Traditional Neutrality Revisited

This volume explores the extent to which frameworks of tradional neutrality might remain useful in modern contexts of peace and war, notwithstanding the technical prohibition of war in the Charter of the United Nations. Traditional neutrality constituted a system through which non-belligerent states could remain at peace with warring states, and thereby avoid attack and continue peacetime trading relations. The essays here collected deal with the rules of neutrality as they had developed and operated generally by the outbreak of World War 1, those variations in and alternatives to traditional neutrality which arose in the aftermath of World War 1, and particular aspects of the legacy of neutrality which continue to survive in the post-1945 era. It is argued that the operable rules of traditional neutrality foundered in the face of industrialized warfare, but that the retreat from the 'logic' of neutrality in the modern era has been premature.