Law and Order in International Society
Aggression is the name we give to the crime of war. We know the crime because of our knowledge of the peace it interrupts—not the mere absence of fighting, but peace-with-rights, a condition of liberty and security that can exist only in the absence of aggression itself. The wrong the aggressor commits is to force men and women to risk their lives for the sake of their rights. It is to confront them with the choice: your rights or (some of) your lives! Groups of citizens respond in different ways to that choice, sometimes surrendering, sometimes fighting, depending on the moral and material condition of their state and army. But they are always justified in fighting; and in most cases, given that harsh choice, fighting is the morally preferred response. The justification and the preference are very important: they account for the most remarkable features of the concept of aggression and for the special place it has in the theory of war.
Aggression is remarkable because it is the only crime that states can commit against other states: everything else is, as it were, a misdemeanor. There is a strange poverty in the language of international law. The equivalents of domestic assault, armed robbery, extortion, assault with intent to kill, murder in all its degrees, have but one name. Every violation of the territorial integrity or political sovereignty of an independent state is called aggression. It is as if we were to brand as murder all attacks on a man’s person, all attempts to coerce him, all invasions of his home. This refusal of differentiation makes it difficult to mark off the relative seriousness of aggressive acts—to distinguish, for example, the seizure of a piece of land or the imposition of a satellite regime from conquest itself, the destruction of a state’s independence (a crime for which Abba Eban, Israel’s foreign minister in 1967, suggested the name “policide”). But there is a reason for the refusal. All aggressive acts have one thing in common: they justify forceful resistance, and force cannot be used between nations, as it often can between persons, without putting life itself at risk. Whatever limits we place on the means and range of warfare, fighting a limited war is not like hitting somebody. Aggression opens the gates of hell. Shakespeare’s Henry V makes the point exactly:1
For never two such kingdoms did contend
Without much fall of blood, whose guiltless drops
Are every one a woe, a sore complaint
’Gainst him whose wrongs gives edge unto the swords
That makes such waste in brief mortality.
At the same time, aggression unresisted is aggression still, though there is no “fall of blood” at all. In domestic society, a robber who gets what he wants without killing anyone is obviously less guilty, that is, guilty of a lesser crime, than if he commits murder. Assuming that the robber is prepared to kill, we allow the behavior of his victim to determine his guilt. We don’t do this in the case of aggression. Consider, for example, the German seizures of Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939. The Czechs did not resist; they lost their independence through extortion rather than war; no Czech citizens died fighting the German invaders. The Poles chose to fight, and many were killed in the war that followed. But if the conquest of Czechoslovakia was a lesser crime, we have no name for it. At Nuremberg, the Nazi leadership was charged with aggression in both cases and found guilty in both.2 Once again, there is a reason for this identity of treatment. We judge the Germans guilty of aggression in Czechoslovakia, I think, because of our profound conviction that they ought to have been resisted—though not necessarily by their abandoned victim, standing alone.
The state that does resist, whose soldiers risk their lives and die, does so because its leaders and people think that they should or that they have to fight back. Aggression is morally as well as physically coercive, and that is one of the most important things about it. “A conqueror,” writes Clausewitz, “is always a lover of peace (as Bonaparte always asserted of himself); he would like to make his entry into our state unopposed; in order to prevent this, we must choose war. . . . ”3 If ordinary men and women did not ordinarily accept that imperative, aggression would not seem to us so serious a crime. If they accepted it in certain sorts of cases, but not in others, the single concept would begin to break down, and we would eventually have a list of crimes more or less like the domestic list. The challenge of the streets, “Your money or your life!” is easy to answer: I surrender my money and so I save myself from being murdered and the thief from being a murderer. But we apparently don’t want the challenge of aggression answered in the same way; even when it is, we don’t diminish the guilt of the aggressor. He has violated rights to which we attach enormous importance. Indeed, we are inclined to think that the failure to defend those rights is never due to a sense of their unimportance, nor even to a belief (as in the street-challenge case) that they are, after all, worth less than life itself, but only to a stark conviction that the defense is hopeless. Aggression is a singular and undifferentiated crime because, in all its forms, it challenges rights that are worth dying for.
The Rights of Political Communities
The rights in question are summed up in the lawbooks as territorial integrity and political sovereignty. The two belong to states, but they derive ultimately from the rights of individuals, and from them they take their force. “The duties and rights of states are nothing more than the duties and rights of the men who compose them.”4 That is the view of a conventional British lawyer, for whom states are neither organic wholes nor mystical unions. And it is the correct view. When states are attacked, it is their members who are challenged, not only in their lives, but also in the sum of things they value most, including the political association they have made. We recognize and explain this challenge by referring to their rights. If they were not morally entitled to choose their form of government and shape the policies that shape their lives, external coercion would not be a crime; nor could it so easily be said that they had been forced to resist in self-defense. Individual rights (to life and liberty) underlie the most important judgments that we make about war. How these rights are themselves founded I cannot try to explain here. It is enough to say that they are somehow entailed by our sense of what it means to be a human being. If they are not natural, then we have invented them, but natural or invented, they are a palpable feature of our moral world. States’ rights are simply their collective form. The process of collectivization is a complex one. No doubt, some of the immediate force of individuality is lost in its course; it is best understood, nevertheless, as it has commonly been understood since the seventeenth century, in terms of social contract theory. Hence it is a moral process, which justifies some claims to territory and sovereignty and invalidates others.
