In Our Time - Just War

Episode Date: June 3, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea of a just war. There were theories about a justified or noble war before the birth of Christ, but it was his reported teachings and a powerful influence, particularly on the Emperor Constantine, which set the standard which had to be kept or bluntly modified. “I say unto you, love your own image,” Matthew writes, “bless them that curse you, be good to them that hate you and persecute you”. In the fifth century, the mighty St Augustus prised the Christian church away from Christ’s reported teachings and the idea of a Just War took root to be formalised and given power by St Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, and by other Christian commentators even up to this day. But after a century, our century, of almost unimaginably violent conflict, does the term a Just War have any meaning at all? The historian AJP Taylor wrote that "the medieval pursuit of the just war is a pursuit as elusive as the Holy Grail. For it is almost universally true that in war each side thinks itself in the right, and there is no arbiter except victory to decide between them". So is the Christian idea of the Just War simply a way of justifying aggression or is it a moral position to take?With Professor John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of Westminster and Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy; Dr Niall Ferguson, Fellow and Tutor in Modern History, Jesus College, Oxford and author of The Pity of War.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, I'm joined today by historian Neil Ferguson and political scientist John Keen to examine the question of the just war. The historian, EGP Taylor, wrote that the medieval pursuit of the just war is a pursuit as elusive as the Holy Grail. For it's almost universally true that in each war, each side, thinks itself in the right, and there's no arbiter except victory to decide between them. So is the Christian idea of the just war simply a way of justifying aggression or is it a moral position to take.

Professor John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Westminster and Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy. He's the author of Tom Payne, a political life, and reflections on violence, an analysis of war through the 20th century and the ethical implications of violence. He's taught in Yugoslavia and was supposed to be directing a summer school in Montenegro right now, but it's been cancelled because of it.

the current conflict. Dr. Neil Ferguson is fellow and tutor in modern history at Jesus College Oxford. He's an enormously prolific writer and along with regular reviews and commentaries in the newspapers. His books include a history of the Rothschild family which led one reviewer to say that the book reaffirms one's faith in the possibility of great historical writing. Virtual history, a defense of the what-if theory of history, which became a bestseller and significantly for us today, the pity of war, his controversial view of the First World War, which comes out in paperback later in the year. John Keane, George Austin Arch, Deacon of Yorker, said,

all war is evil, but a just war is a lesser of two evils. Do you think that is still a real notion of a just war? Yes, there is, but it's looking much more tattered more than a thousand years after its birth. The doctrine of the just war emerges out of Christian pacifism. Christianity was originally in the European region pacifist. It had certain heroes, Maximilianoos, who refused to serve the Roman consuls and was put on trial and executed. And out of that, the collapse of Rome in particular, 410 AD, Christian thinkers, above all, it's Augustine in Dei, the city of God,

who tries to outline a new justification for Christians taking up arms. And this is the doctrine of the just war. It's a complicated doctrine, but to put it very simply, it suggests that there should be a bundle of thou shaltz and thou shalt nots when it comes to war. War should be a last resort. War should be to redress violations of rights. War should be declared openly.

War should probably be winnable. The means should be proportionate to the ends. There should be a distinction between combatants and non-combatants, civilians, and there should be no humiliation of the vanquished. This was a way, in the hands of Augustine and many subsequent thinkers well into modern times, it was a way of saying that violence should not be unconstrained, that the use of violence should be tailored to certain moral ends, and that the means chosen should be proportionate to the ends selected.

That's a terrific survey and of course Augustine was formalized in the 13th century by Aquinas and then taken up again by Grotius and so it went on but they were all against the basic notion of Christ which is what they try to both come from and the same time modify in the real world as they saw it where he said according to Matthew I say unto you love your enemies do good to them that hate and persecute you

So the essential pacifism was something that a just war was trying to combat. Do you think that it ever got away from this uneasy position of actually being in flat contradiction, frankly, to the source of its original inspiration? Christianity has not, and well into the 20th century, there is great discomfort about war. Every modern Pope has had something to say, some precept about, for example, the invention of nuclear weapons or the pursuit of unjust forms of war. But it seems to me that the important fact is that we Europeans have a long-standing tradition of recognizing two things, that pacifism is self-contradictory in many contexts. the principal refusal to use violence can encourage the violent, and it can lead to the most terrible outcomes.

