Western Values in International Relations

This essay presents the three main traditions of thinking about international relations in Western societies since the sixteenth century, with particular attention to the ‘middle ground’ between extremes. These extremes are typified by thinkers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes at one pole, and Kant and Wilson at the other. The via media is associated with the development of constitutional government and the rule of law, as represented by thinkers such as Grotius and Gladstone. The essay illustrates the differences among these three traditions by analysing their distinct positions concerning international society, the maintenance of order, intervention, and international morality. ‘Western values’ are most effectively supported by thinkers and leaders who neither deny the existence of international society nor exaggerate its foreseeable prospects for gaining greater cohesion and strength. The middle course—the mainstream of the ‘Western values’ tradition—respects moral standards and sees moral challenges as complex, instead of regarding them as simple or nonexistent.

Religiöser Universalismus im Zeitalter der Nation. Friedrich von Hügel und die deutsche Geisteswelt (Eucken, Troeltsch, Naumann)

The article analyzes the influence of German thought on Baron Friedrich von Hügel’s philosophy of religion. The activities of the British scholar in the networks of Catholic modernism are placed within the broader framework of the international discussion on religion around 1900. His religious universalism was shaped to a great extent by the encounter of German intellectuals from a liberal Protestant background, most notably by Rudolf Eucken, Ernst Troeltsch and Friedrich Naumann. This encounter, started during the 1890s, focussed on the concepts of historical individuality and historical development. It took a new direction with the public role adopted by German intellectuals in the propaganda of the World War. Von Hügel’s often ignored treatise The German Soul reacted to the fusion of liberal religious thought with German nationalism as observed in Troeltsch and Naumann. His criticism of a lack of „international morality“ of German thought and his approach to identify the reason for this deficit in the Lutheran and idealistic tradition shed light on the ongoing discussions of a „Sonderweg“ of German thought. Von Hügel’s late attempts to promote Christianity as an anti-nationalist force remind of other more theological rejections of nationalism after the war. However, these attempts are not based on a strict theological or confessional rationale (like in dialectical theology) but try to continue the interconfessional and interdisciplinary discussion of the beginning of the century. This is revealed best by von Hügel’s close but not uncritical relationship to Troeltsch in the early 1920s.

Was He Guilty?

The trial might well have taken place were it not for a variety of unforeseen circumstances. For example, the Dutch might have agreed to the Kaiser’s surrender and the Kaiser might even have agreed to the trial. Other options would have been a trial in absentia or a trial in the Netherlands itself. Had a trial been held, the enigmatic charge of an ‘offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties’ would have required interpretation. Many considered that it would have covered not only violations of the laws of war within the conflict, but also the launching of the aggressive war. This would have necessitated proof that Germany was actually responsible for starting the war, and a possible inquiry into the conduct of the European Powers over several years prior to 1914, something for which the British and the French had little enthusiasm.

The Trial of the Kaiser

Today’s elaborate system of international criminal justice originates in proposals at the end of the First World War to try Kaiser Wilhelm II before an international criminal tribunal. In the weeks following 11 November 1918, the British, French, and Italian Governments agreed on a trial. Lloyd George campaigned for re-election on the slogan ‘Hang the Kaiser’. The Kaiser had fled to the Netherlands, possibly after receiving signals from the Dutch Queen that he would be welcome. Renegade US soldiers led by a former Senator failed in a bizarre attempt to take him prisoner and bring him to Paris. During the Peace Conference, the Commission on Responsibilities brought international lawyers together for the first time to debate international criminal justice. They recommended trial of the Kaiser by an international tribunal for war crimes, but not for starting the war or violating Belgian neutrality. The Americans were opposed to any prosecution. However, President Wilson changed his mind and agreed to trial for a ‘supreme offence against international morality’. This became a clause in the Treaty of Versailles, one of the few that the Germans tried to resist. Although the Allies threatened a range of measures if the former Emperor was not surrendered, the Dutch refused and the demands were dropped in March 1920. The Kaiser lived out his life in a castle near Utrecht, dying of natural causes in June 1941. Hitler sent a wreath to the funeral.

