Conceptualizing Politics

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.

---