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Part I
International Society
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1
Origins and Structure
The origins of international society are conventionally traced to mid-way through the second millennium of the Christian era. The diplomatic and legal practices that evolved following the European wars of religion enhanced the role of reason, interest and prudence in international politics and reduced the appeal to passion. This outcome of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was achieved by a negotiated consensus that the sovereign would henceforth be accepted as the final source of authority within his or her own domain. Cuius regio eius religio – roughly to each prince his own religion – was not a general edict of toleration, but it was the ancestor of the modern principle of non-intervention without which, arguably, a generalized system of international co-operation could not have developed. Religious faith was no longer considered a just cause of war, at least amongst Christian princes. In this sense, their mutual recognition of each others’ sovereignty was a blow struck against the millennial impulse in human affairs.
On the basis of the sovereignty formula, other institutions of international society were refined, most notably the diplomatic profession, and the framework of international law. There were also three additional but contested aspects of the post-Westphalia system – the balance of power, the special role of the great powers and the place of war within the system.
If traditional international society was the immediate product of a peace treaty, from a longer-term perspective it was also the successor to the idea of a world empire. Behind this idea lay the long shadow of the Roman Empire, which in turn gave birth to the idea of a united Christendom. So long as these ideas persisted, they favoured the maintenance of a hierarchy of social and political relationships; and consequently also of differentiated, but overlapping, jurisdictions. Compared with the feudal order, the new international society of sovereign states was egalitarian, at least in theory. Since states, then as now, differed enormously in power and capabilities, the question arose as to what was to replace the concept of hierarchy as the ordering principle of inter-state relations.
The answer favoured by most theorists was the balance of power, a principle of such convenient plasticity that it could be advanced in defence of almost any conceivable policy.1 It was primarily the great powers who were most involved in ‘balance of power’ politics, whether pursuing military superiority in their own rivalries, or the maintenance of a diplomatic equilibrium, where necessary at the expense of lesser states. It was only these powers, after all, which had the capacity to drag the whole system into general war. If this happened, the whole edifice would be threatened, including the extension of law from the municipal to the international arena. Great power, it was held, made for great responsibility. Consequently, the great powers were apt to claim for themselves the right to over-ride the law in the interest of order.
Thus, the principal of hierarchy was smuggled back into the organization of international relations, although established on the basis of power not right. Since there was no authority above the sovereigns, the only limitations on the right to go to war were those to which they had agreed themselves. In this way also, war, the devastating effects of which had led to the creation of the system in the first place, was institutionalized as the ultimate mechanism not merely for resolving conflicts of interests but for preserving international order.
This somewhat Panglossian account of international society can only be achieved by ignoring the intellectual debate that has always accompanied the attempt to map the relations among sovereign powers. Most writers have identified three available positions on the question of international co-operation and hence on the possibility of there being an international society. These go by different names, but may conveniently be identified as the positions of political realism, liberal rationalism and revolution.2 For the realist, international society does not exist, and the only restraining element in the war of all against all is the principle of prudential self-preservation. For the rationalist, international society exists but it is a different kind of society from that of the state and should not be judged by the same criteria. For the revolutionary, international society will only exist to the extent that the brotherhood of mankind assimilates to the condition of domestic politics. In other words, international society is a state or should be one.
Both Wight and Bull, the most prominent of the modern theorists of international society, were careful to point out that their labels attached only to ideal types and that in practice the positions shade into one another along a continuum. They are not, therefore, strictly speaking, alternatives but coexist at any one time or place (and indeed in the mind of any one person), although it is fair to say that at some times, and in some places, one position may acquire the ascendancy, as realism did on both sides during the Cold War. For our purposes, the point to note is that there is a fundamental distinction – between pluralism and solidarism – that cuts through the three positions. By pluralism, I mean the view that states, like individuals, can and do have differing interests and values, and consequently that international society is limited to the creation of a framework that will allow them to coexist in relative harmony. It is the recognition by pluralists that it is possible for many, if not all, conflicting values to be accommodated within such a framework that distinguishes their position from indiscriminate relativism. By solidarism, I mean the view that humanity is one, and that the task of diplomacy is to translate this latent or immanent solidarity of interests and values into reality. For pluralists, one of the features that distinguishes international society from any other form of social organization is its procedural and hence non-developmental character. Solidarists, on the other hand, believe in the possibility of international constitutional reform and convergence. Only the most brutal and most dogmatic revolutionaries could fail to recognize the dynamic tension between these alternative forms of co-operation. During the twentieth century, there have been repeated attempts to find ways of resolving this tension at the international level.