The second contribution, I think, of the just war tradition is that it proposes that violence can become an end in itself, that the use of war can be self-annihilating, and that therefore there ought to be certain regulations, certain restrictions under which violence has been used, That tradition has not been exhausted entirely, although if one puts on very large giants' boots and surveys the modern world, well, you see that just war doctrine has partly been superseded by, say,

the 19th century belief that war would wither away in trade and commerce, and also, above all, the just war doctrine has been weakened by the belief that war is justified to defend nation states. Can I ask Neil Ferguson, the idea of the just war has been used on occasions which some people have claimed have been the bloodiest occasions of war. Let's keep out of this century for a moment. We'll have plenty of time to talk about it.

For example, the Crusades was a holy war, just war, everything, it was pre-Aquineous, but everything that they said about the just war applied to the Crusades. And yet that is one way, looking at the society. Another way of looking at it is it is a savage war in Jerusalem alone. 70,000 Muslims were killed, Jews were locked up

in their synagogues, the synagogues were burned to the ground, and so on and so forth. Is your view that there's anything more to the notion of a just war than a mask, a convenient mask, or even a camouflage for the constant aggressiveness of

states, kings, potentates, the powerful? Not a great deal more. I mean, I think I'm probably with Taylor in arguing that in any war are all concerned will claim to have justice on their side. And I think I'm also with you in thinking that there's a fundamental contradiction. Indeed, you might even say the idea of just war is an oxymoron because in practice, moving away from the exalted level of theory, but to look at the reality of war, war is unjust in the sense that the people who get killed in wars are very rarely the people who will the wars in the first place. So I think my own hunch about just war is that it might even be a complete contradiction in terms. And also, I think, there's another contradictory quality to the idea.

And that is that often the rational use of force in Klausovitz's sense, in the 19th century sense, that you should use war to achieve your political ends when other means fail, that may actually be in conflict with the notion of the just war, that when you start confusing the use of force to achieve political ends with moral imperatives, then sometimes these things can come into conflict. And I think this is something which we may even be seeing today. Before we come to today, or to the 20th century,

just to talk the theory, anyway, in some way, do you think there are no humanitarian, moral, religious, theories that hold about war, do you think it is always to do with the worst side of nature expressing itself? Implied in what you say is that war is just a vicious, murderous, bloody business which people, mainly men, practice on each other and have practiced, and let's stop dressing it up. Is that what you think? Well, not quite.

I mean, I think there is a legitimate role for the use of force in international relations. I don't think. So what would the basis for that legitimacy be in your view? pacifist position in the Second World War would obviously have been a completely bankrupt one in the face of a regime in the Third Reich which was manifestly an evil regime.

It's very hard to think of a definition of evil which it doesn't fit. So I think there is a, I mean I'm not a pacifist, I'm not a strict pacifist although I think I probably have pacifist instincts and certainly when I confront the reality

of war looking at the reality, particularly of industrial 20th century war, I find it very hard not to have a kind of instinctive revulsion, particularly when I then see, alongside the industrialization of slaughter, clergymen and politicians, using the language of moralism and of justice, however they care to define that, to justify mass death. Passivism is quite interesting because one of your books, which, as you know, I admire immensely on Tom Paine, he talks about he would be a Quaker if everybody else were a Quaker, but until they are, he's going to take up his musket and thank heaven

for it, that's almost the dream. But the Quaker tradition has been a very honourable one, and it's valued in our society. Do you think it is completely, do you think it's without any, where do you think the inspiration for that comes from? Why do you think that intelligent and deeply decent people, as we know

the Quakers I know to be, hold on to that so tenaciously and have managed to do so? There are two sources. One, the older, is of course, that pacifism originally has Christian roots. To repeat, Christianity was originally, under the Pax Romana, it was originally pacifist. But I think in the 20th century, one can see a long-term rebirth of pacifism.

