Medieval Foundations of International Relations

William Bain, William Bain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317635499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

The purpose of this volume is to explore the medieval inheritance of modern international relations. Recent years have seen a flourishing of work on the history of international political thought, butthe bulk ofthis has focused on the early modern and modern periods, leaving continuities with the medieval world largely ignored. The medieval is often used as a synonym for the barbaric and obsolete, yetthis picture does not match that found in relevant work in the history of political thought. The book thus offers a chance to correct this misconception of the evolution of Western international thought, highlightingthat the history of international thought should be regarded as an important dimension of thinking about the international and one that should not be consigned to history departments.

Questions addressed include:

• what is the medieval influence on modern conception of rights, law, and community?
• how have medieval ideas shaped modern conceptions of self-determination, consent, and legitimacy?

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• are there 'medieval' answers to 'modern' questions?

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• is the modern world still working its way through the Middle Ages?

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• to what extent is the 'modern outlook' genuinely secular?

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• is there a 'theology' of international relations?

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• what are the implications of continuity for predominant historical narrative of the emergence and expansion of international society?

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Medieval and modern are certainly different; however, this collection of essays proceeds from the conviction that the modern world was not built on a new plot with new building materials. Instead, it was constructed out of the rubble, that is, the raw materials, of the Middle Ages.This will be of great interest to students and scholars of IR, IR theory and political theory.

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1 The medieval contribution to modern international relations

William Bain

DOI: 10.4324/9781315758213-1

The essays contained in this collection explore some of the medieval foundations of modern international relations. The belief that there are such foundations, and that scholarship can uncover these foundations, runs up against the deeply entrenched opinion that ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ name discrete historical epochs, and that the latter decisively displaced the former. Historical antecedents are scarce, if not absent altogether, because the grammar that governs the vocabulary of modern international relations is peculiar to a world that smashed the once grand institutions of medieval Christendom. International relations, properly understood, is concerned with distinctively modern set of ideas, institutions, and practices. Niccolò Machiavelli and Martin Luther are counted among the heroes of this new world, while the villains, a long procession of now forgotten popes and emperors, are recalled mainly to illustrate the absurdity of government conducted by two coordinate heads, presiding over a single body. The dualism of separate spiritual and temporal governments could only result in an on-going struggle for supremacy that defied lasting resolution. As Marsilius of Padua argues, expressing what would come to be accepted as the cardinal conviction of modern international relations, the cause of political disharmony demands that ‘the supreme government in a city or kingdom must be only one in number’.¹ In time those claiming universal rule passed from the scene and the reins of power passed to a multitude of princes, some great and others less so; yet they all asserted a superior authority, over and above all internal rivals, and an independence that excluded all external rivals from their jurisdictions.

With this development, the familiar grammar of modern international relations begins to take shape, leaving behind the wreckage of a discredited way of life. Notions of separateness take the place of unity, and equality is emphasised at the expense of hierarchy.² The modern world of states is ontologically flat; it is a horizontal arrangement characterised by political division, overlaid by a veneer of cultural similarity, as opposed to a vertical arrangement that gathers up a multitude of political and spiritual authorities in an order of concord that culminates in God – the only true sovereign.³ Only then is it possible to comprehend the ubiquitous distinction between domestic and international, or the idea of a states-system organised in terms of discrete territorial units, governed by a law, not of peoples or nations, but between states. The grammar that renders this world intelligible is an historical achievement, peculiar to time and place; it is an achievement that facilitates utterance and expression of a particular kind while barring other kinds of expression because they amount to linguistic nonsense. It makes no more sense to speak of sovereignty as entailing a condition of inferiority than it does to speak of the weight of an inch. The possible meanings and interpretations in modern international relations are historically situated, and they are reflected in established usage and practice. There is, then, a vast gulf separating modern usage and practice from that of the Middle Ages, so much so that it is, as Martin Wight puts it, ‘impossible to use the word “international” in speaking of medieval politics without serious anachronism and distortion’.⁴

