Cosmopolis E-Book

Danilo Zolo

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

Seitenzahl: 465

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

COSMOPOLIS

Prospects for World Government

DANILO ZOLO

Translated from the Italian by David McKie

Polity Press

Copyright © Danilo Zolo 1997

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

First published in 1997 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

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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

The Newtonian image of the state as a planetary system and the power of the sovereign as a counterpart of the central force of the sun, fleshed out and added details to Hobbes’ basic picture. The stability of society required not just centralized force, but also a system of fixed orbits: a modern Cosmopolis.

In both science and philosophy the intellectual agenda today obliges us to pay less attention to stability and system, more attention to function and adaptability. This shift of attention has its counterpart in the social and political realms. The task is not to build new, larger, and yet more powerful powers, let alone a ‘world state’ having worldwide sovereignty.

S. Toulmin, Cosmopolis

A forced conformity of cultures would cut back man’s evolutionary prospects. Herein lies the greatest danger to any evolution planned and guided by us. As soon as we direct it to a definite goal, we run the risk of narrowing the spectrum of possibilities and thus setting in train a process of involution. Differentiation, many-sidedness, and openness to the world are human properties that must be retained.

I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, The Biology of Peace and War

The opposite of war is not peace, the opposite of love is not hate, the opposite of collaboration is not harassment. Each of these dichotomous pairs is at the same end of the scale of mutual involvement and relatedness. At the opposite end of the scale lie separation, indifference, exclusion, and rejection.

H. L. Nieburg, Political Violence

Preface

The opinion is rapidly gaining ground among political scientists both in Europe and in the United States that conflict between the nation states of the world will only cease when the situation of international anarchy inherited from seventeenth-century Europe has been brought to an end. Many believe this step to have been made all the more pressing by the escalating globalization of the problems besetting government, economic development, the rational use of resources and control of the world’s ecology. They propose the dismantling of the system of sovereign states which was established in Europe by the Peace of Westphalia and which, by the close of the nineteenth century, had become universal. It was a system which enshrined the right of the nation state to exercise exclusive power within its own boundaries and to claim absolute independence from any external authority. In place of this ‘Westphalian model’ it is argued that a new hierarchy of formally established and legitimated international power is necessary. In other words, a form of modern Cosmopolis is advocated, in which relations not only between one state and another but also between a state and its citizens would be subject to the control and interventive direction of a ‘world government’.

According to this school of thought, political order rests on the concentration of coercive power within centralized institutions. Within each state these institutions have been used to contain centrifugal forces and to remove conflict between particular interests, through recourse, where necessary, to the use of force. Civil wars have habitually resulted in the establishment of (new) central authorities empowered to exercise this function. But institutions of this sort have never hitherto played a part in the relations between states. Here, and for many centuries, the figure at most of the mediator or arbitrator has appeared, but never that of the judge or police official. Whenever and wherever they have been able to do so, states have exercised their own form of justice by resorting to war. For this reason, while individual citizens may not normally be permitted to carry arms, there is no state in the world which has not attempted to arm itself to the maximum possible extent.

At those times when peace between nations has been guaranteed, it has been effected by means of a balance either of power or of fear. If, however, the objective is to achieve a stable and lasting peace within an international system, then some form of pactum subjectionis, subordinating the power of self-defence of states to the control of an appropriately armed central authority, appears to be indispensable. A reform of existing international institutions in order to increase the powers and to enlarge the functions of the United Nations follows from this as an absolute necessity.

Even without invoking so cosmopolitan a viewpoint, however, I believe it to be difficult to argue that the ‘Westphalian system’ has not reached a point of crisis or to claim that the structuring (and democratization) of the international community has made any great progress in its passage from Holy Alliance to League of Nations to United Nations. The last two centuries have seen no significant increase in the efficacy or authority of international institutions. Neither the peace nor the ‘just’ world order which these institutions were officially brought into being to promote has in fact been achieved. And in the meantime the condition of the planet has taken on alarming aspects.

Today, as Hans Küng points out in his Project Weltethos, each minute the nations of the world spend nearly two million dollars on armaments, each hour 1,500 children die of malnutrition, each day an animal species becomes extinct, each week more people are imprisoned, tortured, murdered or forced to migrate, each month some eight billion dollars are added to the accumulated debt – now standing at 1,500 billion dollars – of the world’s poorest countries, and each year an area of tropical rainforest roughly equivalent to the total ground area of Korea is destroyed. In addition, to be added to this list, the world population is increasing at a present rate of over ninety million a year, and is likely, in the course of the next half-century alone, to double, taking its current figure of five and a half billion to eleven billion or more.

