Grotius and the Precedent

1625

Hugo Grotius, jurist of the law of nations, painted in his French exile. Place: Paris (exile), and the chanceries of Münster and Osnabrück Figures: Hugo Grotius (Huig de Groot), Dutch Remonstrant (Arminian) jurist in French exile · the negotiators of Münster and Osnabrück, Catholic and Protestant, reading his treatise in common A Book Written in Exile Hugo Grotius escapes from Loevestein Castle in 1621, smuggled out in a book chest after being sentenced to life imprisonment in the Dutch confessional struggles of the Remonstrant crisis. He settles in Paris under a small French pension. There, in 1625, he publishes De Jure Belli ac Pacis, On the Law of War and Peace, three books in Latin dedicated to Louis XIII. He has already written, in his twenties, Mare Liberum (1609), the brief defending Dutch navigation of the open seas that founds the modern law of international waters. The treatise's premise is that there exists a law binding sovereigns toward one another that derives neither from the Pope nor from the Emperor but from natural reason. Even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, this law would still hold. The argument is offered first as philosophy, then as a practical handbook for diplomats who can no longer agree on a common religious authority. The Thirty Years' War, well underway when the book appears, is precisely the kind of confessional war it is designed to make obsolete. The Treaty as the Book Enacted The negotiators who gather at Münster and Osnabrück from 1643 onward read Grotius. Catholic and Protestant delegations cite him in common, because his arguments do not depend on a shared confession. The principles he names, sovereign equality, the binding force of treaties (pacta sunt servanda), the distinction between just and unjust war, the personality of states under a law of nations, are the principles the treaty drafters operationalize. Grotius dies at Rostock in August 1645, three years before the settlement is signed. He does not see the peace his book made thinkable. The Peace of Westphalia (see [[peace-of-westphalia-1648]]) is, in part, De Jure Belli ac Pacis turned into a treaty: a system of sovereign states regulated by mutual law, with religion expelled from the law's foundation. The discipline that grows from his book, taught for three centuries as the law of nations and now as public international law, supplies the language in which Westphalian sovereignty has been argued, defended, and challenged from 1648 to the present.