An Opening Case
Young men still have to register with Selective Service just in case they are needed in the military, but many soldiers are returning now from overseas to a country that does not understand or much identify with their fighting. In the first decade of the new century, there was a brief period when people talked of bringing back a universal military draft to the United States. While such talk lasted, the events of 9/11 and the resulting “war on terror” seemed more of a reality than now. One might say that as a nation we determined to “outsource” war to those who would volunteer to fight. We are willing to pay (not adequately enough, many would argue) for some among us to wage war on our behalf.
If a war can be justly waged, or an international police action is morally warranted, should not everyone who is age-appropriate and physically able be subject to the military draft as needed? Say through a lottery system, like the one established in December 1969? Young men and women alike? How might the prospect of really having to fight a war influence your level of concern about whether it can justified?
September 11, 2011. Who can forget the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City disintegrating, another hijacked plane crashing into the Pentagon, and yet another in rural Pennsylvania? Thus began the latest international war—a war on terrorism supported by an international coalition but clearly led by the United States.
Most people would agree that war is evil, but many Christians do not agree on whether participation in war is ever necessary and justifiable. There have been three major traditions. When the earliest Christian community was a persecuted minority in the Roman Empire, pacifism was the norm. Many Christians refused to serve in the military forces, claiming to follow the Prince of Peace instead. However, evidence suggests that, even in that time, some Christians served in the Roman army.
With Constantine’s conversion in 312, the Christian faith became recognized as the official religion of the empire, and Christians took a more open stance about the possibility of engaging in war. Contemplating the ravaging of Roman civilization by the barbarians in the fifth century led Augustine to articulate certain conditions under which war could be justified—the so-called just war theory. These conditions, with their subsequent development, are the following:
For a contemporary example of the way the just war tradition may be applied, see the essay by Ronald Osborn in the “Foundations” chapter of this book (pp. 29–33).
Most Christian churches have espoused a just war position, arguing that the presence of evil in the world at times necessitates the use of force in order to protect the innocent and to ensure a just and humane order. One obvious question is whether criteria for a justifiable war have any relevance for the modern age. Nations no longer fight only on weekdays or with the use of limited weapons, as they did in the Middle Ages. While nuclear know-how has not yet been scrapped, the just war criteria appear more useful today than they did at the height of the nuclear buildup. Advocates argue that the just war criteria assume at least a symbolic value in attempts to keep human concerns at the forefront in our consideration of war.
The third position that Christians have adopted is that war can be a crusade, in which the faithful aggressively carry out the will of God. The Crusades of the Middle Ages are the primary example of this view, inspired by Old Testament stories of God’s people using the sword against the enemies of Israel. We see the crusade mentality in claims that “God is on our side,” as many said during World War II and occasionally during the Vietnam War, or in claims today that we are facing an “evil empire.”
In the first essay, Miroslav Volf assesses whether our response to 9/11 made us morally “better” and what sort of conversations Christians should be having today, a decade after the terrorist bombing. His questions are penetrating: Is forgiveness possible? What have been the consequences of 9/11 for us, the United States? What was the impact of the evil suffered on that day for us? He gives a moral accounting, noting both negative and positive consequences. There has been, he writes, an increase in prejudice against Islam and a multiplication in the number of the enemies we have made in order to secure our own future. He suggests further that our own long-term security has diminished along with American exceptionalism. Moreover, torture has increasingly been accepted as a way of getting information about the enemy. Finally, he claims that America itself has come to be seen as a religion. We seem to worship the United States. On the positive side, he lists an increased effort to understand other religions, a sense that America is in fact a pluralistic nation, and a trend toward the sharing of values between Christians and Muslims. Though short, this essay raises significant issues about war and the way it has infiltrated national life. In conclusion, Volf wonders what is driving our capitalistic economy; he suggests that pleasure is now seen as the hallmark of the good life. He concludes by raising the topic of the interrelation of vulnerability and security. How can we secure ourselves against the risk of being vulnerable?
Our second essay, by Mark Allman and Tobias Winright, “When the Shooting Stops,” is quite timely in light of the efforts by emerging nations in the Middle East to build governments. So, to the jus ad bello—the criteria for going to war—and jus in bellum—the norms for conducting war, they add a jus post bellum—some ideals for beginning to build and govern a nation that has been torn by warring factions.
