing, for example, international humanitarian law, international criminal law, or the legal unification process of the European Union.⁹ From a methodological point of view, the analysis is focused on the actions of the actors in the respective field, a particularly attractive perspective for historical work, as it allows us to grasp the emergence and change of a field as a result of a more or less targeted agency of specific persons. The scope and impact of individual actions depend on a number of factors, of which academic qualities, state diplomatic functions, and membership in international professional associations, on the one hand, and social anchoring in national and international establishments, on the other hand, are of particular relevance in our context. Bourdieu offered the concept of different types of capital and their convertibility between social, professional, economic, and political spheres of life for the analysis of this aspect. Sociological and historical research on the legal professions have also contributed valuable theoretical elements, particularly regarding strategies for expanding and closing the jurisdiction of legal professionals in defining their profession.¹⁰ The combination of these approaches provides the methodological and theoretical basis for the present analysis.

With a few exceptions, the development of legal-sociological theories and the presentation of international law history have been undertaken on the basis of empirical research coming from Western Europe and the USA. This occidental approach has been challenged for some years now as a consequence of political and mental decolonization from several supposed peripheries, Latin America being a particularly noteworthy example.¹¹ Eastern Europe has remained largely silent in this respect.¹² Individuals such as Raphael Lemkin or Hersch Lauterpacht have been addressed though; nevertheless, their personal, political, and religious backgrounds have long been ignored and have recently been used to glorify their work.

These selective approaches are contrasted here with an analysis that takes a multiperspective approach to the contribution of Eastern Europe to the further development of international law and the international organizations in the LoN and its orbit. Considering the context of this collective volume, this cannot be a synthesis but rather a series of historical and biographical case studies that results in a proposal for a de-occidentalized perspective on such central issues of the history of international law as international criminal law, international humanitarian law, legislation regarding terrorism, and the protection of minorities and human rights. Three people were selected: Vespasian Pella, Raphael Lemkin, and André Mandelstam. As pars pro toto, they stand for different types in terms of resource endowment, sociopolitical embedding, modes of action, and narratives of legitimacy. Their activities are generally analysed in the field of legal policy and diplomacy but with a focus on their activities in the International Association of Penal Law (Association Internationale de Droit Pénal, AIDP) and the International Diplomatic Academy (Académie Diplomatique Internationale, ADI).

The main results of this chapter bring new aspects to the relation between national diplomacies and transnational legal activism. The national diplomacies of the new states of East-Central and South-eastern Europe, after having reluctantly realized that the LoN was an important field of legal policy, invested heavily in their diplomatic staff’s professionalization and visibility. International lawyer-diplomats, especially from anti-revisionist states, partook in professional lawyer associations in the orbit of the LoN and in its commissions for a legal agenda that would recast and strengthen the nation-state’s role in international relations. In the medium term, during the lifetime of the LoN, this type of state-backed agency was more effective than freelance legal activists in transnational NGOs’ institutes of higher learning and professional associations related to movements for peace, arms reduction, and human rights.

This chapter shares the scepticism towards the civil societies and NGOs’ unilateral powers in boldly shaping international law and politics,¹³ as well as international organizations’ putatively universalist agenda,¹⁴ and stresses rather a more complex nature of legal fields. The limited successes of legal activism for the limitation of absolute state sovereignty is perhaps the most clear example of the state bias in international law – a tendency that was, to some degree, reduced in the interwar period but was still resilient in the post–World War II and post–Cold War periods. But considering the massive arrival of actors from Eastern Europe in the orbit of the League of Nations first requires a historical grounding by looking at the working methods of diplomacy around 1900, which makes some interactions and strategies in the interwar period understandable.

2 Approaches to the Juridification and Professionalization of Diplomacy around 1900

Comparative research on nationalism and state-building has shown that the states in South-eastern Europe, such as Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria, which became independent from the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century through secession, shared an important basic feature:¹⁵ at the beginning of their secession, there were mostly uprisings, but they could only take important steps under international law on the way to internationally recognized independence depending on the European concert diplomatic context.¹⁶ The history of international concert diplomacy abounds with examples of how South-eastern European diplomats were successful when they were able to win the goodwill and support of one or more of the major powers. Traditional virtues of the diplomacy of small states, such as concessions, yieldingness, and compromises, predominated, while insistence on legal positions or norms of international law had little success. This constellation had promoted a type of diplomat who was sceptical of universally valid international law, who tended to focus on narrowly defined national interests, and who, accordingly, had little knowledge of international law from a technical and legal point of view. The limits of this phenomenon can be seen in Romanian diplomacy around 1900.

The peace conferences at The Hague in 1899 and 1907 were the first international conferences that combined a more traditional field of participants composed of state delegates and diplomats with participants of peace societies and other organizations from an emerging global civil society.¹⁷ For states like Romania – which united in 1859, adopted a constitution in 1866, gained sovereignty in 1878, and was recognized as a parliamentary monarchy in 1881 – the 1899 conference at The Hague was the first major international event its diplomats could attend, which did not have any Romanian problems on its agenda. Other than at the Congress of Berlin (1878), Romania’s delegates considered themselves as relevant actors – alongside their colleagues from Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria – on the international scene and on a par with diplomats and politicians from the great powers.¹⁸ Bucharest sent two of Romania’s most senior and experienced diplomats to both conferences: Alexandru Beldiman and Ioan Papiniu.¹⁹

They were amongst the first generation of Romanian diplomats who enjoyed higher education: Papiniu had studied political science in Paris, and Beldiman had studied civil law in Paris and Berlin (doctorate). Furthermore, both entered diplomatic service before a formal competition for the vacant positions was declared mandatory by law in 1885. However, with an elite small in numbers and with heterogeneous professional backgrounds in the new states, the case of Beldiman was rather common for the phenomenon of professional multifunctionality. He began his career as a lawyer in civil law cases in Iaşi in 1878, the very year he joined the Romanian delegation to the Congress of Berlin.²⁰

The main point about this widespread phenomenon is that professional multifunctionality can be regarded as the most important reason for a low level of differentiation and specialization. There was also little time and little prospect for lawyers from these new states to join prestigious international professional organizations, such as the Institute of International Law (Institut de Droit International), which was founded in 1873.²¹ As a consequence, the Romanian delegation to both conferences in The Hague played only a minor role, as was the case with other delegations from South-eastern European states. The demographical fact of being a small country could have served as a bridge from the South-eastern European states to states such as Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands; however, demography did not prove strong enough as a unifier. The small countries from Western Europe had enjoyed a tradition of neutrality – be it perpetual neutrality fixed by international law in the case of Switzerland and Belgium or long-term neutrality by internal decision in the case of the Netherlands – a tradition that had fostered a generation of diplomats well-acquainted with international law and, in some cases, active in the peace movement.²² While demography did not matter, geography mattered to a great extent due to the fact that there was no common position feasible between the small states from Western and South-eastern Europe. Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece were particularly averse to arms reduction, the establishment of enquiry commissions, and an obligatory court of arbitration, hinting at their weak position between imperialistic great powers in the Balkans.

The ample correspondence of Beldiman, the Romanian ambassador to Germany since 1885, with Bernhard von Bülow, the deputy minister of foreign affairs, from The Hague in 1899 conveys the general impression that Romania had no confidence in the power-restraining quality of treatises under international law and sought rather for reassurance from a great power.²³ Nonetheless, Bucharest had to acknowledge that Romanian diplomacy was capable of organizing a negative consensus only amongst the South-eastern European countries, but it proved to be incapable of formulating a positive solution. The main reasons for this was the limited number of specialists in international law and lack of a professional network. Apparently, these were lessons learned that forced Bucharest to develop a new strategy of internationalism in the interwar period.

3 Vespasian Pella: International Criminal Law in the Service of Romania’s Anti-Revisionism

The changed position of the country on the international stage after World War I can be recognized in Vespasian Pella and in his career as an international law expert and diplomat of Romania working within the orbit of the LoN. This applies not only to Romania’s specific situation as an ally of the victorious Triple Entente but also, to the same extent, to its significantly changed possibilities for international action compared to 1900. An analysis of Pella’s career as an international lawyer and diplomat with the instruments of legal and professional sociology suggests that Bucharest had deliberately invested financially and socially in the career of the young lawyer from a politically reliable house and provided him with capital so that he could effectively represent Romania’s interests in the field of international criminal law.

Romania had emerged victorious from World War I on the side of the Triple Entente and was able to more than double its territory and population by adding the provinces of Transylvania, Bukovina, and Bessarabia. Southern Dobrudja had already been added in the Balkan Wars (1912/13). Accordingly, its elites pursued a strictly anti-revisionist foreign policy, which was secured by several treaties and alliances.²⁴ For instance, Romania concluded a military pact with Poland in 1921 against the Soviet Union and for the protection of Bessarabia.²⁵ Furthermore, the Little Entente (1920/21–1938), comprising Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, was intended as a safeguard against Hungary while protecting Transylvania.²⁶ Lastly, the Balkan Pact (1934–1937), an alliance between Romania, Turkey, Greece, and Yugoslavia, was meant to provide protection against Bulgaria in regard to Southern Dobrudja.²⁷

Romanian historiography has been unable to elaborate any other strategy of Romanian foreign policy in the interwar period beyond anti-revisionism, on which a wealth of studies has been published. However, the foreign policy doctrine of collective security from the 1930s was rediscovered and implemented from the mid-1960s onwards, as demonstrated by the partial emancipation from Soviet domination in the communist alliance system. Furthermore, the most famous Romanian diplomat, Nicolae Titulescu, who had worked specifically within the framework of the LoN and gained international renown, was also rehabilitated in the course of this process.²⁸ Notwithstanding, the LoN was an institution on which the contemporary Romanian elites could not develop an unreservedly positive attitude, since the LoN imposed a minority protection system, which these elites perceived as a serious encroachment on the country’s state sovereignty.

