Emil Perels’s German-language study examines the dismantling of wartime restrictions on enemy private rights through peace treaties. Published in 1919, it retains a wartime perspective shaped by the eastern peace settlements and expectations favorable to the Central Powers. Its argument moves from a critique of economic warfare to the treaties with Russia and Ukraine, then to proposals for restoring legal and commercial relations with the Western powers.
Perels distinguishes restrictions on trade and payments, which can support blockade, from interventions against private property and contractual rights. He questions the latter’s military effectiveness:
Als taugliche Kriegsmittel können die Sequestrationen, Liquidationen, Konfiskationen, die Aufhebung von Verträgen und andere Rechtsminderungen und -Zerstörungen gewiß nicht betrachtet werden.
English translation: Sequestrations, liquidations, confiscations, the annulment of contracts, and other diminutions and destructions of rights can certainly not be regarded as suitable instruments of war.
Such measures harm individuals without necessarily weakening an enemy’s economy. They also provoke retaliation and damage the confidence needed for renewed international investment. His objection is both strategic and reconstructive: restrictions on private rights are doubtful weapons and obstacles to postwar commerce. German policy receives no exemption:
Daß die deutsche Vergeltungspolitik den feindlichen Maßnahmen Einhalt geboten hätte, läßt sich kaum behaupten.
English translation: That the German policy of retaliation had put a stop to the enemy measures can hardly be maintained.
The eastern settlements supply his principal legal model. Their supplementary agreements define the exceptional regime through discriminatory treatment arising from belligerency:
In den Zusatzverträgen ist das Kampfrecht als die »Bestimmungen, wonach mit Rücksicht auf den Kriegszustand die Angehörigen des anderen Teiles in Ansehung ihrer Privatrechte irgendwelcher besonderen Regelung unterliegen« definiert.
English translation: In the supplementary treaties the law of economic warfare (Kampfrecht) is defined as the "provisions under which, in view of the state of war, the nationals of the other party are subject to some special regulation with respect to their private rights."
This definition directs attention toward repealing exceptional rules, restoring property, and compensating direct infringements of private rights. Perels values the treaties’ reciprocal structure while recognizing the Central Powers’ advantageous negotiating position. He also identifies a tension between the Russian and Ukrainian negotiators’ political commitments and their accommodation of foreign private rights. Extending these arrangements westward nevertheless requires economic and political judgment, not merely the reproduction of treaty formulas.
His practical discussion addresses repeal, compensation, contracts, monetary claims, debt security, and international arbitration. Immediate repeal might sacrifice negotiating leverage; he therefore favors reciprocal, staged releases of property. His rejection of economic warfare thus coexists with temporarily retaining restrictions to secure mutual restoration.
Compensation requires distinctions among discriminatory interference, military damage, and generally applicable revolutionary expropriation. The eastern settlements compensate direct infringements while excluding losses from trade and payment prohibitions and broadly waiving claims arising from military operations. Perels recognizes the distributional implications of these exclusions, particularly for powers occupying enemy territory. He favors mixed settlement commissions, commercial expertise, and claimant participation over procedures likely to provoke suspicion of national partiality.
Contractual restoration cannot mean mechanically enforcing every prewar obligation. Perels accepts relief where performance has become economically impossible but opposes unilateral cancellation privileging domestic nationals. International cancellation rules or a shared definition of economic impossibility would reduce conflicting national judgments. Interests nevertheless diverge: importers may wish to preserve low-priced supply contracts, whereas exporters may be unable to deliver at prewar prices.
Monetary obligations raise related problems of exchange rates, interest, and scarce foreign currency. Repayment competes with financing essential imports. Perels considers extended payment periods and compromise exchange rates, warning that rigid formulas can distribute benefits unequally or encourage speculation. Centralized foreign-exchange management and long-term borrowing may better support recovery. He rejects blanket public guarantees of private foreign claims and collective pledges of enemy assets, which risk reciprocal liabilities and prolong wartime restraints.
Temporary international tribunals complete this reconstruction program. Commercial participation, neutral chairmanship, flexible procedure, equitable decisions, and reciprocal enforcement would facilitate settlement of war-related private disputes. An international private-law office would support cooperation without a cumbersome appellate hierarchy. Legal restoration consequently appears as an institutional and economic transition, not simply the repeal of exceptional legislation. Although shaped by Central Power interests, Perels’s proposals reveal the limits of retaliatory economic warfare and of automatic restoration of the prewar legal order.
This work was divided into 7 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 7 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian