Sovereignty

Moral and Historical Perspectives

James Turner Johnson

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781626160569, 9781626161054
• eBook ISBN: 9781626160576
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Relaciones internacionales

Sovereignty generally refers to a particular national territory, the inviolability of the nation’s borders, and the right of that nation to protect its borders and ensure internal stability. From the Middle Ages until well into the Modern Period, however, another concept of sovereignty held sway: responsibility for the common good. James Turner Johnson argues that these two conceptions—sovereignty as self-defense and sovereignty as acting on behalf of the common good—are in conflict and suggests that international bodies must acknowledge this tension.

Johnson explores this earlier concept of sovereignty as moral responsibility in its historical development and expands the concept to the current idea of the Responsibility to Protect. He explores the use of military force in contemporary conflicts, includes a review of radical Islam, and provides a corrective to the idea of sovereignty as territorial integrity in the context of questions regarding humanitarian intervention. Johnson’s new synthesis of sovereignty deepens the possibilities for cross-cultural dialogue on the goods of politics and the use of military force.

I
Sovereign Authority and the Right to Use Armed Force in Classic Just War Tradition

1
Sovereignty as Responsibility

The Coming Together and Development of a Tradition

While the origins of the idea of sovereignty as responsibility for the common good of the political community can be traced further back in history, the coming together of the specific tradition on this idea that is the focus of this book traces to the same beginnings as the just war tradition: the medieval intellectual revival of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The traditions on just war and sovereignty as responsibility are intimately mixed together and ultimately inseparable: They began together and subsequently developed together. They are not identical, since just war tradition has to do with one specific element in understanding the implications of the understanding of sovereignty as responsibility for the common good, namely, the sovereign’s use of armed force in the discharge of that responsibility. But one learns a great deal about the understanding of just war from the perspective of the inner meaning and practical implications of this conception of sovereignty, and vice versa, one may learn a great deal about the inner meaning and practical implications of this understanding of sovereignty from how it is laid out in connection with the question of just war, bellum iustum.

The conceptualization of both sovereignty and just war during this period took place in a rich intellectual context shaped by two major influences: the Augustinian heritage and the recovery of Roman traditions on natural law, the associated concept of rights, and ius gentium. Similarly, the changed shape of thinking about both just war and sovereignty that appeared early in the modern age reflected changes in how these two elements in the earlier cultural and intellectual context were interpreted and understood to apply. This chapter examines these two influences as they bore on the ideas of sovereignty as responsibility and just war in their coming together and development as moral and political traditions.

The Augustinian Heritage, the Idea of Just War, and the Idea of Sovereignty

When exploring core ideas about the nature, goals, and obligations of political life in Western culture, one runs up against the influence of Augustine at virtually every turn. It is difficult to overstate the impact of his thought on these core ideas and thus on the theoretical structures and institutions later developed to express them. Not only early Christian theology but assumptions about classical culture and representations of it were funneled and filtered by Augustine’s thought, expressed through his writings, into the Middle Ages, on to the theologians and political theorists of the early modern period, and through their influence on to later generations. So fundamental was Augustine’s thought in the Middle Ages that even when new influences arose, as illustrated by the recovery of Aristotle in the thirteenth century and by the broader recovery of classical culture in the Renaissance, the new thinking that grew out of these influences also reflected Augustinian conceptions. Concern for Augustine’s thought in the present book focuses on his influence on the ideas of just war and of the good ruler, which define and express a conception of sovereignty in the political order as fundamentally moral.

