48 How politics works
pacts
(pacta sunt servanda). We will see that the first two goals, along with the last
one, are present in the international version of political order; the reader will have
also perceived the similarity between these core features of political order and the
essential substantive conditions for the legitimation of political power (see above
Chapter 2, §1).
It is utterly important to understand that political order
only very rarely comes
into being as the consistent result of the actors’ intentions and goal-oriented
actions – especially in international politics. This may be the case in mature liberal-
democratic countries or, internationally, in the UN system in its infrequent best
moments or in the build-up of the European institutions in the 1980–90s. More
generally, the degree of political order achieved at any a given time in history
is rather the combination of the actions taken by the actors in order to pursue
their own goals, rather than shared values such as the reduction
of violence or the
observance of covenants; this combination is unplanned to a larger degree in inter-
national relations, and to a lesser one in domestic politics, in which the achieve-
ment of order is (also, but not exclusively) the consequence of the polity being
purposely established. It is ‘as if ’ all actors had consciously endorsed those peaceful
aims, whereas we know that this is far from being true – some did; others did not.
By no means can we say that a peaceful order is
the goal of political actors, and
depict politics as a goal-oriented or teleological activity of like-minded men and
women based on good will, because the goals of several groups or countries have
been particular, disparate and conflicting in world history, and still are. Against this
real background, the normative posture that defines politics as aiming at a just order
must sound like the vain
repetition of ideal models, from Plato to Kant, if the same
theory is unable or unwilling to inquire how, in which case and under what condi-
tions particular and self-centred actors can be led to endorse universal values like
peace. In other words, musing on lofty universal aims without a look at philosophi-
cal anthropology or a reflection on history risks being useless for the understanding
and the re-orientation of politics.
The
order that comes into being, in the way sketched here, contains a degree of
peace, though often at a price, as is the case with authoritarian regimes domestically
and with imperial order internationally, the
Pax Romana
1
still being its best balanced
example – but not the only one, preceded as it was by other empires such as the
Persian one under the Achaemenids, the builders of Persepolis (see Figure 3.1).
This has two implications: most historical versions of
political order contained
moments of a sharp imbalance of power, of authoritarianism and exploitation, in short
the seeds of rebellion and upheaval, that is of future
disorder and
anarchy (lack of a
central power or authority). In this sense democracy, the regime in which everybody
can to an extent have a share in government while being
protected by the rule of law,
has reduced those self-defeating features of political order. This shows, second, that the
existence of political order is not, as such, the enemy of
freedom and
change. It depends
on how the regime guaranteeing order is shaped, on how much flexibility and adapta-
tion it allows for. Most writers of politics, particularly in the contractarian tradition,
have insisted on the order of the polity being the true condition for the human being
to be free, and debunked the presumptive freedom enjoyed
in the state of nature as
Order, institutions, models
49
illusionary and lethal. Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who praised the free-
dom of man in the state of nature, maintained that obedience to a law one has imposed
upon oneself by a social contract fulfils (civil) liberty (Rousseau 1762, Chapters 7–8).
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