The year 1792 marks the beginning of the long European struggle which started as the French Revolution and culminated in the Napoleonic Wars. The first notice that a state of war existed reached the Government of the United States August 2, 1792, when the French Minister at Philadelphia, M. Jean Temant, informed Thomas Jefferson, the American Secretary of State, that the French Government had declared war against Hungary and Bohemia. The Secretary of State, in reply to this notice, assured the French Minister that the United States would remain friendly to France “and render all those good offices which shall be consistent with the duties of a neutral nation.” This expression of Mr. Jefferson seems to be the only direct acknowledgement by President Washington or his Cabinet that the United States had been placed in the position of a neutral state.

Recent tendencies toward the reduction of diplomatic privileges and immunities have been justified by the decreasing importance of the causes which have contributed to their establishment in their present exaggerated extent. The traditional distrust of diplomatic missions as instruments of espionage and intrigue has all but vanished, and has been supplanted by an appreciation of their functions as agencies for facilitating the pacific intercourse of states. The scrupulousness with which the diplomatic character is now respected and the growing security of the legal order in most states make possible a reduction of diplomatic prerogatives without jeopardizing the successful and independent fulfillment of the mission which it is their purpose to secure. The widest pretensions to exemption from the authority of the receiving state were advanced at precisely those times in which diplomats were in practice subjected to the greatest amount of interference and control. Doctrines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, inspired by a reaction against contemporary conditions, have been incorporated into the customary law, which has lost its raison d'Ure to the extent that the historical factors which influenced its growth are no longer operative. The need of the envoy for independence exists today no less than formerly, but it no longer requires, as a condition of its guarantee, that complete immunity from the law and jurisdiction of the receiving state which has found a figurative expression in the fiction of exterritoriality. As a subject involving few of the political factors which have thus far proved to be insurmountable obstacles in the way of codification, the law of diplomatic privileges and immunities is eminently suited for restatement and amendment in the form of a general convention. Such a restatement, if it is not to be retrogressive, must be based upon the conception that the receiving state has rights, and the sending state duties, which are correlative to the obligations of the state of residence and the rights of the appointing state, alone emphasized in the existing law.

During the early years of independence there existed in America two schools of political thinking. The one, of which Alexander Hamilton was the great exponent, emphasized the rights of government as against those of the individual, while the other, which found its leader in Thomas Jefferson, stressed the rights of the individual as against those of government.

In the judgment Pringle v. Ireland, the full Court of Justice of the European Union (Court or ECJ) upheld the validity of the decision of the European Council enabling the simplified amendment of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union(TFEU). In its Decision 2011/199/EU, the Council had provided for the establishment of a permanent European Stability Mechanism (ESM) by those member states of the European Union (Union or EU) that had adopted the euroas their common currency and legal tender. The Court also found in this judgment that those member states had not violated EU law by negotiating and concluding the Treaty Establishing the European Stability Mechanism (ESM Treaty). The Court based the latter finding on the long-awaited clarification of the scope and content of the TFEU’s “no-bailout clause” (Art. 125(1)), which had been the subject of intense controversies among legal scholars, in particular in Germany.

Through the Hague convention of 1899, for the first time by a general treaty, nations in effect agreed that under certain circumstances, at least, they were morally bound, as were ordinary corporations or mere private individuals, to submit the merits of their disputes to impartial examination. The old doctrine that the king, as the representative of Deity, could do no wrong and the newer fiction that national governments were sovereign—beyond the ordinary gauges of right and wrong—and were their own courts of last resort upon the rightfulness of their actions toward other governments, subject only to the arbitrament of war, were measurably impaired, the signatory nations admitting fallibility and agreeing that, composed as they were of an aggregate of individuals, like their component parts they might err, and that the question as to whether they had erred or not could fairly be determined by other human beings, perhaps no wiser, but certainly more impartial than themselves.

When one state takes the place of another and undertakes a permanent exercise of its sovereign territorial rights or powers, there is said to be a succession of states. This succession may be called universal in case of total absorption, whether through voluntary agreement, forcible annexation or subjugation, the division of a state into several international persons, or the union of several states into a single international person. Universal succession may also be said to exist where a state is broken up and divided among several previously existing states, as in the case of the division of Poland between Kussia, Prussia, and Austria.