When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  Two years later, in November 1989, the East Germans issued a decree for the wall to be opened, allowing people to travel freely into West Berlin. Families that had been separated for decades were finally reunited. On 13 June 1990 the people of Berlin began the joyous process of tearing down the 109 miles of wall. Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and in Soviet Russia itself. The exact but crucial contribution of Mr Gorbachev was to do nothing. As the crowd tore down the wall, taking blocks as historic souvenirs, citizens danced on the wider section of the wall surrounding the Brandenburg Gate which became instantly the symbol of liberty. The Berlin Wall had been a deadly frontier. Before its construction something in the order of 3.5 million people had fled across the border from East to West Germany. It was quiet going the other way. The wall had stopped the human traffic, but dissidents tried anyway. Approximately 5,000 people had managed to make it over or under the wall but 260 people had been killed, most of them shot by East German border guards.

  Reagan left office in January 1989 with the highest approval rating of any departing president since that of his hero Franklin D. Roosevelt. After he had left office, he took a return trip to Berlin, in September 1990, a matter of weeks before Germany was officially reunified. With a hammer in his hand he took a few swings at the remaining chunks of the wall.

  There is one last twist to this speech. Reagan is just lifting himself to the full heights of his finale when he notices some graffiti spray on the wall and breaks from his script to read it aloud. ‘This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality’ it says. What a great ending this would have been. The president who reads the writing on the wall. Instead, he goes back to the text with a superfluous commonplace dig at those who had protested about his visit. It is a flaw in a speech that is otherwise brilliantly crafted, but it doesn’t matter much. Ronald Reagan had seen the writing on the wall anyway.

  JUST WAR

  To start with David Lloyd George’s arresting image, democracy is worth the scrap of paper it’s written on. The system of democratic liberty is superior to its rivals and it is worth fighting for. This is a difficult argument to press these days. Populism has wormed its way into democratic politics and planted an insidious lack of confidence in the institutions of democracies. Western nations are oddly apt to blame themselves for the world’s troubles. Self-criticism is, of course, one of the attributes of a democracy, but self-loathing is not. The colonial adventures of the nineteenth century, the anti-communist conflicts that upheld dubious regimes in the twentieth century and the various military disasters in the Middle East of recent years provide a ready historical roster of Western culpability.

  It sounds vainglorious and imperial to state baldly that democratic societies are superior to their non-democratic counterparts, but it is true all the same and the arguments that democracies make for war show why it is true. Whenever a democracy is in military combat with an autocracy, we should favour the democracy. Hold it to a higher standard of conduct and never stint on warranted criticism, but do not forget which side is the moral victor. That argument needs to be articulated in fine public speech which summons the case for war in sorrow. War can never be a cavalier exercise and great care needs to be taken to ensure that the conflict is just.

  The most thorough articulation of a just case for war of recent times was given by Tony Blair at the Economic Club in Chicago in April 1999 in response to NATO action against the ethnic cleansing, systematic rape and mass murder in Kosovo. I can confidently announce that it was a speech to which I contributed not a word, and that it is the most substantive speech Blair ever gave. I can only hope that these two facts are not related. War brought out the best in Tony Blair as a speaker. His second-best speech, which once again lacks my contribution, was the case he made on 18 March 2003 in the House of Commons, for military intervention in Iraq. Read today as it was heard at the time, which is in ignorance of the course of the war, it is the state of the art of rhetorical persuasion. The 2003 speech owes a lot, however, to the address in Chicago four years before in which Blair had given a public expression of the idea of the iustum bellum, the just war.

  The philosophical tradition of the just war is explained to best effect in the unfinished thirteenth-century classic the Summa theologicae of Thomas Aquinas, and in three volumes by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, published in 1625, called De jure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace). The just war has three components. The first, known as ius in bello, sets out the rules that govern the conduct of war. The battlefield was once a lawless realm in which, in Shakespeare’s words from Macbeth, ‘fair is foul and foul is fair’. However, the attempt to enforce an ethic of war goes back to the references in the Funeral Oration of Pericles to the Athenian code of honour. Homer’s Iliad is full of such codes and so are the works of Cicero. Moral restraint in war now has legal expression in the Geneva Convention and the protocols of The Hague. The existence of a body of law will never entirely prevent depravity but, despite the shameful absence of the United States, the International Criminal Court has successfully tried war criminals. Court proceedings are a difficult and imperfect response to war crimes. They are also the only response that politics can take to war.

  The second part of the just war tradition is an argument that we have seen laced through the speeches of David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill. Ius post bellum describes the moral reasoning that is required to define the peace once the war is won. A war fought to repair a wrong must put it right once peace is restored. The passage in Grotius about the importance of moderation in negotiating the terms of surrender and conquest should be required reading in all democratic states. If the victorious powers had followed this counsel as they drafted the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the Great War, the terrible course of twentieth-century European history might have been avoided. As John Maynard Keynes pointed out in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, imposing reparations of £6.6 billion on Germany simply incubated resentment because it was so widely regarded as unjust.

