International Orders E-Book

John A. Hall

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 426

Beschreibung

This book examines the different ways in which order has been achieved in world affairs with a view to understanding current political dilemmas and opportunities. International Ordersbegins by distinguishing between world order and international order in the spirit of Hedley Bull. This leads to an analysis of five different principles of international order - the principles of the balance of power, the concert of great powers, liberal regimes, interdependence, and the exercise of hegemony. However, principles of international order are rarely simply clear cut in their operations, they intermingle with the perceptions of human agents and the plans of political leaders who have sought to structure the world polity to serve particular aims. The core of this volume comprises a detailed historical sociology of how international order was achieved at three crucial phases in the history of the states system. Theories and evidence are deployed to examine: the emergence of the European states system; the development of the European state from Westphalia to the rise of Nazism; and the emergence and impact of the Cold War. Throughout, the theories of world order are examined, tested and, in the light of evidence, improved. In conclusion, considerable attention is given to the forces of integration and disintegration which might strengthen or undermine world order in the future, and an argument is offered concerning the ethical grounds on which intervention in the affairs of another state might be justified.

Leseprobe

ToLinda Blair

INTERNATIONAL ORDERS

JOHN A. HALL

Polity Press

Copyright © John A. Hall 1996

The right of John A. Hall to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1996 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 2006, 2007

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The right of nations is by nature founded on the principle that the various nations should do to one another in times of peace the most good possible, and in times of war the least ill possible, without harming their true interests.

Montesquieu

The division of Europe into a number of independent states, connected, however, with each other, by the general resemblance of religion, language, and manners, is productive of the most beneficial consequences to the liberty of mankind.

Gibbon

The aim of the ancients was the sharing of social power among the citizens of the same fatherland: this is what they called liberty. The aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of security in private pleasures; and they call liberty the guarantees accorded by institutions to these pleasures . . . through their failure to perceive these differences, otherwise well-intentioned men caused infinite evils . . .

Constant

It was no easy task bringing together fellow citizens who had lived for many centuries aloof from, or even hostile to, each other and teaching them to co-operate in the management of their own affairs. It had been far easier to estrange them than it now was to reunite them . . .

Tocqueville

War is the locomotive of history.

Trotsky

If you love somebody, set them free.

Sting

To robbery, butchery and rapine, they give the lying name of ‘government’; they create a desolation and call it peace.

Tacitus

Contents

AcknowledgementsPreface

1Groundwork

Key Concepts

Ideal Types of International Order

Bringing History Back In

An Elective Affinity

2The European System

Imperial Order

Trahison des Clercs

Murky Waters

Countering Eurocentrism

Conclusion

3The Age of Revolutions

False Dawn

A Pax Britannica?

Traders and Heroes

Bonhomie and Barbarism

Conclusion

4La Paix Belliqueuse

Power and the Pursuit of Peace

The Rise and Fall of the Third World

The End of American Hegemony?

An Absolute Collapse

Conclusion

5Results of the Inquiry

Analytic Summary

Special Brew

Patterns of Integration and Disintegration

Knowledge, Morality, and Action

Index

Acknowledgements

The author of this book is a sociologist rather than an expert in international relations. This may raise expectations of analysis of societal relations and thus of criticism to be directed at the classical realist paradigm of international relations. Such critical commentary is likely to find a welcome within an attractive and open-minded discipline, always in search of new approaches. Whilst these expectations will be fulfilled to a considerable extent, with comments being offered on transnational and ideological forces quite as much as upon domestic politics, it is as well to warn immediately of a strong attachment to realism. This derives both from admiration for the life and work of Raymond Aron and from years of teaching students in sociology that wars, properly seen by Trotsky as ‘the locomotive of history’, massively structure social life. It would be a great mistake to abandon an elegant position precipitously for a mass of hugely questionable theories, versions of which did much harm in sociology. Accordingly, I do not seek to destroy realism but rather to explain the enabling conditions that once enabled it to function so that an amended version can guide us in the contemporary world.

This point being made, very great thanks must be given to colleagues in international relations who warmly welcomed my inquiries and intrusion. I owe a special debt to Susan Strange for characteristically muscular encouragement at an early stage, but wish also to thank Michael Doyle, John Ikenberry, Bob Keohane, and Peter Katzenstein. Anatoly Khazanov, Mette Hjort, Charles Lindholm and T. V. Paul proved themselves great friends in giving me substantial comments on an awful early draft, whilst David Held, Michael Smith, Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Central European University provided support of another kind. The extent to which my thought has been influenced by and remains in dialogue with the ideas of Ernest Gellner and Michael Mann is obvious from the text. I am generally indebted to the most recent volume of Mann’s magnificent Sources of Social Power, but draw as well on works by David Laitin, Hedley Bull, Kalevi Holsti, and Jack Snyder. As the argument made here both disagrees with and goes further than those of these authors, more than convention is involved in stressing my own responsibility for the general position advanced.