It is this context which reveals the structural unsuitability of the United Nations not simply to guarantee peace but to operate effectively in securing the international protection of human rights, the economic and social development of impoverished and backward areas of the planet and the safety of the environment. Naturally responsibility for the remedying of this situation falls most heavily on the industrialized democracies, which are the only countries with sufficient power and economic resources to bring about reform of international institutions. Even democratic countries, however, operate according to methods which are in many respects scarcely to be distinguished from those used by autocratic and totalitarian regimes. These methods include recourse to war, the imposition of tariff or non-tariff strategies which result in the marginalizing of weaker countries and restrictive or conservative immigration and environmental policies. Furthermore, as a result of the growing interdependence of political decision-making, the situation of disorder at international level appears to be exercising an increasing influence on the functioning of democratic institutions and the exercise of fundamental rights within individual countries. In other words, the conditions of ‘internal democracy’ are becoming more and more dependent upon the conditions of ‘external democracy’ and are influenced to an ever-increasing degree by the quality of international relations.

In the face of such formidable problems it is hardly surprising that the establishment of a ‘global government’ is presented by those whom Hedley Bull terms ‘Western globalists’ as the sole available alternative not simply to war and international disorder but, absolutely, to the planet’s destruction and the extinction of human beings as a species: only in the Cosmopolis are world peace and environmental salvation to be found. But, as I shall attempt to argue, this is a view which the growing complexity and turbulence of international relations are rendering increasingly facile.

My own interest in this range of theoretical problems received a strong impetus from the issues raised by the Gulf War in 1991. This is a war which western public opinion has succeeded in allowing to fade rapidly from its consciousness, but one which, in terms of its importance for international organization, I personally hold to be among the most significant events of this century. Sadly, however, this importance lies in entirely negative directions. I remember the sharp jolt of surprise I received when, on the morning of 17 January 1991, the Italian newspapers announced not only that ‘Operation Desert Storm’ had been unleashed during the night but that the political philosopher Norberto Bobbio, in an interview in Milan, had declared the war to be ‘just’. Immediately I wrote an article expressing my profound disagreement with Bobbio. Neither the theory of the ‘just war’, I held, nor, more broadly, theories of ethics in international relations could provide any justification for this war and, in particular, for the actions of the United Nations. In modern warfare, quite apart from the now techologically defunct distinction between conventional and nuclear attack, ethical and legal considerations had ceased to have any commensurability. What was needed, I concluded, was a realistic – rather than a moralistic or legalistic – evaluation of the international political situation following the collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of bipolarism.

Bobbio made his reply, and as a result further discussion took place between us, both in public and in an exchange of letters. In the end, the distance between our positions had appreciably narrowed, and I was left with a clear impression of the intellectual honesty and sense of public responsibility of my distinguished opponent, a man for whom my personal respect remains undiminished.

But that early shock was far from being the only disappointment I was to suffer. I was grieved by the tacit acquiescence of numerous intellectuals who for years past had argued, sometimes even against me, for the moral, even more than political, necessity of judging politics in the light of public ethics. From that point on, silence appears to have acquired something of the force of habit even across a broad spectrum of the left. There is particular cause for concern about this in that the events of the years succeeding the Gulf War have served only to lend stability and legitimacy to the political and military practices which that war established. These events may seem small in themselves but they are in my view indicative of a profound shift in international politics and balances of power. Among these I include the restrictions imposed on Iraqi territorial sovereignty by the western powers with the tacit approval of the United Nations, but quite without any formal legitimation, and the bombings of Iraq carried out on the personal orders of the United States President for reasons either of internal politics or of outright revenge. In addition there have followed the ‘humanitarian’ intervention of certain western powers in Somalia in 1993, the neocolonial expedition by France in Rwanda in 1994 and, in September of the same year, the invasion of Haiti by the United States, which was authorized by the entire Security Council with the sole abstention of China.

