"To Internationalize International Law": American Philanthropic Initiatives and Transatlantic Legal Thought, 1906–21

From the late nineteenth century to World War I, a transatlantic community of international lawyers collaborated in an attempt to forge an international society, based on law. The profession of international law developed distinct national formations, reflecting divergent intellectual traditions and geopolitical contexts. Nonetheless, international lawyers considered their work part of the same global, civilizing project.

The 1910 founding of the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace (CEIP), in Washington, D.C., changed the tenor of the transatlantic relationship. Previously, U.S. international lawyers had looked to Europe—the birthplace of the discipline—for direction and inspiration. But now, the CEIP’s immense resources transferred the initiative across the Atlantic. Along with hefty subventions to European professional societies, Americans hoped, came the power to alter the direction and values of the global advocacy of international law.

Existing histories of international law downplay U.S. academic contributions before World War I. By illuminating the work of the CEIP and James Brown Scott, the director of its Division of International Law, this paper reshapes this narrative. It also permits an analysis of the possibilities and limits of transnational cooperation. Scott aimed to “internationalize international law,” as he put it. Resolving global problems required the amalgamation of diverse national traditions into one truly “international” code. Yet nationalist assumptions remained: the CEIP, for instance, sought to base a “new” code of international law on American models. The subsequent conflict over this attempt to recast international law in the American image illuminates what historian Ian Tyrrell has referred to as “the complex dialectic between exceptionalism and internationalism.” It further suggests the challenges that the asymmetric distribution of resources and the strength of national identity—even among internationalists—posed to international civil society.