How many times do we listen to, or use our selves, the word ‘just’ when dealing with wars, military interventions, killings, and so on? The most recent and emblematic case is represented by the Syrian war and the attacks against the Assad’s facilities and bases after the employment of chemical weapons against the rebels in the eastern Ghouta. Always, when the binomial good and evil is involved, we feel legitimate to consider certain actions as just even if they bring about destruction and death. The punishment itself brings the idea of justness, we are open to accept it if it is directed against someone generally considered evil. However, the centrality of the idea of justice in our debates and in the framework of the governmental decisions is an exception in the history of the last five centuries. To go back to an age in which the concept of justice was paramount we have to recall the middle ages when the system of actors in the international arena (if it could be called so) was totally different and with it also the most accepted principles. From the Roman Empire and the Christian’s justifications of war during the Middle Ages, to the Holy Wars (the Christian Crusade, the Muslim Jihad and the Jewish Milchemet Mitzvah), to the Wars of Religion occurred between the XVI° and XVII° century, justice had a primary role in shaping leaders and authorities’ decisions.
The period between these two ages (some scholars think that we are entering a new one) is represented by the four centuries covering the period since the aftermath of the peace of Westphalia to the outbreak of the second world war. The birth of the modern international system posed an end to the prominence of religion as a contested element and helped to overcome this tradition by bringing fundamental changes in the politico-juridical sphere as well as in its organizational principle and normative instrument: if in the past it was centered on the divine law and the religious authority, since then it gradually shifted on the international law and therefore on the sovereign and reciprocal states.During such time wars were mainly fought in the ‘interest’ of the political unit rather than justice or religion. The clearest example is given by the so frequently recalled and most known quotation of Carl Clausewitz about war as the continuation of politics with other means. This statement was extremely influenced by the experience of Napoleon and it was taken as a maxim by his successors. The idea was to consider war as an instrument of politics to achieve political results, therefore mirroring the political interest. Today we can say that armies and war are not employed in the same way and in order to reach the same goals. Since the second world war but in particular in the last decades, since the end of the cold war and the transition occurred from the bipolar system to the unipolar moment, we witnessed the rediscovery of the narrative of the just war applied to the contemporary international military interventions. The importance of the recent rediscovery of this tradition is directly linked to the greater transformation occurring in the institution of war which is claimed to be at the dawn of a new era no more characterized by the conventional and symmetrical armed conflicts but rather by the Low Intensity Conflicts.[1]Within this new kind of violence the element of justice is likely to be more stressed and to get a higher importance than before: think for instance to the humanitarian intervention, the responsibility to protect and the counter-terror war, so frequently recalled in the actual debate. Given these conditions scholars but also governments and leaders are more and more recurring to the categories of the modern just war tradition in order to justify their interventions in key places around the world.[2]The idea of just war is strictly related to the issues of jus ad bellum, the right to wage war, and the jus in bello, the rights and principles to be respected during the hostilities. The first is a limitation to the situations in which states can declare war, and the second is a limitation to the conduct and means of the armies during armed conflicts. The modern Just War theory is underpinned by some, fundamental criteria that must be respected in a sort of cumulative way both in the case of jus ad bellum and jus in bello.
First of all, it must be a Proper Authority to wage war, recognized in the institution of the State since the birth of the modern system; secondly, it must be a Just Cause, found in the self-defense only, also of a pre-emptive nature (a clear imminent threat of attack usually identified in the mobilization of armed forced), while war of aggression is clearly unjust; the intent of the war must be right (Right Intention) and therefore we must seek only the peace and status quo ruling before the war; again, the resort to the use of force must be the last possibility (Last Resort) and all the others tools – such as diplomacy – have to be previously exhausted; fifth, in the war there must be Proportionality of Ends: the overall good (the will to restore peace) shall exceed the total harm inflicted to the enemy, because even a war in self-defense involve its injury; and finally, the Reasonable prospect of Success is a fundamental element to be taken into account when deciding to wage a Just War because starting a war impossible to be won would bring with itself unnecessary and avoidable civilian and military casualties. On the other side of the coin, Proportionality of Means and Distinction are the two principles linked to the jus in bello. The former imposing the use of means and conducts of war which avoid inflicting unnecessary suffering to the enemy and the latter declaring the fundamental principle to target only combatants during the hostilities. Albeit these principles are generally accepted by the majority of scholars, in the recent history has opened a debate about the inclusion of the Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect among the principles of jus ad bellum and more precisely, just cause, in order to justify the military intervention against regimes not willing or unable to avoid, or responsible of perpetrating, atrocities against the civilian population.It’s here, between the ideal of justice and the will to intervene, that arises a problem of coexistence and hierarchy between two elements: the stability of the international order and the questions of justice around the globe.
It is true that to protect human rights and the safety of populations should represent a key principle and task of the international community. International law, human rights law and international bodies such as the European Union and the United Nations are born not only to ban the war as an instrument of politics between countries but also to protect people against violence coming from their own representatives. However, the problem here is to verify whether such interventions should be considered of primary importance among the international community, in particular over the stability of the international order. To address this issue, it will be taken in particular the opinion of one scholar, Hedley Bull, that expressed on this particular relationship in his work of 1977, “the Anarchical Society”.
