The Reformations and the Emergence of International Law: England and France in Confessional Europe.

In the wake of the reformations, the rules and norms of the Christian Republic which had governed both polities and rulers, could no longer function. The sanction provided by canon law could no longer fulfil the function it had fulfilled, as the law was no longer applicable to all European sovereigns. In light of this, new arrangements for entering into agreements and securing these had to be made, and the obstacles which a confessionalized Europe posed to the traditional workings of agreements between polities had to be overcome. Through an examination of the relationship between Catholic France and Protestant England from the Reformation of the 1530s until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the paper will argue that the practice of states was as crucial to overcoming these obstacles as new developments in international law. If the adherence to promises could no longer be sanctioned by international law, how could one secure the adherence of states to their promises? Rather than seeing the emergence of international law as drive forward by legal scholars and political thinkers in early modern Europe, the paper suggests that the practice of states might very well have contributed to establishing the institution of international law. The empirical basis of the paper will be the legal treaties and agreements entered into by France and England in the period. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]