The Moralization of International Politics: Humanitarian Intervention and its Critics

Quaderni di Relazioni Internazionali n. 14 Maggio 201170

osservatorio internazionale

1 The author would like to thank Luke Glanville for providing helpful comments. He would also like tothank Edward Keene, Ian Hunter and Ryan Walter for providing comments on an earlier draft of the ar-ticle.

2 K. BOOTH, Human Wrongs in International Relations, in «International Affairs», 71, 1, 1995, pp. 103-126.

A succession of “complex emergen-cies” or “new wars” in the 1990s shat-tered any optimism that the end of theCold War might lead to a more peace-ful world order1. From so-called “failedstates” such as Somalia, Liberia, SierraLeone and Sudan, to ethnic cleansingand mass slaughter in Iraq, Cambodia,Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur, the worldseemed to witness the return toHobbesian conditions of bellum omni-um contra omnes. Life for many, if notall, individuals in these war zones hadbecome “nasty, brutish and short” asstates and societies collapsed under thepressure of chronic economic priva-tion, incivility and widespread vio-lence. «Masterless men», to useHobbes’s term, daily committed warcrimes, crimes against humanity andcrimes against peace, and as a resultpolitical and moral order disintegrat-ed, making it ever more difficult forhumanity to progress towards the hu-mane and civilized international rela-tions Immanuel Kant envisaged as per-petual peace.

To combat human suffering in theface of such inhumane scenarios, in-ternational society mounted what be-came known as “humanitarian inter-ventions” – the coercive interference inthe domestic jurisdiction of a sover-

eign state for the purpose of endinglarge-scale human rights abuses. In the1990s, to end what Ken Booth2 callslarge-scale “human wrongs”, the Unit-ed Nations sanctioned a series of coer-cive interventions on humanitariangrounds, including Iraq in 1991, So-malia in 1992, Bosnia in 1992-93, andRwanda in 1994, among many others.But, more than any of these cases, itwas NATO’s 1999 armed interventionin Kosovo without a UN mandate thathighlighted the moral and politicalquestions raised by this alleged newright (some say duty) of humanitarianintervention. Kosovo revealed, betterthan any other international event ofthe decade, the growing tendency ofpolitical leaders, diplomats and civil-ians to analyse, judge and act in inter-national politics from a moral point ofview.

For defenders of NATO’s actions,the use of force was an urgent and le-gitimate, if not entirely lawful, re-sponse to the political violence beinginflicted on Kosovar Albanians by Ser-bia; it was a war in defence of human-ity and human rights. This willingnessto legitimate military action withmoral arguments was in itself not newto international relations. But it wasnotable for an arena of human activity

RICHARD DEVETAK is Senior Lecturer in International Relationsand Director of the RotaryCentre for InternationalStudies in Peace and Conflict ResolutionSchool of Political Scienceand International Studies,University of Queensland

The Moralization of InternationalPolitics: Humanitarian Interventionand its Critics

Richard Devetak

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where moral discourse often succumbsto the predations of power politics. Soalthough moral discourse had neverentirely vacated international rela-tions, it had not acquired such stand-ing since the interwar years. A moralimpulse seemed to awaken with theadvent of globalization and globalmass media, as reports and images ofhuman suffering were beamed into theliving rooms of empathetic Westernpublics who urged their governmentsto “do something” in the face of politi-cal violence and human suffering. Af-ter the wretched failures of Bosnia andRwanda, NATO’s Kosovo interventionseemed emblematic of a growing“moralization of international poli-tics”.

I borrow this phrase from DavidRieff, an insightful and intelligent ana-lyst of the post-Cold War terrain of in-ternational conflict, who has explainedhumanitarianism as part of a broader«post-Cold War moralization of inter-national politics»3. According to Rieff,NATO’s Kosovo war «was undertakenmore in the name of human rights andmoral obligation than out of any tradi-tional conception of national interest».UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and USPresident Bill Clinton both sought tojustify the intervention by appeal tohumanitarian values. Rieff quotesfrom former UN Secretary-General,Javier Perez de Cuellar asserting in1991 that, «We are clearly witnessingwhat is probably an irresistible shift inpublic attitudes toward the belief thatthe defence of the oppressed in the

name of morality should prevail overfrontiers and legal documents»4 (em-phasis added). Rieff himself seems toagree that there has been a noticeableshift in public attitudes from a kind ofindifferent realism to a more compas-sionate humanitarianism. Expressionsof political realism, pre-eminently theappeal to national interests and rea-sons of state, now seem «an esotericlanguage restricted by and large to in-ternational policymakers when theyare out of public view», he said5. Bycontrast, he continued, «the languageof human rights and humanitarianism… now stands as the exoteric languageof public discourse». Western publics,grown used to global news feeds andincreasingly empathetic to sufferingstrangers wherever they may be, havelost their appetite for Realpolitik andits perceived vices, and have developedinstead a taste for humanitarianismand its presumed virtues.

The apparent triumph of humanrights over the past six decades wouldseem to confirm the view that interna-tional politics has progressively suc-cumbed to a moral point of view. In-terestingly, both advocates and criticsseem to agree that the present histori-cal juncture is characterised by the

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The Moralization of International Politics: Humanitarian Intervention and its Critics

3 D. RIEFF, A New Age of Liberal Imperialism?, in «World Policy Journal», 16, 2, Summer 1999, pp. 1-10.4 Ibidem, p. 1.5 Ibidem, p. 2.

