Conceptualizing Politics

partisan warfare. It was more successful, however, only in the wars between ‘civi-
lised’ nations, while on the fringes of European civilisation, in the campaigns against 
native populations in the colonies or on the American frontier, the laws of war were 
disregarded on purpose.
Yet, war has, since the end of the Cold War, changed so deeply that in its new 
reality the just war norms sound surreal. The numerous wars or rather armed clashes 
around the world reflect a degree of cultural fragmentation that makes a shared, or 
at least convergent view, of situations and norms very difficult if not impossible 
to attain. Ethnic or religious hatred or nationalist revenge have taken the place of 
more usual motivations (territory, energy resources) and are hardly conducive to a 
rational conduct of war; they are rather fit to being poles of attraction for fanatics 
and bloodthirsty criminals, who would have otherwise spent their life on the mar-
gins of society and seek a meaning to their own life in hatred and destruction. As 
to the conduct of war, not only mass rape and forced marriage, but the enslavement 
of women and the spectacular execution of prisoners and civilians have become 
frequent practises, as well as, on the other hand, the indiscriminate use of artillery 
and aerial bombardment in densely populated areas.
In this situation it is senseless – except in the sense specified in Excursus 2 – 
to deprecate war altogether: as against Nazi Germany the war against Islamist 

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The states  117
fanaticism cannot but be fought and won, because beyond all geopolitical aspects 
it contains the core instance of ‘civilisation against barbarianism’. It is by no means 
Christian vs. Islamic civilisation, as followers of the clash of civilisations doctrine, or 
the Islamists’ ‘cleansing’ the Middle East of Christian populations would like to have 
it. In Christianity, fanaticism also existed, but retreated at the dawn of modernity 
and with the Enlightenment; Fascist and Nazi fanaticism was a secularised one.
11
 
To eradicate armed fundamentalism and to contain the unarmed one also means 
preserving the great Islamic culture of previous centuries from any involvement 
with this farcical degeneration. In wars of the third kind like this, the very nature of 
warfare makes it extremely difficult to apply the laws of war or ius in bello; which is 
not a good reason for ignoring them altogether.
Against this backdrop peace is the absence of war. Peace research, a school of 
thought initiated in the 1950–60s by the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, 
characterises the absence of fighting as negative peace, whereas positive peace 
includes collaboration among nations as well as the struggle against structural vio-
lence, such as sexism and racism that generates open clashes. But in a philosophical 
perspective Hobbes’s definition maintains the advantages of clarity and simplicity:
so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known dis-
position thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All 
other time is peace.
12
In other words peace is regarded here as the absence of killing because this is 
an existential cleavage, as anybody who was alive in 1945 knows. Also, this cleavage 
speaks for itself, while the attributes of positive peace must remain controversial.
We encounter peace and pacifism on two levels: as a moment in politics that has 
to be actively pursued (political pacifism or peace-building politics) or as a meta-
political goal that must at any time be unconditionally affirmed (absolute pacifism). 
A third, although unauthentic type exists, which makes instrumental, lop-sided use 
of radical, universalistic pacifism in order to give partisan support to one of the 
conflicting parties or to assail another, mostly the USA or NATO or the EU, or 
Western values when used against armed humanitarian intervention in defence of 
human rights (instrumentalist or pseudo-pacifism).
13
On the first level we have seen peace or pacification and containment of flar-
ing conflicts to be an intrinsic, if unplanned aim of international society or com-
munity; but what is meant here is political pacifism as a determined and proactive 
peace-building policy on the side of the actors that want to accelerate or stabilise 
situations of peace. This remains, however, a peace for the time being, with little 
guarantee of lasting or being transformed, as Kant wished, into perpetual peace. Is 
this perspective still open, given that two hundred years after Kant war continues to 
ravage the planet, even if not on the same scale as in the first half of the twentieth 
century – while the threat of nuclear war to destroy civilisation still exists? There is 
ground enough to be sceptic. More will be said about nuclear war as a lethal chal-
lenge to politics in Chapter 7, but we can note here that this kind of scepticism 