This view corresponds to today’s mainstream historiography. The rediscovery of Pella in Romanian international law historiography after 1989 has not yet gone beyond the level of his glorification as a great man of European diplomacy and international law, who – as the “Romanian forefather of the idea of founding a permanent criminal court to punish international crimes” – “was far ahead of his time”.²⁹ Central questions and problems like the following have not yet been addressed: what was it that prompted Romanian diplomacy to promote the young Pella to participate in international legal congresses since the early 1920s and to entrust him increasingly with diplomatic missions, especially to the LoN and its attached networks? Did Pella’s views on the criminal liability of state action not mean the same loss of full state sovereignty that was so vehemently rejected in the context of the protection of minorities?

Pella was born in Râmnicu Sărat in 1897 into a political dynasty. His father belonged to Romania’s political elite; he was the mayor of Râmnicu Sărat and, as a member of the National Liberal Party, first deputy and later a senator in both chambers of the Romanian parliament. Pella followed in his father’s footsteps and was elected to parliament at the tender age of 25, where he represented, just as his father did, the same constituency around Râmnicu Sărat from 1922 to 1928 for the National Liberal Party in the Chamber of Deputies.³⁰ Parallel to politics, Pella began a legal and diplomatic career in the mid-1920s. After studying law in Iaşi and Paris, he published La criminalité collective des États et le droit penal de l’avenir (1925) with a Bucharest publishing house. His main work – both a solid legal study and a legal-policy recommendation – was edited by the Romanian group of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and it was written directly in French. Pella’s official diplomatic career began in 1927 when he became a Romanian delegate to the LoN, where he was particularly active in commissions dealing with criminal law. His previous lively activities and the memoranda he submitted to the Inter-Parliamentary Union and to several legal organizations now took on greater weight because they were attributed to a diplomat.³¹

The conversion of the social, professional, and political capital accumulated by Pella into Romania’s international legal and political influence had begun. The prudence with which Romanian diplomacy organized this process is revealed by the way Pella’s main work was handled. Immediately after his book was published in 1925, it was sent to numerous experts in international law – apparently with the request to return a commentary concerning the value of such a work. In the second edition of the book, in 1926, 50 of these comments were then prepended to the volume. In the same year, a prominent National Liberal Party friend of Pella, Senator Constantin G. Dissescu, a professor of law, nominated him for the Nobel Prize, with the most positive comments from his international colleagues serving as proof of his excellence in international law and his services to world peace.³²

The War of Aggression as a Crime under International Law

The most important issues of international law to which Pella was particularly committed intellectually and politically were war and terrorism. His work aimed to define a war of aggression and cross-border terrorism as offences under international law and to prosecute them under criminal law. In political terms, the common denominator of the two issues under international law lies in the intention of Bucharest’s foreign policy to prevent anything that might encourage a revision of the territorial status quo under the Paris Peace Treaties. Accordingly, Pella’s writings, speeches, and actions are pervaded by fundamental anti-revisionism, albeit in the guise of historical-philosophical and international law claims to universality. The first sentence of his book La criminalité collective des États et le droit penal de l’avenir reads with the bold sentence: “La guerre d’agression est un crime!”³³ This would had become very clear after World War I, and now it was a matter of implementing this widely shared idea in norms, procedures, and institutions of an international criminal justice system.³⁴

According to Pella’s ideas, states and individuals can be guilty of a war of aggression. He links the two levels by drawing on more recent collective and older ideas of the psychology of peoples, according to which some peoples are endowed with an “esprit agressif”,³⁵ but this could be mobilized by particularly active and influential individuals and groups (e.g. school teachers, officers, and clergy organized into associations, clubs, etc.) – in the sense of a nationalist escalation. Under certain circumstances, they would seize the state and prepare and commit crimes in its name, that is to say a war of aggression.

It is interesting here how Pella classified the state in terms of content and time. The basis of a future peace order must be “la reconnaissance de la nation comme l’élément fondamental de l’organisation politique du monde”³⁶ because the state is nothing more than the emanation of the nation, its legal expression. In the understanding of the Romanian elites during the interwar period, however, Pella understood the state as a nation-state and the nation as the titular nation of ethnic Romanians.³⁷ A peace order of equal nation-states must continue to include the elements of arbitrability (jurisdiction) in conflicts, disarmament, and security, whereby he spelled out security in an anti-revisionist manner: “la reconnaissance du principe de la securité de leurs possessions territoriales”.³⁸

In these brief examples short paragraph, Pella’s argumentation strategy in terms of Bucharest’s foreign policy becomes clear. The point of reference regarding content and timing is the status quo following the Paris Peace Treaties, with the ethno-Romanian nation-state in the form of Greater Romania becoming normalized and all resources – not least international law – being mobilized for its political defence. Strategies of normalization are inevitably ahistorical, which becomes clear in the case of Pella’s definition of actions that are to be considered as preparations for a war of aggression and that will accordingly be punishable under criminal law in the future. Accordingly, he lists the following actions, amongst others, as actions of states that are incriminating:

· e)Preparing or permitting to be prepared on its territory attacks directed against the internal security of another State, or aiding or abetting bands of evil-doers making raids on the territories of other States.

· f)Interference by one State in the internal political struggles of another by supplying grants of money or giving support of any kind to political parties.³⁹

With these actions, which are now to be interpreted and assessed according international law, Pella describes political strategies and actions that had been part of the standard repertoire of the South-eastern European national movements against the Ottoman and Habsburg empires in the long nineteenth century. The subtext of Pella’s argumentation was that what was legitimate in the age of national emancipation against the empires is no longer so in the age of nation-states. Pella thus attempted to bring political, military, and propagandistic action elements of irredenta, in general, and revisionism of the interwar period, in particular, conceptually close to the war of aggression and, at best, to integrate them into the definition of such a war of aggression, for example in the form of the preparation of a war of aggression.

Pella’s academic initiative for the criminalization of the war of aggression was flanked by legal policy activities. In August 1924 in Berne, for example, as a Romanian delegate to the conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a body of parliamentary representatives of various nations, he had argued for the criminalization of a war of aggression and proposed the development of an international criminal code.⁴⁰ He was then appointed rapporteur for the next conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union to be held in Washington, DC, in October 1925, where he presented a memorandum along these lines.⁴¹ In addition to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Pella also promoted his ideas on the juridification of international relations in international professional organizations of lawyers, such as the International Law Association (ILA).

But, the most effective platform for him was the AIDP, founded in 1924 and based in Paris. Under the aegis of France and Belgium, the AIDP developed into an international arena in which anti-revisionist states, primarily Poland and Romania, as well as Yugoslavia and Greece, were very active in bundling and pursuing common foreign and international law policy goals.⁴² The AIDP advocated the creation of an international criminal law, either by unifying existing national criminal codes or by creating new international codification.⁴³ It also supported the creation of an international criminal court. In addition to French and Belgian international law experts, such as Henri Donnedieu de Vabres and Henri Carton de Wiart, Pella and the Greek Nicolas Politis continued to advance the plan to classify wars of aggression as crimes under international law, to bring states and individuals to justice, and to condemn them. In doing so, they sought to institutionalize the aim laid down in the Covenant of the LoN to prevent wars as a legitimate means of asserting interests (Article 11) by establishing a norm under international law.

An extremely confident tone emerges from the writings of Pella, considered here as a representative of the legally educated actors in the field of international relations who wanted to shape international law in the orbit of the LoN. In keeping with the phrasing by Martti Koskenniemi of The Gentle Civilizer of Nations (2001), Pella claims for himself, as well as his peers, insights into the necessities of the new age, knowledge of the revision of legal norms, and the necessary non-partisanship in their institutionalization. He expressed this at the twenty-fifth conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, held in Berlin in 1928, as follows:

Monsieur le Président, Mesdames, Messieurs. Dans un exposé prononcé il y a un an devant la VIIIe Assemblé de la Société des Nations j’insistais sur la nécessité pour les Etats de procéder à l’élaboration d’une déclaration de leurs droits et de leurs devoirs.

