By the time Rawls wrote his LP, international relations theory was in full swing. This means that the parties in the second original position had to be presented with at least five options: realism, liberalism, behaviorism, socialism and Rawls’ own76. The procedure conducted here will be similar to that of the domestic case, i.e. parties in the original position reason by comparing alternatives two at a time.
Parties start with Rawlsian principles and compare those to the other available alternatives. The concept of behaviorism is discredited because its precepts do not pass the test of being universal and general, while the precepts of socialism fail the test of ordering77. I hope to show that a stronger balance of reasons supports Rawlsian principles, and hence these ought to be adopted (JF: 95).
We start from two contrasting ideas about international relations: one is that international relations are an ongoing struggle for wealth and power; the other is that there is a reasonably just world-order whose members subordinate equally their powers for the sake of mutual trade and protection and overall prosperity. The tradition of realism takes the first idea as its key motive while the tradition of idealism is the second. Rawls’ conception as we shall see takes elements from both.
Realism
In TJ, the main theoretical opponent of Rawls’ thought was a utilitarian conception of justice for domestic society; in LP it is realism’s conception of international relation. Realism as a theory of
75On the distinction between the ´Rawls´´ and `Rawlsian´ cf. § 1.1.3. ft. 16.
76There are two things to be noted. In this chapter I discuss different approaches in the theory of international relations. This does not mean that I am confusing international relation with international law, nor that I am not aware of the fact tat Rawls takes his principles from the traditions of international law. However, my point so far has been that Rawls is not really using
´principles´ on the international level. He does not use a general and universal theoretical account but simple rules of international jurisprudence, as I have hoped to have shown in the previous chapter. Here, by analyzing different approaches in the theory of international relations I hope to supplement Rawls´ account with the true principles which as such would be able to account for the rules of international law but would at the same time also be guidelines for the development of these.
The second thing to note is that not all approaches in international relations will be discussed here. I put my focus on the realism, liberalism and international society approach since these immediately influence Rawls´ thought.
77Behaviorism is a situation and country oriented theory and hence does not provide for universal, unified standards.
Socialism does not provide standards which would order claims because it does not allow a variety of claims.
international relations has a long tradition. The advocates of realism are authors such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Hans Morgenthau, Hedley Bull, E.H. Carr, Kenneth Waltz, etc. Rawls explicitly refers to the classical example or realist thinking: the Athenian siege of the island of Melos during the Peloponnesian War. According to the description we find in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, upon arriving in Melos the Athenians delivered the following speech: “For you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is the question only between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” (Thucydides: V.89). Athenians further argue that liberty is the fruit of power, for Melos to hold on its independence would be misjudging of the situation with the tragic consequences (Donelly 2000: 23).
“Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do” (Thucydides: V. 105.2, quoted from Donelly 2000: 22-23). Hence, the key element of rationalist theory is their vision of human nature as egoistic and power-seeking. Rawls reluctantly concludes that international relations have not changed since Thucydides times, and that that is one of the reasons he feels obliged to write a normative account on the law of peoples (LP: 46).
Machiavelli is another classical author who advocates realism. According to Machiavelli the world is a dangerous place. One, political leaders must always be aware of dangers; they must anticipate them and not shun any kind of precocious measures against a possible threat. Success is also based on gaining more power than others. The ruler must learn to deal with the principles of power-politics since his honor, well-being and that of his subjects depends on it. The supreme value is that of security and the survival of the state. There is no other responsibility in the international domain that counts more.
“A Prince…cannot observe all those things for which men are considered good, for in order to maintain the state he is often obliged to act against his promise, charity, against humanity, and against religion. And therefore, it is necessary that he have a mind ready to turn itself according to the way the winds of fortune and the changeability of political affairs require…as long as it is possible, he should not stray from the good, but he should know how to enter into evil when necessity commands” (Machiavelli 1984: 59-60, quoted from Jackson, Søerenson: 1999: 70).
Thus for the realists, the state has supreme importance. Its importance and normative value override that of an individual being. The states relate to each other in the same way individuals do: according to the principles of power politics.
Thomas Hobbes, another representative of realism, famously explained the relations between the state and the individual. He argued that in the state of nature, i.e. the pre-political state, everyone is in a war
against everyone else. The political state is formed in order to escape from the brute state of nature and secure protection and safety for each. People cooperate politically because of their fear. Hobbes formulated the famous prisoner dilemma, a thought experiment in which two prisoners held apart from one another are questioned about the crime they committed. They would get a lesser sentence if neither confesses, but since they do not know what the other will do, the most rational choice for each one is to keep silent and accept a longer sentence. The experiment was supposed to show that human nature is based on mistrust and egoism. People are willing to give up on some of their powers only out of fear, i.e. in order to gain protection from the sovereign. This is how political states come into being.
