ロバート・セシル卿の国際平和機構観

―国家主権・世論・平和的変革―

抄録

This article examines Lord Robert Cecil’s views on the League of Nations, with a focus on his thinking about state sovereignty, international public opinion and ‘peaceful change’, an idea devised during the interwar period to provide elasticity to the practice of collective security. Along with President Wilson, Cecil played a key role in the drafting of the Covenant of the League in his capacity as one of the British representatives on the League of Nations Commission set up as part of the Paris Peace Conference. The present article shows how and to what extent the League’s structures and powers were informed by Cecil’s thinking about the role of international organisations designed for the maintenance of international peace. In particular, it takes a close look at Cecil’s attempt to codify the idea of peaceful change in the Covenant, for it not only shaped the League and its Covenant, but also informed and set the stage for the ‘First Great Debate’ in IR.

The first section traces how Cecil came to be involved in the establishment of the League during and in the wake of the First World War. The second section then moves on to examine Cecil’s conception of the League in relation to state sovereignty, showing that he did not think of the League as constituting interference with the principle of state sovereignty, and explaining how the Covenant ensured that the sovereignty of the League membership would not be curtailed by the proper working of the League. The third section considers why Cecil held that the League, based on the principle of state sovereignty, could still effectively guide the behaviour of sovereign states in practice, focusing on the expectations he put on the role international public opinion could play as an agency of law enforcement. Cecil’s thinking about the League was based on the assumption, true or false, that the negative impacts that state sovereignty might have on the working of the League could be alleviated by the agency of international public opinion. The fourth section shows that the same assumption ran through his thinking on peaceful revision or what later came to be called ‘peaceful change’. The section traces the process by which this idea was codified in the Covenant through Cecil’s effort, and demonstrates that the effectiveness of the League’s machinery for peaceful change also heavily depended on the agency of international public opinion. The final section discusses how the First Great Debate sprang from the problems posed by the weakness of the League’s machinery for peaceful change and by Cecil’s views underpinning it, establishing that Cecil’s views on peaceful change are of importance in understanding the development of early IR theory.