On War and Democracy

Christopher Kutz

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781400873937
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

On War and Democracy provides a richly nuanced examination of the moral justifications democracies often invoke to wage war. In this compelling and provocative book, Christopher Kutz argues that democratic principles can be both fertile and toxic ground for the project of limiting war's violence. Only by learning to view war as limited by our democratic values—rather than as a tool for promoting them—can we hope to arrest the slide toward the borderless, seemingly endless democratic "holy wars" and campaigns of remote killings we are witnessing today, and to stop permanently the use of torture and secret law.Kutz shows how our democratic values, understood incautiously and incorrectly, can actually undermine the goal of limiting war. He helps us better understand why we are tempted to believe that collective violence in the name of politics can be legitimate when individual violence is not. In doing so, he offers a bold new account of democratic agency that acknowledges the need for national defense and the promotion of liberty abroad while limiting the temptations of military intervention. Kutz demonstrates why we must address concerns about the means of waging war—including remote war and surveillance—and why we must create institutions to safeguard some nondemocratic values, such as dignity and martial honor, from the threat of democratic politics. On War and Democracy reveals why understanding democracy in terms of political agency, not institutional process, is crucial to limiting when and how democracies use violence.

1

INTRODUCTION: WAR, POLITICS, DEMOCRACY

We live in an era of belligerent democracy, an unhappy sequel to the peaceful democratic transitions that unfolded across Latin America and Eastern Europe at the end of the twentieth century. Democratic aspirations are increasingly voiced across the Mediterranean in the new century—leading more often than not to civil conflict rather than electoral transitions.¹ We live also in an era of democratic wars, when democratic states pursue violent conflict in the name of peaceable ends, ranging from disarmament to democratization to securing access to natural resources.

Despite Churchill’s famous quip—“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”²—democracy is seen as a source of both domestic and international flourishing. Democracy, understood roughly for now as a political system with wide suffrage in which power is allocated to officials by popular election, can solve or help solve a host of problems with stunning success. It can solve the problem of revolutionary violence that condemns autocratic regimes, because mass politics can work at the ballot box rather than the streets. It can help solve the problem of famine, because the systems of free public communication and discussion that are essential to democratic politics are the backbone of the markets that have made democratic societies far richer than their competitors. It can help solve the problem of environmental despoliation, which occurs when those operating polluting factories (whether private citizens or the state) do not need to answer for harms visited upon a broad public. And democracy has been famously thought to help solve the problem of war, in the guise of the idea of the “peace amongst democratic nations”—an idea emerging with Immanuel Kant in the Age of Enlightenment and given new energy with the wave of democratization at the end of the twentieth century.

The “democratic peace” thesis, which holds that mature democracies rarely fight each other, has been a comforting mainstay of political thought, especially in the United States. As a modern correlation, it has held up reasonably well, notwithstanding some important counterexamples, notably the American Civil War.³ But closer scrutiny has also brought to light further doubts about any broader, happy connection between war and democracy. Indeed, as political scientists Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder have shown, emerging democracies are more likely than other kinds of states to go to war, often as a means of securing internal support and legitimacy. And mature democracies have shown great willingness to go to war against nondemocracies, whether as part of colonialist and imperialist agendas or for reasons of local or regional self-defense.⁴ Democracy and war, it seems, are anything but adversaries. This is not news, especially in the United States. Indeed, the “pro-democracy” or “freedom” agenda of George W. Bush’s neoconservatism came to be identified around the world as an expression of martial imperialism.

Discussions of the democratic peace thesis and the real purposes or effects of American “democracy promotion” are empirical questions. They are vital to politicians and international relations scholars. This book, too, is about the relations between democracy and war. But I ask principally what philosophers call normative questions, among them: How should we, as citizens, think about our responsibility for killing done in our name? Do democracies face special constraints in the kinds of weapons or tactics they can use, independently of the conventional law of war? Do democracies have a right or even an obligation to aid other peoples in achieving democratic governance through force rather than example? Does the legal requirement that combatants be uniformed in order to be able to kill in war have any rationale beyond protecting civilians? What responsibilities do democratic revolutionaries have to property holders under the ancien régime?