There is a strong tradition of nonviolence in the Christian tradition, which is represented by our third essay. The president of Evangelicals for Social Action, Ron Sider, calls Christians to “invest large amounts of money and time in serious training and deployment” and to adopt courageous nonviolence as a strategy for resolving conflicts and working toward peace. “We cannot know ahead of time what will happen. But we already know,” he writes, “that unless we do this, our Christian rhetoric about war will be both hypocritical and dishonest.” Sider’s argument is interesting in that it suggests that confrontive nonviolence works and that it should be adopted on the basis of Christian values.
The final essay in this chapter is by Jean Bethke Elshtain, whose essay seems to place her in the camp of Christian political realists. Perpetual peace is not a possibility, but there are relative discriminations, she says. We make relative judgments about what constitutes a decent democracy and the barriers to achieving it. There are situations that require us to take up our responsibilities for action. Utopianism is a dangerous position, she claims. For her part, she “has determined to speak primarily of ‘minimally decent states’ rather than democracy as such in the future,” and to seek to determine what sort of regime is most compatible with human dignity.
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When the first plane smashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center I was in the delegates’ dining room of the United Nations finishing a talk at the Annual International Prayer Breakfast. My theme was reconciliation. To illustrate just what enmity can bring about, I opened and closed the talk quoting from “Death Fugue,” Paul Celan’s haunting poem about hellish hatred, which during World War II sent millions of Jews to their “grave in the air.” Minutes after I ended, we had to evacuate the building for fear that we ourselves may find our grave in the air as so many in the Twin Towers did. Only hours later, New York was a ghost city, abandoned in a hurry by people in shock. The whole nation, wounded and humiliated, was soon gripped by fear, which gave birth to anger and determination to “kick some ass” internationally, as one of our eloquent political leaders put it. That was then, immediately after the attack. Where are we today, ten years later?
One way to approach the question is to ask whether, as a result of the 9/11 trauma, we have become better people? “Better” measured by what standard? I am a Christian theologian and although America is not “a Christian nation,” many of its citizens are Christians. So I’ll use moral standards derived from the Christian faith, which are largely shared by people of other faiths or no faith at all. Have we become better people? Some of us and in some regards have, and others of us and in other regards have not. Let’s look first at the debit side of our moral account:
And now to the credit side of our moral account, which only sometimes balances the debit side of it:
9/11 plunged us into in a moral struggle for our soul as a people. What I hope for those of us who consider ourselves Christians is that we will learn to live positively rather than reactively, guided by our own moral vision of life sketched for us in the teachings and example of Jesus Christ, rather than fighting evil with its own methods. Jesus Christ taught: “in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matt. 7:14); “love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44); “blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matt. 5:9).
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. . . . The absence of a just peace is deeply troubling. Those who are injured, suffering, homeless, fearful, hungry or grieving the deaths of loved ones are the very people that Jesus would have us love. These who have suffered through war are in special need of God’s peace and justice, of reconciliation and restoration. After the smoke clears, Christians must work to foster and promote a just peace.
As the Second Vatican Council noted, “Peace is not merely the absence of war” but “an enterprise of justice” (see Isa. 32:7), which is “never attained once and for all, but must be built up ceaselessly.” Hence, we pray for an end to war. But when war does happen, all that we do during war must be directed toward a just peace. When the shooting stops we must be ready to build that peace.
The Bush administration pitched the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the American people and to the world as just wars, but in the months before the invasion of Iraq, Christian ethicists and theologians criticized the U.S. plans for preventative war on just war grounds. Similar scrutiny continued during the fighting. Yet a just peace remains elusive. While theologians and ethicists continue to be concerned about what’s happening in the wake of these wars, the lack of a framework or list of moral criteria stymies their efforts to gauge and evaluate efforts to establish a just peace.
The just war tradition has come to consist of several criteria for evaluating when and how war should be conducted (the lists vary depending on the source). Although classical just war thinkers did not explicitly do so, modern articulators of just war theory divide the criteria into two primary categories: jus ad bellum and jus in bello. The jus ad bellum category consists of criteria that must be met in order to justify engaging in war; the jus in bello category includes criteria concerning just conduct during a war. In their pastoral letter from 1983, The Challenge of Peace, the U.S. Catholic bishops included under jus ad bellum the criteria of just cause, right intention, legitimate authority, probability of success, last resort, comparative justice and proportionality. Under jus in bello are two criteria: discrimination (noncombatant immunity) and proportionate force. Taken together, these criteria are meant to ensure that there is justice when entering into war and justice in the way the war is conducted.
