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The Birth of the New Justice explains the history of plans for ad hoc and permanent international criminal courts and new international criminal laws to repress aggressive war, war crimes, terrorism, and genocide. Rather than arguing that these legal projects were attempts by state governments to project a “liberal legalism” and create an international state system that limited sovereignty, the book shows that European jurists in a variety of transnational organizations developed their ideas due to diverse motives—liberal, conservative, utopian, humanitarian, nationalist, and particularist. European jurists at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 created a controversial new philosophy of prosecution and punishment, and during the following decades, jurists in different organizations, including the International Law Association, International Association of Criminal Law, the World Jewish Congress, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, transformed the idea of the legitimacy of post-war trials and the concept of international crime to deal with myriad social and political problems. The concept of an international criminal court was never static, and the idea that national tribunals would form an integral part of an international system to enforce new laws was frequently advanced as a pragmatic—and politically convenient—solution.

We have long known that the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 “failed” in the sense that it did not prevent the outbreak of World War II. This book investigates not whether the conference succeeded or failed, but the historically specific international system it created. It explores the rules under which that system operated, and the kinds of states and empires that inhabited it. Deepening the dialogue between history and international relations theory makes it possible to think about sovereignty at the conference in new ways. Sovereignty in 1919 was about remaking “the world”—not just determining of answers demarcating the international system, but also the questions. Most histories of the Paris Peace Conference stop with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany on June 28, 1919. This book considers all five treaties produced by the conference as well as the Treaty of Lausanne with Turkey in 1923. It is organized not chronologically or geographically, but according to specific problems of sovereignty. A peace based on “justice” produced a criminalized Great Power in Germany, and a template problematically applied in the other treaties. The conference as sovereign sought to “unmix” lands and peoples in the defeated multinational empires by drawing boundaries and defining ethnicities. It sought less to oppose revolution than to instrumentalize it. The League of Nations, so often taken as the supreme symbol of the conference’s failure, is better considered as a continuation of the laboratory of sovereignty established in Paris.

This study examines the territorial restructuring of Europe between 1917 and 1923, when a radically new and highly fragile peace order was established. In a first step, it explores the peace planning efforts of Great Britain, France, and the United States in the final phase of the First World War. It then provides an in-depth view on the practice of Allied border drawing at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Special attention is given to a new factor in foreign policymaking—academic experts employed by the three Allied states for the tasks of peace planning and border drawing. Two case studies are presented of disputed regions where the newly drawn borders caused ethnic violence, albeit with different results: the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France in 1918–19 and the Greek–Turkish War between 1919 and 1922. A final chapter investigates the approach of the League of Nations to territorial revisionism and minority rights, thereby assessing the chances and dangers of the Paris peace order over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. The book argues that at both the international and the local levels, the ‘temptation of violence’ drove key actors to simplify the acclaimed principle of national self-determination and use ethnic definitions of national identity. Local elites, administrations, and paramilitary leaders soon used ethnic notions of identity to mobilise popular support under the guise of international legitimacy. Henceforth, national self-determination ceased to be a tool of peace-making and instead became an ideology of violent resistance.