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118  World politics and the future of politics
means neither that the efforts to strengthen international institutions working for 
pacification (institutional pacifism, a specification of political pacifism) nor that 
those aimed at neutralising the hubris of war such as cultural, ethnic, religious 
enmity (cultural pacifism) should be abandoned or downsized. The UNO remains 
in many regards an unkept promise, but without it the world would be much worse.
Still in the realm of peace-building politics or political pacifism one of its basic 
conditions is multilateralism, that is the (normative) recognition of the equal impor-
tance of the participants in international governance, including the principle that 
solutions are to be sought as far as possible through everybody’s participation. This 
goes far beyond multipolarism (the analytical acknowledgement that world power 
is distributed among a number of key players) and is a rejection of unilateralism, in 
particular if ideologically laden like the neoconservative version that inspired the 
George W. Bush administration (2001–2009) on an American mission in allegedly 
spreading democracy. This blindness due to an excess in ideology led in 2003 to the 
most stupid war – much more stupid than the Vietnam war – ever waged by the USA 
in its history, with disastrous consequences for the whole of the Middle East and later 
Europe (terrorism and mass migration being among its long-term effects). Multilat-
eralism is a logical premise for lasting collective security systems (they falter under 
unilateralist efforts of a member) as well as for federative processes at the regional/
continental level, which bind the member states together in a degree of economic 
and political integration that is the best background condition for stable peace – but 
also for regaining the full-fledged sovereignty lost by the weakened individual nation 
states. The European Union is the unprecedented example of this regionalism, some-
how a vindication, beyond democratic peace, of the second reform – federative rela-
tions among the states – Kant suggested as a step towards perpetual peace.
Another version of the federative principle, cosmopolitanism, takes it very radically 
and makes the case for the ‘world republic’ Kant praised as the worldwide realisation 
of the democratic or republican regime, though acknowledging at the same time its 
impossibility and resorting to a more realistic league of states. Cosmopolitanism is 
found in various shades, from a world state or world government or world parlia-
ment to less doctrinarian proposals aimed at building up levels of decision making 
more adequate to the increasingly global dimension of the issues. Scepticism about 
it has two reasons: even in the global era politics does not work the way that the 
expanded dimensions of the problems gives by its own force birth to a correspond-
ing level of decision-making institutions. This will not happen before the previous 
institutions have proved their exhaustion in everybody’s eyes, which is not yet the 
case (the Paris climate agreement of December 2015 has been reached through 
negotiations among states, modest that its policy effect may be). Besides, the intel-
lectual and political forces have still to be identified that under the given historical 
circumstances may find enough determination and power to build a new edifice. In 
international politics the need to find consensus (and its premise, leadership) is no 
less important than domestically, but consensus can from time to time be found on 
very few relevant issues and after many failures, as the history of climate policy or 
the Millennium Development Goals (2000–2015) have shown – hardly establishing 

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The states  119
a binding world government for which no consensus is in sight. Where consensus is 
unattainable, cosmopolitan institutions could be only imposed by war, thus reach-
ing the most counter-intentional effect of cosmopolitanism. Without keeping all of 
this in mind, designing blueprints for new institutions just out of concern for the 
world and good will must remain an idle exercise. Besides, cosmopolitans appear to 
underrate the danger Immanuel Kant already indicated as he spoke (in the second 
definitive article of Perpetual Peace) of the ‘soulless despotism’ of a universal monar-
chy: the homogeneity that world government would bring in its wake collides with 
the huge diversity of civilisations and traditions, which is a premise of conflict and 
ingovernability as well as freedom and creativity. More and better governance, which 
the globalised world certainly needs, does not necessarily mean more government; 
this can be counterproductive, not only unattainable – proven by the fact that not 
even a modest UN reform has been agreed upon after decade-long debates.
Let us now turn to the pacifism of the extra-political type or absolute pacifism. 
This posture is not ready to acknowledge politics as a sphere including force as 
an element that can be restrained but not excluded from it, and wants to reshape 
the world from a religious or philosophical perspective as found in Buddhism, St. 
Francis and the Mahatma Gandhi or several other creeds. Leaving Gandhi and his 
struggle for India’s independence aside, this type of pacifism does not make political 
choices and participates in wars only to take care of the victims. It finds its place in 
religion or philosophy, as a testament to one’s own rejection of any violence and 
any responsibility for a social order based on force. It accepts responsibility for not 
joining active or armed resistance to murderous regimes. It also values the purity 
of radical distance from violence over the efficacy of coordinated action aimed at 
spreading peaceful regulations and checking aggression and genocide – a task that 
only political peace-building, including the use of force to stop aggressors and 
torturers, can implement.
14
 In 1932, still under the impression of the Great War’s 
massacres, Sigmund Freud, on answering the question ‘Why war’ raised by Albert 
Einstein, recognised the superior value of building new ties of affection among 
humanity as a preventive medicine against war, but concluded that these methods 
‘conjure up an ugly picture of mills that grind so slowly that, before the flour is 
ready, people are dead of hunger.’
We add that it is not even safe to assume that those mills effectively grind a rel-
evant amount of flour, because – to stick to a Freudian language – Eros (the force 
building ties of affection) and Thanatos (Greek for death; the force of destructive-
ness) are very much entangled with each other; though the idea that the aggressive 
component of human psychology must at all times lead to war is a piece of con-
ventional wisdom lacking any scientific foundation.
15
Absolute pacifism may not qualify as an effective force in order to bring about 
peace as a political outcome, but preserves its dignity as long as it sticks to its refusal 
of violence and war under whatever circumstances and from whatever actor they 
may come; as long as it observes a super (or rather extra) partes universalism. It loses 
its dignity as soon as it pretends to brandish the lofty reasons of universalism to 
condemn wars fought by just one party and forgets about the others. This kind 

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120  World politics and the future of politics
of pseudo-universalistic pacifism is but one partisan position among others in the 
political game.