These last three instances seem to me to be typical of the institutional confusion which characterized the Gulf War and which has in succeeding years become a matter of course. This is the confusion between the powers of the formalized organs of the United Nations, the powers of national governments taking part in military intervention, and, extending over all of these, the powers of the United States. A result of this confusion has been that the ‘Blue Helmets’ sent into Somalia for humanitarian reasons ended by firing on defenceless crowds, while some hundreds of civilians were killed by fire from United States helicopters which had not been formally incorporated into the United Nations military force. In turn, innocent western journalists were killed at the hands of angry Somali mobs, and captured United States soldiers were subjected to torture. In Rwanda ‘Operation Turquoise’ repeated the model adopted by the United States in Somalia: French soldiers fought, not under the flag and military command of the United Nations, but as an autonomous force ‘authorized’ by the Security Council. This followed diplomatic pressure applied by France in direct opposition to the Organization for African Unity. Clearly the interests of France went beyond the simple alleviation of the sufferings of the population of Rwanda, and included promotion of its own hegemony in the region. This coincided largely with the interests of the dictatorial Hutu regime, which France had itself supported both politically and militarily.

Even more was at issue in the authorization by the Security Council of the invasion of Haiti by the United States in order to re-establish democracy (Uphold Democracy being the name given to the operation by the Pentagon). On a formal level this was a matter of unprecedented seriousness. For the first time the world’s supreme international institution, in total disregard of the provisions of its own Charter, gave legitimation to the Realpolitik traditionally practised by the United States in the Caribbean and Central America and known as the ‘Monroe Doctrine’. It is now easy to predict that in the near future, notwithstanding the evident mistakes and failings of this strategy for the enforcement of peace and the promotion of democracy, analogous ‘humanitarian interventions’ will be undertaken in the countries of Central and sub-Saharan Africa, over and beyond, naturally, further ‘traditional’ incursions in the Caribbean and Latin America.

Nor does the new ‘global security’ strategy devised by the western powers and Japan provide any less cause for concern. Following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet empire, the security of industrialized nations, it is argued, is now threatened by the explosion of nationalism and the growing danger of anarchy. Defensive military strategies, developed in accordance with an earlier minimalist conception of collective security and international regulation, now appear inadequate. The situation of increased economic and technological interdependence requires the political stability of the planet to be guaranteed by intervention of a kind which will meet the needs of collective security both quickly and flexibly. Such intervention, greatly exceeding the traditional geographical limitation of NATO, is intended to focus above all on crisis hotspots which emerge in the non-industrialized world.

For it is from this region, it is argued, that there arises the greatest likelihood of conflict and of danger to peace as a result of the increasing economic differentials between undeveloped countries, the population explosion, climatic upheavals, ethnic warfare and terrorism. The poorest areas of the world, more than any others, are held to pose the greatest threat to the regular movement of energy resources, the security of air and sea transport, the stability of financial markets and the commitment of industrialized countries to restricting the proliferation of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

More questionable still, however, is the emerging cosmopolitan philosophy which, based on Kant far more than on Grotius, aims to give theoretical justification to the new strategy of the industrial powers and the role which international institutions must inevitably play in it. My fear is that ‘globalistic’ theoretical outlooks such as those advanced respectively by Richard Falk and David Held (or, in Italy, by Norberto Bobbio and Antonio Cassese) will be found to give unwitting support to just this type of political philosophy. They are liable, for instance, to lend justification to the theory of ‘humanitarian intervention’ by the great powers in the political, economic and social problems of other states, even against the wishes of their governments or of majorities or minorities within those countries. Still less confidence is inspired by ethical theories which, in the name of a moral obligation or planetary responsibility which they attribute to the United States or the West, are all too ready to produce justificatory arguments for the actions and undertakings of the ‘Christian armies’.

Paradoxically, however, the concept of world government suggests itself, even to writers who have declared themselves opposed over these last years to military intervention by the great powers in countries such as Iraq, Somalia or Bosnia, as the most suitable means of engendering a more peaceful and just international order. For this reason they have declared their support for ‘democratic reform’ which aims to legitimize the United Nations as a provider of compulsory worldwide justice and an international police force.

