Men and States: Rethinking the Domestic Analogy in a Global Age

Men and States Rethinking the Domestic Analogy in a Global Age

Chiara Bottici Translation from the Italian by Karen Whittle

Men and States

Also by Chiara Bottici A PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICAL MYTH

Men and States Rethinking the Domestic Analogy in a Global Age Chiara Bottici Department of Philosophy University of Florence, Italy

Translation from the Italian by Karen Whittle

© Chiara Bottici 2009 English translation © Karen Whittle 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published in Italian 2004 English translation published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-20681-6 ISBN-10: 0-230-20681-6

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bottici, Chiara. [Uomini e stati. English.] Men and states: rethinking the domestic analogy in a global age / Chiara Bottici; translation from the Italian by Karen Whittle. p. cm. Translated from the Italian. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-230-20681-6 1. International relations. 2. Political science—Philosophy. I. Title. JZ1305.B67513 2009 320.101—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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to all the expectant mothers who made this book possible

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Contents Preface to the English Edition

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction 1

1

The Domestic Analogy

11

1.1 The origins of the debate

12

1.2 Analogical reasoning and the domestic analogy

19

1.3 Disentangling the domestic analogy

26

2 The Domestic Analogy in Modern Political Thought

37

2.1 Hobbes and the realist tradition

39

2.2 Kant and the idealist tradition

51

2.3 Grotius and the rationalist tradition

68

3 The Domestic Analogy in Contemporary Theories

81

3.1

Neoidealism

83

3.2

Neorealism

94

3.3

Neoinstitutionalism

106

3.4 Beyond the three traditions: Constructivism, postmodernism, feminism and marxism

115

Epilogue: The Domestic Analogy in the Global Era

133

Notes

142

Bibliography

154

Index

166

vii

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Preface to the English Edition This book is the revised and expanded English version of a book that was published in Italian in 2004 under the title Uomini e Stati: Percorsi di un’analogia (Pisa, ETS). For this edition, the text has undergone a considerable amount of revision. All chapters have been updated with references to more recent literature, whereas more substantial work has been done on Chapter 1 and an entire new section has been added to Chapter 3. In particular, the discussions raised by the Italian book made me realise that I needed to spell out more explicitly the disciplinary boundaries of this work. In the English edition I have therefore tried to make it explicit that, in all of its parts, this has been conceived as both a work on political philosophy and international relations theory. As will become clear later on, this work is based on the assumption that, particularly today, in an epoch of globalisation, we need to rethink the boundaries between these disciplines while heading towards a new form of global political theory. The re-writing of Chapter 1 resulted in a new organisation of the chapters: sections 1.2 and 1.3 of the Italian version have been merged into a single chapter, while the remaining two chapters have been expanded. Chapters 2 and 3 have also been updated and expanded, while section 3.4 has been written afresh for this edition. The debate caused by the book made me aware that I needed to show in more detail how contemporary thinking has gone, so to speak, ‘beyond the three traditions’ of international thought identified by M. Wight many years ago, as well as how this is reflected in a different attitude towards the domestic analogy. Finally, I would like to add two linguistic remarks. First, the reader will notice that in many parts of this work, the text is not feminised. This reflects the awareness that in most of the theories analysed in this book the domestic analogy is an analogy between ‘men’ and ‘states’ and not between ‘human beings’ and ‘states’. The inconsistencies between the different parts of the texts, and in particular between quotations from earlier authors and the rest of the text, are a way to signal the problem. Similarly, oscillations between the capitalised and non-capitalised substantive term ‘State’ are meant to signal the differences that arise ix

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Preface to the English Edition

among the different theories as to the nature of the state. The fact that the capitalised ‘State’ once prevailed and now seems to have almost disappeared is perhaps no coincidence: it is in an epoch of globalisation, when boundaries are challenged, that the very nature of the state is questioned. The inconsistencies between the quotations from earlier authors and other parts of the text are the sign that the debate as to the nature of the ‘state’ is still open. A similar strategy has been adopted for the term ‘God’. With regard to the system of quotations, references to ancient classical texts are made using the system ‘title plus reference’. For example, Nicomachean Ethics, 1131 a30 indicates passage 1131 a30 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. More recent texts are quoted using the system ‘author plus year of the consulted edition plus chapter (when preceded by a comma) and/or page number (when preceded by a colon)’. For instance, Hobbes 1968, VI: 118 indicates Hobbes’s Leviathan, Chapter VI, page 118, while Waltz 1959: 44 indicates page 44 of Waltz’s Man, the State and War. Quotations of foreign texts are usually taken from their English translations, as indicated in the bibliography. In the case of texts that have not been translated, they have been translated by the English translator and indicated as such in the text. I am very grateful to Alessandro Cecchieri for taking care of the translations from Latin.

Acknowledgements This book, which originated from my ‘Tesi di Laurea’ in Political Philosophy awarded by the University of Florence, is the result of research and discussions carried out at various universities in Italy and Europe: the University of Florence, the University of Pisa, the European University Institute in Fiesole, the London School of Economics, the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. I would like to thank everyone who took part in these activities, thereby making a contribution to this endeavour. First of all, Furio Cerutti who, in addition to pointing me towards studying this topic, has given me support in various ways over the years, constantly urging me to strengthen my arguments through his criticism. I would also like to thank all the other members of the Political Philosophy Research Group at the University of Florence, with whom I have had many opportunities over these years to discuss various parts of this work – in particular Claudia Attucci, Renata Badii, Dimitri d’Andrea, Elena Pulcini, Debora Spini and Monica Toraldo di Francia. Among the fruits of our teamwork, I would like to point out the volume entitled Filosofie della globalizzazione, edited by Dimitri D’Andrea and Elena Pulcini (Pisa, ETS, 2001), containing my essay on globalisation, sovereignty and anarchy referred to on several occasions in this book, and the special issue of Quaderni Forum on Guerra e conflitto. Trasformazioni nell’età globale, edited by Renata Badii, where my essay on war and conflict in a globalising world first appeared. Among the other people who have contributed to this undertaking in various ways, I am also obliged to Massimo Mugnai for his suggestions on the logic of analogy; to Dimitri d’Andrea for sharing with me his meticulous knowledge of Hobbes’s texts; to Augusta Marchini, Anna Loretoni, Thomas Pogge, Otfried Hoeffe and Katrin Flikschuh for reading and commenting on the chapter on Kant, a version of which appeared in the December 2003 Journal of Political Philosophy under the title ‘The Domestic Analogy and the Kantian Project of Perpetual Peace’. A German version of the same paper was also presented and discussed at the ‘Globale Gerechtigkeit/Global Justice’ conference held in Florence from 6 to 9 December 2001 and published by Frommann-Holzboog among the conference papers edited by J-Ch. Merle. xi

xii Acknowledgements

I would also like to thank Mouloud Boumghar for reading and commenting on the parts dealing with international law issues. Regarding the chapters on contemporary international relations theories, I benefited from the precious suggestions of Sonia Lucarelli, Rodolfo Ragionieri and Jan Zielonka. The theories upheld in the epilogue to this book are taken in part from the essay ‘Globalisation: Sovereignty or Anarchy beyond Modernity?’ (Florence, EUI Working Papers, November 2002), which I discussed on several occasions with Carol Gould, Peter Wagner and Gianfranco Poggi. I am also grateful to all of them for their comments and critical observations. Finally, for reading the entire work, I am grateful to Luca Baccelli, Alessandro Cecchieri, Benoit Challand, Marco Galvagni and Danilo Zolo, whose support has been fundamental in encouraging me to pursue this undertaking.

Figure 1

Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651).

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Introduction

The image in Figure 1 is very familiar to scholars of political philosophy. The figure of the great man made up of many single men, sword in one hand and crosier in the other, symbols of worldly and spiritual power respectively, ruling over a vast territory, is the image that Hobbes wanted on the title page of his Leviathan. And this image is indeed the symbol of the latter: the Leviathan State, to which men give their freedom in exchange for protection, does not appear in the guise of the biblical monster of the same name, the Leviathan, but as a great man consisting of many individuals whom he himself resembles. The image of the magnum corpus is a recurrent metaphor in political thought. From Plato onwards, this image has been employed many times by philosophers and political thinkers. While in ancient times it was mainly used to underline the organicist nature of the polis, in the modern era it appears to take on further meanings. Hobbes’s Leviathan is not just a great man, but also a monster and a mortal god, whose power, as we read on the title page, on earth is without compare (Non est potestas super terram quae comparetur ei, Job, 41: 24). The Leviathan State at once represents and transcends the single individuals from whence it originates: it is an artificial person born of the desire of single individuals, but, once created, it is a monstrous being, due to the terror that its power incites, and a mortal god, because on earth it knows no superior being to itself (Hobbes 1968, XVII). Although it is mortal – since should it fail to guarantee protection for its citizens, the state is dissolved – it is nonetheless a being whose existence transcends that of its subjects, and who is therefore considered an independent person from them. This is not the only analogy Hobbes makes between state and person. In presenting his conception of the state of nature, the condition of individuals prior to the establishment of the political body, as a condition of 1

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Men and States

war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes), he observes that even though there has never existed such a state of war among individuals in any place or time, sovereign states, constantly in the posture of gladiators, their weapons pointing against each other, are an example of such a condition (Hobbes 1968, XIII). Having established this additional analogy between the state of nature and international relations, Hobbes then adds a significant restriction: while individuals are prompted to leave behind the state of nature, states guarantee the conditions in which the citizens’ lives may flourish precisely because they are sovereigns and therefore not subjected to any common power (superiorem non recognoscentes). This is the reason why international ‘anarchy’ is ultimately not as troublesome as civil ‘anarchy’ (Hobbes 1968, XIII) and why therefore the analogy between them is incomplete. While in Hobbes the analogy between the state of nature and international relations is only partial, after him other authors went further, applying to states the same arguments developed by Hobbes in his theory of political order among individuals. According to the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, for example, if states stand before each other like gladiators, always ready to invade each other as soon as the opportunity arises, this is due to the condition of international anarchy: in the same way as individuals are prompted to leave behind such a condition and through a social contract create a superior power to be subject to, states should break away from the international anarchy in which they find themselves and submit to a supreme authority that guarantees perpetual peace (Saint-Pierre 1717). The analogy between states and individuals and the consequent application of the syntax of natural law (state of nature and social contract) to international relations played a fundamental role in Enlightenment projects for perpetual peace. Again based on such an analogy, for example, is the project to reorganise European society proposed by SaintSimon in 1814: despite being limited to Europe alone, this project is based on the very idea that European peace and prosperity cannot be guaranteed without establishing a great Leviathan which relates to the various peoples in the same way as domestic governments do to single individuals (Saint-Simon 1967). In applying to international relations the same categories used to theorise political order among individuals these authors reflect a rationalist attitude towards the problems of peace and war, and boundless faith in the law as the means for governing both men and states alike: here the faith typical of the Enlightenment in the possibility of humankind’s progression combines with the idea that by treating states as individuals

Introduction

3

it is possible to guarantee the same order in relations among the former as the state guarantees it among the latter. The idea of an analogy between domestic and international order would continue to make its mark later on, not only among philosophers, but also among jurists and politicians. Among the international law theorists, for example, there were both those who supported the idea of the latter having a specific nature and, on the other hand, those who claimed it was incomplete, that is, who maintained that a guarantee of lasting peace among states could only be achieved by developing an international law following the same lines as the state system.1 Backing for this idea increased dramatically following the devastating events of the First World War. Even authors who before the war had been advocates of the specificity of international law found themselves upholding the need for legal tools more similar to those of the state in order to guarantee an ordered international life. It was in this general climate that the League of Nations was created, in which the idea of a possible analogy between governing men and governing states played a fundamental role. This analogy was perhaps never so evident as in article 11 of the Covenant establishing the League of Nations, which stated the so-called principle of the indivisibility of peace, that is, the idea that every war or threat of war not only concerned those directly involved, but the whole League of Nations. This principle relates to an analogy with the concept, typical of domestic public law, of criminal responsibility: while in the case of civil responsibility whoever infringes a contract thereby inflicts wrong on the other party, in the idea of criminal responsibility the wrong is seen to be directed against the whole community, because the latter is equally interested in punishing and repressing the criminal offence. While the Enlightenment projects for perpetual peace were mainly aimed at creating international legislative bodies, such as the European Parliament proposed by Saint-Simon on the basis of an analogy with the English constitutional model (Saint-Simon 1967), the proposals for reforming the international system following the First World War above all set their sights on creating a judicial system that obliged adversaries to find a peaceful solution to controversies. However, the League of Nations, which came about as an association of sovereign states with the purpose of promoting cooperation, peace and security, would not bear up, as is known, to the worsening international situation of the 1930s. Despite its failure to prevent the outbreak of the Second World War, it was to be the very League of Nations that was used as a model for building the United Nations. Nevertheless, the issue on which the writers of

4

Men and States

the Charter establishing the United Nations were most eager to go one step beyond the League of Nations’ Covenant was limiting the use of force, and it was here that the idea of drawing closer to the domestic juridical system would prevail. Indeed, the charter did not stop at setting out the principle of indivisible peace, but prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity and independence of any state (Article 2, Clause 4). Moreover, while in the League of Nations it was the single state that decided whether to intervene against another state that had shattered the peace, in the United Nations it is the Security Council that takes the binding decisions on this subject and the states have, in principle, to undertake to identify with its action (Article 24, Clause 1). According to some interpretations, these innovations, which were only possible by paying the price of giving the great powers the right to veto on non-procedural issues, have been conceived of on the basis of an analogy with domestic legal systems, and, in particular, in reference to what has been called the ‘police analogy’ (Suganami 1989). The aim of this book is to provide the means for assessing this type of analogy as well as the related problems. Among the latter, central attention will be devoted to that of the nature of the state. In this, my approach will be specifically theoretical: while the aim of those who have systematically dealt with the topic until now was mainly polemical or historical, in that they tried to use the domestic analogy as a polemic weapon (Bull 1966a, 1977) or to reconstruct the role it played within historically relevant world order proposals (Suganami 1989), the objective of this work is to break down this analogy and analyse its conceptual preconditions, that is, reconstruct the conceptual problems that it conceals. The reason this is necessary is due in the first place to the fact that this analogy between ways of governing men and ways of governing states is still very influential in our global age. On the one hand, many of the present-day proposals for a cosmopolitan democracy can be traced back more or less explicitly to reasoning based on an analogy with the domestic model of political system;2 on the other hand, as we will see, also in approaches not necessarily directed at getting rid of the current system of sovereign states, we often find arguments based on some form of analogy drawn from that model. For example, the principle of the incompleteness of international law seems to be based on a more or less explicit analogy with the domestic juridical system: we can only claim that something is incomplete by referring to a model taken as a more or less explicit end.3 And, as we will see, even realist approaches