Preface

If nature abhors a vacuum, it may well be that this condition is particularly dangerous, and thereby prone to short duration, in the arena of state competition. Hence it was scarcely surprising that enormous attention was given to Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History,” an intelligent attempt to interpret the contours of the modern world in the light of the final collapse of the Soviet Union.1 Nonetheless, it was a phrase used by President Bush when confronting Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait that did most to capture the spirit of the moment. He first posited the hope for “a new world order” on September 11, 1990, but made increasing use of the phrase throughout the winter. His attempt to redefine American grand strategy was most thorough when addressing the 45th Session of the United Nations General Assembly on October 1, 1990. Bush began by stressing that the end of the Cold War made it possible for the United Nations to be used as it was intended, that is, as a centre for international collective security. If this was sensible, it was not disinterested: it had been a mere two months since Iraq had invaded Kuwait, and the speech was part of Bush’s skillful and successful building of a coalition. But the lyricism of later passages seemed to hold out much more:

I see a world of open borders, open trade and, most importantly, open minds; a world that celebrates the common heritage that belongs to all the world’s people, taking pride not just in hometown or homeland but in humanity itself. I see a world touched by a spirit, that of the Olympics, based not on competition that’s driven by fear but sought out of joy and exhilaration and a true quest for excellence. And I see a world where democracy continues to win new friends and convert old foes and where the Americas – North, Central, and South – can provide a model for the future of all humankind: the world’s first completely democratic hemisphere. And I see a world building on the emerging new model of European unity, not just Europe but the whole world whole and free.

When the Gulf War was so dramatically won, it began to seem possible that this dream of a new world order, of affluence, security, and liberty, was within humanity’s grasp.

This notion of a new world order quickly came to be seen as a sick joke. The most striking reason for this reversal was the use of violence, formal and informal, for the purposes of “ethnic cleansing” in parts of Europe and the former Soviet Union previously considered to be beyond such brutality. Faced again with concentration camps and the mass displacement of peoples, it suddenly seemed sensible to talk of the “delusion of world order,” even of “new world disorder.”2 The whole episode seemed to justify the dictum of the Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey that “recurring optimism is a vital prelude to war.”3 This had been true before the First World War, and still more strikingly so in the interwar years. All that seemed different was the speed with which hubris had come to haunt grandiloquent, bloated optimism.

Emotions can tyrannize, with revulsion, however justified, being as capable of blocking genuine thought as are Panglossian views presuming that human affairs are necessarily getting better and better. Violent swings in mood between these two poles will not do. One way to avoid volatility is to follow Hedley Bull in concentrating attention on international rather than world order, that is, in replacing an obviously emotive label with one whose relatively aseptic nature makes it suitable for social science.4 If the present inquiry opens with a restatement of Bull’s key concepts, it then turns to the different ideal types of international order that can and have characterized international relations. Whilst it would be possible to continue analysis at an abstract level, the cognitive strategy adopted here, that of examining the international orders of the historical record, is different. If this approach entails comparison of historical reality with the ideal types, its deeper purpose is that of allowing for a better understanding of our own international order. This historical turn to the argument should not be read as implying any belief that societal patterning must be of a single kind: to the contrary, historical sociology is of especial use because it enhances understanding as to why, for example, state-formation in the contemporary period cannot repeat the experience of early modern Europe.

As my fundamental claim is that this book advances social theory, at both descriptive and prescriptive levels, the reader may be helped if some notion of my position, dubbed “the realism/liberalism mix,” is given immediately. This view is heretical in seeking to join together positions classically opposed to each other. Liberals have often regarded the workings of states as impediments to social progress, a position which has occasionally led, in the opinion of realists, to strategies that so placed hope above reality as actually to have facilitated war. There is much truth to the realist objection, in my view, with states anyway remaining necessary shells given the absence of world government. Still, it is possible to make this point and to remain a liberal: Raymond Aron certainly managed this, albeit my intention is to begin to spell out a connection to which he devoted curiously little attention.

The analysis of international orders in history will show that realism depends upon certain social conditions for its existence, and that these can be – and in contemporary circumstances should be – provided by liberalism. The social constructivism of this argument does not entail, as is so often the case with that school of thought, endorsement of any facile idealism: to the contrary, analysis focuses on nations, states, regimes, and economies quite as much as upon modern ideologies. That the varied intertwinings of these forces are complex suggests a final characteristic of the argument as a whole. No elegant formal model of international order is possible, let alone any complete ethical handbook for the conduct of foreign affairs. What is offered instead is a way of looking at key social forces designed to enhance judgment, thereby to encourage prudence.

1F. Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The Public Interest, vol. 16, 1989. Fukuyama’s argument (especially when expanded as The End of History and the Last Man, Free Press, New York, 1992) led to a huge amount of commentary, the most important of which was that of an essay by Perry Anderson in his A Zone of Engagement, Verso, London, 1993.