Still, it has been more than twenty years since the last great wave of pro-democratic revolutions, in Eastern Europe and Latin America—not long in political time, perhaps, but long enough for awareness of the risk that democracy will wilt under the malfunctioning, corruption, and paralysis of so many of the older democracies. In the United States, the Arab Spring coincided with the spectacle of a deadlocked government, seemingly unable to summon the collective forces needed to challenge the worst economic crisis in nearly a century. Europe’s experiment in fiscal union staggers from crisis to crisis, for lack of concerted political will. The contrast between the initial hopes of the crowds of Cairo and Tunis and the cynicism of Europe and America makes clear the gap between the ideal of democracy and its messy reality.

As an ideal, democracy remains unchallenged, even unchallengeable. Twenty years ago, Francis Fukuyama declared “the end of history,” by which he meant that a history of grand ideological conflict had ended with the collapse of the Soviet empire, leaving only one governing philosophy in place: democratic liberalism, meaning popular control of political institutions, private property rights, and a market-dominated system of resource allocation.⁵ Fukuyama was soon mocked for his declaration: even as the Cold War became a memory, geopolitical conflict continued through decades defined by the resurgent tribalism and postnationalism of the Balkans and Africa, as well as the broader contest between the forces of capitalist globalization and antimarket Islamic fundamentalism. But even if history has not ended, Fukuyama’s central claim remains strong: within Western thought, democracy has no extant challenger. On the broader global playing field, its only remaining challengers are fundamentalism and—perhaps—Chinese-style managerial capitalism. The distance kept by revolutionary Arab demonstrators from fundamentalism, especially in Egypt, makes the former an unwise bet; as to the latter, whether or not China can continue to suppress pro-democratic movements internally, its model represents a holding action at best, not a likely export.

Hegemony is an ugly word, but it well describes the role of democratic ideology within American political theory, if not political practice. Political theorists compete with one another to offer more radical or fundamental forms of democracy for consumption and endorsement.⁶ Legitimacy is defined in theoretical terms as the right to rule; the only evident source of that right is democracy, in one or another institutional form. Put another way, the only acceptable answer to the question put by a citizen, “who are you to tell me what to do?” is an answer that says, “We (the rulers) are you—you chose us, or accepted the procedure that gave us this authority. You are responsible for the conditions of your own rule.”⁷ We can entertain, as a theoretical possibility, the benevolent dictator who says, “I’m in charge just because I can run your life better than you would yourself,” but we entertain it only as a foil for the clearly correct answer, that the right to rule rests on the will of the governed. In the circumstances of politics—when it is a collective being ruled—the will of the governed is also collective. And this is the essence of democratic legitimacy: rulers rule on the basis of what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called the general will of the community they rule. Anything else is enslavement to the will of another.

The idea of democratic legitimacy, resting on a kernel of collective will, is obviously powerful, though it is pliant enough to serve as both banner and critique of many of the political pathologies we know today, from paralyzed legislatures to populist demagogues. The underlying idea that rule must be legitimated to each person ruled is what separates political modernity from feudal and caste systems. But, even apart from its vagueness, it suffers from two problems. The first is that it is too static: the value of democracy, on this understanding, exists when there is a correspondence between the authority claimed by the governors and the content of the will of the governed. When such a correspondence exists, confirmed by electoral institutions, then rules and norms are legitimate, because they express a people governing itself. The problem with this view is that it allows us to fix the label “democratic,” which involves little more than viewing a spectacle of mass politics, on the basis of a moment of annual or quadrennial activity.⁸ Whatever the defects of our actual democratic practice, I seek a way of understanding the form of collective self-determination that is at least potentially at play at the margins of democracy. By margins of democracy, I mean periods of revolution and wartime emergency rule, as well as in the forms of civic organization and resistance that contend with organized, institutional forms.