A cette occasion, j’exprimais le désir de voir non les organismes de la Société des Nations, mais au contraire des associations internationales non-officielles – élaborer une telle déclaration qui doit server de base à la codification future du droit international et constituer en même temps la charte de la communauté des Etats.⁴⁴

In the further course of his speech, however, he only mentions lawyers, for example those in the Inter-Parliamentary Union, as appointed actors for drafting a charter of the international community because they had the professional skills and the necessary room for manoeuvre. On the one hand, this would set the international lawyers apart from politicians, whose horizon in everyday life was often nationally restricted in the search for political legitimacy.⁴⁵ On the other hand, the legally educated international lawyers were usually delegates sent by the state to the commissions of the LoN, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and specialist legal organizations, such as the ILA and AIDP, and were therefore familiar with diplomatic practices. The latter qualification was implicitly directed against a large number of legal activists and NGOs, which – not legitimized or diplomatically secured by any state – nevertheless operated within the sphere of influence of the LoN. As analysed below regarding Lemkin and Mandelstam, persons and NGOs without a state mandate or diplomatic status acted in the same legal field as Pella, where the state-bound international law experts, however, sometimes pursued a markedly different legal policy.

Romanian Threat Perceptions

It was no coincidence that Pella began to campaign in the mid-1920s for the criminal liability of state action. On the one hand, the initial distance of Romanian diplomacy from the LoN gave way to the realization that this international organization was too important to ignore as a field of action. On the other hand, the diplomatic and irredentist activities of several revisionist-minded neighbours intensified against Romanian interests. Romanian diplomacy thus sought ways and means to measure various threats according to a common denominator. In addition to the criminal liability of the war of aggression, terrorism crystallized as a further field of action for Bucharest and for its busy international law expert and diplomat Pella. As early as 1926, Romanian diplomats had suggested that terrorism should be defined in such a way that it could be justified as being classified as an international crime.⁴⁶

The early and subsequently sustained engagement of Romanian diplomats and international law experts in this matter is interpreted here as an attempt to provide a legal dimension beyond the purely political concept of revisionism to the manifold threats from several of its neighbouring countries. From Bucharest’s perspective, the existence of Greater Romania was threatened by activities in the new provinces, which – depending on the respective minority and on the ideological self-description and foreign policy orientation of the revisionist states – had a different character. After the downfall of Béla Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic, brought about by the intervention of Romanian troops, the situation in Transylvania in the mid-1920s was interpreted primarily as a lack of loyalty on the part of the Hungarian minority and as political revisionism on the part of Budapest.⁴⁷ Bucharest’s perception of threats to the province of Dobrudja resulted not only from the alleged lack of loyalty of the Bulgarian minority and political revisionism in Sofia but also from a military component. Particularly in Southern Dobrudja, in the so-called Cadrilater, numerous organizations, such as the Internal Dobrudjan Revolutionary Organization (Vătrešna Dobrudžanska Revoljucionna Organizacija), often operated from Bulgarian territory and attacked Romanian colonists and state institutions with armed force.⁴⁸ Finally, in Bessarabia, the Bucharest political class saw a third type of threat to the territorial status quo in addition to revisionism and armed bandit activity, namely the ideologically grounded questioning of the province’s affiliation to Romania by the Soviet Union and the Comintern, according to which this was tantamount to bourgeois, large-scale landownership class rule.⁴⁹

In practice, the above-mentioned revisionist actions overlapped considerably; an exact and selective definition was not possible regarding either bandit activity or political revisionism within the conventional state system or outside it. This conceptual uncertainty can be observed in security analyses and discourses of Romanian actors at all levels, including reports sent by the prefect, the police, or the secret service to the Bucharest headquarters, parliamentary debates on threats from ethnic minorities in the new provinces, or dialogue with the LoN on such issues.⁵⁰ The assessment of any activity of ethnic minorities in any new province, with or without demonstrable influence of the potentially interested “motherland”, could vary between “irredentism”, “revisionism”, and “bandit activity”, with the use of pejorative adjectives such as “subversive”, “violent”, or “terrorist”.

The so-called rebellion of Tatar Bunar may serve as an example. In September 1924, in a Bessarabian region bordering the Soviet Union, the mostly Russian-speaking inhabitants of several towns took armed action against Romanian state institutions, very likely with the support of Bolshevik agitators, and could only be defeated after several days by units of the gendarmerie, the military, and the citizens loyal to the state.⁵¹ A year later, after a thorough investigation of the events, the secretary of state in the Ministry of the Interior, Gheorghe Tătărăscu, presented a detailed report to the parliament in December 1925. He opposed a trivialized description of the events as the “Tatar Bunar Rebellion”; it was rather a “fight against the stifling of [Romanian] national sentiment through assassination, assault and bandit attacks” by Russian Soviet terrorists and revolutionaries in Bessarabia.⁵²

Politically, Pella’s initiative for outlawing war was superseded by the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), and his activism for the creation of an international criminal code with an attendant court brought no immediate result in the 1920s. Notwithstanding, his activities earned him high reputation both as an international lawyer and as an influential diplomat from the anti-revisionist camp. He reached the peak of his international career at the beginning of the 1930s, when he was simultaneously commissioned by all three organizations concerned with international criminal law in the context of the LoN – the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the ILA, and the AIDP – to prepare a draft for the codification of international criminal law.⁵³

The Marseilles Assassination in 1934 and the League of Nations Terrorism Convention

When the Yugoslav king, Aleksandar I. Karadjordjević, and the French foreign minister, Louis Barthou, were assassinated in Marseilles on 9 October 1934, many contemporaries felt reminded of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian heir to the throne, in Sarajevo 20 years earlier. Behind the external similarities – both political assassinations were carried out by shooting state dignitaries in automobiles – the possible political implications were interpreted in parallel: if the fatal shots in Sarajevo had initiated the end of empires in Europe, then those of Marseille threatened to be the end of the territorial and political post-war order. The police and political clarification of the Marseilles assassination was to be just as great of a challenge for the post-war order as it was for the LoN was to punish terrorism under international law.

In a relatively short time, police investigations were able to clarify that the direct perpetrators came from circles of the Croatian insurgency organization Ustashe and the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (Vătrešna Makedonska Revoljucionna Organizacija).⁵⁴ Both organizations had Yugoslavia as a common enemy and were proactive in their actions with states that were also striving for a revision of the post-war order: besides Albania and Bulgaria, these were Hungary and Italy.⁵⁵ The two militant, anti-Yugoslav groups were able to plan the Marseilles assassination in Janka-Puszta, Hungary, and in Fontecchio and San Demetrio, both in Italy, where they ran training camps with the knowledge of Budapest and Rome.⁵⁶ While Yugoslav diplomacy opted to publish all the results of a mixed Franco-Yugoslav police group, Paris opposed this. French diplomacy only accused Hungary of aiding and abetting the assassination, while Italy was exempted in order not to damage an apparent rapprochement between Rome and Paris, particularly against the Third Reich, which was striving towards South-eastern Europe.⁵⁷ Bennett Kovrig characterizes the political solution of the international crisis in his still authoritative article from 1976 as “mediation through obfuscation” and continues to write:

[T]he League’s institutional role had been marginal at best. Apart from being a convenient meeting place, it served to publicly legitimize the outcome of secret diplomacy – “open covenants secretly arrived at”, to amend Wilson’s phrase, and as usually the covenants only partially reflected political reality.⁵⁸

In November 1934, at the request of Yugoslavia and with the support of France, the plenary assembly of the LoN dealt with the assassination attempt and the discussions culminated in the establishment on 10 December 1934 of a committee of experts on the “international suppression of terrorism”.⁵⁹ Under the chairmanship of Henri Carton de Wiart and with Pella as rapporteur, delegates from 11 states deliberated and finally presented 2 conventions in November 1937: the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism (hereinafter Terrorism Convention) and the Convention for the Creation of an International Criminal Court (hereinafter ICC Convention).⁶⁰ The intention of the Terrorism Convention, as well as a generic definition of terrorism, was laid out in Article 1 as follows:

1. The High Contracting Parties, reaffirming the principle of international law in virtue of which it is the duty of every State to refrain from any act designed to encourage terrorist activities directed against another State and to prevent the acts in which such activities take shape, undertake as hereinafter provided to prevent and punish activities of this nature and to collaborate for this purpose.

2. In the present Convention, the expression “acts of terrorism” means criminal acts directed against a State and intended or calculated to create a state of terror in the minds of particular persons, or a group of persons or the general public.

In Article 2, this generic definition was fleshed out with examples according to which actions against the following persons, institutions, and groups of persons should be considered terrorism:

1. Any wilful act causing death or grievous bodily harm or loss of liberty to:

a. Heads of States, persons exercising the prerogatives of the head of State, their hereditary or designated successors;

b. The wives or husbands of the above-mentioned persons;

c. Persons charged with public functions or holding public positions when the act is directed against them in their public capacity.

Since the focus here is less on the legal and technical aspects of the Terrorism Convention and more on its political aspects, it should only be emphasized that the state and its representatives were clearly at the centre of the regulations as entities to be protected against terrorist acts, while individuals or population groups (i.e. society) were considered to be derived from them. This state centrality is particularly evident in the naming of heads of state, their successors and spouses, and state dignitaries.