One of the criticisms of the just war tradition is that it lacks what John Kelsay calls “historical thickness”; the tradition tends to ignore the larger historical context (the decades preceding the war) and instead looks only at the period immediately prior to conflict. John Howard Yoder cautioned against this tendency to “punctualism” in moral decision making and in connection with just war thinking (see his Century essay on the first Gulf War, March 13, 1991): “What is either right or wrong is that punctual decision, based upon the facts of the case at just that instant, and the just war tradition delivers the criteria for adjudicating that decision. This procedure undervalues the longitudinal dimensions of the conflict.”
To counter this tendency, ethicist Glen Stassen has led Christian pacifists and just war theorists in working to diminish the likelihood of war by promoting peacemaking practices that help create conditions for a just peace. While this effort has gained traction, the just war tradition also needs to be longitudinally extended to include jus post bellum. This will “close the loop” and make for a more honest just war theory by bringing us back to the practices of just peacemaking.
This postwar dimension has begun to gain the attention of church leaders. In “Toward a Responsible Transition in Iraq,” Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski, as chair of the international policy committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote in 2006, “It is important for all to recognize that addressing questions regarding the decisions that led us to war, and about the conduct of war and its aftermath, is both necessary and patriotic.” Similarly, in their 2007 document “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” the bishops called on nations to find ways to prevent conflicts, to resolve them by peaceful means “and to promote reconstruction and reconciliation in the wake of conflicts.”
While criteria exist for addressing questions about the decisions leading to war and the conduct during war, there are none concerning its aftermath. We do not mean to suggest that the just war tradition has been completely blind to postwar ethics. For centuries, military strategists have talked about exit strategies. Some ancient religious examples of just war thought prohibited poisoning wells, salting fields and cutting down fruit and olive trees because such actions extend the effects of war well beyond the period of active combat.
Others who addressed postwar ethics, including Cicero, Augustine, Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suarez and Immanuel Kant, did so mostly in passing and not with the degree of systematic detail that is part of the jus ad bellum and jus in bello categories. In the October 26, 1994, issue of the Century, theologian Michael Schuck pointed out this lacuna in the just war tradition. Since then, however, those who have treated this neglected dimension of just war have mainly been philosophers, political theorists, international law scholars and military scientists, while bishops and theologians have been largely silent on the issue.
International relations scholar Serena K. Sharma observes that too often the two sets of criteria are viewed as “logically separate and self-contained categories,” so that focus remains on justice immediately before and during war. We believe that the criteria are interrelated and interlocking, so that the categories jus ad bellum and jus in bello are basically shorthand devices meant to reinforce a just peace not merely as an afterthought of war but as “a guiding principle, present at the initiation of hostilities and continuing throughout all respective phases of war.”
We propose four jus post bellum criteria or components to complement the jus ad bellum and jus in bello categories: just cause, reconciliation, punishment and restoration. These are not to be understood in any particular chronological sequence or order of importance. All should be implemented together.
The first criterion is just cause. The result of any just war should be the accomplishment of the objectives that served as the grounds for just cause in the jus ad bellum phase. Satisfying the demand for a just cause is different from returning to the situation that led to war in the first place. The goal of a just war is to establish social, political and economic conditions that are more stable, more just and less prone to chaos than conditions that existed prior to the fighting. Three primary theoretical objectives are: to hold parties accountable until the mission is accomplished, to restrain parties from seeking additional gains and to stem overly zealous post bellum responses. In practice this criterion entails both the return of unjust gains and the prohibition of unconditional surrenders.
The second criterion is reconciliation. If the primary objective of a just war is a just and lasting peace, then there can be no peace without reconciliation. A relationship of animosity, fear and hatred must be transformed into one of tolerance (if not respect), with enemies turned into friends and emotional healing brought to the victims of war. For Catholic Christians, there are parallels here with the sacrament of reconciliation, or penance. Moreover, the paradigm of restorative justice informs this criterion and its attendant practices. This phase is not about cheap grace or taking a “forgive and forget” approach. It involves acknowledgment of wrongdoing, admission of responsibility, punishment, forgiveness and perhaps amnesty. Ideally reconciliation should lead to the return of the offending party to communion. The goal is justice tempered by mercy; in practice, reconciliatory aims can be promoted through ceasefire agreements, restrained postwar celebrations, public and transparent postwar settlement processes, and apologies.
The third jus post bellum criterion is punishment. Here the primary objectives are justice, accountability and restitution. The legitimacy of punishments depends on several factors: publicity and transparency (punishments ought to be meted out through public forums to which many, if not all, have access); proportionality and discrimination (appropriate punitive measures should not be excessively debilitating and must make distinctions based on level of command and culpability); and legitimate authority (punishments ought to be assigned by an authority that is recognized as legitimate by all sides). In all likelihood, the legitimacy of the punishment phase depends on an independent authority (a third party) in order to avoid even the appearance of a victor acting as judge, jury and executioner of the vanquished. In practice, the punishment phase involves compensation (restitution) and war crimes trials.
