Cosmopolis

Prospects for World Government

Danilo Zolo

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745613017
  9780745613000
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745669335
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume makes a challenging critique of the idea of Cosmopolis - that is, the idea of world or 'global' government. In recent years this idea has been put forward as a way of averting the threat of war and international disorder, and as a way of avoiding the destruction of the planet. Proponents of this idea call for a radical reform of the United Nations which aims to legitimize this institution as an international police force and as a provider of global justice.

Zolo criticizes this new cosmopolitan philosophy and rejects the idea of trying to eliminate international conflict through the use of centralized and superior military force. He seeks instead to develop a conception of international relations which takes account of their pluralistic, dynamic and conflictual nature. This conception moves away from the logic of hierarchical centralization, which so dominates the UN Charter, and towards the logic of 'weak interventionism' and 'weak pacifism' which relies on self-organization, co-ordination and negotiation.

Timely, provocative and iconoclastic, Cosmopolis is an important contribution to current debates in politics, international relations and social and political theory.

1 The Cosmopolitan Model of the Holy Alliance

The international government of the United Nations is identical with the international government of the Security Council. The Security Council appears, as it were, as the Holy Alliance of our time. And the five permanent members of the Security Council are, as it were, a Holy Alliance within a Holy Alliance.

H. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations

A Modern Cosmopolis

For two centuries now the winners of large-scale continental or world wars have set in motion ambitious schemes to ensure the subsequent preservation of peace. The result has not been, however, that a depletion of the military arsenals of these powers has in any way matched the growth of their schemes. On the contrary, the accumulation of weaponry has continued unimpeded and threats to use it have often been made. It would be facile, nevertheless, to conclude from this that war has all along remained the secret agenda of the great nineteenth-and twentieth-century powers. What their repeated attempts in fact amount to is pursuit of a modern Cosmopolis in which peace and stability are to be guaranteed by a legitimized power hierarchy.¹ Peace, as Bert Röling has observed, has gradually taken over from Christian and other notions of civilization in the role of a central criterion which is used to justify not only the existence of an international juridical system but also its continued expansion and the preservation of its pyramidical structure.²

But war has in no sense been ended by these means, nor have its intensity and violence been at all reduced. If anything, the precise opposite has been the result. Analyses of the long-term dynamics of ‘global power’ – such as those of Modelski, Gilpin or Wallerstein – show that war is a process set in train by a party which believes, for the most part erroneously, that it can gain advantage from an altered situation which the use of force will bring into being.³ Such is not the objective of a power which has already emerged victorious from a preceding ‘contest for hegemony’. For, as soon as certain territorial, political or economic results have been achieved within the global political arena, preservation of a lasting and universal peace – ‘hegemonic stability’, in the terminology of Robert Keohane’s neo-realist lexicon – becomes the prime aim of a conquering power. To this end victorious nations have on at least three occasions in modern times endeavoured to lay the basis of an international organization capable of countering the forces of anarchy and war. In constructing new forms of the concentration and legitimation of international power, they have time and again attempted to hold in check those movements which – arising principally from technological and economic developments – militate against the continuation and legitimation of their own control.⁴

The situation whereby great powers resort once more to the use of armed force – and in so doing contradict the principles and even at times violate the rules of the very international institutions which they have themselves set in place – arises from the overpowering need which they develop to counteract threats to the ‘hegemonic stability’ which they have so painfully built up.’⁵ Action is similarly provoked if other powers disturb the world order by violently overturning legitimized hierarchies and established procedures for the allocation of international resources. On all occasions, however, the task of maintaining peace has, despite repeated historical failure, been assumed by a small nucleus of superpowers, while the great majority of other countries have acquiesced passively in the action which was taken. There has arisen, in other words, what I propose to term here ‘the cosmopolitan model of the Holy Alliance’: that is to say, the formation of a political entity envisaged as universal, pacific, hierarchical, monocentric and, given the natural force of circumstances, eurocentric or in any event centred on the West.