The apparent triumph of humanrights over the past six decadeswould seem to confirm the viewthat international politics has progressively succumbedto a moral point of view




“moralization of international poli-tics”. Where they disagree is in its eval-uation. Some argue that internationalpolitics can and ought to submit tomoral injunctions, while others denythat international politics can or oughtto accede to such moral demands. Theone invokes humanity as a moral andpolitical concept, the other discredits itas little more than a hollow slogan ordangerous fiction. This clash over in-vocations of humanity is by no meansnew; it is but a particular instance of amore general clash between moralsand politics in the history of politicalthought, one that reaches a crescendoin early modern Europe.

To analyse contemporary debatesover humanitarianism, therefore, itmay be useful to revisit the origins ofthe rival narratives on the moralizationof international politics, to see howthis clash of politics and morality playsout in current debates. The article firstsketches the humanitarian and count-er-humanitarian narratives. Second, itturns to the counter-humanitariannarrative in more detail, elaborating itshistorical account of international re-lations and its defence of the jus pub-licum Europaeum. The third section re-turns to the early modern “histories ofmorality”, showing how Kant claimedto supersede previous accounts offeredby secularising natural law theorists.This leads to the conclusion which ar-gues that, despite appearances, theclash today between advocates andcritics of humanitarian intervention isnot in fact a clash between politics and

morality, or at least, not only that; it isalso a clash between rival moralities.

Rival Narratives of the Moralization of International Politics:Humanitarianism and its Critics

This apparent moralization of in-ternational politics has elicited bothpositive and negative responses. Eachresponse comprises a broad spectrumof thinkers and positions, making itdifficult to generalise, but for want ofbetter terms we shall call them human-itarianism and its counter-humanitar-ian critics. In what follows, the con-tending views of humanitarian inter-vention are used to highlight points ofcontention between the two narratives.

HumanitarianismThe humanitarian narrative sees

the moralization of international poli-tics as a positive development. Why?Because in upholding and pressingmoral claims in international politicsthe prospect of realizing humanity as apolitical end is thought to advance.The moralization of international pol-itics demonstrates international soci-ety’s commitment to uphold humanrights and to act decisively against vio-lations of international humanitarianlaw (crimes of war, crimes against hu-manity, crimes against peace). There isof course a set of deeply Kantian andliberal themes at play in this narrative.The world appears to have entered up-



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6 I. KANT, Perpetual Peace [1795], in H. REISS (trans. and ed.), Kant’s Political Writings, Cambridge 1970,pp. 107-108.

on Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitanuniversal community «where a viola-tion of rights in one part of the worldis felt everywhere»6. According to thisway of thinking, the rights of sovereignstates are not sacrosanct and shouldnot be used to infringe or deny humanrights or to obstruct universal justice.The claims of humanity trump sover-eignty. This kind of liberal humanitar-ianism, inspired by John Locke asmuch as Kant, invokes humanity orcivil society as a foil to the sovereignpower of the state, to limit the state’swell-honed capacities to abuse powerand harm its citizens. Protection fromthe state becomes the central theme ofthis humanitarian narrative.

This humanitarian narrative hasfound strong support in contemporarysocial, political and international theo-ry, not least among those who havebeen willing to consider humanitarianintervention as a possible sign of thismoralization of international politics.Cosmopolitan critical theorists such asJürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel,Mary Kaldor, Andrew Linklater, MarcLynch, and Daniele Archibugi, EnglishSchool theorists such as Alex Bellamyand Nicholas Wheeler, and liberalssuch as Michael Ignatieff and Fernan-do Téson, to name but a few, have ar-gued for humanitarian intervention asa legitimate exception to the non-in-tervention norm. Needless to say thereare wide variances among thesethinkers in how they circumscribe theconditions under which humanitarianintervention can be deemed legitimate.

My main concern at the moment,however, is simply to register their partin the emerging consensus around themoralization of international politics.In different degrees they all urge un-derstanding, analysing and criticisinginternational politics from a moralpoint of view. This leads them to seeone of political and international theo-ry’s major tasks as protecting individu-als and communities from state vio-lence.

Counter-humanitarianismLike any narrative, humanitarian-

ism has a rival. In this case, the rivalnarrative finds expression in a deepscepticism towards the possibility ordesirability of enlisting the moralpoint of view in international politics.The counter-humanitarian narrativesees the moralization of internationalpolitics as a negative development.Why? Because insofar as it embodiesliberal values, it harbours all liberal-ism’s faults and failings; and insofar asit permeates international society it re-neges on the sovereign rights of states,imposes Western forms of justice andpower, engenders a more intolerantand belligerent international society,and multiplies the prospects of war.The range of criticism made of hu-manitarianism is evidence of the di-verse grounds on which the moraliza-tion of international politics is reject-ed: including anti-liberalism, anti-cos-mopolitanism, realism, statism, his-toricism, various strains of Marxism,and pacifism.




7 H. DEXTER, New War, Good War and the War on Terror: Explaining, Excusing and Creating Western Neo-interventionism, in «Development and Change», 38, 6, 2007, pp. 1055-1071; J. MOSES, Challenging JustWar and Democratic Peace: A Critical Perspective on Kant and Humanitarian Intervention, in C. ENE-MARK (ed.), Ethics of War in a Time of Terror, «Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence», n. 163, March2006.

8 C. MOUFFE, On the Political, London 2005, p. 5.

These narratives are most notablefor their objection to the intrusion ofhuman rights into international poli-tics. We can distinguish between atleast two different strains of counter-humanitarianism: one which is statistin conviction, the other pacifist. Thelatter, which I leave aside here, is lessconcerned with defending the sover-eign state than simply criticising liber-alism and two discourses with which ithas an historical affinity, human rightsand Just War, for contributing to polit-ical violence7. Common to both statistand pacifist strands of the counter-hu-manitarian narrative is a vehement re-jection of the very idea of humanitari-an war.