2S. Hoffmann, “Delusions of World Order,” New York Review of Books, April 9, 1992; B. Anderson, “The New World Disorder,” New Left Review, no. 193, 1992. Cf. T. Sommer, “A World beyond Order and Control,” Guardian Weekly, April 28, 1991.

3G. Blainey, The Causes of Wars, Macmillan, London, 1977, p. 73.

4H. Bull, The Anarchical Society, Macmillan, London, 1977. I have no desire to prejudge anything, and turn in a moment to open discussion of the moral connotations attached to the notion of order.

1

Groundwork

In order to understand what is happening to contemporary world politics, it is first necessary to establish why President Bush’s heralding of a new world order was conceptually mistaken. There is no better guide to the nature of sociability, states, and justice than Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society.1 Discussion of these key concepts is followed by an exposition of five ideal types of international order; this necessarily goes beyond Bull’s position, for all that he was aware that international order came in varied forms, given notable intellectual development since his death. Justification is then offered for giving the inquiry an historical turn. The logic of the realism/liberalism mix is first noted in remarks concluding this chapter.

KEY CONCEPTS

Perhaps the most important characteristic of social life is one that is taken for granted, namely the success with which we manage most social encounters. Most of our relations in public are with strangers, yet they proceed on an orderly and regular basis, whether piloting a car through traffic lights or negotiating the pitfalls of cocktail parties.2 That the very notion of society implies a way of life opposed to random violence lay behind Raymond Aron’s criticism of Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the term “symbolic violence”:

A curious vocabulary because it no longer enables one to distinguish between different modes of socialization: on the one hand, the inevitable and diffuse influence on individuals of the social group which tends to reproduce itself, on the other hand, constraint which presupposes resistance, whether conscious or not, on the part of those who feel the pressure of social milieu and authority. Violence only retains a specific meaning when it designates a relationship between men which comprises the use of physical force or the threat to use physical force.3

Aron is here rejecting the residues of the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, so evident in Bourdieu’s concept. Socialization is less a permanent threat to authenticity than an enabling condition for humanity; the fact that many do not find that daily life resembles the triangular hell of No Exit suggests, moreover, that sociability may be more natural than Sartre’s supremely protestant hyper-Hobbesianism allows. The sharing of norms offers the possibility of banishing violence, and thereby of moving towards justice. This mattered enormously to Aron from the early 1930s. How could it have been otherwise? Aron was of Jewish background. Witnessing the Nazi book burnings made him realize that the destruction of all baselines of social reciprocity was on the historical agenda.4

Aron’s notion of sociability has everything to recommend it, but its acceptance should not close off interesting sociological complexities. Let us move from the Kantian essence of sociability to broader reflection on the nature of society. Consider Susan Watkins’s impressive recent demonstration that Western European demographic behavior came to be patterned by nation-states in the period between 1870 and 1960.5 If this strikingly supports the notion that a society can provide a way of life, it also suggests opening out debate in two ways. On the one hand, nation-states had not been unitary societies beforehand, just as they may not be completely so any longer; indeed, the territorialization of social relations is usually more ambition than achievement. If we are to understand the social world in general and international politics in particular, attention needs to be paid both to the processes that build and undermine unitary societies and to the complexities of social identity that exist in their absence. On the other hand, the fact that unitary societies are not natural, even if sociability is, raises the question as to who benefits from a particular set of rules established within a nation-state. If the violence of the Nazis towards some elements within Germany made their rule a revolt against the very notion of sociability, that is, a triumph of force and arbitrariness over settled expectations, the creation of societal order has never yet been the same as the establishment of social justice.6 In consequence, radicals and conservatives are always likely to differ in their political judgements. But division need not be absolute: there is no reason why one cannot have a reverent appreciation for the importance of the rule of law in combination with an insistence on extending social justice.7

Whatever the exact nature of the relations between sociability and society, there can be no doubt but that they are qualitatively different from relations between states. Hobbes makes the point with characteristic brutality:

But though there had never been any time, wherein particular men were in a condition of war one against another; yet in all times, kings, and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms; and continual spies upon their neighbours; which is a posture of war. But because they uphold thereby, the industry of their subjects; there does not follow from it, that misery, which accompanies the liberty of particular men.

