Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century by Benjamin Allen Coates (review)

Benjamin Allen Coates has written an important book. Coates has analyzed American foreign policy from the late nineteenth century to the Cold War in terms of the thinking and practice of key lawyers from within the eastern establishment and foreign policy elite. Among the leading figures upon whom Coates bases his study are Elihu Root, William Howard Taft, James Brown Scott, John Bassett Moore, Theodore S. Woolsey, and Robert Lansing. These lawyers were founders and leaders of organizations such as the American Society of International Law (1906), and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1910). Many also served in the United States government and specifically the Department of State. Coates sets out how legal thinkers, in and out of government, worked to promote and protect United States economic interests in the international sphere through law.

Coates sees the discussion about international law and American foreign policy moving through several time periods and sets of objectives. By the late nineteenth century, world cultures were perceived in hierarchical terms. Civilized cultures were those based on the rule of law — they generally accepted rules of procedure and evidence, the sanctity of contracts and treaties, the protection of property, and the acceptance of judicial decisions. Cultures that lacked these practices were regarded as barbaric or savage and needed western civilization to establish the rule of law to improve their quality of life. The moral correctness of western civilization and legalist aspirations were to be seen in the steady progress to reduce international conflict through arbitrations. International law became the mechanism, Coates argues, that facilitated imperialism by standardizing Eurocentric values, the rule of western style law, in the underdeveloped world. For the United States, he argues, the acquisition of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, hegemony in Cuba, and intervention in Panama were legally justified by these international lawyers because it brought order to these societies on western terms.

The calamitous First World War shattered confidence in the steady progress of western civilization and the capacity of international law to prevent or limit international conflict. Germany’s invasion of Belgium was in stark violation of its treaty commitment to guarantee Belgian neutrality. Thus the war generated a new vision embodied in President Woodrow Wilson’s non-legalist collective security notions to prevent conflict and establish stability through the League of Nations. (Wilson famously did not intend to have lawyers writing the peace treaty.) Could the League enforce international law by assuming the power to coerce sovereign states? This form of collective security presented the prospect of the enforcement of international law by overriding the fundamental principle of state sovereignty that had shaped international relations since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. This idea divided the legal community. The international lawyers argued over whether international law could reach beyond voluntary compliance and an accepted code of customary international law, or whether international law could be drafted and enforced through a superstate agency such as the League. Taft and Woolsey and a new generation of young lawyers supported enforcement and membership in the League. Root, Scott, and Moore did not, arguing that the actions of the League were essentially political, not legal. Coates offers a fresh view of the debate over United States membership in the League that goes beyond the rivalries of Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge and puts the argument in terms of whether the League was an instrument of international politics or international law. Although Elihu Root and modernists or utopians such as Charles Fenwick, Manley O. Hudson, and Quincy Wright, supported joining the Permanent Court of International Justice, this institution also appeared too political and too great a departure for classicists or realists such as Chandler P. Anderson, David Jayne Hill, and Philander Knox. Under James Brown Scott, the Carnegie Endowment never gave the Court its support.

In his concluding remarks Coates goes on to say that by the...