The committee of experts, under the leadership of Pella, had also called for and initiated in 1937 the establishment of an international criminal court.⁶¹ Although the committee did not conceive of the state as an aggressor against its own population, the prospect of an institutionalized international criminal justice system already represented such a massive encroachment on the sovereignty of most states that only 13 states signed the ICC Convention. In the end, 19 states signed the Terrorism Convention. Notwithstanding, neither of the two conventions came into force as only India and, to a limited extent, Mexico ratified the Terrorism Convention, and not a single state ratified the ICC Convention.⁶²

4 Raphael Lemkin: From International Criminal Law to the Genocide Convention

At no time during the interwar period did Raphael Lemkin hold a comparably strong position to that of Pella.⁶³ As a public prosecutor, a lecturer at the Free Polish University, and as a member of the Polish Codification Commission, Lemkin was primarily involved in teaching and research at the university and in advising the criminal law section of the commission. He was also sent by Warsaw to AIDP conferences as an expert on international law issues – but not as a diplomat or a politician. The differences between Lemkin, whose international radius of action depended on the favour of Polish government agencies, and Pella, who acted as an international lawyer-diplomat, become clear in connection with the efforts made in the 1930s for an international criminal law code. Here, the paths of Lemkin and Pella probably crossed for the first time. Pella, born in 1897, was only three years older than Lemkin, who was born in Ozerisko in eastern Poland in 1900. As the son of a Jewish tenant farmer, Lemkin grew up in modest circumstances, with a feeling of individual legal insecurity due to the prohibition of Jews in the Russian Empire to settle in the countryside and to engage in agriculture.⁶⁴

After the Marseilles assassination in 1934, the LoN had set up its own committee of experts and did not draw on the preparatory work of the AIDP. This indicates that the international legal investigation of the assassination was as politicized as the police investigations. The main reason for the LoN’s own committee of experts may have been the fact that the AIDP was not consistently state centred, with delegates who clearly followed the respective reasons of the state and those with more professional ethics and a transnational horizon. The best-known example of the latter type is without a doubt Lemkin. At the fourth conference of the AIDP, held in Paris in 1931, Lemkin still appeared as a delegate of Poland and acted as one of the two rapporteurs, alongside the Romanian Andrei Rădulescu. While the latter, in line with Romanian threat perceptions, sought to define terrorism as a threat to public order posed by communists and anarchists, Lemkin’s interventions aimed at a broader definition of terrorism.⁶⁵ By the time the next conference was held in Madrid in 1933, Lemkin apparently had fallen into disgrace in Poland; thus he was no longer nominated as a delegate of his country. Accordingly, his draft for Madrid was discussed only informally, but it was dropped from the agenda of the commission not least due to Lemkin’s diminished status.⁶⁶ However, the real reason for this was of a substantive nature, as Lemkin had rejected a central premise of previous discussions and had taken a completely new direction.

Lemkin broke with the received wisdom of defining terrorism primarily through the intentions of the perpetrators and through those persons and institutions attacked. Instead, his approach focused on universally conceived legal goods, such as “international means of transport and communication, which were indispensable for the functioning of a peaceful international order”.⁶⁷ He also mentioned works of fine art or libraries and members of a certain social or ethnic group as “goods” to be protected from acts of “vandalism” and “barbarism”. In his posthumously published autobiography, he summarized his thoughts on the subject:

Is not the destruction of a religious or racial collectivity more detrimental to mankind than destroying a submarine or robbing a vessel? When a nation is destroyed it is not the cargo of the vessel, that is lost but a substantial part of humanity, with a spiritual heritage in which the whole world partakes. These people are being destroyed for no other reason than that they embrace a specific religion or belong to a specific race. They are destroyed not in their individual capacity but as members of a collectivity of which the oppressor does not approve.⁶⁸

While Lemkin’s autobiographical reflections are not free from a retrospective adaptation of his concept of terrorism in the 1930s to his concept of genocide in the late 1940s, it can nevertheless be stated that he reconfigured the relationship between states and individuals in several respects early on. Until then, but also still in the Terrorism Convention, international terrorism was defined as violent acts committed by individuals, possibly assisted by other states, against representatives and institutions of a state. Not explicitly, but by means of omission, the state as a possible aggressor, in Lemkin’s case, no longer only adopted an international approach but also employed a national one against its own citizens. For Lemkin, the previously functioning institutions of international criminal law were not sufficient to sanction acts such as the Turkish genocide of the Armenians, to which he refers repeatedly in his autobiography. Consequently, he called for the establishment of an international criminal court.

5 André Mandelstam: From Minority Protection to General Human Rights

The protection of minorities in the Paris Peace Treaties and under the supervision of the LoN was actually an element foreign to the system within a modern, political understanding of the nation.⁶⁹ For if a state was truly based on a political understanding of the nation, all citizens – regardless of their ethnicity and religious denomination – were equal before the law and in the political arena. Their free cultural development and participation in political life and power would be sufficiently guaranteed by freedom of association and religion, by the right to freedom of expression, and by other general civil rights – there was no need for separate protection of minorities. Political practice in the new states, which understood themselves as nation-states, showed that their elites generally followed an ethnonational understanding of state and nation that the right of self-determination of peoples applied only to the members of the titular nation, not to those of the minorities. In the understanding of the minorities at that time (buttressed as such in much of the present-day research), the intention and effect of minority protection in the LoN can be summarized as follows: the minority protection may have been devised to protect the minorities from encroachments by the new states, but, in practice, it protected the new states from claims by the minorities.⁷⁰

This political understanding of the relationship between state and citizen corresponded to the principle of international law according to which only states could be subjects of international law but not individuals. Until the interwar period, the idea that states could commit crimes against their own citizens, which could then be the subject of international law sanctions, was also completely marginal. Nevertheless, minority protection opened a discursive door to such an approach. Theoretically, minority protection could be conceived of as a group right or as a general human right – the decisive factor in the new approaches was that civil rights were no longer solely a matter of national law.

André Mandelstam was one of the first and, in any case, one of the most persistent international law-educated legal activists in the interwar period, who pointed out the aforementioned aporias of minority protection.⁷¹ Mandelstam was born in Russia in 1869 as the son of a Protestant family.⁷² He studied law and began a diplomatic career, which initially took him to Constantinople. There, he became chief translator (dragoman) and legal advisor at the Russian embassy, and, after the liberal February Revolution (1917), he became director of the legal department of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This steep career trajectory came to an end with the October Revolution (1917), and he preferred moving to Western Europe. In Constantinople, Mandelstam was particularly concerned with solutions to the Armenian question within the Ottoman Empire, and, in later writings, he was deeply shocked by the Turkish genocide of the Armenians.⁷³ His political motor in exile was the concern that the community of states, the LoN, and international law had not learned enough lessons from the genocide and that they were insufficiently equipped for further crimes committed by states against their own citizens.

Since 1919, he had been a feverish lecturer and publisher on minority issues. Initially, he pleaded for a territorial extension of minority protection as a group right so that it would have universal validity.⁷⁴ He pointed out aporias of the new minority protection as early as the mid-1920s. According to his legal and political analysis, the Paris Peace Treaties, in the form of a minority protection system, had created a regional and fragmented doctrine of international law and institutionalized it in the LoN.⁷⁵ It was regional because only newly established or enlarged states in East-Central and South-eastern Europe were subject to it, but not Germany and the Soviet Union as non-members and certainly not Western European states, such as Great Britain and France, with their considerable colonial possessions. The new international law was fragmented because only members of ethnic and religious minorities could petition for access to organizations of the LoN and to international law, unlike other citizens of these states. The particular insult that such international law held in store for the elites in Eastern Europe consisted of the extension of an assumed cultural divide from West to East from the long nineteenth century to the period after World War I. As a result, the societies and states of Eastern Europe, like the Ottoman Empire in the past, needed humanitarian interventions to protect certain population groups because their level of civilization would not allow them to do so. With his criticism of the regional character of minority protection, Mandelstam responded to the sensibilities in Eastern Europe. At the same time, however, he greatly offended the state elites because he was convinced that the absolute sovereignty of states was diminishing:

la science juridique […] évolue, sur un rythme accéléré, non seulement vers le dogme de la primauté du droit international sur le droit de l’Etat, mais aussi vers la reconnaissance à l’individu, du moins sous certains rapports, de la qualité du sujet du droit international.⁷⁶

As we know, Mandelstam’s optimism was premature regarding the insight of the elites of both Western and Eastern Europe that the absolute sovereignty of nation-states was a doctrine of the past that could easily be dispensed with. Nonetheless, it is significant in which circles his idea of the further development of the protection of minorities into general human and civil rights was gaining acceptance, namely not within the LoN itself but in specialist legal organizations, diplomatic-legal NGOs, and educational institutes in its orbit. Mandelstam was able to celebrate the zenith of his legal activism in the fact that his International Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the Institute of International Law during its plenary session in New York in October 1929.⁷⁷ Subsequently, he lectured on human rights at the Institut Universitaire des Hautes Etudes Internationales (Graduate Institute) in Geneva and at the Hague Academy of International Law. His International Declaration of Human Rights was also discussed sympathetically at the International Institute of Public Law and endorsed by in 1931 the International Federation of Leagues for the Defence of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (Fédération internationale des ligues pour la défense des droits de l’homme et du citoyen).⁷⁸ However, the success proved to be hollow because, although the most renowned international law organizations, institutes, and NGOs had adopted a human rights approach, this had no immediate consequences.

