2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 187political approach.^350 What Berber intended in making this distinction (a
distinction which reflected, as Fassbender notes, the legal theorising of
Carl Schmitt and the conceptual preferences of the National Socialists
more generally), had been explained more fully by Berber in his 1934
book Security and Justice.^351 Therein, Berber rejected the approach to
international law that had emerged after 1920. He claimed that the post-
war approach to international law was characterised by ‘a “totalitarian”
view’: he contrasted ‘the “old” international law, satisfied with regulat-
ing, so to speak, minor affairs between nations with the “new” inter-
national law’ which attempted to ‘regulate the most central and highly
political relations between states’. In this connection, he dew a contrast
between the ‘purely static character of the French conception’ of interna-
tional law and a ‘dynamic’ conception. Berber thought that international
law had only a limited role to play in the field of international relations.
However, he also thought that to the extent that it did play a role, it
should be able to respond to an ever-shifting political reality: interna-
tional law should seek to ‘materialize justice,’ understood, first and fore-
most, as respect for ‘national honour’ and ‘full equality’ among states, ‘in
the concreteness of political reality.’^352
Wright well understood the intentions behind Berber’s distinction
between the abstract and the political method. He countered Berber’s
argument in regard to this distinction by insisting that if the conference
taking place were to ‘to make any contribution at all, it must make it
on the basis of general considerations.’ Attempts at reaching ‘solutions
on the exigencies of a particular moment or a particular area,’ Wright
(^350) International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw
Materials, Colonies, 476.
(^351) Fassbender notes that Carl Schmitt’s ‘koncrete Ordnungs-und Gestaltungs-denken
(“thinking in terms of concrete order and formation”)...declared rules to be secondary
to “concrete”, pre-existent reality.’ Fassbender, ‘Stories of War and Peace: On Writing the
History of International law in the “Third Reich” and After,’ 489–90. Fassbender observes
that Schmitt’s ‘construction fitted exceedingly well the National Socialist preference for the
“concrete” over the “abstract”, the “natural” over the “artificial”, the “organic” over the
“mechanical” and the “living” over the “rational”’ and that his ‘construction was also an
“open” concept which allowed one to understand and interpret the law in accordance with
changing (political) developments and guidelines’ (ibid., 490).
(^352) Joseph L. Kunz, review of Sicherheit und Gerechtigkeit. Eine gemeinverständliche
Einführung in die Hauptprobleme der Völkerrechtsspolitk, by Fritz Berber, American Journal
of International Law 29, no. 2 (1935): 350.