  The third part of the idea of the just war is the one that, after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the conflict in Syria, most clearly needs restating. This is the case for military action itself, the account of the fair war, the ius ad bellum. Both Aquinas and Grotius argue that a just war can only be waged on the basis of a legitimate sovereign in order to put right a clearly defined wrong.

  Aquinas provides a list of relevant wrongs which he has largely derived from Saint Augustine: avenging wrongs, punishing a nation, restoring what has been seized unjustly. Grotius describes the same point as a cause that is designed to prevent or to repair an injury. On the final criterion Aquinas and Grotius differ. Aquinas stresses that a war can only be just if it is the expression of a rightful intention to promote good and forestall evil. He mentions securing the peace, punishing evildoers and uplifting the good as examples of rightful intention. Grotius places his emphasis on the prudential likelihood that good consequences will follow.

  This distinction, between intention and consequence, is beautifully dramatised in the speech that Krishna makes in the Hindu epic the Bhavagad Gita. On the eve of battle the warrior Arjuna confesses to his adviser Krishna his anxieties about the great loss of life that will be an inevitable result of the fighting. Krishna offers advice of some moral purity that Arjuna must do his duty, no matter the consequences. Krishna’s position is endorsed by T. S. Eliot in the Four Quartets:

  And do not think of the fruit of action.

  Fare forward.

  […]

  Not fare well,

  But fare forward, voyagers.

  The distinction between moral intention and consequence, proves to be critical in the context of Blair’s Chicago speech and the democratic case for a just war. In Chicago Blair was not especially concerned with the conduct of war. Instead, he provided the most important contemporary updating of the other two parts of the case, the just intervention and the just peace. The latter is the less controversial. Blair’s pos
t bellum vision for Kosovo would command widespread support even among those who had been sceptical about the case for military action: ‘we need to begin work now on what comes after our success in Kosovo. We will need a new Marshall plan for Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, Albania and Serbia too if it turns to democracy’.

  The dispute turns on the case for the intervention itself, the ius ad bellum. Blair makes the case in Chicago that the rules of the international community need to be rewritten to provide a legitimate sovereign authority for a democracy to go to war. This was Blair’s first serious statement in favour of open markets and the rule of international law and against protectionism and nativism. These precepts, he argued, have to be defended and that requires a viable United Nations that can both legitimate and enforce justice. In the event, the national vetoes within the United Nations mean that it has not been a serious protagonist in this process, let alone a source of legitimate authority. That task has been returned, not without controversy, to national legal process.

  The main burden of Blair’s just war argument is, in an echo of Aquinas, that war must be fought as a retaliation against a clear wrong. The just moral case for action in Kosovo was ‘the evil of ethnic cleansing’, and much of the Chicago speech is devoted to setting out the moral imperative. Blair’s section on the clarity of the military objective, though, reveals a crucial part of the case for the just war that has been forgotten in the aftermath of Iraq. He says in Chicago, quite baldly, that military action should only be undertaken if it can be plausibly asserted that ‘we have clear objectives and we are going to succeed’. The objective is very clear indeed: ‘a verifiable cessation of all combat activities and killings; the withdrawal of Serb military, police and paramilitary forces from Kosovo; the deployment of an international military force, the return of all refugees and unimpeded access for humanitarian aid; and a political framework for Kosovo’.

  In his Chicago account of the just war, Blair is including, quite rightly, an assessment of consequence. Granting free rein to the tyrant, he argues, will be calamitous and make further conflict unavoidable: ‘we will have to spill infinitely more blood and treasure to stop him later’. Remember, though, the second half of Blair’s just war formula. Action needed not just a clear objective but also the reasonable assumption that ‘we are going to succeed’. The military adventures envisaged in the Chicago speech are subject to a prudential caveat. Action should follow, says Blair, only if ‘there are military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake’. He adds the further prudential requirement that intervention can be justified only with a commitment to the long term. The just war must be all three of morally correct, plausibly beneficial and viable.

  It is intriguing to apply the Chicago doctrine to Britain’s subsequent involvement in the conflict in Iraq. The opposition to that war comes from both a critique of intent and, with the benefit of hindsight unavailable to Blair himself, a reading of the consequences. When no weapons of mass destruction were unearthed the casus belli collapsed. In his much later defence of the conflict, Blair himself changed his argument. After the consequences had unfolded and it was hard to argue that the outcome had been beneficial, he often argued from rightful intention – ‘I did what I thought was right’. The sophisticated critique of the Iraq war is not the absurd allegation that Blair lied or entered into the conflict for another nefarious reason, it is that he failed to follow his own just war axioms. He has slipped from consequence to rightful intention, from Grotius to Aquinas, Arjuna to Krishna. The Chicago speech makes it clear that both are required.

