Conclusion of Part III

Summary

After having evidenced the discrepancy between the past and modern discourse about the use of force, the third and final part of this book aimed at pin-pointing the nature, the apparition, and the raison d’être of the narrative of indifference in twentieth century international legal scholarship. It upheld the hypothesis according to which today’s commonly accepted history of the use of force finds its roots in the beliefs that underlie the identity of international law as a discipline confronted with the events of the World War I and immediate post-war. Guided by the work of Jan Assmann and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the demonstration was carried out in two main steps. The first, Chapter 8, wished to verify if and to what extent the narrative of indifference could, indeed, be considered to be an emanation of the discipline’s assumptions about itself and others. In this context, we saw that the common account of the history of the use of force in international law mimics, in several aspects, the discipline’s more general discourse about itself and about the power of international law to order international relations and bring progress to humanity. The purpose of Chapter 9 was, then, to interrogate the social function of the narrative of indifference and of the exaggerated contrast between pre- and post-war era that it upholds. It has been argued that this traditional account is linked to the events of the World War I, and that in at least two interconnected ways: (i) as a result of the negative experience caused by the outburst of the war and the concomitant need to salvage the little credibility international law had left by finding another culprit and (ii) as a result of the positive experience caused by the adoption of the Covenant of the League of Nations and the conviction that international law had finally been given the means of its ambitions.