Justifying Interventions—The Case of ECOWAS in Liberia

In contrast to the other chapters in Part V, Nina Wilén’s focus is on multilateral military interventions at the regional level: She explores the relationship between sovereignty, intervention, and the international normative order, by examining how ECOWAS, an African regional organization, justified its intervention in Liberia’s civil war referring to international norms. Based on a critical discursive analysis of the speeches related to ECOWAS’ decision to intervene in Liberia in 1990, as well as the responses the justifications provoked from the UN and the United States, it is argued that ECOWAS’ intervention and the justifications which accompanied it were clearly influenced by an international normative order where sovereignty is the key constitutive norm and non-intervention the main regulative norm. Yet the fact that ECOWAS also violated the very same norms through its intervention, created a precedent for future regional interventions and implied long-term consequences for the international normative system.

The Justification and Critique of Coercion as World Order Politics

The present chapter turns from the justification of war (the use of force) to the justification of coercion. It proceeds on the assumption that to stabilize the current international order requires less ‘legitimate force’ and more ‘legitimate coercion’ since in most institutions the enforcement of norms—as the very basis of order—does not only or even primarily rely on physical force but on various forms of political and economic coercion. The chapter distinguishes various forms of coercion and reconstructs debates in International Law and International Relations with regard to their legality, legitimacy, and effectiveness. Doing so, Christopher Daase and Nicole Deitelhoff intend to broaden the debate on world order by redirecting the focus from the use of force to the use of less violent coercive measures. Specifically, the chapter introduces a concept of sanction as a means of communicating normative expectations to the normative community rather than executing punishments.

Justifications of the Use of Force as Constitutive Elements of World Order—Points of Departure, Arrivals, and Moving Destinations

In the book’s concluding chapter Lothar Brock and Hendrik Simon take up the notions of change, progress, and structural repetition (Wiederholungsstrukturen) as understood by Reinhart Koselleck. From a genealogical viewpoint, how and in which way do theories and practices of the justification of war and their meaning for world order change from early modernity to the present? Are there any signs of progress in terms of hedging collective violence and if so, what makes the difference? Or does the history of the justification of war repeat itself in endless cycles of justifying, criticizing, and reproducing war so that change and progress (if any) are stuck in these cycles? Whichever answer seems plausible: the contributions to this book show that international law is more than the white handkerchief in the dinner jacket of crocks.

‘What We Are Fighting For’: Democracies’ Justifications of Using Armed Force since the End of the Cold War

While this volume’s Part IV is devoted to internal and external oppositions to ‘liberal peace’ in the early and mid-twentieth century, Anna Geis and Wolfgang Wagner introduce Part V by turning to paradoxes of democratic warfare and its justification in the last three decades: Democratic warfare has a strong impact on the development of domestic, regional, and international normative orders and has in a number of cases been conducted without the authorization of the UN Security Council. Drawing on insights of the ‘democratic peace’ scholarship, this chapter investigates justifications offered by democratic governments and members of parliaments after 1990 when seeking to legitimate or to reject a participation in military interventions. Such justification patterns have changed over time during the period of liberal hegemony since they always reflect the interplay between changing domestic constellations of interest and power, hegemonic discourse within the state and the surrounding normative order. The chapter presents empirical research on justifications that democratic actors have brought forward in Western parliaments (with regard to the Gulf War, Kosovo, Iraq War, Afghanistan, and the fight against ‘Daesh’ in Iraq and Syria).

In the Name of State Sovereignty? The Justification of War in Russian History and the Present

This chapter shows that the Russian philosophical and legal traditions regarding war have advanced along a number of different tracks. In Imperial Russia, some thinkers adopted pacifist positions; others regarded war as a necessary evil. A similar bifurcation of thought can be seen in the Soviet era. The Soviets expounded a belief in the principles of non-interference and peaceful coexistence. At the same time, they also sometimes portrayed war in a positive light. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian scholars and political leaders have generally supported state sovereignty and rejected attempts to justify humanitarian interventions, regime change, and preventive war (on these Western strategies, see Geis/Wagner, Stohl, and Jahn in this volume). Nevertheless, they have on occasion resorted to very similar language themselves. Russian narratives thus oscillate between favouring pacifism and sovereignty as means of preserving the status quo and, as an exception, supporting military interventions when these are required by the transient goals of Russian foreign policy.

