Just War and the Construct of the West
http://samvak.tripod.com/justwar.html
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Just War and the Construct of the West
By: Dr. Sam Vaknin
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In an age of terrorism, guerilla and total warfare the medieval doctrine of
Just War needs to be re-defined. Moreover, issues of legitimacy, efficacy
and morality should not be confused. Legitimacy is conferred by
institutions. Not all morally justified wars are, therefore, automatically
legitimate. Frequently the efficient execution of a battle plan involves
immoral or even illegal acts.
As international law evolves beyond the ancient percepts of sovereignty, it
should incorporate new thinking about pre-emptive strikes, human rights
violations as casus belli and the role and standing of international
organizations, insurgents and liberation movements.
Yet, inevitably, what constitutes "justice" depends heavily on the cultural
and societal contexts, narratives, mores, and values of the disputants.
Thus, one cannot answer the deceivingly simple question: "Is this war a just
war?" - without first asking: "According to whom? In which context? By which
criteria? Based on what values? In which period in history and where?"
Being members of Western Civilization, whether by choice or by default, our
understanding of what constitutes a just war is crucially founded on our
shifting perceptions of the West.
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Table of Contents
I. Hitler and the Invention of the West
II. The Demise of the West?
III. The New Rome - America, the Reluctant Empire
IV. The Doctrine of Just War
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I. Hitler and the Invention of the West
In his book - really an extended essay - "Of Paradise and Power: America and
Europe in the New World Order" - Robert Kagan claims that the political
construct of the "West" was conjured up by the United States and Western
Europe during the Cold War as a response to the threat posed by the
nuclear-armed, hostile and expansionist U.S.S.R.
The implosion of the Soviet Bloc rendered the "West" an obsolete,
meaningless, and cumbersome concept, on the path to perdition. Cracks in the
common front of the Western allies - the Euro-Atlantic structures - widened
into a full-fledged and unbridgeable rift in the run-up to the war in Iraq
(see the next chapter, "The Demise of the West").
According to this U.S.-centric view, Europe missed an opportunity to
preserve the West as the organizing principle of post Cold War geopolitics
by refusing to decisively side with the United States against the enemies of
Western civilization, such as Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
Such reluctance is considered by Americans to be both naive and hazardous,
proof of the lack of vitality and decadence of "Old Europe". The foes of the
West, steeped in conspiracy theories and embittered by centuries of savage
colonialism, will not find credible the alleged disintegration of the
Western alliance, say the Americans. They will continue to strike, even as
the constituents of the erstwhile West drift apart and weaken.
Yet, this analysis misses the distinction between the West as a civilization
and the West as a fairly recent geopolitical construct.
Western civilization is millennia old - though it had become self-aware and
exclusionary only during the Middle Ages or, at the latest, the Reformation.
Max Weber (1864-1920) attributed its success to its ethical and, especially,
religious foundations. At the other extreme, biological determinists, such
as Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) and Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), predicted
its inevitable demise. Spengler authored the controversial "Decline of the
West" in 1918-22.
Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) disagreed with Spengler in "A Study of History"
(1934-61). He believed in the possibility of cultural and institutional
regeneration. But, regardless of persuasion, no historian or philosopher in
the first half of the twentieth century grasped the "West" in political or
military terms. The polities involved were often bitter enemies and with
disparate civil systems.
In the second half of the past century, some historiographies - notably "The
Rise of the West" by W. H. McNeill (1963), "Unfinished History of the World"
(1971) by Hugh Thomas, "History of the World" by J. M. Roberts (1976), and,
more recently, "Millennium" by Felip Fernandez-Armesto (1995) and "From Dawn
to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life" by Jacques Barzun (2000) -
ignored the heterogeneous nature of the West in favor of an "evolutionary",
Euro-centric idea of progress and, in the case of Fernandez-Armesto and
Barzun, decline.
Yet, these linear, developmental views of a single "Western" entity -
whether a civilization or a political-military alliance - are very
misleading. The West as the fuzzy name given to a set of interlocking
alliances is a creature of the Cold War (1946-1989). It is both missionary
and pluralistic - and, thus, dynamic and ever-changing. Some members of the
political West share certain common values - liberal democracy, separation
of church and state, respect for human rights and private property, for
instance. Others - think Turkey or Israel - do not.
The "West", in other words, is a fluid, fuzzy and non-monolithic concept. As
William Anthony Hay notes in "Is There Still a West?" (published in the
September 2002 issue of "Watch on the West", Volume 3, Number 8, by the
Foreign Policy Research Institute): "If Western civilization, along with
particular national or regional identities, is merely an imagined community
or an intellectual construct that serves the interest of dominant groups,
then it can be reconstructed to serve the needs of current agendas."
