A Richness of Martens II

A note about my post A Richness of Martens.

I've just noticed in Jennifer Mori's latest book, The culture of Diplomacy: Britain in Europe, c.1750-1830 a reference to G.F. Martens' Summary of the Law of Nations. It's an interesting reference that's reminded me why I'm interested in the general sweep of international political and diplomatic history.

She says that an early-nineteenth century English diplomat, James Justinian (known to his family as Jem), commented that he wanted to get another edition of Martens as the 1795 English edition he owned

had been translated into English by "that rogue [William] Cobbett..."

She continues by making a comment on how we can see what contemporary diplomats thought about international relations by looking at the ideas contained in the books they owned. In Jem's case, this edition of Martens and Vattel's Law of Nations. These books, she says, 'both presented the European community as a system of states bound together by an enlightened self-interest that drove its members to co-operate with each other, even in times of war. Utility, rather than civility or abstract morality, was therefore the invisible hand at the heart of international relations...'

It's a good point, one that academic historians tend to forget repeatedly and which I've been waiting quite a long time to hear. Rather than being a mechanism that was formed solely as an extension or expression of competitiveness, mutual suspicion and Machiavellian agitation between states, the formation of systems of diplomacy should be interpreted as doing fundamentally useful things in the moderation of politics between states. Not taking this idea at least on board, and academics run the risk of relegating the diplomat  to being performer in the meaningless rituals of courtly life or, at worst, as little more than a spy.  It's  a point one that I've been thinking about ever since I decided that diplomatic history of the early modern period has been not sufficiently studied. Or, I think sometimes, that when it has been studied, it's been looked at the wrong way.

You can download a copy of Cobbett's translation of Martens from google books here. And even if I'm never going to read any of the books that archive.org have about and by Cobbett, how can I resist a link to them?

Frances Hutcheson

Today, a link to a text on a site I only discovered a few days ago that looks quite useful, the Online Library of Liberty. It's to the last chapter of a work of moral philosophy from 1747 by Francis Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy or in its Latin original Philosophiae moralis institutio compendiaria. Hutcheson was one of the greatest influence on the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment and, arguably, upon the thought that underpinned the American founding fathers and Jefferson’s drafting of the Declaration of Independence.


It’s interesting because the last chapter of this work is on international law, diplomacy and treaty making - as its Latin title puts it aptly for this blog De Foederibus, Legatis, et Civitatum Interitu. One of the key elements of Hutcheson’s thought is that humans are implanted with a  sense of moral virtue, which lead us to feel satisfied with actions and behaviours that are morally good, whilst being naturally dissatisfied with those that are not. By extension, his theory of morals, called the “benevolent theory” by some, which sees all human action as finding its origin in a natural sense of good will towards others, rather than in the perspective of earlier thinkers on international relations and law, particularly Samuel Pufendorf, whose work Hutcheson attacked directly, and Hobbes, who Pufendorf drew significantly upon, which suggest that the central drive of human behaviour is our self-interest and thus, by extension, states exist to protect us from ourselves. Hutcheson said specifically that he disagreed with Pufendorf’s view that “men were driven in society only for the sake of external advantage, and for fear of external evils, but in opposition to their natural turn of mind and to all natural affections and appetites.”


I should point out that I claim no expertise in Hutcheson, the precise details of the philosophical or legal debate he was involved in, nor in the intricacies of international thought of the mid-eighteenth century. What I find interesting, though, is that he was another early or pre-modern thinker – like Erasmus – who extended an idea of the goodness of individuals and extends this into a framework of inter-state politics, and in doing so, should be seen as part of the long and long-understudied tradition of international thought that is not driven by what have come to be called realist concerns.

A richness of Martens...

As an undergraduate I noticed occasionally that quite often my bibliographies - alphabetically speaking - were particularly stacked around certain letters or in one particular part of the alphabet. It's something that I found in diplomatic compilations in even a more pronounced way: three scholars drawn to international law, compilations of peace treaties and diplomacy with the same surname.

In the first case it's not incredibly surprising as the work of  the German jurist and diplomat Georg F. Martens (above), best known as the editor of the  Nouvelle recueil des traites, was continued on his death,  by his nephew,  Karl von Martens. The younger Martens shared his uncle's interests; as well as editing his own treaty series, he also wrote a guide to famous cases of international law in history and the widely-read practical guide for the diplomat Le guide diplomatique, I was lucky enough to pick up for only a few pounds before I left the UK in the 2nd edition of 1832. 