According to the statist narrative,which has strong affinities with realism,the rights of sovereign states are sacro-sanct and should not be violated in pur-suit of abstract, Western notions of hu-man rights. To do so is to subvert therules of co-existence which sustain in-ternational order. Sovereignty trumpshumanity because it is the only meansof providing peace and order. Realistcritics of humanitarianism, such asDanilo Zolo, David Chandler, Alessan-dro Colombo, Christopher Bickerton,Philip Cunliffe and Alexander Goure-vitch, are highly suspicious of argu-ments from a moral point of view ininternational politics for two main rea-

sons: first, because they think it under-mines the fundamental building blockof international order, the sovereignequality among states; second, becausethey think it devalues or denies the au-tonomy of the political.

We should note that moralization,as used here, does not mean that poli-tics is being replaced by morality, orthat international politics is todaymore moral than it was in the past. Thepoint is simply that, as Chantal Mouffeputs it, «nowadays the political isplayed out in the moral register»8. Tosummarise, this strand of counter-hu-manitarianism bears the visible im-prints of realism, statism and anti-lib-eralism, and likes to conceive of itselfas understanding, analysing and criti-cising international relations from apolitical point of view.

Countering Humanitarianism:the Critique of “GenevanUniversalism”

At the heart of the counter-human-itarian narrative, from Hobbes andPufendorf to Schmitt and Zolo, is therise of the state as the supreme, un-challengeable political authority. Wecan distinguish between two versionsof statism in contemporary counter-humanitarianism: one founded onreason of state, the other on nationalself-determination. In the former, thestate is conceptualized as a neutral civ-il sovereign, capable of rising above re-ligious and ethnic disputes, refusing to

The counter-humanitarian narrativesees the moralization of international politics as a negative development



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9 E. KEENE, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics, Cambridge2002.

10 C. SCHMITT, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, New York2003, p. 159.

11 C. SCHMITT, The Land Appropriation of a New World, in «Telos», 109, Fall 1996, pp. 29-80.12 See C. SCHMITT, Il concetto discriminatorio di guerra, Roma 2008; C. SCHMITT, The Nomos of the

Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, cit., part III, ch. 2; D. ZOLO, Prefazione,in C. SCHMITT, Il concetto discriminatorio di guerra, cit.; R. KOSELLECK, Critique and Crisis: Enlight-enment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, Cambridge 1998, ch. 3.

take sides, but insisting that its author-ity be recognised as supreme (fromtheorists of the absolutist state such asJean Bodin and Samuel Pufendorf toCarl Schmitt and on to secular liberalstatists such as Reinhart Koselleck andIan Hunter). In the latter, the state isconceptualized as a representative, self-determining national state (byChristopher Bickerton, Philip Cunliffeand Alexander Gourevitch who tracethe notion, quite problematically fortheir counter-humanitarianism, backto the philosophes and French revolu-tionaries). In both versions, the state isconceived as an autonomous politicalentity claiming the status of legalequality in a system of sovereign states.Moreover, it is thought to be funda-mentally related to the rise of an inter-national order predicated on rules ofco-existence. However, if thinkers asdifferent as Schmitt and Keene9 arecorrect, the international order se-cured among European states was sus-tained by maintaining the inequality ofnon-European peoples.

In Defence of Jus PublicumEuropaeum

According to Carl Schmitt10, «[t]hestate was established as the new, ra-tional order, as the historical agency ofdetheologization and rationalization».This in itself was important enough inhis eyes, but there was a further gain tobe produced by the new spatial princi-

ple of politics. Sovereign power alsoformed the basis of the jus publicumEuropaeum, the classical internationalsystem that arose out of the ashes ofthe religious civil wars that ravagedEurope during the Sixteenth and Sev-enteenth centuries. In Schmitt’s narra-tive, this “golden age” of post-medievalinternational relations, which reigneduntil the twentieth century, carriedforward the de-theologisation of poli-tics established first in theories of theabsolutist state as articulated by JeanBodin and other French legists, and inan emerging secular theory of interna-tional law articulated by Balthazar Ay-ala and Alberico Gentili11. The con-junction of these two developmentsbrought the European civil war to anend and inaugurated a jus publicumEuropaeum that would secureSchmitt’s “golden age”.

The jus publicum Europaeummoved beyond morality (that is, be-yond the religious designations ofgood and evil) by embracing a «non-discriminatory concept of war»12. Bycontrast with the Churchmen, post-Scholastic jusnaturalists denied theclaim that in war only one side has ajust cause. This aspect of the Just Wartradition (“objective justice”) had to beabandoned so that the focus couldshift from jus ad bellum to jus in bello,that is, from efforts to justify war onreligious or moral grounds to efforts to“humanize” war, or at least forestall the





13 E. DE VATTEL, The Law of Nations, or, Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct and Affairsof Nations and of Sovereigns [1758], edited and with an Introduction by B. KAPOSSY - R. WHITMORE,Indianapolis 2008.

14 See R. DEVETAK, Law of Nations as Reason of State: Diplomacy and the Balance of Power in Vattel’s Lawof Nations, «Parergon», 28, 2, 2011 (forthcoming).

15 A. COLOMBO, La guerra ineguale. Pace e violenza nel tramonto della società internazionale, Bologna2006, see esp. ch. 4.