The rights of states rest on the consent of their members. But this is consent of a special sort. State rights are not constituted through a series of transfers from individual men and women to the sovereign or through a series of exchanges among individuals. What actually happens is harder to describe. Over a long period of time, shared experiences and cooperative activity of many different kinds shape a common life. “Contract” is a metaphor for a process of association and mutuality, the ongoing character of which the state claims to protect against external encroachment. The protection extends not only to the lives and liberties of individuals but also to their shared life and liberty, the independent community they have made, for which individuals are sometimes sacrificed. The moral standing of any particular state depends upon the reality of the common life it protects and the extent to which the sacrifices required by that protection are willingly accepted and thought worthwhile. If no common life exists, or if the state doesn’t defend the common life that does exist, its own defense may have no moral justification. But most states do stand guard over the community of their citizens, at least to some degree: that is why we assume the justice of their defensive wars. And given a genuine “contract,” it makes sense to say that territorial integrity and political sovereignty can be defended in exactly the same way as individual life and liberty.a
It might also be said that a people can defend its country in the same way as men and women can defend their homes, for the country is collectively as the homes are privately owned. The right to territory might be derived, that is, from the individual right to property. But the ownership of vast reaches of land is highly problematic, I think, unless it can be tied in some plausible way to the requirements of national survival and political independence. And these two seem by themselves to generate territorial rights that have little to do with ownership in the strict sense. The case is probably the same with the smaller properties of domestic society. A man has certain rights in his home, for example, even if he does not own it, because neither his life nor his liberty is secure unless there exists some physical space within which he is safe from intrusion. Similarly again, the right of a nation or people not to be invaded derives from the common life its members have made on their piece of land—it had to be made somewhere—and not from the legal title they hold or don’t hold. But these matters will become clearer if we look at an example of disputed territory.
In 1870, both France and the new Germany claimed these two provinces. Both claims were, as such things go, well founded. The Germans based themselves on ancient precedents (the lands had been part of the Holy Roman Empire before their conquest by Louis XIV) and on cultural and linguistic kinship; the French on two centuries of possession and effective government.5 How does one establish ownership in such a case? There is, I think, a prior question having to do with political allegiance, not with legal titles at all. What do the inhabitants want? The land follows the people. The decision as to whose sovereignty was legitimate (and therefore as to whose military presence constituted aggression) belonged by right to the men and women who lived on the land in dispute. Not simply to those who owned the land: the decision belonged to the landless, to town dwellers and factory workers as well, by virtue of the common life they had made. The great majority of these people were apparently loyal to France, and that should have settled the matter. Even if we imagine all the inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine to be tenants of the Prussian king, the king’s seizure of his own land would still have been a violation of their territorial integrity and, through the mediation of their loyalty, of France’s too. For tenantry determines only where rents should go; the people themselves must decide where their taxes and conscripts should go.
But the issue was not settled in this way. After the Franco-Prussian war, the two provinces (actually, all of Alsace and a portion of Lorraine) were annexed by Germany, the French conceding German rights in the peace treaty of 1871. During the next several decades, the question was frequently asked, whether a French attack aimed at regaining the lost lands would be justified. One of the issues here is that of the moral standing of a peace treaty signed, as most peace treaties are signed, under duress, but I shall not focus on that. The more important issue relates to the endurance of rights over time. Here the appropriate argument was put forward by the English philosopher Henry Sidgwick in 1891. Sidgwick’s sympathies were with the French, and he was inclined to regard the peace as a “temporary suspension of hostilities, terminable at any time by the wronged state. . . .” But he added a crucial qualification:6
We must . . . recognize that by this temporary submission of the vanquished . . . a new political order is initiated, which, though originally without a moral basis, may in time acquire such a basis, from a change in the sentiments of the inhabitants of the territory transferred; since it is always possible that through the effects of time and habit and mild government—and perhaps through the voluntary exile of those who feel the old patriotism most keenly—the majority of the transferred population may cease to desire reunion. . . . When this change has taken place, the moral effect of the unjust transfer must be regarded as obliterated; so that any attempt to recover the transferred territory becomes itself an aggression. . . .
Legal titles may endure forever, periodically revived and reasserted as in the dynastic politics of the Middle Ages. But moral rights are subject to the vicissitudes of the common life.
