From the Lecture Series on Religion and Violence, Stetson University, Deland Florida

Application of Just War Criteria to the War against Terrorism

[1] There are some distinct conceptual problems applying the just war tradition to the current engagement against terrorist organizations worldwide.

[2] The first and most obvious difficulty is that the just war tradition since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 has been organized around the principle of sovereign states. You will recall, that prior to the Reformation, Europe notionally was a unified Christian civilization. Nationality was in principle, and often in practice, subordinated to a common loyalty to the Pope and the ideal of Christendom.

[3] After the Reformation, and after the wars of religion that followed, it became obvious that the idea of a unified Europe was no longer possible. After a couple centuries of religious war attempting to restore that unity in the name of one form of Christianity or another, the states of Europe accepted at Westphalia that there would be a new international order, dominated by sovereign states. These new sovereign states would have the twin rights of territorial integrity and political sovereignty. In other words, peace would be gained in Europe by allowing each state to control its own internal affairs. In practice, this meant that Catholic states would persecute Protestants, and Protestant states would persecute Catholics. But international stability was to be bought, as we would say in modern parlance, at the price of human rights.

[4] This means that only states can truly wage war against one another. Therefore, when we use the term "war against terrorism," we are not using language precisely. Of course, in the case of Afghanistan, the fact that the Taliban government of Afghanistan was unwilling to produce the al Qaeda representatives within its territory made it possible to conduct war against the de facto government of Afghanistan, as well as against the terrorist groups whom they harbored.

[5] But as our engagements with al Qaeda extend globally, the character of that engagement will change dramatically with reference to the various states in whose territory they may be found. Some states, such as the Philippines and Georgia, may invite American forces to operate with their own forces to suppress terrorist organizations they have internal reasons for wanting to suppress. Some states, such as Pakistan, may have governments willing to act to suppress and locate al Qaeda representatives, but at considerable domestic political risk to their own government's stability. Some states may be too weak, even if willing, to act against al Qaeda; some may indeed actively support or covertly be willing to tolerate terrorist presence in their territories.

[6] Given that complex picture, how do we begin to think about our relationship to these various situations? The modern theory of state sovereignty would counsel that every state is free to do within its own territory whatever it chooses. Presumably, that freedom includes harboring individuals and groups that are unpalatable to other states. But clearly, it is our intent to pursue al Qaeda wherever we may find it, if necessary in the face of resistance or noncooperation from the government in whose territory they may reside. What justification in terms of just war can there be for such interventions?

[7] Obviously, there is no great ethical or legal question involved with states that choose to cooperate in our efforts. They are clearly acting within the scope of their sovereignty to invite us to assist them to locate and defeat terrorist groups internal to their territory.

[8] But what about those states that do not cooperate, either from inability or from unwillingness? The standard of Westphalian respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty would argue strongly against granting the US or even a coalition to intervene in such circumstances--at least in the absence of an authorizing resolution from the UN.

[9] But it may be that the era of Westphalian sovereignty is fading. Recall that the moral tradition of just war (as distinct from the specific legal tradition) is much older and more robust than its particular instantiation in formal international law in its post-Westphalian form.

[10] In his "Letter to Count Boniface," Augustine urges Roman military commander Boniface to see his military service in resistance to barbarian invasion as a mournful but necessary duty. The necessity of fighting has been imposed by those who have disrupted the relative peace and order of the Roman Empire, and not by Boniface's will.

[11] Writing from his home in North Africa to this senior military officer after Rome itself has already fallen, Augustine invokes Jesus' saying, "Blessed are the peacemakers" and applies it to the conscientious soldier who, by using arms against the barbarian, is attempting to restore the peace that has been broken by invasion.

