CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

As Gross’s title suggests, this order was to survive, virtually unchallenged until the
Twentieth Century, and it is an order that still has a significant hold on our thinking.
So just war doctrine evolved from a vindication of war concerned, essentially, with an
individual’s moral conscience, to one predominantly founded on the rights of states.
Just cause and right intention are then interpreted in terms of, indeed become almost
entirely associated with, the vindication of states’ rights. The weakness of this order is
that in the absence of any mechanism for enforcing the peaceful resolution of disputes,
self-help is the only way in which states can effectively enforce their rights, and that
route is open to states in proportion with their power. Furthermore, as Skubiszewski
points out, 156 in the period between the Peace of Westphalia and the signing of the
Kellog-Briand Pact, whenever force could be used to preserve, protect and vindicate
rights, it was also invariably used to extend those rights; thus the totality of rights
enjoyed by any individual state was relatively insecure.
1.2.4 Establishing the Legalist Paradigm: From The League of Nations and the
Pact of Paris to the UN Charter Era
Whatever the insecurity of states’ rights throughout this period, the paradigm survived
for more than 250 years. It took the wholesale devastation of the First World War,
together with the influential liberalism of Woodrow Wilson to convince states that
something else was needed, and the ill-fated League of Nations was born. However, the
Covenant of the League was largely about mechanisms to prevent war – particularly the
‘accidental’ slide into war that was seen to be characteristic of the First World War; it
was not conceived as a restraint on states’ sovereign rights. There had been earlier
treaties restricting the issues over which states might go to war. The Hague Protocol of
1907, for example, prohibited parties from waging war in order to recover contract
debt. 157 However, the Covenant of the League marked a sea change. It required that its
members should refer disputes to arbitration, judicial review, or inquiry by the Council
of the League. Once an arbitral or judicial decision had been passed down, or the
Council inquiry reported, the disputants were prohibited from going to war for a further
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