Though the idea of the West, as a convenient operational abstraction,
preceded the Cold War - it is not the natural extension or the inescapable
denouement of Western civilization. Rather, it is merely the last phase and
manifestation of the clash of titans between Germany on the one hand and
Russia on the other hand.
Europe spent the first half of the 19th century (following the 1815 Congress
of Vienna) containing France. The trauma of the Napoleonic wars was the last
in a medley of conflicts with an increasingly menacing France stretching
back to the times of Louis XIV. The Concert of Europe was specifically
designed to reflect the interests of the Big Powers, establish their borders
of expansion in Europe, and create a continental "balance of deterrence".
For a few decades it proved to be a success.
The rise of a unified, industrially mighty and narcissistic Germany erased
most of these achievements. By closely monitoring France rather than a
Germany on the ascendant, the Big Powers were still fighting the Napoleonic
wars - while ignoring, at their peril, the nature and likely origin of
future conflagrations. They failed to notice that Germany was bent on
transforming itself into the economic and political leader of a united
Europe, by force of arms, if need be.
The German "September 1914 Plan", for instance, envisaged an economic union
imposed on the vanquished nations of Europe following a military victory. It
was self-described as a "(plan for establishing) an economic organization
... through mutual customs agreements ... including France, Belgium,
Holland, Denmark, Austria, Poland, and perhaps Italy, Sweden, and Norway".
It is eerily reminiscent of the European Union.
The 1918 Brest-Litovsk armistice treaty between Germany and Russia
recognized the East-West divide. The implosion of the four empires - the
Ottoman, Habsburg, Hohenzollern and Romanov - following the first world war,
only brought to the fore the gargantuan tensions between central Europe and
its east.
But it was Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) who fathered the West as we know it
today.
Hitler sought to expand the German Lebensraum and to found a giant "slave
state" in the territories of the east, Russia, Poland, and Ukraine included.
He never regarded the polities of west Europe or the United States as
enemies. On the contrary, he believed that Germany and these countries are
natural allies faced with a mortal, cunning and ruthless foe: the U.S.S.R.
In this, as in many other things, he proved prescient.
Ironically, Hitler's unmitigated thuggery and vile atrocities did finally
succeed to midwife the West - but as an anti-German coalition. The reluctant
allies first confronted Germany and Stalinist Russia with which Berlin had a
non-aggression pact. When Hitler then proceeded to attack the U.S.S.R. in
1941, the West hastened to its defense.
But - once the war was victoriously over - this unnatural liaison between
West and East disintegrated. A humbled and divided West Germany reverted to
its roots. It became a pivotal pillar of the West - a member of the European
Economic Community (later renamed the European Union) and of NATO. Hitler's
fervent wish and vision - a Europe united around Germany against the Red
Menace - was achieved posthumously.
That it was Hitler who invented the West is no cruel historical joke.
Hitler and Nazism are often portrayed as an apocalyptic and seismic break
with European history. Yet the truth is that they were the culmination and
reification of European history in the 19th century. Europe's annals of
colonialism have prepared it for the range of phenomena associated with the
Nazi regime - from industrial murder to racial theories, from slave labour
to the forcible annexation of territory.
Germany was a colonial power no different to murderous Belgium or Britain.
What set it apart is that it directed its colonial attentions at the
heartland of Europe - rather than at Africa or Asia. Both World Wars were
colonial wars fought on European soil.
Moreover, Nazi Germany innovated by applying to the white race itself
prevailing racial theories, usually reserved to non-whites. It first
targeted the Jews - a non-controversial proposition - but then expanded its
racial "science" to encompass "east European" whites, such as the Poles and
the Russians.
Germany was not alone in its malignant nationalism. The far right in France
was as pernicious. Nazism - and Fascism - were world ideologies, adopted
enthusiastically in places as diverse as Iraq, Egypt, Norway, Latin America,
and Britain. At the end of the 1930's, liberal capitalism, communism, and
fascism (and its mutations) were locked in a mortal battle of ideologies.
Hitler's mistake was to delusionally believe in the affinity between
capitalism and Nazism - an affinity enhanced, to his mind, by Germany's
corporatism and by the existence of a common enemy: global communism.
Nazism was a religion, replete with godheads and rituals. It meshed
seamlessly with the racist origins of the West, as expounded by the likes of
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). The proselytizing and patronizing nature of the
West is deep rooted. Colonialism - a distinctly Western phenomenon - always
had discernible religious overtones and often collaborated with missionary
religion. "The White Man's burden" of civilizing the "savages" was widely
perceived as ordained by God. The church was the extension of the colonial
power's army and trading companies.
