The judgment of war: On the idea of legitimate force in world politics

Review of International Studies

Volumn 31, Issue SUPPL. 1, 2005, Pages 143-161

  Rengger, Nicholas ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33645072445     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210505006832     Document Type: Review

References (79)

1. In Dealing in Darkness, chapters 1 and 2 will be largely taken up with evaluating these sorts of claims.
2. See, of course, principally Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (NewYork: Basic Books, 1977; 2nd edn. 1992; 3rd. 2000).
3. But see also Walzer, Arguing about War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
4. The Daily Telegraph, 26 May 2005.
5. See his wonderful book, The Gentle Civiliser of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1880-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
6. This dispute is manifest in the debates within the US Supreme Court over, for example, the banning of the execution of those under 18, partly on precedent drawn from existing international practice, Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, dissenting emphatically on the grounds that such precedents could not (and should not) count as binding precedents in US law.
7. There is, of course a large body of philosophical and jurisprudential literature on this issue and those surrounding it. Classic modern statements, with special relevance to the international case, would be H. L. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1959),
8. Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Law and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945).
9. The specific reference to 'pagan virtue' is to Robert Kaplan's Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York: Random House, 2002) which combines a strong attempt to rubbish the just war, with a not especially nuanced approach to ancient thought.
10. The wider tendencies, however, are visible in many places, from writers like Robert Kagan in Paradise and Power (New York: Atlantic Books, 2004) to the statements of many Bush administration officials.
11. There were obviously a good many other aspects to this debate that I simply do not have time to go into here; that all such general moral arguments are necessarily cultural or religious and therefore bound by history and geography was one of the most common. I shall say something about this later on.
12. See Nicholas Rengger, 'On the Just War Tradition in the Twenty First Century', International Affairs, 78:2 (2002), pp. 353-63.
13. This, in fact, led to one of the first sustained deployments of the just war tradition in post-Wittgensteinean Anglophone analytic philosophy, in that Elizabeth Anscombe - student, translator and heir of Wittgenstein - wrote two papers where she excoriated the decision to use atomic weaponry. Anscombe, a deeply devout Catholic, drew in fact on very traditional just war arguments (as had Bell in the controversy over strategic bombing) but her status in the philosophical world made her arguments stand out. It was also helpful that the first of the articles - 'Mr Truman's Degree' - was in fact a response to the proposal that Oxford (where Anscombe taught at the time) award Harry Truman, the President who authorised the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of course, an honorary degree. The essays are reprinted in vol. 3 of her Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
14. For a discussion of the significance of this claim see, inter alia Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order From Grotius to Kant (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1999),
15. Thomas Pangle and Peter Ahrensdorf, Justice Among Nations: On the Moral Basis of Power and Peace (Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1999),
16. and David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
17. See especially Paul Ramsey, The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility (New York: Scribners, 1968)
18. and also War and the Christian Conscience: How Shall Modern War Be Conducted Justly? (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1961).
19. Ramsey's student, James Turner Johnson, is perhaps the person who has done most to explore the history of the tradition, especially in Ideology Reason and the Limitation of War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975),
20. and Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), but he has also illuminatingly discussed the content of the ideas;
21. see Can Modern War Be Just? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984)
22. and Morality and Contemporary Warfare (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
23. Aside from Just and Unjust Wars,
24. his most influential academic studies have probably been Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983)
25. and Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987),
26. but earlier in his career he wrote on the political thought of the English Civil War [Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965)],
27. on the debates surrounding the French Revolution and the execution of Louis XVI [Regicide and Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974)]
28. and many essays on various aspects of political thought and political thinking. Mostly these have been collected as volumes of essays, see especially, Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War and Citizenship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970)
29. and Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (South Bend: Notre Dame University Press, 1994).
30. Michael Joseph Smith, 'Growing Up with Just and Unjust Wars: An Appreciation' in Ethics and International Affairs, 11 (1997), pp. 3-18, at 3-4.
31. All the above quotations are from Just and Unjust Wars, 3rd edn., pp. xvii-xix.
32. Just and Unjust Wars, 3rd Edn. Ibid., p. xxii.
33. Just and Unjust Wars, 3rd Edn. Ibid., p. xix.
34. This is, obviously, a large claim. And, of course, I am not suggesting that there are no differences between the original formulations of the tradition in Ambrose and Augustine and the 'School of Salamanca' version of it in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The point is merely to say that, to all intents and purposes, the general cast of the tradition for much of its existence into modern times was as a casuistic tradition of moral reflection not as a juristic one. I have made this point in more detail in 'On the Just War tradition in the Twenty-First Century'. Of course that does not solve - as we shall see - a different problem; which is how Aristotelian the casuistry in question has to be.
35. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 52-4.
36. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars Ibid., p. 61.
37. A point that Walzer developed in detail in an earlier essay, one that strongly influenced Just and Unjust Wars.
38. See Walzer 'Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands', in Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel and Thomas Scanlon (eds.), War and Moral Responsibility (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).
39. It is worth noting that, in this respect at least, Walzer's work is very close to the so-called 'English School' of IR scholarship and to certain older versions of realism, especially Hans Morgenthau and Rheinhold Niebuhr.
40. See Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 3rd edn., new preface, p. xi.
41. See Smith, 'Growing up with Just and Unjust Wars', cf. 'Perhaps no part of Just and Unjust Wars has inspired greater debate and controversy than its discussion of intervention', p. 15.
42. See especially The Politics of Rescue', in Arguing about War.
43. See James Turner Johnson, Morality and Contemporary Warfare ch. 1, pp. 22-40.
44. Consider, for example, the dismissal of the tradition by the likes of Robert Kaplan. See his Warrior Politics.
45. Oliver O'Donovan, The Just War Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. vii.
46. O'Donovan, The Just War Revisited, p. 15.
47. Johnson, Morality and Contemporary Warfare, p. 30.
48. For an extremely powerful account of the views on war of the 'School of Salamanca' in general, and Vitoria in particular, see the introduction to Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawerence (eds.), Francisco de Vitoria: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
49. An extremely good account of the background can also be found in Pagden, Lords Of All the World-Ideologies of Empire in Sapins, Britian and France c. 1500-1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).
50. O'Donovan, The Just War Revisited, p. 14., emphasis added.
51. O'Donovan, The Just War Revisited Ibid., p. 15.
52. See, for example, ch. 16 of Just and Unjust Wars.
53. See Walzer, Arguing About War, p. xiii.
54. These are the best-known stated reasons; I do not deny there might have been others.
55. For the importance of the fact of deliberation, see O'Donovan, The Just War Revisited, p. 131,
56. and also Grady Scott Davis, Warcraft and the Fragility of Virtue (Idaho: University of Idaho Press, 1992), of which more in a moment.
57. Walzer, Arguing about War, pp. 160-1.
58. See perhaps most obviously, Elshtain Women and War (Brighton: Harvester, 1987)
59. and Elshtain (ed.), Just War Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
60. But see, more recently, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in A Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003), that marks the change I am referring to here.
61. See most significantly his speech in Chicago in 1999, which can be found at (http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page1297.asp).
62. Quotations from the above speech.
63. I have examined this in much greater detail than I will here in 'Just A War Against Terror? Jean Elshtain's Burden and American Power', in International Affairs, 80:1 (January 2004).
64. Elshtain, Just War Against Terror, pp. 169-70.
65. See, for the merest sample, Terry Nardin (ed.), The Ethics of War and Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998),
66. Perry Schmidt-Leukel (ed.), War and Peace in the World Religions (London: SCM Press, 2004).
67. Or, at least, Theologians. The two communities are not always, of course, coterminous.
68. For Nardin's work on the Just War see, especially, Law, Morality and the Relations of States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983);
69. and Nardin (ed.), The Ethics of War and Peace.
70. He has also written many essays on the use of force and military intervention, which flesh out his defence of 'common morality', now far more pronounced than it was in the 1983 book.
71. For three well known examples, see Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981),
72. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
73. and Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
74. And, for those of a multicultural turn of mind, there are always the narratives of the Aristotelian School's meetings with other, non Greek, ways of thinking in Persia, India, even - according to some - China as well.
75. Though there are interesting signs that other scholars are beginning to plough this furrow as well. A Colloquium on Natural Law and Humanitarian Intervention held at Durham University in March 2005 at which I was present, contained a superb paper rooting the tradition in Aristotelian philosophy, from Bob Dyson. A harbinger, perhaps, of a (if not the) future.
76. Onora O'Neill, in a telling essay, has pointed out the distinction between Kant's ethics (that is the ethical thought of the historical figure Immanuel Kant), 'Kants ethics' (the usually erroneous ideas about Kant's ethics that have a good deal of contemporary currency) and Kantian ethics (ideas deriving in some form or other from Kant's ethics, but certainly not coterminous with them). Substituting Augustine for Kant, this essay - and the book of which it is a part - works from a broadly Augustinian position but does not suppose that this would necessarily be seen as in agreement with Augustine's thought.
77. It is also worth pointing out here that Augustine believed this to be a tendency amongst all forms of political agents, not just 'properly constituted ones' - however we might interpret that condition. In other words, political agents other than the state would fall under Augustine's bracing scepticism as much as the state itself - in any of its forms - would.
78. I am in the process of trying to think through the way in which what I call 'modern anti-Pelagianism' has manifested itself in general in political thought from the Renaissance onwards. A book on this theme will, I hope, eventually emerge and there I hope to discuss the relations between such ideas as the just war tradition and various versions of realism in more detail.
79. Bull, The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 320.