Before turning to these efforts, let me briefly consider the second and third questions raised earlier – who are the members of international society and what are its boundaries? In the original formulation there was no doubt about the question of membership. International society was a society of sovereigns, not of people. There was room for dispute about who had a right to exercise sovereignty and under what circumstances it might be forfeited, but individual subjects had no international rights of their own. Faced with persecution in one country, they might find refuge in another – as the Jews did in England under Cromwell’s Protectorate – but their ability to do so was a function of politics, not of law. Cuius regio eius religio meant what it said, that is, that it was for the ruler to determine the circumstances under which his subjects lived. In theory, domestic affairs had no place in international politics. In this sense international society was pluralist. Indeed, before the First World War there were few concessions made to solidarist principles.
The boundaries of the original international society were only slightly less inflexible than its membership. The Peace of Westphalia itself was concluded between the powers that had been directly involved in the Thirty Years War, but its principles were generally accepted within Europe. To the extent that in time non-European countries were accepted into the society of states, this was largely a function of geopolitics, and the fact that powerful political rivalries dictated alliances with the Ottoman Empire. No one seriously believed that their rulers had willingly bound themselves to what Burke referred to as the public law of Europe.
The restraints that theoretically operated within the European states-system did not govern relations between Europeans and other peoples. Indeed, as Western ascendancy was extended around the world, some authorities drew a distinction between the relations of civilized powers, that is, the members of international society, and those with barbarians and savages.3 With the former – Muslim rulers or Indian princes – relations could be based on treaties but these were more provisional than treaties governing relations between civilized powers, and were mostly unequal in the sense that they often established un-reciprocated rights for Europeans living abroad. One example was the Capitulations, the system of British courts that operated in Egypt until the end of the nineteenth century. The Europeans recognized the existence of China and Japan, whose rulers had traditionally viewed them as the barbarians, as powerful civilizations in their own right. But in the early period, East-West relations were insufficient in scope to challenge Western assumptions about the nature of international society, while later on the Oriental powers were also forced into the expanded system on European terms. Europeans defined non-literate cultures as savage. With regard to these peoples there was no need to codify relations by treaty – although the British and Dutch tended to do so – and under certain circumstances there might even be a duty of conquest.
So long as Europe was ruled by dynasts the set of rules they had established to govern their mutual relations left them free to deal with outsiders more or less at will. Philosophers might agonize about whether, beyond the confines of European international society, there was a community of mankind, or who was or was not covered by the ius gentium (law of peoples), but most statesmen, protected by their pluralist compact in Europe, felt free to enclose and exploit the outside world. Traditional international society was thus seen as geographically restricted and as an essentially fixed structure. The erosion of dynastic rule and the success of Western expansion called both these aspects into question.
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2
The Modernization of International Society
The attempt to graft a solidarist conception onto the original pluralist framework was largely a consequence of the nationalization of the state, first in Europe, and then, in reaction to European imperialism, elsewhere. It was also partly a consequence of the integrating impact of modern technology in relation to both security and economic welfare.
The ideal of popular sovereignty was established by the American and French revolutions. The key documents – the Declaration of Independence, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen – were national expressions of what were held to be universal rights. They were advanced within particular contexts, but self-consciously spoke for humanity, not merely for the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies and the citizens of France. A global society, based on the solidarist assumption of equal rights, was entailed in the ideas underlying these revolutions, even though their implications for international relations were only dimly perceived at the time. The defeat of Napoleon not only restored the ancien régime, but its international equivalent, the static conception of international society, that is confined geographically to Europe and in membership to sovereign governments. It was only after 1918 that the solidarist principle of national self-determination was transformed from being an aspiration of the democratic opposition into the legal basis of the new world order. As we shall see, this transformation was flawed by the practical impossibility of resolving the contradiction between the sovereignty of states and the self-determination of peoples. What nationalists wanted was a state of their own, once and for all, not a fluid situation in which they might periodically be required to cede territory to any dissatisfied minority that had missed out in the first wave of state-creation, and might subsequently claim the right of self-determination for itself. From this point of view, nineteenth-century nationalists were only selective solidarists – they wanted to join the club, not to change it. The same point can be made about the anti-colonial nationalists who achieved power after 1945.
Solidarism, nonetheless, influenced the ‘constitution of international society’ in two respects. The first concerned the use of force as an instrument of foreign policy; the second the legitimacy of empire. The enthusiasm with which the belligerents had greeted the outbreak of the First World War quickly turned to a deep revulsion; not only with war itself but with the diplomatic practices and secret treaties that had simultaneously propped up the balance of power as the corner-stone of the system, and ensured that it catastrophically broke down.