The present work arises from my opposition to this view of political philosophy, an opposition which is rooted in my unwillingness to subscribe to the ethical and juridical theories on which it is based. It is intended, therefore, to be what Günther Anders would describe as a work of iconoclasm. Iconoclasm, understood as active obedience to the precept ‘thou shall not make unto thee any graven image’, lies for Anders at the very heart of any non-academic philosophy. In my own case it is more a matter of breaking an image – that of the moral, legal and political rationality of world government – which, despite its entirely regressive nature, or perhaps precisely because of it, has come to assume for us all the overbearing dominance of an idol. It is as if the old dream of monarchie universelle, criticized by Hume as well as Montesquieu, were coming to life once more after centuries of obscurity. It should cause no surprise to recall that the need for a higher political authority is a cause dear to the heart of the Catholic Church.

In contrast to this dream of old Europe, which undoubtedly underlies the organization itself of the United Nations (and accounts also for its failures), my own endeavour has been to achieve a conception of international relations which takes account of their ‘complex’ – that is to say, pluralistic, dynamic and conflictual – nature. I have attempted also to sketch out the elements of a theory of peacemaking which assimilates the results of recent research into human ethology and the ethology of war. It is an attempt – no more than an attempt, I fully recognize – to develop a theory which not only takes account of the growing complexity of international relations but also aims to take realistic advantage of the contributions that moral and legal philosophy have to offer.

From my own standpoint, therefore, diversity, change and differentiation should be conceived as the rule, rather than the exception, in the conduct of international relations of a kind which are capable of ‘reducing fear’ without attempting to remove conflict through the use of centralized and superior military force. Such relations, without claiming in the slightest to be able to eradicate war once and for all, would at least promote less destructive expressions of human aggression. The process looks, needless to say, very much towards the long term, and is subject to a multiplicity of conditions which may not be easy to realize. But its object is to take us, in Stephen Toulmin’s apt phrase, away from the logic of the Leviathan to the logic of the many small chains of Lilliput. We would move, in other words, away from the logic of hierarchical centralizing which so dominates the Charter of the United Nations and towards the logic of a ‘weak interventionism’ – and hence of a ‘weak pacifism’ – which sets greater store by self-organization, co-ordination and negotiation.

The aim of this book is to present a realist approach to international politics and the problem of peace and war. The approach will, however, be found to have little in common with the classic international realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau or Carr, but is closer, all told, to the neorealist stance of Robert Keohane and, in some important respects, to that of a Grotian neo-realist such as Hedley Bull. If it is possible to follow Martin Wight in identifying three distinct traditions within the European philosophy of internationalism – the Hobbesian-Machiavellian, the Grotian and the Kantian – then my own position approximates most closely to the first. This will be seen in at least the sense that I find no practical value in the idea of the spiritual unity of humankind that lies at the heart of the Kantian position and exercises influence also on the Grotian. I am, moreover, little inclined to accept that Rawlsian theories of justice or Kelsenian metaphysics of law are able to offer any assistance in formulating the problems of peace and war. Nor, finally, am I able to place much confidence in the ethics of international relations.

This ‘Machiavellian’ realism is likely to have its roots more in my early political experiences than in my later philosophical inquiries, and is, at least in part, a reaction to those experiences. My interest in international relations derives from the early 1960s and my collaboration at that time with Giorgio La Pira, Mayor of Florence, who involved me in his mission of unofficial diplomacy in the service of world peace which concentrated in those years on Israel, Egypt and the Arab countries of north Africa.

My final commission for him took me to Tunis, where I was to take a private message to the President of the Tunisian Republic, Habib Bourguiba. The assistance of the Italian ambassador, a personal friend of La Pira, succeeded in obtaining for me a meeting with the Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Escorted by the ambassador, I was received in a room splendidly decorated in Moorish style. There I spoke with passion on the opportunity to strengthen cultural links between countries lying on the shores of the Mediterranean, on the dialogue which could be held between the three great monotheistic religions which adjoin one another in that region and on the need to build spiritual bases from which to resolve the conflict between Arab and Israeli (I had been in Israel shortly before, and my conversation on the matter with Martin Buber was fresh in my mind). I advanced in particular the idea of an Islamic Council – Vatican II was then coming to an end in Rome – to be held in Tunis or the holy city of Kairouan and to be freely attended by Christian and Jewish observers. Such an initiative, I added, would receive a warm reception in Italian Catholic circles.

