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Comment by drglitch | Hacker News Reader

As a bit of an aside, it is surprising how concise and to-the-point each of the articles (points) are. Compared to contracts written in modern legalese or your typical website TOS this looks almost "dumbed down" and yet it was one of the most important documents of 20th century. Perhaps we're overcomplicating things a bit today?

(ps: native Russian speaker here, but the German version looks similar.)

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TOS are written for lawyers and courts. For bilateral contracts like this there's no overarching law and legal authority, so they're more like a protocol of a verbal contract.

When you read books about arms control between equal parties, they really drive in this point.

The lack of a binding authority means what you're really doing is communicating and clarifying your intentions. Knowing full well that either party could unilaterally chose to breach the terms.

One of the reasons that bilateral arms control agreements usually include a breach clause. "If you do X, we will do Y." Where Y is calculated to make X less advantageous.

I'd like to read more about arms control negotiation, do you have a book suggestion?

Contract law and international arbitration do exist though. The ultimate inability to enforce seems like it is a separate issue and not limited to bilateral contracts - nation states are more powerful than international courts in many cases.

Particularly at that time, there were no international courts that I know of who would have anything to say about a secret pact between two belligerents in the second world war.

The contract was to be enforced by the militaries of these belligerents, and to be interpreted and settled privately.

The International Court of Arbitration already existed, and there were other such courts even earlier.

It may well be the case that this was never intended as a formal contract, but I am responding to the assertion that there was no way for it to be. I stand by the claim: the issue is authority/power, not the necessary legal means.

While it is true about contract law and international arbitration, it would be inadequate to compare courts of early Soviet Union and today. As stated in the article, these agreements were meant to be privately handled between Adolf and Stalin, meaning there would be no overseeing court body to interpret the legality of their proposal. If anything, this agreement was their blueprint to lay a foundation for their own court system with them being their own judge and executioner.

Yes; that is what I'm saying: power is the real issue, not lack of legal framework/remedy (and in most cases, private contracts are specifically the purpose contract law; "I intended it to be privately handled" would not be a winning argument. "I have the Soviet army over that hill" might be though).

When you say "nation states" here, do you really mean states which are based on cultural/ethnic values and self-determination or do you just mean "country"?

In the US, a "state" came to mean, well, a US state, and a "nation" (or "nation state"), a country. ('State' in the original sense, a government, is still used in some research contexts.)

The Munich agreement was very detailed and formal. That made no practical difference. Everybody and their dog rushed to take a bite out of Czechoslovakia.

It looks fairly similar in length:

https://www.mzv.cz/file/198473/MunichAgreement.pdf

Well, relatively more detailed and formal :)

> The territory marked No. I on the 1st and 2nd of October; the territory marked No. II on the 2nd and 3rd of October; the territory marked No. III on the 3rd, 4th and 5th of October; the territory marked No. IV on the 6th and 7th of October. The remaining territory of preponderantly German character will be ascertained by the aforesaid international commission forthwith and be occupied by German troops by the 10th of October.

They also literally titled the secret amendment "Geheimes Zusatzprotokoll". And there is a photocopy of it!

It’s pretty interesting that this document is secret and there is no mechanism to enforce it. It’s pretty much just a declaration of intent.

Military is the mechanism of enforcing intent.

Lets agree to do this or there will be a war.

The complications are about drawing a line about what breaks the agreement and what does not. This is important when both parties rely on a third party to decide who broke the agreement, and justify penalties: Nobody wants uncertainty in front of a judge. In this case, neither Nazi Germany or the USSR really care about those things. If one party went over the line in a non-accidental way, there'd be would be war. It's not as if, when Germany invaded the USSR, some faux argument about the USSR breaking the agreement first would have made a difference whatsoever to third parties.

Therefore, what is best for large, highly militarized sovereign countries that solved their disagreements by trying to utterly destroy the other's regime might not work so well in civil life, where making sure we know exactly how he judiciary will interpret the contract is so important we incorporate in Delaware not just because it's cheap, but because we know how the judge will interpret the legalese.

As others have said, these agreements are meaningless, they are more like timeouts to get ready to attack. Lots of agreements were broken, when one side felt they could away with it.

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