Why was this? A tentative answer to this question is given by looking at the political and professional environment of Mandelstam in exile, informed by Bourdieu’s capital and field theory. Mandelstam did not act as a solitary figure but within a larger group of diplomats, politicians, and international lawyers who were in exile in Western Europe for political and religious reasons. The first intensive working contacts between activists in political exile and representatives of refugee and philanthropic organizations were established in the Consultative Committee of the High Commissioner for Refugees of the LoN. The committee had the task of advising the high commissioner Fridtjof Nansen on Russian, Ukrainian, Armenian, and Jewish refugee groups that had emerged in the Russian and Ottoman Empires as a result of the revolution and civil war.⁷⁹ In these working contexts, a group was consolidated that was heterogeneously composed and operated in different organizations whose members, however, shared basic political convictions. A particularly large number of actors came from liberal Russian circles, many of whom were Jews; however, other people – who had acted for the independence of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan or who had been defeated in the conflicts in Greece after the Asia Minor Disaster (1922) – joined them. Most of them were in Paris, where they were active, as well as in Geneva and The Hague. In addition to the Institute of International Law, they propagated their ideas in the Geneva Graduate Institute and the Hague Academy of International Law. Characteristic of this group was that they led materially precarious existences; therefore, they took over teaching and lecturing activities at the above-mentioned institutions whenever they were offered.

However, the main site of their activities seems to be the International Diplomatic Academy (Académie Diplomatique Internationale, ADI), which was founded in Paris in 1926. The historian (member of the French Academy [Académie Française] since 1897) and career diplomat Gabriel Hanotaux was its président d’honneur, and some of ADI’s features seem to be connected to Hanotaux. During his time as minister of foreign affairs in the 1890s, he successfully worked for a French-Russian rapprochement. From 1920 to 1923, Hanotaux served as the French delegate to the LoN. As a career diplomat, he disliked party politicians’ meddling in international affairs and favoured diplomacy based on thorough knowledge of states and states’ interests. The acting president of ADI was the viscount Joseph de Fontenay, who was the French ambassador to Spain and the Holy See from 1923 to 1932. At the opening session of the ADI on 10 June 1927, de Fontenay reasoned that the new association could offer good and unique services to the international community.⁸⁰ While other institutions, like the LoN most notably, were working for the consolidation of peace as well, “nous travaillerons à notre manière […], uniquement en apportant toute notre conviction, tout notre bonne volonté”. The ADI’s founders “veulent tenter d’empêcher, sinon l’éclosion d’incidents et de différends, du moins les complications qui en surgissent fatalement si on n’intervient à temps”. He likened the ADI to a producer of médecine préventive (preventative medicine) since it would analyse burning issues of the time and offer balanced solutions that would be informed by non-partisan, fact-finding efforts.⁸¹ However, Antoine F. Frangulis, one of ADI’s two permanent secretary generals, cautioned at the same opening session that the received methods of diplomacy would not suffice any longer in a world of significantly more intense international relations: “La méthode de travail, l’adresse, le savoir-faire, l’art diplomatique ne suffit pas à faire face à la complexité et à la multiplicité de ces rapports. […] Devant l’effort global de la science, la diplomatie ne saurait demeurer dans la domaine de l’art.”⁸²

Two years after its foundation, the ADI announced its membership structure according to occupation. Out of the envisaged 150 members, 130 were co-opted already, and they were grouped according to their assumed importance: 2 former presidents, 12 acting chiefs of governments, 30 ministers of foreign affairs, 14 ministers in other fields, 23 ambassadors; 28 plenipotentiary ministers, 9 international law professors, and 5 members of the International Court of Justice.⁸³ The membership structure is indicative of what the ADI leaders thought to be a viable way to influence international foreign policy and the agenda of the LoN, namely to gather politicians specialized in foreign affairs and diplomats and to engage them in a dialogue with international lawyers and judges. The preponderance of politicians and career diplomats, however, points to the international law’s somewhat limited role for diplomacy and international policy. The above-mentioned group of political émigrés formed a distinct category of ADI members, since they brought personal experiences of political suppression or ethno-religious minority sensibilities to the table. They were former foreign ministers, ambassadors, plenipotentiary ministers, and so forth in the Russian Empire, in formerly (often short-lived) independent countries that were incorporated in the Soviet Union (such as Armenia and Georgia), and in Greece before the anti-royalist takeover in 1923/24.

While Mandelstam seems to have been the intellectual leader of the émigré group with a specific agenda as discussed above, Frangulis assumed the role of its organizer within ADI as he was one of its two permanent secretary generals. Frangulis was presented in the ADI’s Séances et Travaux (1929) as “ancien Ministre de Grèce” and “ancien Délégué à la S.D.N.”, and Mandelstam featured interchangeably as “Professeur de Droit International” and as “ancien Directeur au Ministère des Affaires Etrangères de Russie”. The interplay between Mandelstam’s legal activism and Frangulis’s political leverage becomes clear with the International Declaration of Human Rights. It was only after Frangulis had assumed his diplomatic status again, as the delegate for Haiti on behalf of its president Stenio Vincent, that he was able to table the declaration at the Assembly of the LoN in 1933.⁸⁴ The intellectual and institutional trajectory of Mandelstam’s declaration points to the limits of capital transfers in the interrelated fields of diplomacy, international politics, and international law. To a certain extent, the boundaries of the fields became more fluid and permeable for legal activisms in the interwar period; however, still diplomatic status was required for moving declarations the decisive step ahead to become international law.

6 Towards a Typology of Interwar Legal Activism: A Conclusion

In their book on advocacy networks in international politics, Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink make the observation that “the jurists responsible for inserting the idea [of human rights] into early twentieth-century global debates came from countries at the periphery of the European system rather than at its cultural core”.⁸⁵ This chapter has explored the structural reasons for this tendency in legal activism with an Eastern European background, which are to be found in the concomitant appearance of small nation-states and of ethno-religious minorities after World War I. Both the diplomats of the new states and the representatives of the minorities perceived international politics and international law as arenas and instruments for their legal advocacy. However, state-led and minority-based legal activism drew on partially different resources, argued with different normative assumptions, and had different agendas.

The results of this chapter are primarily based on three case studies, which, surely, do not allow for sweeping generalizations. Much more research is necessary in all aspects of the legal and diplomatic fields analysed in this chapter. To give just one example, the degree and the exact proceedings of the policy coordination between the main anti-revisionist’s alliances – the Little Entente and the Balkan Pact – are known only superficially. Deeper knowledge on biographical and intellectual aspects of interwar international and transnational legal activism would further insights into strategies and traditions of self-positioning in East-Central and South-eastern Europe, transcending the supposed watershed of 1945.

From the analysis of three legal activists’ biographies in the interwar period, I propose a typology of legal activism operating within the sphere of influence of the LoN, which builds on a series of antagonistic variables:

· government intellectuals versus intellectuals in political exile or minority rights advocates,

· agency in the LoN versus legal activism in the orbit of the LoN, and

· recasting and strengthening the state’s position in international law versus questioning and curtailing the state.

Pella was a prototypical government intellectual.⁸⁶ He belonged to the Romanian political establishment; his legal career was furthered with state subsidies, and his standing as an international lawyer was bolstered by acquiring the status of an official delegate to the LoN. Bucharest invested in several currencies – that is to say, financially, politically, and symbolically – in Pella’s career, ultimately with the aim of having a strong voice in international relations and international legal policy that served Romanian interests. Bucharest’s strategy with Pella paid off to some degree since his activism in several professional associations and political bodies in the orbit of the LoN earned him the role of an indispensable actor on the field of criminal law. Yet, both conventions that Pella drafted in 1937 for the LoN, the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism and the Convention for the Creation of an International Criminal Court, proved to be non-starters. Pella’s advocacy for banning aggressive wars and for fighting international terrorism seemingly served noble causes that, however, served Romanian foreign policy interests well as an aggrandized nation-state with several large ethno-religious minority groups and with all neighbouring countries having more or less revisionist policy aims. As this constellation was constant in the interwar period – with Romania’s political regime changing from parliamentary monarchy to royal dictatorship under King Carol II in 1938 to military dictatorship under Ion Antonescu in 1941, and to communist-led people’s democracy in 1945⁸⁷ – Pella served Romanian interests throughout this time. The following suggestion that Pella sent to Bucharest from Berne in 1944 concerning the fate of the Transylvanian Jews under Hungarian occupation gives a glimpse into his understanding of how to further Romanian state interests:

Strictly personal for the Secretary General in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I ask you to communicate to me if you agree that we plan a special action with means we have here at our disposal for protecting the Jews from Northern Transylvania who are now the subjects of the Hungarian regime. By this action, we could attract not only the sympathy of the Jewish world organizations, but that of the Anglo-Americans as well. At the same time, we would mark a sign for consolidating our rights to the territories we have lost through the so-called Vienna arbitrations.⁸⁸

In comparison to Pella, the legal activism of Raphael Lemkin, André Mandelstam, and Antoine Frangulis (whom I touched upon only briefly) had to draw on significantly weaker resources. As exiled persons, Mandelstam and Frangulis lost any financial and political state support as they were no longer official Russian or Greek diplomats or delegates, and Lemkin lost his status as a Polish delegate. Their legal activism was informed by sensibilities about ethno-religious minorities in Eastern Europe and by their personal experience of politically motivated emigration and suppression. Partially, they acted in the same professional lawyers’ associations and commissions as Pella; however, losing or lacking an official status diminished their immediate agency and success in shaping international law. In order to compensate for this disadvantage, they tried to develop alternative repertoires of legal activism by stressing their unique diplomatic skills and intellectual insights in institutions in the orbit of the LoN. They were also well aware of the limits of freelance legal activism, as only state delegates to the LoN were entitled to table declarations and conventions. In the medium term, during the lifetime of the LoN, Lemkin’s and Mandelstam’s attempts to reconfigure international law on the basis of universally conceived legal goods, thereby curtailing state powers over its own citizens, were doomed to fail. Only after World War II and after the Holocaust did Lemkin’s and Mandelstam’s interwar legal activism bear fruit – two of the most important international law documents of the twentieth century – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, both adopted in 1948.