To this war of every man, against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust.8

Sartre’s position was deemed “hyper-Hobbesian” a moment ago because he thinks that the war of all against all permanently characterizes “being-in-itself.” That is not Hobbes’s view. Life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” only in the absence of government.9 As there is no Leviathan to rule over the conflict between states, violence is natural. This is not to say that no international order can ever be achieved. But such order is likely to be the product of artifice rather than of socialization. Insofar as there are contacts between states, it is possible to talk of a system of states: still, the essence of that system remains anarchic. It was almost inevitable that this position, which can be dubbed that of brute realism, would be theorized so as to stress that states, in a world bereft of justice, seek nothing but power – or, more precisely, the maximization of their “national interest.”10

This picture needs as much qualification as did that of sociability. Just as there are elements of power within the nation-states to which we are accustomed, so too can there be sociability in the relations between states. International order is likely to be strengthened by the extensive sharing of norms and practices, that is, from the presence of international society. That we live, to some extent and for some of the time, in a society of states was Hedley Bull’s central analytic point. The morality appropriate to such circumstances was noted by Montesquieu: “The right of nations is by nature founded on the principle that the various nations should do to one another in times of peace the most good possible, and in times of war the least ill possible, without harming their true interests.”11 Aron so loved this prudential maxim that he used it to introduce his great treatise on peace and war.12

The nature of international society can be highlighted by returning to demographic patterns. Watkins’s study pays most attention to the ways in which nation-states have replaced provinces: Bretons came to behave, for example, as did the rest of France, thereby making Breton identity essentially supernumerary, an option rather than a condition. But as important as this has been the attempt to cage relations which exist outside states within their territorial boundaries.13 Ambivalent attitudes exist towards such caging. On the one hand, the control of feudalism’s violence, that is, the ability of states not just to claim the monopoly of violence but actually to achieve it, has received a good press.14 On the other hand, understanding between states, each jealous of their sovereignty, is likely to be enhanced by shared by understandings of foreign policy makers.15 The solidarity of eighteenth-century Europe’s cosmopolitan, French-speaking upper class helped ensure the smooth workings of international order, for example, quite as much as did calculations of power and advantage in the abstract. In this spirit, the creation, maintenance, and increasing social reach of international norms is often seen to be nothing less than part of the process of civilization. This can be accepted as long as the norms in question are universal and not just widespread, that is, as long as their content includes the recognition of the rights of other societies and of humane conduct when at war with them – in contrast, that is, to the extensive “norms” of fascism and Bolshevism, as well as those endemic to the racism of the European powers at the height of imperialism.16 No attempt to strike a balance between what should and what should not be contained within states has yet been successful. Much of this book concerns the changing balance between the two.

No international order has yet created a world order, that is, an arena of justice in which human beings would be welcome as universal strangers anywhere at any time, entitled to the treatment habitually given to a social group within territorial boundaries. The concept of international order is not then purely aseptic; to the contrary, it has a troubled relationship to morality. An international order may systematically favor the interests of some states rather than of all states. It is worth recalling in this context the comment made by the British general Calgacus on the Pax Romana: “To robbery, butchery and rapine, they give the lying name of ‘government’; they create a desolation and call it peace.”17 Equally, the world restored by the Congress system was directed against revolution, whilst America’s ordering of capitalism gave few favors to the developing world, despite the extension to it of the norm of sovereignty and non-intervention;18 more generally, the long peace established by the freezing of social relations in the postwar era meant very different experiences for those living in the East from those familiar to us in the West. As was the case with social order, opinion is likely to be split between radicals and conservatives as to whether international order is a good per se. Again, there is little need to take sides: one can very often (but not necessarily always) favor international order, not least since this now means the absence of nuclear war, whilst wishing to press for an extension of international society so as to allow for greater justice in world politics.

These distinctions allow us to make two points about the heralding of a new world order. Most obviously, a category mistake was being made. A new international order was in question rather than the creation of world order. A second reason for scepticism was the absence of any positive specification of what a new world order would comprise. The presumption was that the removal of evil would allow truth, peace, justice, and all good things to flourish automatically. Such carte blanche laxity, taking to be natural what needs to be justified, is very much the intellectual fashion of the age.19 As the nature of the good is deeply contested, this style of argument is useless.

If the distinction drawn by Bull between international order and world order retains validity, this does not for a moment mean that we can sit back in idleness. To the contrary, very great intellectual labors are desperately needed. Is the contemporary world polity ordered? If so, how should we characterize this order, and how distinguish it from its predecessors? Which social forces in the contemporary world are likely to support and which to undermine international order? Bull’s early death necessitates finding our own responses to these questions. Whilst answering these questions, moreover, it is important to bear in mind that Bull’s concepts have prescriptive as well as descriptive content – in itself no bad thing, provided that the two are not mingled in any licentious manner. For one thing, Bull himself insisted that international order was a necessary precondition for the development of world order, which is not to say that he felt that every international order made equivalent progress towards justice. For another, Bull was critical of the very idea of world government on moral as well as practical grounds, preferring instead a world of states firmly bound by the ties of civilization. This normative position will be maintained in this book, but only with caution and multiple reservations.