Territorial integrity, then, does not derive from property; it is simply something different. The two are joined, perhaps, in socialist states where the land is nationalized and the people are said to own it. Then if their country is attacked, it is not merely their homeland that is in danger but their collective property—though I suspect that the first danger is more deeply felt than the second. Nationalization is a secondary process; it assumes the prior existence of a nation. And territorial integrity is a function of national existence, not of nationalization (any more than of private ownership). It is the coming together of a people that establishes the integrity of a territory. Only then can a boundary be drawn, the crossing of which is plausibly called aggression. It hardly matters if the territory belongs to someone else, unless that ownership is expressed in residence and common use.
This argument suggests a way of thinking about the great difficulties posed by forcible settlement and colonization. When barbarian tribes crossed the borders of the Roman Empire, driven by conquerors from the east or north, they asked for land to settle on and threatened war if they didn’t get it. Was this aggression? Given the character of the Roman Empire, the question may sound foolish, but it has arisen many times since, and often in imperial settings. When land is in fact empty and available, the answer must be that it is not aggression. But what if the land is not actually empty but, as Thomas Hobbes says in Leviathan, “not sufficiently inhabited”? Hobbes goes on to argue that in such a case, the would-be settlers must “not exterminate those they find there but constrain them to inhabit closer together.”7 That constraint is not aggression, so long as the lives of the original settlers are not threatened. For the settlers are doing what they must do to preserve their own lives, and “he that shall oppose himself against [that], for things superfluous, is guilty of the war that thereupon is to follow.”8 It is not the settlers who are guilty of aggression, according to Hobbes, but those natives who won’t move over and make room. There are clearly serious problems here. But I would suggest that Hobbes is right to set aside any consideration of territorial integrity-as-ownership and to focus instead on life. It must be added, however, that what is at stake is not only the lives of individuals but also the common life that they have made. It is for the sake of this common life that we assign a certain presumptive value to the boundaries that mark off a people’s territory and to the state that defends it.
Now, the boundaries that exist at any moment in time are likely to be arbitrary, poorly drawn, the products of ancient wars. The mapmakers are likely to have been ignorant, drunken, or corrupt. Nevertheless, these lines establish a habitable world. Within that world, men and women (let us assume) are safe from attack; once the lines are crossed, safety is gone. I don’t want to suggest that every boundary dispute is a reason for war. Sometimes adjustments should be accepted and territories shaped so far as possible to the actual needs of nations. Good borders make good neighbors. But once an invasion has been threatened or has actually begun, it may be necessary to defend a bad border simply because there is no other. We shall see this reason at work in the minds of the leaders of Finland in 1939: they might have accepted Russian demands had they felt certain that there would be an end to them. But there is no certainty this side of the border, any more than there is safety this side of the threshold, once a criminal has entered the house. It is only common sense, then, to attach great importance to boundaries. Rights in the world have value only if they also have dimension.
If states actually do possess rights more or less as individuals do, then it is possible to imagine a society among them more or less like the society of individuals. The comparison of international to civil order is crucial to the theory of aggression. I have already been making it regularly. Every reference to aggression as the international equivalent of armed robbery or murder, and every comparison of home and country or of personal liberty and political independence, relies upon what is called the domestic analogy.9 Our primary perceptions and judgments of aggression are the products of analogical reasoning. When the analogy is made explicit, as it often is among the lawyers, the world of states takes on the shape of a political society the character of which is entirely accessible through such notions as crime and punishment, self-defense, law enforcement, and so on.
These notions, I should stress, are not incompatible with the fact that international society as it exists today is a radically imperfect structure. As we experience it, that society might be likened to a defective building, founded on rights; its superstructure raised, like that of the state itself, through political conflict, cooperative activity, and commercial exchange; the whole thing shaky and unstable because it lacks the rivets of authority. It is like domestic society in that men and women live at peace within it (sometimes), determining the conditions of their own existence, negotiating and bargaining with their neighbors. It is unlike domestic society in that every conflict threatens the structure as a whole with collapse. Aggression challenges it directly and is much more dangerous than domestic crime, because there are no policemen. But that only means that the “citizens” of international society must rely on themselves and on one another. Police powers are distributed among all the members. And these members have not done enough in the exercise of their powers if they merely contain the aggression or bring it to a speedy end—as if the police should stop a murderer after he has killed only one or two people and send him on his way. The rights of the member states must be vindicated, for it is only by virtue of those rights that there is a society at all. If they cannot be upheld (at least sometimes), international society collapses into a state of war or is transformed into a universal tyranny.