So far my Arabian host had heard me through with gracious courtesy, but, on hearing this, he interrupted me with a tiny gesture of impatience: ‘We have long’, he said, ‘been interested in having good relations with the Catholic Church. That is shown by the contracts which we have recently exchanged with the Vatican regarding substantial investment in the housing sector here in Tunis. If you and your friend Professor La Pira, thanks to your influence with the Vatican, could succeed in increasing this investment for us in future years, we would be most grateful to you and very happy to make manifest our gratitude in some concrete way. As for the other matters, however, I will tell you frankly that they are not ones which hold great interest for us. Cher monsieur, en politique nous sommes cartésiens, nous sommes réalistes…’

Acknowledgements

In recognition of the many debts which I have incurred in writing this book my first thanks are due to Ezra Suleiman, Director of the Council on Regional Studies at Princeton University, for his hospitality during the period I spent in the winter and spring of 1993 as Visiting Fellow in the Department of Politics. This time at Princeton gave me, among many other advantages, the valuable opportunity to discuss the ideas of this book with Richard Falk, Director of the World Order Studies component of the University’s Center of International Studies.

I was enabled to bring my work to its conclusion through the grant in 1993 of a Jemolo Fellowship at the Centre for European Studies, Nuffield College, Oxford, where I also returned for further periods of study in the autumn of 1994 and 1995. Here I was able to benefit greatly from the exceptional resources of the Bodleian and other Oxford libraries, as well as from the friendly assistance of Andrew Hurrell, David Miller and Vincent Wright, Fellows of Nuffield College.

My further thanks are due to Antonio Cassese, who has been lavish in the provision of information, advice and cautionary warnings. Without the safety net of his constant attention, this is a project I could never have dared to embark upon. This must not, however, be taken to involve him in responsibility for the theories which are here advanced and with which, I fear, he will not find himself in full agreement. Amongst others whom I wish most warmly to thank are Roberto Gilodi, who first encouraged me to write a work of political philosophy on the international questions arising from the great watershed formed by the Gulf War; Furio Cerutti, whose frequent criticisms have stimulated me to pay greater attention to the problem of relations between democracy and international issues; Patrizia Messeri, who initiated my interest in the ethology of primates and human ethology with regard to matters such as aggression, pacification rituals and war; Pietro Costa, Luigi Ferrajoli, Giorgio Gaja, Letizia Gianformaggio and Pier Paolo Portinaro, whose reading of my work in its complete but not yet final form resulted in considerable further improvement.

In addition I wish to record here the debt I owe to my friends in the Inter-university Seminar on Political Philosophy, which has met for a number of years now in Florence, and with whom I have discussed at length the arguments of this book, in particular Luca Baccelli, Franca Bonichi, Antonella Brillante, Anna Loretoni, Maria Chiara Pievatolo, Emilio Santoro, Monica Toraldo di Francia and Francesco Vertova.

My last, and crucial, debt is once again to the literary skill of David McKie, Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge, who has, for this third time, undertaken the English translation of my work. On this occasion I am indebted in addition to Rachel Barrit for her co-operation in providing an initial English version of chapters 3, 4 and 5.

D. Z.

Oxford, September 1995

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 thestatus 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 forward at Dumbarton Oaks fail essentially to match the arrangements which later materialized as the United Nations. When, on 25 April 1945, the United Nations Conference met at San Francisco to bring into being the Charter of the new organization, the fifty countries which had accepted the invitation of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin found themselves confronted with a clear-cut position. Although a two-thirds majority was sufficient to decide the formulation of individual articles, no overall option was open to them other than that of accepting the general lines already laid down at Dumbarton Oaks (and explicitly presented by the host governments as non-negotiable) or of bringing about the immediate collapse of the initiative.17

Such attempts as were made to avoid dependence of the functioning of the new organization on the will of the great powers ran into obstacles at every stage. The only exception to this of any significance was the introduction of a right of self-defence granted to states in the event of their being subjected to aggression. This effectively reduced what would otherwise have been a complete monopoly of the use of military force invested in the Security Council.18 On the other hand the proposal to grant the International Court of Justice authoritative power of interpretation of the Charter and thus a control over the legitimacy of the acts of the organization was, along with a number of other similar proposals, withdrawn. On 26 June 1945 the constitution thus devised for the United Nations received unanimous approval and was signed by the representatives of all the countries involved.19

In the broad outline of its structure, i.e. General Assembly, Security Council, Secretariat and Court of Justice, the United Nations repeats the essential elements of the League of Nations. Beyond this, however, many of its points of contact are more readily shared with the Holy Alliance. Even in the grandiloquence of the preamble to its Charter – which contrasts markedly with the extreme sobriety of expression used in the League of Nations Covenant – the United Nations appears to draw on the same rhetorical tradition as that which fills the pages of the Treaty of the Holy Alliance.

