Abstract
International Law and Conciliarist Internationalism under Pressure: Political Profiles of the Carnegie Men framing the Carnegie Report on the Balkan Wars c. 1914 and Beyond
The Carnegie Report on the Balkan Wars could neither pacify the regional conflicts nor ban future ethnic violence. Yet it signifies a highly symptomatic moment in early 20th-century US Big Philanthropy. In order to assess its historical relevance, this article traces the report’s historical setting in contemporary US American political and legal debates from 1910 to the early 1920s. Two major features stand out: First, the report testifies to the contemporary programmatic creed and political leanings of its most renowned trustees – such as Elihu Root, James T. Shotwell, James Brown Scott and Nicholas Murray Butler – who envisioned an international world order based on increasingly professionalized international law. Most of them judicial experts, some of them staunch republican foreign policy elites, others more progressive intellectuals, they felt authorized to scientifically analyse and advise international diplomacy. Second, however, the Carnegie Men’s emphasis on law-based internationalism was no static endeavour. It rather succumbed to the turmoils of their time. Under the unfavourable auspices of World War I since 1914 and, even more so with the United States entering the war in 1917 and during the complicated peace negotiations in 1918/19, the philanthropic experiment of propagating a law-based vision of the world order was gradually transformed into a new version of conciliarist internationalism based on close cooperation with the new League of Nations in the early 1920s.