from the wreckage of the League at the end of the Second World War, but
the roots of these institutions go much further back in the history of the
European states-system. ‘Roots’ in the plural is important here, because a
central problem of these bodies has always been
that they have attempted to
institutionalize and fuse two quite separate traditions, with quite different
normative approaches to the problem of international order and global
governance – the tradition of the ‘Peace Project’ and the tradition of the
‘Concert of Europe’.
The most famous ‘Peace Project’ was Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace’ of 1795,
but while the phrase ‘perpetual peace’ was a commonplace amongst the
creators of ‘Peace Projects’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
Kant’s work was actually untypical of most others (Reiss 1970). The basic
idea of these projects was clear, even though they differed markedly as to
detail (Hinsley 1963). In order to overcome the scourge of war, the states of
Europe would form a kind of parliament
or federal assembly wherein
disputes would be solved. Projectors differed as to such matters as voting
mechanisms and enforcement procedures, but collective decision was
central – states would no longer have the power to act as judges in their own
cases. Impartial rules would be impartially applied to all. International
relations would become a realm of law and not a realm of power – although
the ‘projectors’ were suspicious of the international lawyers of the day,
regarding them as, in Kant’s phrase, ‘sorry comforters’; that is, apologists
for power politics and the rights of states.
The Concert of Europe was very different in approach. This notion
emerged in the nineteenth century, initially via the medium of the formal
congresses which dealt with the aftermath
of the Napoleonic Wars, later on
a more informal basis. The idea of the Concert was that the Great Powers
would consult and, as far as possible, coordinate policy on issues of
common concern. The root idea was that great power brought with it great
responsibility; managing the system in the common interest was something
that the powers should do if they could – but, crucially, it should be noted
that the ‘common interest’ was weighted towards the interests of the
Great Powers themselves. Sometimes ‘managing the system’ might involve
preserving a balance of power amongst the great
at the expense of lesser
players – as with the wholesale reorganizations of boundaries that took place
after 1815. Sometimes, if the great powers were in conflict, it could not
work at all, and Bismarck for one was wont to regard the notion of a
European interest with disfavour. In any event, the Concert of Europe was,
in no sense an impartial body, dispensing impartial laws. If it worked at all,
it worked partially, in the interests of order perhaps,
of the Great Powers
certainly.
Both of these traditions still exist at the beginning of the twenty-first
century. Movements for institutional reform of the UN and global
134
Understanding International Relations
‘democratization’ clearly draw on the tradition of peace projects, but, on
the other hand, for example, the informal ‘contact group’ of the United
States, Russia, Germany, France and Britain, which oversaw policy on
former Yugoslavia during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s, was clearly a
(wider) reincarnation of the Concert of Europe,
with a similar attitude to
the rights of smaller countries, as the Bosnian Government discovered to its
cost. However, the actual institutions set up in the League and UN represent
an uneasy and unsuccessful hybrid of both traditions.
Thus the doctrine of Collective Security draws on the universalism of the
Peace Projects – one for all and all for one – but is meant to be operated by
states which retain the power of deciding when the obligations of collective
security are binding, unlike the institutions envisaged by most of the
projectors. Moreover, collective security defends a status quo, with only a
passing nod in the direction of
mechanisms for peaceful change, while the
peace projectors envisaged that their deliberative bodies would be able to
bring about such change in a lawful manner. The Council of the League and
the Security Council of the UN clearly reflect the idea of a Concert of Great
Powers, but they also attempt to be representative of the rest of the system,
and the norms the Security Council is supposed to enforce are norms which
stress the equality of states, not their differentiation. As with the Concert, it
has been tacitly recognized that the Councils would operate effectively only
when there was consensus amongst the Great Powers. In the League,
unanimity in the Council was required, with the exception of the interested
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