These essays challenge the vastness of this gulf and the extent to which ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ stand for truly separate ideational and material continents. Taken together, they do so by making three principal claims. First, they show that the contrast between a religious medieval outlook and a secular modern outlook cannot be sustained. The wars of religion may have dimmed the light of the papacy, but they did not loosen the grip of religion entirely. The modern states-system is, in significant ways, founded on late medieval theological and philosophical commitments that prefigure a world composed of individual and contingent things, and which privilege a voluntarist vocabulary of command, decision, and contract. Independent states, sovereignty, and a legislative conception of law are political translations of this vocabulary, and they are given to a world of will and artifice – a world that is made and unmade rather than discovered. Second, these commitments undermine the conventional historical periodization that posits a sharp break between medieval and modern, thereby excluding medieval thought and practice from meaningful engagement with the ‘international’. Because sovereignty and statehood are not proprietary possessions of modern international relations, employing the word ‘international’ in a medieval context does not necessarily lead to anachronism and distortion. Once these reified historical boundaries are unsettled, it is possible to think coherently in terms of the modern Middle Ages; that is, in terms of a modernity that is in some ways still working through medieval problems related to the conditions of freedom and order, and therefore the nature of sovereign power and the relation of political units. Third, these essays suggest that there might be ‘medieval’ answers to ‘modern’ questions. Exposing the medieval foundations of modern international relations also exposes thought and practice which have been discarded. Therefore, recovering what has been left behind might be put to use in theorising different conceptions of international community or providing more compelling justifications for protecting civilians against atrocities.

In excavating these foundations, the essays in this volume do not suppose that medieval and modern are indistinguishable. It is a mistake to see the modern as a simple and unproblematic reflection of medieval experience. Medieval ways of thinking and doing cannot be applied as equally unproblematic answers to whatever ails the modern world because they are different in some respects. However, the essays proceed from the conviction that the modern world was not built on a new plot and constructed entirely out of new materials; instead, it was constructed from the rubble of the Middle Ages.⁵ The value of this enterprise is found at least in part in the reminder it provides of the danger of becoming bewitched by modern achievements and the attractiveness of modern values.⁶ Inquiry of this kind denies that we have answered the big conceptual or philosophical questions of our world; that these questions are no longer contentious and, therefore, have little substantive bearing on what actually goes on in the world. These essays evince sympathy with Quentin Skinner’s view that engaging the past offers a sense of perspective on our own systems of belief. They illuminate what we have inherited from the past and what has been discarded, and to that extent they point to what we believe and to our reasons for holding such beliefs. And in this sense, too, we are reminded that ‘the values embodied in our present way of life, and our present ways of thinking about those values, reflect a series of choices made at different times between different possible worlds’.⁷

Foundations and perspectives

David Armitage’s Foundations of Modern International Thought exemplifies the importance of foundations in attaining a proper understanding of contemporary international relations. Overcoming the bias cultivated by the theory of the state is a critical part of this agenda. For Armitage, the central puzzle that has guided historians of political thought is the genesis of the idea of the state. Skinner explains the nature of this project as one of illuminating the process by which the modern state came to be formed. The process begins in the late Middle Ages, and it is complete when it is possible to imagine the state ‘as the sole source of law and legitimate force within its own territory’.⁸ Establishing the state as the most important unit of analysis has had no less an impact on the way in which international relations have been imagined and theorised. Theory about the state, Wight famously argued, is concerned with the conditions of the good life; conversely, theory about the relations of states is concerned with questions of life and death – that is, national existence and national extinction. This distinction follows from the pervasive belief that the sovereign state is ‘the consummation of political experience and activity which has marked Western political thought since the Renaissance’.⁹ Political theory is susceptible to progressivist interpretation. Within states, it is possible to observe growing social cohesion and interdependence, increased wealth and better distribution, and the softening of manners and the diffusion of culture. But to say the same of the international realm is to put conviction before evidence. International theory is resistant to progressivist interpretation, because relations between states are distinguished by ‘recurrence and repetition; it is the field in which political action is most regularly necessitous’.¹⁰