The fourth criterion is restoration. The goal of a just war is not simply the cessation of violence but the creation or restoration of the political, economic, social and ecological conditions that allow citizens to flourish. In other words, a just war should seek to create an environment that permits citizens to pursue a life that is meaningful and dignified. Doing so involves practical concerns such as providing and establishing security through policing and the rule of law; enabling political reform so that a functional government can promote the common good and provide public services such as education, health care and electricity; fostering economic recovery by helping with the transition from a postwar to a peacetime economy; providing social rehabilitation for people who have been victimized by war and for soldiers who may suffer from injuries and trauma; and initiating ecological cleanup efforts to remove cluster munitions and other unexploded weapons.
We hope that this account of jus post bellum becomes a lasting and integral component in Christian reflection on just war. We intend for these criteria of jus post bellum to enrich and to buttress the just war tradition—to give it more teeth, as Yoder called upon Christian just war proponents to do—by emphasizing that moral responsibility for war does not come to a halt when combat ends. As Christians we believe we owe something to Hamid, his young daughter and his nephew. We have a duty to Mohamed Moussa and to returning soldiers like Eugene Cherry. For them and countless others, Ezekiel’s ancient words about false prophets “saying ‘Peace,’ when there is no peace” hit close to home.
After the destruction of Jerusalem, Ezekiel shifted his focus to the hope of Israel’s restoration, the New Jerusalem. The plain filled with dry bones, he prophesized, would be transformed into a habitat teeming with new life. The dispossessed would return to their land, rebuild their homes and regain their livelihoods. This era would be characterized by lives devoted to virtue, righteousness, justice and true peace, or shalom.
As Christians we believe that within Ezekiel’s metaphorical message of hope is a commission that we have inherited as a new community brought into being through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If we are going to continue to view armed intervention as sometimes justified—as “just war” or “legitimate defense” or “the responsibility to protect”—we need criteria to help warrant such actions (jus ad bellum), to govern conduct during these interventions (jus in bello) and to guide the establishment of a just and lasting peace (jus post bellum).
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The twentieth century was the bloodiest in human history. In Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century, Jonathan Glover estimates that 86,000,000 people died in wars fought from 1900 to 1989. That means 2,500 people every day, or 100 people every hour, for ninety years.
In addition to those killed in war, government-sponsored genocide and mass murder killed approximately 120,000,000 people in the twentieth century—perhaps more than 80,000,000 in the two Communist countries of China and the Soviet Union alone, according to R. J. Rummel’s Statistics of Democide.
It is ironic, then, that the twentieth century also produced numerous and stunningly successful examples of nonviolent victories over injustice and oppression. The best-known campaigns are probably those led by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. King’s nonviolent marchers changed American history. (The fact that the police and National Guard sometimes guarded civil-rights marchers does not change the fact that King’s movement was overwhelmingly nonviolent.) And Gandhi’s nonviolent campaign defeated the British Empire and won India’s independence. In contrast to Algeria’s violent independence campaign, in which one in every ten Algerians died, only one in every 400,000 Indians died in India’s nonviolent struggle.
One of the most amazing components of Gandhi’s campaign was a huge nonviolent “army” (eventually over 50,000) of Muslim Pathans in the northwestern section of India. These are the same people we now know as the Taliban in Afghanistan and along the Pakistan border! Even when the British humiliated them and slaughtered hundreds of them, they remained faithful to Gandhi’s nonviolent vision.
There are other examples: In Poland, the nonviolent campaigns of Solidarity, an anti-Communist movement affiliated with the Catholic Church, successfully defied and helped defeat the Soviet empire. In the Philippines, a million peaceful demonstrators overthrew the brutal dictatorship of president Ferdinand Marcos. The list of successful twentieth-century nonviolent campaigns is long.
Considering these successes, one wonders what might happen if the Christian world became serious about exploring the full possibilities of applying nonviolent methods of seeking peace to unjust, violent situations around the world. All Christians claim to believe Jesus when he says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matt. 5:9). But we have not made much use of one demonstrably successful way of making peace.
