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2001 / 2
The Return of the Just War?
Introduction
Is humanitarian intervention a means of combating genocide or a sophisticated concealment of the violence of global systems of domination?
Dietmar Mieth
Since recent cases of military intervention to prevent genocide — not all of them sanctioned by the recognized authority of the United Nations — there has again been talk of the return of the ‘just war’ paradigm. Politicians point out the occasion for the intervention and the aims that they hope to achieve with it. Though the proportionality of the means is often questionable and the promise to minimize death and injury is often felt to be one-sided, the individual criteria of the moral tradition of the ‘just war’ can easily be recognized in the norms to which at least lip service is paid, even if they cannot always be observed. Here, of course, the theory of the ‘just war’ does not mean that wars themselves can claim to be justified; rather, a war can be justified if strict conditions are fulfilled (including a clear justification for the action, the exhaustion of all alternative means, the proportionality of the violence used, the prospect of success and the proper authority), and if, given the possibility of successful intervention, not to act would entail complicity in the continuation of the genocide. Although this question of a ‘return’ to the theory of the just war might at first sight seem clear, even if, given the nature of modern advanced technology, there no longer seems to be any justification for war between nations, the matter is complicated and ethical assessment has become more difficult.
This issue of Concilium sets out to document a great tension and perhaps to heighten it. The Christian peace ethic, which we might perhaps call a primary ethic, and the Christian ethic of legitimate counter-violence, which represents so to speak a secondary but often dominant ethical tradition, have been in conflict since the time of the late Roman empire. A large part of the [8] theological discussion, which is also developed in the articles which follow, has moved along this line of demarcation between the primary ‘greater’ peace ethic and the secondary ‘lesser’ self-defence ethic of the just war. The religious rhetoric is also stamped by this split (cf. the contribution by Kenneth Himes). In inter-faith dialogue it is evident that the world religions each in their own way contain the legacy of the religious poverty of violence, but nevertheless fluctuate between the extremes of the legitimation of violence and pacifism. But here too one could speak of a primary ‘greater’ ethic and a secondary ‘lesser’ ethic (cf. the article by John F. Burke). If, with Juan-José Tamayo-Acosta, we consider the biblical roots, then the ‘greater’ ethic is the one which links up with the promise and messianism. It relocates utopian thought in the expectations of the extrinsic, of what is to come, which transcends the ‘lesser’ intrinsic ethic that does away with specific, but excessive, emergencies.
The tradition of moral theology described by Lisa Sowle Cahill, taking up Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, is also first of all a tradition against war which has been revived in some encyclicals of the most recent popes (above all John XXIII and John Paul II). But alongside the universal condemnation of evil there stands its reduction in the minimization of possibilities of war and the control of the means of waging war. However, alongside the tension between the permanent ‘greater’ ethic of peace and justice on the one hand and the transitory necessity for the just war on the other, a new tension has arisen. This forms the central question of this issue: the tensions between the incessant, everyday war of violence as waged by the global systems of domination on the one hand, in which war simmers on a low flame and kills by the withdrawal of commodities vital to life or by a lack of solidarity, and war as explicit military intervention, the intensity and duration of which can be described; perception of the latter in the northern hemisphere conceals the permanent state of war in the remaining two-thirds of the world. In his committed contribution José Maria Vigil has redistributed the profiles of the gods: the god of war has detached himself from Mars or the crusader masks of Christians and has become the god of the implementation of economic interests, the god of racism, sexism and the destruction of the environment. By contrast, the God of peace is the God of the poor: their hope, their solidarity, their brotherliness.
We cannot be indifferent to the clear way in which in this issue the tension between the ‘greater’ and the ‘lesser’ ethic in Christianity is redefined. For the critical discussion of the ‘greater’ ethic, which is concerned with peace [9] and justice, has to do with unmasking the masked violence behind the daily acts of destruction. Petrus Bsteh points out that we are in a new process of religious learning which is characterized by apocalyptic drama — Tamayo-Acosta draws attention to this. Here, too, the power of the media must not be under-estimated. Above all in the electronic age, they can help to put military intervention as an act of war in the foreground or even glorify it, but they can also see their responsibility as being to unmask the hidden dominant type of war, which consists of the violence of global systems of domination. The filter of the media, which is so often misused and is even entangled in a global dependence, filters out what the dominant interests ought to be seeing (see the article by Cristián Parker Gumucio). When we reinforce back up our perception of the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention in the ‘Eurocentricity’ described by Gerhard Beestermöller, in so doing we have already subjected the greater ethic to the domination of the lesser ethic. The question which then arises — quite legitimately in the specific context — is whether here rights are being claimed without becoming universal responsibilities (the comparison between Kosovo and Rwanda), and whether an ethic of defence can be stated in such a way that it can be universalized and applied to all cases.
J. Milburn Thompson in his article has investigated the internal ethics of humanitarian intervention. Here above all the juridical non-intervention theory and the moral theory of legitimation are brought face to face. The paradigm with a moral foundation is in tension with legal implementation; solidarity stands over against autonomy. Thompson, too, in his article once again emphasizes the predominance of the ‘greater’ Christian ethic in this discussion.
In fact, as María Pilar Aquino points out in her concluding contribution, this ethic would relate directly to the presuppositions of institutional and institutionalized violence. The need for the transformation of domination can be demonstrated by means of many examples. But a central case where it is necessary is that of violence against women, from which more of those aged between fourteen and fifteen in the two-thirds world die than from sicknesses. The ‘economic war’ in the age of globalization can utilize the ‘lesser’ war ethic of the explicit, military war to make some of the killing seem ‘legitimate’ as representative of the daily dying.
As can easily be seen, the shift in the question of a ‘return of the just war’ which is clear in this volume at the same time also represents a critical deconstruction of this question. Is this military intervention a means against [10] genocide or, as one of my fellow-editors emphasizes, ultimately a sophisticated veiling of the violence of the global systems of domination? I do not see this as an alternative. But I have learned to establish a priority here: a priority of the ‘greater’ ethic over institutionalized or institutionalizable violence which begins with the unmaking or the contrast experience of permanent violence, of which escalating genocide is a terrible aspect. The question of the return of a just peace becomes the question of a move towards the just peace.
In the perspective of the ‘greater’ peace ethic, so-called humanitarian intervention appears as a selective action which chooses in accordance with its own interests — where intervention is made in similar cases of genocide. A didactic drama seems to be being staged here which is followed at whim. And in another respect, too, this drama could become an ‘excuse’: an excuse for fighting effects and symptoms, moreover in a selective way, rather than causes and background conditions. From the perspective of the ‘lesser’ ethic of self-defence, however, the appeal to the ‘greater’ peace ethic often seems the better alternative, which is called on in opposition to what is unavoidably right in a concrete situation.
However, one thing can be established: the credibility of a ‘lesser’ ethic of selfdefence is bound up with a recognizable action in solidarity which is obligated to the ‘greater’ peace ethic and thus to the fight and resistance against injustice. If something is right in a given situation but the intention lacks credibility — if the argument for not doing anything — one must not just be a spectator! — is applied to momentarily explosive excesses and not to the permanent war and its victims, then it will be difficult to convince people that one is seriously opposing the violent injustice in a world which has been so brought together into a single whole.
Translated by John Bowden