Augustine has frequently been characterized as the originator of the just war idea and the first just war theologian. These characterizations reflect and honor the depth of his influence on Western culture generally and on Christian thought in particular, but they are true only up to a point. As to his place in the history of just war thinking, a close look at what he wrote about just war shows that Augustine in framing his own position drew heavily on an established tradition of just war in Roman thought and practice, a tradition also related to earlier classical ideas and practice, as well as on conceptions of justified war from the Hebrew scriptures.¹ His conception of the requirements for a justified resort to armed force—the authority of a ruler, a just cause, and the intention of restoring or newly establishing peace—clearly reflected Roman thinking and practice. Augustine did not originate the just war idea; he built on traditions already existing. Nor did he produce a unified, well-developed, and systematic conception of just war; doing so was the work of medieval thinkers beginning with the canonist Gratian in the mid-twelfth century. By contrast to what he had to say about another moral subject, sexuality and marriage, which he treated extensively and systematically in several distinct theological treatises, what Augustine wrote about just war consists of a relatively small number of passages, typically brief, scattered through works of diverse sorts—letters, theological treatises, biblical commentary. These are the passages lifted out, collected, systematically organized, and oriented to practical reflection, decision making, and behavior by Gratian and then used by the canonists who succeeded him and by theologians like Thomas Aquinas and his successors. But the story consists of more than the specific passages cited from Augustine; it also includes the broader context of Augustine’s own thought, especially as this was appropriated, assumed, and used by the medieval thinkers who organized and defined the idea of just war. For though Augustine built on late classical Roman ideas on just war, he did not simply restate them but put his own stamp on them as he employed them. For their part, his medieval successors also placed their stamp on the inheritance from Augustine by how they interpreted and used it.

To begin to penetrate and understand this Augustinian world, we may usefully consider the following quotations, several from Augustine, one from Isidore of Seville, and one from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.

First, from Augustine: “On the contrary, they were told: ‘Do violence to no man; … and be content with your pay.’ If he commanded them to be content with their pay, he did not forbid soldiering.”²

Again from Augustine: “The natural order conducive to peace among mortals demands that the power to declare and counsel war should be in the hands of those who hold the supreme authority.”³

And: “A just war is … one that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished, for refusing to make amends for the wrongs inflicted by its subjects, or to restore what it has seized unjustly.”⁴

From Isidore: “A war is just when … it is waged in order to regain what has been stolen or to repel the attack of enemies.”⁵

Returning to Augustine: “What is it about war that is to be blamed? Is it that those who will die someday are killed so that those who will conquer might dominate in peace? This is the complaint of the timid, not of the religious. The desire for harming, the cruelty of revenge, the restless and implacable mind, the savageness of revolting, the lust for dominating, and similar things—these are what are justly blamed in wars.”⁶

And this: “We do not seek peace in order to be at war, but we go to war that we may have peace. Be peaceful, therefore, in warring, so that you may vanquish those whom you war against, and bring them to the prosperity of peace.”⁷

Finally, from the Book of Romans: “For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of him who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.”⁸

These few passages constitute the core of the idea of just war as it first came together in Christian moral thought in the Middle Ages. All of them appear in the discussion of war in Gratian’s Decretum; most appear also in Aquinas’s question “On War.” The first passage refutes the argument that Christians ought to reject all forms of the use of force but affirms that they may without sin serve in the armed forces of the political community. The second passage defines and restricts the right to resort to force to the “supreme authority” in that community, implicitly denying it to everyone else who would employ force on his own behalf, that is, anyone who would, in the language of the first passage, “do violence” to another, a distinction too often lost in present-day just war argumentation, but one central to the concept of just war in Augustine and in the Middle Ages, and one bearing directly on the question of the meaning of sovereignty as understood there.

The third and fourth passages clarify the limited range of causes that justify resort to force: for Augustine, punishing wrongdoing and restoring that which has been unjustly taken away; for Isidore, retaking that which has been stolen and defending against unjust attack. Gratian, who employed both of these quotations to define the category of just cause for resort to force, thus recognized three such causes, while Augustine (and Aquinas, who quoted only the passage from Augustine on this) did not explicitly mention defense against attack. Other causes that some might wish to include as justifications for resort to force are also absent here; these are passages that strictly limit what the sovereign (or “supreme”) authority should look for.