More particularly, the division of functions between the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council differs radically from that which obtained between the same bodies of the League of Nations. The United Nations General Assembly possesses no power of binding decision and is limited simply to the formation of recommendations. These the Security Council is not bound to take into account. Significantly, in cases where the Council already has a dispute or situation in hand, the Assembly is not then permitted to proceed with recommendations unless requested to do so.20

In the United Nations the totality of powers is concentrated therefore in a Security Council which, quite unlike the Council of the League of Nations, is not a purely deliberative body. Chapter VII of the Charter is, for example, given over entirely to specification of the powers of military organization and command which belong to the Council in cases where coercive international action is under consideration.21 In granting these most important military functions to the Council, the creators of the United Nations institutional framework at Dumbarton Oaks clearly started from the premise that the League of Nations had failed precisely because of the lack of powers given to its leading organizational body.

Decisions of the Security Council do not, as was the case with the League of Nations, require unanimity, but rely instead on the principle of a qualified majority which must include votes in favour from the permanent members, which is to say the five powers victorious in the Second World War. This formulation, which gives an effective force of veto to each of the five great powers,22 reflects the wishes expressed by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin at Yalta. In effect, therefore, the Security Council members enjoy an extremely high level of discretionary power to intervene in both the political and the military spheres, and yet, as was by no means the case under the League of Nations, are not bound to abstain in instances where force is needed to resolve disputes in which they are themselves involved. The natural consequence of this is that the five permanent members of the Council have the ability to exercise the very extensive powers granted to that body without themselves, thanks to their right of veto, running the risk of being at any stage subjected to those powers.

As Hans Morgenthau has frankly and realistically observed, the Holy Alliance amounted to open and unashamed international government on the part of the great powers. The League of Nations was, on the other hand, international government by the great powers tempered by the advice and consensus of all the member countries. In principle the rule of unanimity gave them the effective ability to oppose the wishes of the great powers. The United Nations, by contrast, is international government by the great powers identical in its constitutional outline to that of the Holy Alliance. It is therefore entirely autocratic, while pretending at the same time to be open and temperate in the same way as the League of Nations was.23 The Security Council, it may then be said, has become the Holy Alliance of the twentieth century, and its five permanent members a Holy Alliance within the Holy Alliance.24 A similar conclusion has been reached by Ian Clark, who argues that the institutional structure of the United Nations amounts to a clear regression to the eighteenth-century position whereby the fate of all other states lay at the mercy of the changeable alliance between the great powers. The Charter of the United Nations failed even to grant the concessions in favour of the interests of weaker states which the Covenant of the League of Nations had earlier provided for.25

In practice, given the circumstances whereby the United States and the Soviet Union formed the only true superpowers, the Charter of the United Nations guaranteed these two countries a highly extensive coercive control over international relations without, however, providing means for the resolution of any conflict potentially arising between them. The lack of a requirement to abstain should they both be involved in a dispute which required the use of military force, and the mechanism of the veto formed two highly effective obstacles to any altercation between the countries being internationally regulated against their own volition.

The Prolonged Agony of the United Nations

In its first years the United Nations operated very much under the hegemony of the United States, one of whose actions was the decision to house the organization on its own territory and to account for at least one quarter of its expenses (a situation which continues to obtain today).26 Evidence of this domination is to be seen in the 1947 decision to constitute the state of Israel, where it was plain not only that this decision exceeded the remit of the United Nations but that establishment of the state in Palestine ran contrary to the wishes of the great majority of the inhabitants of the territories involved. Furthermore, in 1950, the United States was able to take advantage of the temporary absence of the Soviet delegation to the Security Council and to respond to the invasion of South Korea by launching its own attack against the North under the auspices of the United Nations (whose flag remains flying to this day over the military demarcation line between the two Koreas).