Recently, the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), made famous by the kidnapping of four team members in Iraq in late 2005, have been working to apply the nonviolent techniques of Gandhi and King to conflict situations around the world. At Hebron in the West Bank, a few Jewish settlers live in the midst of the overwhelmingly Palestinian city of Hebron. Taunts, anger, violence, and deaths are frequent.
For ten years, CPT’ers have lived in Hebron, seeking to befriend both sides, accompanying those oppressed by violence, sitting in houses threatened with illegal demolition, and walking children to school in neighborhoods where gunfire has too often struck down the wrong targets. CPT teams are defending the rights of native Canadians and Latin American peasants, as well.
The team’s work made nightly news when four members were kidnapped by militants in Baghdad. Months later, three were released after the body of Tom Fox was found in the city. Last month marked the second anniversary of that kidnapping. One need not agree with all of CPT’s political and theological ideas to conclude that now is the time for the entire Christian community to ask: Could we build on and vastly expand CPT’s nonviolent approaches to peacemaking?
Just-war Christians—the vast majority of Christians since the fourth century—have always upheld that war must be a last resort. Before we are to go to war, we must have tried all reasonable nonviolent alternatives. But how can contemporary just-war Christians claim they have tried all reasonable nonviolent alternatives in the face of two hard facts: One, even without much preparation, nonviolent approaches have worked again and again; and two, we have never trained CPT-like teams that could explore the possibilities of nonviolence in a serious, sustained way? In order to engage in a serious, large-scale test of nonviolence, just-war Christians do not have to believe that nonviolence will always prevent war. All they must do is implement their own rule that war must be a last resort.
Pacifists have long claimed they have an alternative to war. But that claim remains empty unless they are willing to risk death, as soldiers do, to stop injustice and bring peace.
The theological commitments of both just-war and pacifist Christians demand that they invest serious time and resources in sustained nonviolent peacemaking. Think of what might have happened before Bosnia or Kosovo exploded in carnage if the Archbishop of Canterbury, top Catholic cardinals (or even the Pope), and leading Orthodox leaders had invited Muslim leaders to join them in leading a few thousand praying, peaceful Christian and Muslim followers into those dangerous places to demand peace.
Christian leaders from all traditions should together issue a call for something that has yet to happen in Christian history: the training and deployment of thousands of CPT-type peacemakers who are committed to using the nonviolent teachings of Gandhi and King, inspired by Jesus, in unjust, violent settings around the world.
I know from personal experience that this kind of nonviolent intervention is dangerous. In the mid-1980s, the U.S. was secretly funding thousands of guerillas (called the Contras) who were killing hundreds of Nicaraguan civilians in their attempt to overthrow the Sandinista government. I opposed the Marxist, repressive tendencies of the Sandinista government, but also rejected U.S. funding of the Contras.
So in early 1985, I joined a team from Witness for Peace that visited a Nicaraguan town under attack by the Contras. As we wound our way down the side of the mountain toward the town, we knew a thousand guerillas in the surrounding hills had their binoculars—and perhaps their guns—trained on us. I was scared, but believed God had called me to that moment. We arrived safely and the townsfolk told us they slept peacefully that night, believing the Contras would not attack while a team of praying American Christians was there.
If top global Christian leaders (hopefully joined by Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and others) led a thousand trained, praying, non-violent peacemakers into the West Bank, the eyes of the world would be on them. Hundreds of millions would be praying for peace and justice for both Israelis and Palestinians. Massive media coverage would pressure both sides to negotiate. The same would happen if Archbishop Tutu led a few thousand praying African Christians, joined by people from other continents, into Zimbabwe to demand that President Mugabe call fair elections.
If Christians with both just-war and pacifist convictions truly mean what they have been saying for centuries about war and peace, then they have no choice. Nonviolence has worked. It’s time to invest large amounts of money and time in serious training and deployment. We cannot know ahead of time what will happen. But we already know that unless we do this, our Christian rhetoric about war will be both hypocritical and dishonest.
It’s time to live what we preach.
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Prophets of the new utopianism take strong exception to the arguments of those they call “the new internationalists,” a stance they associate with such thinkers as Michael Ignatieff, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Jean Bethke Elshtain. Many of these rejoinders are rather angry, as if the new internationalists stand in the way of a real possibility to create a new international order in which sovereignty is side-lined, international law triumphs, and nations no longer know war. These are ancient dreams restated in contemporary terms. . . .