16 C. SCHMITT, The Land Appropriation of a New World, cit., p. 68.17 Ibidem, p. 36.18 C. GALLI, Lo sguardo di Giano: saggi su Carlo Schmitt, Bologna 2008, p. 131.19 C. SCHMITT, The Land Appropriation of a New World, cit., p. 63.

excesses of “total war”. Emer de Vattel13

put the argument as clearly as anyonein the eighteenth century14. As he ex-plained, in a system where states areequal and independent, none can beset up as judge over another (par inparem non habet jurisdictionem).Therefore, war must be regarded asequally lawful on all sides (bellumutraque parte justum). For Vattel, thiswas a necessary prudential measuredesigned to take the ideological heatout of war; a measure intended tomoderate war and keep it within civi-lized limits. Alessandro Colombo15

draws upon Vattel to make the samepoint in his discussion of how interna-tional society limits violence by insti-tutionalizing Grotian and Clause-witzean “breaks” (freni).

Keeping the Just War notion of jus-ta causa out of international politicswas the corollary of keeping religion(and morals) out of politics more gen-erally. Doing so had the effect of limit-ing the authority of the Papacy and theEmperor, two institutions purporting

to represent universal values andsupra-state authority. As these Christ-ian and feudal institutions crumbled,destroying the Church’s potestas spiri-tualis and its hopes of universal do-minion, Europe’s rulers began to em-brace the idea that they formed a soci-ety or commonwealth of states (theselatter terms are not Schmitt’s butGrotius and Vattel’s). This, Schmitt be-lieved, inaugurated a concrete newspatial order (nomos) built on the sec-ular legal principles of territorial sov-ereignty16. Importantly, Schmitt arguesthat this order extended only to theedges of Europe. “Beyond the line”which separated Europe from the restof the world, these principles had nopurchase; «only the law of thestrongest applied»17. There must alwaysbe a constitutive outside for any politi-cal order to function18.

Crucial to Schmitt’s understandingof this spatial and nomothetic divi-sion, was the disposition of Europeaninternational law to function as a pow-erful limiting factor on war within Eu-rope, war outside was another matter.«Instead of iusta causa, the [new] orderof international law between states wasbased on iustus hostis. Any war be-tween states, between equal sovereigns,was legitimate»19. This was the basis onwhich Europe performed a «juridicalformalization, a rationalization and

The jus publicum Europaeummoved beyond morality (that is,beyond the religious designationsof good and evil) by embracing a “non-discriminatory concept of war”


20 Ibidem.21 C. SCHMITT, The Land Appropriation of a New World, cit., p. 43.22 Ibidem, pp. 38-39.23 Ibidem, p. 30.24 Ibidem, pp. 69-70.25 C. GALLI, Lo sguardo di Giano: saggi su Carlo Schmitt, cit., p. 136.

humanization – a bracketing – ofwar»20. Inter-state war involved hostesaequaliter justi. This moved Europeaway from Just War principles wherethe enemy was a criminal or “foe” to bepunished or annihilated. The advent ofthis non-discriminatory concept ofwar is the great achievement of earlymodern international law, according toSchmitt, and, as we shall see, a crucialelement in contemporary critiques ofhumanitarian intervention.

To summarize, the nomos of the newworld order born with the conquest ofthe New World, an event Schmitt21 seesas fundamental to the structure of Eu-rope’s “golden age” of international re-lations, served to divide and distributethe earth according to two different setsof rules: one giving rise to rules of co-existence within a jus publicum Eu-ropaeum, the other, beyond the line cir-cumscribing Europe, to a lawless anar-chy of the kind depicted in Hobbes’sstate of nature22. If the new territorialorder engendered international rulesand norms for maintaining order with-in Europe (a jus inter gentes Europaeas),European powers entered a lawless an-archy when they ventured into the “freespace” of the New World, space «opento European occupation and expan-sion»23. This was the context in which,according to Schmitt, the territorial or-der of the sovereign state emerged. This“new spatial order” grew out of threesecularizing trends.

First, it created clear internal ju-risdictions by placing feudal, ter-

ritorial, estate and church rightsunder the centralized legislation,administration and judiciary of aterritorial ruler. Second, it put anend to the European civil war ofchurches and religious parties andthereby neutralized confessionalconflicts within the state througha centralized political unity. …Thirdly, on the basis of the inter-nal political unity it achieved vis-à-vis other political unities, thestate constituted within and of it-self a closed area with fixed bor-ders allowing a specific type offoreign relations with other simi-larly organized territorial orders24.

Eventually, by the twentieth centu-ry, this order would breakdown, ru-ined by two world wars and the rise ofanti-political doctrines (namely, liber-alism, Marxist-Leninism, and interna-tional law). The new order built on auniversalistic conception of interna-tional law, at least as Schmitt saw it de-veloping in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries, and revivedthe notion of a Just War, albeit withoutthe framework of respublica Chris-tiana. “Genevan universalism” was, asGalli25 explains, Schmitt’s main polem-ical target because it opened the doorto disorder and “total war”.