The historical events of the last two hundred years reveal, therefore, a notable recurrence to which theoreticians of international relations, with the sole exception of system analysts and a small number of the exponents of the realist school, have paid scant attention.⁶ As Ian Clark has rightly pointed out, no political system over the last two hundred years has shown itself to possess greater stability than the hierarchical model adopted by the international institutions in 1815. And, paradoxically, such stability as has been achieved has received no support from any particular ability of this system to correspond to its own institutional goals.⁷

My own view is that this phenomenon, once recognized, forms a valuable starting-point for a philosophical investigation of the nature, potentiality and limitations of contemporary international organizations. A necessary first step towards this investigation will be a survey, however summary, of the historical development of international institutions over the past two centuries. The following pages of this chapter, for all their digressive and perhaps elementary appearance, will form therefore the indispensable basis of the arguments which will subsequently be developed.

The Holy Alliance

The Napoleonic Wars – truly the first cataclysmic ‘world war’ in the sense that, all told, the extended series of conflicts claimed the lives of some two million victims – overturned at the beginning of the nineteenth century the balanced European order of the day. This balance had grown from the accord which had developed within the ‘family of nations’ from the time of the Peace of Westphalia at the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. Out of this accord arose the first recognizably ‘modern’ relationship between nations whereby a plurality of separately sovereign nation states did not acknowledge a higher authority of Church or Empire.⁸ It was precisely this pluralism of sovereign states which Napoleon sought to replace with a personal universal empire. In addition, as his armies spread through the continent, they brought with them the nationalistic ideals of the French Revolution and the bourgeois principles which called into question the legitimation of the kings and aristocratic ruling classes of Europe. For at least these two paradoxically contradictory reasons the reaction of the absolute monarchies could not be anything other than severe.

The alliance formed by the victorious powers after the defeat of Napoleon was the first large scheme in the direction of ‘international government’. It was the first attempt to find a peaceful alternative to anarchy and war which went beyond a simple return to the pre-war system of equilibrium between the European powers. In the years 1814 and 1815 Austria, Great Britain, Prussia and Russia succeeded in bringing about a genuinely ‘congressional government’ whose duration they envisaged as being conceivably indefinite but in any case as of no less than twenty years.

‘For the benefit of the world’, in the words of the protocol signed by Russia, Prussia and Austria (followed in practice by Britain also), the superpowers committed themselves to an agreed schedule of international congresses for the purpose of taking ‘those measures most conducive to popular tranquillity and prosperity and to the maintenance of international peace’. The Holy Alliance was, within a short time, to embrace all other European states of whatever rank and size, with the exception of the Roman See and the Sultanate, without any of these other members making the slightest claim that they should be allowed to submit to further discussion decisions which had already been taken by the superpowers. Thus for the first time in European and in world history the principle was established of an international federation for the promotion of peace whose membership was open to all states but which was under the effective control of the major European powers. This conception, as Hegel was somewhat scornfully to remark in his Philosophy of Right, bore a remarkable resemblance to the idea of a federation of states acting as guarantor of lasting peace which Kant had advanced in his widely circulated work Zum ewigen Frieden of 1795.⁹

The Holy Alliance was, however, ripe for collapse after scarcely ten years.¹⁰ Despite the lack of any permanent organizational structure, it had, even so, successfully created at least three specialized agencies devoted to the consideration of individual issues, one of them the abolition of the slave trade. In its congresses, furthermore, it had taken in hand the resolution of several other problems of primary importance.¹¹

One major cause of the demise of the Alliance was unquestionably the conflict of interest which emerged between two of the largest powers of the time, Great Britain and Russia. These interests were to leave no doubt in the end as to whether precedence went to them or resided instead in the expressions of pious international hope and Christian rhetoric which flowed from the documents of the Alliance, filled as they were with phrases, prompted by Tsar Alexander I, such as ‘reciprocal benefit’, ‘unalterable goodwill’, ‘mutual affection’, ‘Christian charity’, ‘indissoluble fraternity’ and so forth.¹²

A second and deeper cause of the disintegration lay in the collision between the expectations of dynastic legitimation which formed the real basis of alliance for at least three of the four great powers – Russia, Prussia and Austria – and the growing impetus of the forces of nascent European nationalism and liberalism. Shortsightedly, but in accordance with the purposes of European restoration for which it had been called into being, the Alliance acted against these forces by giving tacit consent to recourse on the part of its members to the severest imaginable military repression, especially in Italy and Spain.