However, on the international level there is no possibility for states to form a world government.
Sovereign states will not give up on their sovereignty, and hence international relations stay in the state of nature, in the struggle for power and anarchy.
Classical realists thus argue that human nature entails in its essence a will to power; hence, the human condition in a state of nature remains insecure. The problem of insecurity may be solved on the domestic level but not on the international one, since the states are much more independent than the individual persons are. Thus internationally the only solution is anarchy and the balance of powers.
In modern times thinkers such as Hans J. Morgenthau continued classical realist thinking. Morgenthau writes that men have an animus dominandi, a soul with the desire for power (Morgenthau 1965: 192).
“Politics is a struggle for power over men, and whatever its ultimate aim may be, power is its immediate goal and the modes of acquiring, maintaining, and demonstrating it determine the technique of political action” (Morgenthau 1965: 195). There is one morality for private conduct and another, argue Morgenthau and the realists, for the conduct of states. Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of a state in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place. The individual may say for himself: “‘fiat justitia, paret mundus´, but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care”
(Morgenthau 1985: 12). International politics is an arena for conflicting state interests. Each state wants its interests fulfilled. These are not fixed, and realism responds to the fact of a changing world. Thus, it cannot be guided by general moral principles. Political leaders are responsible to their peoples and precisely because of that they are justified and obliged to change their politics depending on the situation in question (cf. Morgenthau 1985: 4-17).
The most eminent representative of neo-realist thinking is Kenneth Waltz. Waltz seeks to provide a scientific justification for realist thinking; he leans heavily on the positivist models of economics. He does not speak of human nature but of the dynamics of an international system as such. His basic thought is that states are structurally similar: they all need to collect taxes, conduct foreign policy, take
care of safety and security of its citizens, etc. States do have different traditions and cultures but that is unimportant; what is important is their capability of performing the tasks every other state performs as well. Every state seeks to carry out its policies the best way it can, and doing so some are more successful, i.e. more powerful than others. International change occurs when the balance of powers shifts, in other words when some states stop performing their tasks in the usual way. In order to maintain state functions in the best possible way, states are allowed to use all methods.
Although realism has many faces, its core thought may be encapsulated in the following three points:
1. Human nature is self-centered and egoistic; people always want more for themselves.
2. States should protect their citizens and gain even more power, and are justified in choosing any means for doing that.
3. The only peace one can hope for in international relations is the balanceofpower.
It is the third point that is of interest for my discussion here. The realist way of thinking about human nature, and consequently about relationships between human beings, leads to the view on international relations characterized by the struggle of powers, an anarchy with no overreaching global power. Thus, realists respect the sovereignty of the state and the status quo i.e. balances of powers, as the best solution when it comes to relations between the sovereign states. This basically means that there is no such a thing as mutual support or duties between states. It is solely the state’s interest that plays a role in international relations. Keohane and Nye, in their influential work, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (1977), explain the realist vision for international relations saying that realists assume that “force is a usable and effective instrument of policy”, they furthermore assume “a hierarchy of issues in world politics, headed by questions of military security: the ‘high politics‘ of military security dominate the ‘law politics’ of economic and social affairs”. Finally, according to Kaohane and Nye, realists “allow us to imagine a world in which politics is continually characterized by active or potential conflict among states, with the use of force possible at any time. Each state attempts to defend its territory and interests from real or perceived threats. Political integration among states is slight and lasts only as long as it serves the national interests of the most powerful state. Transitional actors either do not exist or are politically unimportant. Only the adept exercise of force or the threat of force permits states to survive, and only while statesmen succeeds in adjusting their interests, as in a well-functioning balance of power, is the system stable” (Keohane, Nye 1997: 23-37).
In its extreme form, realism is the line of thinking Rawls explicitly tries to avoid. However, one must admit that the great evils of our time, e.g. World War II, showed that realist doctrine is present and should not be underestimated in political praxis. Hence, the parties who are in the original position and
are about to choose the principles of global justice need to be presented with this influential doctrine.