In Defence of Politics and Sovereignty

Contemporary IR versions of thisnarrative agree with the general direc-tion of Schmitt’s story, though varia-tions are in evidence. In any case, the


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26 D. ZOLO, Victors’ Justice: from Nuremburg to Baghdad, London 2009, p. 66.27 Ibidem, p. 48.28 Ibidem.29 Ibidem, pp. 5-6.30 Ibidem.31 D. ZOLO, Chi dice umanità: Guerra, diritto e ordine globale, Torino 2000; Idem, Victors’ Justice: from

Nuremburg to Baghdad, cit.32 D. CHANDLER, From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention, London 2002;

Idem, Back to the Future? Neo-Wilsonian Ideals of Exporting Democracy, in «Review of InternationalStudies», 32, 3, 2006, pp. 475-494.

plot goes something like this. Once up-on a time (the exact periodisation ofthis “golden age” will differ) interna-tional relations were regulated accord-ing to political rules (generally basedon sovereign equality and non-inter-vention) that kept “total war” at bay.Eventually (again, the exact momentwhen the “golden age” breaks downwill vary), an array of new liberalnorms and practices emerged – com-posing what Zolo26 calls “humanitarianfundamentalism” – that threatened notonly the authority and rights of indi-vidual sovereign states, but the very ex-istence of international order itself.

According to Zolo27, the 1990s sawthe rise not just of humanitarian inter-vention as a Western strategy of worldorder, but also the supplanting of tra-ditional “laws of war” by “internation-al humanitarian law”. These develop-ments were the culmination of effortsbegun at the behest of Woodrow Wil-son after the First World War to inau-gurate a universalistic, “de-spatialized”cosmopolitan order28. For Zolo, theconsequences of this moral shift in in-ternational relations are considerable.The jus publicum Europaeum, embod-ied in the modern Westphalian system,had established procedural rules of co-existence and measures for containingwar, but over the course of the twenti-eth century these had been dismantledby the growth of a cosmopolitan glob-al order. Zolo’s29 concern, like

Schmitt’s, is that the rise of liberal hu-manitarianism has permitted the res-urrection of “discriminatory war”. Themoralization of international politics,on Zolo’s30 exemplary account, thusengenders a “global civil war” which is«sanguinary and destructive in thehighest degree».

It is in the context of such historicalnarratives that critics of humanitarian-ism condemn particular interventions,such as the Kosovo War. Typical of cri-tiques of NATO’s Kosovo interventionis the decontextualisation of the con-flict. Emphasis is laid exclusively on theYugoslav state and citizens, with nomention made of the events leading upto the intervention. Zolo31, for exam-ple, the most lucid and sophisticated of counter-humanitarians, protestsagainst «the death sentence … en-forced on thousands of Yugoslav citi-zens», but remains silent on the matterof Yugoslavia’s death sentence onKosovar Albanians, either before or af-ter the aerial bombing commenced. Heis hardly alone; David Chandler32, an-other persistent and vocal critic of hu-manitarianism also has no words forthe Kosovar victims.

Inherent to this new “humanitarianinterventionism”, the critics say, is an“anti-political” and “anti-statist” atti-tude that is common to various formsof English-School rationalism, liberal-ism, and Critical Theory. A frequentrefrain of the counter-humanitarian


33 H.J. MORGENTHAU, Scientific Man Versus Power Politics. Chicago 1946.34 D. CHANDLER, Back to the Future?, cit.35 C.J. BICKERTON - P. CUNLIFFE - A. GOUREVITCH (eds.), Politics without Sovereignty: a Critique of

Contemporary International Relations, London 2007.36 On severeignty see H. SUGANAMI, Understanding Sovereignty through Kelsen/Schmitt, in «Review of

International Studies», 33, 3, 2007, pp. 523-526.37 D. CHANDLER, Back to the Future?, cit., p. 486.38 D. ZOLO, Chi dice umanità. Guerra, diritto e ordine globale, cit., p. x.

narrative is that, to use Hans Morgen-thau’s33 words from a related context,humanitarianism «repudiates the po-litical». A mélange of different phraseshas emanated from recent narratives todenounce humanitarianism: “warwithout politics”, “state-building with-out politics”, and “peace without poli-tics”, are just three examples drawnfrom one article by Chandler34. Bicker-ton, Cunliffe and Gourevitch35, ex-pressing the same anxiety, refer to“politics without sovereignty”. As theseslogans indicate, the alleged anti-sta-tism of humanitarianism is assumed tobe inseparable from its alleged anti-political attitude. Both these allega-tions rest on particular biases aboutwhat politics is and what sovereignstates have a right to do or expect, thatbetray attitudes that could just as plau-sibly be called anti-political. At thevery least they reveal an unhistoricalunderstanding of politics and statesovereignty, since the precise contentof both is historically variable36.

The counter-humanitarian narra-tive sees the “ethical turn”37, or “la mu-tazione normativa”38, as dangerous for

being anti-political and anti-statist. Itwould be a mistake, however, to con-clude that counter-humanitarianismsomehow stands apart from this nor-mative turn; for despite the often vo-ciferous protestations at morality’s in-troduction into international politics,an irreducible moral point of viewpermeates their critiques of humani-tarianism and cosmopolitanism. It isjust that morality is conceived differ-ently by the counter-humanitarians,functioning in a more restrictedsphere, and to different ends.

One way to demonstrate the moralpoint of view being posited in count-er-humanitarian narratives is by re-turning to the early modern “historiesof morality” to which they owe a sig-nificant debt. Doing so will also allowus to see the moralization of (interna-tional) politics as an historical prob-lem that has taken different formsover time. Nonetheless, general fea-tures of the counter-humanitariannarrative can be identified: a suspicionof moral universals, the professed pri-oritization of the political over themoral, and the determined commit-ment to the sovereign state, as op-posed to any higher authority, all ofwhich find their way into contempo-rary critiques of humanitarian inter-vention.