Introduction

5

to world politics, which are usually critical of world state proposals, at times contain elements of the domestic analogy. The emergence of the phenomena of globalisation seems to have generated additional arguments supporting such an analogy: by eroding national borders, globalisation and interdependence, it is said to have opened the doors to the possibility of reproducing on a world scale those institutions, typical of the sovereign state, used for centuries to guarantee order among individuals. Whether this reproduction is seen as total, as in world state proposals, or partial, in that only some of the state institutions are reproduced on a global scale, in both cases these arguments are based on extending institutional models taken from the experience of the modern sovereign state to the international level by analogy. Indeed, it would seem that the emergence of global phenomena such as the nuclear threat and environmental challenges has plunged humanity back into a Hobbesian state of nature. Already in the 1960s, faced with the terror aroused by the nuclear arms race, Martin Wight in England and Norberto Bobbio in Italy asked themselves whether there were any empirical foundations to the claim that just as much misery resulted from international as from civil anarchy (Wight 1996; Bobbio 1984). Wight did not draw any consequence from this, while Bobbio went so far as to suggest the need to create a world state: in the same way that it is first of all necessary that all men in the state of nature renounce the use of force and then attribute it in a monopolist form to a single power, states would have to fulfil an analogous passage from the current situation of various centres of power to concentrating power in a new and supreme body with the same monopoly of force towards the single states as the state towards single individuals (Bobbio 1984: 85). Bobbio wrote in the 1960s. Today, in an age in which not only the nuclear threat continues to exist, but in which the world seems to have become one and the fate of some islands in the Pacific ends up depending on the millions of car drivers on the other side of the globe, it could be said there are additional arguments in favour of such an analogy. We will come back to this point later on. Here suffice to observe that the very simplicity of this analogy can be a sign of its weakness. According to Hedley Bull, the argument drawn from modern political theory according to which the subjection to a common power is the condition for social order among states in the same way as for individuals, which he christened the ‘domestic analogy’, is a weak form of reasoning which we must free ourselves from as soon as possible if we want to grasp the specific nature of international order (Bull 1966a: 45). While claiming the status of an autonomous academic discipline for

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Men and States

International Relations, Bull criticised resorting to the domestic analogy as a sign of infancy in the subject: instead of starting from analogies taken from the domestic model of political order, we should look to the specific characteristics of a particular type of society: the anarchical society of states (Bull 1977). As we will see, the path followed by International Relations to become an autonomous discipline included taking up a critical stance towards what, to follow Bull, from now on I will call the domestic analogy (Chapter 1). In the first place, we should observe that the term domestic analogy and the accompanying debate has had a critical function: the use of analogies taken from the domestic sphere began to come under discussion when the doubts over its validity became more rooted (section 1.1). Nevertheless, as we will see, Bull’s criticism of the analogy as a weak form of reasoning, or as a sign of infancy within a subject, seems to miss the target: according to the most recent theories, the use of analogies is an extremely important heuristic tool and form of argument in scientific research (section 1.2). A brief reflection on the nature of this type of reasoning can also show how forms of argumentation apparently based on analogy, which Bull considers implicit in Kant’s project for perpetual peace, for example, are in fact based on a deduction made from a normative proposition: in these cases we are applying a principle that is valid due to its normative value, not because it has an analogical basis. Thus, in order to analyse if the domestic analogy works, it becomes necessary to give an alternative definition to the one provided by Bull (section 1.2). Taking such alternative definition as a starting point, it will also become more clear as to which preconditions are required by a line of reasoning based on the domestic analogy: (1) the extension to the international sphere of a proposition drawn from the domestic sphere; (2) the idea that between the domestic and international spheres there are certain similarities (positive moment of the analogy), and, finally, (3) the existence between the two spheres of a sufficient degree of diversity to be able to speak of two separate domains, that is, what I will call the negative moment of the analogy (section 1.3). As this discussion will show, the problems of the domestic analogy arise not so much from its being a weak form of reasoning because, as Bull claims, it is analogical, but from the fact that it transforms a model – that of the sovereign state – into a paradigm of universal value which is limited as regards history and problematic in normative terms. Disentangling the domestic analogy will then be my starting point for analysing the way in which such a form of reasoning works in modern (Chapter 2) and in contemporary political thought (Chapter 3).

Introduction

7

In this reconstruction, I will use the same classification of three traditions of international theory proposed by Martin Wight: realist (or Machiavellian), idealist (or Kantian) and, lastly, rationalist (or Grotian),4 to which Wight himself and his follower Bull belong. As we will see, Hobbes’s realist reflections on international relations show some elements of the domestic analogy, amongst which the idea of an international state of nature, but, contrary to what some interpretations have considered implicit in his reasoning, Hobbes’s thought remains fundamentally hostile to the domestic analogy because the analogy between an international and individual state of nature is interrupted at the point where the basic mechanism of political obligation comes into action: the equal distribution of the fear of violent death (section 2.1). At this point in my line of argument, I will try to underline how in reality the concept of the domestic analogy is not a monolithic whole, but a complex reasoning, comprising various preconditions that should be kept apart and discussed separately. Chapter 2.2 will try to show how the project of perpetual peace proposed by Kant which, according to most interpretations, is the typical example of a line of argument built upon the domestic analogy, is instead based on deducing and applying a normative proposition: more than the domestic analogy, in this case we are dealing with deducing a principle (according to which those who can harm the other must be able to enter a juridical relationship with them) from the pure concept of law which is then applied to states and individuals without distinction. As we will see, this could also throw light on one of the problems that have most perplexed interpreters of Kant, that is, how it is possible that Kant sways, at times within the same text, between the two institutional solutions of a federation of states (Völkerbund) and a republican world state (Weltrepublik). While the head of that idealist tradition which Bull interprets as being more inclined towards the domestic analogy thus appears fundamentally critical towards it, Grotius, the greatest representative of the tradition which should on the other hand be more hostile towards it, seems to make significant and repeated concessions to such an analogy (section 2.3). In particular, Grotius’s conception of just war as war fought in the name of the entire international community seems to conceal the form of domestic analogy that has been dubbed the ‘police analogy’ (Suganami 1989). As we move to contemporary international relations theories, we can see an even more distant stance from the domestic analogy. Contemporary approaches cannot but reflect the consequences of the global transformations we are living in. While Kant, who was not a supporter

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Men and States

of the domestic analogy, accepts the idea of the state as a person, more recent cosmopolitan proposals, such as the one by Charles Beitz, not only make explicit criticisms of the domestic analogy, but also make this criticism the basis for claiming that the current system of states could be the most suitable institutional solution to applying principles of cosmopolitan justice (section 3.1). In this case, adopting a cosmopolitan philosophical viewpoint which takes individuals as the normative starting point and considers the rights and duties of states to be derived from those originally pertaining to individuals seems to act as a safeguard against falling back on a possible form of domestic analogy. While, therefore, we have to distinguish between a philosophical cosmopolitism not necessarily inclined towards the domestic analogy, and an institutional cosmopolitism which fully accepts it as it aims to reproduce the sovereign state model on a universal scale, we also have to recognise that even realist conceptions can conceal some forms of domestic analogy. For example, a conception such as Kenneth Waltz’s structural neorealism, based on the assumption that states are rational and unitary actors conceived of by analogy with individuals and the anarchy of the international system as the fundamental problem of international relations, implicitly rely on domestic analogy-style arguments, accepting at least some of its fundamental presuppositions (section 3.2). The tradition of thought that seems to depart furthest from the domestic analogy are the rationalists. One of the most significant expressions of contemporary rationalism is Robert Keohane’s neoinstitutionalism. In particular, by underlining the role of institutions typical of the international system in creating order, Keohane’s institutionalism assumes that it is possible to create order even in absence of a sovereign enforcer, as supporters of the classical form of the domestic analogy maintain (section 3.3). At this point, Wight’s classification of international theory into three traditions of thought reveals its limits. As we will see, although helpful in order to understand how the different traditions relate to the domestic analogy, Wight’s tripartition is like a ladder that we must be ready to leave behind as soon as we reach the top if we want to expand our horizons. This will be done in section 3.4 which analyses the role that the domestic analogy plays in theories of international politics that go beyond the three traditions. While constructivists point to the constructed nature of both our social world and our knowledge of it and therefore tend to criticise the idea that the experience of the modern state could be assumed as a paradigm of universal value, significant exceptions, such as Wendt’s theory of the state as a person, are always

Introduction

9

possible. On the other hand, by putting emphasis on categories other than the modern state (respectively modernity, classes and gender), more radical forms of constructivism such as postmodernism, together with Marxism and feminism implicitly distance themselves from the domestic analogy. Reconstructing the feminist critique of the gender bias in the classical and still dominant theory of the state is also a way for explaining the title of this book. ‘Men and States’, instead of more generally ‘human beings and states’, reflects a deep awareness of the gender prejudice of many of the theories analysed in this book. Had the face of the Leviathan in Figure 1 been that of a female, the sovereign power would have been conceived of differently and this ultimately would have been another book. Instead, it is a fact that most classical thinkers thought of the state as originated by a social contract that included only men. The classical social contract was also a ‘sexual contract’ (Pateman 1988). Although this part of the agreement is never mentioned, the social contract for the creation of the sovereign power is based on the systematic exclusion of women from the public sphere and their relegation to the private one. And there are reasons to suspect that even today, in a world where official world politics is still to a large extent in the hands of men, not to mention the severe violations of their basic rights that women suffer in many parts of the globe, the gender bias has not yet completely disappeared either in reality or in the representation of international life (section 3.4). If feminism radically questions the very presuppositions of the domestic analogy in that it shows that no separation between the ‘domestic’ (in the wide sense of the term, also including the family) and the ‘international’ exists, it is with the emergence of globalisation that the distinction collapses. Globalisation questions the very elementary assumptions of the domestic analogy. In spite of the absence of a sovereign to enforce order, a form of government (or governance) of globalisation already exists. While the official places of democratic representation are being increasingly bereft of their effective power, global politics is being carried out more and more through the action of institutions that do not even aspire to democracy (Epilogue). Faced with the challenges of the world of global politics, both political philosophy and International Relations are called upon to rethink their old categories and formulate new ones. One of the inescapable points of this rethink seems to be the role of the model of political and social order embodied by the modern state. According to some interpretations, the lack of a great tradition of reflection on international

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Men and States

relations is due to the influence of that very model: for centuries the sovereign state seemed to be the culmination of politics, everything outside of it being mere ‘relations’, worthy at most of an appendix chapter in books of political theory (Wight 1996). In a world in which borders are questioned, together with the sovereign state model, we should also rethink the very distinction between ‘political theory’ and ‘International Relations’. Conceptually speaking, there are indeed two basic roads for maintaining a distinction between political philosophy (or theory)5 and International Relations. The first points to a radical difference in terms of the subject of the two disciplines, whereas the second points to a difference in methods. According to the first, political theory and political philosophy concern the problems that arise within the state, whereas International Relations focuses on those that emerge among them. As I have already suggested but shall see in more detail in the course of this work, such a distinction does not hold, or at least it no longer does: in a globalising world, political philosophy can no longer ignore what happens among states, while International Relations has to consider what happens within them. Even more: both have to focus on what happens in the space that is neither totally within states nor totally among them and constitutes the space par excellence of global and glocal6 interactions. Together with the rigid separation between the different objects of analysis, the distinction between the different methods is also questioned. If the subject of political philosophy and International Relations is to a large extent the same, then no rigid methodological opposition is justifiable. In particular, once we get rid of the old positivistic idea according to which philosophy is only normative and International Relations only descriptive, there is no a priori reason why there should not be a more fruitful osmosis between the two. In a world in which the dichotomy of ‘facts’ versus ‘values’ has collapsed, because we have come to recognise that facts can also be soaked with values (Putnam 2002), there is no a priori reason to maintain that political philosophy should be only normative and International Relations descriptive. Although both disciplines can and will probably maintain their specificity, there is space for a more general ‘global political theory’ between the two.

1 The Domestic Analogy

Although wide use of analogies taken from the experience of individuals within states has been made since the outset in reflections on international relations, the domestic analogy label and alongside that the first explicit formulation of the problem referred to by this designation are relatively recent. Furthermore, as we will see, the term domestic analogy originally had a critical function: the use of analogies taken from political theory began to be problematised when seeds of doubts were sown over its validity. Criticism of the domestic analogy was originally linked to international relations’ claim to independence as an autonomous academic discipline. Resorting to analogies taken from the experience of individuals within states was seen as a sign of infancy in a nascent discipline which was still too heavily dependent on models of political and social order drawn up by modern political theory (section 1.1). Regarding this criticism of the domestic analogy, the first step of this work is to ask what reasoning by analogy consists of, and what its gnosiological capacity is, that is, if it should be considered a mere sign of infancy in a discipline (section 1.2). Only thereafter will I deal with the particular strain of analogical reasoning indicated by the term domestic analogy. Through a discussion of the definition of this type of reasoning, I will demonstrate the limits of the original definition and propose an alternative one (section 1.3). Then the last step will be to ask what conditions are needed to apply that definition of the domestic analogy and hence its degree of reliability (section 1.3).

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1.1 The origins of the debate The expression ‘domestic analogy’ came about in the debate within the so-called English School of international relations. Drawing from Manning’s legacy, the school began to flourish above all after the Second World War around the activities of the British Committee for the Theory of International Politics. Its exponents were united through their commonly recognising the existence of a certain degree of international order based on the operation of institutions typical of the international system (hence the name British Institutionalism). Among its leading figures were Alan James, R. J. Vincent and Martin Wight. The latter was the mentor of Hedley Bull, the author who made the ‘domestic analogy’ a popular expression (Bull 1966a, 1966b, 1977). After a period of relative decline, so much so that in 1981 a famous essay called for it to wind up,1 the so-called English School has recently been the subject of heated debate.2 For some, today it represents both an empirical and theoretical body of literature started by the reflections of the authors quoted above. Yet their contribution is considered a mere starting point. At times the term ‘English School’ has seemed to denote more generally a typically British brand of reflection on international relations contrasting with the American production (hence the more general name of ‘English School theory’).3 As early as 1992, the contribution of the school could be summed up as a variety of theoretical inquiries which conceive of international relations as a world not merely of power and prudence or wealth or capability or domination but also as one of recognition, association, membership, equality, equity, legitimate interests, rights, reciprocity, customs and conventions, agreements and disagreements, disputes, offences, injuries, damages, reparations and the rest: the normative vocabulary of human conduct. ( Jackson 1992: 271) The term ‘domestic analogy’ was used for the first time by Manning, one of the most illustrious progenitors of this school, in a lesson on the topic of ‘The Future of the Collective System’ held in 1935 at the Geneva Institute of International Relations. In those very years which saw the triumph of the idea that the international system should develop along the lines of the state system, Manning criticised this position by underlining the structural differences existing between international and domestic society.4