From the beginning of the 1950s, however, up until the end of the 1980s the rivalry between the two superpowers (and their subsequent sharing of power along the lines of a sort of twofold ‘Brezhnev doctrine’) brought paralysis once again to the notion of ‘international government’. The logic of equilibrium between sovereign states – this time in the form of a matched and escalating nuclear deterrent – again came to dictate the terms of war and peace between the nations of the world.

It is common knowledge that both of the superpowers repeatedly and almost as a matter of course have violated the principles set out in the preamble to the Charter of the United Nations through their attempts in the Security Council to protect their own positions, and those of their allies, by a systematic use of the right of veto.27 Both have involved themselves in long-drawn-out armed conflicts: the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. And both have embarked on the pursuit of more limited military objectives such as, in the case of the United States, Guatemala (1954), Lebanon (1958), Cuba (1961), the Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986) and Panama (1989), and, in the case of the Soviet Union, the invasions in Eastern Europe in 1956 and 1968. In one instance only, that of the United States’s support of the Contras in Nicaragua, has condemnation been forthcoming from the International Court of Justice, a result entirely ignored by virtue of its power of veto by the United States government.28

For over forty years now the two superpowers and their respective military alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, have edged the United Nations out of the international arena and nullified the wide military and political powers formally possessed by the Security Council. Few of the Chapter VII rules, designed to bring the use of armed force under the control of the Security Council, have ever been applied. In particular article 47, which provides for the constitution of a Military Staff Committee composed of the Chiefs of Staff of the five permanent members of the Security Council, has remained entirely ineffectual. This committee was to have been responsible for the strategic direction of all armed forces put at the disposal of the Security Council. The most, however, that the Security Council has ever been authorized to do is to exercise functions of vastly inferior importance to those envisaged for it in the Charter, such as the exercise of placing invited peacekeeping forces between parties in conflict (as in the Middle East, the Congo and Cyprus).

Nor has the General Assembly achieved anything other than declarations of principle lacking legal potency such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 or its many long-winded and unspecific documents on such world problems as aid to underdeveloped countries, protection of the environment, development of international trade, demographic control, human rights. The vast majority of these, such as, typically, the 1974 programme for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), have never been more than dead letters. And this has been the case even in the circumstances of the 1960s when the process of widespread decolonization created favourable conditions for the entry into the United Nations of many of the Third World countries, as well as the People’s Republic of China (1971). Hopes were raised by this that the General Assembly would be able to overcome its lack of power and find a way of exercising some sort of significant function. Such illusions, however, fostered as they were by the creation of a plethora of commissions on the part of the Assembly and the Economic and Social Council, were destined to wilt in the face of opposition from the United States and the western powers and indifference from the Soviet Union. The nadir of impotence, passivity and lack of status occurred – to borrow Richard Falk’s observation – with the election in 1971 as Secretary General, followed by renewal in 1976, of a figure such as Kurt Waldheim.29

Some Political-Philosophical Questions

At this stage I propose to consider some of the political-philosophical questions which arise from the consideration of international institutions as they stood at the point so far reached, the end of the 1980s. Clearly subsequent events, in the shape of the collapse of the Soviet empire and the outbreak of the Gulf War, have brought about highly significant further developments. But, before turning attention to these in the next chapter, I wish first to attempt to formulate certain questions which it will be the aim of this study to answer.

None of the three schemes for lasting and universal peace which have been brought into being over the last two centuries has, as we have seen, achieved any notable degree of success. On a strictly political level their lack of effect appears attributable to, first, the tendency of stronger states to pursue their own advantage through the practice of a power politics flagrantly contradictory to the principles to which they had previously expressed adherence; second, the lack of any provision for the peaceful resolution of quarrels which have risen between these states; third, the difficulty over the long term of reconciling, without self-contradictory recourse to the use of force, the maintenance of peace with the defence of the international status quo and its need for the institutional concentration and legitimation of power.

In the event, not only has peace not been maintained but the potential for world conflict has developed immensely. Worldwide military spending has continued to grow unchecked, as have the global stocks both of conventional arms and of the more sophisticated weaponry and strategic nuclear arsenals held by the major powers. A recent finding of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute is that world military spending rose from $220 billion in 1950 to $610 billion in 1970, and reached a high point of $950 billion in 1987.30 Perhaps not unconnectedly, some 130 armed conflicts are known to have arisen in the years from 1935 to today, resulting in a total of not fewer than thirty-five million deaths.