Between Kant and Pufendorf: Humanitarian intervention, statist anti-cosmopolitanism and critical international theory

Review of International Studies

Volumn 33, Issue SUPPL. 1, 2007, Pages 151-174

  Devetak, Richard ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34547245637     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210507007449     Document Type: Review

References (151)

1. For examples of Leibniz's position see his 'Meditation on the Common Concept of Justice' and 'Opinion on the Principles of Pufendorf', both collected in Leibniz, Political Writings, trans. and ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
2. Andrew Linklater, 'Men and Citizens in International Relations', Review of International Studies, 7:1 (1981), pp. 23-37, at 28.
3. Ian Hunter, 'Conflicting Obligations: Pufendorf, Leibniz and Barbeyrac on Civil Authority', History of Political Thought, 25:4 (2004), pp. 670-99.
4. Helen Thompson notes this unfortunate association in a most thoughtful and non-dogmatic defence of statism, 'The Case for External Sovereignty', European Journal of International Relations, 12:2 (2006), pp. 251-74, at 262.
5. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic, of Enlightenment (London: Allen Lane, 1973).
6. Ibid., p. 6.
7. On the Frankfurt School's contribution to an emancipatory social theory of international relations see Martin Weber, 'The Critical Social Theory of the Frankfurt School, and the "Social Turn" in IR', Review of International Studies, 31:1 (2005), pp. 195-209.
8. Also see my "Critical Theory', in Scott Burchill, Andrew Linklater, Richard Devetak, Jack Donnelly, Matthew Paterson, Chris Reus-Smit and Jacqui True, Theories of International Relations, 3rd edn. (London: Palgrave, 2005).
9. See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).
10. I have argued elsewhere that the Frankfurt School Critical Theory-inspired writings of Linklater and the more post-structuralist inclined writings of Walker may be interpreted as different moments of a broader project of modernity insofar as both are concerned to elaborate the conditions of possibility for emancipation. See Devetak, 'The Project of Modernity and Theories of International Relations', Millennium, 24:1 (1995), pp. 27-51.
11. See Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community; Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998)
12. and R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
13. For the differences, see Walker, 'The Hierarchicalization of Political Community', Review of International Relations, 25:1 (1999), pp. 151-6.
14. David Rieff, 'A New Age of Liberal Imperialism?', World Policy Journal, 16: 2 (1999), pp. 1-10, at 1.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ken Booth, 'Ten Flaws of Just Wars', in Booth (ed.), The Kosovo Tragedy: The Human Rights Dimension (London: Frank Cass, 2001).
18. The most important book published on humanitarian intervention is Nick Wheeler's Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
19. Also see Alex Bellamy's chapter on humanitarian intervention in his Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), ch. 10.
20. Philippe Garigne, 'Intervention-Sanction and "Droit d'Ingérence" in International Humanitarian Law', International Journal, XLVIII (1993), pp. 669-86.
21. Christopher Coker, Humane Warfare (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 5.
22. Habermas, 'Bestiality and Humanity: A War on the Border between Legality and Morality', Constellations, 6:3 (1999), pp. 263-72, at 263-4.
23. Marc Lynch, 'Critical Theory: Dialogue, Legitimacy, and Justifications for War', in Jennifer Sterling-Folker (ed.), Making Sense of International Relations Theory (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005), p. 182.
24. Robert Cooper, The breaking of Nations; Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century (London: Atlantic Books, 2004)
25. Lee Feinstein and Anne-Marie Slaughter, 'A Duty to Prevent', Foreign Affairs, 28:3 (2004), pp. 136-55
26. Fernando Tesón, 'Ending Tyranny in Iraq', Ethics and International Affairs, 19:2 (2005), pp. 1-20.
27. For a detailed critique of liberal internationalism's succumbing to imperialist tendencies, see Anthony Burke, 'Against the New Internationalism', Ethics and International Affairs, 19:2 (2005), pp. 73-89.
28. Patricia Owens, 'Hannah Arendt, Violence, and the Inescapable Fact of Humanity', in Anthony Lang Jr and John Williams (eds.), Hannah Arendt and International Relations: Readings Across the Lines (London: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 42-3.
29. Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1999).
30. Owens, 'Hannah Arendt'.
31. Ibid., p. 46. In fact, it is not altogether clear that Owens believes the violence is unintentional. Despite saying that 'Habermas and his followers . . . do not consciously seek to replicate in the global arena the ills of contemporary liberal society, . . ., she also says, 'not only is there an implicit structural violence in the deliberative rationality assumed by discourse ethics, there is an explicit effort to rationalize violence in the form of "humanitarian" war'. Ibid., pp. 57, 50.
32. Ibid., p. 57.
33. Ibid., p. 43.
34. Trans. by George Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 54.
35. Schmitt's 'anti-humanism' inspires the title and argument of Danilo Zolo's Invoking Humanity: War, Law and Global Order, trans. Federico and Gordon Poole (London: Continuum, 2002), see especially pp. 38-42.
36. Owens, 'Hannah Arendt', p. 53.
37. Ibid., p. 43. Schmitt, it hardly needs saying, is enjoying an extraordinary revival at present. See Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005) for a sympathetic account of his work. For useful accounts of his relevance to IR theory
38. see Michael C. Williams, 'Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Polities', International Studies Quarterly, 47:4 (2005), pp. 511-31
39. and Jef Huysmans, 'Know your Schmitt: A Godfather of Truth and the Spectre of Nazism', Review of International Studies, 25:2 (1999), pp. 323-8.
40. Jeremy Moses, 'Challenging Just War and Democratic Peace: A Critical Perspective on Kant and Humanitarian Intervention', in Christian Enemark (ed.), Ethics of War in a Time of Terror, Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence, no. 163 (Canberra, 2006), p. 72.
41. Here is not the place to dispute Moses' reading of Kant, but a more critical reading of Kant would acknowledge that some ambivalence exists in his historico-political writings regarding state sovereignty and the rule of non-intervention. At the very least it should be noted that Kant steers clear of any absolute commitment to non-intervention; as even in the fifth preliminary article Kant allows for 'interference' in another state when its sovereign can no longer claim exclusive authority. For an argument supporting Moses' interpretation of the fifth preliminary article, see Thomas Mertens, 'Cosmopolitanism and Citizenship: Kant against Habermas', European Journal of Philosophy, 4:3 (1996) pp. 328-47
42. for one that notes Kant's ambivalence, see Howard Williams, 'Back from the USSR: Kant, Kaliningrad and World Peace', International Relations, 20:1 (2006), pp. 27-48.
43. Moses, 'Challenging Just War', p. 73.
44. In fact, I express similar concerns in a chapter of the same volume that carries Moses' chapter. My argument there is that distinctions between liberal and non-liberal states are part of a broader attempt by the North (or West) to spatialise the sources of terrorist violence; that is, to identify terrorism with the South. This spatialisation not only exculpates the North, but opens opportunities for the North either to wage war against enemies in the South or to impose their preferred forms of political and economic governance. Devetak, 'Failed States, Rogue States and the Sources of Terrorism: How the North Views the South', in Enemark (ed.), Ethics of War.
45. For a powerful and persuasive critique of Tesón see Terry Nardin, 'Humanitarian Imperialism', Ethics and International Affairs, 19:2 (2005) pp. 21-6.
46. Moses, 'Challenging Just Wars', p. 74. It is interesting that Moses pinpoints 'conscience' as a problem. Although he mentions only contemporary Finnish lawyer Martti Koskenniemi in his footnote, he might also have mentioned Thomas Hobbes who dismantled 'conscience' which such devastating effect over three hundred and fifty years ago in Leviathan. As we shall see, this dismissal of conscience connects Moses' argument much more directly to the arguments of Schmitt, Koselleck, Saunders and Hunter that we explore below.
47. David Chandler, From Kosovo to Kabul (London: Pluto Press, 2002).
48. Ibid., p. 38.
49. Ibid., p. 5.
50. Ibid., p. 107.
51. Ibid., p. 16.
52. Ibid., p. 16. It may or may not be true that on occasion proponents of the so-called 'new' humauitarianism have handled facts in less than satisfactory ways; but the same criticism can easily be applied to absolutist defenders of state sovereignty like Chandler. Facts relating to large-scale and systematic forms of state violence are never mentioned. Either they do not matter or Chandler believes we live in a world free of violence thanks to the sovereign state. In any case, Chandler stands exposed for sidestepping facts in his Panglossian apologia for 'the best of all possible worlds'.