  Blair does not live up to the standard he set in Chicago, which remains a brilliant and durable account of when and how a democratic nation can intervene in the affairs of a rival and retain the mantle of justice. But it would be a terrible dead end if we were to lose the insight of Chicago in the counter-example of Iraq. To intervene in a human catastrophe, such as the instance of Kosovo, can be a noble venture. As Lloyd George pointed out in 1918, it is ignoble not to act in aid of an oppressed nation which has been wronged, even though we fear the consequences.

  The prudential clause can, however, be a charter for a tyrant to wreak havoc. It was the bargain that Chamberlain made at Munich. But there is always a risk involved in the calculus of war. Not all circumstances are as clear as those that faced Churchill in 1940. With the Luftwaffe in the sky over the cities of Britain, fighting back was the only option, and Churchill spoke for the nation at such a moment: ‘What is our aim?’ he asked. ‘Victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.’

  Most conflicts are not as clear-cut as this, but the Second World War is exemplary as a reminder that a war can be just. Blair’s Chicago speech is a sophisticated account of the conditions under which intervention is a more potent moral imperative than absence. Today, in the Western democracies the confidence that we are acting with justice seems to have been mislaid. When we doubt our rightful intention we simply leave others to bear the consequences. We say, in effect, to the people of Syria, not fare forward but farewell.

  A World Made Safe by Democracy

  It is important to remember that peace and democracy are linked at their deepest points. This argument, which Pericles is the first to make, is common to Lloyd George, Wilson and Churchill, before Ronald Reagan provides its fullest expression in the midst of a cold conflict. The political speech is a statement of a faith in peace. A democrat making the case for war is performing a concession speech, sadly admitting that war is now necessary, to save and then confirm democracy. It is a temporary political ceasefire, to be replaced, until normal service can resume, by gunfire.

  The man who pioneered international cooperation was President Wilson. His quest to persuade America failed, as we have seen, and the failure is due in part to the fact that he got his central message exactly the wrong way around. The world does not need, as Wilson argued, to be made safe for democracy. It is democracy that will make the world safe. Democracy does not require, as Wilson suggests, a safe space to inhabit. The rule of law is itself the creation of that security. Liberal institutions are a guarantee of a lower likelihood of conflict. This is, at root, what all war speeches by democrats are about. Lloyd George and Churchill pass through national glory as a means of inspiration, but that is not their subject. Their true topic is democracy.

  When democracies get entangled in conflict it is either a colonial adventure or a fight against a tyranny. Between two democracies the only wars are conducted with words. There are too many conflicts in the world today between ethnic rivals within the borders of a single nation-state. There are too many tyrants engaged in quelling popular uprisings. But there is no conflict anywhere, there never has been, and it is unlikely there ever will be, between two established democracies. This is not a curiosity; it is a point about the bedrock of politics. A democracy cannot wage war at the whim of an autocrat. The sceptical public has to be persuaded. This is as close to an empirical law as exists in international relations. In Triangulating Peace, Bruce Russett and John Oneal assigned every party to a conflict between 1816 and 2001 a score, on a decimal scale, for its approximation to a liberal democracy. They found that when one country was either a low-scoring democracy or an autocracy the chance of a quarrel between them doubled.

  The spread of democracy has therefore been accompanied by an era of comparative peace. The quarter-century since the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989 has been a time of great progress. The changed nature of warfare means there will never again be anything to compare with the Battle of the Somme or the siege of Leningrad. The last conflict between two great powers, the Korean War, effectively ended nearly sixty years ago. The last sustained territorial war between two regular armies, Ethiopia and Eritrea, ended a decade ago. Even civil wars, though a persistent evil, are less common than in the past; there were about a quarter fewer in 2007 than in 1990. In the first decade of the twenty-first cen
tury there were fewer deaths in war than in any decade during the preceding century. Worldwide, deaths caused directly by war-related violence in the same period have averaged about 55,000 per year, just over half of what they were in the 1990s (100,000 a year), a third of what they were during the Cold War (180,000 a year from 1950 to 1989), and a hundredth of what they were in the Second World War.

  What democracies do instead of fight is talk and trade. As long ago as 1909 Norman Angell argued that commerce made war unprofitable and conflict was therefore, in the title of his book, The Great Illusion. The richer a nation becomes the more likely to abandon dictatorship for democracy. Of the fifty-six nations with a GDP per capita of $15,000 or more, forty-five are democracies. The only general exception to this rule is the oil curse. When a ruling elite discovers the gift of lucrative natural resources it sees no need of democratic politics. Instant enrichment is simply a vast unearned dividend for the presiding ruling family. However, under a more usual economic development, gradual progress generates a demand for democratic representation. Private property within open markets creates a sphere of autonomy in which all people are granted certain liberties. The more that property ownership extends throughout a society, the more that power is spread. A resilient civil society, one more bulwark against the might of the state, is a characteristic of liberal democracies which, again, gives people something to value.