From this picture, two presumptions follow. The first, which I have already pointed out, is the presumption in favor of military resistance once aggression has begun. Resistance is important so that rights can be maintained and future aggressors deterred. The theory of aggression restates the old doctrine of the just war: it explains when fighting is a crime and when it is permissible, perhaps even morally desirable.b The victim of aggression fights in self-defense, but he isn’t only defending himself, for aggression is a crime against society as a whole. He fights in its name and not only in his own. Other states can rightfully join the victim’s resistance; their war has the same character as his own, which is to say, they are entitled not only to repel the attack but also to punish it. All resistance is also law enforcement. Hence the second presumption: when fighting breaks out, there must always be some state against which the law can and should be enforced. Someone must be responsible, for someone decided to break the peace of the society of states. No war, as medieval theologians explained, can be just on both sides.10
There are, however, wars that are just on neither side, because the idea of justice doesn’t pertain to them or because the antagonists are both aggressors, fighting for territory or power where they have no right. The first case I have already alluded to in discussing the voluntary combat of aristocratic warriors. It is sufficiently rare in human history that nothing more need be said about it here. The second case is illustrated by those wars that Marxists call “imperialist,” which are not fought between conquerors and victims but between conquerors and conquerors, each side seeking dominion over the other or the two of them competing to dominate some third party. Thus Lenin’s description of the struggles between “have” and “have-not” nations in early twentieth-century Europe: “. . . picture to yourselves a slave-owner who owned 100 slaves warring against a slave-owner who owned 200 slaves for a more ‘just’ distribution of slaves. Clearly, the application of the term ‘defensive’ war in such a case . . . would be sheer deception. . . . ”11 But it is important to stress that we can penetrate the deception only insofar as we can ourselves distinguish justice and injustice: the theory of imperialist war presupposes the theory of aggression. If one insists that all wars on all sides are acts of conquest or attempted conquest, or that all states at all times would conquer if they could, then the argument for justice is defeated before it begins and the moral judgments we actually make are derided as fantasies. Consider the following passage from Edmund Wilson’s book on the American Civil War:12
I think that it is a serious deficiency on the part of historians . . . that they so rarely interest themselves in biological and zoological phenomena. In a recent . . . film showing life at the bottom of the sea, a primitive organism called a sea slug is seen gobbling up small organisms through a large orifice at one end of its body; confronted with another sea slug of an only slightly lesser size, it ingurgitates that, too. Now the wars fought by human beings are stimulated as a rule . . . by the same instincts as the voracity of the sea slug.
There are no doubt wars to which that image might be fit, though it is not a terribly useful image with which to approach the Civil War. Nor does it account for our ordinary experience of international society. Not all states are sea-slug states, gobbling up their neighbors. They are always groups of men and women who would live if they could in peaceful enjoyment of their rights and who have chosen political leaders who represent that desire. The deepest purpose of the state is not ingestion but defense, and the least that can be said is that many actual states serve that purpose. When their territory is attacked or their sovereignty challenged, it makes sense to look for an aggressor and not merely for a natural predator. Hence we need a theory of aggression rather than a zoological account.
The theory of aggression first takes shape under the aegis of the domestic analogy. I am going to call that primary form of the theory the legalist paradigm, since it consistently reflects the conventions of law and order. It does not necessarily reflect the arguments of the lawyers, though legal as well as moral debate has its starting point here.13 Later on, I will suggest that our judgments about the justice and injustice of particular wars are not entirely determined by the paradigm. The complex realities of international society drive us toward a revisionist perspective, and the revisions will be significant ones. But the paradigm must first be viewed in its unrevised form; it is our baseline, our model, the fundamental structure for the moral comprehension of war. We begin with the familiar world of individuals and rights, or crimes and punishments. The theory of aggression can then be summed up in six propositions.
1. There exists an international society of independent states. States are the members of this society, not private men and women. In the absence of an universal state, men and women are protected and their interests represented only by their own governments. Though states are founded for the sake of life and liberty, they cannot be challenged in the name of life and liberty by any other states. Hence the principle of non-intervention, which I will analyze later on. The rights of private persons can be recognized in international society, as in the UN Charter of Human Rights, but they cannot be enforced without calling into question the dominant values of that society: the survival and independence of the separate political communities.
2. This international society has a law that establishes the rights of its members—above all, the rights of territorial integrity and political sovereignty. Once again, these two rest ultimately on the right of men and women to build a common life and to risk their individual lives only when they freely choose to do so. But the relevant law refers only to states, and its details are fixed by the intercourse of states, through complex processes of conflict and consent. Since these processes are continuous, international society has no natural shape; nor are rights within it ever finally or exactly determined. At any given moment, however, one can distinguish the territory of one people from that of another and say something about the scope and limits of sovereignty.
3. Any use of force or imminent threat of force by one state against the political sovereignty or territorial integrity of another constitutes aggression and is a criminal act. As with domestic crime, the argument here focuses narrowly on actual or imminent boundary crossings: invasions and physical assaults. Otherwise, it is feared, the notion of resistance to aggression would have no determinate meaning. A state cannot be said to be forced to fight unless the necessity is both obvious and urgent.
4. Aggression justifies two kinds of violent response: a war of self-defense by the victim and a war of law enforcement by the victim and any other member of international society. Anyone can come to the aid of a victim, use necessary force against an aggressor, and even make whatever is the international equivalent of a “citizen’s arrest.” As in domestic society, the obligations of bystanders are not easy to make out, but it is the tendency of the theory to undermine the right of neutrality and to require widespread participation in the business of law enforcement. In the Korean War, this participation was authorized by the United Nations, but even in such cases the actual decision to join the fighting remains a unilateral one, best understood by analogy to the decision of a private citizen who rushes to help a man or woman attacked on the street.