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According to Manning, these differences consist in primis of the fact that the units comprising them are different: states in the first case, individuals in the second. As he put it: The units of our [international] society, if ultimately and in fact individuals, are immediately and in effect something else. Our personnel are not real persons. They are States – mere notional entities, conceived of rather than found, and though personified in the habits of our thinking and our speech, yet intrinsically other than the men and women that we see. (Manning 1936: 159) From this passage it clearly emerges that according to Manning, the components, states on the one hand and individuals on the other, do not differ due to some extrinsic characteristic, but due to their very ontological status: mere ‘notional entities’ in the first case, and something that is ‘found’ in the second. Both domestic and international society are social realities with an intersubjective type of existence; but while in the first case this reality consists of individuals, empirically given phenomenal entities, instead in the second we are dealing with a notional entity comprising only notional entities. This is one of the crucial points of his major work, The Nature of International Society (Manning 1975). This work was the result of an entire lifetime’s thinking on international relations and its central point was that within the multifaceted, multilayered social cosmos there existed a particular social realm sufficiently discrete, important and intelligible to deserve treatment as a distinct field of academic enquiry: the society of sovereign states (Wilson 2004: 759).5 This does not mean such a society is a palpable, physical reality, whereas it certainly is a fact, but a fact of a particular kind. Real societies are composed of flesh and blood human beings, while international society is made of states. According to Manning’s definition, the state is a ‘socially prevalent idea’: its territory, its population and its government are indeed observable facts, but never, not even together, can they constitute a state in its entirety (Manning 1975: 11–27). This is what prompts his criticism of the states–individuals analogy which, as we will see, is the keystone for the classic form of domestic analogy: states are not rational and unitary actors like individuals; even though, due to our tendency to personify states, we speak of their ‘psychology’, it is still us who, by observing how they behave, bestow upon them unitary aims and intentions (Manning 1936: 161). Manning is very clear on this point: the

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tendency to treat states as if they were individuals is a ploy of the mind that comes naturally but in no way should it allow us to forget the fundamental difference that exists between two ontologically different beings: concrete human beings on the one hand and socially prevalent ideas on the other. In this sense, Manning was therefore what we would today call a ‘constructivist’ as he saw the society of states as a social construct which exists only insofar as people behave as if it existed.6 As a consequence, the society of states is subject to processes of interpretation and reinterpretation. This insight at times collides with Manning’s more general conservative attitude. By this I do not simply mean that his few and concrete pronouncements on world affairs are generally conservative – which is certainly true (Wilson 2004: 762) – but more generally that he tends to see the deep structure of international affairs as immutable. Manning indeed explicitly says that the structure of international society is ‘virtually unalterable’ and that it is a ‘built in feature of that structure’ (Manning 1975: 71). Still, it can be argued that he anticipates many important points that would later be developed by constructivism within international relations, but also by social constructivism more generally. This is evident not just in his definition of the state as a socially prevalent idea, but also in his more general characterisation of the ‘collective life of social man’ as not merely diamond-like, a thing with facets, but ‘pudding-like, a compound of ingredients; not to say skein-like, a tangle with threads; and weather-like, the resolution of a complex of inter-acting forces; and battle-like, the occasion of a matching of nerves and skills with nerves and skills’ (Manning 1975: 210).7 Although real societies and societies of states differ in many important respects, one may still argue that, despite being on completely heterogeneous levels, there is nevertheless a structural analogy between them. But, Manning observes, international and domestic society also differ under this respect: the very bases of the association are the states’ sovereignty and independence on the one hand, and ultimately the subordination of the party to the whole, of the citizen to the state on the other. The principle of sovereignty and the independence of the single units is what set apart the constitutional foundation of international order from its counterpart in the national context (Manning 1936). Finally, Manning points out that the juridical system is also different, as international law is lacking the coercive element that gives domestic law its characteristic function of controlling society. This does not mean that international law is not law real and proper; which, in his view,

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would be like claiming that a musical composition does not exist unless performed: once composed, the ‘music’ exists even if no instrument is playing it at that moment (Manning 1936: 164). Therefore, although international law is law in the full meaning of the term, we must nevertheless recognise that it constitutes a particular type of law. Manning concludes that in analysing the system of states, analogies taken from domestic experience can be admitted only with the highest degree of hesitation (Manning 1936: 165). It is indeed a problem sui generis, the solution to which requires an independent study which does not unquestioningly use the solutions drawn up to resolve the problem of domestic order. As a consequence, he rejects the idea that the construction of a world state is a necessary condition for abolishing war. This is why, on the level of political project, he suggests making sure that the existing tools really do work,8 instead of conjecturing an improbable amendment of the League of Nations Covenant. This view was drawn up by Manning in the interwar years, in the very moment when the study of international relations was becoming an autonomous academic discipline.9 This conception was to have a profound influence on the other members of the English School of International Relations, especially as regards recognising the specific nature of the system of states and international relations’ consequent claim for autonomy. While in Manning the term ‘domestic analogy’ still quite generically signifies an analogy drawn from the experience gained within states, the term was to be given a more precise meaning by Hedley Bull, who would make this concept one of the main targets of his polemics. By ‘domestic analogy’, Bull means the argument from the experience of individual men in domestic society to the experience of states, according to which the need of individual men to stand in awe of a common power in order to live in peace is a ground for holding that states must do the same. The conditions of an orderly social life, on this view, are the same among states as they are within them: they require that the institutions of domestic society be reproduced on a universal scale. (Bull 1966a: 35) From this definition it clearly emerges that what Bull is interested in is the problem of international order and, in particular, recognition of the fact that maintaining it does not necessarily depend on a sovereign authority holding the monopoly of legitimate coercion, as happens in

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the domestic sphere. Bull rejects the idea that the model of domestic society within which order is maintained by centralising political power can be used to understand the conditions of international order. By ‘social order’, Bull intends a model of interaction that upholds the elementary and primary ends of social life, that is, security against violence, preservation of pacts and stability of possession. In this sense, order is guaranteed through the perception of common interests in those ends, through rules prescribing the model of conduct to uphold them, and through institutions10 that make these rules effective (Bull 1977: 53). Hence, order is not the same as a simple regular pattern of events; it also includes the actors’ (un)conscious pursuit of some goals. Bull defines these as ‘elementary’, as no social life is possible outside them, and ‘primary’, as they are compatible with additional objectives that can be prescribed when needed on the basis of the most different values – from perpetual peace to classless society (Cerutti 1995). International order, in turn, is defined as the model or set-up of international activity that supports, in addition to the goals of any social life (limiting violence, respect of pacts, stability of possession), those ends specific to the society of states, that is, in order of priority, the very preservation of the society of states, the maintenance of its members’ sovereignty, and peace (Bull 1977: 16–20). Understood as such, international order is not the opposite of anarchy, that is, the absence of government, but of chaos and disorder. This is guaranteed by the fact that in their relations states give rise not only to a system, a pattern of interaction such that one has to take into consideration the conduct of the other, but to an international society. Upon the latter, in that it lacks a common government, Bull bestows the provocative definition of ‘anarchical society’.11 Despite the lack of a common government, the states make a society insofar as, by sharing certain interests and values, they are perceived as bound to a set of rules of conduct and to the work of common institutions. Among the institutions belonging to international society are the balance of power, international law, diplomacy, the role of the great powers and war itself. In order for Bull to be able to claim the existence of an international society, it ends up being an obligatory step for him to criticise the idea according to which no ordered social life is possible in a condition of anarchy. This position is shared, according to Bull, both by the so-called realist thinkers, who apply the concept of the state of nature to international relations, and by the supporters of the world state, who, by stretching the domestic analogy to the limit, extend the analogy so far as to embrace the concept of social contract (Bull 1966a).

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Against the former, Bull observes that, of the elements characterising the state of nature as meant by Hobbes, the only one that seems to adapt to international relations is war,12 with the fundamental difference that through this states provide the domestic conditions in which the life of individuals may prosper. Moreover, states are not vulnerable like individuals to violent attacks and, above all, they are not all vulnerable in the same way: while by nature individuals are so equal that ‘the weakest is strong enough to kill the strongest’, among states the opposite could be said to be true (Bull 1966a, 1981). Even if insecurity, the fundamental characteristic of the state of nature meant as a condition of potential war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes), exists in international society, it is not distributed equally among its members. This is why, in the last analysis, international anarchy is much more bearable than civil anarchy. If we had to compare international relations to a pre-contractual state of nature, we should choose, Bull observes, the description by Locke, and not that of Hobbes: in the concept of a society without government, whose members must themselves pass judgement and apply the laws, we can indeed make out the traits of international society described by many thinkers in the international law tradition (Bull 1966a: 44). Nevertheless, Bull’s conclusion totally refutes the possibility of continuing on this interpretative path: We must, however, at some point abandon the domestic analogy altogether. Not only is this because the attempt to understand something by means of analogies with something else is a sign of infancy in a subject, an indication of lack of familiarity with our own subject-matter. But also because international society is unique, and owes its character to qualities that are peculiar to the situation of sovereign states. (Bull 1966a: 45) Therefore, according to Bull, using categories taken from political theory is, in the best of cases, a sign of the lack of more mature theoretical tools; in any case, this use is misleading because it prevents us from grasping the specific nature of the international system. This series of objections also holds true against the supporters of the world state who agree with realists on the description of international relations in terms of potential war of all against all, the difference being that they deem it possible and desirable to provide a remedy in the form of a social contract between states (Bull 1966a). This latter possibility is something that Bull categorically excludes: it would not be desirable,

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seeing that, to use a Kantian expression, a world state could turn into the most terrible despotism, and it would not even manage to eliminate the problem of war as what set out as a war between states would simply become civil war. In addition, even if it were desirable, it would nevertheless not be possible due to what Bull, following Wight, calls the ‘Kantian paradox’: if the condition in which states find themselves really is that Hobbesian condition in which ‘covenants, without the sword, are but words’, then he does not see how it is possible to have a contract between states that would establish a world state; if, instead, in this condition the ‘covenants without the sword’ are something more than mere words, due to which, far from being brutal bellum omnium contra omnes, it demonstrates a certain degree of order, then there is no longer any reason for which states should put an end to it (Bull 1966a: 49). Against these two traditions, realist and idealist, which, in line with the well-known definitions of Martin Wight, we can also call ‘Machiavellian’ and ‘Kantian’, Bull sets the theorists of the society of states, particularly numerous among the international law theorists (Bull 1966b). These authors do indeed reject the domestic analogy as defined by Bull, as they recognise the existence of a set of rules, that is, international law, which link states together, giving rise to a society that is unique because it is not incompatible with the use of force by its members. Bull nevertheless distinguishes two possible conceptions of international society: on the one hand, the ‘solidarist’ conception, according to which there is a certain degree of solidarity among states concerning the application of the law, meaning that the international community as a whole should ascertain breaches and inflict any punishments; and on the other hand, the ‘pluralist’ conception, maintaining that the area of potential agreement among states is much smaller than required for that purpose (Bull 1966b).13 While authors like Lassa Oppenheim,14 who support the second idea, totally reject the domestic analogy, the supporters of the former make important concessions to it: an example is the position of Hugo Grotius who, with his theory of the legitimacy of war carried out for a just cause (ex justa causa), sees in war a crime or its punishment inflicted in the name of the whole international society, falling under what Suganami called the ‘police analogy’ (Suganami 1989).15 Bull’s criticism of the solidarist vision, which has came back into fashion last century, as shown by the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Charter of the United Nations, moves in two directions. Not only does it not correspond to reality, as according to Bull, among states

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the level of solidarity required for the application of international law does not exist, but it could even end up being harmful: since it imposes upon international society a tension that it cannot bear, it would have the effect of undermining the institutions’ effectiveness (Bull 1966b). In other words, Bull is critical both of the ‘cosmopolitan’ form of domestic analogy, as embodied in the proposals to constitute a world state, and of its ‘internationalist’ form, reflected in the developments of international law in the twentieth century. According to the latter, it is desirable that only some of the principles taken from the domestic sphere, and not the entire state model, are transferred, so that the structure of the system of sovereign states is not altered (Suganami 1989). In both forms, which can be ascribed to the two possible types of social contract, unlimited in the first case and limited in the second, Bull sees an unjustified extension to international relations of the means set aside for maintaining order among individuals in the state sphere, which, insofar as they interfere with the work of institutions that belong to international society, would not only be inopportune, but also harmful. Therefore, according to Bull, if we want to understand how international society works, we must free ourselves from any form of domestic analogy as quickly as possible: as Bull sees it, the latter is too weak a form of reasoning, a mere sign of infancy in the discipline, that is at the same time harmful, because by extending to the international sphere institutions set up to maintain order among individuals, we risk endangering the effectiveness of the very institutions of international society itself. In order to assess this conception, we now need to make some preliminary considerations. In particular, before going on to analyse the domestic analogy, we need to dwell on the concept of analogy, in order to first of all clarify if it should be considered, as in Bull’s view, a specious form of reasoning, or at least a sign of infancy in the discipline that uses it.

1.2 Analogical reasoning and the domestic analogy In the history of Western thought, it is possible to distinguish two fundamental meanings of the term ‘analogy’. According to the first meaning, analogy is the equality of relations between members of a proportion (Abbagnano 1971: 37–40). The term is used in this sense by Plato and Aristotle for instance (Kluxen 1971: 214). The latter, for example, in the Nicomachean Ethics distinguished between mathematical analogy, according to the equation (a:b) = (c:d), and geometric analogy,

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in which the second term is identical to a third, by which (a:b) = (b:d) (1131 a30-b3). Nevertheless in time the term began to be given a wider sense than this strict meaning by which analogy came to mean any extension of knowledge from one situation to another on the basis of the similarities between them (Abbagnano 1971: 37; Kluxen 1971: 214). This second meaning is the one most widely used in common language and in modern philosophy, while medieval scholars gave it a meaning somewhere between the two.16 Of course there are other possible meanings of the word, but all fall in one way or the other into one of the two semantic areas mentioned above, as a result of which in this investigation I will refer to these two. At the same time, though the two meanings must be kept apart, we should not neglect possible entanglements and overlapping. Indeed, the similarities upholding the extension of knowledge from one situation to another in the broader sense of the term analogy (the second meaning) can be conceived of as the equality of relations (the original meaning), as a result of which the two meanings of the term may find themselves converging. In its second and wider meaning, reasoning by analogy approaches induction, so much so that some authors have claimed that it is impossible to distinguish clearly between the two. According to David Hume, for example, at the basis of every inference, there must always be some sort of analogy, as ‘all arguments from experience are founded on the similarity, which we discover among natural objects, and by which we are induced to expect effects similar to those, which we have found to follow from such objects’ (Hume 2000: 31). On this point, Kant also seemed to agree with Hume, at least at times: for Kant, analogy is an induction, merely an induction with respect to the predicate, insofar as on this basis if two things agree in all the attributes that I can make out in them, then the others will also agree (Kant 2004, XXIV: 287). As has recently been observed, the parallel between analogical inference and inductive inference nevertheless has significant limits (Cellucci 1997: 377). Kant himself stresses the difference between the two when he sums up their differences in the formula, ‘One in many, hence in all: induction; much in one (that is also in others), thus also the remainder in one: analogy’ (Kant 1988, 84: 137). More in general, we observe that inductive and analogical inference are interconnected only if limited to the positive moment of the analogy, but can in no way be ascribed to each other if we also consider the negative moment of the analogy (Cellucci 1997: 377). Indeed, while induction draws general