The heart of this book is therefore built around an alternative understanding of democracy, one that is simultaneously more modest and, I believe, more promising. The understanding I propose is one that focuses on our agency when we act together to build, defend, transform, and sometimes tear down the institutions of our common political life. I call this understanding agentic democracy. Agentic democracy is, in the view I develop here, much less a matter of formal institutions of democratic choice and representations, such as elections and parliaments, and much more a matter of how we think about and work with one another in establishing democratic political institutions. We act as democratic agents not just when we vote or debate in the public square but also before it is even possible to vote or to debate in public. Eastern European intellectuals, meeting in a café to lay the groundwork for a challenge to communist rule, were acting as democrats: thinking about how they might make mass politics safe for others to join in protest. Soldiers defending their homeland from invasion, not because they were ordered to do so, but because they think of themselves as defending their land, their way of life, can equally be acting as democrats. The crucial component of democracy, on my view, is a matter of our mutual orientation in collective action: how individuals conceive of their actions in relation to each other, and in relation to a broader set of goals involving building or defending open political institutions.

A further advantage of understanding democracy in terms of agency is that it can help to make sense of the particular phenomenon of collective violence, a phenomenon that has been central to the ways in which some—though hardly all—democracies understand themselves. Such a self-understanding was famously true of Revolutionary France. It also plays a major role in American self-consciousness.⁹ The quintessentially Wilsonian assertion of democratic ideals in global life has been the major thread of world politics since World War I. In that respect, while I speak of a conception of democracy in general terms, it is a conception tailored to the particular contours of American politics. The account I provide is deliberately grounded on the American practice of war, so that we can understand the tangled and intimate connection between the violence of war and the prospect of democratic self-government.

Of course, the connection between a theory of the state and a theory of violence is linked by more than US history. Weber’s definition of the state as the body successfully claiming a monopoly on violence presupposes the violence that lies at the origin of the state—if not as a matter of conceptual necessity, then as a matter of undisputed history.¹⁰ Without violence (whether celebrated or shrouded in myths of origin), the circumstances of politics would not exist: a defined territory, a unifying system for resolving disputes between mine and thine, and common allegiance.

Still, one might have thought democratic politics to be hostile to violence as a matter of principle. Violence, at least political violence, denies the voice and integrity of others, rejects their standing as equals in a shared dialogue about common causes and meanings—the essence of democratic self-government. And, indeed, democratic states have achieved, over time, an outstanding record of rejecting violence in favor of dialogue, within their domestic spheres. But the global record is less reassuring, whether as a product of colonialism, ideological conflict, or—most recently—a missionary conception of democracy, with the aim of seeding it as widely as possible. Democracies have the same instincts of self-defense as other regimes, as well as the same expansive capacity to understand the interests worth defending through resort to violence. Whether the trigger for war is naked colonialism, more subtle calculations of balances of power, the entanglements of treaties with democratic allies, or a universalist rhetoric of the defense of human rights, democracies use war as a regular instrument of liberal foreign policy.

And yet the criminal law of the modern state is virtually defined by the limits it places on private violence. With the exception of the homeowner’s right of self-defense, there rests almost no license to its recourse. The restrictions of private law find their mirror in the law of nations: since the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, and further codified in the United Nations Charter, the right to war as a privilege of princes has been equally abrogated, save only in self-defense of territory or material interest.¹¹ One might well define the project of public international law as achieving for the international system something like the monopoly on violence exercised at the domestic level. Of course, the legal abolition of the right to nondefensive war has entailed nothing like its actual abolition, any more than its domestic abolition. If, in both cases, violence is now exercised in the face of the law, many actors are undeterred by law’s sanction. Whether justified by tortured legal argument or simply executed in the teeth of the prohibition, violence, both private and political, persists.