IDEAL TYPES OF INTERNATIONAL ORDER

If curiously little empirical work has been done on the incidence of war and peace, the evidence we do have points to a single conclusion.20 War seems so universal, with peace being scarcely an alternative, given that it was so often used as an arena in which to prepare for further hostilities, as to suggest that the very object of the present inquiry might be mistaken. Closer analysis of empirical findings suggests a more complex view. If war has been ever-present, it is only some wars that have tended towards the absolute. The Thirty Years War caused actual depopulation in Central Europe, whilst the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars brought forth new principles of political rule that threatened all anciens régimes. The destruction of the First World War and the rather different horrors of the Second World War require no comment; equally, the foul certainty that the kill-ratio of modern weapons has the capacity to end all human existence has become part of public awareness. In consequence, restraints on the manner of fighting in and limits to the scale of war seem to me all-important, making international orders substantial achievements, despite their biases and their habitual inability to establish peace. But even if this moral gloss is rejected, variation in levels of conflict remains a social fact which demands explanation.

Attention will be given to five theories of international order, each of which offers plans for limiting war (and sometimes for establishing peace) as well as diagnoses as to why wars take place in the first place. Implicit in this comment is the fact that each one of these theories has descriptive and normative components: these are grand theories which need to be judged in practical as well as theoretical terms. In addition, the theories are in mutual contact; indeed they have sometimes been spawned as much by each other as by historical events. It should be noted immediately that not every theory of international order, either extant or conceivable, is included in this typology; a prejudgement is accordingly being made that these five theories are more important than others. One further option does in fact receive detailed attention in the next chapter: nonetheless, imperial order does not gain central billing since it is unlikely to characterize the modern world polity as a whole.21 The same is true of other principles, including those of international law, Marxism, technological determinism, and dependency theory, all of which accordingly receive short shrift.

The most elegant and powerful theory of peace and war is that of realism. This position received powerful rendition in antiquity from Thucydides, in the early modern period from Machiavelli, Hobbes, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, and most recently from Aron and Waltz. The central tenet of realism is that states live in an asocial society, in which the recourse to violence is normal. The fact that some states have disappeared makes it entirely understandable that the main task of states is that of the search for their own security. A central presupposition of this approach is that states can be treated as entities: leaders of different political persuasions end up behaving in a similar manner because of the force of external circumstances.

The hope for international order that results from realism is that of the balance of power. Whilst there can be various mechanisms involved in balancing, all versions of realist theory stress that states will ally together in order to protect themselves against the hegemonic pretensions of an overmighty neighbor (or any allied set of neighbors).22 This tends to involve what many, especially in the United States at all times and quite generally elsewhere in the inter-war period, came to see as a measure of immorality. It is necessary, in order for a balance to be real, for powers to shift from one side to another; no permanent set of allegiances can be allowed, for to admit them would be to rigidify the system, and so to cause disaster. The extent to which this behavior has sometimes been accepted is striking: Frederick the Great chopped and changed, but there was no condemnation of him for so doing. Modern scholars imbued with the spirit of realism sometimes argue that it was a mistake to ban Bolshevik Russia from the international community, for it thereby became much harder to balance Hitler’s Germany.

Beyond this point, there is a measure of disagreement, allusion to which has already been made when noting Bull’s criticism of brute realism. At the core of divergence lies the desire of brute realism to become absolutely parsimonious. States are presumed by this view to be essentially similar, rational, calculative, and coherent, concerned above all to maximize their power in a situation of anarchy. In one famous interpretation of this sort states were compared to firms: not surprisingly, this move opens the door to the high-powered but abstract logic of rational choice theory which so dominates economics.23 It can be said immediately that the power that parsimony can bring has a high price tag attached to it here, as can be seen by analysis based on an unhappily but necessarily imperfect division between descriptive and prescriptive levels of the theory.

Descriptively, the difficulty is that brute realism has a tendency to become circular. On the one hand, its tenets are held to be in operation when the balance of power is operating smoothly, when all the actors in a system are seeking to measure the power of their rivals so as change allegiances in order to establish equilibrium in the system. On the other hand, the same tenets are held to accurately describe the alternative position, in which a state first seeks to establish hegemony but is then destroyed by the alliances that are built against it. A theory which gains support from two such different sets of data, and which can thus explain everything, is essentially non-falsifiable and of little scientific validity.

The key point to be made at the level of policy is that states do not always seek the same goals. Some can be modest and appeasing, others desperate for glory. It is accordingly an immense mistake to imagine that state behavior can be subject to the simplifying analyses of any uniform economistic logic. This point was made with unrivaled force by Aron when analyzing the way in which American strategic thought conceptualized involvement in Vietnam.24 Formal reasoning led to a view that North Vietnam would accept defeat when a certain level of force had been reached. The fact that Aron might well have welcomed such a defeat, given that he saw the war less in terms of national liberation than as an example of communist imposition, makes his ensuing criticism of American thought all the more impressive.25 The stakes of the conflict were different for both sides, and the failure of American international relations experts, bound to a monolithic conception of interest, to realize this meant that they misunderstood everything. It was necessary to calculate properly, to understand the mental set of the opponent rather than to live within a theoretical model that seemed powerful but which in fact lacked content. Pseudo-scientific hardness is no replacement for judgement – which is the quality needed if we are to “think” an open system.