The Council of Virgins

All of the serious decision-making at the Peace Conference fell to four leaders, Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando. Known semi-officially as the Council of Four, they were sometimes called the ‘Council of Virgins’. Meeting in April 1919, they essentially discarded the recommendations of the Commission on Responsibilities. Lloyd George and Clemenceau returned to the idea of prosecuting the Kaiser for starting the war. After lengthy debate, Wilson abandoned US opposition to trial and on his own drafted a paragraph for the treaty. The new text that he prepared provided for an international tribunal that would be authorised to try Kaiser Wilhelm for a ‘supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties’, although it insisted that this was not to be viewed as a criminal offence.

International relations, philosophy of

The philosophy of international relations – or more precisely its political philosophy – embraces problems about morality in diplomacy and war, the justice of international practices and institutions bearing on economic welfare and the global environment, human rights, and the relationship between sectional loyalties such as patriotism and global moral commitments. Not everyone believes that such a subject can exist, or rather, that it can have significant ethical content. According to political realism – a widely-held view among Anglo-American students of international relations – moral considerations have no place in decisions about foreign affairs and international behaviour. The most extreme varieties of realism deny that moral judgment can have meaning or force in international affairs; more moderate versions acknowledge the meaningfulness of such judgments but hold either that leaders have no responsibility to attend to the morality of their actions in foreign affairs (because their overriding responsibility is to advance the interests of their constituents), or that the direct pursuit of moral goals in international relations is likely to be self-defeating. Leaving aside the more sceptical kinds of political realism, the most influential orientations to substantive international morality can be arrayed on a continuum. Distinctions are made on the basis of the degree of privilege, if any, extended to the citizens of a state to act on their own behalf at the potential expense of the liberty and wellbeing of persons elsewhere. ‘The morality of states’, at one extreme, holds that states have rights of autonomy analogous to those of individuals within domestic society, which secure them against external interference in their internal affairs and guarantee their ownership and control of the natural and human resources within their borders. At the other end of the continuum, one finds cosmopolitan views which deny that states enjoy any special privilege; these views hold that individuals rather than states are the ultimate subjects of morality, and that value judgments concerning international conduct should take equally seriously the wellbeing of each person potentially affected by a decision, whether compatriot or foreigner. Cosmopolitan views may acknowledge that states (and similar entities) have morally significant features, but analysis of the significance of these features must connect them with considerations of individual wellbeing. Intermediate views are possible; for example, a conception of the privileged character of the state can be combined with a conception of the international realm as weakly normative (that is, governed by principles which demand that states adhere to minimum conditions of peaceful coexistence). The theoretical difference between the morality of states and a fully cosmopolitan morality is reflected in practical differences about the justifiability of intervention in the internal affairs of other states, the basis and content of human rights, and the extent, if any, of our obligations as individuals and as citizens of states to help redress the welfare effects of international inequalities.

Ethics and Internationalism in Japanese Education, 1933–45

After their government's 1933 withdrawal from the League of Nations, Japanese internationalists searched for new ways to engage with the world or struggled to accommodate their advocacy of international cooperation to the realities of the wartime empire. The idea of international morality was central to this effort. Ethics textbooks, which presented ideals of international behaviour, provide a particular view of this intellectual and policy endeavour of the 1930s and early 1940s, showing how the concept of morality became a means to reconcile internationalism with imperialism and war. Echoing many of the ideas current in both public discussion and behind-closed-doors decision-making on foreign policy at the time, textbook authors and other educators contributed to a broader redefinition of internationalism that enabled it to persist through a period of imperialism and war.

Human rights and the rights of states: a relational account

What is the relationship between human rights and the rights of states? Roughly, while cosmopolitans insist that international morality must regard as basic the interests of individuals, statists maintain that the state is of fundamental moral significance. This article defends a relational version of statism. Human rights are ultimately grounded in a relational norm of reciprocal independence and set limits to the exercise of public authority, but, contra the cosmopolitan, the state is of fundamental moral significance. A relational account promises to justify a limited conception of state sovereignty while avoiding the familiar cosmopolitan criticisms of statist accounts.