Top Highlights

• deteriorating economic environment by launching programs of internal self-strengthening and autarky. Rather than stopping this nationalist tide and the risk of war that it entailed, sanctions reinforced
• As early as 1920, the head of the League’s Information Section, the American journalist Arthur Sweetser, declared that “if it is charged that the League is powerless because of lack of actual military or naval forces, it may easily be retorted that it possesses against a Covenant-breaking state a force far more subtle and more powerful, the force o...
• The Italo-Ethiopian War is often interpreted as a defeat for internationalism at the hands of fascism and imperialism. But from a strategicmaterial perspective it is better seen as the moment when the first major use of economic pressure dramatically raised the stakes of using sanctions as a tool to maintain world order. The League sanctions were s...
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s On the Social Contract (1762) argued that “War then is not a relationship between one man and another, but a relationship between one State and another. . . . Any State can only have other States, and not men, as enemies.”32 In the Napoleonic era this view became the basis for the so-called Rousseau-Portalis Doctrine, which ...
• In the treaty ending that war, the Paris Declaration of 1856—the first multilateral treaty open to signature by any country—the maritime foundations of globalization acquired a further layer of protection through the creation of a category of “free goods” that were immune to seizure on the high seas.35