Conceptualizing Politics

112  World politics and the future of politics
2.   War
War has been the central problem for modern political philosophy, whose leading 
authors often lived among foreign and civil wars. Hobbes reinvented the good bib-
lical monster Leviathan as remedy to bellum omnium contra omnes/war of all against 
all dominating the state of nature as well as opponent to Behemoth, the nasty mon-
ster of civil war,
6
 but in his realism saw no alternative to international anarchy but 
war preparedness. On the opposite, idealistic side of the spectrum the ageing Kant 
wrote his last famous work immediately after the peace treaties signed in Basel by 
revolutionary France, Prussia and Spain, arguing the reforms he deemed necessary 
to make peace finally perpetual (Kant 1795). John Rawls, himself an infantryman in 
the US Army on the Pacific Front from 1943 on, wrote, at the end of his scholarly 
activity, his view on the international order that may best secure peace (1999).
But what is war? Empirically speaking, an armed conflict between states or other 
organised political groups with at least 1,000 battlefield casualties – as statisticians 
used to have it. For a philosophical definition we must turn to the celebrated ‘phi-
losopher of war’, the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), whose 
Vom Kriege/Of War was published in 1832 by his widow Marie von Brühl: ‘war 
is . . . an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfil our will’ (Clausewitz 1832, 
1).
7
 On this account, war as violence is a means for a goal that is not itself military 
but political in nature: to have the opponent do what we want her/him/it to do. 
This comes very close to our initial relational and substantive definitions of political 
power; but in the case of war, violence does not remain in the background as a last 
resort guarantee and rather intervenes as actual violence.
Clausewitz’s famous formulation of these relationships ‘war is simply the con-
tinuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means’ illuminates his 
entire analysis of the several aspects and stages of war, which he sees as shaped by a 
‘trinity’: hatred and enmity, rooted in the population (Clausewitz was deeply influ-
enced by the anti-Napoleonic Prussian liberation war, in which he fought); prob-
ability and chance, which is the business of the commanders; the war’s nature as a 
political instrument, therefore governed by intellect. In this philosophical account 
the emotional side of war is considered, but also relativized, far from seeing war – as 
conventional wisdom sometimes still wants to have it – as the inevitable outcome 
of ‘natural’ aggressiveness.
Clausewitz’s philosophy of war was, up until the Great War, an excellent intel-
lectual tool for the understanding of interstatal war in anarchical society. Then, 
things started changing with war and politics, and that conceptual grid lost some 
of its analytical strength. In the years from 1914 through 1918, two aspects popped 
up that came to full development only in the Second World War: one was the total 
engagement of a country in the war effort, requiring a restructuring of the econ-
omy in the sense of planned mass production and changes to social life, particularly 
regarding women. Second, with the fledgling use of the great novelty, aviation, for 
military purposes, began the weakening, then the disappearance of the distinction 
between armed forces and civilian population, now explicit target or ‘collateral 

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The states  113
damage’ of aerial bombardment. It was the beginning of the process that in the 
wars fought after the First World War has seen the ratio of civilians’ casualties vs. 
the fighters’ more and more reversed in comparison to previous wars, thus de facto 
voiding the distinction of combatant and non-combatant, the pillar of ius in bello.
The step further was the massive re-entering of ideology into politics and war, in a 
dimension and depth unattained in the religious wars of early modernity. The Span-
ish Civil War of 1936–1939 was the prologue to the following world war clashes 
between Fascism, Nazism, Communism and democratic doctrine, which made the 
war bloody and cruel well beyond any former example. The Shoah (destruction) 
of the Jews, or Holocaust, went far beyond any military logic, and is a watershed 
moment in the history of civilisation rather than an event in war history – along 
with the extermination of Slavs, Roma and Sinti, gays and Jehovah’s Witnesses in 
Hitler’s death camps. The Shoah cannot just as easily be regarded as political con-
flict, because it includes dynamics of paranoid identification or invention of the 
‘enemy’ and industrial destruction of human beings deprived of all human dignity 
that escapes the usual categories of politics. On the other hand the prevention of 
similar events by all possible cultural and administrative tools has become after 1945 
an elementary task of all politics.
The Second World War ended in August 1945 with the atomic bombings on 
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a step that opened a new era in human history and to 
which politics has not yet provided an adequate response. The Third World War 
indeed did not come about and was replaced by the Cold War, but in any case we 
know that at stake is now not victory, but the survival of humankind. In a nuclear 
war, which is always an implied potentiality in the deterrence regime, the instru-
ment of war turns against its owner, since starting a nuclear war or participating 
in it is suicidal beyond being omnicidal; the weapon is no longer a means for a 
political goal and becomes the element dominating the outcome of the game well 
beyond the intentions of the players. Although never fully experienced,
8
 already the 
perspective of nuclear war put an end to Clausewitzian war as the war in which 
deadly violence remains under the control of political actors and their finality. We 
will come back to nuclear war and deterrence in Chapter 7.
The transformation of war has gone further after the invention of nuclear weap-
ons. Beyond interstate war fought with conventional weapons, which after the 
Falklands War of 1982 has become a rarity, and nuclear war, which has never been 
fought (otherwise we would not be here writing or reading about it), the actually 
fought wars fall into the category ‘wars of the third kind’,
9
 which comprise ethnic, 
tribal, religious, secession, civil, and drug wars presently fought by actors that can 
be states, parties, movements, sects, terrorist groups and criminal gangs. A war of this 
kind can hardly be neatly attributed to just one of these types and is rather likely 
to result from a mix of them and to be ‘asymmetric’ in the tactics chosen (laser-
guided bombs from supersonic fighter-bombers on the one hand, suicide terrorists 
with explosive belts on the other). In either case, asymmetric conventional warfare 
of the third kind has made big advances in destructiveness even if remaining under 
the nuclear threshold.

