The Peace Palace

When I was at Den Haag I visited the Peace Palace.  The Peace Palace is the site of the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration.  The International Criminal Court (where war crimes trials, such as that for Saddam Hussein, are held) is in a different building a few miles away.

This is a Wikipedia photo of the Biltmore Estate. 

The building reminded me a lot of the Biltmore Estate so when I got back, I looked it up, and they don't look all that much alike, really.  I finally decided that the similarity is because of the silhouette and all of the little window turrets all over it.  There are, however, similarities in the period in which it was constructed and in who commissioned it.

The Peace Palace was funded and built by Andrew Carnegie who was interested, at the beginning of the 20th century, in promoting international peace.  In a little historical irony, once the construction was completed, the importation of the furniture and all of the ceremonial gifts from different nations was disrupted by the beginning of World War I.

You are only able to see the Peace Palace with a reservation and a guided tour and even then you don't get to see the gardens, which are supposed to be quite beautiful, although I suppose that it doesn't make that much of a difference in January.  Security is really tight.  You have to go through a metal detector and your bag has to go through a scanner.  I waited (in what turned out to be the wrong line) to get in.  There were a whole bunch of extremely plummy English lawyers talking about the differences between Dutch lawyers and English lawyers and the incompetencies and abilities of their superiors.  It was pretty entertaining.  Then, when I got to the front of the line they said that I needed to wait and then they would make a new, special line later, for the tour.  The Palace was pretty busy as, besides the court cases that are going on, they have lots of conferences and legal courses going on.

The exterior grounds of the Palace are decorated in "Peace" themes.  There were a few benches with mosaic peace themes.

 






There is also a world peace rock garden surrounding the world peace flame.  Each of the rocks in the boarder around the circle were the gifts of different nations, presumably with rocks which are significant nationally.  


Some of the nations had really pretty agate-type rocks and marble type rocks.  They were really nice.


The U.S.  did not.  That long, rectangular, boring, inconspicuous rock is the U.S. representative.  I thought perhaps that someone had taken the U.S. rock or it had come out but I looked at it, and that is what it is supposed to look like.  I thought that it was quite disappointing.  

There were also inscriptions along all of the borders of all of the names of the nations that had signed on to a certain international peace accord.


And they had a giant plaque which you could use to find the stone of a particular nation and which explained that the flame of peace has been drug around the world to be set at different peace negotiations.


You weren't allowed to take pictures on the Palace grounds or inside the Palace, which is a shame because it was pretty beautiful.  We did have a pretty good tour guide who gave us a lot of information on the history of the Palace and on what goes on there.  There are art pieces all over the Palace which were donated by different nations.  If you click here you will go to the English language site of the Peace Palace.  You can see about the history of the building, its purpose , and other general information.  If you click on the "Pictures" tab on the left, you will go to a gallery of the Palace.  The Dutch version of the website, which you can find here, has a lot more pictures than the English site.  If you click on the links under the "Gebow" (Building) label, you will see lots of pictures of the interior.

One of the things which the U.S. sent is the ceiling of the Smaller Court of Arbitration (you can see the picture here).  I forget what wood was used but it is made in 8 layers with a dovetail design which uses the weight of the ceiling itself to hold it together.  It contains no glue, pegs, or nails.  Which, when you look up at it, is kind of nerve racking.  But it hasn't fallen in in 80 some years, so I guess that it is pretty safe.

The interior--stairs, walls, floors, pillars--is designed with 127 different types of marble from all over the world, although they were all donated by Italy.  It is amazing the variety in colors and designs in the natural marble and it makes a pretty striking layout.  If you click on this you can see the entry hall.  All of the designs on the floor are made with various sizes and shapes of different kinds of marble and it is really beautiful.  If you notice the stairs, they are modeled on some famous stairs somewhere else, but on a smaller scale.  To make the stairs look right, on the smaller scale, they are made in gradations.  The lowest stair is convex and the top stair is concave and the stairs in between gradually change their shapes to make the stairs look longer, deeper, and wider than they really are.  It is really interesting and, despite what you might fear, it doesn't seem to make the stairs dangerous.  If you click here, you can see some of the pillars.  The large "Russian Vase", which you can see here, is made out of jasper, which looks kind of like a dark green, veined marble.  I guess that I had never really seen jasper before but, having seen it now, I could see where a vision of a city walled in jasper, clear as crystal would be a pretty affecting sight.

When we were in the Court of International Justice, the guide mentioned that this was where states (as in, nation-states) could sue one another over treaty violations and international wrongs as a means of limiting the need for war-like disputes over those kinds of things.  That is where things went bad:

"So", said one guy, "this is where you could sue the U.S. over Iraq?"
"Well, " said the guide,
"Yeah," said a lady, "that would be great.  Somebody should do that."
"Yeah," said a British lady (oh, the irony), "why hasn't anyone done that?"
"Well," said the guide, "most of the cases that come here are for treaty violations, and that isn't really the issue in the Iraq case, probably."
"But you could do it, couldn't you?" said the first guy.
"Well, yes" said the guide.

Then one of the Chinese tourists asked a question about something else.

"Why haven't they then?" asked the first guy.
"Well, the U.S. has a permanent member on the court, so they can veto the acceptance of the case."  Said the guide.
"So they can block getting sued?!!" said the guy "That is so stupid."
"Yeah," said the British lady, "that is soooo stupid!"
"Why would they ever let the U.S. have a permanent member? Ugh, that is terrible."
"Can't we just get rid of them and kick them off."
"Oh, it makes me so mad."

It continued pretty much like that until the guide made everybody leave the room and started talking about the stained glass windows and the poor Chinese tourist never got his question answered.

I think the take away from this story is that, whatever the news media seems to think, everyone else in the world would be just as happy if the U.S. adopted a Ron Paul foreign policy.  (Or else they were just a bunch of grumpy folks who were unhappy with the U.S., but I think that it still works.)