Notes

M. Payk, Frieden durch Recht? Der Aufstieg des modernen Völkerrechts und der Friedensschluss nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018.

D. Müller, “Statehood in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe: The Interwar Period”, in: W. Borodziej, J. v. Puttkamer, and S. Ferhadbegović (eds.), The Routledge History Handbook of Central and Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 2: Statehood, London: Routledge, 2020, pp. 148–193.

D. Müller, Bodeneigentum und Nation. Rumänien, Jugoslawien und Polen im europäischen Vergleich (1918–1948), Göttingen: Wallstein, 2020.

S. Pedersen, “Back to the League of Nations”, The American Historical Review 112 (2007) 4, pp. 109–117; I. Löhr, “Völkerbund”, Europäische Geschichte Online (EGO), http://ieg-ego.eu/de/threads/transnationale-bewegungen-und-organisationen/internationale-organisationen-und-kongresse/isabella-loehr-voelkerbund/?searchterm=V%C3%B6lkerbund&set_language=de (accessed 27 December 2019).

P. Clavin, “Defining Transnationalism”, Contemporary European History 14 (2005) 4, pp. 421–439.

M. Schulz, “Internationale Institutionen”, in: J. Dülffer and W. Loth (eds.), Dimensionen internationaler Geschichte, Munich: Oldenbourg, 2012, pp. 211–232; D. Laqua (ed.), Internationalism Reconfigured. Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars, London: I. B. Tauris, 2011; C. Kraft, “Nationalisierende Transnationalisierung. (Inter)nationale Strafrechtswissenschaft in der Zwischenkriegszeit”, in: D. Müller and A. Skordos (eds.), Leipziger Zugänge zur rechtlichen, politischen und kulturellen Verflechtungsgeschichte Ostmitteleuropas, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2015, pp. 15–26.

Y. Dezalay and M. R. Madsen, “The Force of Law and the Reflexive Sociology of Law”, The Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences 8 (2012), pp. 433–452; G. Sacriste and A. Vauchez, “The Force of International Law: Lawyers’ Diplomacy on the International Scene in the 1920s”, Law & Social Inquiry 32 (2007) 1, pp. 83–107. As an emanation of the French School of Sociology of Law, cf. M. R. Madsen and C. Thornhill (eds.), Law and the Formation of Modern Europe. Perspectives from the Historical Sociology of Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Dezalay and Madsen, “The Force of Law”, p. 436.

A. Cohen, “Constitutionalism without Constitution: Transnational Elites Between Political Mobilization and Legal Expertise in the Making of a Constitution for Europe (1940s–1960s)”, Law & Social Inquiry 32 (2007), pp. 109–135; J. Hagan and R. Levi, “Crimes of War and the Force of Law”, Social Forces 83 (2005), pp. 1499–1534; M. R. Madsen, La genèse de l’Europe des droits de l’homme: Enjeux juridiques et stratégies d’Etat (France, Grande Bretagne et pays scandinaves, 1945–1970), Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2010; A. Vauchez, “The Transnational Politics of Judicialization. Van Gend en Loos and the Making of EU Polity”, European Law Journal (2010), pp. 1–28.

A. Abbott, The System of Professions. An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988; M. Burrage, Revolution and the Making of the Contemporary Legal Profession. England, France, and the United States, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 22–41.

A. B. Lorca, Mestizo International Law. A Global Intellectual History 1842–1933, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

For an exception, see S. Troebst, “Lemkin and Lauterpacht in Lemberg and Later: Pre- and Post-Holocaust Careers of Two East European International Lawyers”, Tr@nsit-Online (2013), http://www.iwm.at/read-listen-watch/transit-online/lemkin-and-lauterpacht-in-lemberg-and-later-pre-and-post-holocaust-careers-of-two-east-european-international-lawyers.

T. Davies, NGOs. A New History of Transnational Civil Society, London: Hurst & Company, 2013; M. E. Keck and K. Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders. Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.

M. Mazower, Governing the World. The History of an Idea, 1918 to the Present, New York: Penguin Press, 2012.

D. Müller, Staatsbürger auf Widerruf. Juden und Muslime als Alteritätspartner im rumänischen und serbischen Nationscode. Ethnonationale Staatsbürgerschaftskonzeptionen, 1878–1941, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005; J. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982, pp. 90–117.

S. Troebst, “Politische Entwicklung in der Neuzeit”, in: M. Hatschikjan and S. Troebst (eds.), Südosteuropa. Gesellschaft, Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur. Ein Handbuch, Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999, pp. 73–102; K. Clewing, “Staatensystem und innerstaatliches Agieren im multiethnischen Raum: Südosteuropa im langen 19. Jahrhundert”, in: K. Clewing and J. O. Schmitt (eds.), Geschichte Südosteuropas vom frühen Mittalalter bis zur Gegenwart, Regensburg: Pustet, 2011, pp. 432–553.

J. Dülffer, Regeln gegen den Krieg? Die Haager Friedenskonferenzen von 1899 und 1907 in der internationalen Politik, Berlin: Ullstein, 1981.

R. Lüthi, Die europäischen Kleinstaaten und die Haager Friedenskonferenz von 1899, Winterthur: Keller, 1954; J. Dülffer, “Die kleineren Staaten auf den Den Haager Friedenskonferenzen von 1899 und 1907”, in: M. Kröger, U. S. Soénius, and S. Wunsch (eds.), Im Zeichen der Gewalt. Frieden und Krieg im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Cologne: Böhlau, 2003, pp. 79–88.

L. Bieltz, “România la conferinţele de pace de la Haga. 1899; 1907. Fotografii originale din Patrimoniul Muzeului Naţional de Istorie a României” [Romania at the Peace Conferences in The Hague. 1899; 1907. Original photographies form the Treasure of the National History Museum of Romania], Muzeul Naţional 9 (1997), pp. 113–116.

A.-B. Ceobanu, Diplomaţi în Vechiul Regat. Familie, carieră şi viaţă socială în timpul lui Carol I (1878–1914) [Diplomats in Old Romanian Kingdom. Family, career, and social life during the reign of Carol I (1878–1914)], Iaşi: Editura Universităţii „Alexandru Ioan Cuza“, 2015, pp. 181–218; R. Dinu, Diplomaţia Vechiului Regat (1878–1914) [The Diplomacy of the Old Romanian Kingdom], Bucharest: Editura Monitorul Oficial, 2014, pp. 184–185.

M. Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; H. Mosler, “Das Institut de Droit International und die völkerrechtliche Stellung der menschlichen Person”, in: W. Wengler (ed.), Justitia et Pace. Festschrift zum 100jährigen Bestehen des Institut de Droit International, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1974, pp. 77–100; Sacriste and Vauchez, “The Force of International Law”, pp. 93–105.

M. Herren, Hintertüren zur Macht: Internationalismus und modernisierungsorientierte Außenpolitik in Belgien, der Schweiz und den USA 1865–1914, München: Oldenbourg, 2000; M. Herren, “Governmental Internationalism and the Beginning of a New World Order in the Late Nineteenth Century”, in: M. H. Geyer and J. Paulmann (eds.), The Mechanics of Internationalism. Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 121–144.

Dülffer, Regeln gegen den Krieg?, p. 199.

V. Moisiuc, Premisele izolării politice a României 1919–1940 [Preconditions of Romania’s political isolation 1919–1940], Bucharest: Humanitas, 1991.

F. Anghel, Construirea sistemului “Cordon sanitaire”. Relaţii româno-polone 1919–1926 [Romanian-Polish Relations 1919–1926], Târgovişte: Editura Cetateta de Scaun, 2008.

M. Adam, Richtung Selbstvernichtung. Die Kleine Entente 1920–1938, Budapest: Corvina, 1988; M. Adam, The Little Entente and Europe (1920–1929), Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1993; E. Campus, Mica Înţelegere [The Little Entente], Bucharest: Editura Ştiinţifică, 1968; R. Kiszling, Die militärischen Vereinbarungen der Kleinen Entente 1929–1937, Munich: Oldenbourg, 1959; R. Machray, The Little Entente, New York: H. Fertig, 1970.

