One of the most fundamental learning processes for a human infant is learning to check its purely selfish urges and to make allowances for the needs of others. It is counterintuitive at first to see this also as fundamental to conflict resolution, but recognizing the need for self-imposed restraints even in the case of war has long been understood by European civilizations. Referred to as the concept of a just war, its origins are in Roman times. Two fundamental assumptions can be found: first, that there are higher values (particularly the value of justice) than the simple pursuit of self-interest, and, second, in order to satisfy the requirements of these values, combatants have to fulfill certain criteria, both when resorting to the use of violent force and in the conduct of war.
With an admixture of Christianity, the criteria for a just war today are accepted by some thinkers and statesmen of different creeds as an essential underpinning of our international order. The United Nations Charter deems a war to be legitimate only if it is waged in self-defense or if it is authorized by the UN Security Council for the protection of a more general peace. Five basic criteria must be met, according to the A More Secure World report, drawn up by sages from all corners of the world by the UN’s secretary-general in 2004:
(a) Seriousness of threat.
(b) Proper purpose.
(c) Last resort.
(d) Proportional means.
(e) Balance of consequences.
Each one of these can be traced back to antiquity and has echoes through European history. They have been summarized time and again in permutations of the Aristotelian paradox that “We . . . make war that we may live in peace.” The creation of a lasting peace must be the strategic aim of any war and many European writers have commented on the implications of this both for the conduct of war and for any post-hostilities regime. This includes satisfying the basic human needs of the defeated adversary’s population, their protection against transgressions of all sorts, such as the infliction of bodily harm, or the denial of any other security or basic resources like food and shelter.
The recognition that all humans have equal basic needs for survival and security is another European discovery, as seen in the declaration of human rights of 1789. Just war theory does not clash with this assumption. It denies no human being’s rights, but exhorts us to weigh the consequences—or apply the criterion of the lesser evil—to judge whether it can be justifiable to sacrifice some for the benefit of many others during war. The just war theory does not deny that inflicting death and destruction upon non-combatants should be avoided, including on the adversary’s side. Indeed, it holds that the death of soldiers on all sides is not the supreme aim of the war. The theory concedes that such action might be necessary in order to counter a greater evil.
With few exceptions (usually concerning the treatment of religious dissidents seen as dangerous heretics or concerning rebels against what was defensively seen as legitimate authority) writers on warfare prior to the Napoleonic Wars took it for granted that war was waged for the purpose of establishing a better peace. Matthew Sutcliffe, chaplain to Queen Elizabeth I and King James I of England, said that unnecessary violence and cruelty should be shunned. A primitive hatred of the enemy was not a just motivation for war. The enemy was no longer to be fought, tortured, or otherwise harmed once he had declared himself defeated, that is, once the higher purpose of the war had been served.
Reality was often different, however. The motivations of princes in pursuing war often clashed with the requirements that needed to be fulfilled to make a war just. Writers on war, such as the Duke of Sully, adviser to King Henry IV of France, criticized this fact, and with it the princes who fought for base motives like “jealousy, avarice, ambition and vanity,” and legal pretexts were found for the pursuit of selfish aims.
There was, of course, another important strand of thinking in Europe as well as the just war theory: the admiration of warriors and the glorification of war. The Roman nexus between consulship and generalship and between military victory abroad and political triumph at home, created the mold in which leaders liked to cast themselves until the twentieth century. In this tradition, the triumphant victor was often revered by contemporaries and posterity for his very success and the immoral yet successful pursuit of selfish interests without any regard to the rights of others was registered with grudging respect if not outright admiration.
It was only after experiencing the conquests of Napoleon that writers on warfare were so blinded by his success they lost sight of the only just strategic aim of any war, namely, a just peace. The pursuit of victory for its own sake now became the overriding preoccupation of strategic theorists. It went together with the rise of nationalism and racism, with the militarization of society in many continental European countries, a tidal flow that resulted in the torrent of the theory of total war—total in terms of one’s own mobilization and, on the German side, the targeting of entire enemy nations.
It took two world wars and the contemplation of the devastating effects of nuclear weapons to lead Europeans to the rediscovery that military victory cannot in itself be the proper grand strategic aim of war in and of itself. Instead, this has to be a durable, just peace. The realization that the mindless pursuit of military victory, rather than post-bellum peace, had led humankind into a terrible abyss dawned on some thinkers in the victor states of the First World War. Some individuals had seen this all along, working to create restraints on war and working toward what would become the League of Nations. It took the realization of the First World War’s futility as demonstrated in the Second World War to bring the lesson home to many more.
Pitched against an enemy with total war aims—the elimination and enslavement of entire populations—Churchill’s verdict of the Second World War is well taken: Britain had to fight for “Victory at all costs … for without victory, there is no survival.” Churchill here recognized, however, that survival, not victory, was the ultimate aim in war against Hitler’s Germany. A crushing military victory over an enemy might thus well be the main way to reach a durable peace. But only the American Marshall Plan to Europe and its similar aid efforts to Japan fully turned Germany and Japan into peaceful members of an international order.
In short, victory must be the means to peace and cannot be the end in itself. This is the widespread lesson many Europeans drew from events of the first half of the twentieth century, an interpretation of history on which European integration has been built. It is shared at least by parts of the societies of other countries that have participated in the two world wars—Japan, Australia, Canada—and is the prevailing opinion even in the United States, to name but a few.
Like the just war strand of the European tradition on warfare, however, this European lesson drawn from the catastrophes of the twentieth century is not the only view around. The pursuit of “national interest,” without any concern for the interest of others, is still the leitmotif of the predominant “Realist” reading of international relations, and few undergraduates on either side of the Atlantic come away from this reading with moral outrage about governments acting in this manner. The curious relationship between the United States and its own creature, the UN, is a reflection of the persistent uncritical belief that U.S. governments must, above all, pursue U.S. interests, unrestrained by the wider needs of humankind. “Realists” unrealistically think that only weaker powers—which by now include all the Europeans—need to hide their own interests behind international law and more general human interests; the world’s remaining superpower, argues much of the American right of the political spectrum, does not need to do so.
Elsewhere, too, there are those who do not share this particular European experience and interpretation of the world wars or indeed European views of human rights. The national arrogance found in Europe pre-1945 has since found its equivalent in the post-decolonization nationalism and Islamism of other parts of the world. Nationalist selfishness is a disease that is currently kept in check within the European Union; beyond its limits it is still rampant. Nor is there a guarantee that, as the memories of the catastrophic world wars recede, new generations of Europeans with their multiple cultural roots are vaccinated forever against re-infection. The absence of rampant, selfish nationalism, however, is the essential prerequisite to any common European identification and pursuit of common strategic aims. As is the realization, not to be taken for granted again, that the only just strategic aim of the use of force is the creation of a more just and enduring peace. Not victory for its own sake.
Beatrice Heuser, professor for International Relations at the University of Reading, is currently a visiting professor at the University of Paris 8 (St Denis). She is the author of The Evolution of Strategy and The Strategy Makers.
To reinvigorate debate over European foreign policy and Europe’s role in the world, Carnegie Europe is publishing a series of essays from leading policymakers, diplomats, experts, and journalists on Strategic Europe over the coming weeks. A new essay will appear every day.