It's certainly evident in the public discussions about the current war for the Balkans. And it is a child, I think, of two basic developments in 20th century war. One is the spread of total war. The form of war embodied in aerial bombardment in the invention of the bomb. Remember Kersler's remark that the 6th of August 1945 was probably the most important day of the 20th century. The spread of total war is repulsive. It violates any moral precepts and it's not surprising that there have been some who have recoiled against total war and adopted the peace. pacifist position, thereby putting themselves in a contradictory position. The other development,

I think, is the growth of uncivil wars. Forms of war, we see forms of these in the Balkans at the moment and have for 10 years where ends are totally lost, where the means triumph, in which there's moral mayhem, the kind of warfare conducted by Arkan, Mr. Rajnyatovich, Slivovits are swilling soldiers who like to spend the day raping, killing, burning, murdering, and feel tired and happy at the end of the day. But that isn't new in warfare. I mean, you were talking about the end of the Second World War, the German Corps in the Baltic states, is that right?

You're talking about the... Well, the idea that war continues, even after the official war is over, is a very important one, and indeed precedes the official war. After all, what's happened recently in Kosovo, happened in 1912, the First Balkan War in exactly the same way. I think that this is a very important point

that actually Freud made rather well during the First World War that there is a kind of instinct for violence, he called it the death instinct, which is a kind of integral part of the human beast. And I think that that can actually be unleashed without anybody needing to blow a whistle

and say, here begineth the war. And how to contain that, well, maybe that's part of the pacifist conception, that somehow one must use the teaching of Christ to contain this fundamental instinct for violence, which seems to be almost a perennial facet of human nature. I know it is very difficult not to talk about Kosovo in this context, and we all get to that, but I would like to, because everybody else is talking about, I would like, here, just try to first of all to somehow contextualize it with this idea of the just war, which has

persisted, perhaps it's been a fig leaf, but it has persisted now for hundreds and hundred of years in the West. and in different versions in other parts of the world. And look at the 20th century as a whole. So looking at the First World War, in the context of what you've just said, Neil Ferguson, again, I come back to the fact that you seem to have a view of human nature. There's not an accusation.

It's a description of what you've said. And if I'm wrong, you'll tell me. It is murderous, there is a murderous, vengeful, instinctively killing streak, which cannot be denied. And yet, when we're talking about the First World War, which you've written about, you talk about that as an accidental stumble. in which doesn't seem to, in its beginnings and even in its first year or so, conform to that pattern at all.

Does that make any sense to you? Well, I think one of the points that one ought to make right away is that the First World War breaks out when notions of international law and international justice are still semi-developed, they're half-baked. You've had the Hague peace conferences and there are all kinds of resolutions about how war should be avoided. and it's all, so to speak, put in the waste paper bin when the war begins. Now, the war begins with all sides claiming to have right on their side. For example, it begins over Serbia when the Austrian government presents the Serbs of an ultimatum after the assassination of the airst of the Austrian throne.

And the ultimatum basically says we have the right to infringe your national sovereignty. Now, this was after an act of terrorism which the Serb government seemed to be implicated in. but then the ball starts to roll. The Russians see their fellow Slavs being threatened by this invasion of their sovereignty, so they weighed in. The Germans then claim that they're being attacked by the Russians, because the Russians appear to mobilize before the Germans do. And then finally, to end it all, enter Britain, claiming that we're intervening,

because of a treaty signed in 1839, which upholds the neutrality of Belgium, all concerned for the duration of the war, claimed to have right in their side, and almost all, leaving Turkey aside, claim to have God on their side, the Christian God. And so it seems to me, if you wanted to illustrate the complete bankruptcy of the notion of just war, read about the First World War. Do you agree with that, John?

Not at all. I think that the combined effect of thinking that human nature is prone to evil and violence and the cynical view that all moral precepts in matters of violence are simply masks for interests that are ruthlessly pursued leads to into a cul-de-sac. You don't accept understandably,

as I do not, the precept of pacifism. It's self-contradictory, and it produces absurd outcomes. It would, a pacifist position, would, in the current war for the Balkans, for example, lead to a justification of violence.

