Eric Patterson - Ethics Beyond Wars End

ERIC PATTERSON

2012 Georgetown University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ethics beyond wars end / Eric Patterson, editor.

p. cm.

Rev. essays from a conference held in Apr. 2010 at Georgetown University.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-58901-888-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. WarMoral and ethical aspects. 2. Just war doctrine. I. Patterson, Eric, 1971JZ6392.E75 2012

172.42dc23

2011036279

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

15 14 13 12 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 First printing

Printed in the United States of America

THIS BOOK BEGINS WITH A QUESTION, Where is the jus post bellum? It was 2004 and the setting was a month-long seminar for scholars on War and Morality: Rethinking the Just War Tradition on the campus of the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. My doctorate was less than two years old and most of my colleagues in the room had been publishing on ethics and war for yearseven decades. The first scholar I asked replied, Good question. There was an awkward pause. I dont think there is one. It turns out that many were flummoxed by the question, although one senior philosopher pointed me to the new work by a Canadian scholar named Brian Orend.

The fact that we could spend a month talking about the morality of going to war (jus ad bellum) and the morality of how war is fought (jus in bello) without discussing the morality of conflict settlement and postconflict (jus post bellum) should be startling to the outside observer. However, for just war thinkers there has been and remains plenty of work to do simply applying just war theory to the ever evolving battlescape, which today includes global terrorist networks, armed humanitarian intervention, the use of nonlethal weapons (lasers, heat-rays, high-decibel machines), piracy, rogue states, preventive and preemptive war, private military contractors, robots and drones, and the like.

My own idea for a parsimonious framework with policy relevance was first published in 2005 and is the basis for the book Ending Wars Well: Just War Thinking and Post-Conflict. The basic model is that a war must end with some form of order; the dilemma we see today in Africa and Central Asia is that there is political disorder, and that disorder is more than insecurityit is the conflation of a lack of domestic security, governance and institutions, and regional security across borders. Without order there can be no politics. The second part of the model is justice: We all want to see aggressors pay and victims be vindicated, but I have argued that justice must not destabilize the order. Draconian reparations, ICC indictments, or reneging on amnesties is likely to destabilize a tenuous peace. However, justice is possible in some cases, as illustrated by Nuremberg, Tokyo, the trial of Saddam Hussein, and Rwandas gacaca courts. Finally, order and justice can be the first steps to, and be reinforced by, conciliation. Conciliation, or reconciliation in some cases, is extremely rare in political life, but it is the material for long-term peace and security as we see in the Franco-German relationship.

With this framework in mind, and a burgeoning interest in the morality of late- and postconflict developing particularly in the United States following the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, I hosted a one-day conference specifically on jus post bellum at Georgetown University in April 2010. Some of the participants were a part of the 2004 conference at Annapolis and we were all fortunate at the depth and breadth of the symposium, which included some of the very best thinkers on just war theory in North America. This book is a result of the essays developed in advance of the conference and which were subsequently revised in its aftermath.

Many thanks are thus in order. First, I sincerely appreciate the participation of the conference participants and contributors to this volume. I thank Thomas Banchoff, director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, for providing resources to make the conference possible. Berkley Center staff, most notably Melody Fox Ahmed, Annie Hunt, and Abby Waldrip, supported the event and my team of research assistants contributed in numerous ways: Caryl Tuma, Joseph Shamalta, Ilan Cooper, Vanessa Francis, Elizabeth Royall, and Jonathan Barsness. I appreciate Richard Brown and the staff of Georgetown University Press for their confidence in the book. Finally, I am grateful to my family for their support in yet another writing project, and I dedicate my work on the project to my children, nieces, and nephews.

ERIC PATTERSON

IN OCTOBER 1944 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill flew to Moscow to meet with Soviet leader Josef Stalin. Part of their discussion centered on British and Soviet spheres of influence following an Allied victory over the Axis powers. Churchill nonchalantly jotted on a piece of paper his suggested percentages of British and Soviet spheres of influence: 5050 in Hungary and Yugoslavia, 90 percent for the Russians in Romania, and 75 percent in Bulgaria, whereas the Brits were to have 90 percent influence in Greece. Churchill pushed the paper across the table to Stalin, who ticked off the various countries one by one: Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary. Stalin then returned the sheet to Churchill. The prime minister recorded in his biography that the following exchange ensued:

Churchill: Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper.

Stalin: No, you keep it.1

Is this all that there was to it? Was the end of the Second World War in Europe really decided over brandy, without regard for wider issues of colonies, oil, or the looming German question? What about the unresolved business of the Treaty of Versailles from World War I, not to mention other players such as Japan, China, and the United States?

Today we tend to look back on that as a golden period, a so-called great war for civilization. We refer to its American participants as the Greatest Generation. Historians hail Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and members of the Truman administration as the leaders who prosecuted a war against barbarity and handed us a new world order in the aftermath. However, many of the postwar achievementsthe political rehabilitation of Germany and Japan, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, the Bretton Woods System, the inauguration of the United Nationswere ad hoc. They were often experimental quick fixes to the dilemmas of international politics of the time, and they were not tethered to robust strategic and ethical analyses that provided a long-term future picture of what international relations might look like at wars end. Certainly, some planning did occur on specific issues, but neither Churchill, Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Clement Attlee, Dean Acheson, General George C. Marshall, nor any other major figure as far as we know utilized a formal ethical framework to think ahead to the long-term issues of justice and security at wars end beyond immediate victory over the Axis powers, securing Europe and the Pacific, and prosecution of the enemys senior leadership.