Otfried Nippold was born in Wiesbaden, Germany in 1864. He studied law at the University of Bern, University of Halle, University of Tübingen before earning his doctorate at the University of Jena in 1886. This extract from Martti Koskenniemi , The Gentle Civilizer of Nations discusses Nippold and his contribution to the understanding of the political reality:
Should lawyers examine political reality by reference to how some people (or States) wanted that reality to be – or should they assess the normative nature of State policies by reference to what worked in practice?
This difficulty may be illustrated by reference to the 1894 study of treaties by the Swiss liberal internationalist Otfried Nippold (1864-1938). He observed that in international relations power seemed to go before the law and that this had been nowhere more visible than in European behavior in the colonies. Treaties that were cited as proof of the beneficial expansion of international law had been imposed by brutal force on peaceful communities. Rejecting Weltstaatlich utopias as imperialism in disguise he emphasized the centrality of treaties in a strictly consensual legal system: “Mes positive Volkerrecht ist auf den Willen der Staaten zuruckufuhren .The problem lay not in excess voluntarism but in the law’s insufficient regard to the actual wishes of communities. Prevailing doctrines refrained from concluding that imposed treaties – including peace treaties – were invalid. They were enchanted by effective power in contradiction with their professed voluntarism. A treaty imposed by force (whether or not a peace treaty) was not voluntarily concluded and cannot be rationalized as binding under a system of co-coordinative wills.
For Nippold, it was clear that treaties were the most important source of international law Like other liberals, he imagined State will as the rational will to participate in increasing co-operation and even in the harmonization of domestic laws. A natural Annaherung and Ausgleichunp were slowly leading to something like a world State. Despite his sociological language, however, Nippold saw most progress in international law as a result of the work of Wissenshaft. He proposed the establishment of an international organization of jurists with a much larger membership than that of the Institut as well as the setting up of an international training school for international lawyers – a proposal that culminated in the establishment of the Hague Academy of International Law in 1913. His work did not contain a serious effort to analyze the social forces that would determine the direction of future integration. It was an armchair sociology he espoused, built on the assumption that States would – when gently guided by men of science – come to understand where their real interests lay, and agree on a world federation. Here was its weakness: irrespective of its sociological language, Nippold’s view emerged from a Kantian rationalism that defined internationalism as rational – and thereby undermined his criticism of the present system of imperial power. For to distinguish between beneficial internationalism and malignant imperialism one needed to have substantive criteria; in the absence of a material theory of progress, Nippold could do this only by falling back on his liberal intuitions.