This enormously influential distinction is premised on a contrast between an ordered internal realm and a precarious external realm, perhaps not entirely devoid of order, which nonetheless is threatening in an existential way. Indeed, it is this imagery that succeeded the imagery of medieval hierarchy, universalism, and religiosity. For beyond the confines of the state lays an uncertain international anarchy that privileges power and interest before authority and obligation. States dominate over and above individuals, and the law that governs their relations is not much more than a concrete record of what states do as a matter of fact. The problem, according to Armitage, is that the distinction between inside and outside, that is, the scaffolding that upholds the dominant imagery of international relations, ‘remains perhaps the least investigated of all the fundamental divisions in our political lives’.¹¹ What is more, this distinction is a product of nineteenth and twentieth century historical and legal thought that has been projected retrospectively on to ‘canonical’ thinkers, such as Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, who are said to be bearers of the distinctive standard of modernity. It is in this sense that James Brown Scott, editor of a famous canon of texts in international law, portrays Francisco de Vitoria as a practically minded statesman, more so than a theologian, who anticipated the shape of the international community of the future – a community larger than the parochial confines of Christendom.¹² Uncovering the foundations of modern international thought exposes the mythography that has grown-up around such opportunistic appropriations. As Armitage puts it, stories accounting for the origins of modern international relations are often little more than ‘foundation myths retailed by later communities of historians and diplomats, international lawyers and proto-political scientists, seeking historical validation for their ideological projects and infant professions’.¹³

The foundations that concern Armitage are located in a period spanning the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, beginning roughly with Hobbes and ending with Jeremy Bentham.¹⁴ He does not presume to uncover all of the foundations that might be of interest. The claims he makes are symptomatic rather than systematic. Yet these symptoms invite a root-and-branch re-evaluation of canonical thinkers, Hobbes¹⁵ foremost among them, as well as momentous events, such as the transition from medieval empire to a world of independent states. Only then is it possible to make headway in addressing the question that guides investigations in the foundations of international thought; indeed, a question that signifies a profound shift in political consciousness: ‘How did we – all of us in the world – come to imagine that we inhabit a world of states?’¹⁶ Of course, foundations are in a fundamental sense conditional; they provide platforms of understanding that enable evaluation as well as analysis. A foundation is the platform on which propositions are erected, courses of action articulated, and ideas made intelligible. Foundations are conditional because they are historical. It is in this context that Armitage sets out to expose foundational myths, and so invest international relations with meaning that is stripped of presentist ideology which is meant to ratify or condemn a particular state of affairs. This collection of essays evinces sympathy with this project, while looking in a different direction for foundations that remain unexplored or obscured by reifications that have not yet been de-mythologised.

Here, too, the objective is qualified by the modesty that infuses Armitage’s project. These essays do not purport, either singly or collectively, to uncover the medieval foundations of international relations. What they do aim to provide is insight into the medieval influence on some of the fundamental ideas and practices that are taken to exemplify the spirit of modern international relations. For instance, they question the idea that Grotius furnished a secular theory of natural law and, therefore, the basis of modern international legal order.¹⁷ They also question Hobbes’s credentials as an unalloyed modern thinker by showing how his epistemology accords with his theology.¹⁸ History is like the index of a book: it holds out multiple points of entry that are suited to a variety of projects and purposes.¹⁹ Each of these points of entry affords a vantage point from which to engage in a continuous process of observation, argumentation, and revision. And, as a platform of understanding, a foundation is useful in isolating a part of international relations for further study. But a vantage point is nothing more than a vantage point. There is no panopticon of history, in international relations or any other domain of historical inquiry, which affords a single vantage point from which it is possible to view everything that can be seen from every other vantage point. Interpretations, and the foundations on which they rest, are conditional because they emanate from a point of view. They are qualified by the experience of the interpreter, which is to say ...