Elsewhere I have called this sort of peace “an ontologically suspicious” concept. It never appears without its violent doppelgänger, war, lurking in the shadows: the one requires the other. Peace is healing order; war is destructive discordance—the antinomies may be proliferated almost endlessly. There is an impatience with the realistically achievable possibilities of imperfect human beings and the political configurations they create.[1] Much of this impatience historically has yielded horrific terror—one thinks of Marxism with its eschatological “moment,” an insistence that once the pure classless society is achieved, states themselves will disappear and all will be as one. I will not go into detail on this—or other destructive visions of peace (perhaps, better said, visions that led to destruction once attempts were made to implement them)—here. Instead I want to speak of a possible new international order that contrasts quite strongly with the new utopianism or, as one has called it, modest utopianism with its neo-Kantian proclamations. . . .
Neo-Kantianism, of whatever stripe, is rather a far cry from arguments some of us have mounted that aspires to a world of “minimally decent states” and a commitment to the principle of “equal moral regard” for human beings. This “equal moral regard” sounds rather Kantian, to be sure, but it is not an absolute principle in practice—it is an aspiration. One appreciates the tragedy that on this earth even good and decent principles cannot be wholly realized. Surprisingly, even this rather more modest call for minimally decent states—and the assumption that such states will in one way or another likely be democratic—is taxed with a disguised form of moral imperialism, with ethnocentrism, and the encouragement of the use of force. I suspect this has happened because “the new internationalists,” myself included, point out that American constitutional principles constitute universal claims, not particular ones, and that these universal claims, e.g. “all persons are created equal,” really means all persons. As everyone knows, much of the domestic history of American political life involves contestation to achieve in practice the universalism embedded in the American experiment in principle.
Further, I and others argue that there is no way around American power. The question is whether, on balance, it is used for good or ill. For the new utopians, American power is often the problem and in the wilder forms of European anti-Americanism, America functions as the repository of all that is disgusting, crass, wicked, manipulative, etc. in the world. The mere existence of American power somehow stifles and strangles the rest of the world—on and on in this vein. For example, Anthony Burke claims that the new internationalism traffics in “fear-soaked rhetoric,” and labels the war against Saddam’s republic of fear an “unimaginable break” with international norms; Abu Ghraib is construed as the norm rather than an aberration (which makes criminal prosecution of the perpetrators rather inexplicable—if indeed their disgusting display was the norm we would give them medals, not indict them); the idea of state sovereignty is blasted as “violent and exclusivist . . . lingering like a latent illness in the very depths of modern cosmopolitanism.”[2] The metaphor of disease is fascinating here. But who are the physicians to heal the international order? For Kant, they are the moral philosophers. For Burke and so many others, it is a fantasy United Nations—quite unlike the one we actually have—and international law, universally accepted and endorsed and enforced—although their arguments are often rather thin concerning how just these laws are to be enforced and by whom. Given that the United Nations today is composed of delegates who lopsidedly represent undemocratic and corrupt regimes, this strikes me as a not terribly helpful argument. Moreover, why should an International Court of Justice dominated by Europeans be any more “universal” than claims launched by a democratic state premised on universal propositions? In sum, the Kantian vision relies on a dualistic contrast between “perpetual peace” and “perpetual war” that is a chimera. The new utopians ignore or downplay moral and political ambiguity and nuance, the smudginess of real human lives and history.
Those of us who believe the universe is not “heal-able” (if there is such a word) are often taxed with being imperialists if we express the hope that American power can help to stabilize and provide order in international affairs and, at the same time, defeatists precisely because we—or at least I—share St Augustine’s conviction that on this earth it will remain impossible to perfectly reconcile human wills. Pace the critics, this is not a counsel of defeatism at all; rather, it represents hope by contrast to optimism. Hope that the world can be made less brutal and less unjust, and this means more respect for human rights and more democratic forms insofar as democracy involves respect for persons qua persons. Saying this does not dictate any particular form of government save that no one is born to be a slave, to be tormented, or to be slaughtered because of who he or she is—whether American or Israeli or Palestinian, whether Jew or Christian or Muslim, whether male or female. The new neo-Kantian universalism—or new utopianism—is a mixture of untethered idealism, hoping for the triumph of good will and a world in which international bodies supplant states, international law supersedes multiple civic laws, and there is at some point a definitive abandonment of the use of force in international affairs.
For us “new internationalists”—if we accept the designation and I am not wild about it—we find the real challenge to our position not so much from the new utopians—I believe their arguments can be rather readily answered—but from serious classical realists who set the bar lower, insisting that the best we can do is to forestall the worst and not hope for some good. There is great wisdom in this posture—forestalling the worst is no small achievement—but, contrary to some interpreters of Augustine, I believe there is also warrant for a measure of hopefulness within his arguments concerning political life and order.