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The counter-humanitarian narrativesees the “ethical turn”, or “la mutazione normativa”,as dangerous for being anti-political and anti-statist




39 I. KANT, Perpetual Peace, cit., p. 103.40 G.W. BROWN, Kantian Cosmopolitan Law and the Idea of a Cosmopolitan Constitution, in «History of

Political Thought», 27, 4, 2006, pp. 661-684.

Rival “Histories of Morality”:Kant and his JusnaturalistPredecessors

As we have seen, the current debatepits a Kantian-inspired humanitariannarrative against a more sceptical nar-rative which sees danger in the moral-ization of international politics. In thissection I want to flesh out the counter-humanitarian narrative by returningto a largely forgotten genre of moral,legal and political writing thatemerged in the Seventeenth century:the “histories of morality”. This genreis most commonly associated withJean Barbeyrac (French translator andannotator of Grotius and Pufendorf),but Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorfand Christian Thomasius were alsoprime movers in the genre which es-sentially sought to challenge Aris-totelian and Scholastic constructionsof natural law by secularizing naturallaw and paving the way for a system ofsovereign territorial states outside thejurisdictional reach of the Papacy’s andthe Holy Roman Empire’s universalistclaims. This genre of “history ofmorality” has almost been lost fromsight due mainly to the hegemony ofKantian histories of philosophy whichhave tended to see the philosopher ofKönigsberg’s writings as the crowningmoment in perfecting a universalistmoral philosophy capable of sublimat-ing rationalism and voluntarism, ide-alism and empiricism.

Kantian Histories of MoralityBefore presenting the “histories of

morality” literature, it is worth notingthat it was against this genre that Kantpresented his arguments for “perpetu-al peace” and universal justice. WhenKant famously dismissed Grotius,Pufendorf, and Vattel as «miserablecomforters», his accusation was thatthey were little more than apologistsfor war. Their treatises on the law ofnature and nations «do not and cannothave the slightest legal force», he said,«since states as such are not subject toa common external constraint»39. Thechief task then is to develop concretelegal and political institutions whichwill restrain the international interac-tions of states.

It is in this context that Kant pre-scribes the six preliminary articles andthree definitive articles of perpetualpeace. These articles have, understand-ably, been the focus of most critical at-tention, and need no elaboration here;the main point is that Kant, unlikePufendorf for example, was willing toconsider the prospects of transformingstate power through the developmentof republican, international and cos-mopolitan constitutional principles40.These would have a constitutive as wellas regulative impact on states. Stateswould assume the moral purpose ofbeing provisional means to achievingcosmopolitan ends. From this Kantianpoint of view, the moral purpose ofstates must not be reduced to the pro-vision of order and security, but mustbe conceived as vehicles for the moral



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41 I. HUNTER, Kant’s Regional Cosmopolitanism, in «Journal of the History of International Law», 12, 2,2010, p. 178.

42 I. KANT, Contest of the Faculties [1798], in H. REISS (trans. and ed.), Kant’s Political Writings, cit., p. 182;R. DEVETAK, Signs of a New Enlightenment? Community and Humanity after the Cold War, in S. LAW-SON (ed.), The New Agenda for International Relations: from Polarization to Globalization in World Pol-itics, Cambridge 2002.

43 A. LINKLATER, Distant Suffering and Cosmopolitan Obligations, in «International Politics», 44, 1, pp.19-36.

44 T.J. HOCHSTRASSER, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment, Cambridge 2000; I. HUNTER,The Recovery of Natural Law: Hochstrasser’s History of Morality, in «Economy and Society», 30, 3, 2001,p. 356; R. TUCK, Natural Rights Theories: their Origin and Development, Cambridge 1979.

45 I. HUNTER, The Recovery of Natural Law, cit., pp. 356-357.46 Ibidem, p. 357.

perfection of individuals and commu-nities within a global community ofcosmopolitan justice. As Ian Hunter41

glosses Kant’s moralization of interna-tional politics:

Kant cannot accept public-lawconstructions of territorial sover-eignty, or jus gentium construc-tions of an order of territorialstates, as independent forms orloci for justice. These are at bestway-stations to be folded into theonly true form of justice, which isglobal or cosmopolitan.

In Kant’s narrative, humanity car-ries the potential to realize universaljustice. Consider his discussion in theContest of the Faculties where he iden-tifies an historical sign that he believesis evidence of humanity’s capacity formoral improvement. He locates thissign not in the French Revolution it-self, but in the attitude of “onlookers”(or spectators) who express «universalyet disinterested sympathy for one setof protagonists against their adver-saries»42. This sentiment of «universalyet disinterested sympathy» has clearlygained considerable traction amongtoday’s global publics, and providesthe context for Andrew Linklater’s43 ef-fort to defend cosmopolitan obliga-

tions in the face of distant suffering.

“Histories of Morality” before KantThe original “histories of morality”

were «exemplary histories of the rise ofand need for a modern “worldly” nat-ural law»44. They were designed to re-place «the a-historical view of philoso-phy as the timeless recovery of quasi-sacred truths with an account of thecontingent development of successive“schools” of thought»45. As IanHunter46 explains, these histories typi-cally «narrated the recovery of the trueprinciple of morality (namely, socia-bility) from the long night of scholasti-cism in which it had been buried bythe confusion of theology and philoso-phy». Rather than see philosophical ar-guments as transcendental answers totimeless questions, philosophy was in-stead viewed as temporally bound topolitical conflicts. Philosophy was thusdenied its metaphysical status andbrought down from the heavens to be-come a mundane (earthly) set of com-peting attempts to improvise moralmeaning. For the leading thinkers as-sociated with these early “histories ofmorality”, the purpose was to de-theol-ogize philosophy in order to constructa secularized natural law theory whichwas concerned with the temporal af-




47 J. BARBEYRAC, An Historical and Critical Account of the Science of Morality, in S. PUFENDORF, On theLaw of Nature and Nations: Eight Books, London 1717, p. 79.

