In Full Flower 337and killing the emperor himself. Th e most famous of these rescue missions
was the one mounted in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion in China, for the
benefi t of 3,200 people besieged in the foreign legation quarter of Peking.
(Some 76 of them died in the siege, with about 180 others being wounded.) An
unpre ce dented alliance of Eu ro pe an powers, joined by the United States and
Japan, formed a multinational force some 18,000 strong to rescue the legation
residents. Th e result was the defeat of the Boxer movement and the restora-
tion of eff ective power to the Chinese imperial dynasty— plus the imposition
of a $337 million indemnity onto China.
Backlash
It could not escape the attention of even the most casual observer that inter-
national law enforcement by way of armed reprisals was a prerogative exclu-
sively of major military powers, with poor and weak states almost invariably
on the receiving end. It was sometimes ominously diffi cult to distinguish
between bona fi de law enforcement and imperial swagger. London theater
audiences were given a vivid illustration of this in 1899, in George Bernard
Shaw’s play Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, a satirical portrayal of a res-
cue by British armed forces of captive Eu ro pe ans in Africa.
In a more sober vein, international lawyers in Western countries tended
to insist that the underlying legal principles were sound: that international
law imposed certain standards of conduct onto countries— and that those
standards could not be violated with impunity. Former American Secretary
of State Root, for example, stated in 1910, in a matter- of- fact tone, that it is
“an international custom” for powerful countries to intervene to protect
their nationals abroad, even though this necessarily involves “an impeach-
ment of the eff ective sovereignty” of the host country. Root did caution that
this customary right should not be lightly exercised. It should only be re-
sorted to if there are “unquestionable facts which leave no practical doubt of
the incapacity of the government of the country to perform its international
duty of protection.” But in the fi nal analysis, he insisted, the right to take
armed action on behalf of nationals abroad cannot be denied.
Th e question of entitlement to self- help remedies against misconduct was
closely allied to the issue— also highly controversial— of what substantive
standard of conduct foreigners were entitled to expect from host countries.