Abstract
Social science has assumed a distinction between empirical statements about reality as it is and normative statements about how the world ought to be. Realists who claim to work with the world as it is, also make this distinction. In this view, the empirical reality is one of power politics; thus neither moral principle, ethical action nor legal codification is ultimately important at the international level. In the absence of any overarching authority, states are guided by their national interest rather than moral principle. War is a brute reality and the attempt to introduce norms is a mere add on, growing out of a desire to alter the unalterable. However, if war is viewed as a social artifact, then its practice is no less permeated with moral and normative restrictions than more explicit moral or humanitarian efforts to limit it.1
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Notes
For the latter argument, see: Michael N. Barnett, “The UN and Global Security: The Norm is Mightier than the Sword,” Ethics and International Affairs 9 (1995), 50; John Keegan, A History of Warfare (London: Hutchinson, 1993); Martin van Creveld, “The Persian Gulf Crisis of 1990–1991 and the Future of Morally Constrained War,” Parameters, 22, 2 (1992), 37–8; Neta Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization and Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See: Jutta Weldes, Constructing the National Interest (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), for an argument that the national interest is itself a social construct.
Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel, eds, Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 2. Nardin and Mapel’s edited volume provides an excellent overview of various traditions of international ethics. See also: Charles R. Beitz, Marshall Cohen, Thomas Scanlon and A. John Simmons, eds, International Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Ward Thomas, The Ethics of Destruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Stanley Hoffman et al., The Ethics and Politics of Humanitarian Intervention (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996); Jonathan Moore, ed., Hard Choices: Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); David Campbell, Politics before Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics and Narratives of the Gulf War (Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner, 1993); Karen E. Smith and Margot Light, eds, Ethics and Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Thomas Donaldson, “Kant’s Global Rationalism,” in Nardin and Mapel, Traditions of International Ethics, pp. 136–7. See also: Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1964), and Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). For a discussion of agent-centered deontological theory, see: Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 164–85.
Max Weber, Politics as Vocation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1965).
Thucycides, History of the Peloponnesian War (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), Book I, para. 76. The realist description of Thucydides is an incomplete reading of the role of morality in the History. See: Hayward Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 59–60, APRS; Crawford, Argument and Change.
He contrasted the actions of Cesare Borgia, who created order in his state with ruthlessness, to the Florentines, who, in avoiding cruelty, allowed the development of such disorder that their acquisition was “destroyed.” Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses (New York: The Modern Library, 1950), chs 17, 65.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Penguin Books, ([1651] 1980), ch. 13.
Another angle is that morality is a private not a public concern, inappropriate for policy. From the perspective of the practitioner theorist, morality should not enter into international discourse, although it is possible for it to do so. The classical perspective denies the possibility of moral considerations in an anarchical system. There are broadly descriptive and prescriptive accounts of the absence of morality in international relations. G. Graham, Ethics and International Relations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
Reinhold Neibuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), p. 91.
Nicholas John Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), p. 18.
Henry Kissinger, American Foreign Policy, 2nd edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977); Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 6th edn (New York: Knopf, 1948, rev. by K. W. Thompson, 1985).
Neta Crawford, “Just War Theory and the U.S. Counterterror War,” Perspectives on Politics, 1, 1 (2003).
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
Mervyn Frost, “The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention: Protecting Civilians to Make Democratic Citizenship Possible,” in Karen E. Smith and Margot Light, eds, Ethics and Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 26.
Janice A. Thomson, “Norms in International Relations: A Conceptual Analysis,” International Journal of Group Tensions, 23 (1993), p. 73.
Although justness was still linked to a cause ordained by God. For a discussion of the Islamic Just War tradition, see: Terry Nardin, ed., The Ethics of War and Peace: Religious and Secular Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Torbjorn L. Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 18.
St Augustine, City of God (New York: Image Books, 1958), book 19, chapter 7.
Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory, p. 18. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (New York: Benzinger Brother, [1266–1273] 1947).