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conclusions from the cases observed, analogical inference is based not only on the knowledge of the similarities between the members of the analogy (what we could call the positive moment of the analogy), but also on the knowledge of the differences existing between them. This is what constitutes the negative moment of the analogy, something which is not found in inductive reasoning. Following on from this are two fundamental remarks for understanding how the particular type of reasoning represented by analogical inference works. The first concerns the importance of both the positive and the negative moments of the analogy. Indeed, should one of the two moments be lacking, when for example an analogy traced for a heuristic purpose proves to be so perfect that the differences between the two members of the analogy disappear, we can no longer speak of analogy, but rather of identity.17 This is a central point, and, though often neglected in literature, we will see that it is fundamental in distinguishing forms of reasoning based on the domestic analogy from others that are so only in appearance. The second remark concerns the epistemological status of reasoning by analogy. Already Kant seems to deny the cognitive value of analogy, in that he relegates inference by analogy to mere reflective judgement, which, by definition, does not possess cognitive value (Kant 2007, §90). A harsher criticism of the cognitive value of analogy is made by the logics and methodology of nineteenth-century science (Abbagnano 1971: 40). Mill, who couples analogy and induction to such a degree that he states that, from a certain point of view, ‘we have nothing here by which to discriminate analogy from induction’ (Mill 1973, VII: 555), is perhaps one of the harshest critics of the idea that analogy has the strength to provide proof. In his opinion, the extent to which this manner of reasoning can increase the probability of the conclusion cannot be determined, and, in any case, is quite modest, while the possibility that it could result in falsity remains very high (Mill 1973). Later on, part of twentieth-century philosophy would go against this devaluation of reasoning by analogy, also by restoring the original meaning of analogy as an equality of relations. Writing in 1905, Ernst Mach already underlined how all scientific hypotheses were stimulated by some type of analogy (Mach 1976). Nonetheless, in his view, the only heuristically valid analogy is the relationship between two different systems of concepts in which both their qualitative or absolute diversity as well as the isomorphism or relative similarity between them become evident if considered on the basis of the structure (Mach 1976).18 Therefore, for example, we can say that the analogy between the concepts of electrical

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and electrodynamic currents has proved to be valid as the two systems continue to have a similar structure. More recently, the role of the analogy has been reassessed through the study of the concept of models of scientific research (Hesse 1967). By distinguishing between positive, negative and neutral analogy, where the latter indicates the properties of a model which is not yet known to have positive or negative analogies, Mary Hesse underlined the very important function that the latter play in formulating scientific forecasts (Hesse 1966). As the example of the kinetic theory of gases shows, if gases are similar to billiard balls as regards motion and impact, then our knowledge of the mechanics of billiard balls really can allow us to make new predictions (Hesse 1966). Hence, analogy can lead to the advancement of scientific knowledge. Reasoning by analogy, therefore, seems to play a very important heuristic role in scientific research. Nevertheless there is still the problem of determining its specifically cognitive value. In this respect, we need to make some observations. First of all, as has been noted, we cannot but recognise its argumentative value, which is due to the fact that it can be counted on to support one hypothesis above the others (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969). At the same time, we must recognise that, in gnosiological terms, it remains unstable and precarious. This seems to be due to two factors, which are at the same time both the strength and weakness of this type of reasoning. In first place, the instability of reasoning by analogy seems to be linked to what I have defined as its negative moment. Indeed, with perhaps the partial exception of scientific models, the opponents of an analogy can always point to its negative moment, that is, the differences existing between the members of the analogy, to criticise the strength of its argumentation. For example, in the case of the analogy between states and individuals, we can always highlight the differences between the two members of the analogy so as to reject it as proving anything. As we have already seen, we can for example underline the ontological difference between empirically observable realities such as single individuals and purely notional entities such as states, or again emphasise the indivisibility of the first against the divisibility of the second. In this case, we can speak of a weak analogy or an analogy without a sufficient basis. On the other hand, even a perfect analogy tends to have a precarious constitution: in this case, the instability is due to the fact that when an analogy traced for a heuristic purpose proves to be so exact that the negative moment disappears, the analogy itself seems to vanish too.

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In such a case, we are no longer faced with an analogy between two different situations, but an identity. This is particularly important in the logic of juridical argumentation, where it is always necessary to distinguish between analogy and identity (Becker 1973). As I have noted, the use of analogy in the field of juridical argumentation is more limited than may be thought. It must be limited to comparing particular factors in juridical systems distinguished by time, geographical space or the subject matter being dealt with. On the contrary, every time we argue for or against applying a rule determined by new cases, for example to fill a gap in the juridical system, we are maintaining that there are not two distinct domains, but that we are dealing with the same field (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969). Torn between two opposing dangers, that is, of having too little or too great a foundation, the analogy therefore remains fundamentally precarious. It is in the difficult balance between the prevalence of the negative or positive moment that every form of analogical reasoning must find its own equilibrium. Nevertheless that does not mean that the use of analogies should be rejected a priori as a sign of the infancy of a subject (Bull 1977). Not only is it a deeply rooted and widespread form of reasoning, but it is also an extremely precious source of scientific innovation, to which we owe some of the most important scientific discoveries of our times.19 An analogy can perform a very important heuristic function in drawing up scientific theories, but can also count in favour of one argument against another in a line of reasoning. In all these cases, we can speak of a well-grounded analogy. If this is reasoning by analogy, what do we mean by domestic analogy? As we have seen, for Bull the systematic criticism of the domestic analogy is an obligatory step in claiming the existence of a society of states which, despite being anarchical, is nevertheless able to maintain, although with notable oscillations over the centuries, a certain degree of order. According to Bull, the domestic analogy is the argument, taken from the experience conducted by individuals in domestic society and applied to international relations, according to which the individuals’ need to be subject to a common power in order to live in peace is the basis for considering that states have to do the same thing; according to this line of reasoning, the conditions for an ordered social life are the same among states as within them, as a result of which the main route towards peace is to reproduce the institutions of domestic society on a universal scale (Bull 1966a). As we can see, this reasoning is structured upon an analogical inference, as it is based on extending the validity of a certain proposition X

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from one particular situation to another considered similar; the more similarity there is, or rather, the number and importance of the propositions valid for both situations, the greater the strength of the analogy. In this definition, the proposition X is equal to ‘subjection to a common power is a condition for social order’ and therefore refers to a specific type, however paradigmatic, as we will see, of domestic analogy. In the end, however, it is too restricted a definition of domestic analogy. First of all, it thus emerges that what interests Bull is the problem of international order, while it can be conjectured that the aim requiring the reproduction of national institutions on an international scale is not order, but another goal whose achievement on the international level is considered desirable, such as justice or well-being. The latter is what the representatives of so-called welfare internationalism held valuable, and what apparently also influenced the establishment of the specialised agencies of the United Nations; in their opinion what needs reproducing on an international level are only those institutions with the purpose of promoting social well-being, and not order per se (Suganami 1989). Secondly, the Hobbesian expression of ‘being subject to a common power’ reveals that when speaking of ‘institutions of domestic society’, Bull has in mind the modern state, that is, the holder of the monopoly of legitimate coercion. As a consequence, the form of domestic analogy that Bull refers to is mainly cosmopolitan. In reality, in order to have a proposal based on the domestic analogy, it is sufficient that the institution in question is first of all typical of the national sphere, or rather, that its efficacy in guaranteeing the desired end is proven by the experience of the single states. Thus, it is possible that, on the basis of the ‘internationalist’ form of domestic analogy, authors contrary to establishing a world state promote institutions that do not require the existence of an authority holding the monopoly of legitimate physical coercion, but whose efficacy in guaranteeing the desired objective is derived from the experience of the individuals within the state (Suganami 1989: 31). Thirdly, Bull’s definition seems to imply an analogy between states and individuals, that is, the personification of states, betrayed by the expression ‘states, like individuals’ (Bull 1977: 46), which, according to Suganami, is not a necessary condition of the domestic analogy. For example, the position of the supporters of functionalism, such as David Mitrany and Ernst Haas, embodies a form of domestic analogy that does not imply the personification of states (Suganami 1989: 120). The functionalism theory, first formulated by Mitrany, and then redrafted and applied to the case of the European Union by Haas, is based on the extension by analogy

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to the international sphere of the proposition, taken from experience in the domestic sphere, according to which there is a tendency among individuals to develop loyalty towards those institutions that are able to respond to their needs. The fundamental idea is that cooperation between states is what is needed in order to deal with imperative functions such as economic and financial interdependence, and technological and environmental challenges; this, and not political construction, is therefore the path to follow to form supranational institutions. For the purposes of our investigation, it is therefore a good idea to draw up a wider definition which takes into account the previous observations. A point of reference can be the definition given by Suganami, according to which the domestic analogy is ‘presumptive reasoning (or a line of argument embodying such reasoning) about international relations based on the assumption that since domestic and international phenomena are similar in a number of respects, a given proposition which holds true domestically, but whose validity is as yet uncertain internationally, will also hold true internationally’ (Suganami 1989: 24). A line of argument based on the domestic analogy therefore assumes that there are similarities between the two spheres, or rather, propositions that are valid for both; given these similarities, it is considered legitimate to conclude that a certain proposition, whose validity is only proven in the domestic sphere, will probably also be valid on an international level. Suganami uses the term ‘presumptive’ to qualify the cognitive value of reasoning by analogy. However, the term is too vague, as every form of reasoning is presumptive in the sense that they always ‘presume’ something. A philosophically more correct term would be probability. Of course, the probability that is based on such a type of reasoning is, as we have seen, quite a lot more precarious than what is at the basis of induction, but it is still probability that is at stake. Once the concept of domestic analogy has been redefined as such, it first becomes necessary to distinguish the domestic analogy from other forms of reasoning that can wrongly be associated with it. First of all, we must distinguish between reasonings that take on an inductive form and those based on an analogy real and proper. No matter how related the two are to the sphere of ‘probability’ in the wide sense, the two types of reasoning need to be kept separate, as underlined by Kant and contemporary philosophers of science (see above). Second, insofar as it is an extension of knowledge from the domestic to the international sphere, the domestic analogy must above all be distinguished from forms of logical deduction starting from a normative proposition. The latter, whether it is an axiom or moral principle,

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is assumed to be valid in any human context, whether domestic or international: for example, a form of reasoning arguing in favour of applying the pacta sunt servanda principle to international law, is not necessarily a form of domestic analogy insofar as its validity can be derived from a normative principle being applied to a particular case and not by the fact that the pacts are or must be respected within states. As we will see during our investigation, reflections based on this type of argument, that is, on a deduction starting from a normative proposition, have often been interpreted as forms of domestic analogy, but as the discussion of the Kantian project for perpetual peace shows, they are not based on an analogical line of reasoning. Now we have a working definition of domestic analogy which will allow us to analyse a wider spectrum of world politics theories compared to those which would fit Bull’s description. Before going on to reconstruct the role that the domestic analogy has played in them, it is nevertheless necessary to linger a little longer on this concept and to make some considerations on its basic components. In particular, it becomes necessary to try to disentangle the domestic analogy in order to reconstruct the presuppositions for applying this type of reasoning. By distinguishing between the different presuppositions of the domestic analogy, I will show that it is not a monolithic form of reasoning with the radical alternative of ‘all’ or ‘nothing’. In most cases, we will have to distinguish the levels of domestic analogy that are present in the different forms of reasoning, which, as we will see, tend to use it only in part, while backing up the rest of the reasoning with other forms of argument.

1.3 Disentangling the domestic analogy As I have shown, the domestic analogy, in the widest sense, is a type of reasoning based on the idea that since the two domains, the domestic and the international, are similar in many respects, a given proposition that is valid for the first universe in question will presumably also be so for the second. What assumptions are implicit in this type of argument? Insofar that it is a specifically analogical reasoning which extends the national to the international sphere, it presupposes at least the following conditions: (1) The proposition predicating the extension has to be drawn from domestic, that is, national experience;

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(2) The two levels – domestic and international – between which the analogy is traced must be sufficiently distinct; and (3) The same levels must however at the same time present a degree of similarity so as to justify extending the validity of the proposition in question from one to the other. As regards the first element, we can observe that in the classic form of domestic analogy, as expressed by Bull’s definition, what is extended by analogy is the idea that ‘subjection to a common power’ is the condition for social order. This is taken from the experience of individuals within domestic society and, in particular, from the history of the modern state. The experience we are referring to is what began in Europe in the sixteenth century, when well-defined political entities started to emerge from the medieval system of numerous intersecting and overlapping centres of power, characterised by their having achieved a monopoly of legitimate physical coercion within a particular territory and over a certain population (Weber 1979).20 In the modern state, the problem of order was resolved through unification and concentrating political power in the hands of the sovereign authority, and as a result of recognising no superiors (superiorem non recognoscens), the sovereign was the owner of the exclusive right to use force both within, against private violence, and outside the state, to defend its territory and its population against other sovereigns. The experience of the modern state was therefore one of sovereignty, which, as the supreme political power, was the political and juridical concept that allowed the modern state to take over from the medieval organisation of power, based on classes and estates on the one hand, and on the two general universalistic coordinates of the Pope and the Emperor, on the other (Matteucci 1993). The lesson that the supporters of the domestic analogy draw from this experience is that the main route to peace is through the concentration and centralisation of political power. However, they hence make a specific historic experience, in itself problematic in many ways, a paradigm of universal value. This is the critical observation put forward by the constructivist Ashley, according to which at the basis of the domestic analogy lies the tendency to envisage the sphere of politics according to the sovereignty-versus-anarchy dichotomy (Ashley 1995). By presenting sovereignty as the only alternative to anarchy, in turn seen as a condition of chaos needing to be overcome, they tend to conceive of the universe of politics as divided into two large spheres, in themselves

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dichotomies because at the same time they are both reciprocally exclusive and exhaustive of that universe.21 The ‘sovereignty-versus-anarchy’ pair constitutes a dichotomy as they are able to divide the universe of politics into two jointly exhaustive spheres – so that what does not belong to the domain of sovereignty is commonly considered to belong to that of anarchy – and, at the same time, they are mutually exclusive, because what is included in the first cannot be part of the second. As we can see, sovereignty is the strong term, that is, it is given a positive definition, while anarchy is usually defined in the negative as a lack of sovereignty. We may also argue that both terms stem from the two faces of sovereignty, the internal and the external: on the one side, there is the internal domain of sovereign power which does not recognise any superior power; on the other, we have the external anarchical domain of equally sovereign powers facing each other.22 According to its classical formulation, by ‘sovereignty’ we mean the existence of a supreme power, which is defined territorially and has the exclusive right to resort to force both internally, against private violence, and externally, against other sovereign entities (Bodin 1967). From its very first formulations the concept of sovereignty was strictly linked with that of the state, where this latter, as we have seen, following Max Weber, can be defined as an institution characterised by its monopoly of physical coercion over a specific territory (Weber 2004: 38). Sovereignty, as the claim to superiorem non recognoscens power within a specific territory, is indeed the political and juridical concept which supported the modern state in its fight against the two universalistic coordinates of the Pope and the Emperor. While the medieval system was characterised by a set of overlapping and interwoven authorities, the modern organisation of power appears as a system of homogeneous political entities which are territorially defined and aspire to the exclusive exercise of power.23 This is an absolute novelty in history: before modern times no power had ever presented itself as claiming exclusive sovereign command within a clearly defined territory. Political power need not be territorial and need not be territorially fixed. Furthermore, even where systems of rule are territorial, and even where territoriality is relatively fixed, the prevailing concept of territory need not entail mutual exclusion – the archetype of non-exclusive territorial rule being medieval Europe with its patchwork of geographically interwoven and overlapping rights of government.24 These two features of modern power – territoriality and exclusivity – create the conditions for a dichotomous view of politics, presenting

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the two spheres of sovereignty and anarchy as reciprocally exclusive. When political power started to be thought of as corresponding to a territorially defined political space and as recognising no superiors within it, that is, as internally sovereign, then it appeared unavoidable to conceive of the external relationships between these political entities as the anarchic clash among equally sovereign powers. According to the conceptual context, anarchy may then be understood either in its etymological meaning as a mere absence of government or, with a semantic slide, as a condition of chaos. In fact, as I will try to show, this semantic slide is typical of modern political thought. By presenting sovereignty as the only alternative not just to the absence of government, but also to chaos, some modern political theorists have pushed the concept of anarchy from its etymological meaning to the idea of a condition of disorder from which we should escape. In their attempt to provide justification for sovereign power, they present sovereignty as the only alternative to disorder and, thus, as the sine qua non condition of social order. As we will see in more detail later on, the thought of Thomas Hobbes seems in this case to be paradigmatic: he presents a condition of anarchy, both domestic and international, as necessarily implying chaos and disorder. Witness to the English Civil War, Hobbes devoted all his energy to showing that sovereignty was the only alternative to the anarchy of the state of nature. Since, according to its pessimistic anthropology, he conceived of this latter as a condition of war, where isolated individuals moved by antagonistic passions were continuously exposed to the danger of violent death, sovereignty was presented as an alternative not only to the absence of government, but also to a condition of chaos where men are like wolves to other men (homo homini lupus): only by associating with each other and placing themselves under a sovereign power through a social covenant (respectively, pactum unionis and pactum subjectionis) can individuals escape the state of nature. Still, according to Hobbes, sovereignty, which guaranteed peace within states, led to the necessary consequence of the condition of international anarchy. Not by chance did Hobbes devote only few pages of his main work, the Leviathan, to international relations. His problem was civil, not international, anarchy. As we shall see, this is a very common approach in modern political philosophy, however different the single conceptions of anarchy may be. The sovereign state appears to be the perfect model of political life. Political theorists dedicate to it all their energies, while international relations seem to deserve only secondary attention, an appendix chapter.