Aron underlined this basic point towards the end of his career when assessing the contribution made by the thought of Clausewitz. The Prussian theorist of war was initially deeply attracted to the essential purity of Napoleon’s military style, above all, by its ability to so concentrate power that it gained complete success. But the more Clausewitz reflected, the more he came to question his youthful admiration. In the last months of his life, he produced a final trinitarian definition of war:

War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case. As a total phenomenon its dominant tendency always make war a paradoxical trinity – composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.

The first of these aspects mainly concerns the people; the second the commander and his army; the third the government. The passions that are to be kindled in war must already be inherent in the people; the scope which the play of courage and talent will enjoy in the realm of probability and chance depends on the particular character of the commander and the army; but the political aims are the business of government alone.26

This view made apparent that Napoleon’s escalation to extremes had been a failure. In contrast, the dull pragmatism of Frederick the Great’s limited wars had achieved more. It was Aron’s own appreciation of this principle that allowed him to assert, on the very day that the Six Day War between Israel and the Arabs ended, that Israel – about whose fate he cared deeply – had won a victory but not the victory (which could only have been, in his view, peace).27

Perhaps the dictates of pure logic – namely, the realization that excessive ambition may have deleterious consequences in the long run – should force brute realism away from the unbridled struggle to increase national power towards a realization of the virtue of prudence. However, logic is not always life, and the first point made at a descriptive level by what is best dubbed sophisticated realism is that realism is likely to work best, as was noted when discussing Bull’s appreciation of this point, when the ties of international society are strong.28 This sociological condition is most easily seen at work when state leaders share realist values, not least since this makes balancing a conscious activity rather than the mere end result of a mechanical process. However, international homogeneity of this sort can have several bases: if class solidarity within and racism without characterized European history, the power of capitalism and still more acceptance of the norm of sovereignty characterize the contemporary world polity.29 Of course, the norms of international society can be shared by the people as much as by the elite; the extent to which this will facilitate the workings of any contemporary international order will be of considerable interest later.

Sophisticated realists also stress that states must calculate, especially given that the goals of state behavior vary. This point was made particularly forcefully by Aron when he emphasized the need to make states rational calculators of consequences.30 What Aron meant prescriptively should also be taken sociologically. For some states are so constrained by pressure groups that they cannot properly weigh priorities and calculate national interest; the same situation can result when state capacities are limited, making for erroneous calculations of an opponent’s intentions.31 Of course, to make this sociological point is not to refute Aron. States blessed with the sociological preconditions for rational calculation will make mistakes if they do not learn the prudential logic of realism.32 Possessing room in which to calculate is not the same thing as – and no guarantee of – skill in calculation. Hereafter, I use the omnibus term of “the intelligent state,” taken as social achievement rather as presupposition, to capture this second condition of realism’s existence.

The main policy recommendations of sophisticated realism are closely related to a proper understanding of homogeneity. Martin Ceadel has very powerfully argued that realism is best termed “defencism” on the grounds that the only war that it can countenance is one to preserve the status quo, albeit this can involve initial aggression given that attack can be the best or only form of defense.33 This was certainly the view of Montesquieu when writing about the Europe of his day. But homogeneity is a sociological rather than an ontological condition; this would surely make sophisticated realists chary of the absolute injunction issued by Ceadel. In this spirit, Michael Walzer’s important Just and Unjust Wars allows intervention to stop absolute brutality as an exception to the defencism that he proposes under the name of legalism.34 Similarly, Aron mused that a preventive war against Hitler might well not have been immoral.35 Prudence demands extreme boldness when faced with an absolute enemy, though there remains everything to be said for fighting with as much moderation as possible.

We can discover a second theory of international order by once again considering Clausewitz.36 Although he came ever more to reject the Napoleonic escalation to extremes, to stress that the political control of war mattered more than obedience to its pure logic, Clausewitz nonetheless remained true to key principles of the revolution. He had realized that citizens fought better than paid mercenaries, and had accordingly been part of the reform group around Scharnhorst, Yorck, and Gneisenau that had played a major role in the abolition of serfdom. The logic of this position led Clausewitz to support the founding of a citizens’ militia in 1813. This was rejected by the King, largely because the act of putting arms into the hands of the people was still deemed dangerous. Clausewitz fought against Napoleon for the next years in the service of the Tsar, and his career never fully recovered from this radicalism. But it was the view represented by the King that came to triumph in the next years, and which gives us a second source of international order, namely that of a concert of great powers determined to prevent revolution. The revolutionary principles in question were of course those of equality, liberty, and fraternity, of a career open to the talents – all ideas, as Tocqueville noted, which spread throughout Europe like a new religion.37 Although it is far from being historically accurate, Henry Kissinger’s A World Restored captures the feel of one version of this sort of arrangement.38 The intent of the system designed by Metternich was to meet at frequent intervals so as to help contain revolution. This arrangement was initially directed against France but, as it unfolded, albeit with the eventual absence of Britain, it was used against liberals and nationalists throughout Europe.

