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cal order pursues, though not in a planned way: reduction of violence and inflicted
death, observance of covenants. One of the norms, or rather habits, underlying it is
to try as far as it goes to solve controversies by diplomatic means and to go to war
only as a last resort. This is all possible only because the actors have recognised each
other as sovereign states, and sovereignty remains the first conceptual pillar of the
anarchical society. They, and they alone, not whatever group can legitimately go to
war, since the compétence de guerre – as the entitlement to do so was called in French,
until the Second World War the language of diplomacy – is reserved to them.
A further consequence of this ‘societal’ element is that war is conceived as a
clash of legal personalities, the states, not of peoples, being therefore clothed in
legal forms – though combat remains the opposite of a legal relationship. Fighting
happens only after the formal declaration of war, and is restrained on a voluntary
basis by the rule to not attack civilians and to not loot their properties, to not kill
wounded enemies or prisoners and to not impose the occupier’s religion over the
vanquished. These provisions belong to ius in bello/law within war, that is the law –
we will soon come back to it – that still has a voice among armed clashes, unlike in
the Roman sentence quoted above.
Let us now recapitulate what we have learned so far and situate it in the context
of history: just as with the notion of the state, international anarchy as a structure
already existed in antiquity and the Middle Ages, but came first to full life in moder-
nity with the wars for hegemony between the Holy Roman Empire (comprising
Austria, Germany, Bohemia, Slovakia, parts of the Baltic states, Northern Italy and
was for a while in the sixteenth century in the person of Charles V connected to
Spain and the Netherlands) and other European states in the late Middle Ages and
the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries, then was reshaped as anarchical society in the
process that started with the Westphalian Treaties. In the eighteenth century, offi-
cially with the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which contains the clause iustum potentiae
equilibrium/just balance of power or might, a new element came to define the
modern political order. Balance of power as opposed to hegemony was intended to
describe a situation in which a limited number of great powers could coexist with
military force and diplomatic influence approximately in the balance; attempts at
acquiring a hegemonic position by one or two powers were legitimately rejected
by the other powers joining in the common effort, including if necessary by war, to
counterbalance the hegemonic move. This scheme of order is almost a constant in
history and remains still now one component of international politics along with
others, though severely limited by nuclear armament; its most linear manifestation
was the European system of the eighteenth century.
The states 111
The war of revolutionary, and later Napoleonic France, brought a first moment
of perturbation to that order: ideology. This had been largely absent from European
conflicts after the end of the religious wars, and came up again, on the one hand, as
the revolutionary ideology of bourgeois France, on the other, as the traditionalistic
doctrine of the Holy Alliance (since 1815). Later the preservation of the balance of
power as well as of the anti-revolutionary order (the Restoration) was entrusted to
a new tool, a first glimpse of what became in the twentieth century the interna-
tional organisation: this was the (informal) Concert of Nations, which made its first
appearance at the Congress of Vienna (1815) and then again at the Congresses of
Paris (1856, after the Crimean War) and Berlin (1878, on the Balkan question). In
the new scenario created by the Great War, as the First World War was nicknamed,
the creation of the League of Nations at Paris in 1920 marked the beginning of a
new international order based on the notion of collective security.
What is collective security? It’s a system of relations in which political and military
security is no longer the business of the single actor, but rather everybody’s con-
cern. A potential enemy must know that, if it attacks one of the system members,
it will have to do with the reaction of the entire alliance, an expectation that deters
it from waging an aggression and stabilises the environment. The first worldwide
collective security system, the League, then renamed the Society of Nations, failed
miserably, as it made no serious attempt at stopping Fascist Italy’s invasion of the
Kingdom of Ethiopia (1935–1936); the second one, the United Nations Organiza-
tion, has done much better, either authorising military action by a ‘coalition of the
willing’ against invaders (two examples: Communist North Korea invading South
Korea in 1950, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invading Kuwait in 1990) or keeping peace
by interposition forces and aiding civilians in crisis areas (one of the many examples
is UNIFIL operating in Southern Lebanon since 2006). However, the worldwide
security system is a weak Third, hardly a Third above the parties, as it depends on
the will of the majority in the UN Security Council and can be paralysed by the
veto of one of the five veto-holding powers. Much better results are on the record
of regional security systems such as NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organiza-
tion, in force since 1949) that can reckon on a deeper homogeneity among mem-
bers and/or the presence of a leading partner.
5
Lastly, collective security can be
reinforced by common security, in which two potential enemies reassure each other
and prevent overreactions and misperceptions, a factor known for igniting wars, by
communicating steadily with each other and taking confidence-building measures.
This is all we have for keeping peace among the states, which was one of the major
problems with which the modern classics of political philosophy from Hobbes to
Kant were concerned. It is not much, it remains below what seemed to be the opti-
mal solution of a law-abiding and peace-imposing Third, but it has transformed sheer
anarchy into an anarchical society or even an international community in which at
least in principle almost every state is interested in peace and cooperation.
Even this modest but real progress is however almost powerless when confronted
with both nuclear war and the wars that are not interstate clashes. To better grasp
this present reality we shall now linger for a while on the concept of war.
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