53. Ibid., p. 111.
54. Ibid., p. 107. Whilst it is true that critical international theorists charge the sovereign state with various forms of domination, exclusion and perhaps horrors, it is false to say that they attribute these problems to democracy. Quite the opposite is true.
55. Ibid., p. 19.
56. Ibid., p. 119.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., p. 156.
59. Ibid., p. 210.
60. There are, of course, different interpretations of the seventeenth and eighteenth century 'histories of morality', the best known being Richard Tuck's The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). He sees things rather differently to Hunter and Saunders, admitting a greater continuity between Hobbes and Kant than between Hobbes and Pufendorf. For another historical narrative that affirms statism against cosmopolitanism
61. see Blandine Kriegel, The State and the Rule of Law, trans. Marc LePain and Jeffrey Cohen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
62. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 366.
63. Ibid., p. 366.
64. Ibid., p. 370.
65. Ibid., pp. 370-1.
66. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988), pp. 28-9.
67. Ibid., p. 34. Carl Schmitt, 'The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations', Telos, 96 (1993), pp. 130-42.
68. David Saunders, Anti-Lawyers: Religion and the Critics of Law and State (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 4.
69. Ibid.
70. Originally published in 1673, On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to the Law of Nature is a condensed version of the massive On the Laws of Nature and Nations which had been published in the previous year. Since the argument is essentially the same, nothing shall be lost by focusing on the shorter and more widely available text. See James Tully, 'Editor's Introduction', to Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, trans. Michael Silverthorne, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. xxi.
71. Pufendorf, On the Duty, p. 9.
72. Ibid., pp. 8 and 35.
73. Ibid., p. 9.
74. Saunders, Anti-Lawyers, p. 88.
75. Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, brief edn. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), ch. 1.
76. Also see Martti Koskenniemi, 'Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, and the Image of Law in International Relations', in Michael Byers (ed.), The Role of Law in International Politics: Essays in International Relations and International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
77. and Michael C. Williams, 'Why Ideas Matter in International Relations: Hans Morgenthau, Classical Realism, and the Moral Construction of Power Polities', International Organization, 58 (2004), pp. 633-65.
78. Pufendorf, On the Duty, p. 146.
79. Ibid., pp. 132-3.
80. Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of 'Raison d'État' and Its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), pp. 15, 1.
81. Tuck, Rights of War, ch. 2.
82. Edward Keene, International Political Thought: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), p. 100.
83. Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 33.
84. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, p. 16.
85. Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
86. Linklater's narrative in Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1982) would appear to tell just such a story.
87. Ibid., p. x.
88. Ian Hunter and David Saunders, 'Introduction', in Hunter and Saunders (eds.), Natural Law and Civil Society: Moral Right and State Authority in Early Modern Thought (London: Palgrave, 2002), p. 4.
89. Hunter, Rival Enlightenments, p. xi.
90. Ibid., p. xii.
91. Ibid., p. 8.
92. Ibid., p. 9.
93. I. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper, 1960)
94. and 'The Metaphysics of Morals', in Kant's Political Writings, ed. Hans Riess (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
95. Ibid., p. 316.
96. Ibid., p. 336.
97. Koselleck continues this critique in depicting Enlightenment critics of the absolutist state as dangerous, hypocritical utopians blind to their own will to power. In a manner similar to J. L. Talmon's argument in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Sphere Books, 1970)
98. Koselleck says that the Enlightenment "succumbed to a Utopian image which, while deceptively propelling it, helped to produce contradictions which could not be resolved in practice and prepared the way for the Terror and for dictatorship', in Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, p. 2.
99. See also Carl L. Becker's argument in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1932) that the French Revolution 'took on the character of a religious crusade', not only in the sense that it had its own forms of worship and its own saints, but in the sense that it 'was sustained by an emotional impulse, a mystical faith in humanity, in the ultimate regeneration of the human race', p. 155.