In the previous part of the article it has been introduced the issue of the Just War theory to show how the concept of Justice played a central role throughout the history, it’s actual relevance and the framework in which it is recalled. Here it will be finally addressed the problem of the controversial relationship between Order and Justice in the international politics. The first step to do so is to understand what International Order means. One of the most respected definitions is the one given by Hedley Bull, who considers the International Order as “[...] a common interest towards a pattern of activity that sustains the elementary, primary and universal goals of the society of States”[1]. These goals, says Bull, are the preservation of the very International System and Society, the maintaining of the independence or sovereignty of States, the peace (meant as a situation in which war isn’t the normal condition of the international system), and finally those purposes proper of every social formation such as the limitation of violence, the respect of promises over time and the protection of each own possess. To achieve these goals and thus the International Order, States collaborate in a cluster of institutions proper of the society of States: the balance of power, the international law, the diplomacy, the concert of great powers and the war. It is through these institutions that States are able preserve Order within the international arena and only with a collaboration and a positive attitude toward them Order will be the effective result. However, and here comes the problem about the relationship between Order and Justice, Bull identifies a criticality in this binomial and namely that a hierarchy does exist in their order of priority. In Bull’s opinion, the former is more important than the latter and Justice can be obtained only within a strong International Order. The reason is given by the fact that efforts in maintaining the stability of the International Order don’t work in favour of the realisation of Justice because the institutions of the society of States inherently act against it. This means that the International Order is preserved through tools that systematically damage the most spread and basic principles of the International Justice and the more efficiently these institutions work, the more they violate them.
Two instances brought by Bull regard War and the Concert of Great Powers and their role toward the achievement of Order. Limited war has a core role in maintaining the International Order: it helps to defend from violations of the international law, the balance of power and unjust changes. But through war, at the same time, is possible to violate the international law, to jeopardize the balance of power and to impose unjust changes. When dealing with the concert of Great Powers the result is almost the same. Through hegemony they impose order and their will from above and preserve (willing or unwilling) the balance of power. However, this is done forgoing the rights of smaller states.
The result seems to be a sort of inverse relationship in which is impossible to achieve both Order and Justice at the same time, but this is not true at all. Bull argues that Justice is possible to be achieved when there is consent among powers to satisfy a quest of right change. In such a situation, there aren’t offenses to the basis of the International Order. In contrast, the conflict arises in the case in which there is no consent upon what Justice itself entails. If countries take a path in which it lacks an agreement about what Justice involve, then Order is put in jeopardy. This situation arises when both a minimal level of Order and Justice do exist and we decide to give a priority to the latter instead of the former. Trying, for instance, to give priority to the protection of human rights without a general consent upon this attitude and their consistency would clash with the more shared will to preserve the International Order therefore bringing about its destabilization. From this doesn’t follow a total inconsistency in which Justice is impossible to be achieved and States have to put aside any quest of just change or the protection of human rights in favor of the stability of the International Order. It means that Order within the world politics is paramount as compared to other goals because it is the precondition for the realization of secondary values: it wouldn’t be otherwise possible to achieve the most basic elements of a society in a disordered world; it would be even worse to try to realize Justice in a situation in which the International Order doesn’t even exist. The ultimate problem is deeply-rooted in the traits of these institutions: designed to maintain order but in some way antithetical or in contradiction to secondary values that can be obtained only if some consent creates between actors.
But if Bull’s words are written during the cold war, in the seventies, in a situation in which the International Order was stronger than today and in which the demands of just change were put aside, afterthe collapse of the Soviet Union we assisted to a proliferation of conflicts and in the last 25 years many of them have been justified through moral reasons, looking for some justice in a new, unipolar, world. We are in a contest in which there are many demands of right change, however we are also in a world that most scholars of international relations define “unipolar moment” and not system, because it is inherently fragile and compromised at its basis. Being an unstable “moment” of international relations, follows that it is also difficult to impose a strong order. Therefore, using Bull’s categories, trying to achieve some form of justice within the actual international system means to jeopardize its already unstable order. We can think that the international system was more stable (as compared to nowadays) in the aftermath of the cold war, but since the decline of the US will to lead the system, to avoid overstretching and bleeding (the reasons for the decline of hegemonies), it grew disorder and with it also multipolarity.
The change in the distribution of power is the first element that affected the rediscovery of Justice, its tradition and the increasing risk of destabilization of world politics. In a system in which the “lonely superpower” had the possibility to impose its own narrative of democracy and liberalization, and in which the theory of democratic peace was recalled, every actor clashing the “end of history” could became a threat. Thus, this discrimination created a polarization of the international system and the promotion of liberal-democratic regimes to “reduce the likelihood of war”.[2] This, in addiction to too many constraints upon the use of force – it is possible to wage war only in self-defense and under the authorization of the security council – made possible the recall of Just war.
Rengger’s opinion is that: “State could no longer assume a simple right of going to war, as they largely had during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then the question ‘Under what circumstances might States (or other actors) use force?’. The answer is Just war.[3]
We are witnessing a fragile shift in the distribution of power: the world is getting more and more multipolar and the majority of scholars is fully aware of that. Given this situation, the minimal level of Order is living on a weak balance and there is few consent among powers in almost every field of international coexistence. This could be the reason for which today is so difficult to confront so many quest of right changes and more significantly this could be the reason for which it could be even worse to give them a priority in a world that is getting more and more disordered. Only within a strong balance we will be able to answer them in an effective and efficient way, the result lacking today.
A cura di Marcello Alberizzi
[1]Bull, H., “The Anarchical Society. A Study of Order in World Politics”, Palgrave, New York, Third Edition, 2002 [1977].
[2]Rengger, N., “On the Just War Tradition in the Twenty-First Century”, International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 78, No. 2 (Apr., 2002), pp. 353-363, Oxford University Press.
[3]Ibidem.
[2]Crawford, N.C., “Just War Theory and the US Counterterror War”,Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Mar., 2003), pp. 5-25, American Political Science Association, Cambridge University Press.