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One may now object that Hobbes’s conception is not representative of the natural law tradition as a whole and even less so of modern political theory. I will try to answer this problem in two steps. Concentrating on only those aspects which are relevant, I will first analyse the relationship between Hobbes’s thought and the natural law tradition and, second, its relationship with modern political theory. As many scholars have noticed, Hobbes occupies a particular position within the natural law tradition and contractarianism. The conceptual syntax by which this tradition is defined (state of nature, civil society and social contract) can have very different outcomes according to the philosophical and anthropological context. However, we could argue that always lying behind the dichotomy of civil society versus state of nature, which is defining to this tradition, is the dichotomy of sovereignty versus anarchy. Thus, however much conceptions of the state of nature may differ – sometimes considered as a war of all against all, sometimes as an imperfect social condition, and sometimes as the original phase of humankind when man was free and happy – this remains a condition from which we must exit to enter a civil society characterised by the existence of a sovereign power. Be this the absolute sovereignty of Thomas Hobbes, the limited type of John Locke or, finally, the popular sovereignty of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the establishment of sovereignty is always justified by contraposition with a state of nature that, however positively it is conceived, is still viewed as a condition of anarchy. The dichotomy of sovereignty versus anarchy, indeed, does not have a merely descriptive role: by opposing sovereignty to the disadvantages of an anarchical state of nature – ranging from the uncertainty of law enforcement (Locke) to the danger of violent death (Hobbes), it provides grounds for political obligation, a justification for loyalty towards the sovereign power. In modern contractarianism then, the sovereignty-versus-anarchy dichotomy plays a crucial role. First, it points to the relevant problems, those which deserve most attention – among these the anarchy problematique, that is to say the fact that anarchy started to be seen as a problem because of necessarily implying social disorder, and the related issue of the justification of the sovereign power. Second, it orients towards certain guidelines in order to find out specific solutions – like through the contraposition state of nature / civil society. I will call the former the constitutive role, because, by identifying the significant questions, it helps to draw the contours of the discipline, while I call the latter the regulative role because it consists in orienting towards a set of possible solutions.

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Let us move on to modern political theory. Even if we admit that the sovereignty-versus-anarchy dichotomy plays this kind of role within contractarianism, it is difficult to see how this could hold true for modern political theory as a whole. A first remark concerns the importance of this tradition of thought. It occupies a crucial place within modernity, not so much because of the language in which it is expressed – inherited from previous traditions – as because of the central place accorded to the issues here at stake. From this point of view we can argue that with respect to the set of theories usually indicated as ‘modern political theory’, the sovereignty-versus-anarchy dichotomy plays a constitutive role, that is, it operates by pointing out which problems are relevant. Most of the issues raised by modern political theorists are, for instance, somehow related to the issue of sovereignty – how to organise it, how to limit it, how to make it accountable and so on. However much particular points of view may differ, sovereign statehood is always the necessary presumption, and if it is not the solution to everything, it is at least the starting point. The result of the influence of this dichotomy is that the term ‘anarchy’ tends to be used under the broader meaning of disorder rather than the etymological meaning of a lack of government. As we will see, this is particularly evident in the supporters of the domestic analogy. Highlighting the problematic nature of this dichotomy, first of all for the unquestioned use of references to the experience of the modern sovereign state as a universal paradigm, nonetheless does not imply having to make a generalised rejection of modernity. While authors of postmodernist inspiration such as Ashley see in the domestic analogy the reproduction of a tendency for the ‘modern sovereign man’ to rule every part of human experience, something in itself deplorable (Ashley 1995), it is instead possible to combine a critical stance towards the idea that the modern state is a paradigm of universal value with a more complex and ambivalent vision of political modernity. I cannot deal with this topic in detail here. I will restrict myself to observing that modernity, and above all political modernity, have been the source of forms of discipline and alienation, but also the stage for human and civil conquests. Modernity appears, therefore, as the site of an unstable entanglement of freedom and discipline, as the setting for multiple, variegated historic experiences, in which the balance between these two extremes cannot be decided beforehand, but needs to be analysed in the single contexts and experiences (Wagner 1994). Rather than making final judgements on modernity, it is therefore a matter of being on guard against unquestioningly raising a historically

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limited experience to the rank of universal paradigm. As we will see, this appears all the more necessary in an age like the present in which this experience, however far from coming to an end, nevertheless seems to have been placed in difficulty by several processes following the emergence of globalisation (Bottici 2002). It is not a matter of celebrating or mourning the eclipse of sovereignty (Camilleri and Falk 1992) or the end of territories (Badie 1995), the two elements defining the sovereign state, but rather of underlining that this recent, historic experience could be about to undergo a great change (if not disappear altogether). As a consequence, the categories drawn up by modern political theory may no longer be able to incorporate such a transformation (Bottici 2002).25 This leads to reflections on the second condition for applying the domestic analogy. As we have seen, reasoning based on the domestic analogy assumes that the two levels between which the analogy is traced are distinct. Revealing the differences between the two levels is what we have called the negative moment of the analogy and, as we have seen, this is indeed fundamental in order to be able to speak of an analogy: if an analogy proves to be so perfect that the negative moment disappears, then we are no longer in the presence of an analogy, but an identity. Once again, on the other hand, behind the possibility of separating the two domains, the domestic from the international, is the construction of the modern sovereign state. It is indeed sovereignty, with its two external and internal faces, that allows the internal space, subject to the sovereign power exercised by the state, to be separated from the exterior, the place where equally sovereign states meet/clash, while it is the state, with its precise territorial definition, which allows us to separate inside from outside in a clear-cut and, we could say, Cartesian way (Walker 1993). Nevertheless the assumption that there are two separate domains, domestic and international, is by no means without its problems. Once again we are dealing with a boundary, the one between two spheres of political life: the domestic subordinated to the sovereign state, and the international, characterised first of all by anarchy, which is problematic in itself. Furthermore, as we will see, this becomes all the more evident in a global era which has strongly questioned the existence of clear-cut immutable borders (Macmillan and Linklater 1995). Once again it is not a matter of celebrating the end of boundaries, but rather of highlighting that the Westphalian political map, with its clear-cut inside/outside borders, risks concealing what is more relevant in order to understand the world we live in today. As we will see in more detail in the epilogue, the

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set of activities and interaction, which have commonly been labelled as ‘globalisation’, take place precisely between or in spite of boundaries. Globalisation, in its numerous aspects – economic, financial, environmental, technological, political and cultural – has created such a situation that events, decisions and activities in one part of the world can have significant consequences for individuals and communities in other quite distant parts of the globe. It is a set of processes which shift the spatial form of human organisation and activity to transcontinental and inter-regional patterns of activity, interactions and exercises of power (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton 1999). It therefore involves a stretching and deepening of social relations and institutions across space and time such that, on the one hand, day-to-day activities are increasingly influenced by events happening on the other side of the globe and, on the other, the practices and decisions of local groups or communities can have significant global reverberations, well beyond political and, at times, even physical boundaries. In the face of it, drawing clear-cut boundaries between the domestic and the international cannot but appear at least problematic. Thirdly, in order to be able to apply the domestic analogy, we need to show that between the two levels, state and international, there is also a sufficient degree of similarity – what we can call the positive moment of the analogy. The greater the similarity, that is, not only the number of propositions that are true for both domains, but above all the relevance of the properties considered to be valid for both, the stronger the analogy. In the classic form of domestic analogy, a central role was played by the state–individuals equation: the idea that states are unitary and rational actors like individuals resulted in it being considered that there was a structural similarity between the two domains. The figure of the state-person, as we will see, is one of the central figures of modern political philosophy. While in Plato and in ancient times in general, the aim of the metaphor of the great man was to underline the organistic nature of the political association, due to which the polis appeared as a whole superior to the sum of its parts while at the same time inconceivable without them, the modern idea of the person-state claims something radically new: the state, as a juridical person, becomes an autonomous actor, an abstract legal subject, a centre upon which to bestow rights and duties (Schild 1990). Classical jurists had not drawn up a true concept of the juridical personality. Roman law does not see an abstract legal subject in either political or private associations that is independent from the concrete

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set of the single members: the populus romanus, for example, cannot be conceived as an independent legal subject from the corpus of the concrete universitas civium (Albanese 1983). In classical law, the term ‘person’ originally indicated the theatrical mask, by extension going on to mean the role impersonated by the actor (Cotta 1983). Thus, the concept of person is well suited to indicate every human being, independently from the physical differences differentiating them.26 By its very nature, the task of the theatrical mask is to conceal the differences between those wearing it. A decisive contribution to the development of the modern concept of the juridical personality came from canon law. Medieval legal science was given the task of giving a theoretical form to a concept which in reality appeared to have many facets: monasteries, churches, religious confraternities and charitable institutions made it necessary to model a concept that gave the full idea of an ideal institution, with a distinct patrimony from the people that formed the material substratum (Campitelli 1983). As the historiography inspired by the German historian Gierke claimed, in the sphere of canon law such a concept of person could easily be derived from the concept of Pauline origin of the mystic body (corpus mysticum), that is, from the idea of an entity of a clearly distinct rank from the members comprising it (Campitelli 1983).27 The link between the modern concept of legal personality and the theological corpus mysticum is an example of the modern ‘political theology’ described by Carl Schmitt (Schmitt 2005). According to his reconstruction, the central concepts of modern political theory derive from theology. This regards in particular the concept of sovereignty: the idea of the omnipotent sovereign law-maker derives in his view from that of the omnipotent god legibus solutus (Schmitt 2005, iii). This would explain in part at least the ambivalent nature of the modern concept of sovereignty, encapsulated somewhere between the two extremes of representation and transcendence: the sovereign’s transcendence is no longer based on an external theological order, but is immanent to the very nature of human social relations; on the other hand, the representative aspect that legitimises this sovereign power also completely alienates it from the multitude of subjects it represents.28 This will become particularly evident from analysing how Hobbes’s theory of the state is constructed (section 2.2): once constituted, the artificial person of the Leviathan becomes independent from the subjects that gave rise to it, as by doing so, they conceded their authority (auctoritas), that is, the right to be author (auctor), as a result of which the state has precisely the right to personate (Hobbes 1968, XVI).29

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As we will see later, after disappearing for a long period, the debate on the analogy between states and individuals has recently returned to the centre of attention of academics of various disciplines. In the philosophical and juridical field, the topic has been at the centre of the debate aroused by the trials against war crimes, where it has been highlighted that only individuals can be held responsible for their actions, as a result of which they cannot be sentenced for the presumed responsibility of collective institutions like states. It was on the basis, for example, of such criticism of the idea of collective responsibility that the trial against the Nazi official Eichmann for the extermination of Jews during the Second World War was held and interpreted.30 Within international relations theories, after for a long time acting as a sort of implicit presupposition of the theory (we look at states ‘as if’ they were individuals, although we know that in the end they are not),31 this analogy once again became the subject of heated debate (Chapter 3, sections 3.1 and 3.4). On the one hand, postmodernist thinkers such as Ashley polemicise over it in their criticism of the domestic analogy (Ashley 1995), while on the other, as we will see, authors such as Alexander Wendt came up with a new version of it which to a large extent draws on both Gierke and Hobbes’s concept of authorisation.32 Together with the importance of the states–individuals analogy, here we should also consider in what contexts this analogy has worked best. In particular, it is when the idea of the state as an autonomous subject met the syntax of contractarian theories that it seemed natural to apply to international relations the same category of state of nature that political theory used to characterise relations between individuals before the state came into being. Once this category is applied to international relations, the difference is only how many, like Thomas Hobbes, consider that equally as much misery follows on from this state of affairs as does from the state of nature between individuals (Hobbes 1968), and how many, instead, like the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, preach its being overtaken by a social contract between states (Saint-Pierre 1717). Starting from the idea of an international state of nature, it was a short step to claiming that, as individuals are induced to leave behind the state of nature by subjecting themselves to sovereign authority in order to end the (potential or effective) state of war, so states, which find themselves opposing each other in this natural condition, can achieve peace only after drawing up a contract among themselves to unite and be subject to a common power. In this case, the analogy seemed to take on the strength of a mathematical proportion: ‘states : international relations = individuals : state of nature’. It is on this

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basis that the numerous projects for perpetual peace that were to flourish in the modern era were put forward (Suganami 1989). Whether it is the cosmopolitan form of domestic analogy, like the one proposed by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, or the internationalist one, built on the idea of a limited contract between sovereign states and therefore on the only partial reproduction of the state institutions, what played a fundamental role in both cases was the conception of international relations according to the natural law category of the state of nature (Suganami 1989, §2). According to Charles Beitz, the analogy between states and individuals and the consequent application of the category of the state of nature to the former is perhaps the invention that influenced reflections on international relations more than any other (Beitz 1979: 69, 179).33 Once again, we are faced with a category derived originally from theology: as has recently been shown, the state of nature was a specifically theological concept, denoting the condition of human beings before leaving the Garden of Eden (Jahn 2000). It was only in the debate on the condition of the native Americans after the Spanish conquest, in which were jurists such as Bartolomé de La Casas, Juan Ginés de Sepùlveda and Francisco de Vitoria played a leading role, that the old religious concept of the state of nature started to enter the secular sphere (Jahn 2000, §2). This was due not only to the discovery of the existence of an unknown continent, but also because meeting the natives brought under discussion many of the consolidated beliefs about nature and the history of humanity. Applying the state of nature to the native Americans was one of the most important responses to this cultural shock (Pagden 1982, 1990, 2000). Having already entered the secular sphere thanks to the Spanish jurists, the concept then passed over to modern political theory where, as we will see, it was to play a fundamental role. Reflection on international relations was also to be influenced by this category. As has been observed, the first reflections on international relations are characterised precisely by the central role that seems to be played by the ‘model of natural law’, a fundamental part of which is the state of nature category (Bonanate 1994). The task is now to analyse how this model combines with the domestic analogy within modern political thought.

