Kelsen and Kunz had conceptualized international law as a substantively unrestricted means of guiding society on the world level, that is, as “universal law.” This reflected the high expectations that the cosmopolitan elites placed in the medium of international law during the interwar period. They believed that the phenomenon of European nationalism had driven the nations into the First World War. In the “new world order,” aggressive nationalism was to be countered by new institutions that secured the peace. From the perspective of the liberal modernization movement, the passionate forces of nationalism could be rationalized and defused only via the law of nations in international procedures and processes. That required new actors, who were to take their place beyond the sovereign nation state as the organs of universal law. The politically created new organs of the community of states were especially the League of Nations and the individual as a bearer of rights and obligations under international law.

This new way of looking at international law was intended to do justice to its growing importance as a pacifying medium in international relations. The political conflicts created by the territorial reorganization of Europe in the wake of the First World War were to be resolved through the new world organization and through international “legal experimentation,” such as novel treaties protecting minority rights or internationalized zones like the “Free City of Danzig.” In the eyes of the cosmopolitan scholars, the specter of nationalism had not yet been banished.