The third Martens was a Russian legal scholar who was active around the turn of the twentieth century, Fedor Fedorovich Martens (1845-1909.) He represented Russia at the first Hague Convention of 1899  and drafted the clause that became known as the "Martens Clause", which stated: "Until a more complete code of the laws of war is issued, the High Contracting Parties think it right to declare that in cases not included in the Regulations adopted by them, populations and belligerents remain under the protection and empire of the principles of international law, as they result from the usages established between civilized nations, from the laws of humanity and the requirements of the public conscience." In more plain words, just because certain principles or acts are not prohibited in the stipulations of treaties it does not necessarily follow that those principles or acts are legal. Moreover, it also recognises that international law is not only adjudicated by those that shape it and their appointed arbiters, but that it also should be subject to the public conscience. 

He wrote many works on international law, including a series on Russian treaties with other powers that stretched to fifteen volumes and a more general studies of war and peace, and international law, Traité de droit international. See also the biography of him by V.V. Poustogarov Our Martens: F.F. Martens, International Lawyer and Architect of Peace (Kluwer Law International, 2000)

The title is an excuse to deviate from the subject slightly. A richness is the collective noun referring to the furry kind of marten related to minks and weasels (rather than those related to international jurists, I couldn't find a collective term for them. Perhaps a martens?) While we're off the subject, in looking about to find this piece of information I also found out another piece of useless information which I quite liked: the mobile phone company Nokia is named after a stream near where the company started in Finland, the Nokianvirter or stream of the nokia marten, which lived there in great numbers.

Jean Yves de Saint-Prest.

As I’ve said before the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw several massive projects to transcribe and publish the contents of royal archives started. It’s quite amazing how many there actually are are. I’ve written already about the imperial historiographer Jean Dumont’s Corps Universel de Droit des Gens, about the need for more historical work to be done on the drive to compile peace treaties that he was part of, and my joy at finding these works made available to scholars over the internet. So I thought today I’d post a link to the text of another compilation, this time the Histoire des Traités de Paix put together by Jean Yves de Saint-Prest (1640-1721) and published after his death in 1725.  What I find particularly fascinating about comparing these works is not the texts of treaties they contain – after all, these tend to be pretty much the same, at least from Dumont onwards. It’s their different rationales for justifying why a study of treaties is important. 

In this respect, Saint-Prest is one of my favourites. His cynical suggestions that ‘one fools men with treaties as one fools children with nuts’ or that they were simply ‘spiders’ webs that are unable to catch flies’ are balanced with the idea that despite their faults, without peace treaties there would be an almost ‘universal upheaval’ between the states of the world; that as a soldier defends his patrie with a sword, so does the diplomat with his pen. There’s something that I particularly like about this passage from the introduction that extends this idea: ‘…que les transactions qu’on nomme Traitées de Paix, etc faites et ratifiées solonellement par les puissances assemblée, établies sur une infinité de précautions, jurées, après des dis cussions sans nombre, sur les Saints Evangiles, au nom de la trés Sainte Trinité, aux yeux de tous les peoples de l’univers, ne soient un necessité si indispensable, que sans elles on verroit bien-tôt un bouleversement universel dans les Etats. Toutes ces circonstances rendent l’étude des Traités de Paix la plus belle etude du monde et la plus nécessaire par rapport au bien public. Ceux qui s’y appliquent par leur plume qu’un habile Général par son épée. De meme que ceux-ci repoussent les violanes d’un ennemi qui attaque à force ouverte, les premiers repoussent les sophisms et les subtilités des perjures, mettent au jour leur mauvaise foi, et renversent leurs chicanes et leurs equivoques.’ (p.I.)

Of course, such sentiments praising the capacity of diplomacy to ‘counter the sophisms and subtleties of the dishonest, uncover their bad faith, and counter their chicanes and equivocations’ are not surprising, considering that Saint-Prest was the director of both the archival dépot of French foreign affairs and the  French diplomatic academy, both newly set up by Secretary of State, the Marquis de Torcy in 1710. What I like about this passage, though, is that it suggests studying peace treaties is not only useful, but also honourable and useful. This is something that is easy to forget. Looking at peace treaties retrospectively, it's much easier to see the equivocations, chicanes and deceptions that lead to the failures of particular agreements than it is the good intentions that led to other.

The Bilbiothèque Nationale in Paris has made Saint-Prest’s editions of treaties available through Gallica. Read/ download it here. Or, if you prefer, there is also a version scanned by the Boston Library of a copy once owned by the American statesman John Adams.