5. Nothing but aggression can justify war. The central purpose of the theory is to limit the occasions for war. “There is a single and only just cause for commencing a war,” wrote Vitoria, “namely, a wrong received.”14 There must actually have been a wrong, and it must actually have been received (or its receipt must be, as it were, only minutes away). Nothing else warrants the use of force in international society—above all, not any difference of religion or politics. Domestic heresy and injustice are never actionable in the world of states: hence, again, the principle of nonintervention.
6. Once the aggressor state has been militarily repulsed, it can also be punished. The conception of just war as an act of punishment is very old, though neither the procedures nor the forms of punishment have ever been firmly established in customary or positive international law. Nor are its purposes entirely clear: to exact retribution, to deter other states, to restrain or reform this one? All three figure largely in the literature, though it is probably fair to say that deterrence and restraint are most commonly accepted. When people talk of fighting a war against war, this is usually what they have in mind. The domestic maxim is, punish crime to prevent violence; its international analogue is, punish aggression to prevent war. Whether the state as a whole or only particular persons are the proper objects of punishment is a harder question, for reasons I will consider later on. But the implication of the paradigm is clear: if states are members of international society, the subjects of rights, they must also be (somehow) the objects of punishment.
These propositions shape the judgments we make when wars break out. They constitute a powerful theory, coherent and economic, and they have dominated our moral consciousness for a long time. I am not concerned to trace their history here, but it is worth emphasizing that they remained dominant even during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when lawyers and statesmen regularly argued that war-making was the natural prerogative of sovereign states, not subject to legal or moral judgment. States went to war for “reasons of state,” and these reasons were said to have a privileged character, such that they needed only to be alluded to, not even expounded, in order to terminate all argument. The common assumption in the legal literature of the time (roughly from the age of Vattel to that of Oppenheim) is that states always have, like Hobbist individuals, a right to fight.15 The analogy is not from domestic to international society, but from the state of nature to international anarchy. But this view never seized the popular imagination. “The idea of war and the launching of it,” writes the foremost historian of the theory of aggression, “were for the ordinary man and for public opinion always loaded with moral significance, demanding full approval if waged with right and condemnation and punishment if without. . . .”16 The significance ordinary men attached was exactly of the sort I have been describing: they drew the terrifying experience of war, as Otto von Bismarck once complained, back to the familiar ground of everyday life. “Public opinion,” Bismarck wrote, “is only too ready to consider political relations and events in the light of those of civil law and private persons generally. . . . [This] shows a complete lack of understanding of political matters.”17
I am inclined to think that it shows a deep understanding of political matters, though not always in its applications a knowledgeable or sophisticated understanding. Public opinion tends to focus on the concrete reality of war and on the moral meaning of killing and being killed. It addresses the questions that ordinary men cannot avoid: should we support this war? should we fight in it? Bismarck works from a more distant perspective, turning the people who ask such questions into pawns in the high game of real-politik. But ultimately the questions are insistent and the distant perspective untenable. Until wars are really fought with pawns, inanimate objects and not human beings, warfare cannot be isolated from moral life. We can get a clear view of the necessary links by reflecting on the work of one of Bismarck’s contemporaries and on one of the wars at which the German chancellor connived.
Karl Marx and the Franco-Prussian War
Like Bismarck, Marx had a different way of understanding political matters. He regarded war not merely as the continuation but as the necessary and inevitable continuation of politics, and he described particular wars in terms of a world historical scheme. He had no commitment to the existing political order, nor to the territorial integrity or political sovereignty of established states. The violation of these “rights” raised no moral problem for him; he did not seek the punishment of aggressors; he sought only those outcomes that, without reference to the theory of aggression, advanced the cause of proletarian revolution. It is entirely characteristic of Marx’s general views that he should have hoped for a Prussian victory in 1870 because it would lead to German unification and ease the course of socialist organization in the new Reich and because it would establish the dominance of the German over the French working class.18
The French need a drubbing [he wrote in a letter to Engels]. If the Prussians are victorious, then the centralization of state power will be favorable to the centralization of the working class. German preponderance will shift the center of the working class movement in Western Europe from France to Germany and . . . the German working class is theoretically and organizationally superior to that of France. The superiority of the Germans over the French . . . would mean at the same time the superiority of our theory over Proudhon’s, etc.
