5 - The Codification Projects: Stalemate

Summary

It was in the context of codification that struggle over the internationalisation of protection against rebels played out in its most explicit confrontation, culminating in the League of Nations’ Codification Conference held at The Hague in 1930. If the rules coming out of the arbitral practice rested on shaky and contested authority, and were inextricably tied up with practices of intervention, formal multilateral codification offered Latin American international lawyers a means to set clear and mutually agreed standards that would restrict occasions for intervention. At the same time, Anglo-American international lawyers sought to codify responsibility on their own terms. This was codification as the technical practice of elite lawyers, simply a continuation of arbitration and scholarship – a surreptitious means to universalise US ways of doing things. The attempt to reconcile the two contrasting approaches to codification and responsibility ended in stalemate at The Hague.