In 1795, the philosopher Immanuel Kant had published Perpetual Peace, a pamphlet in which he attempted to resolve the problem of war by drawing up a constitution for a pacific union of Republican states. In 1918, President Wilson of the United States attempted to achieve the same end by institutional means. His system of collective security failed because the world could not be made to correspond to the confederation of like-minded republics that Kant had envisaged. But although the idea that peace was indivisible remained implausible, Wilson established the unacceptability of armed aggression at the centre of all future debates about international order. When the Europeans counted their dead, few were prepared to view war as an institution of international society. On the contrary, from now on – and across the political spectrum – war would be regarded as the breakdown of that society. The United Nations Charter, like the Peace of Westphalia, did not seek to eliminate force from international relations, but unlike the earlier treaty the Charter did attempt to restrict its use to self-defence, or collectively agreed action to deter or prevent threats to international peace and security across international borders.
At first sight, the Great War not only left the victorious powers with their empires intact, but added to them the spoils of victory. Germany’s colonies and the Levantine provinces of the Ottoman Empire were divided, primarily between Britain and France. Even Woodrow Wilson had not initially thought of the right of self-determination applying beyond the confines of the ‘civilized’ world. On the other hand, had he accepted the traditional idea that territorial title could be acquired by force, it would have contradicted the liberal ideology that underpinned the peace settlement. It would have meant that, as in the past, a right could be derived from a wrong. The new ideology appealed to the nascent nationalist movements of Asia and the Middle East, as much as those in Europe, precisely because it was couched in universalist, rather than in culturally specific terms. The presuppositions of those who held liberal views, in other words, were at odds with their own philosophy.
The solution to the problem was to create the League of Nations mandate system. Under it, the German colonies and Ottoman provinces were held in trust by the mandatory power, which was accountable to the League for the welfare of the subject populations. On the surface, the mandate system barely disturbed the European empires. Colonies had no separate legal personality of their own – although the British Dominions and the Government of India were partial exceptions to this rule – and were therefore not members of international society. The mandated territories were sometimes even folded into neighbouring colonies for administrative purposes, as the western part of the Cameroon was into Nigeria. A principle of international accountability on the margins of European empire was thus established, which inserted a time bomb beneath the concept of imperial legitimacy. Despite the different categories of mandates, the introduction of the underlying idea of accountability for them all signalled the growing, if reluctant, recognition that self-determination could not be confined to Europe.
The fuse on the time bomb was long. European governments had always been reluctant to accept, until forced to do so, that outsiders had equal rights. It was, for example, only at the second Hague Conference of 1907 that Asian and Latin American countries had been admitted to international society.1 And it took at least until 1960 before the Western powers would admit that the imperial game was over; and that the implicitly racist categories of the mandate system could no longer be advanced as obstacles to entry. The imperial powers continued to denounce all external attempts to influence their colonial policies up to the point when they transferred power. On the other hand, they could not reasonably argue that those territories they held in trust, under the League mandate system and its successor the UN Trusteeship Council, should enjoy rights denied to the populations of neighbouring countries which they ruled on their own behalf.
Traditional international society was a minimalist association. It was concerned with the mutual recognition of sovereigns, with establishing their rights, including their right to form and change alliances, or to have their neutrality collectively guaranteed by their peers. But with little else. The enthusiasm of nationalist governments for this conception stemmed from its grounding in the legal principle of sovereignty which has always been more highly regarded by the weak and vulnerable than by the strong. New entrants to international society have always feared that they may lose their independence as the result of intervention, allegedly sanctioned on solidarist grounds, but in fact masking the economic and political interests of stronger states.
The economic and strategic integration of the world since the industrial revolution has also led to modification in the traditional conception of international society. This process amounts to a kind of technological solidarism, in that most countries are now heavily dependent on the outside world not just for the import of luxuries but for the basics of their existence and livelihood. In reaction to this interdependence there has been a tendency, throughout the twentieth century, to transform the quasi-constitutional order of international society into an enterprise association, that is, one that exists to pursue substantive goals of its own. The commitment of states to the pluralist framework still blocks the way to a fully fledged transnational society of this kind. However, the fact that most governments accept that people have positive as well as negative rights – as in the drafting of an international Covenant of Economic and Social Rights, or the continuing debate about the establishment of an international criminal court – illustrates the extent to which the international political thought has been penetrated by solidarist assumptions.
The case for a c...
