The 1949 Geneva Conventions Were A Real Battle
The 1949 Geneva Conventions Were A Real Battle
A review of Boyd van Dijk's new history
Preparing for War: The Making of the 1949 Geneva Conventions by Boyd van Dijk. Oxford University Press, 2022. 376 pages.
Dispelling what he calls the “foundation myth” that the atrocities of the Second World War motivated the postwar powers to a rare show of unity in 1949, Boyd van Dijk argues that the Third Geneva Convention was in fact a fraught process of disagreement and furious debate between countries trying to shape the laws of future wars to their own liking.
“The drafting process resembled less an ivory tower, in which blueprints are conceived in splendid isolation, than a political arena, in which actors contemplate and struggle over different proposals and the stakes are often impossibly high,” van Dijk writes.
Rather than a moment of international solidarity, the negotiations were “a series of political struggles among the drafters, many of whom were not liberals and whose ideas changed radically over time.” In order to magnify their achievement, after the Conventions were signed, the Swiss diplomatic corps created a “powerful memory regime” framing the process as a harmonious affair.
Yet from the beginning, leftists and pacifists have criticized the Geneva Conventions for not going far enough to protect civilians. Common Article 3 has been called “a major breakthrough, a disappointment — or even both” for its inconsistencies. Weaponized hunger, city bombing, and atomic warfare were all left out of the 1949 Convention. The full rights of prisoners of war were not extended to insurgents.
World powers were all happy to negotiate new laws of war to protect civilians for the first time in history, but not at the expense of their own ability to win the wars they expected to wage. The Cold War and decolonization politics were the barrier to better compromise.
The Soviets wanted to extend law of war protection to their own resistance fighters, and to the communist insurgents they expected to rise up all across the capitalist west some day. Britain, the Netherlands, and France wanted a free hand in their own Southeast Asian colonies, as well as protection for their own civilians living in them. The United States wanted to protect downed bomber crews from summary execution. Everyone had the next war in mind.
“In many different ways, they tried to define the contours of future battlefields by deciding who deserved protection, what counted as a legitimate target, whose lives mattered, whose did not, and who had the right to enforce them,” writes van Dijk. The results were “hybrid constructs, shaped by different drafters with contrasting political aims.” This process was so difficult that the final version could only be approved by secret ballot.
However, the Third Geneva Convention did manage to ban collective penalties and hostage taking in reprisal for guerilla activity, finally ending a European legal debate that had begun with the 1871 Franco-Prussian War and continued through two world wars.
World War II had seen the normal ratio of dead soldier to dead civilian flip, so that societies generally suffered more than their armies. Brutal suppression of resistance movements was one factor in the change. As van Dijk demonstrates, however, these wartime death tolls were not what brought the parties together in Geneva. Common Article 3 was in fact the culmination of decades of work by legal theorists responding to the challenges of the wars in their time.
Van Dijk leans to the political left in his analysis. He is especially keen to emphasize the role of Stalin’s diplomats in making the Conventions happen at all just by showing up, and to be fair, he does have a point here. Swiss diplomat Claude Pilloud said afterwards that he “hardly dared to think what would have become of the Civilian Convention without the [Soviet] presence.”
Yet the Soviet push for a ban on atomic bombings of cities looks a bit less magnanimous when we recall, as van Dijk fails to do, that the Soviets tested their own atomic bomb just ten days after signing the Conventions. Nor was their presence always a positive influence, as van Dijk admits. He takes his title from the Soviet accusation that western powers were “preparing for war” in their negotiations. That may have been true, but it was also true of the Soviets themselves.
Even the International Committee of the Red Cross deserves clear-eyed examination. The Third Geneva Convention happened in the first place because the ICRC keenly felt its own humanitarian failures, such as Soviet criticism of the organization’s silence about German mistreatment of POWs, and feared becoming irrelevant. As van Dijk notes, the ICRC was as concerned for its own agenda as any power involved in the negotiations.
Written for a college freshman, this book is a valuable addition to 20th Century diplomatic and military historiography of the most important international treaty of the modern world.