Building (of) the international community: a history of the Peace Palace through transnational gifts and local bureaucracy

Abstract

The Peace Palace in The Hague is more than a mere venue where international law is practiced. Initiated after the 1899 Peace Conference it provided a material home for the emergent international community and as such, we argue, helped to sing this community into existence. This article traces the process of materialising the grand international ideal of ‘peace through justice’ by shedding light on its bureaucratic backstage of transnational diplomacy. Taking a ritual perspective on gift-giving as a way to constitute relationships, we analyse how three sets of gifts were crucial to (the) building (of) the emergent international community: finding a proper site (as a gift from the Dutch government), securing Andrew Carnegie’s financial gift, and collecting materials and artworks donated by the States as gifts to the Palace. We examine how each of these arrangements involved a complex web of public and private transnational actors, temporalities, and bickering over nitty gritty details as the conditions of possibility for giving and receiving gifts, and constituting the international community.