2 The Domestic Analogy in Modern Political Thought

Despite the relative recentness of the ‘domestic analogy’ label, the use of analogies taken from the domestic sphere is quite widespread in reflection on international relations. Since the outset, analogies taken from domestic experience have entered the debate on international relations in various ways. While trying to reconstruct the role that the domestic analogy plays in such a debate, I will follow the same classification criteria used by Bull himself (Bull 1966a: 37). According to Bull, the various theories of international relations can be classified in line with how they relate to the idea of international society (Bull 1966a: 37). If we are to follow such a criterion, they can be grouped under three fundamental conceptions: (1) The view according to which international anarchy implies the absence of such a society, formulated by those who describe international relations in terms of a Hobbesian state of nature and cannot see any way out of this condition. (2) The idea, similar as regards cognition, but contrary in normative terms, of those who push the analogy between states and individuals so far as to claim that the former, like the latter, should draw up a social contract to put an end to such a state of (potential) war. (3) And finally those who, contrary to the above-mentioned positions, recognise the existence of a society of states, considered compatible with the condition of anarchy in which they exist. In this classification it is not hard to see a reference to the thinking of Martin Wight and his classification of international relations theories into three traditions of thought: realist or Machiavellian, revolutionary or Kantian, and, finally, rationalist or Grotian (Wight 1991). 37

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The realists set out with a negative conception of human nature, seeing the states’ pursuit of power, with the consequent condition of war of all against all, as the central element of international life. Figuring among them are modern philosophers such as Hobbes, Spinoza and Rousseau, but also twentieth-century international relations theorists such as Carr, Morgenthau and Niebuhr. The revolutionists, on the other hand, start from a fundamentally optimistic conception of human nature and above all from a progressist view of history and consider it possible and desirable for states to exit the condition of war and give rise to a cosmopolis (civitas maxima). They count, in Wight’s opinion, both the ‘religious revolutionists’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (in particular the Calvinist theologians) and philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, and finally the French and Russian revolutionists, all of whom are, again according to Wight, imbued with the same missionary spirit (Wight 1991: 9–10). Instead, the rationalists, whom Wight and his disciple Bull follow, consider international relations to be characterised by a certain degree of order, as demonstrated by the existence of the institutions of international society. The main exponents of this tradition include international law theorists such as Francisco de Vitoria, Bernardo Suarez and Hugo Grotius, and the ‘founding fathers’ of the American republic, such as Alexander Madison, James Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Wight defines them as ‘rationalist’ because they share a moderate faith in the possibility that men, as rational beings, can live together according to reason even in the absence of a common government (Wight 1991: 13). We could cast numerous objections against this classification. For example, that it says too much and too little at the same time: on the one hand, it is too rigid for a great thinker to fall into a single tradition, while, on the other, it does not cover the whole variety of possible positions. As we will see, on the one hand, it is extremely problematic to lock an author such as Kant into the revolutionist tradition, given his lack of indulgence towards rapid forms of political change. On the other hand, important international relations theories, such as those deriving from Marx or nevertheless focusing on the international political economy, plus those of postmodernist inspiration, not to speak of international relations gender theories, are difficult to place within this tripartition. It is significant that in all the literature on the domestic analogy there is no reference whatsoever to these theories. While theories of postmodernist inspiration only appear among the critical approaches (as we have seen, Ashley for example), others remain wholly outside. By putting emphasis on categories other than the modern state

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(class, gender and modernity), they implicitly distance themselves from the idea that the modern state could be a universal model and therefore also from the domestic analogy. But I will come back to these theories later. Wight’s tripartition maintains a crucial heuristic function, as it allows us to make out a fundamental classification in the conceptions of international order, and above all towards the presuppositions of the domestic analogy. At the same time, as we will see, it is a ladder that we can cast aside as soon as we reach the top, as it conceals too much of the variegated and complex contemporary panorama of the different ways of thinking about world politics.

2.1 Hobbes and the realist tradition There are two reasons for my choice to analyse the thought of Thomas Hobbes. On the one hand, Hobbes is the first great philosopher to have organised his political theory around the concept of the person-state; and on the other, he is also the first thinker to have applied the state of nature category to international relations, which, as we have seen, is one of the fundamental components of the classic form of domestic analogy. My task is now to see if, and if so, to what extent, he can therefore be considered a supporter of the domestic analogy. I will try to follow Hobbes’s texts as closely as possible in order to distinguish his position on the issue from the numerous interpretations that have blossomed within the so-called realist tradition and, in particular, from what these interpretations considered they had to take as implicit in the reasoning of Hobbes himself.1 In this connection, I will first of all have to take into account the fact that what Hobbes wrote on international relations was not very extensive, filling but a few pages: he was mainly concerned with internal, not international order. This consideration seems to substantiate Wight’s observation according to which, from the Renaissance onwards, the sovereign state was considered the culmination and completion of political life (Wight 1966), resulting in the remainder relegated to the category of ‘relations’ between states, not deserving more than an appendix chapter. Barring a few exceptions, modern political philosophy seems to forsake international relations as a subject for specific investigation. Recognising sovereignty, with its supreme expression in the decision to make war, as the solution to the problem of internal order, was like condemning the domain of international relations to an immutable condition of anarchy and chaos. In the face of such

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a dominion of disorder and repetition, modern political philosophy seems to have little to say. Hobbes’s theory of world politics is a good example of this attitude. Indeed, as we will see, Hobbes’s reflections on relations between sovereign states really do seem to be an appendix to his state theory. In turn, the latter is built and organised around the conception of the personstate. As has recently been observed, Hobbes is always mentioned as the great theorist of the modern state, but it is not often remembered that the crucial point of that theory is that the state is but the name for a particular type of person; moreover, the person whose reasons and actions we have the greatest cause to worry about, since, as we will see, the state is the holder of sovereign power over us all (Skinner 1999: 2). From the very frontispiece of his greatest work, the Leviathan, we are faced with the image of a great man, composed, like the state, of a multitude of single individuals (see Figure 1). The image is then explained in the first page of the work: Nature (the Art whereby God hath made and governes the World) is by the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal […]. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended. (Hobbes 1968: 81) Therefore, on the one hand, we have the state which is said to be a merely artificial person, and on the other, as we will see, the attribution to such a person of the sovereignty over all of us. How can they go together? It is remarkable that the question is not given enough attention in the literature on Hobbes’s thought.2 As is well known, the organicist metaphor of the man-state is, from Plato onwards, a recurrent metaphor in political philosophy. Nevertheless, while in ancient times its main function was to underline the organic type of relationship between the parts and the body of the polis, in Hobbes’s conception, the Leviathan is at the same time a man, a great machine or artificial creation, and God-like, despite its mortality (Hobbes 1968, XVII). As Carl Schmitt underlined, this threefold characterisation is summed up by the biblical figure of the Leviathan, about which, according to the verse from the book of Job above the image Figure 1, we know that Non est potestas super terram quae comparetur ei, that is, there is no power that can be compared to it (Schmitt 1996).

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The paradox of Hobbes’s Leviathan is, therefore, that a completely artificial creature which, to use Hobbes’s words, is nothing but ‘a word without substance’ (Hobbes 1968), is at the same time the holder of sovereignty, he who does not recognise any superior power above him (Skinner 1999: 2). Hobbes looks for the solution to this paradox in various ways and one is already hinted at in part in his Elements of Law (1640) and De Cive (1642). Nevertheless it is only with his Leviathan from 1651 that a complete solution seems to be available. Already in his De Cive, Hobbes had claimed that the state was a person, though of a particular kind. That is, a person whose will is seen to be expressed in the covenant that men make between themselves, as it uses their individual faculties in view of common peace.3 Nevertheless what was missing in this work and would only appear for the first time in the Leviathan is a clear theory as to how certain actions can be validly attributed to such a person by many men, that is, the conditions in which it can be said that such a person represents them.4 The solution is introduced in Chapter XVI of the Leviathan ‘Of PERSONS, AUTHORS, and things Personated’, the chapter immediately prior to the one on the constitution and definition of the state (Hobbes 1968). It is in this chapter that Hobbes defines a person as ‘he whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of an other man […], whether Truly or by Fiction’ (Hobbes 1968, XVI: 217; my italics), to which he then adds, ‘When they are considered as his owne, then is he called a Naturall Person: And when they are considered as representing the words and actions of an other, then is he a Feigned or Artificiall person’ (Hobbes 1968, XVI: 217). This passage has recently been the subject of heated debate: while some such as Skinner, in light of subsequent developments, maintain that the state, despite being a ‘purely artificial person’, must nevertheless not be understood as ‘a fiction’ (Skinner 1999), others, following the line of Runciman, are inclined to make a literal reading of this passage and claim that the state should be understood as a ‘person by fiction’ (Runciman 2000). The solution to the dilemma is to a large extent a question of terminology: what separates, if anything at all, ‘a fiction’ from something that is ‘purely artificial’? My impression is that there is not a big difference between the two, unless one, erroneously, understands ‘fiction’ to be what is ‘unreal or counterfeit’. Indeed, just because something is constructed and artificial does not mean it has to be ipso facto inexistent. As Hobbes himself clarifies a short while later, the concept of a person that originally meant theatre mask had been transferred from the stage

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to whoever spoke or acted in representation of others, hence ‘a Person, is the same as an Actor’ (Hobbes 1968, XVI: 217). This theatrical terminology may sound strange to us, but it was quite widespread in Hobbes’s times.5 In the case of artificial people, therefore, we can say that an action can be validly attributed to them in representation of someone else only if they possess authority, defined as ‘the Right of doing any Action’ (Hobbes 1968, XVI: 218). In this case it is said that each of these people’s words and actions is ‘recognised’ by those whom they represent.6 From what has been said, it is already clear that the concept of person is therefore needed to create a united political body, as a multitude can become a single person only ‘when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented; […] with the consent of every one of that Multitude in particular’ (Hobbes 1968, XVI: 220). How this happens is then explained in the next chapter on the constitution of the state: in order to exit the state of nature that is a condition of (potential) continual war of all against all, individuals join together to submit to a sovereign to whom they hand over their ‘right to all things’7 in exchange for the protection they receive. The state is defined as follows: One Person, of whose Acts a great Multitude, by mutuall Covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the Author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their Peace and Common Defence. (Hobbes 1968, XVII: 143) According to Hobbes, upon constituting the political body, individuals charge the representative of sovereign power ‘to beare their person’, recognising all of their acts as their own, and this is where the state’s authority, that is, the right to perform an action, arises from (Hobbes 1968, XVI). It is indeed through the covenant that what had been a dispersed multitude of individuals, described in mechanical terms and considered as lacking any social bond, becomes a unit, a person, and it is in the actions of this person that the individuals undertake to recognise themselves insofar as it is the bearer of their person.8 Nevertheless, not only does Hobbes define the state as a person, thus accepting one of the pillars of the classic form of domestic analogy, he seems to go further, asserting that sovereign states find themselves, like individuals before the constitution of the political body, in a state of nature, which is a state of war. In Hobbes’s text, not only is there a states–individuals analogy in the most general sense of a comparison

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between two terms, but also a stricto sensu analogy, that is, a proportion between four terms: ‘individuals’ : ‘state of nature’ = ‘states’ : ‘international relations’. Hobbes uses the example of the condition of war among states to prove the fact that individuals would be in such a condition were they not subject to a common power.9 After citing the condition of the savage peoples of America and civil war, Hobbes indicates the condition of international relations: But though there had never been any time, wherein particular men were in a condition of warre one against another; yet in all times, Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency, are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their Forts, Garrisons, and Guns upon the Frontiers of their Kingdomes; and continuall Spyes upon their neighbours; which is a posture of War. (Hobbes 1968, XIII: 187–8) The condition of relations between states is thus a paradigmatic example of a natural condition in which the subjects of that condition find themselves facing each other in the ‘posture of gladiators’, that is, in a condition of continual potential war. The exegetic and theoretical problem is now to establish if this and similar passages in the Elements of Law and De Cive permit us to infer that the similarities between the individual and international state of nature are greater than their differences. If the positive moment of the analogy prevails over the negative, then Hobbes can be placed among the supporters of the domestic analogy. In particular, it is a matter of verifying if in Hobbes’s system that divided, abstract individualism which characterises the state of nature among individuals also characterises relations among states. The most important characteristic of the state of nature, war, is perfectly applicable to international relations: states, like individuals, are in a condition of war not in the sense that they are actually fighting, but in the sense that they show a manifest disposition towards this type of situation. Furthermore, the causes of war are the same between states and individuals: rivalry, which leads to wars fought to obtain an advantage; diffidence, which leads to wars fought for security; and finally, pride, which leads to hostility caused by the contempt of others.10 But, in particular, the main reason driving states as well as individuals is fear,

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that is apprehension in the face of future insecurity. The reason for this is deeply rooted in human nature, writes Hobbes: [I]n the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death. And the cause of this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. And from hence it is, that Kings, whose power is greatest, turn their endeavours to the assuring it at home by Lawes, or abroad by Wars. (Hobbes 1968, XI: 161) In modern times, this logic is applied to international relations in the shape of the so-called security dilemma: in a world of sovereign states competing against each other in a condition of anarchy, apprehension for its own security causes a state to acquire more and more power in order to face the others; in turn, this makes the other states even more insecure and leads to them trying to accumulate even more power. Thus, we enter a vicious circle, in which states give rise to competition that makes their own security more and more precarious in order to guarantee that very same security. Norberto Bobbio describes this situation as the sword and shield paradox: we build weapons to defend ourselves, but the more resistant the shield becomes, the sharper and therefore more dangerous the sword (Bobbio 1984). For my investigation, it is significant to note how the person who drew up the security dilemma, John Herz, makes deliberate reference to Hobbes, describing this condition in terms that are valid for both states and individuals, as clearly emerges from this passage: Wherever such anarchic society has existed […] there has arisen what may be called the ‘security dilemma’ of men, or groups, or their leaders. Groups or individuals living in such a constellation must be, and usually are, concerned about their security from being attacked, subjected, dominated, or annihilated by other groups and individuals. Striving to attain security from such attack, they are driven to acquire more and more power in order to escape the impact of the power of others. This, in turn, renders the others more insecure and compels them to prepare for the worst. Since none can ever feel entirely secure

