What's Sacred in International Politics?

First Quarter 2004

Is the state no longer sacred? Or is the problem that it has been worshipped for too long as ultimate in human affairs? If the state is not God, to whom or what should it be subordinate? To the God of Islam, or to Jesus Christ, or to international law, or to the United Nations?

These are some of the questions probed quite provocatively and with considerable learning in The Sacred and the Sovereign: Religion and International Affairs (Georgetown University Press, 2003), edited by John D. Carlson and Erik C. Owens, two graduate students at the University of Chicago, both of whom have worked with Jean Bethke Elshtain in the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The fifteen essays in this volume by a diverse range of authors, including journalist Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, retired Air Force General James P. McCarthy, and numerous Catholic and Protestant academic specialists, is worthy reading for anyone interested in contemporary world affairs.

The first half of the book deals chiefly with questions of war—questions about the justice of the American intervention in Kosovo, for example, and other instances where religious and ethical concerns about state sovereignty and humanitarian intervention arise. The second half of the book, in two parts, includes essays on human rights, religious allegiances, and various questions about the future of international law and order. A brief engagement with two of the essays will serve our introductory purposes here.

Challenges to Sovereignty

John Kelsay's essay from the first part of the book, titled "Justice, Political Authority, and Armed Conflict: Challenges to Sovereignty and the Just Conduct of War," is very illuminating. Kelsay is a professor of religion at Florida State University and an expert on Islam and war. The sovereign state as we know it today, Kelsay argues, is being challenged "from above" by international efforts to intervene in states. State sovereignty is also being challenged "from alongside" by other individual states. And it is being challenged "from below" by non-state actors such as Al Qaeda (al-Qa'ida).

Yet Kelsay asks whether the idea of inviolable state sovereignty was ever as firm a principle as we now imagine it to be. Certain norms of international justice were recognized in the West from the beginning of the modern state system, following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. It is true that international society underwent an enormous change following World War II," shifting from what Kelsay calls "positive sovereignty" to "negative sovereignty." Positive sovereignty was associated with what western states called a "civilized" state, a state that manifested certain patterns of behavior and met certain moral requirements. Empire building by European states in "uncivilized" parts of the world could be justified on these grounds. Negative sovereignty, by contrast, has meant elevating the autonomy of the state to first principle. After 1945 and the establishment of the UN, any act of imperialism was assumed to be an act of wrongdoing unless proven otherwise.

However, Kelsay argues that even in the new UN system there are elements of recognition that "justice is prior to or more fundamental than respect for the integrity of borders," and this reveals a continuity with the past. Consequently, the enduring question endures: When and how is it just to intervene or not to intervene in a sovereign state? And who or what may justifiably conduct the intervention? This takes us right back to the whole argument about criteria for justifiable warfare or humanitarian intervention. In this regard, says Kelsay, it is important to recognize that the just-war criteria developed in the early Christian West are not so different from the criteria of justice developed in the Islamic tradition. Therefore, we must engage carefully in a comparative evaluation of different conceptions of justice.

For example, at stake in the encounter between the United States and Osama bin Laden, says Kelsay, "are competing visions of justice, which at least as currently formulated are irreconcilable. Not—I repeat, not—that Islamic conceptions of justice are inherently irreconcilable with those advanced by the United States and its allies or those advanced by the UN, in which Muslim delegates have consistently worked to craft and implement the instruments associated with international notions of human rights."

Universal Justice?

A second essay worth highlighting here is by co-editor John Carlson in the second half of the book, titled "Trials, Tribunals, and Tribulations of Sovereignty: Crimes Against Humanity and the imago Dei" [the image of God]. After an extended discussion of "crimes against humanity," as they came to be called following the Nazi holocaust, Carlson begins an investigation into the assumptions about human nature that have been taken for granted when defining such crimes. He finds those assumptions rooted in the ethical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who in essence elevates the individual to the position of ultimate sovereign. To whatever extent this may sound like the proper way to recognize the dignity of the human person, it in fact places the supposedly universal law of human autonomy in the position of God.

The effort to develop international judicial institutions to try those who have committed "crimes against humanity" may be a mistake, says Carlson. Such trials may simply remove responsibility that belongs to states, which ought to fulfill their obligation to enforce justice. "Universal justice is largely a theory of retribution," writes Carlson. "It seeks to hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity. The intent of international trials was to disencumber citizens from shouldering 'collective guilt' or responsibility for the crimes of state officials whom they may or may not have supported. But this process also removes nations and their citizens from the process of rectifying relations and coming to terms with the past for which they bear some responsibility."

In place of Kant's humanistic conception of law, Carlson wants to recover the biblical understanding of human creatures as made in the image of God. From this point of view, humans are not the authors of their own dignity, and their self-worth is not the highest universal. Nor can there be a mode of administering universal justice that transcends the limited capacities and responsibilities of human political institutions. Norms of justice can certainly be recognized as universal, but the human means of enforcing them cannot be divine or a replacement of divine judgment. "Because ultimate justice belongs to God," says Carlson, "limited justice may require that we leave final judgment for another time. In fact, limited or penultimate justice leaves room for God's justice precisely because we are not obliged to exact revenge or fulfill all the demands of divine justice. We need not—and cannot—do all of God's bidding."

This leads Carlson back to standards of justice that should qualify the "sovereignty" of states. From a Christian point of view, ultimate sovereignty can belong only to God, so every state and government and person should recognize its limited authority as a "divinely imposed task," to quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Among the important responsibilities of international organizations, then, should be helping to set "standards for what it means [for a state] to be a full-fledged member of the family of nations. Assisting nations with their own enterprise of justice remains a potent task of international and perhaps even regional governmental organizations."

The question for states and international justice, Carlson concludes, is this: "Are political institutions simply an extension of... prideful belief [in our own ultimacy]? Or does humanity's dignity accrue from its penultimate worth, from its relation to and participation in—but not equivalence with—the ultimate?"

Questions

Carlson's essay, in particular, helps to raise a question that gets too little attention in the book and in contemporary discussions generally: What is just governance? For many Americans the first principle of justice is simply the inviolability of U.S. sovereignty. For some internationalists the first principle is the transcendence of state sovereignty. For others, the aim of either preserving sovereignty or intervening in other states is to advance freedom and democracy. But none of these "principles" or aims adequately gets at the qualities of governance that meet the demands of justice.

The just-war criteria, developed from within the Christian tradition, are not simply about defense or about intervention to stop atrocities elsewhere. The criteria arise with the responsibility to govern justly. When one state or international coalition intervenes elsewhere and abolishes a government, as just happened in Iraq, the occupying power becomes responsible for governing justly. Whatever one might say about the justifiability of toppling Saddam Hussein, the responsibility of those now governing Iraq is to govern justly. And when the U.S. and the British turn over governance to the Iraqis, they will bear responsibility for the kind of government they help establish. If that transition leads only to a new dictatorship, or to civil war, or to an extended period of instability, then the interveners will not have met the demands of the just-war criteria.

The reason why state sovereignty may be facing so many challenges today is not simply because states have idolized themselves but because the shrinking globe, with its increasing degrees of interdependence across state borders, cannot be adequately governed by states alone, even if every one of them is democratic, accountable, and properly protective of human rights. Carlson is right, it seems to me, that a Christian view of human responsibility to the sovereign Creator is far superior to Kant's absolutization of the individual. But if humans are responsible to God in all kinds of ways, then the first questions about government are not about justifiable warfare, or humanitarian intervention, or the limits of sovereignty, but about how humans should respond to God's call to justice in the establishment of states and institutions of international governance.

—The Editor