The purpose of this ongoing blog post is
to chronicle my own thoughts about the relationship between Hans Morgenthau and
the concept of international society. International Society, is generally not associated with Morgenthau or classical realism, but rather the
group that Hidemi Suganami aptly refers to as the ‘British Institutionalists’, more
colloquially known, much to its detriment, as the ‘English School.’[1] It is a significant venture
– more ‘side-quest’ if anything - to undertake, at least for myself, precisely
because the locating the distinction between the British Institutionalists and
other thinkers of international politics in the immediate post-war era brings
the English School further into focus; even if for my own understanding.
There are some conceptual concerns here,
that must be accounted for. Chiefly, these concerns the quality of the central
concept under investigation: ‘International Society.’ Conceptualising this has
never been an easy task, and there is a wealth of literature attempting to pin
it down structurally, materially, historically, legally, phenomenologically,
and so on. Thus, it would be a breach of academic rigour, or even a mockery of the
intelligence of any reader, to assume that ‘international society’ hails the
same object or phenomenon for Morgenthau as it would have done for Wight,
Butterfield, Bull, Howard or Manning. The horizon of each and every thinker is
distinct, and so we should not expect a thick interpretive overlap of understanding
across the gulf of context between the British Institutionalists and Morgenthau
over such a contested concept. Even now, the gulf between academies on how to
conceive of international society feels almost insurmountable, with the signifier
itself denoting what feels to be distinct entities in US and European schools
of thought.
Nonetheless, as Morgenthau sat on the
intersection of both of these camps, considering his Weberian and continental
sensibility amidst a background of US social science, it must be asked the
extent to which the context and meaning behind the use of this concept is too
distinct between Morgenthau and others to warrant an exploration of the former’s
usage. The task of this ongoing part-time exploration, which I intend to add to
over time, will not be this - sadly. Rather, it will concern the preliminary requirements
of such a study, i.e. the banking of excerpts from Morgenthau’s work within
which he references the concept, and my immediate thoughts on these fragments.
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Politics Among Nations
Pages 189-191
c) Destruction of International Society
While the democratic selection and
responsibility of government officials destroyed international morality as an
effective system of restraints, nationalism destroyed the international society
itself within which that morality had operated. The French Revolution of 1789
marks the beginning of the new epoch of history which witnesses the gradual
decline of the cosmopolitan aristocratic society and of the restraining
influence of its morality upon inter- national politics. Says Professor G. P.
Gooch:
While patriotism is as old as the
instinct of human association, nationalism as an articulate creed issued from
the volcanic fires of the French Revolution. The tide of battle turned at
Valmy; and on the evening after the skirmish Goethe . . . replied to a request
for his opinion in the historic words, “From to-day begins a new era, and you
will be able to say that you were present at its birth.”[2]
It was a slow process of corrosion with
the old order resisting valiantly, as illustrated by the Holy Alliance and
incidents such as the one discussed above when as late as 1862 the Russian Czar
invited Bismarck to enter the Russian diplomatic service. Yet the decline of
the international society and its morality, which had united the monarchs and
the nobility of Christendom, is unmistakable toward the end of the nineteenth
century. It has nowhere become more painfully patent than in the theatrical
hollowness of William IIs verbal attempts at reviving it. He wrote to the
Russian Czar in 1895, with regard to the French:
The Republicans are revolutionists de
natura. The blood of Their Majesties is still on that country. Has it since
then ever been happy or quiet again? Has it not staggered from bloodshed to
bloodshed? Nicky, take my word on it, the curse of God has stricken that people
forever. We Christian Kings and Emperors have one holy duty imposed on us by
Heaven, that is to uphold the principle of By the Grace of God.
And the anachronism of
William IPs still-born plan, conceived on the eve of the Spanish-American War,
to unite the European powers in support of the Spanish monarchy against the
American republic, dismayed his advisers.
But even in 1914, on the eve
of the First World War, there is in many of the statements and dispatches of
statesmen and diplomats a melancholy undertone of regret that individuals who
had so much in common should now be compelled to separate and identify
themselves with the warring groups on the different sides of the frontiers.
This, however, was only a feeble reminiscence which no longer had the power to
influence the actions of men. By then, these men had naturally less in common
with each other than they had with the respective peoples from which they had
risen to the heights of power and whose will and interests they represented in
their relations with other nations. What separated the French Foreign Minister
from his opposite number in Berlin was much more important than what united
them. Conversely, what united the French Foreign Minister with the French
nation was much more important than anything which might set him apart from it.
The place of the one international society to which all members of the
different governing groups belonged and which provided a common framework for
the different national societies had been taken by the national societies
themselves. The national societies now gave to their representatives on the
international scene the standards of conduct which the international society
had formerly supplied.