The League of Nations

The First World War mobilized some seventy million combatants and resulted in over eighteen million deaths (including those of ten million civilians) and twenty-one million casualties. Physical destruction of property was also carried out on an unprecedented scale. At the end of the war resurrection of the model of the Holy Alliance took place at the instigation of the victorious powers, Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan. Formally constituted in 1920, the League of Nations represented the second great attempt to secure for the world stable peace through the institution of a permanent organization designed to supersede the earlier principle of international equilibrium. Unlike the Holy Alliance, with which it nevertheless shared many aspects in common, the League of Nations was an international organization drawn up with specific constituent elements such as an Assembly, Council, permanent Secretariat and Court of Justice.

The Assembly was composed of representatives of the governments of all the member states. Each state was entitled to one vote, and unanimity of the members present was required to implement any decision of a political nature, including those concerned with peace-threatening international disputes. In such a case, however, the parties who were themselves involved were required to abstain from voting and could not exercise a right of veto in pursuit of their own advantage.¹³

The Council was made up of both permanent and non-permanent members, those in the latter category being nominated by the Assembly. Here too the rule of unanimity applied. All four great powers, joined later by Germany and the Soviet Union, were permanent members.¹⁴ Clearly the influence on the League of the permanent members, and especially of France and Great Britain, was hard to resist, but this did not remove the fact that the Assembly – unlike, as will be seen, the Assembly of the United Nations – constituted an international body with the authority to take decisions on matters of vital importance, such as measures to ensure the prevention of war. It is true that the Assembly did not have the power (as neither, for its part, did the Council) to send troops against a potential aggressor, but it was able to recommend sanctionary measures, representing an effective collective response, if only on a voluntary basis.¹⁵ In this, as in all other matters, the area of its responsibility and that of the Council’s were equivalent and parallel.

The inability of the League of Nations to fulfil its potential as a source of international government is most naturally and most convincingly explained by the obsessive tendency of the great powers, France above all, to employ it as a means towards rigid preservation of the status quo. The League had, of course, been essentially set up with very much this end in view, given its objective of holding all states, from the most down to the least powerful, to a strict adherence to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and the other successive treaties which had brought the war to a conclusion and had imposed conditions of peace on the defeated countries. This adherence entailed above all the permanent disarmament of Germany and its relegation to a reduced political ranking. Not only was the policy of disarmament a failure but the conservative attitude of France and Great Britain also helped to keep permanently outside the League two states which had clearly succeeded in reaching premier world status, the United States and, with the exception of a brief period of inclusion, the Soviet Union.

Second, just as had earlier been the case with the Holy Alliance, the League of Nations also was discredited and in the end paralysed by the increasing distance which developed between the interests of its two most powerful members. Although, unlike the situation which was later to obtain in the United Nations, they held no exclusive right of veto, the preponderant power which these two countries wielded prevented the League from operating, either in Assembly or in Council, as a truly collective body. A series of outright violations of international order received therefore a form of tacit legitimation. These included the Italian occupation of Corfu, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and China and the continuous infringements by Germany of the Treaty of Versailles which culminated in the invasion of Poland in 1939. The sanctions decreed against Italy for its aggression towards Ethiopia, a fellow member of the League, remained deliberately unenforced. The expulsion, finally, of the Soviet Union in December 1939 for its attack on Finland was inevitably devoid of effect: the Second World War was already in the process of breaking out and the League was for all practical purposes defunct.¹⁶

The United Nations

In very many of its aspects the organization of the United Nations encapsulates the history, objectives and structure of both of its two forerunners on the international stage, the Holy Alliance and the League of Nations. As the Second World War drew to a close with its tally of tens of millions of deaths – amongst them some six million Jews exterminated in the Nazi death-camps – the representatives of the governments of the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and China gathered in the summer of 1944 at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC, for the purpose of laying the foundations of a new international organization.

In only one respect, the system of voting among the members of the Security Council, did the proposals put ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Cosmopolitan Model of the Holy Alliance
• 2 The Gulf War: The First Cosmopolitan War
• 3 The Blind Alleys of International Ethics
• 4 Civitas Maxima and Cosmopolitan Law
• 5 Towards a ‘Weak Pacifism’
• Conclusion
• Postscript to the English Edition
• Select Bibliography
• Index