The Hague Appeal for Peace

Some 8000 peace activists, government officials, and world leaders convened in The Hague this May for a Centennial Commemoration. This major event received almost no press coverage in the US. Several Peacework correspondents wrote, in haste, to meet our deadline. The following background paper by Peter Weiss sets the context.

On May 18, 1899, 108 delegates from 26 countries gathered in The Hague's beautiful Huis ten Bosch in response to an invitation issued the previous August by Nicholas II, the young Czar of Russia, to hold an international conference to discuss way of halting the arms race.

In May of 1999, on the centenary of the First Hague Peace Conference, many more delegates from many more countries gathered in The Hague's Congress Center in response to an appeal launched by the International Peace Bureau, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms, and the World Federalist Movement and supported by hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals throughout the world.

The purpose of The Hague Appeal for Peace 1999 is more ambitious than the Czar's: It is to raise, in a serious and realistic way, the question of whether, at the end of the bloodiest century in history, humanity can find a way to solve its problems without resorting to arms; whether, from the next century onward, war is still necessary or legitimate; and whether, given the nature of the weapons currently in arsenals and on drawing boards, civilization can survive another major war.

The first Hague Peace Conference was not driven by the sudden conversion of Europe's rulers to pacifism, but by Russia's desire to escape the crushing burden of keeping up with the pace of armament in Western Europe, particularly Germany and England. Certain idealistic motives may also have played a role. At the end of the day, no progress was made on disarmament, but the Conference was not without important results: It produced a Convention for the Pacific Settlement of Disputes, which resulted in the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration; a second Convention on Laws and Customs of War on Land, now popularly known as "The Hague Convention," remains to this day one of the most important sources of humanitarian law. It also adopted "Declarations" to the effect that the throwing of projectiles from balloons and other aircraft and the use of asphyxiating gases and dum-dum bullets should be forbidden, the first because of the indiscriminate effect on civilians and the other two because of their inhumane nature. They expressed the wish that another conference be held to deal with the unfinished parts of the agenda.

Civil society played a considerable role both before and after the first conference. It helped to overcome the initial reluctance of most governments. Various peace societies kept up a drum roll of urgings and entreaties. In England alone, over 750 resolutions endorsing the conference were sent to the Foreign Office by peace societies, religious groups, town and county councils and, in some cases, simply "The People of Bedford" or "Public Meeting at Bath."

At the conference itself, the voice of the people was strong. Belgium weighed in with a 100,000-signature petition, only to be bested by the Netherlands with one bearing double that number. Andrew White, the chief American delegate, noted in his diary that he was inundated by people with "plans, schemes, nostrums, notions and whimsies of all sorts," but was forced to admit that they were evidence of a feeling "more earnest and widespread than anything I had dreamed."

Several weeks of conviviality in the auspicious atmosphere of the Huis ten Bosch also contributed to a gradual diminution of the skepticism with which most delegates had originally approached their task. As William Stead, the British peace campaigner, noted in his diary: "A month of amicable discussion of the gravest problems has worked the happiest change in the spirit of the Conference. The fact is that the intrinsic absurdity and unreason of the existing international anarchy are such that honest men cannot seriously consider them without the conviction growing that a little good faith and sincere effort are alone wanting for a great step toward a happier future."

It is a little known fact that the initiative for the Second Hague Peace Conference came from civil society in the US. In 1903, the Massachusetts legislature, prompted by a petition from the American Peace Society in Boston, passed a resolution requesting the Congress "to authorize the President of the United States to invite the governments of the world to join in establishing...a regular international congress to meet at stated periods to deliberate upon the various questions of common interest." The idea was taken up in St. Louis in 1904 by the Inter-parliamentary Union, which recommended a conference to deal with the subjects postponed at The Hague in 1899, the negotiation of a series of arbitration treaties among the various nations, and the consideration of plans for a series of congresses of the kind recommended by the Massachusetts legislature.

President Theodore Roosevelt responded to this invitation by calling for the Second Hague Peace Conference which met June 15, 1907, after being formally convened by the Czar. This time, it was the Russians who proposed an agenda limited to improvements in arbitration and humanitarian law, while the Americans suggested discussing the limitation of armaments and the use of force in the collection of debts. Disarmament again received short shrift, while some progress was made on the other agenda items.

Elihu Root, the American Secretary of State, who believed that successive failures were necessary to success, responded to the criticism of the disappointed peace activists: "The question about each international Conference is not merely what it has accomplished, but also what it has begun and what it has moved forward." He instructed the American delegate, Joseph Choate, to obtain a resolution calling for a third Conference to be held within another seven to eight years. The guns of August 1914 interfered with the implementation of this resolution.