100. Koselleck, Crisis and Critique, p. 27.
101. Saunders, Anti-Lawyers, ch. 2.
102. Hunter, Rival Enlightenments, p. 317.
103. Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 133.
104. Chandler, From Kosovo.
105. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 54.
106. Moses, 'Challenging Just War', p. 74.
107. On the social construction of sovereign states and their rights, see Thomas Biersteker and Cynthia Weber (eds.), State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
108. and Chris Reus-Smit, 'Human Rights and the Social Construction of Sovereignty', Review of International Studies, 27:4 (2001), pp. 1-20.
109. Also see John Dunn's deft 'deconstruction' of the idea that human rights and the modern state are 'diametrically opposed', in The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics (London: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 89-90.
110. Chandler, From Kosovo, p. 101.
111. Saunders, Anti-Lawyers, p. 88.
112. Hunter and Saunders, 'Introduction', pp. 1-2. The implication of their position is that arguments like Chandler's which appeal to self-determination are equally guilty of the metaphysical resort to higher laws.
113. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 26.
114. Ibid., p. 29.
115. Ibid., pp. 43-4.
116. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 5.
117. For the most important recent analysis of the 'state of exception', see Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), ch. 1.
118. Ibid., p. 12.
119. Samuel Weber, 'Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt', Diacritics, 22:3-4 (1992), pp. 5-18, at 10.
120. There has been growing research interest in the aesthetic dimensions of international relations in recent years. See the special issues of Millennium on aesthetics and the sublime, 30:3 (2001) and 34:3 (2006).
121. Williams, 'Why Ideas Matter'.
122. Ibid., p. 653.
123. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, p. 25.
124. Kant, 'Perpetual Peace', in Kant's Political Writings, p. 103.
125. For useful accounts of Kant's views on international relations, see James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (eds.), Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1997);
126. Linklater, Men and Citizens, ch. 6, Mertens, 'Cosmopolitanism and Citizenship'; and Howard Williams, 'Back from the USSR'.
127. Kant, 'Perpetual Peace', p. 118.
128. Ibid., p. 122.
129. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), p. 28.
130. For a useful discussion in International Relations see Jürgen Haacke, 'The Frankfurt School and International Relations: On the Certainty of Recognition', Review of International Studies, 31:1 (2005), pp. 181-94, especially at 182-6.
131. Habermas, ibid., and Kant, "Metaphysics of Morals', p. 134.
132. Having said that, Kant does align himself with Pufendorf in denying citizens the right of resistance. See Kant, 'Metaphysics of Right', pp. 143-7 and Pufendorf, On the Duty, pp. 146-7.
133. Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 53.
134. Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 151.
135. Linklater, The Transformation, pp. 84-9.
136. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, pp. 4-5.
137. See also Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (London: Heinemann, 1984).
138. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 106.
139. Habermas, 'Kant's Idea of Perpetual Peace: At Two Hundred Years' Historical Remove', in Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 199.
140. Ibid., p. 201.
141. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 129.
142. The notion of a 'differentiated' conception of state sovereignty is discussed in Kenneth Baynes, 'Communitarian and Cosmopolitan Challenges to Kant's Conception of World Peace', in Bohman and Lutz-Bachmann (eds.), Perpetual Peace, and 'good international citizenship' is discussed in Linklater, 'What is a Good International Citizen?', in Paul Keal (ed.), Ethics and Foreign Policy (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992). There is a very large literature criticising sovereignty
143. but see Walker's Inside/Outside for one of the most devastating critiques.
144. Habermas, 'Bestiality and Humanity', p. 267.
145. Ibid., p. 271.
146. Ibid.
147. Linklater, 'The Good International Citizen and the Crisis in Kosovo', in Albrecht Schnabel and Ramesh Thakur (eds.), Kosovo and the Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention (Tokyo: UN University Press, 2000), p. 488.
148. Lynch, 'Critical Theory', p. 192.
149. Ibid., p. 185. For a qualified defence of NATO's Kosovo war, see Bellamy, Kosovo and International Society (London: Palgrave, 2002).
150. I borrow the phrase 'the economy of violence', from Sheldon Wolin's classic Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1960), pp. 220-35.
151. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms.