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The Law of Military Occupation from the 1907 Hague Peace Conference to the Outbreak of World War II: Was Further Codification Unnecessary or Impossible?

World War I is commonly perceived as having had a profound impact on international law. Such a general perception, be it justified or not, might in any event prove erroneous when looking at specific areas of this law. A focus on the law governing military occupation reveals a notable absence of change over the course of the war and the subsequent interwar period. In search of possible reasons, this article first looks at various opportunities that emerged – but were not ultimately seized – to adapt treaty law in the period between the two world wars. It then assesses whether changes had in fact occurred through other channels such as customary international law or treaty interpretation. Based on the observation that no meaningful change intervened, can it be concluded that, on the whole, the Hague regulations on military occupation met stakeholders’ expectations and therefore were not altered? The author suggests, rather, that the equilibrium founded in The Hague in 1899 (and confirmed in 1907) on the lines of tension between the states involved remained operational throughout the period under scrutiny. * PhD candidate, Faculty of Law and Criminology, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels, Belgium. Email: Thomas.Graditzky@ulb.ac.be. This article builds on a paper presented at the workshop entitled International Law and the First World War: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, which took place at Jesus College, University of Oxford, on 25–26 September 2015. I am grateful to the organizers and participants in this workshop, to my colleagues from the ULB International Law Center and to the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article. The research underlying these results received financing from the Belgian Science Policy under the Interuniversity Attraction