Truth and Tragedy

Tribute to Hans J. Morgenthau

Kenneth Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000680379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Counseling

Featuring a new fifty-page interview with Hans J. Morgenthau by Bernard Johnson, this volume on the renowed scholar and philosopher demonstrates how pervasive is his mark on the study of international relations and political philosophy. The interview illuminates Morgenthau's intellectual development in Europe between the world wars and in the United States. It is in recognition of his unsurpassed contribution to the field of international relations and political philosophy that this collection of contributions from distinguished scholars has been assembled. The continuation and refinement of his work in this book prove the lasting value of his philosophical truths in the understanding of human nature, the role of power at all levels of society, and his concept of national interest.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Fifty Years of International Government

REFLECTIONS ON THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND THE UNITED NATIONS

BY ERICH HULA

Hans J. Morgenthau came into prominence as a student of international relations at a time when the illusions of Wilsonian internationalism, only slumbering since the Covenant of the League of Nations was defeated in the United States Senate, were once more awakened in this country by the outbreak of World War II. The new wave of hope rose particularly high in the academic community. Morgenthau was one of the few scholars who was not swept along by it. His realistic approach to the problems of international politics in general, so characteristic of Politics Among Nations, his magnum opus published in 1949, also determined his assessment of the potentialities of a global, political, international organization as a peace-preserving instrument. Morgenthau’s sober realism, unfortunately, has stood the test of time only too well.

The idealistic peace strategists of the forties were convinced, and anxious to convince others, that the establishment of the United Nations would inaugurate a new era of human history. They could not altogether avoid references to the defunct League of Nations, but they insisted on the superiority, for constitutional and political reasons, of the new over the old organization. There were indeed differences, legal as well as political, between the two bodies, including differences seemingly speaking in favor of the future world body. Its sponsors failed to see, however, or did not want to see, that the United Nations, like the League of Nations preceding it, was after all only another variant of the same type of government—if government it can be called—the confederate system. The inherent weaknesses of this form had already been demonstrated, once and for all, in the Federalist Papers.

The disappointing record of the United Nations hardly justifies any claim of superiority over the peace organization of Geneva, notwithstanding the fact that it has already surpassed the lifespan of the League. While the latter ceased to play an active, politically significant role after merely eighteen years of existence, the United Nations has now been operating for more than three decades. In the light of the experience of these thirty years, we begin to wonder whether the performance of the organization on Lake Geneva was not perhaps in some respects more commendable than that of its successor on New York’s East River.

To weigh with some accuracy and fairness the respective merits and demerits of the two bodies would be difficult, if not impossible, for it would also require balancing the political forces and difficulties with which they were contending. Nor is so ambitious an attempt intended in the following pages. But it might be possible and worthwhile to point out and ponder on some basic similarities and dissimilarities in the records of the two world bodies. A clearer awareness of the continuity of issues and problems in the history of general political international organization should help us to see that there is more coherence and unity in it than we might be inclined to assume, and thus gain a better insight into the actual and potential role of international organization in contemporary world politics.

When claiming for the United Nations constitution superiority over that of the League, its proponents primarily meant that the Charter provided for a legally stricter and technically more advanced system of collective security. Not that they did not see that the first requirement for preserving peace was a machinery for the pacific settlement of international disputes that, if properly functioning, would save the organization from having to resort to enforcement measures. But they did indeed feel very strongly that the establishment of a truly effective system for the enforcement of peace was the best means for ensuring the successful operation of mediatory and conciliatory procedures.

Leaving aside for the moment the much more important question of whether the political assumptions on which the collective security system of the Charter was based were more realistic than those underlying that of the Covenant, the claim of superiority was not entirely unjustified.