48 C. THOMASIUS, On the History of the Natural Law Until Grotius [1707], in I. HUNTER - T. AHNERT- F. GRUNERT (trans. and eds.), Essays on Church, State, and Politics: Christian Thomasius, Indianapo-lis 2007.

49 Ibidem, p. 1.

fairs of politics, namely order and se-curity, rather than spiritual salvation.

These “histories of morality” beganwith Pufendorf ’s essay on the Originsand Development of the Discipline ofNatural Law (1678). Other major con-tributors to this genre include Christ-ian Thomasius and Jean Barbeyrac,both of whom I shall discuss brieflyhere. Common to most of these histo-ries was recognition of Grotius’s im-portance. Thomasius, for example,calls the Dutchman “incomparable”.Barbeyrac47 says «he broke the ice» indeveloping an alternative history. TheDutchman was celebrated by seculariz-ing natural law theorists as refoundingnatural law on more secular legalgrounds.

In his essay, On the History of theNatural Law Until Grotius, publishedas the Foreword to the first Germantranslation of Grotius’s De jure belli acpacis, in 1707, Thomasius48, studentand friend of Pufendorf, set out a vig-orous juridico-political programaimed at discrediting scholastic natu-ral law. The very first sentence of thisessay sets the tone: «All men by natureare in the same miserable shape»49.This immediately telegraphs his anti-Aristotelian theoretical program; it al-

so hints at the Epicureanism that heand others wanted to recover from an-tiquity. In both these regards, Thoma-sius was a disciple of Hobbes. The Eng-lishman had of course already indictedAristotelian philosophy for sendingWestern intellectual thought off therails in chapter XXVI of Leviathan andelsewhere. Human beings, according toHobbes’s Epicurean understanding,have some reason, but far less than ra-tionalist (i.e., scholastic) naturallawyers would suggest. Reason is al-ways liable to the vagaries of the willand the irrepressible desires of the hu-man body. Experience shows, Thoma-sius said, that for all his fine talk, manis a creature of his desires and interests.So it is not enough simply to know thedifference between good and bad. Cor-recting the mind’s understanding, asAristotelians are wont to do, is insuffi-cient to improve the will, or change be-haviour; an external force is required:namely, the sovereign. This is whyThomasius, like Hobbes andPufendorf, drew from Epicurean phi-losophy, which emphasized fear ofdeath as the passion compelling sub-jection to a sovereign, and restrictedthe focus of philosophy to earthly hap-piness and security rather than salvificguarantees.

Thomasius’s concern, followingHobbes’s, was to describe how scholas-ticism led to a general disorder ofknowledge. «At the beginning of theSeventeenth century, moral philoso-phy, ethics, natural law and so on werein a pitiful and terminal condition», he

Rather than see philosophicalarguments as transcendentalanswers to timeless questions,philosophy was instead viewed as temporally bound to politicalconflicts



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50 C. THOMASIUS, On the History of the Natural Law Until Grotius, cit., p. 41.51 Ibidem, p. 2.52 Ibidem, p. 42.53 J. BARBEYRAC, An Historical and Critical Account of the Science of Morality, cit., p. 4.54 Ibidem, p. 1.55 Ibidem, p. 2.56 R. TUCK, Philosophy and Government: 1572-1651, Cambridge 1993.

lamented50. More specifically, he notedin scholastic metaphysics a failure toseparate between the theological andthe properly moral. In his words,scholasticism failed to separate «natu-ral and supernatural lights, reason anddivine revelation»51. This led to gravepolitical consequences. Scholastics, healleged, were responsible for drivingrulers «into illegitimate wars under thepretense of spreading the name ofChrist … Drawing on the works ofAristotle … they knew how to presentsuch wars as lawful and laudable»52.

Jean Barbeyrac is best known as theeighteenth-century French translatorand annotator of Pufendorf ’s Law ofNature and Nations (1706) and Dutiesof Man and the Citizen (1707), andGrotius’s De iure belli ac pacis (1724).His lengthy commentary, An Historicaland Critical Account of the Science ofMorality was published as a Preface toPufendorf ’s Law of Nature and Na-tions. Like Thomasius, Barbeyrac tellsthe story of how scholasticism hasbeaten a barren philosophical path. Itsfocus on «the real essence of sub-stance», said Barbeyrac53, should be nobusiness of morality, which should beconcerned with external human con-duct rather than the inner life of themind. Indeed, Barbeyrac’s very defini-tion of morality registers a significantdeparture from the Aristotelians andPlatonists. By morality, Barbeyrac54

meant «the conduct of a man’s self, ac-cording to his estate and condition».He thus included natural law and poli-tics under it.

Against the Aristotelian scholastics,Barbeyrac, following Hobbes, Pufendorfand Thomasius, mobilized the Stoics.Why the Stoics? Because they rejectedthe Aristotelian notion of a humanitydivided between full men and naturalslaves. «Their philosophy was notabove the reach of women andslaves»55. More importantly for ourpurposes, they recognized that naturallaw provided the ground of moral du-ties; they made the greatest contribu-tion to the natural law prior to Grotiusand Pufendorf. Their key argumentwas that men should live in conformi-ty with their nature, which was to-wards self-preservation. This notion,as Richard Tuck56 has shown, was cen-tral to early modern efforts to developa theory of sociability whilst acceptingthe starting point of philosophicalscepticism (as exemplified in Thucy-dides and Carneades), intellectualmoves that shaped the formation ofstate absolutism and the reception andmodification of a politically circum-scribed morality of states.

