Introduction

The immediate effects of the San Francisco conference in 1945 had made themselves felt, it seemed, in the culmination of the impulses found in the nineteenth century, away from exclusion on the basis of ideology or civilisation or, even, ‘democracy’, away from the idea of state crime and away from using intervention as a means of creating homogeneity among states. The United Nations Charter and the International Military Tribunal Charter together were suggestive of a world in which states of different character would be equal, intervention to promote particular versions of the good life would be illegal, and enemy states would be rehabilitated through selective criminal trial rather than subject to mass punishment through ‘reparations’.

In 1815, the Prussian press had demanded that: ‘We outlaw the French people’ but what prevailed was a sober British preference for re-engaging with a defeated enemy after selective purging. When the Holy Alliance demanded a right to intervene to prevent the fomentation and spread of revolutionary liberalism, the Western powers made their lack of enthusiasm very clear and the right came to nought. And, most importantly, the tendency to distinguish a civilised, and predominantly European, core from a non-Western fringe was slowly reversed as the nineteenth century played itself out. The overall effect was to buttress the idea of sovereign equality and pluralism. San Francisco and Nuremberg seemed, then, simply to continue these egalitarian trends in relations among states.