[12] The temporal peace Augustine urges Boniface to restore is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the perfect peace of the City of God. It is the lesser temporal order of the Human City -- a "tranquility of order" in which there are still many who are miserable, but within an overall framework of order. Individuals in that order may be wretched, Augustine grants, but "they would … be far more wretched if they had not that peace which arises from being in harmony with the natural order of things." Augustine realizes that, in the conflict between the barbarians and the Roman army in his lifetime, the stakes are literally the collapse of civilization as his world had known it for centuries. He realizes that what follows, if Rome is defeated (and what did follow, since it was!), was not just a rearrangement of the individual miseries of his world. What follows is the Dark Ages, from which centuries will be required before even a flicker of civilization reappears in the Western Roman Empire.

What is the relevance of this ancient discussion to the current Global War Against Terrorism?

[13] Like Augustine, we are now dealing with threats and challenges that do not fit the model of state sovereignty that has defined the Westphalian world for the past four centuries. What is threatened by al Qaeda is not captured in a conceptual model which thinks of wars as conflicts between states, or in which what is at stake is the prospering or survival of a particular state's political order or territory.

[14] If al Qaeda's fondest hopes were realized, what would fall is not the United States of America, but rather the entire world order created over centuries by the forces of capitalism, Enlightenment rationality, modern science, and political democracy.

[15] It is fashionable, of course, to criticize the miseries created for many groups and nations by that civilization. There are, indeed, many valid and important questions to be raised about the effects of globalized trade, the World Trade Organization, or the spread of American culture across the planet. But it is no more of the essence of the argument to idealize our civilization than it was for Augustine to pretend that Rome ruled a world of sweetness and light. Moral seriousness requires, instead, asking "if this civilization falls, what comes next?"

[16] There is always room for reform and change under an umbrella provided by Augustine's "tranquility of order." The sober assessment of the situation asks not about the perfection of order, but about the cost of its collapse. One intellectual disease of much of modern liberalism and many a modern university is a kind of moral utopianism which one-sidedly dwells on the deficiencies and injustices of existing civilization.

[17] Such a perspective neglects entirely to balance moral criticism of imperfections with an equivalent recognition of the value of order. Such thinking is then squeamish about the reality that such order is always maintained by power, often in ways which are less than perfect or ideal.

[18] Such moral utopianism fails entirely to provide a moral and conceptual framework within which real-world political decisions can be made. One finds such views, for example, in perspectives that attribute responsibility for the attacks of September 11 exclusively or primarily to elements of American policy and conduct - while not recognizing the absolutely essential role of America and her power in maintaining what passes for "tranquility of order" in the modern world.

[19] When one contemplates an absence of that order, few can improve on Thomas Hobbes' description:

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.

[20] What I am suggesting is that we may well be at one of those historical moments when a real shift in our thinking is required. It is not the just war framework of the post-Reformation Westphalian order that provides the deepest insight to our circumstance--although the fact that black letter international law presupposes that order makes harmonizing our challenges with that form of the just war tradition necessary and important. But the terrorist challenges are not fundamentally challenges to particular states, but rather to civilization itself as we know it.

[21] For all the brutality of its foundations and conduct, the Pax Romana was, for Augustine, clearly an order worth defending; no less, the Pax Americana in our time and place. Indeed, a striking fact about the early Christian church is, for all its ambivalence about serving in the Roman government, there was never the hint of a doubt that the stability, safety, and ease of travel made possible by Roman power was a gift of God. Similarly, it does not require much imagination to imagine the human consequences of a collapse of the complex and interlocking structures of the modern international system. Of course, there's plenty of misery in our world, but it pales to insignificance in comparison to an abrupt break or collapse in the structures that keep it intact.

[22] The most fundamental point of the evolution of a just war perspective in the Christian church was a resolute embrace of the realm of practical politics as a locus of moral seriousness. The temptation to flee the world of moral ambiguity and shades of gray is, of course, a powerful one - a tug no morally serious person can avoid feeling. But it is, from the core of the just war perspective, a temptation to be resisted in favor of the hard, messy, and (as Augustine put it) "mournful" work of sustaining relative goods in the face of greater evils.