But this was not a view that Marx could defend in public, not only because its publication would embarrass him among his French comrades, but for reasons that go directly to the nature of our moral life. Even the most advanced members of the German working class would not be willing to kill French workers for the sake of German unity or to risk their own lives merely in order to enhance the power of their party (or of Marx’s theory!) within the ranks of international socialism. Marx’s argument was not, in the most literal sense of the word, a possible account of the decision to fight or of the judgment that the war the Germans fought was, at least initially, a just war. If we are to understand that judgment, we would do better to begin with the simplistic assertion of a British member of the General Council of the International: “The French,” said John Weston, “had invaded first.”19
We know now that Bismarck worked hard and with all his usual ruthlessness to bring about that invasion. The diplomatic crisis that preceded the war was largely of his contrivance. Nothing that he did, however, can plausibly be said to have threatened the territorial integrity or political sovereignty of France; nothing that he did forced the French to fight. He merely exploited the arrogance and stupidity of Napoleon III and his entourage and succeeded in putting the French in the wrong; it was the tribute he paid to the public opinion he deplored. Hence it has never been necessary to correct the argument of John Weston or of those members of the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party who declared in July 1870 that it was Napoleon who had “frivolously” destroyed the peace of Europe: “The German nation . . . is the victim of aggression. Therefore . . . with great regret, [we] must accept the defensive war as a necessary evil.”20 The “First Address” of the International on the Franco-Prussian War, drafted by Marx on behalf of the General Council, took the same view: “On the German side, the war is a war of defense” (though Marx went on to ask, “Who put Germany to the necessity of defending herself?” and to hint at the true character of Bismarckian politics).21 French workers were called upon to oppose the war and to drive the Bonapartists from power; German workers were urged to join the war, but in such a manner as to maintain “its strictly defensive character.”
Some six weeks later, the war of defense was over, Germany was triumphant at Sedan, Bonaparte a prisoner, his empire overthrown. But the fighting continued, for the chief war aim of the German government was not resistance but expansion: the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. In the “Second Address” of the International, Marx accurately described the war after Sedan as an act of aggression against the people of the two provinces and against the territorial integrity of France. He did not believe that either the German workers or the new French republic would be capable of punishing that aggression in the near future, but he looked for punishment nonetheless: “History will measure its retribution, not by the extent of the square miles conquered from France, but by the intensity of the crime of reviving, in the second half of the nineteen century, the policy of conquest.”22 What is striking here is that Marx has enlisted history not in the service of the proletarian revolution but in the service of conventional morality. Indeed, he invokes the example of the Prussian struggle against the first Napoleon after Tilset and so suggests that the retribution he has in mind will take the form of a future French attack on the German Reich, a war of exactly the sort that Henry Sidgwick also thought justified by the German “policy of conquest.” But whatever Marx’s program, it is clear that he is working within the terms set by the theory of aggression. When he is forced to confront the actualities of war and to describe in public the possible shape of a socialist foreign policy, he falls back upon the domestic analogy and the legalist paradigm in their most literal forms. Indeed, he argued in the “First Address” that it was the task of socialists “to vindicate the simple laws of morals and justice, which ought to govern the relations of private individuals, as the rules paramount of the intercourse of nations.”23
Is this Marxist doctrine? I am not sure. It has little in common with Marx’s philosophic pronouncements on morality and little in common with the reflections on international politics that fill his letters. But Marx was not only a philosopher and a letter-writer; he was also a political leader and the spokesman of a mass movement. In these latter roles, his world-historical view of the significance of war was less important than the particular judgments he was called upon to make. And once he was committed to judgment, there was a certain inevitability to the categories of the theory of aggression. It was not a question of adjusting himself to what is sometimes condescendingly called the “level of consciousness” of his audience, but of speaking directly to the moral experience of its members. Sometimes, perhaps, a new philosophy or religion can reshape that experience, but this was not the effect of Marxism, at least not with regard to international warfare. Marx simply took the theory of aggression seriously, and so he placed himself in the front ranks of those ordinary men and women about whom Bismarck complained, who judged political events in the light of domestic morality.
The war of 1870 is a hard case because, with the exception of those French liberals and socialists who challenged Bonaparte and those German social-democrats who condemned the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, none of its participants are very attractive. The moral issues are muddy, and it would not be difficult to argue that the struggle was in fact an aggressive war on both sides, rather than on each in succession. But the issues are not always muddy; history provides wonderfully clear examples of aggression. The historical study of war virtually begins with such an example (with which I also began): the Athenian attack on Melos. But the easy cases raise problems of their own, or rather, one characteristic problem. Aggression most often takes the form of an attack by a powerful state upon a weak one (that is why it is so readily recognizable). Resistance seems imprudent, even hopeless. Many lives will be lost, and to what end? Even here, however, our moral preference holds. We not only justify resistance; we call it heroic; we do not measure the value of justice, apparently, in terms of lives lost. And yet such measurements can never be entirely irrelevant: who would want to be ruled by political leaders who paid them no mind? So justice and prudence stand in an uneasy relation to one another. Later on, I will describe various ways in which the argument for justice incorporates prudential considerations. But now it is important to stress that the legalist paradigm tends in a radical way to exclude them.