But that leaves, what does that leave? I think in your position, it leaves a lot of unclarity about the conditions, the terms under which violent means can be used for the resolution of conflict. But it seems to me that one of the long-term effects of this violent century is the return of just war doctrine. It is going on at the moment, and it has been for some decades. It is a reaction against total war and uncivil war, and the rebirth of international humanitarian law is, I think, symptomatic of this. We will look back on May the 27th, 1999 Louise Arbor's decision to indict five Serbs, including Mr Milosevic, on war crimes, crimes against humanity. We will look back on this as a very significant development. But significant only because it illustrates the contradiction I mentioned earlier between the rational use of food.

between states and the notion of a kind of moral order in the world. Now, in the First World War, it seems to me clear that once you had a moralistic conception of what the war was about, it tended to perpetuate the conflict. It made it impossible to achieve a negotiated compromise between the warring states, particularly once the Americans had become involved, and Woodrow Wilson had set out a doctrine of self-determination as the basis, for a European order. That made the war last longer,

and the notion of some kind of compromise with the central powers became more and more remote, the more Britain and America particularly appealed to the idea of an absolute moral future for which they were fighting. And I think this is the great problem that once you start claiming to have justice on your side, rather than simply to be using force to achieve your political objectives,

which are as defined at the beginning, it becomes harder and harder actually to stop the war, because the moral victory requires total victory, unconditional surrender by the other side. I think this is a caricature of just war doctrine. But it's what experience suggests. Just war doctrine is not and has never been moralizing. Rather, it emphasizes the importance of putting war on trial,

of thinking about the conditions under which war is justified, and accordingly measuring means and ends. I think if one wants to talk about prudence in war, which is an alternative, the only alternative it seems to pacifism and real politic on the other side, then one has to be in favour of some species of just war doctrine. Just war doctrine does not mean that we ruthlessly pursue a given end despite the fact that nobody else or few others agree with it. It rather emphasizes that there are certain limits and constraints upon the pursuit of ends. And in any case, there's so many kinds of justice which can be invoked here. Yes.

But it seems to me ultimately to become impossible to differentiate between them. Self-defense is one, which I think few would dispute. I mean, there's no doubt that a war of self-defense is a just war if you're attacked. But what about the idea of the defense of another state which is attacked? Now, why should one do that? Because in the 19th century concept and the early 20th century concept, indeed right up until 1939, you would do it because you had a contractual obligation, a Treaty of Alliance which says if they're attacked, we have to help them.

And that's another, it seems to me, perfectly straightforward notion of just war. But then it becomes harder and harder when you start to say that you're fighting for, say, human rights. I mean, what does that exactly mean? The right of self-determination is a right which was almost in some ways invented in the 20th century or in the late 19th century. Now are you fighting for self-determination? What does that mean? The determination or the right of a people to be independent, to have their own state. Now we know from the 20th century

that once you start to apply the notion of self-determination in central and eastern Europe, what you actually do is you create the potential for an almost endless visiparity where violence is almost unstoppable because there are so many potential little nation states in the Kosovo's and in the Bosnias. But the idea that morality has no place

which you seem to be suggesting and the idea which made your book on the First World War so controversial, that we would have been better out of the first, we being Britain would have been a better out of the First World War and better just let it Germany win and therefore we would have had European Union earlier. Noel Anand, in contradiction, said that there wouldn't have been a European dominated by German democracy, but by German militarism,

and that would have had far-reaching consequences, which I think is a sound point of view. And all you said one could agree with the, with the tendency of it, but when you come to another war, the Second World War, the idea of it being just, the idea of morality having a central place there, is I would have thought, but you two are the expert, but nobody is an expert on morality, so I've got my five pen of the Thén of Thore, like every listener has. In the Second World War, the idea of a just war can be brought to birth. Well, absolutely, in the sense that you're fighting a dreadful regime in the form of the Third Reich,

But there's a problem here, and I think it has to do with our hindsight about the Second World War. There are many people today who I think genuinely believe that the Second World War was fought to stop the Holocaust and to stop the annihilation of the Jews of Europe. And this is not true. The Second World War was fought because finally Britain decided that another Central European state, in this case Poland, could not be carved up by the Germans as Czechoslovakia just had been. and it was really on the basis of one of those 19th century-style contracts, alliances, pledges that Britain went to war on behalf of Poland. Now, what happens to Poland in 1945? Answer, it is handed from dictatorship one to dictatorship two.