The two fundamental principles of collective security—the restriction of the lawful resort to war by sovereign states to the case of self-defense and the legal obligation of the international community to render assistance, possibly military assistance, to the victims of aggression—were utterly alien to the traditional notions of international law and politics. It is therefore hardly surprising that the first step in so radical a departure from time-honored maxims and practices was taken with some hesitation. The Covenant imposed upon the members of the League the duty to try to settle disputes likely t6 lead to a rupture by peaceful means, political or judicial, but it did not yet abolish unconditionally the jus ad bellum of the sovereign state, practically uncontested before World War I. That the League was conceived as an institution promoting cooperation among its members, rather than arrogating to itself supranational coercive powers, found expression also in the famous Article 16 of the Covenant relating to the diplomatic, economic, and military sanctions to be taken in the case of a member’s unlawful resort to arms. The article left to the discretion of the several members the decision on the casus foederis and on the coercive measures to be applied.

The conviction that the collective-security provisions of the Covenant required some strengthening was already held by League members themselves. The Assembly and Council of the League—prompted by the members’ conviction that the collective-security provisions of the Covenant required strengthening—soon became engaged in frantic, although ultimately futile, efforts to tighten the rules prohibiting the resort to war and to centralize the procedure of sanctions in the hands of the League organs. This was to be attained by separate international agreements supplementary to the Covenant, such as the Geneva Protocol of 1924, or by an outright revision of the Covenant itself, or by a combination of both methods. The efforts were inspired by various convergent motives.

France and nations close to her wished to strengthen the security provisions of the Covenant because they saw in the League an instrument capable of being used in a grand alliance against defeated Germany. The tendency to employ the abstract system of collective security, contrived as a protection for all against any aggressor state, for the purpose of building and cementing an alliance against a specific state or group of states, will always be very strong and reveals itself in the history of both the League and the United Nations. Other nations, particularly minor ones, felt they could only benefit from an effective protective system against aggression in which the greater powers were supposed to carry the main burden. In the parlance of Geneva, they were the consumers of collective security, in contrast to the great powers, its producers. Last but not least, collective security was in the twenties a most powerful idea, with a worldwide appeal difficult to realize some fifty years later.

Looking back at those efforts inside and outside the League, made at a time when the prestige of the organization was at its height, one is struck by the close interplay of political forces in the old and the new world. The Geneva Protocol and similar international agreements considered by the League were as much an incentive to the negotiation and conclusion of the Kellogg Pact outlawing war as the latter was to the reformers of Geneva. No less striking is the extent to which the principles and techniques of collective security, as formulated and devised in the Charter of the United Nations, were formulated and devised in the proposals that had been worked out by the organs of the League. Certain conceptions of the reformers of Geneva were even more radical in part than those of the founders of the United Nations.

As a matter of fact, the system of collective security incorporated in the Charter was in one highly important respect less ambitious than that of the Covenant itself. The sanctions of Article 16 were, on principle, applicable against any member of the League, including the great powers holding a permanent seat in the Council. In the Italo-Ethiopian conflict of 1935, the only case in which the procedure of sanctions was actually set in motion, it was directed against one of the then great powers, Italy. The subjection of all members of the League to coercive measures fit in with the egalitarian structure of the organization of Geneva. The enforcement system of the United Nations was, on the contrary, originally intended to be restricted to conflicts among smaller nations. One of the reasons the new organization was given an oligarchic structure by its founders was to rule out its universal applicability. The collective-security system of the United Nations, allegedly a great improvement upon that of the League, was, in fact, intended to operate within a constitutional framework similar to the European Concert of Powers of the nineteenth century rather than to that of the organization of Geneva.

This construction seems somewhat surprising, considering the preponderate influence of the United States upon the formation of the new organization from the days of the preparatory work in the State Department through the deliberations at Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco. American democratic traditions in general, and America’s traditional espousal of the rights of small nations in particular, hardly predestined the United States to advocate an authoritarian and oligarchic type of international organization, confining smaller nations to a minor role. The explanation of this American policy is not difficult to find, however. The scheme of the future world body had to satisfy both American internationalists, who were pleading for an organization approximating world government, and American isolationists, who were still opposed to an international organization, even one no stronger than the defunct League of Nations. The only solution to the dilemma was a scheme of supranational government in the operation of which the United States and the other great powers of the day would be assured a leading role without being subject themselves to its coercive powers. The means for attaining this end were to be the centralization of all pertinent powers, including the decision on whether a breach of the peace had been committed and what coercive measures should be taken, in the hands of a Security Council alone, and the exemption of the five great powers, who held permanent seats on the Council, from the operation of the majority principle by requiring their concurrence in an affirmative vote. With such a privileged position guaranteed to the United States, the isolationists, so the planners in the State Department calculated, would not block the road toward a security system superior to that of the League both in terms of the rules limiting the jus ad bellum and in terms of the enforcement machinery to be set in motion against a future aggressor. The Charter, incorporating as it did this ingenious legal construction, had indeed smooth sailing in the Senate. Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, when advocating American membership in what apparently promised to be a powerful peace organization, could at the same time assure his colleagues that the flag would stay on the dome of the Capitol.