The most important political up-shot of the “histories of morality” wasindeed to develop and legitimize thepolitical program of state absolutismand its correlative state morality. Theythus served as a crucial moment in ear-ly modern attempts to discredit alter-native sources of political authority.Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf,of course, both argued that appeals toalternative authorities not only under-mined the state but fuelled violentconflict.




57 C. SCHMITT, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, cit., p.157.

58 S. PUFENDORF, On the Duty of Man and Citizen [1673], in J. TULLY (ed.), M. SILVERTHORNE(trans.), Cambridge 1991, p. 8.

59 Ibidem, p. 146.60 I. HUNTER, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany, Cam-

bridge 2001.61 Ibidem, p. xi.

On Schmitt’s57 reading of history,the great accomplishment of the sover-eign state was to end «murderous as-sertions of right» and accusations ofguilt. It would confine its “moral” con-cerns to «the orbit of this life»58, with aview to shaping sociable and sociallyuseful citizen-subjects. This contrastswith theology where the end is salva-tion in “the life to come”. On this ac-count, absolutist natural law marked avital step forward in decoupling poli-tics and religion, and giving the tem-poral priority over the ghostly. The de-sacralised absolutist state envisaged byHobbes and Pufendorf needed to erad-icate “ghostly authority” from the po-litical realm. Only by delegitimizing al-ternative sources of moral authoritycould the state take its rightful placeabove the fray of sectarian bickering asa neutral civil authority – though itwould take no position on the truth orotherwise of asserted religious doc-trines, it would assert unchallengeablesupreme authority on all matters af-fecting the public sphere. This is thepoint and purpose of sovereignty. Itdenotes a singular and exclusive au-thority unanswerable to any other au-thority. As Pufendorf59 puts it, «its ex-

ercise is not dependent on a superior;it acts by its own will and judgment; itsactions may not be nullified by anyoneon the ground of superiority».

Hunter60 argues that the Seven-teenth century generates a clash be-tween metaphysics and civil philoso-phy – two opposing responses to thedecoupling of civil and religious au-thority. On the one side are Hobbes,Thomasius and Pufendorf who wantto defend and consolidate this separa-tion, developing «a doctrine of naturallaw in which the exercise of politicalpower (the “civil kingdom”) was segre-gated from the sphere of life in whichthe pursuit of moral perfection tookplace (the “kingdom of truth”)»61.Thomasius endorsed Hobbes’s andPufendorf ’s secularized political abso-lutism. Peace, not purity, was the goalof politics and the source of its “moral”norms. Their version of natural lawtheory sought “inner calm” (what Hel-lenistic philosophers called ataraxia,tranquility) and outer security (follow-ing the Epicureans). Natural law theo-ry thus grew out of a decidedly non-transcendental source, viz., the reasonof empirical human beings. On theother side are Leibniz, Wolff and Kant,who, by contrast, envisage a rationalreconciliation of politics and religionat a higher level, the metaphysical. Ac-cording to Hunter, the latter offer the-ories aimed at rising «to the domain oftranscendent perfections»; moral puri-ty rather than political peace. This type

The most important political upshotof the “histories of morality”was indeed to develop andlegitimise the political program of state absolutism and its correlative state morality


of argument, which mixed theologyand philosophy, took shape in a uni-versity metaphysics (Schulmetaphysik)that asserted its claim to moral over-sight of the spheres of politics and ju-risprudence. It had the terrible conse-quence, according to the civil philoso-phers, of heightening the “legitimationcrisis” by blurring ghostly and tempo-ral authority and giving rise to war-mongering confessional states62.

Conclusion

This article contemplates the extentto which positions in contemporarydebates on humanitarian interventionowe a conceptual debt to early moderndebates. It proceeds on the premisethat accounting for the intellectualroots of the rival narratives may allowfor interrogation of the terrain onwhich the moralization of internation-al politics is debated. This is not to sug-gest that contemporary debates can beneatly transposed onto an early mod-ern intellectual terrain, or vice-versa.No such transposition is possible ordesirable. But it does allow for an ap-proach – contextual intellectual histo-ry – that disentangles lines of concep-

tual descent in such a way as to high-light what is most at stake today, per-mitting us to see how particular ideasand doctrines which are today takenfor granted, grew out of very particularcontexts, and may not necessarily offerthe kind of political resolution that isimputed to them. Such an approachshould also allow us to see how certainconcepts have undergone subtle butsignificant adjustment over the cen-turies (this goes for state sovereignty asmuch as humanity), that modifies howwe should think about the relationshipbetween politics and morals.

By returning to rival early modern“histories of morality”, this article hasrevealed that the counter-humanitari-an critics who have reproved the mor-alization of international politics,nonetheless share a moral point ofview, even if it remains unacknowl-edged. This suggests that the clash isless one between politics (represent-ed by counter-humanitarians) andmorality (humanitarians), as it is usu-ally portrayed, than one between rivalmoralities. Defences of the sovereignstate and non-intervention are norma-tive programs, grounded on moralclaims just like their cosmopolitancounterparts.


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62 See R. DEVETAK, Between Kant and Pufendorf: Humanitarian Intervention, Critical International Theo-ry and a Critique of Statist Anti-Cosmopolitanism, in «Review of International Studies», 33, 2007, pp.151-174.


The Moralization of International Politics: Humanitarian Intervention and its Critics

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