The big problem about the idea of the just war in the case of the Second World War is that in order to defeat Nazi Germany, Britain ended up having to ally itself with a regime which was in many ways as repulsive, namely the Stalinist Soviet Union. Now, with hindsight, of course, it was a very, very, very good thing that the Nazis were defeated and the Holocaust was stopped before it was pursued to its ghastly conclusion. But in practice, what made the Holocaust possible?

What made mass murder of civilians in Eastern Europe possible was the outbreak of war? The Holocaust begins properly. The persecution of Jews and the mass murder of Jews begins with the outbreak of war over Poland. And that is a terrible paradox, just like the paradox that we end up on the side of Stalin. John Keane.

Again, just war doctrine doesn't solve the problems of means, ends, contradictions. All war is full of friction, as Klausvitz said. But this is, again, the key reason why the measurement of means and the clarification of moral ends in the pursuit of war is imperative. If we look at the current war for the Balkans, several things are striking. The war conducted by NATO has some elements of just war doctrine therein. War was pursued as a last resort against Milosevic. It is being conducted in the name of the violation of rights and the opposition to genocide,

a word which some Bruce Kent and others don't like. And there is contained within this war some vision of passion for the vanquished. But there are some other striking things. The lack of clarity about the ends of this war. It is all very well, and here I agree with Neil Ferguson, that talk of humanity is too abstract. This is probably, the historians will look back on this war and see that this was a war for a certain definition of Europe. Either there will be a war ravaged southeast European region which permanently disrupts the process of European integration, and the chaos will spread to Macedonia and Montenegro and so on,

or there will be a European Union-backed protectorate and pacification of Europe. It seems to me that it's imperative to be clear about what the ends are, and they're certainly not in public being made clear enough. In just war theory, yes, but we're coming towards the end of the program, unfortunately. Neil Ferguson, do you think that the Second World War was an exception in this century, in this century? on the hold an exception in being susceptible to the description of a just war.

And you think that wars since, before and since have been more to do with accident, chance, and man's inhumanity to man. And we shouldn't confuse the issue of basic instincts, as it were, with morality is laid across. In your case, often laid across to extend and make wars worse. Well, I think that in the 20th century, there's actually a continuity that Britain has tended to fight wars to uphold the integrity of sovereign states. And when that's been violated, whether in the case of Belgium in 1914 or Poland in 1939, we felt obliged to act. And that, of course, is why the problem raised by Kosovo is such a profound one.

The Blair doctrine says you can actually intervene inside Serbia over the future of Kosovo. Doesn't that have a humanitarian way? Isn't that a humanitarian extension of the just war? Is that possible to argue that? Well, that's obviously what's being argued by Messrs. Blair and Clinton at the moment. But it does represent a break with the norms of international law, which were established after the Second World War, under the United Nations Charter, then the Helsinki Final Acts,

that the integrity of nation states was the sort of starting point for international order. And I think that's however one justifies it. And obviously, it is a good thing to try and stop people being massacred in Kosovo, by an odious regime like the Milosevic regime. One has to acknowledge that we are now into terror incognita where the notion of international justice is once again, and for the umpteenth time in the 20th century, being redefined to suit one side in a conflict.

That seems to me a terrific point for you to give a brief response to I hope John Keene. Is the just war doctrine basically the justification of the victorious, which AJP Taylor said, and I quoted to the top of this program? Not always, and in this particular conflict, historians will tell us in some years to come that it was not simply that. Just war principles to repeat, emphasize certain limits upon the use of violence. Realpolitik does not work.

And there are certain lessons from the 20th century, and one of them is that realpolitik, the pursuit by, states of war as a means of defending their populations often produces the most horrendous outcomes. The legal situation is now much more complicated and the rather heartening thing is the rebirth of international humanitarian law which places limits upon characters of the Milosevic type. Well, thank you both very much. Thanks, John Keane and Neil Ferguson. Thank you very much indeed. And thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.