The Great War and International Law: German Justifications of Prevention and Pre-emptive Self-Defence

Isabel V. Hull uses the German declarations of war in 1914 to examine three issues: 1) the role of customary international law (CIL) in statesmen’s decision to go to war (using Germany as an example); 2) the assumptions that state actors held a jus ad bellum; and, especially, 3) how they distinguished self-defence, prevention, pre-emption, and aggression. Hull uses not the claims of jurists, but the arguments and actions of civilian and military leaders, i.e. those who actually made the decisions for war. With this, she continues Anuschka Tischer’s and Hendrik Simon’s examination of the question whether there was a transformation of war discourses in (early) modernity that led to overcoming the need to justify war. The chapter confirms that, even as Germany began a ‘preventive war’, the European state consensus held that, on the continent, preventive war was illegal, pre-emptive war was severely restrained, and genuine self-defence – meaning both fending off armed attack against one’s territory, independence, or sovereignty, and defending the treaty-structure that guaranteed the inter-state order – was the only justification for war acceptable to the community of states.

Capitalism, British Grand Strategy, and the Peace Treaty of Utrecht: Towards a Historical Sociology of War- and Peace-making in the Construction of International Order

Benno Teschke offers a specific focus on the historical sociology of normative change in the transition from early modernity to modernity in Europe. How can we explain international diplomacy and peace accords from within critical International Relations (IR) Theory? Teschke addresses this question by focusing on the Peace of Utrecht (1713) that concluded the War of the Spanish Succession. It tracks the relations between the domestic sources of the rise of Britain as a great power, the revolutionary transformations of its post-1688 foreign policy institutions, the formulation of a new British grand strategy—the blue water policy—in the context of the War of the Spanish Succession, and its strategic ability to impose through coercive and secret diplomacy a new pro-British ‘normative’ set of rules for post-Utrecht early modern international relations during the ‘long eighteenth Century’ (1688–1815). This British-led reorganization of early modern international order cannot be captured through prevailing IR concepts, including automatic power-balancing, off-shore balancing, hegemony, international society, formal or informal imperialism, or collective security.

Kant’s Rejection of Just War: International Order between Democratic Constitutionalism and Revolutionary Violence

Following up on Tischer’s, Becker Lorca’s and Teschke’s observations on early modern war discourse, Oliver Eberl in this chapter elaborates Immanuel Kant’s critique of the justification of the use of force in early modernity which revolutionized the thinking on international order. Kant condemned the justification of the use of force as just war since this would perpetuate the state of nature which the states still found themselves in. Kant does not link directly theory and practice but rather formulates his theory on the background of revolutionary change, which in his view opens up the possibility of a completely new approach to international order. However, in unfolding his theory, Kant had to take into consideration its possible practical consequences in the context of an unstable international constellation of power. Furthermore, he had to accommodate the practice of the French republic to identify its opponents as ‘unjust enemies’, thereby contradicting the envisaged role of the revolution as the nucleus of the new era of peace envisioned by Kant.

Justified: Just War and the Ethics of Violence and World Order

This volume’s final Part VII on the impact of legal claims in war discourses is introduced by Chris Brown. In this chapter, he fundamentally questions the relevance of international law as a frame of reference for the justification and limitation of war. Brown turns our attention back to just war which we have discussed earlier in this volume (ch. 2 by Anthony Lang, Jr): Brown argues that, properly understood, the just war tradition can be defended against most of its critics, the exceptions being those Clausewitzian realists and Gandhian pacifists who refuse to make the kind of discriminations upon which the tradition is based. More problematic are some of the newer friends of the tradition, analytical political theorists who reject its praxis-oriented dimension, and focus on the rights and responsibilities of individuals, discounting the importance of collectivities. These writers are, in some respects, closer to the medieval tradition than are defenders of contemporary international humanitarian law, but their reliance on the ability of philosophers to decide matters of justice leads to a dogmatism uncharacteristic of the just war tradition, and their emphasis on the individual undermines the link between theory and practice. This chapter defends a traditional, albeit post-Christian, reading of the notion of justified war against both its overt opponents and its supposed friends.

Peace through Law: Lessons from 1914

The theme ‘peace through law’ has engaged the continued attention of states and international law scholars – and indeed for a much longer time than often assumed, as the chapters in Part III have shown. In the context of the First World War, the urgency of this project again became particularly clear. But despite the changes in the normative and institutional structures since the beginning of the twentieth century, wars are still with us. It is in this context that Bhupinder S. Chimni revisits the rich reflections of the times on the causes of the First World War and asks whether more international law could have prevented the war. The aim is to draw certain lessons for our times.