I obviously cannot speak on behalf of all those thinkers now lumped together as “the new”—and troubling, to their critics—“internationalism.” But I want to provide a quick summary of my thinking here in order to pave the way for what St Augustine brings to this inquiry. I find myself rather pained that some critics believe I have abandoned Augustine for a triumphant liberal internationalism when, for my part, Augustinianism forms the set of background assumptions for my entire argument.
In a nutshell, I have argued in several papers that we require a new standard of international justice (based on very old beliefs). Embodied in this justice is a claim to the use of coercive force deployed on one’s behalf if one is the victim of systematic, egregious, and continuing violence. The political questions—not philosophic propositions or legalistic ones, for that matter—are central here. Absent political stability, every attempt to prop up impoverished regimes must fail. This, indeed, has been the story in sub-Saharan Africa where corrupt one-party dictatorships have become the norm. Foreign aid to such bodies is eaten up by corruption. Justice demands accountability and there is no accountability where there is no structure of power and laws. Instead one sees disasters like Darfur where human beings are prey to the ruthless, the inflamed, and the irresponsible.
Absent such a structure, culminating in some form of political sovereignty—another name for “responsibility” of collective bodies in the world as we know it—the likelihood of what we now routinely call “humanitarian catastrophes” is magnified many-fold. A paradigm example of the ills attendant upon political instability absent a central, legitimate locus of power and authority is the disaster of so-called “failed states.” It is, of course, the case that states themselves, whose very reason to exist is to maintain stability and a measure of internal civic peace, may become disturbers of the peace. But because sovereignty is the way we “name” responsibility, such states can and should be held to account. We still don’t do a very good job of doing that but it is one that seems a reasonable aspiration.
I have drawn the just or justified war tradition into a discussion of international justice, demonstrating the ways in which the just war tradition embeds a theory of comparative justice applied not only to war and intervention but to politics more generally. Further, the just war tradition helps to secure a citizenship model by contrast to the model of dominator/victim that underlies the humanitarian intervention model, the latter being one that invites a kind of welfare program by contrast to the possible use of force as one way to strengthen or to secure a polity within which accountable officials are responsible for securing civic order and minimal decency.
The victimizer/victim model or modality too often incorporates a form of patronizing pity rather than recognition of those in trouble as citizens who, by definition, have the right to expect a minimally decent state. Perhaps one might call this “putting politics first”—something, oddly, that is infrequent in so many discussions mounted by the new utopians whose faith tends to be placed in a fantasy United Nations (as I have called it) and a neo-Kantian international law. If one believes with the political theorist Hannah Arendt, in a number of her major works, that it is impossible to be something as vague as a “citizen of the world” in anything like the robust way one can be a citizen of a particular state, then you will more likely be drawn to the political, citizenship model.
Just war thinking, of course, is best known as a cluster of concrete injunctions: what it is permissible to do; what it is not permissible to do, where the resort to, and the use of, force is concerned. For example, a war must be openly and legally pursued; a war must be a response to a specific instance of unjust aggression or the certain threat of such aggression; a war may be triggered by an obligation to protect the innocent (non-combatants), including those who are not members of one’s polity, from certain harm; a war should be the last resort: these are the so-called ad bellum criteria. As a set of strictures about war fighting, just war insists that means must be proportionate to ends—the rule of proportionality—and that a war be waged in such a way as to do one’s best to distinguish combatants from non-combatants—the principle of discrimination: these are the in bello criteria.
Just war and international justice as equal regard make contact precisely because the origins of just war thinking lie in Christian theology, a view of human beings as equal in the eyes of God. This underscores what is at stake when persons are unjustly assaulted, namely, that human beings qua human beings deserve equal moral regard. Equal moral regard means one possesses an inalienable dignity that is not given by governments and must not be revoked arbitrarily by governments. It follows that the spectacle of people being harried, slaughtered, or starved en masse constitutes a prima facie justice claim. Depending on the circumstances on the ground as well as the relative scales of power—who can bring force effectively to bear—an equal regard claim may trigger armed intervention on behalf of the hounded, murdered, and aggrieved. For there are times when the claims of justice may override the reluctance to take up arms. An implication of this claim is that a third party may be justified in intervening with force in order to defend those unable to defend themselves, to fight those who are engaged in unjust acts of harming, and to punish those who have engaged in systematic unjust harm in order to diminish their capacity to continue on a path of systematic and egregious violence.