Therefore, the parties in the original position may be presented with the following realist principles on international relations:
1. States shall respect human rights as long as they do not collide with national goals.
2. States shall cooperate with other states for the sake of personal gain or in order to preserve a balance of power.
3. States shall not assist other states unless the assistance produces an immediate benefit for them.
Being heavily anchored in the political praxis, what is immediately politically effective does not, as I hope to show, mean that political theory should not aim for higher ideals. According to Rawls: “If a reasonably just Society of Peoples whose members subordinate their power to reasonable aims is not possible, and human beings are largely amoral, if not incurably cynical and self-centered, one might ask, with Kant, whether it is worthwhile for human beings to live on the earth” (LP: 128)
Liberalism
The core idea of any liberal theory is that individual rights and liberties need to be respected: “a certain minimum area of personal freedom which on no account must be violated” (Berlin 1969: 124). And that is done not in the sense of realist thinking, i.e. in the egoistic and self-centered way, but through the respect for rights and liberties of everyone. The first task for a political organization like a state is to ensure that these liberties are respected. This notion is kept also when theorizing about the world-order.
Liberalism as a way of thinking about our social world that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, as the Reformation brought religious toleration, which was followed by the fortification of secular state, i.e. the division of secular and religious states, with the secular one being put in charge of political affairs, and democratization of the labor force (LHPP: 11) Thinkers such as John Lock, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, and many others gave a theoretical swing to these practical-political changes. The underlining thought was to secure basic liberties; however, thinkers differ in defining those.
Rawls teaches us that in thinking about liberty we always need to keep three things in mind: “the agents who are free, the restrictions or limitations which they are free from, and what it is that they are free to do or not to do” (TJ: 202). All versions of liberalism share the faith in human reason. Humans are not utterly egoistic or evil, but are reasonable beings. As such they are capable of weighting arguments for
and against a certain regime, i.e. for and against a certain way of living together with others in one political community. Hence, reason is a good basis for cooperation. Kant talks about “unsocial sociability of men” (Kant: 8: 20), that is of an innate conflict in every individual between a desire for unrestrained freedom and the need for the company of others. This collision gives birth to culture and all the creative activities of humanity. Kant´s view is a direct response to Hobbes dictum homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to his fellow man). According to Hobbes, the interaction evolves in order to avoid conflict or threat; for Kant, it is a necessity for human flourishing and an inseparable part of human nature.
Liberals see the state, as well as realism, as a constraint on the unleashed freedom. However, unlike realists all liberals think that state institutions and policies need to be justified. Justification is not to be found in power games or egoistical urges, as within realist theories but in some kind of balance and the protection of liberties though political authority to which everyone can agree. According to Rawls, “a legitimate regime is such that its political and social institutions are justifiable to all citizens- to each and every one- by addressing their reason, theoretical and practical. Again: a justification of the institutions of the social world must be, in principle, available to everyone, and so justifiable to all who live under them. The legitimacy of a liberal regime depends on such justification” (LHPP: 13). This kind of thinking is core to the establishment of what Kant calls a republic, and what later came to be liberal democracies: the public or the peoples have an active saying on how they are to be governed. The sovereign is the people itself and for all political decisions public reasons are given. This line of thinking allows for the diversity in comprehensive doctrines as long as there can be a minimum overlapping consensus (PL: IV) among the parties which will account, to everyone’s satisfaction, for the cohabitation.
The applications of these notions of human nature and political systems were translated by the same token to international affairs. Most liberal thinkers saw the state as the moral actor, capable of bringing about reasonable decisions and acting towards other states in a cooperative manner. Hence, an idealist would argue that through a reasonably designed international organization, it is possible to put an end to war and to achieve a more or less permanent peace (Jackson, Søerensen 2007: 34). Already Kant argued for the idea of eternal peace. His notion of peace needed as its components states organized as republics. If these are then organized into a Society of States, a foedus pacificum (peaceful union), there will be no reason for war.
Kantian thought is alive today and many liberal thinkers advocate the co-called “democratic peace thesis”. The thesis is purely inductive and says that democracies do not go into war with each other. It is on one hand against their values, the public does not approve it, and on the other they in most cases
already have an economic cooperation with other democracies and hence the war does not pay off.
The democratic peace thesis however does not say anything either about the war between democracies and non-democracies, or about asymmetrical warfare such as terrorism.
The necessity for such a supranational body was felt immediately after World War I. American president Woodrow Wilson initiated the formation of the League of Nations, an organization which would look after peace and security in the world. A few years after the League was formed, further steps were taken in order for peace to be secured, e.g. signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), an international
The necessity for such a supranational body was felt immediately after World War I. American president Woodrow Wilson initiated the formation of the League of Nations, an organization which would look after peace and security in the world. A few years after the League was formed, further steps were taken in order for peace to be secured, e.g. signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), an international