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in such a world of competing units, power competition ensues, and the vicious circle of security and power accumulation is on. (Herz 1950: 157) The atomistic individualism that characterises the state of nature is the joint cause, together with human nature, for the readiness of individuals to cause damage for fear of sustaining damage themselves (Hobbes 1968: 80); similarly, in such a posture of war, according to the recent literature on the so-called prisoners’ dilemma, states are led to make the worst assumptions about the intentions of others, and thus prepare themselves for the worst. In a condition of anarchy such as the one characterising the relations between sovereigns described by Hobbes, according to which states face each other in the posture of gladiators, it is impossible to make predictions as to the behaviour of others. This is why, in order to guarantee their security, states are led to form the worst hypothesis. Their condition therefore becomes similar to that of two prisoners who, when interrogated separately, both confess to the crime committed for fear of the other’s confession; therefore both obtaining the worst result. Another characteristic of the state of nature that seems to apply to international relations is that ‘the notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law: where no Law, no Injustice’ (Hobbes 1968, XIII: 188). Whatever else Hobbes may intend in this famous passage,11 he certainly means that in the state of nature there is no positive law: the only rule is natural law, defined as ‘the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation of his own Nature’ (Hobbes 1968, XIV: 189). Indeed, the law is the sovereign’s command and cannot exist except as the consequence of the constitution of the political body and appointment of its representative: as they are not subject to any sovereign power, states cannot be subject to the law. Indeed, the law of nations (Jus gentium) is not law, it has the same status as the laws of nature which, in Hobbes’s sense, means precautional rules for survival.12 The latter only oblige in foro interno, that is, they bind to a desire they should take place; but they do not always coerce in foro externo, that is, being put in act (Hobbes 1968: 215). In Chapter XXX we indeed read: Concerning the Offices of one Soveraign to another, which are comprehended in that Law, which is commonly called the Law of Nations, I need not say any thing in this place; because the Law of Nations,

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and the Law of Nature, is the same thing. And every Soveraign hath the same Right, in procuring the safety of his People, that any particular man can have, in procuring the safety of his own Body. And the same Law, that dictateth to men that have no Civil Government, what they ought to do, and what to avoyd in regard of one another, dictateth the same to Common-wealths, that is, to the Consciences of Soveraign Princes, and Soveraign Assemblies; there being no Court of Naturall Justice, but in the Conscience onely; where not Man, but God raigneth. (Hobbes 1968, XXX: 394) As clearly emerges from this passage, in order to deal with the issue of right and wrong in international anarchy, we must not look so much towards natural law, as to natural right, that is, the freedom to do everything necessary for self-preservation. And, as we have seen, this natural right of freedom is enjoyed by states as well as by individuals when they are in the natural condition. However, Hobbes does not take this analogy to what we would call its logical conclusion. Individuals are led to exit the state of nature by submitting to a power that keeps them in subjection, or by making a covenant between them to establish the state, or, in the case of the state by acquisition in which sovereign power is obtained by force, by submitting directly to the sovereign in exchange for his protection. But neither of the two ways out is suggested in the case of international relations. It has been said several times that if Hobbes had stuck by the premises of his argumentation, he should have recognised that states are subject to the same pressure that drives individuals to exit the state of nature, as a result of which they should draw up a covenant between themselves to submit to a world government. This conception has recently been upheld by Tommy Lott, for example; in his opinion, since natural right, that is, the right of self-preservation, obliges sovereigns to adopt a posture of war against each other, it also authorises them to look towards hegemony as the strategy to defend against any potential threat to their security. It could, therefore, ultimately also be resolved by planetary hegemony and thus lead to setting up a world government through conquest. This possibility, according to this interpretation, conforms with Hobbes’s reasoning (Lott 1989). Hobbes’s theory seems to leave us without any good reason for resisting the establishment of a world government through conquest: in his conception, the people who fall into the hands of a foreign conqueror who is prepared to protect them can submit to him, given that they are

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released from any obligation towards their own sovereign as he failed to protect them. Therefore, if not according to Hobbes’s writings, according to his reasoning at least, we can take the domestic analogy to its ultimate consequences. Nevertheless it is by no means clear if, by not supporting the project for a world state, Hobbes is stepping away from the premises of his very own thought. First of all, because one of the greatest pressures leading individuals to exit the state of nature is the need to form large enough groups to resist external attacks. And, obviously, there cannot be any enemy external to a world Leviathan. Perhaps today we should start to ask ourselves if such an enemy might not be the so-called global challenges (Cerutti 1991, 2007), but I will come back to that later. However, what prevents Hobbes from taking such a hypothesis into account is a wholly philosophical reason. As observed by Bernard Willms, the foundations of Hobbesian thought are nominalistic, and for nominalists, the concrete, reality is always individual. The Leviathan, that is, the modern state, is a political person. And, in order to think or speak of a person, other people must exist. As a consequence, the concept of world state would not make sense within his conceptual system (Willms 1989). However, for my investigation, it is more useful to return to Hobbes’s text. And indeed here we already explicitly find a seed of criticism of the domestic analogy. First of all, there is an important restriction to putting on the same level the international state of nature and the condition in which individuals would be if they lived without a government. The passage from the Leviathan quoted above, in which Hobbes describes how sovereign authorities face each other in a posture of war, continues by saying that, ‘but because they uphold thereby, the Industry of their Subjects; there does not follow from it, that misery, which accompanies the Liberty of particular men’ (Hobbes 1968, XIII: 188). The sovereignty that determines the condition of international anarchy on the outside is what guarantees peace on the inside, and as a result, the possibility of a social life. While individuals in the state of nature use up their resources in trying to guarantee their security, the same thing is by no means the case for states. We could even upturn the argument by claiming that states, with their wars, directly promote the ‘industry’ of their citizens. By analysing the elements comprising Hobbes’s conception of the state of nature, it clearly emerges that the analogy is broken by other fundamental factors. When describing the state of nature, he underlines the brutality of that life and above all the fact that it is solitary, hostile

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and short: in such a condition of brutality and hostility the possibilities of a long life are quite slim.13 Another difference between states and individuals is therefore that for states there is not the same ‘danger of violent death’ as for individuals – or at least there has not been until now (since nuclear arms bring that radically into question). As Clausewitz had shown, traditional war never achieves definite results, while it can do for individuals, for whom a violent assault can result in death. Individuals are a lot more vulnerable than states because, as underlined by Spinoza, they are overcome by sleep, at times by illness, all inconveniencies that do not concern states in any way.14 This is one of the reasons for which in the case of states the concept of state of nature does not trigger the mechanism justifying political obligation: the driving force behind Hobbes’s system is the fear of individual people of a violent death, a fear that cannot be shared by states to the same extent. Besides, states cannot share the same fear of death that individuals feel because while the death of an individual is definitive, if a sovereign is defeated in war, the state that he represents dies, but the individuals do not. In that case, the citizens of that state are simply released from the obligation of loyalty towards that sovereign, as a result of which they are free to submit to another sovereign who is able to give a more effective guarantee of their security (Hobbes 1968, XXIX: 375). Once again we are faced with the ontological difference between palpable and real, flesh and blood individuals, and states, which are, to use Manning’s expression, pure notional entities. Even if we were to grant that both states and individuals are characterised by fear for their own survival, as already seems to be suggested by Herz, what counts most is its uneven distribution. Indeed, what makes the condition of civil anarchy intolerable for everyone, and therefore leads individuals to abandon their freedom to submit to a common sovereign power, is the equal vulnerability of each individual. According to the Leviathan: Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of the body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with

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others, that are in the same danger with himselfe. And as to the faculties of the mind […], I find yet a greater equality amongst men, than that of strength. (Hobbes 1968, XIII: 183) This means that individuals are in a condition of perfect equality, not in the sense of physical equality, but in the sense that they are equally exposed to the contingency of superiority, that is, the possibility of finding themselves in the condition of overcoming the other without sustaining any damage (D’Andrea 1997). It is this condition of equality, and therefore, of the equal fear of death felt by every man in the state of nature that drives them to transfer to their sovereign the ‘right to all things’, and to submit to their authority. Nothing of the sort happens among states: in history there has always been a distinction between large and small powers, due to which the former only had to fear the other great powers and any particularly insidious alliances. For all these reasons, in Hobbesian thought there is not, and neither could there have been, any justification for a world government, despite the law of peoples being equivalent to the laws of nature, which drive man to seek peace (first law of nature) and, to achieve it, to transfer to the sovereign those rights that, if withheld, would impede peace (according to the law of nature). Besides, these laws become laws real and proper15 only with the appointment of the sovereign, who, alone, is able to guarantee their observance. According to Hobbes, the laws of nature are like covenants without the sword, that is, empty words, as they are contrary to our natural inclinations. As can be read in the text: For the Lawes of Nature (as Justice, Equity, Modesty, Mercy, and (in summe) doing to others, as wee would be done to) of themselves, without the terrour of some Power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our naturall Passions, that carry us to Partiality, Pride, Revenge, and the like. And Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all. Therefore notwithstanding the Lawes of Nature, (which every one hath then kept, when he has the will to keep them, when he can do it safely,) if there be no Power erected, or not great enough for our security; every man will and may lawfully rely on his own strength and art, for caution against all other men. (Hobbes 1968, XVII: 223–4)

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The situation described in this passage is exactly that of states: as it is not applied by any worldwide Leviathan, the law of peoples only has a conditional validity, subject to the desire of states who apply it at their discretion. Indeed, in their sovereignty, they enjoy total freedom concerning its application, so much so that Hobbes can explicitly say that every state, like every individual in the state of nature, has ‘an absolute Libertie, to doe what it shall judge […] most conducing to their benefit’.16 From this point of view, the recently opened debate on the possibility that the laws of nature may serve as ‘compelling guides’ for international relations (Navari 1996) seems destined to arrive at a negative outcome. As we have seen, they oblige in foro interno, but not always in foro externo, that is, being put into practice. As a consequence, anyone who is modest and tractable and fully observes them, and performs all he promises in a time and a place in which no one else does, would not achieve anything but to make himself prey for others, and therefore ‘procure his own certain ruine’ (Hobbes 1968, XV: 215). What we should expect of international relations is also clearly described in A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of Common Law of England: PHILOSOPHER. What hope then is there of a constant Peace in any Nation, or between one Nation, and another? LAW STUDENT. You are not to expect such a Peace between two Nations, because there is no Common Power in this World to punish their Injustice: mutual fear may keep them quiet for a time, but upon every visible advantage they will invade one another. (Hobbes 1971: VII, 57) Therefore, we should conclude that in Hobbes’s reasoning the states– individuals analogy is only partial, and, above all, it is broken at the point where the mechanism creating political obligation is triggered, that is, with the fear of death caused by the condition of equality of the state of nature. The fact that Hobbes has dedicated so few pages to reflection on international relations, therefore, takes on a wholly different light: it is not accidental, but the result of his conviction that the condition of anarchy on an international scale is not ultimately as grave as civil anarchy. We may now ask whether the analogy today has not become complete since the diffusion of nuclear arms has made it possible for war to achieve definitive results, and states are equally vulnerable when faced with the nuclear threat. By increasing in quantity, the capacity of

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destruction has perhaps reached a new quality. And there is good reason to doubt that modern political thought is suited to that quality. It seems that reality has changed so much that it can no longer be contained within the classic paradigms. Perhaps in this sense philosophy is truly the ‘owl of Minerva’, taking flight at dusk when reality has already run its course. But I will come back to this point in the epilogue. For now, it is nevertheless enough to note that in Hobbes’s system he does not fully apply the law-of-nature model to international relations. Of the elements constituting the domestic analogy, Hobbes accepts the first two, but refuses the third: it is true that subjection to a common power is the only route to exiting the state of nature, and it is equally true that states find themselves in such a condition; but there are not sufficient similarities between the individual and international states of nature to make the road for exiting the first right for exiting the second too. According to different interpretations, the image that analogically links individuals and states, which we have seen to be limited in Hobbes, is completed in Kant’s cosmopolitan proposal (Suganami 1989; Bonanate 1994; Höffe 2006). My task is now to verify to what extent Kant can be identified as a supporter of the domestic analogy.

2.2 Kant and the idealist tradition It is only recently that Kant’s works have aroused the attention of international relations theorists. This rediscovery is linked to the reassessment of normative theories, which, after the Second World War, had been eclipsed by the triumph of realism and sociological approaches. It was at the end of the 1980s that the person who until then had remained on the whole a marginal figure, only known indirectly, began to be included in the manuals of international relations theory, occupying a place worthy of the importance of his contribution.17 The return to Kant’s texts served to bring back into discussion the image of Kant diffused by Wight’s interpretation of him as the Enlightenment missionary, advocate of the world state on the basis of the maxim fiat iustitia, pereat mundus. Although Wight often invites us not to take his tripartition too seriously, putting Kant at the head of the ‘revolutionist’ tradition whose members in the best of cases include Woodrow Wilson and Khrushchev, and in the worst, Stalin and Hitler, by no means did justice to a thinker displaying so little indulgence towards forms of violent and rapid change as Kant. According to a recently suggested mode of interpretation, Kant’s thought was the victim of an English stratagem: pushing authors such

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as Kant with such a scarcely revolutionist attitude towards one of the extremes of the spectrum of possible positions was a way of favouring the centre of that spectrum, that is, the very English School that Wight himself founded (Williams and Booth 1996). In the wake of Wight’s lesson, Bull interprets Kant as the representative of the domestic analogy in its ‘progressist’ form, that is, the one inviting states to exit the state of war that they find themselves in through a social contract. This should not happen by looking back to the unity of the Roman and Christian empire, but by trusting in the possibility of a form of progress that could achieve in the future what had not been achieved in the past (Bull 1966a). According to this interpretation, Kant, advocate of the world state, is the one who, by applying not only the concept of state of nature in its Hobbesian sense to international relations, but also that of the social contract, takes the states–individuals analogy to its ultimate consequences (Bull 1966a: 48). Also according to Suganami, who, unlike Bull, maintains the theory of a change in the Kantian position, from supporter of a world state to theorist of a permanent congress of states, there is no doubt that Kant’s argumentation is structured along the lines of the domestic analogy: states must unite in an international organisation just as individuals unite in the various states (Suganami 1989: 21). Moreover, a similar interpretation seems to unite international relations theorists and Kantian scholars alike. Recently, for example, Otfried Höffe claimed that the analogy between states and individuals plays a fundamental role in Kantian thought and it is precisely upon this analogy that Kant’s proposal for a world republic is based (Höffe 2006). There are many passages which seem to support such an interpretation, like the following from the Second Definitive Article of his Perpetual Peace: People who have grouped themselves into nation states may be judged in the same way as individuals in a state of nature, independent of external laws, for they are a standing offence to one another by the very fact that they are neighbours. Each nation for the sake of its own security, can and ought demand of the others that they should enter along with it into a constitution, similar to the civil one, within which the rights of each could be secured.18 (Kant 1991c: 102) The parallel, ‘civilised nations of Europe = savages of America’ (which had already been proposed by Hobbes), highlights the suggestive