E. Campus, Înţelegerea balcanică [The Balkan Pact], Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 1972.

See the edition of Titulescu’s most important speeches before the League of Nations: N. Titulescu, “Discursuri”, in: R. Deutsch (ed.), [Speeches], Bucharest: Editura Ştiinţifică, 1967.

J. Rinceanu, Völkerstrafrecht in Rumänien, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2008, p. 251. See also M. Duţu, Vespasian V. Pella (1897–1952). Fondator al dreptului internaţional penal. Promotor al unificării dreptului penal. Artizan al justiţiei penale internaţionale [Founder of the international law. Promoter of the unification of the criminal law. Architect of the international criminal justice; transl. provided on book cover], Bucharest: Universul Juridic, 2012; G. Sbârnă, “Vespasian V. Pella – au service de la science du droit et cause de la paix”, Annals of the Academy of Romanian Scientists. Series on History and Archeology 5 (2013) 2, pp. 85–125.

Duţu, Vespasian V. Pella, pp. 11–13.

Ibid., pp. 35–36. See also M. Iacobescu, România şi Societatea Naţiunilor 1919–1929 [Romania and the League of Nations], Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 1988, pp. 192–194.

See V. V. Pella, La criminalité collective des états et le Droit Pénal de l’avenir, Bucharest: Imprimerie de l’État, 1925 (here cited after the 2nd edn 1926). For the Nobel Prize proposal see: “Propunerea adresată Comitetului Nobel al Parlamentului Norvegian de către profesorului şi senatorului Constantin G. Dissescu, în vederea atribuirii Premiului Nobel pentru Pace pe anul 1926 lui Vespasian V. Pella” [Proposal towards the Nobel Prize Commitee of the Norvegian Parliament by the profesor and member of parliament Constantin G. Dissescu in regards awarding the Nobel Prize 1926 to Vespasian V. Pella], in: G. Sbârnă (ed.), Vespasian V. Pella – în slujba ştiinţei dreptului şi a cauzei păcii [Vespasian V. Pella – in the cause of law and peace], Ploiești: Karta-Graphic, 2011, pp. 261–292.

Pella, La criminalité collective des états, p. 3. In doing so, he refers to the draft of the disarmament agreement discussed in the League of Nations in the early 1920s, which initially postulated that “aggressive war is an international crime”. See O. A. Hathaway and S. J. Shapiro, The Internationalists and Their Plan to Outlaw War, London: Allan Lane, 2018, p. 117.

Pella expressly refers to American pacifists and liberal internationalists who would have prepared the ground for the criminalization of a war of aggression under international law (see Pella, La criminalité collective des états, p. 6). In descriptions of the genesis of the Kellogg-Briand Pact to outlaw war of aggression – which is not expressly discussed here – Pella’s initiative is mentioned only in passing. The most recent monograph on the subject even dispenses with mentioning Pella altogether (see Hathaway and Shapiro, The Internationalists).

Pella, La criminalité collective des états, p. 3.

Ibid., p. 101.

Müller, Staatsbürger auf Widerruf.

Pella, La criminalité collective des états, p. 103.

V. V. Pella, “The Criminality of Wars of Aggression and the Organisation of International Repressive Measures”, in: Pella, La criminalité collective des états, p. 331.

V. Pella, “Discours tenu dans le cadre des débats généraux sur le Compte-Rendu du Bureau de l’Union Interparlementaire de la 22e conférence déroulée à Berne du 22 au 28 Août 1924”, in: Sbârnă (ed.), Vespasian V. Pella, pp. 97–103.

V. Pella, “La criminalité de la guerre de l’agression et l’organisation d’une répression internationale. Rapport présenté au nom de la Commission permanente pour l’étude des questions juridiques, 23e Conférence tenue à Washington du 1er au 7 octobre 1925”, in: Sbârnă (ed.), Vespasian V. Pella, pp. 111–144. For a description of its activities within the Inter-Parliamentary Union, see V. V. Pella, “L’Union Interparlementaire et le droit pénal international”, in: L’union interparlementaire de 1889 à 1939, Lausanne: Librairie Payot, 1939, pp. 101–121. For further preparatory work, see Pella, La criminalité collective des états, p. 9.

C. Kraft, Europa im Blick der polnischen Juristen. Rechtsordnung und juristische Profession im Spannungsfeld zwischen Nation und Europa 1918–1939, Frankfurt on the Main: [Klostermann], 2002, pp. 290–311.

M. Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice. The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919–1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014; M. Lewis, “The History of the International Association of Penal Law, 1924–1950”, in: C. W. Ling, M. Bergsmo, and Y. Ping (eds.), Historical Origins of International Criminal Law, Brussels: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2015.

V. Pella, “Discours donné lors de la XXVe Conférence de l’Union interparlementaire tenue à Berlin du 23 au 28 août 1928”, in: Sbârnă (ed.), Vespasian V. Pella, p. 318.

Regarding of Pella’s continuous claim of scientificity as a necessary quality of dealing with international law, reference is made here to his speech at the meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Washington in 1925, see V. Pella, “La criminalité de la guerre. Rapport présente à Washington du 1er au 7 octobre 1925”, in: Sbârnă (ed.), Vespasian V. Pella, p. 115.

B. Saul, “The Legal Response of the League of Nations to Terrorism”, Journal of International Criminal Justice 4 (2006), pp. 78–102, at 80. However, Ben Saul does not name the author of the suggestion.

A. Kovács-Bertrand, Der ungarische Revisionismus nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Der publizistische Kampf gegen den Friedensvertrag von Trianon (1918–1931), Munich: Oldenbourg, 1997; L. Leuştean, România, Ungaria şi Tratatul de la Trianon 1918–1920 [Romania, Hungary and the Treaty of Trianon 1918–1920], Iaşi: Polirom, 2002; L. Leuştean, România şi Ungaria în cadrul “Noii Europe” (1920–1923) [Romania and Hungary in the context of „New Europe“ (1920–1923)], Iaşi: Polirom, 2003.

A. Schmidt-Rösler, Rumänien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Die Grenzziehung in der Dobrudscha und im Banat und die Folgeprobleme, Frankfurt on the Main: Peter Lang, 1994, pp. 101–119.

C. King, The Moldovans. Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2000, pp. 36–62; A.-M. Mironov, “Bessarabien in der Zwischenkriegszeit (1918–1940). Das politische Leben”, in: K. Bochmann et al. (eds.), Die Republik Moldova. Republica Moldova. Ein Handbuch, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2012, pp. 59–69.

Cf. the volume of sources on foreign policy by G. Sbârnă (ed.), Parlamentul şi politica externă a României 1919–1940 [The Parliamant and Foreign Policy of Romania], Bucharest: Editura Sylvi, 2000, as well as three source volumes on minority policy: I. Scurtu and L. Boar (eds.), Minorităţile naţionale din România 1918–1925 [The National Minorities in Romania 1918–1925], Bucharest: Editura Semne, 1995; I. Scurtu and I. Dordea (eds.), Minorităţile naţionale din România 1925–1931 [The National Minorities in Romania 1925–1931], Bucharest: Editura Semne, 1996; I. Scurtu (ed.), Minorităţile naţionale din România 1931–1938 [The National Minorities in Romania 1931–1938], Bucharest: Editura Semne, 1999.

M. Hausleitner, Deutsche und Juden in Bessarabien 1814–1941. Zur Minderheitenpolitik Russlands und Großrumäniens, Munich: IKGS Verlag, 2005, pp. 90–98; O. Schroeder-Negru, “Rebeliunea de la Tatar Bunar din 1924. Germanii basarabeni între anti-bolşevism şi patriotism românesc” [The Rebellion of Tatar-Bunar 1924. The Germans from Bassarabia between anti-Bolshevism and Romanian patriotism], in: S. Ihrig et al. (eds.), Istoria între ştiinţă şi şcoală – perioada interbelică şi Basarabia. Studii, materiale, surse şi sugestii [History between science and school – the interwar period and Bassarabia], Chişinău: Editura Cartdidact, 2008, pp. 85–92. From the perspective of the Executive Committee of the International Red Cross, the events are presented by G. Stachovitch and N. Pfaff, 500: Der bessarabische Bauernaufstand von Tatar-Bunar, Halle: Georg Stolt, 1925.

See doc. nr. 8, in: Sbârnă (ed.), Parlamentul şi politica externă a României, p. 106.

H. Ahlbrecht, Geschichte der völkerrechtlichen Strafgerichtsbarkeit im 20. Jahrhundert. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der völkerrechtlichen Straftatbestände und der Bemühungen um einen Ständigen Internationalen Strafgerichtshof, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1999, pp. 52–53.

For the presentation of the police investigations from the point of view of the Yugoslav acting in a leading position, see V. Milićević, Der Königsmord von Marseille. Das Verbrechen und seine Hintergründe, Bad Godesberg: Hohwacht, 1959. The Third Reich did not play a direct role in this; for a description to the contrary, see V. K. Volkov, Ubistvo Kralja Aleksandra. Hitlerova Zavera [The Murder of King Alexander. A Hitlerite conspiracy], Belgrade: Nova Knjiga, 1983.