James Turner Johnson, Morality and Contemporary Warfare (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 42–4.
Prior to the Second World War, this meant that non-state actors, for instance, those resisting occupation, had no just cause for war. On the contrary, occupying powers were justified in employing force against persons or groups that had no political superior. This was at the core of Rousseau’s critique of the laws of war as formulated by Grotius. For an in-depth discussion of historical debates regarding the relationship between occupation and resistance, see: Karma Nabulsi, “Occupying Armies and Civilian Populations,” in Traditions of War: Occupation, Resistance and the Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 19–65.
A. J. Coates, The Ethics of War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 2.
Adam Roberts and Richard Guelff, eds, Documents on the Laws of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 2.
Geoffrey Best, War and Law since 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 45. See also the discussion of the role of peace movements in William C. Olson and A. J. R. Groom, International Relations Then and Now: Origins and Trends in Interpretation (London: HarperCollins, 1991).
C. I. A. D. Draper, The Red Cross Conventions (London, Stevens and Sons Ltd, 1958), p. 2. The numbers appear to be contested since Draper puts the number of deaths at 38,000 while the Encyclopedia of Britannica states the more conservative estimate of 29,000. See http://concise.britannica.com/ebc/article?tocId=9379057
For further background on Dunant’s experience and the pamphlet, see: Pierre Boissier, From Solferino to Tsushima: History of the International Committee of the Red Cross (Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 1978).
Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), p. 32.
Collective Security was not a new idea but one as old as the Westphalian System. Adam Roberts and Benedict Kingsbury, United Nations, Divided World: The UN’s Role in International Relations, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 30.
Articles 12–15 took up South African Jan Smut’s idea for a breathing space, during which war would be precluded as countries attempted to settle their disputes peacefully and public opinion would thus be allowed time to restrain any rush to war. Clive Archer, International Organizations (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 16.
E. H. Carr, “The Beginning of a Science,” The Twenty Years’ Crisis: 1919–1939 (London: Papermac, [1939] 1964), p. 34.
Thomas Weiss and Cindy Collins, Humanitarian Challenges and Intervention: World Politics and the Dilemmas of Help (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), p. 3.
Larry Minear, The Humanitarian Enterprise: Dilemmas and Discoveries (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2002), p. 2.
Emergency and distress relief increased from $766 million in 1989 to 4.365 billion in 1999, OECD/DAC, Development Cooperation 2000 Report (Paris), table 2, 180–1.
For an analysis of UN powers under chapter VII, see: Danesh Sarooshi, The United Nations and the Development of Collective Security: The Delegation by the UN Security Council of its Chapter VII Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Rights of due process, under the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949, deal with prisoners of war and civilians respectively. The defendant has the right to be told—early on and in a language he understands—what he is accused of; to be presumed innocent until proven guilty; to be tried without undue delay; to be heard before an impartial decision-maker; to be tried in a “regularly constituted court” (if the accused is a PoW, it may be a military court); to prepare and present a defense; to present witnesses; not to be required to testify against himself or to confess guilt; to be tried in his presence; to be convicted only of a crime that he himself committed; not to be punished more than once for the same act; to be convicted only for what was a crime at the time of the act in question; to have a sentence no more severe than the law allowed at the time of the act in question; to be told of his rights of appeal and what time limits there are; to appeal and ask for pardon or reprieve; and to have any death sentence stayed until six months after notification of the protecting power. For a more detailed discussion, see: Gideon Levy, “Due Process,” in Roy Gutman and David Rieff, eds, Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know (London: W. W. Norton, 1999), pp. 127–30.
Adam Roberts, “Counter-Terrorism, Armed Force and the Laws of War,” Survival, 44, 1 (2002), p. 24. See also: Adam Roberts, “The Laws of War in the War on Terror,” Israeli Yearbook on Human Rights, vol. 32 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 2002).
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Fierke, K.M. (2005). Moral Interventions. In: Diplomatic Interventions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230509917_3
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