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114  World politics and the future of politics
This is all tantamount to the collapse of the picture of international order as 
found in international relations classics from Hobbes to Waltz. It is not easy, for 
example, to readapt the latter’s authoritative framing, some sixty years ago, of the 
phenomenon of war in three ‘images’ to the later evolution – authoritative because 
it shaped the language of international theory for decades and is still worth being 
learned (Waltz 1959). In the first image the roots of war are seen in human behav-
iour, as it results from ‘selfishness, from misdirected aggressive impulses, from stu-
pidity’ (Waltz 1959, 16), or in other words, from human nature as seen through 
optimistic or pessimistic lenses. In the second image or level of analysis it is the 
internal regime of states to determine their bellicose or peaceful attitude. The third 
image places the cause of war in international anarchy, in the terms seen above. This 
is regarded as a permissive cause of war: the international system makes it possible. 
Image One and Two, in whatever version or combination, provide the efficient 
causes, which make the possibility of war an actuality based on a given occasion. 
Neither image taken by itself can explain any war.
Having enriched our view on international affairs and war, let us now briefly 
recapitulate by linking this chapter to the general categories of politics as defined 
in the previous chapters. Politics here too can be seen as the re-allocation of mate-
rial and relational resources by means of power, as we saw in its first definition in 
Chapter 1; and power in the international arena does not appear to coincide with sheer 
economic or military force, because a mighty actor still needs political skills (alli-
ances, inclusive management of one’s own points of strength, soft power) in order 
to not misuse and disperse its elements of superiority. Even in the conduct of a 
war – history teaches – diplomatic ability remains a fundamental asset along armies, 
fleets and healthy budgets.
What lacks – at least prima facie – in the anarchical society is another basic ele-
ment of our definition of politics and power: legitimacy. Power among nations is 
primarily de facto power, building on the pillars mentioned above; it does not need 
to correspond to models of good governance that peoples and their elites may have 
in mind. Neither does – except in the EU – a region-wide or worldwide covenant 
exist, similar to a domestic constitution, under whose rules the legitimacy of old or 
new powers can be discussed and evaluated. The only universally accepted category, 
national sovereignty, goes in the opposite direction of justifying only (formal, legal) 
equality among nations. This is however no longer the whole truth: to begin with, 
a formal mechanism of legitimation of international behaviour has been introduced 
in 1945 with the UN Charter, which we will come back to in the following sec-
tion. Second, a weak form of legitimacy pops up when peoples (or their majorities) 
which are not high on the ladder of international politics approve – perhaps willy-
nilly rather than enthusiastically – of a regime of relative peace, prosperity and stabil-
ity guaranteed by an overwhelming leader or imperial country or bloc. In their best 
days, Rome with the Pax Romana, the USA with the Pax Americana of the decades 
following the Second World War and the European Community or (since 1993) 
Union with the peace and prosperity it contributed to on the continent until 2008, 
are examples of what the (weak or second-grade and half-hidden) legitimacy of 

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The states  115
power in international politics means. It must be noted that we are now speaking of 
the effective legitimacy of international power in history and presently. A fairly dif-
ferent question regards the criteria of legitimacy for a hoped-for transformation or 
regeneration of government/governance in the international realm; we will briefly 
touch upon this area of questions in Chapter 9 under the heading of ‘global justice’.