For Italy’s policy on South-eastern Europe and the terrorist Croatian-Macedonian cooperation that began in 1929, see S. Troebst, Mussolini, Makedonien und die Mächte 1922–1930. Die “Innere Makedonische Revolutionäre Organisation” in der Südosteuropapolitik des faschistischen Italien, Cologne: Böhlau, 1987.

Milićević, Der Königsmord von Marseille, pp. 33–34.

B. Kovrig, “Mediation by Obfuscation: The Resolution of the Marseille Crisis, October 1934 to May 1935”, The Historical Journal 19 (1976) 1, pp. 191–221.

Ibid., p. 221.

P. Kovács, “Le grand précédent: la Société des nations et son action après l’attentat contre Alexandre, roi de Yougoslavie”, European Integration Studies 1 (2002) 1, pp. 30–40; V. Marjanović, “Das Attentat von Marseille und die internationale Bekämpfung des Terrorismus”, Zeitgeschichte 13 (1986), pp. 197–204; F. Monier, “L’attentat de Marseille (9 octobre 1934): régicide et terrorisme dans les années trente”, La Révolution française 1 (2012), pp. 2–14.

For the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism and the Convention for the Creation of an International Criminal Court, both adopted in 1937, see B. B. Ferencz, An International Criminal Court, Vol. I: Half a Century of Hope, London: Oceana Publications, 1980, pp. 380–398. See Saul, “The Legal Response of the League of Nations to Terrorism”; B. Saul, Defining Terrorism in International Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 171–176.

Pella promoted the establishment of an international criminal court even after World War II (see V. V. Pella, “Towards an International Criminal Court”, The American Journal of International Law 44 (1950) 1, pp. 37–68).

Ferencz, An International Criminal Court, p. 53–54.

C. Kraft, “Völkermorde als delictum iuris gentium – Raphael Lemkins Vorarbeiten für eine Genozidkonvention”, Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 4 (2005), pp. 79–93; M. Kornat, “Rafał Lemkin’s Formative Years and the Beginning of International Career in Interwar Europe”, in: A. Bieńczyck-Missala and S. Dębski (eds.), Rafał Lemkin: A Hero of Mankind, Warsaw: The Polish Institute of International Affairs, 2010, pp. 59–73; P. Sands, East West Street. On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes against Humanity”, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016, pp. 142–190.

D.-L. Frieze, Totally Unofficial. The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013, pp. 3–24.

C. Kraft, “Völkermord im 20. Jahrhundert. Rafał Lemkin und die Ahndung des Genozids durch das internationale Strafrecht”, in: J. Hösler and W. Kessler (eds.), Finis Mundi – Endzeiten und Weltenden im östlichen Europa. Festschrift für Hans Lemberg zum 65. Geburtstag, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1998, pp. 91–110, at 97. For the more national Polish context of Poland’s legal policy developments in the 1930s, see Kraft, Europa im Blick der polnischen Juristen.

D. M. Segesser and M. Gessler, “Raphael Lemkin and the International Debate on the Punishment of War Crimes (1919–1948)”, Journal of Genocide Research 7 (2005) 4, pp. 453–468, at 458.

Kraft, “Völkermorde als delictum iuris gentium”, p. 89.

Frieze, Totally Unofficial, p. 23.

D. Müller, “Staatsbürgerschaft und Minderheitenschutz. ‘Managing diversity’ im östlichen und westlichen Europa”, in: Themenportal Europäische Geschichte, 2006, www.europa.clio-online.de/essay/id/fdae-1379; D. Müller, Staatsbürger auf Widerruf; J. E. Nijman, “Minorities and Majorities”, in: B. Fassbender and A. Peters (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 95–119, at 109–118.

C. Fink, “The League of Nations and the Minorities Question”, World Affairs 157 (1995) 4, pp. 197–205; C. Fink, Defending the Rights of Others. The Great Powers, the Jews, and the International Minority Protection, 1878–1938, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; M. Mazower, “Minorities and the League of Nations in Interwar Europe”, Daedalus 126 (1997) 2, pp. 47–63; M. Scheuermann, Minderheitenschutz contra Konfliktverhütung? Die Minderheitenpolitik des Völkerbundes in den zwanziger Jahren, Marburg: Herder-Institut, 2000.

For a long time, André Mandelstam had not been the focus of research. Amongst the few exceptions are Mosler, “Das Institut de Droit International und die völkerrechtliche Stellung der menschlichen Person”, pp. 77–100; J. H. Burgers, “The Road to San Francisco: The Revival of the Human Rights Idea in the Twentieth Century”, Human Rights Quarterly 14 (1992) 4, pp. 447–477; J. H. Burgers, “André Mandelstam. Forgotten Pioneer of International Human Rights”, in: F. Coomans et al. (eds.), Rendering Justice to the Vulnerable. Liber Amicorum in Honour of Theo van Boven, The Hague: Brill, 2000. Recently, however, Mandelstam has enjoyed a rediscovery as an important legal activist in the interwar period, cf. H. P. Aust, “From Diplomat to Academic Activist: André Mandelstam and the History of Human Rights”, European Journal of International Law 25 (2015) 4, pp. 1105–1121; D. Kévonian, “Les juristes juifs russes en France et l’action internationale dans les années vingt”, Les Belles Lettres 34 (2001) 2, pp. 72–94; D. Kévonian, “André Mandelstam and the Internationalization of Human Rights (1869–1949)”, in: P. Slotte and M. Halme-Tuosaari (eds.), Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 239–266.

Dzovinar Kévonian put an end to conjectures in research that Mandelstam was Jewish by consulting Mandelstam’s death certificate issued in Paris (see Kévonian, “André Mandelstam and the Internationalization of Human Rights”, p. 245, fn. 20).

A.-N. Mandelstam, Le sort de l’Empire ottoman, Paris et al.: Payot, 1917; A.-N. Mandelstam, La Societé des Nations et les puissances devant le problème arménien, Paris: Pedone, 1926. See also K. J. Partsch, “Die Armenierfrage und das Völkerrecht in der Zeit des Ersten Weltkrieges. Zum Wirken von André Mandelstam”, in: M. Dabag and K. Platt (eds.), Genozid und Moderne. Vol. 1: Strukturen kollektiver Gewalt im 20. Jahrhundert, Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 1998, pp. 338–346.

A. Mandelstam, “La protection des minorités ethniques”, Séances et travaux (Académie Diplomatique Internationale) 1 (1927) 1, pp. 17–38.

A. Mandelstam, “Das Problem der Menschen- und Bürgerrechte im ‘Institut de Droit International’”, Die Friedens-Warte 28 (1928) 12, pp. 350–354; A. Mandelstam, “La généralisation de la protection internationale des droits de l’homme”, Revue de droit international et de législation comparée 11 (1930) 2, pp. 297–325, and 11 (1930) 3, pp. 698–713.

A. Mandelstam, “La généralisation”, Revue de droit international et de législation comparée 11 (1930) 3, p. 698.

For the text of the international declaration of human rights (Déclaration des droits internationaux de l’homme), which comprises only six articles, see Mandelstam, “La généralisation”, pp. 708–709; Aust, “From Diplomat to Academic Activist”, pp. 1120–1121.

Burgers, “The Road to San Francisco”, pp. 452–453.

Kévonian, “André Mandelstam and the Internationalization of Human Rights”, pp. 241–242.

For the following quotes, see, “Allocution de M. le Vicomte de Fontenay”, Séances et travaux (Académie Diplomatique Internationale) 1 (1927) 1, pp. 8–9.

“Si jamais en cas de désaccord entre deux peuples, les Gouvernements intéressés devaient adopter de nos travaux pour mettre fin à l’incident, nous pourrions nous dire avec fierté et satisfaction que nous avons bien servi la cause de Paix et de l’Humanité.” Ibid.

Ibid., pp. 10–11.

“Allocution du Vicomte de Fontenay”, Séances et travaux (Académie Diplomatique Internationale) 2 (1929) 4, p. 7.

Burgers, “The Road to San Francisco”, p. 457.

Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders, p. 82.

I borrow this category from French historiography on the post–Dreyfus Affair differentiation of intellectuals’ public roles. The government intellectual – as opposed to the revolutionary and the specific intellectual – is conceived of as a reformist, often a scholar working in existing institutions where he seeks to enlighten public opinion and to guide the actions of statesmen. For the case of an international lawyer, see M. Papadiki, “The ‘Government Intellectuals’: Nicolas Politis – An Intellectual Portrait”, The European Journal of International Law 23 (2012) 1, pp. 221–231.

P. Nistor, Admiterea României comuniste în ONU. Între negocieri diplomatice şi discreditare simbolică [Romania’s Admission to the United Nations. Between diplomatic negotiations and simbolic dicreditation], Iaşi: Institutul European, 2014, pp. 67–87.

See doc. nr. 264, in: M. Hausleitner, S. Hazan, and B. Hutzelmann (eds.), Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945. Bd. 13: Slowakei, Rumänien und Bulgarien, Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018, pp. 549–550. Obviously, Pella used Jewish persecution by Hungary instrumentally for Romania’s claims to Northern Transylvania, while not addressing the official anti-Semitism of the Romanian state under Carol II and Antonescu and the Holocaust in Bucovina, Bessarabia, Transnistria, and the Old Kingdom.

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