American insistence on this constitutional scheme seems to be open to the charge of cynicism. Realism in politics is often mistaken for cynicism even if it is as sound as it undoubtedly was in this case. In the first place, the privileged members of the system, the great powers, were also to carry its main burden, especially if and when military enforcement measures were required. They were to be the chief producers of collective security. Second, and more important, ruling out the application of the enforcement system against one of the great powers, and particularly one of the two then emerging superpowers, meant not to charge the United Nations with a task that would most certainly go beyond its physical capacity. Indeed, such enforcement action would, practically, mean the very kind of global war that the United Nations was founded to avert. The failure of the League to impose sanctions in the Sino-Japanese conflict or truly effective economic sanctions in the Italo-Ethiopian case had already clearly indicated the limits within which a system of collective security might possibly work.

Commendable as the constitutional realism of the fathers of the Charter was, they proved less farsighted in regard to the political assumptions on which they were trying to build permanent peace. To put it more generously, their ability to divine the future was no greater than it usually is in human, and particularly political, affairs.

It was only natural that Americans, when weighing the political reasons for the League’s failure, were more inclined than others to attribute it to the fact that in the end the United States had refused to join the organization that owed its very existence largely to Wilson’s statesmanship and that was based upon conceptions of international politics more deeply rooted and more widely held in this than in other countries. It is easier to understand the optimistic political expectations of 1945, insofar as they were based upon American participation and leadership in the future United Nations, than it is to understand the optimistic assumption of the five members of the world concert of powers, which were to form the nucleus of the organization, that they would be willing and able to cooperate closely with one another. The deep ideological rift within the Concert made it very unlikely that the military Grand Alliance of World War II could be continued and sustained as a political instrument into the period of peace.

The explanations of the badly misplaced optimism clearly lie in the tenets of the liberal creed ingrained in the American political mind, such as the belief in the fundamental harmony of divergent interests and opinions, the potency and justness of public opinion, and the effectiveness of rational procedures in resolving conflicts in the international, no less than in the national, community. Americans believed in the general efficacy of the ideas, institutions, and procedures of liberal democracy and in their suitability for ordering international affairs, since their domestic political creed, after the termination of the Civil War, had not had to stand the test of political forces that were hostile to the democratic faith or state.

The Soviet Union, on the other hand, can be safely assumed to have not held such liberal tenets. Least of all did it expect that their application in international affairs would render the game of power politics obsolete. That the Soviet Union joined the United Nations, and even more that it remained in it throughout the long period of American predominance while it was itself relegated to the unenviable position of a seemingly permanent minority power with little actual influence on United Nations policies, was a result of other motives. Bolshevism, from the beginning of its revolutionary career, has been inclined to adopt a pragmatic attitude in institutional and tactical questions. After 1905, Lenin, asserting that the parliamentary forum offered even to the smallest group, provided it was resolute enough, the possibility of successful revolutionary agitation and propaganda, pleaded for socialist participation in the imperial Duma. Similar considerations can be presumed to have prompted Stalin in 1945 to agree to and maintain Russian membership in the various newly-established international organizations. Being fully conscious of the dynamic force in anticolonialism, the Soviet Union from the beginning realized the chance United Nations membership offered it, as the champion of colonial liberation, to enhance its own prestige and influence. It was no acc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editors’ Preface
• Fragment of an Intellectual Autobiography: 1904–1932
• Introductory Essays
• Political Philosophy
• International Relations
• Notes on the Contributors