Peace Conferences and the Century Of Total War: The 1899 Hague Conference and What Came After

The Hague Peace Conference of 1899 was unprecedented and momentous. Pressed by public concern about the arms race and its costs, the governments of all great and most lesser powers, suppressing their doubts about the possibility of achieving anything, convened in May 1899 to discuss the Tsar's draft proposals for general measures of disarmament and pacification. Although there was too much mutual suspicion for any progress with disarmament, the Conference opened up a new era in international relations: its multilateral treaty to encourage arbitration and its establishment of a permanent court to facilitate this may be seen as the germ of the International Court of Justice; and within a batch of measures designed to modernize the laws of war, the Hague Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, recapitulated at the second such conference in 1907, became the basis of our century's laws of war. Apart from those achievements, given the grand aims of the Conference and the public interest it generated, it can be seen as a prototype of all League of Nations and United Nations gatherings ever since.