The paradigm as a whole is commonly defended in utilitarian terms: resistance to aggression is necessary to deter future aggressors. But in the context of international politics, an alternative utilitarian argument is almost always available. This is the argument for appeasement, which suggests that giving in to aggressors is the only way of avoiding war. In domestic society, too, we sometimes choose appeasement, negotiating with kidnappers or extortionists, for example, when the costs of refusal or resistance are greater than we can bear. But we feel badly in such cases, not only because we have failed to serve the larger communal purpose of deterrence, but also and more immediately because we have yielded to coercion and injustice. We feel badly even though all that we have yielded is money, whereas in international society appeasement is hardly possible unless we are willing to surrender values far more important. And yet the costs of war are such that the argument for surrender can often be put very strongly. Appeasement is a bad word in our moral vocabulary, but the argument is not morally obtuse. It represents the most significant challenge to what I have been calling the presumption in favor of resistance, and I want now to examine it in some detail.
Czechoslovakia and the Munich Principle
The defense of appeasement in 1938 sometimes involved the claim that the Sudeten Germans were, after all, entitled to self-determination. But that is a claim that might have been met through some sort of autonomy within the Czech state or through boundary changes considerably less drastic than those that Hitler demanded at Munich. In fact, Hitler’s goals reached far beyond the vindication of a right, and Chamberlain and Daladier knew this, or should have known it, and surrendered anyway.24 It was the fear of war rather than any view of justice that explains their actions. This fear was given theoretical expression in a very intelligent little book, published in 1939 by the English Catholic writer Gerald Vann. Vann’s argument is the only attempt that I have come across to apply just war theory directly to the problem of appeasement, and for that reason I shall look at it closely. He defends what might be called the “Munich principle”:25
If a nation finds itself called upon to defend another nation which is unjustly attacked and to which it is bound by treaty, then it is bound to fulfill its obligations. . . . It may, however, be its right, and even its duty, to try to persuade the victim of aggression to avoid the ultimate evil of a general conflict by agreeing to terms less favorable than those which it can claim in justice . . . provided always that such a surrender of rights would not mean in fact a surrender once and for all to the rule of violence.
The “duty” here is simply “seek peace”—Hobbes’ first law of nature and presumably near the top of Catholic lists as well, though Vann’s phrase “the ultimate evil of a general conflict” suggests that it is nearer to the top than in fact it is. In just-war doctrine, as in the legalist paradigm, the triumph of aggression is a greater evil. But it is certainly a duty to avoid violence if one possibly can; this is a duty that the rulers of states owe to their own people and to others as well, and it may override obligations established by international treaties and conventions. But the argument requires the limiting clause at the end, which I would have thought applicable in September 1938. That clause is worth examining, since its purpose is obviously to tell us when to appease and when not.
Imagine a state whose government strives to press its boundaries or its sphere of influence outward, a little bit here, a little bit there, continually over a period of time—not quite Edmund Wilson’s sea-slug state, something nearer to a conventional “great power.” Certainly the people against whom the pressure is being brought have a right to resist; Allied states and possibly other states as well ought to support their resistance. But appeasement, by the victim or the others, would not necessarily be immoral—this is Vann’s argument—and there might even be a duty to seek peace at the expense of justice. Appeasement would involve a surrender to violence, but given a conventional power, it would not or might not involve absolute subjection to the “rule of violence.” I take it that absolute subjection is what Vann means by “once and for all.” He cannot mean “forever,” for governments fall, states decay, people rebel; we know nothing about forever. “Rule of violence” is a more difficult term. Vann can hardly set the limit of appeasement at the point where it means yielding to greater physical force; that is always what it means. As a moral limit, the phrase must point to something more unusual and more frightening: the rule of men committed to the continual use of violence, to a policy of genocide, terrorism, and enslavement. Then appeasement would be, quite simply, a failure to resist evil in the world.
Now that is exactly what the Munich agreement was. Vann’s argument, once we have understood its terms, undermines his own case. For there can be no doubt that Nazism represented the rule of violence, and that its true character was sufficiently known at the time. And there can be no doubt that Czechoslovakia was surrendered to Nazism in 1938; the remnants of its territory and sovereignty could not be defended—at least not by the Czechs—and that, too, was known at the time. But it remains a question whether Vann’s argument might not apply to other cases. I will skip the Polish war, for the Poles were confronted again by Nazi aggression and had, no doubt, learned from the Czech experience. But the situation of Finland a few months later was different. There the “Munich principle” was urged by all of Finland’s friends and by many Finns as well. It did not seem to them, despite the Czech experience, that an acceptance of Russian terms in the late fall of 1939 would have been “a surrender once and for all to the rule of violence.”
Stalin’s Russia was not a conventional great power, but its behavior in the months before the Finnish war was very much in the style of traditionalist power politics. It sought to expand at the expense of the Finns, but the demands it made were moderate, closely linked to questions of military security, without revolutionary implications. What was at issue, Stalin insisted, was nothing more than the defense of Leningrad, which was then within artillery range of the Finnish border (he did not fear a Finnish attack but a German attack from Finnish territory). “Since we cannot move Leningrad,” he said, “we must move the border.”26 The Russians offered to yield more land (though less valuable land) than they sought to take over, and that offer gave the negotiations at least something of the character of an exchange between sovereign states. At an early point in the talks, Marshal Mannerheim, who had no illusions about Soviet policy, strongly recommended making the deal. It was more dangerous for Finland than for Russia for the Finns to be so close to Leningrad. Stalin may well have intended an eventual annexation of Finland, or its transformation into a communist state, but that was not apparent at the time. Most Finns thought the danger, though serious enough, was something less than that. They feared further encroachments and pressures of a more ordinary kind. Hence the Finnish case offers a useful test of the “Munich principle.” Should Finland have agreed to terms less favorable than it could justly claim in order to avoid the carnage of war? Should its allies have pressed such terms upon it?