Liberalism provides a third theory of international order, most strikingly in Immanuel Kant’s 1795 proposal for “Perpetual Peace.”39 The importance of this mock treaty for peace has recently been stressed by Michael Doyle in a superlative essay, whose huge impact comes from its factual claim that no two liberal states have ever fought against each other.40 This claim is slightly exaggerated because of an unduly severe and restricted definition of liberalism. A more generous and sensible view would allow that there have been some wars between liberal states, most notably, the Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century, the Anglo-American war of 1812 and the Spanish–American war of 1898. Still, the relative paucity of wars between liberal states remains striking.41 A warning should be issued at this point, before Kant’s position is outlined. Doyle is not naive. A particular merit of his essay, often neglected by his critics, is that it also notes the presence of an unpleasant and unacceptable side of liberalism’s attitude to foreign affairs. Despite their pacific record against each other, liberal states have fought both often and with extreme viciousness against non-liberal states. If one can see touches of this mentality in the history of British foreign affairs, it has often affected the conduct of American policy – most obviously, in the crusade directed against communism.

Kant’s position derives from insistence that the idea that peace will be achieved by the balance of power is pure illusion, “like Swift’s story of the house which the builder had constructed in such perfect harmony with all the laws of equilibrium that it collapsed as soon as a sparrow alighted on it.”42 His alternative proposal rests on three “definitive articles.” First, Kant argues that governments must be republican, by which he means not just political processes open to the views of the people but also the separation of executive from legislature – something which will improve modern republics, in his view, when compared to their ancient forebears. Secondly, a union between liberal states is called for with the specific purpose in mind of agreeing never to make war on each other. Finally, liberal states should agree on a right to universal hospitality, one element of which will include economic affairs – and thus the creation of an interdependence based on trade as well as upon the free movement of peoples.

What strikes one most about Kant’s proposal is that it is realist in both senses of the word, that is, realistic and based on the continued presence of states. Most obviously, Kant does not rule out war: to the contrary, the eventual extension of the union of liberal states is ensured by the experience of war. The great educator of mankind is human suffering. Equally, Kant does not imagine that states will cease to exist, nor does he desire any empire of the earth since “laws progressively lose their impact as the government increases its range, and a soulless despotism, after crushing the germs of goodness, will finally lapse into anarchy.”43 It is worth insisting, finally, that Kant’s position is not one which resembles the collective security attempted by the League of Nations in the inter-war period. For the first preliminary article proposed by Kant in his draft treaty insists that no plans be made for any future war.44 This makes it clear that collective security was in fact a concert of the left, directed against revisionist and nationalist revolution from the radical right.

The sophistication of Kant’s position can better be appreciated by contrasting it with a naive version of liberalism whose application to foreign affairs was disastrous. This alternative view had expected that the entry of the people onto the political stage would in and of itself guarantee the reign of peace. According to this populist vision, wars result from the atavistic drives of a warrior class, trained for and able to benefit from conflict.45 The optimism of this type of liberalism was put into question, and should have been dealt a death-blow, by the sight of the popularity of French revolutionary militarism.46 In more practical terms, liberals in the inter-war period, prone to imagine that the experience of the trenches had made for an absolute horror of war, went on far too long imagining that everyone was open to sweet reason. This led to the world of illusion in which the Kellogg-Briand pact banned war, absolutely unconscious of the fact that many still found war to be ennobling.47 The most powerful theorization of this negative view remains that of Tocqueville.48 If the people can be remorseless and vicious once aroused, Tocqueville insisted that they are habitually slow to become angered in the first place. Both George Kennan and Henry Kissinger have argued that this slowness to anger can impede the effective conduct of foreign affairs. Thus popular pressures prevented Sir Edward Grey from making it apparent that an attack on Belgium would lead to war, and Roosevelt from joining the fight against Hitler early on.49

Popular participation does not guarantee peace, nor can it ever do so if war is seen only as a sinful aberration against the very nature of humanity. But to admit this is not to accept most of what is implied in the negative case outlined. Most obviously, popular participation has prevented or curtailed war rather more than it has occasioned it; accordingly, any final balance sheet of the costs and benefits of popular participation must be complex, not least since the statesmen/theorists Kennan and Kissinger are not above blaming the people for their own mistakes. Elitism is not necessarily better than populism.