In the fifth passage quoted, Augustine defines a number of kinds of intentions that are to be avoided in the use of force. For him the issue in the passage cited is one of inner attitude, mindset, or motivation toward the use of force itself and toward those against whom it is to be used. One does not use force justly if he is seduced by the power it gives him, if he uses it for his private interest or pleasure, or if he uses it out of blinding hatred for the enemy. This passage complements the next one quoted, which defines right intention in terms of its end: aiming to secure peace. This last passage from Augustine defines the ultimate purpose toward which all moral uses of force should aim: the restoration of peace where there has been war and the creation of peace where there has been none, along with a caution that one must fight “peacefully,” that is, in a way that does not undermine the achievement of peace but rather supports it. As Augustine explicitly signals in the language he uses in the list of evil intentions in the passage from Contra Faustum, such evil intentions arise from sinful cupiditas, “self-love,” and sinful libido, “lust,” while the intention of securing peace, a good for all, is in accord with caritas, “charity,” the kind of love that is directed toward the good of the neighbor, the triumph of the heavenly city, and life in the presence of God. Together these two passages define what both Augustine and his medieval successors who consolidated and systematized the idea of just war understood as the requirement of right intention. In their thinking, this requirement reinforced the condition that only persons in supreme or sovereign authority within a political community may justly engage in the use of force, for they bear the responsibility of aiming at the good of all, and in principle only the use of force under their authority can have this purpose, while the use of force by private persons is always inevitably tainted by cupiditas. But at the same time, Augustine’s list of wrong intentions set limits on sovereigns, reminding them that they may not justly employ force out of such private reasons either.

Romans 13:3–4, the final passage quoted, stands as a kind of motto for medieval and early modern Christian thinking about the just use of force: The use of force belongs properly to the role of political authority as an element in God’s government of the world. In the immediate context of the passages I have quoted from Augustine, it provides a weighty biblical source for why force should be morally restricted to the highest authority in the political community. Among medieval and early modern just war theorists, this is the main use to which this passage from Romans was put. But the passage also had another kind of influence: If the ruler is the servant of God who is to act in the stead of God to punish evildoing, some thinkers reasoned, then this shows what the ruler himself must be and what ought to be the quality of his rule and of the society he governs. Thus Romans 13:3–4 also became a foundational passage for a tradition of reflection on the good ruler and the good state, a tradition that helped to influence modern political theory on what good government should be and what aims should guide it. This tradition is examined further below.

Taken all together, then, these sparse passages I have quoted have had a great influence on Western thought on the use of force within the context of the political community and, from the perspective of the question of the justified use of force, on the conception of good government and the nature of the good political community itself. These passages first appeared in close, thematic connection with other passages from the Bible, from Augustine, and from other magisterial Christian theologians in the canonist Gratian’s Decretum from the middle of the twelfth century. Their purpose there, and the purpose of canon law generally, was to guide Christian moral behavior by specifying right and wrong uses of force by Christians in the context of God’s overall government of the world. The next two generations of canonists after Gratian, known as the Decretists and the Decretalists, respectively, focused mostly on the question of the use of force by the governing authority and on limiting the number or kinds of people who could claim a right to have recourse to arms. A century and a quarter after Gratian, the passages from Augustine and from Romans became the backbone of Thomas Aquinas’s discussion of just war in the Summa Theologiae, where they were tied especially to the concept of responsibility in good government as exercised by the just ruler.

The Recovery and Redefinition of the Idea of Natural Law

In the twelfth century, the Roman conception of law was recovered, but this took place in a context deeply shaped by Augustinian ways of thinking. To examine the recovery and redefinition of the idea of natural law and associated concepts in this period, then, we need first to reflect on how Augustine had dealt with such law in his own work, for Augustine’s influence loomed large over the medieval understanding of natural law. Yet Augustine’s own thinking on this matter changed over his lifetime.

Commenting on Augustine’s early treatise De Libero Arbitrio, R. A. Markus writes, “The just war, among other things, had been deeply embedded in the universal order, and Augustine’s reflection on it was closely linked with his own theory of the eternal and the temporal law: the soldier in killing has been a minister legis [De Libero Arbitrio I.5.12], executing a law which was itself distinct from but dependent on a lex aeterna”⁹ Markus goes on to note that Augustine held to the core concepts identified here throughout his life, though he revised his thinking on law twice after this.¹⁰ First was his new understanding of law in Contra Faustum, again offered in the context of a discussion of war (indeed, in the context of the longest specific discussion of just war found in his works). Here, influenced by the Theodosian regime’s embrace of the Church, Augustine envisioned a state of affairs in which the law of the state was being increasingly conformed to the law of Christ, and the use of force by the state was an imp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Sovereign Authority and the right to Use Armed Force in Classic Just War Tradition
• Part II Engaging The Westphalian Idea Of Sovereignty
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index