At the international level, the ambivalence of political violence lies in more than the gap between the abolitionist ideal and the reality of its exercise. It lies also in the labored modern history of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention and its broader cousin, the responsibility to protect.¹² The doctrines are expansions of the right of national self- or other-defense, now including defense of persons and not just of the state. Both have been and still are seen as a threat to the absolutism of the UN Charter’s Article 2(4), which generally prohibits the use of force in international relations, even if these doctrines also give voice to an ideal of the protection of human dignity in their own form, existing only when exercised by the international community, or some substantial-enough subset to claim legitimacy. It lies in the broad construal, accepted by international lawyers, of the right of military self-defense, extending beyond the right to defend territory to the right to protect one’s nationals, wherever they are threatened, and the right to protect all the assets of national security, including electronic systems. And it lies in Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Convention (not universally accepted, to be sure), which grants the privilege of belligerency to insurgents fighting wars “of national liberation.”¹³ These doctrines and exceptions acknowledge that violence has the power to create and protect.

The ambivalence regarding mass violence is a problem at the heart of democratic theory as well. The ambivalence exists primarily across time, before and after the formation of what counts, in institutional terms, as a democracy. If democratic legitimacy resides, at first approximation, in the exercise of a universal franchise, then no acts preceding the exercise of franchise can claim democratic legitimacy. Thus, to justify its own origins, democratic theory must reach back into time to link a group defined by its aspirations to its future status as popular assembly. I adverted above to the need for a conception of democracy at the revolutionary margins of new institutions. The difficulty is that few or no rebellions or liberatory movements can actually define themselves in democratic terms, and hence can help themselves to democratic legitimacy only on terms of future credit. Put another way, the justification of the lives they take in revolutionary violence comes in the classical form: by the end it achieves, not the process of its justification.

There are, indeed, distinctions among revolutionary movements: those having wider or narrower popular support, with more or less dialogue-based ways of building that support; those giving greater or less attention to distinguishing noncombatants; and those having greater or less independence from international interests. But it is fair to say, using history as our guide, that few revolutionary movements are likely to be fully respectful of the laws of war, grounded in essentially democratic politics—and triumphant. Historically, the democratic ambitions (both successful and failed) of the American, French, and Russian revolutions were largely dependent on the military mobilization and crowd violence that swept out the anciens régimes. At the other extreme stand the Velvet Revolutions of Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Those revolutions, it is true, owe a great deal to popular mobilization, democratic rhetoric, and—in Poland—genuine exercises in democratic votes. But even in these cases, success owed as much to the exogenous collapse of Soviet military control in the face of American defense spending as to the internal democratic practice of the revolutionaries. More generally, while contemporary revolutions—especially revolutions capable of winning the critical support of the democratic powers—will voice a democratic rhetoric, and will show their legitimacy through mass protest and mobilization, their eventual legitimation comes after the risks have been run. Thus, if we are inclined to take revolutions as epitomes of popular will, then an interest in historical adequacy entails a conception of democracy adequate to the way in which popular will can manifest itself in violence as well as in its polls. An interest in normative adequacy means that we need to elaborate a set of critical terms, internal to democratic agency, to restrain that violence. Such is my aim here.

Thus, I argue that we must maintain our guard against the seductions of a particular understanding of democracy and i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Permissions
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Introduction: War, Politics, Democracy
• 2: Democratic Security
• 3: Citizens and Soldiers: The Difference Uniforms Make
• 4: A Modest Case for Symmetry: Are Soldiers Morally Equal?
• 5: Leaders and the Gambles of War: Against Political Luck
• 6: War, Democracy, and Publicity: The Persistence of Secret Law
• 7: Must a Democracy Be Ruthless? Torture, Necessity, and Existential Politics
• 8: Humanitarian Intervention and the New Democratic Holy Wars
• 9: Democratic States in Victory: Vae Victis?
• 10: Drones, Democracy, and the Future of War
• 11: Democracy and the Death of Norms
• 12: Looking Backward: Democratic Transitions and the Choice of Justice
• Notes
• Index