When, in the course of the
nineteenth century, this fragmentation of the aristocratic international
society into its national segments was well on its way to consummation, the
protagonists of nationalism were convinced that this development would
strengthen the bonds of international morality rather than weaken them. For
they believed that, once the national aspirations of the liberated peoples were
satisfied and aristocratic rule replaced by popular government, nothing could
divide the nations of the earth. Conscious of being members of the same
humanity and inspired by the same ideals of freedom, tolerance, and peace, they
would pursue their national destinies in harmony. Actually the spirit of
nationalism, once it had materialized in national states, proved to be not
universalistic and humanitarian, but particularistic and exclusive. When the international
society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was destroyed, it became
obvious that there was nothing to take the place of that unifying and restraining
element which had been a real society superimposed upon the particular national
societies. The international solidarity of the working class under the banner
of social- ism proved to be an illusion. Organized religion tended to identify
itself with the national state rather than to transcend it. Thus the nation
became the ultimate point of reference for the allegiance of the individual,
and the members of the different nations all had their own particular object of
allegiance.
We have in Lord Keynes’s
portrait of Clemenceau a vivid sketch of this new morality of nationalism:
He felt about France what Pericles felt
of Athens — unique value in her, nothing else mattering. … He had one illusion
— France; and one dis-illusion — mankind, including Frenchmen, and his
colleagues not least. … Nations are real things, of whom you love one and feel
for the rest indifference — or hatred. The glory of the nation you love is a
desirable end — but generally to be obtained at your neighbour’s expense.
Prudence required some measure of lip-service to the “ideals” of foolish
Americans and hypocritical Englishmen, but it would be stupid to believe that
there is much room in the world, as it really is, for such affairs as the
League of Nations, or any sense in the principle of self-determination except
as an ingenious formula for rearranging the balance of power in one’s own
interests.[3]
This fragmentation of a
formerly cohesive international society into a multiplicity of morally
self-sufficient national communities, which have ceased to operate within a
common framework of moral precepts, is but the outward symptom of the profound
change which in recent times has transformed the relations between universal
moral precepts and the particular systems of national ethics. The
transformation has proceeded in two different ways. It has weakened, to the
point of ineffectiveness, the universal, supranational moral rules of conduct,
which before the age of nationalism had imposed a system — however precarious
and wide-meshed —of limitations upon the international policies of individual
nations, and it has finally endowed, in the minds and aspirations of individual
nations, their particular national systems of ethics with universal validity.
--
So, for Morgenthau it is not
a question of if there IS an international society. He isolates that the
study of international society is historical. It IS NOT in existence –
not because it is impossible to conceive or construct as an extant entity or
mode of international order. Rather the question Morgenthau answers here that
fits in with English School thinking is WAS there an international
society? The answer to which is Yes – but no longer. Hence, outside of the long-standing
and multi-generational historical discourse undertaken by the school, any discussion
of international society by the British Institutionalists would be an
eschatology of sorts for Morgenthau, pondering over what was as opposed to what
is, or, being idealistically eisegetical by attempting to employ categories of
a dead past to the present – much like claiming that Pink Floyd are Baroque in
style, for instance.
There is a significant
moment that Morgenthau misses in his discussion of Keynes. Morgenthau tells us
nothing of the Keynes’ phrase that: ‘prudence requires some measure of
lip-service to the “ideals”…’. Why is this significant? ‘Lip service’ is itself
a practice that is constituted out of social reality for some end. This makes it,
using Navari’s framework, a ‘telic practice’ with a common end, a unifying telos. Thus, in the Keynesian
formulation that Morgenthau builds from, there are still practices that
constitute a society, even if those practices are constructed on a framework of
idealist pretence. These practices are still shared and thus create some mode
of society via this element of telic practiced commonality, whether or not the
practitioner truly conceives of that commonality as materially identifiable or
concretised in its phenomenal immanence.
[1] Hidemi Suganami (2003) ‘British
Institutionalists, or the English School, 20 Years On’, International
Relations, 17(3): 253-272.
[2] George Peabody Gooch (1942) Studies
in Diplomacy and Statecraft. London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green and
Company. pp. 300, 301.
[3] John Maynard Keynes (1920) The Economic Consequences of the Peace. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. pp, 32, 33. Morgenthau’s quoted edition does not include the following sentence after ‘expense’ and before ‘Prudence’: “The politics of power are inevitable, and there is nothing very new to learn about this war or the end it was fought for; England had destroyed, as in each preceding century, a trade rival; a mighty chapter had been closed in the secular struggle between the glories of Germany and of France.” This is actually rather significant as it indicates the point that Keynes goes on the make at the end of the quoted section.