Judging the World: International Courts and the Origins of Global Governance, 1899-1971

Abstract

Today, international courts are everywhere. There are hundreds of them, located on every inhabited continent. Together, they have delivered tens of thousands of decisions. International courts do everything from prosecuting individuals for war crimes to acting as supreme courts for supranational organizations to arbitrating disputes involving multinational corporations. And yet these courts are often dismissed as ineffectual. States frequently ignore their decisions. Courts struggle to enforce them. Few people even know they exist. International courts, then, are everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

This study uncovers a period in the twentieth century when international courts were at the center of global governance. As ideas, international courts dominated plans to establish a world organization. Proposals for a League of Nations, for instance, began as an international court. Similarly, during the Second World War, blueprints for an international court preceded what became the United Nations. Before there were world “parliaments” like the League and UN, there were world courts.

Meanwhile, as institutions, international courts regulated world politics. In total, three international courts were established between 1899 and 1971. Almost every polity joined these courts: from the smallest of states to the largest of empires, including the British Empire, the United States, and Russia and the Soviet Union. Leading political figures became judges on them: heads of state, prime ministers, and supreme court judges, including a U.S. president. And these courts were involved in some of the most important international conflicts of the twentieth century: from the Boer War to the First World War; from the Russian Revolution to the Anschluss; and from Indian independence to the decolonization of Africa. For much of the twentieth century, then, international courts judged the world.

Combining legal, diplomatic, and intellectual history, “Judging the World” offers both a new way of understanding the history of global governance and a new conception of the role of international courts in the present.