The first question cannot be answered flatly either way; the choice belongs to the Finns. But the rest of us have an interest, and it is important to try to understand the moral satisfaction with which their decision to fight was greeted throughout the world. I am not referring here to the excitement that always attends the beginnings of a war and that rarely lasts for long, but rather to the sense that the Finnish decision was exemplary (as the British, French, and Czech decision to surrender, greeted with an uneasy combination of relief and shame, was not). There is, of course, a natural sympathy for the underdog in any competition, including war, and a hope that he can pull off an unexpected victory. But in the case of war, this is specifically a moral sympathy and a moral hope. It has to do with the perception that underdogs are also (usually) victims or potential victims: their struggle is right. Even if national survival is not at stake—as in fact it was, for the Finns, once the war began—we hope for the defeat of the aggressor in much the same way as we hope for the defeat of a neighborhood bully, even if he is not a murderer. Our common values are confirmed and enhanced by the struggle; whereas appeasement, even when it is the better part of wisdom, diminishes those values and leaves us all impoverished.
Our values would also have been diminished, however, had Stalin quickly overwhelmed the Finns and then treated them as the Athenians did the Melians. But that suggests less the desirability of surrender than the critical importance of collective security and resistance. Had Sweden, for example, been publicly committed to send troops to fight with the Finns, there would probably never have been a Russian attack.27 And the British and French plans to come to Finland’s aid, inept and self-serving as these were, probably played a decisive part, along with the early and unexpected victories of the Finnish army, in persuading the Russians to seek a negotiated settlement. The new borders established in March 1940 were far worse than those that had been offered to Finland four months earlier; thousands of Finnish soldiers (and a greater number of Russians) were dead; hundreds of thousands of Finnish civilians were driven from their homes. But against all this must be set the vindication of Finnish independence. I don’t know how one strikes the balance, still less how one might have done so in 1939 when vindication seemed an unlikely or at best a chancy prospect. Nor can its value be measured even now; it involves national pride and self-respect as much as freedom in policy-making (which no state possesses absolutely and Finland, since 1940, to a lesser degree than many). If the Finnish war is commonly thought to have been worthwhile, it is because independence is not a value that can easily be traded off.c
The “Munich principle” would concede the loss or erosion of independence for the sake of the survival of individual men and women. It points toward a certain sort of international society, founded not on the defense of rights but on the adjustment to power. No doubt there is realism in this view. But the Finnish example suggests that there is also realism in the alternative view, and in a twofold sense. First, the rights are real, even to the people who must die to defend them; and second, the defense is (sometimes) possible. I don’t want to argue that appeasement can never be justified, only to point to the great importance we collectively attach to the values the aggressor attacks. These values are summed up in the existence of states like Finland—indeed, of many such states. The theory of aggression presupposes our commitment to a pluralist world, and that commitment is also the inner meaning of the presumption in favor of resistance. We want to live in an international society where communities of men and women freely shape their separate destinies. But that society is never fully realized; it is never safe; it must always be defended. The Finnish war is a paradigmatic example of the necessary defense. That is why, for all the complexity of the diplomatic maneuvering that preceded the war, the actual fighting has about it a great moral simplicity.
The defense of rights is a reason for fighting. I want now to stress again, and finally, that it is the only reason. The legalist paradigm rules out every other sort of war. Preventive wars, commercial wars, wars of expansion and conquest, religious crusades, revolutionary wars, military interventions—all these are barred and barred absolutely, in much the same way as their domestic equivalents are ruled out in municipal law. Or, to turn the argument around once more, all these constitute aggressive acts on the part of whoever begins them and justify forceful resistance, as their equivalents would in the homes and streets of domestic society.
But this is not yet a complete characterization of the morality of war. Though the domestic analogy is an intellectual tool of critical importance, it doesn’t offer an entirely accurate picture of international society. States are not in fact like individuals (because they are collections of individuals), and the relations among states are not like the private dealings of men and women (because they are not framed in the same way by authoritative law). These differences are not unknown or obscure. I have been ignoring them only for the sake of analytical clarity. I have wanted to argue that as an account of our moral judgments, the domestic analogy and the legalist paradigm possess great explanatory power. The account is still incomplete, however, and I must look now at a series of issues and historical cases that suggest the need for revision. I cannot exhaust the range of possible revision, for our moral judgments are enormously subtle and complex. But the major points at which the argument for justice requires the amendment of the paradigm are clear enough; they have long been the focus of legal and moral debate.