The equal regard argument does not mean that any one nation or group of nations can or should respond to every instance of violation of the innocent, including the most horrific of all violations—genocide or ethnic cleansing. It is important to note that the just war tradition incorporates a cautionary note. Be as certain as you can, before you intervene in a just cause, that you have a reasonable chance of success. Don’t barge in and make a bad situation worse. Considerations such as these take us to the heart of the in bello rules, those restraints on the means deployed even in a just cause. The damage should not be greater than the offenses one aims to halt—in full recognition that even this cannot be an absolute requirement as no one ever knows for certain what the use of force may invite “down the line.” This approach, I insist, is better than the strategies of evasion and denial visible—but one example—in the Western reaction to the 1994 slaughter by Rwandan Hutus of Rwandan Tutsis; indeed, in President Clinton’s administration word went down that the term “genocide” should never be used by administration spokespersons to characterize what was happening in Rwanda as that term might incite the American people to want to “do something”—even though genocide was an accurate designation of what was happening.
This must suffice as a truncated version of my international justice and equal regard argument. Now it is time to turn to St Augustine. . . .
Of particular interest to political theology is Augustine’s thinking on issues of war and peace. He holds that an imperfect but nonetheless real earthly peace lies within the realm of the possible. At the same time, peace can never be endorsed uncritically. For Augustine offers a withering critique of the injustices that traffic under the name of peace. And justice is what is at stake in any discussion of war and peace—justice that repairs our fragile bonds of sociality and seeks to mend bonds that have already been broken or frayed by violent acts. In a fallen world, filled with imperfect human beings, we cannot achieve anything remotely approaching perfection in earthly dominion, or religious life, or anything else. At the same time, we all bear responsibility to and for one another to serve and to love our neighbors.
One implication for reflecting on Augustine’s theology as it applies to “international relations” lies in the fact that if our neighbor is being slaughtered and continuingly crushed by the heavy hand of an intolerable oppression, the just use of force and the vocation of soldiering rise to the fore as options to which we may be urged, perhaps even commanded, by a God of justice.
What is forbidden to the individual—use of lawless violence against another—is sanctioned for the social body in the form of the rule-governed use of force in and through the offices of statespersons and soldiers. In this way, justice is driven by charity and this, in turn, means one must determine the circumstances under which justice may demand penalizing those guilty of massive and egregious injustices. For Augustine, one can never get away from original sin but that does not preclude seeking right order—justice—between peoples and between peoples and God. The force brought to bear as an instrument of justice cannot be uncontrolled violence. It is not private violence. It is the use of force at the behest of right authority.
In the interest of summing things up following this much-too-brief discussion, let me just indicate that an Augustinian approach both enables the use of force in the name of justice and simultaneously limits it. Perfecting our natures is beyond our reach. So is “perpetual peace.” In the realm of force, a drive to achieve perfect justice, to create a world of neo-Kantian republics, may also erode limits to the justifiable use of force; limits, therefore, to what we are permitted to do even in the name of justice. This Augustinian wisdom exerts—or should—a chastening influence on even the most hopeful ideals lifted up by human beings. I suspect that I have myself, from time to time, been rather too exuberant about the prospects for democracy—by which I mean basic rights-respecting regimes, the most fundamental right being the right to life itself implied by innate human dignity. I have, in other words, associated myself with a tradition in American political thought resoundingly articulated by so many of our twentieth- and, now, twenty-first-century presidents: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower (though rather less so), John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, William Clinton (in an uneven way), and the second George Bush. It has been a bi-partisan commitment for decades—until the very recent past when the “left” and many American liberals, quite astonishingly, have abandoned universal aspirations for human decency and justice. Just recently a leading Democratic Senator called for a return to “fortress America,” classic isolationism. It is either that or the new utopianism that emanates from the left nowadays in America—developments that would stun the Democratic Presidents in my list above. In Great Britain, the so-called “Euston Manifesto” provides a stirring restatement of the values at stake in the war against radical extremist Islamism and why the abandonment of a robust stance in opposition to this totalitarian mind-set should be endorsed.
Naming aspirations for decent democracies is a good and understandable thing. At the same time, one must be continually aware of the barriers to the completion of such acts. The aspiration must be strong enough, and the moral imprimatur robust enough, to require us to take up our responsibilities for action. At the same time, the chastening recognition of human imperfection, finitude, and sinfulness should create barriers to utopianisms of any kind. Thus I have determined to speak primarily of “minimally decent states” rather than democracy as such in the future and, continually, to spell out what sort of democracy I have in my sights as the regime or regimes most compatible with human dignity. This suggests an argument that must await another day.