Thus, following two ineffably ruinous world wars, Europe finally shifted its
geopolitical sights from France to Germany. In an effort to prevent a repeat
of Hitler, the Big Powers of the West, led by France, established an "ever
closer" European Union. Germany was (inadvertently) split, sandwiched
between East and West and, thus, restrained.
East Germany faced a military-economic union (the Warsaw Pact) cum eastern
empire (the late U.S.S.R.). West Germany was surrounded by a military union
(NATO) cum emerging Western economic supranational structure (the EU). The
Cold War was fought all over the world - but in Europe it revolved around
Germany.
The collapse of the eastern flank (the Soviet - "evil" - Empire) of this
implicit anti-German containment geo-strategy led to the re-emergence of a
united Germany. Furthermore, Germany is in the process of securing its
hegemony over the EU by applying the political weight commensurate with its
economic and demographic might.
Germany is a natural and historical leader of central Europe - the EU's and
NATO's future Lebensraum and the target of their expansionary predilections
("integration"). Thus, virtually overnight, Germany came to dominate the
Western component of the anti-German containment master plan, while the
Eastern component - the Soviet Bloc - has chaotically disintegrated.
The EU is reacting by trying to assume the role formerly played by the
U.S.S.R. EU integration is an attempt to assimilate former Soviet satellites
and dilute Germany's power by re-jigging rules of voting and representation.
If successful, this strategy will prevent Germany from bidding yet again for
a position of hegemony in Europe by establishing a "German Union" separate
from the EU. It is all still the same tiresome and antiquated game of
continental Big Powers. Even Britain maintains its Victorian position of
"splendid isolation".
The exclusion of both Turkey and Russia from these re-alignments is also a
direct descendant of the politics of the last two centuries. Both will
probably gradually drift away from European (and Western) structures and
seek their fortunes in the geopolitical twilight zones of the world.
The USA is unlikely to be of much help to Europe as it reasserts the Monroe
doctrine and attends to its growing Pacific and Asian preoccupations. It may
assist the EU to cope with Russian (and to a lesser extent, Turkish) designs
in the tremulously tectonic regions of the Caucasus, oil-rich and
China-bordering Central Asia, and the Middle East. But it will not do so in
Central Europe, in the Baltic, and in the Balkan.
In the long-run, Muslims are the natural allies of the United States in its
role as a budding Asian power, largely supplanting the former Soviet Union.
Thus, the threat of militant Islam is unlikely to revive the West. Rather,
it may create a new geopolitical formation comprising the USA and moderate
Muslim countries, equally threatened by virulent religious fundamentalism.
Later, Russia, China and India - all destabilized by growing and vociferous
Muslim minorities - may join in.
Ludwig Wittgenstein would have approved. He once wrote that the spirit of
"the vast stream of European and American civilization in which we all stand
... (is) alien and uncongenial (to me)".
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II. The Demise of the West?
The edifice of the "international community" and the project of constructing
a "world order" rely on the unity of liberal ideals at the core of the
organizing principle of the transatlantic partnership, Western Civilization.
Yet, the recent intercourse between its constituents - the Anglo-Saxons (USA
and UK) versus the Continentals ("Old Europe" led by France and Germany) -
revealed an uneasy and potentially destructive dialectic.
The mutually exclusive choice seems now to be between ad-hoc coalitions of
states able and willing to impose their values on deviant or failed regimes
by armed force if need be - and a framework of binding multilateral
agreements and institutions with coercion applied as a last resort.
Robert Kagan sums the differences in his book:
"The United States ... resorts to force more quickly and, compared with
Europe, is less patient with diplomacy. Americans generally see the world
divided between good and evil, between friends and enemies, while Europeans
see a more complex picture. When confronting real or potential adversaries,
Americans generally favor policies of coercion rather than persuasion,
emphasizing punitive sanctions over inducements to better behavior, the
stick over the carrot. Americans tend to seek finality in international
affairs: They want problems solved, threats eliminated ... (and)
increasingly tend toward unilateralism in international affairs. They are
less inclined to act through international institutions such as the United
Nations, less likely to work cooperatively with other nations to pursue
common goals, more skeptical about international law, and more willing to
operate outside its strictures when they deem it necessary, or even merely
useful.
Europeans ... approach problems with greater nuance and sophistication. They
try to influence others through subtlety and indirection. They are more
tolerant of failure, more patient when solutions don't come quickly. They
generally favor peaceful responses to problems, preferring negotiation,
diplomacy, and persuasion to coercion. They are quicker to appeal to
international law, international conventions, and international opinion to
adjudicate disputes. They try to use commercial and economic ties to bind
nations together. They often emphasize process over result, believing that
ultimately process can become substance."