But to leave matters at this point would be very unsatisfactory. Kant’s starting point was realism, and his greatest contributions are made at both institutional and normative levels.50 Crucially, liberal institutions increase the intelligence of states. Philosophical support for this view can be found in Popper’s convincing demonstration that objective knowledge depends upon critical discussion much more than it does upon finding virtue in our souls.51 If liberalism helps to weigh and establish priorities, quite as important is the fact that its system of checks and balances has prevented or shortened hapless adventures. I do not wish to deny that tension results from conducting diplomacy within an open political system, but will show that domestic pressures in some authoritarian regimes have curtailed rational calculation much more – and with disastrous consequences.52 Of course, rational and democratic formation of national priorities is often less reality than ambition. Hence, liberal institutions are likely to work best when they rest upon prudential norms, that is, hatred of war combined with awareness that the use of force has sometimes been necessary. It is important to stress again that there is no reason to presume the people to be blindly passionate and the elite moderate in this matter, nor indeed to argue the opposite case: what will matter in liberal democracy is a process of dialogue between two parties equally capable of error. Finally, it is worth noting that both norms and institutions can work outside the state, at the level of international society. Aggression is certainly likely to be limited by feelings of solidarity between peoples, whilst international liberal institutions, as will be seen in a moment, can encourage rationality on the part of states.53

A fourth type of international order pays more attention to economics than to the nature of a political regime. Auguste Comte’s crude position suggested that the coming of industrialism would ensure peace, given that the fundamental cause of war was scarcity.54 More important has been the insistence that the growth of commerce would make war less feasible. This theory of interdependence is by no means new – not surprisingly, given that capitalism predates the industrial revolution. Perhaps the most striking early formulation is Benjamin Constant’s The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation, published in Hanover in 1814. Constant had distanced himself from Napoleon’s drive for imperial glory, and used the occasion of his impending downfall to sit in judgement on the very idea of the acquisition of wealth via territorial aggrandizement. In his discussion of “the character of modern nations in relation to war,” he asserted bluntly that: “War then comes before commerce. The former is all savage impulse, the latter civilised calculation. It is clear that the more the commercial tendency prevails, the weaker must the tendency to war become.”55 In addition, Constant insists that territorial conquest has now become self-defeating: it leads to a “universal horror” that defeats the purpose of the enterprise.56 That this was so delighted Constant: the more powerful the warrior ethic, the less likely was it that constitutionalism, which he admired and endorsed, would be safe, let alone have the capacity to spread.57 Constant is a powerful thinker who added much to what he learnt in Edinburgh whilst a student of the Scottish moralists, and his hopes were accordingly by no means unqualified. The rational calculation brought by commerce was not, Constant feared, sufficiently strong to overcome the capacity of Parisian life to create excessive ambition; as importantly, the privatization endemic to commercial society might lead a passive populace to gain vicarious pleasure from conquest.

In contrast, few doubts as to the peace-inducing consequences of the spread of commerce were entertained by the Manchester School, perhaps because their experience was of industrial capitalism. The views of this school were marvellously captured by Cobden in his parliamentary speech during the Don Pacifico affair in 1850:

The progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce, and the diffusion of education, than upon the labours of cabinets and foreign offices . . . [There should be] as little intercourse as possible between Governments; as much connection as possible between the nations of the world.58

This prescriptive view had turned into a descriptive account of reality by 1909 in Norman Angell’s Europe’s Optical Illusion: the intercourse of capitalists was held to be so extensive that war was impossible.59 However, other important liberal voices could not accept that a harmony of interests would be brought about naturally and spontaneously. Such thinkers favored social engineering so that basic liberal values and institutions could be put in place.60 The market mechanism, upon whose beneficent workings so much depended, had to be established by an act of will. Equally, most liberals allowed some room for intervention so as to help the fight of nations struggling to throw off the oppression of foreign rulers, although the extent of such intervention was very much a matter of debate.61 Similarly, where Cobden was prepared to leave the abolition of slavery to the workings of the market, John Stuart Mill insisted that the West African Squadron of the Royal Navy be kept in place so as to establish basic workings of civilized society – within which, of course, market principles might then work. Interestingly, Mill’s views on this point angered his friend Tocqueville, who saw the Navy’s actions in terms of the interests of Britain rather than those of humanity.62 This type of reaction proved to be much more general.

Alexander Hamilton made an early contribution to the alternative approach when insisting, in his 1791 “Report on Manufactures,” that the young United States needed to protect its infant industries against Britain’s commercial might. An open world economy was very much in the interest of a nation which had an established economic lead; it was advisable, in Hamilton’s view for latecomers to reject the terms of the leading power so as to ensure their own development. The need for special practices to overcome economic backwardness was articulated still more clearly by German thinkers, most notably by Fichte’s The Closed Commercial State (1808) and by List’s The National System of Political Economy (1841); it is generally familiar today in the form of dependency theory.63