Kagan correctly observes that the weaker a polity is militarily, the
stricter its adherence to international law, the only protection, however
feeble, from bullying. The case of Russia apparently supports his thesis.
Vladimir Putin, presiding over a decrepit and bloated army, naturally
insists that the world must be governed by international regulation and not
by the "rule of the fist".
But Kagan got it backwards as far as the European Union is concerned. Its
members are not compelled to uphold international prescripts by their
indisputable and overwhelming martial deficiency. Rather, after centuries of
futile bloodletting, they choose not to resort to weapons and, instead, to
settle their differences juridically.
As Ivo Daalder wrote in a review of Kagan's tome in the New York Times:
"The differences produced by the disparity of power are compounded by the
very different historical experiences of the United States and Europe this
past half century. As the leader of the 'free world,' Washington provided
security for many during a cold war ultimately won without firing a shot.
The threat of military force and its occasional use were crucial tools in
securing this success.
Europe's experience has been very different. After 1945 Europe rejected
balance-of-power politics and instead embraced reconciliation, multilateral
cooperation and integration as the principal means to safeguard peace that
followed the world's most devastating conflict. Over time Europe came to see
this experience as a model of international behavior for others to follow."
Thus, Putin is not a European in the full sense of the word. He supports an
international framework of dispute settlement because he has no armed
choice, not because it tallies with his deeply held convictions and values.
According to Kagan, Putin is, in essence, an American: he believes that the
world order ultimately rests on military power and the ability to project
it.
It is this reflexive reliance on power that renders the United States
suspect. Privately, Europeans regard America itself - and especially the
abrasive Bush administration - as a rogue state, prone to jeopardizing world
peace and stability. Observing U.S. fits of violence, bullying, unilateral
actions and contemptuous haughtiness - most European are not sure who is the
greater menace: Saddam Hussein or George Bush.
Ivo Daalder:
"Contrary to the claims of pundits and politicians, the current crisis in
United States-European relations is not caused by President Bush's
gratuitous unilateralism, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's pacifism, or
French President Jacques Chirac's anti-Americanism, though they no doubt
play a part. Rather, the crisis is deep, structural and enduring."
Kagan slides into pop psychobabble when he tries to explore the charged
emotional background to this particular clash of civilizations:
"The transmission of the European miracle (the European Union as the shape
of things to come) to the rest of the world has become Europe's new mission
civilisatrice ... Thus we arrive at what may be the most important reason
for the divergence in views between Europe and the United States: America's
power and its willingness to exercise that power - unilaterally if necessary
- constitute a threat to Europe's new sense of mission."
Kagan lumps together Britain and France, Bulgaria and Germany, Russia and
Denmark. Such shallow and uninformed caricatures are typical of American
"thinkers", prone to sound-bytes and their audience's deficient attention
span.
Moreover, Europeans willingly joined America in forcibly eradicating the
brutal, next-door, regime of Slobodan Milosevic. It is not the use of power
that worries (some) Europeans - but its gratuitous, unilateral and exclusive
application. As even von Clausewitz conceded, military might is only one
weapon in the arsenal of international interaction and it should never
precede, let alone supplant, diplomacy.
As Daalder observes:
"(Lasting security) requires a commitment to uphold common rules and norms,
to work out differences short of the use of force, to promote common
interests through enduring structures of cooperation, and to enhance the
well-being of all people by promoting democracy and human rights and
ensuring greater access to open markets."
American misbehavior is further exacerbated by the simplistic tendency to
view the world in terms of ethical dyads: black and white, villain versus
saint, good fighting evil. This propensity is reminiscent of a primitive
psychological defense mechanism known as splitting. Armed conflict should be
the avoidable outcome of gradual escalation, replete with the unambiguous
communication of intentions. It should be a last resort - not a default
arbiter.
Finally, in an age of globalization and the increasingly free flow of
people, ideas, goods, services and information - old fashioned arm twisting
is counter-productive and ineffective. No single nation can rule the world
coercively. No single system of values and preferences can prevail. No
official version of the events can survive the onslaught of blogs and
multiple news reporting. Ours is a heterogeneous, dialectic, pluralistic,
multipolar and percolating world. Some like it this way. America clearly
doesn't.
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On to:
III. The New Rome - America, the Reluctant Empire
IV. The Doctrine of Just War
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Also Read:
The Inverted Saint - Hitler
Fascism - The Tensile Permanence
Left and Right in a Divided Europe
Communism, Capitalism, Feudalism
A Classification of Cultures
Why America is Hated
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