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power of the idea of an international state of nature, as well as the rhetorical strength of a comparison with ‘savage peoples’.19 As in Hobbes’s Leviathan, we find in this passage not only a parallel between states and individuals but also a proportion, which I held to be constitutive of analogies: ‘states : international relations = individuals : state of nature’. Believing a change in this condition to be ultimately unnecessary, Hobbes did not push the analogy any further. As we have seen, after having stated the parallel ‘savage peoples = sovereign states’, and having described all the incommodities of such a ‘posture of warre’, Hobbes then concludes that, since sovereign states ‘uphold thereby the industry of their subjects, there does not follow from it that misery which accompanies the liberty of particular men’ (Hobbes 1968: 188). Kant, in contrast, seems to draw from this proportion the conclusion that states, like individuals, must exit from the state of nature through a social contract and give rise thereby to a juridical condition (Rechtszustand) – where, for Kant, ‘the right (das Recht) is the sum total of those conditions within which the will of one person can be reconciled with the will of another in accordance with a universal law of freedom’.20 Kant puts forward this conception again two years later in the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals, that is, the part dedicated to the metaphysical principles of the doctrine of right; while speaking of the right of peoples (Völkerrecht), a constitutive part of public right together with internal and cosmopolitan right, Kant sums up its contents as follows: The elements of international right are as follows. Firstly, in their external relationships with one another, states, like lawless savages, exist in a condition devoid of right. Secondly, this condition is one of war (the right of the stronger), even if there is no actual war or continuous active fighting (i.e. hostilities). But even though neither of two states is done any injustice by the other in this condition, it is nevertheless in the highest degree unjust in itself, for it implies that neither wishes to experience anything better. Adjacent states are thus bound to abandon such a condition. Thirdly, it is necessary to establish a federation of peoples in accordance with the idea of an original social contract, so that states will protect one another against external aggression while refraining from interference in one another’s internal disagreements. (Kant 1991d: 165) From this passage it clearly emerges that the conceptual system upon which Kant builds his project of perpetual peace is that of the natural

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law theorists, which consists of the concept of the state of nature interpreted in Hobbes’s wake as a state of potential war; that of the social contract, which puts an end to the natural condition by entering a juridical condition; and finally, civil society, that is, in Kantian terminology, that of the peremptory state of right which, as such, is the only one able to guarantee peace. Kant’s perspective, like that of the natural law theorists, is in primis a juridical perspective because the very categories used for its construction are categories taken from law. According to Bobbio, Kant’s view is as a consequence a form of juridical pacifism, meant as a subspecies of institutional pacifism, as it sees the main cause of wars to be the state of international anarchy and, consequently, entrusts their removal through the establishment of a juridical community (Bobbio 1992: 12). Kant’s reasoning therefore starts from the presupposition that once the state of nature is transferred from relations between individuals to relations between states, states should be considered as individuals who, since they are not subject to external laws, are ‘a standing offence to one another by the very fact that they are neighbours’. As a consequence, every state can demand that the other enter a juridical condition, in the same way that the individual in the state of nature can demand it of other individuals. According to this reconstruction, it seems that Kant’s argument, based on extending the law of nature model from relations between individuals to relations between states, moves along the lines of the domestic analogy. Indeed, it is the entire conceptual system of natural law, used by a large part of modern political theory to analyse the problem of individuals living together, that Kant applies to relations between states: no longer just the concept of the state of nature like in Hobbes, but also that of the social contract. Nevertheless, by more carefully analysing Kant’s writings on politics, law and philosophy of history, and above all by placing them in the wider context of Kantian thought, it clearly emerges that there are significant limits to extending the paradigm of natural law from relations between individuals to those between states. First of all, the passage quoted above from his Metaphysics of Morals carried on by adding a fourth element to the right of peoples: This association [of peoples in accordance with the idea of an original contract] must not embody a sovereign power as in a civil constitution, but only a partnership or confederation. It must therefore be an alliance which can be terminated at any time, so that it has to be renewed periodically. (Kant 1991d: 165)

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In other words, the covenant between states that Kant outlines in his Metaphysics of Morals is neither a pactum societatis followed by a pactum subiectionis, nor a Hobbesian pact of union that incorporates both, it is purely and simply a pact of society which is not followed by any pact of subjection. In other words, while agreeing to put an end not to a single war (pactum pacis), but to all wars (foedus pacificum), the states do not make the efficacy of the covenant subject to a coercive power above all of them, and therefore do not give rise to a world state (Völkerstaat). Kant’s objections against the hypothesis of a world state (Völkerstaat) or republican world state (Weltrepublik), which he himself formulated in 1793 in his work Religion in the Limits of Pure Reason, and then put forward again in part in his Perpetual Peace, are that, on the one hand, as the state is extended too far, it is not able to guarantee protection for its members and, on the other, that it could transform into the ‘most horrible despotism’ due to its unlimited power (Kant 1998c). Using his words from the work Perpetual Peace: The idea of international right presupposes the separate existence of many independent adjoining states. And such a state of affairs is essentially a state of war, unless there is a federal union to prevent hostilities breaking out. But in the light of the idea of reason, this state is still to be preferred to an amalgamation of the separate nations under a single power which has overruled the rest and created a universal monarchy. For the laws progressively lose their impact as the government increases its range, and a soulless despotism, after crushing the germs of goodness, will finally lapse into anarchy. (Kant 1991c: 113) Kant’s objections against the hypothesis in parts suggested by himself on the world state are very strong: it could transform into ‘soulless despotism’ from which there is no way out and risks returning to the condition of anarchy that it had been established to put an end to. The problem now arises of evaluating how far Kant went with this analogy. The passage quoted above goes on to say that the constitution ‘similar to the civic one’, to which states should give rise, must be a federation of states (Völkerbund)21 and not a world state (Völkerstaat). That is, firstly, because the latter would contradict the initial assumption of considering the right of nations in relation to one another insofar as they are a group of separate states which are not to be welded together as a unit; it is so, secondly, because laws progressively lose their impact as the government increases its range, and a soulless despotism would finally lapse into anarchy itself.22

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One could now object that these arguments do not seem to be decisive, precisely in a Kantian perspective. The last two arguments that he puts forward against the hypothesis of a world state are mostly drawn from experience, whereas in Kant’s view, as we will see, experience cannot provide a certain guide for the future. One may also argue that the constitution of the United States of America, to which Kant devotes too little attention, serves as a potential counterexample to both these arguments: whereas the impact of laws is guaranteed through a clear division of competencies between federal and national levels, the dangers of despotism could be avoided by a complex counterbalancing between both federal and national powers as well as between legislature, executive and judiciary power. Indeed, by ‘despotism’ Kant means a form of government (forma regiminis) that is counterpoised to ‘republicanism’ because it does not respect the separation between the government and the legislative power; as a consequence, despotism prevails each time the laws are made and arbitrarily executed by one and the same power (Kant 1991c: 101). This is a point on which many interpreters have recently insisted: the arguments mentioned above only hold against the hypothesis of a despotic world state (what Kant calls ‘universal monarchy’)23 but not against the idea of a republican world state (Weltrepublik), which would fight the dangers of despotism through a clear division of the legislative from the executive.24 On the other hand, one can add, the argument moving from the idea of a ius gentium seems to be a petitio principii and it contradicts the passage from the Metaphysics of Morals where he says that the ius gentium concerns not only relations among states but also among individuals (Kant 1991d: 165). However, a much stronger argument against the hypothesis of a world state seems to be that again put forward in Perpetual Peace: [W]hile natural right allows us to say of men living in a lawless condition that they ought to abandon it, the right of nations does not allow us to say the same of states. For as states, they already have a lawful internal constitution, and have thus outgrown the coercive right of others to subject them to a wider constitution in accordance with their conception of right. (Kant 1991c: 104) Here, no way out seems to be suggested; having argued according to the states–individuals analogy, a fundamental qualification is added. If there is a domestic analogy in Kantian thinking, it must therefore be

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significantly limited. In fact, Kant does not simply apply the domestic model to the international realm of social order, and therefore he cannot be accused of having overlooked the specificity of international order, as Bull suggested. Kant’s proposal of a free federation of states, as well as his perplexities on the hypothesis of a world state, stem precisely from the awareness of the difference existing between states and individuals, namely from the fact that states already have a constitution. In this sense, the Kantian project cannot be charged with naively applying the domestic model of social order to the international realm. Furthermore, according to the first definitive article of Perpetual Peace, this constitution must be republican (Kant 1991c: 99). Republics, in Kant’s view, are not inclined to go to war because, under this kind of constitution, the consent of the citizens is required to decide whether or not war is to be declared; and it is natural that they will hesitate greatly before embarking on so dangerous an enterprise which would mean calling down on themselves all the miseries of war (Kant 1991c: 100). Even if this is a thesis that can be isolated from the others, and even if it can be subjected to criticism,25 it should not be overlooked. By saying that states must have a republican constitution in order to achieve the ultimate end of perpetual peace, Kant clearly shows his awareness of the differences existing between states and individuals. Put in the language of international relations theories, Kant combines a systemic level of analysis with an approach which focuses on the units of the international system, making him aware of the specificity of international order. At this point, however, one could object that the Kantian project of Perpetual Peace still ultimately rests on the domestic analogy, however qualified this analogy might be. Indeed, as I stated above, the negative moment of the analogy is constitutive of it. Moreover, one can still argue that the necessity for states to give rise to a common power, even if not intended as a world state, is still derived from the experience of individuals in domestic society. In fact, there are in Kantian thinking at least two of the three conditions for the application of the domestic analogy. There is a separation between the domestic and the international domain, a separation that seems to acquire systematic value through the division of the concept of public right (öffentlicher Recht) into right of the state (Staatsrecht), international right (Völkerrecht) and cosmopolitan right (Weltbürgerrecht).26 Furthermore, as we have seen, there is also the statement that similarities between the two domains exist, similarities that are ultimately expressed through the proportion ‘states : international realm = individuals : state of nature’.

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But once it has been stated that important elements of the domestic analogy are present, the real question must be as to what role these play. I argue that, despite being present, they do not play any decisive founding role, because they are necessary but not yet sufficient conditions of the domestic analogy. In order to have a fully-fledged domestic analogy, all three conditions must be met. And this does not happen in Kant’s project because, as I will show, he explicitly rejects the second condition of the domestic analogy, that is, to derive the necessity of a social contract among states from the domestic experience of individual human beings. In other words, going back to the two meanings of the term analogy described at the beginning of this work, one can certainly say that there are in Kant some elements of domestic analogy. There is a proportion ‘states : international realm = individuals : state of nature’, and there is therefore an analogy according to what I called the first meaning of the term. But can we say that he derives from such a proportion an extension of knowledge from one domain to another, as required according to the second meaning of the term? Is his reference to the domestic experience the basis for saying that, since individuals successfully resolved the problem of the social order through a social contract, states should do the same? It could not possibly be so, because for Kant the reference to a fact (be it the experience of individuals in the domestic society, or any other kind of historical experience) could never be the basis for saying states should follow this example. This is to say that the reference to whatsoever past experience could never rise to the status of philosophical justification. As he patently puts it in the Metaphysics of Morals when talking of the constitution necessary in order to achieve perpetual peace: [T]he rule on which this constitution is based must not simply be derived from the experience of those who have hitherto fared best under it, and then set up a norm for others. On the contrary, it should be derived a priori by reason from the absolute ideal of a rightful association of men under public laws. For all particular examples are deceptive (an example can only illustrate a point, but does not prove anything, so that one must have recourse to metaphysics). And even those who scorn metaphysics admit its necessity involuntarily.27 (Kant 1991d: 174) In other words, there is nothing in the experience of individuals that might tell us why states should do the same, because this experience is

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at best an example which does not prove anything and might even be misleading. I will come back later to the reasons why, according to Kant, particular examples are deceptive. Suffice it to say here that, according to Kant, we cannot rely on past experience in order to reach perpetual peace, which is the ultimate end of the whole theory of right, because past experience is contingent and it can therefore at best illustrate (erläutern) a point, but it does not demonstrate (beweisen) anything (Kant 1991d: 174). Furthermore, according to Kant, it could not possibly be experience that makes the public coercion of right necessary. Even if experience told us that human beings or states are extremely benign to each other – even if we imagined them to be as benevolent and law-abiding as we please – the a priori rational idea of a non-lawful state will still tell us that, before a public and legal state is established, individual men, peoples and states can never be secure against acts of violence from one another, since each will have his own right to do what seems right and good to him (Kant 1991d: 137). Reason tells us a priori that this, as a lawless state, is unjust. Therefore, independently from what actually happens, states must abandon the state of nature. As we also read at the beginning of Perpetual Peace, where Kant introduces the Definitive Articles for perpetual peace, these articles do not stem from an a posteriori experience, but are based on the a priori postulate of reason according to which ‘all human beings who can at all influence one another must adhere to some kind of civil constitution’ (Kant 1991c: 98). This is not to say that these articles have nothing to do with the real world. On the contrary, once we have derived from pure reason the principle in question, the next step consists of applying it to the possible cases provided by experience. Indeed, the passage continues by saying that ‘any legal constitution, as far as the persons who live under it are concerned, will conform to one of the three following types: (1) a constitution based on the civil right of individuals within a nation (ius civitatis); (2) a constitution based on the international right of states in their relationship with one another (ius gentium); (3) a constitution based on a cosmopolitan right, in so far as individuals and states, coexisting in an external relationship of mutual influences, may be regarded as citizens of a universal state of mankind (ius cosmopoliticum)’ (Kant 1991c: 98–9). As it clearly appears from the order of the arguments in this and similar passages, Kantian reasoning involves two fundamental steps: firstly, there is the justification of an a priori postulate of reason and secondly, there is its application to experience. It is not merely that these steps are

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distinct; their order cannot be inverted either, because experience cannot be the basis for the justification of an a priori principle. Therefore, Kant could never have moved from the domestic experience for saying that, since this has been successful, states should follow it and also enter a lawful condition – as Bull in his interpretation suggests. On the contrary, Kant moves from an a priori postulate of reason and then applies it to all the possible cases: individuals within a nation, states in their relationships with one another, and finally individuals and states as far as human beings are regarded as citizens of a universal state of mankind. It is also counterintuitive to think that Kant moves from the domestic realm to the global one. Given his cosmopolitan outlook, we would expect that he would move the opposite way.28 I will come back to this point later. It is sufficient to stress here the importance of the distinction between the two steps of philosophical justification of a principle and its application. I argue that it is only because this distinction has been overlooked that Kant could have been interpreted as a supporter of the domestic analogy. In fact, even if there are some elements of the domestic analogy in Kantian thinking, they could never play a decisive founding role because in his view reference to past experience cannot provide the basis for philosophical justification. This distinction can also help to make sense of the otherwise unsolvable tensions of his thinking. For instance, according to Otfried Höffe, there is a contradiction in the thesis put forward by the Second Definitive Article of the Perpetual Peace, namely between the final proposal of a federalism of free states (which implies the rejection of a world state) and the founding states–individuals analogy, which would instead call for statehood (Höffe 2006). However, as I have shown, the states–individuals analogy does not necessarily imply the proposal of a world state. For that, it is also necessary to accept the second condition of the domestic analogy, which as we have seen Kant explicitly rejects. To put it in a different way, there is no contradiction, because in order to have a contradiction we must have two contrasting propositions which are held to be true at the same time and in the same respect. But here we have two propositions: one asserting that states, like individuals, should give rise to a lawful condition; and the other saying that a free federation of states, under given circumstances, might be better suited to realising this end, whose truth holds from different points of view. Indeed, even if the text of Perpetual Peace with its structure of an international treaty suggests that Kant is addressing these issues to policymakers, it would be misleading to read the text as though here Kant had aimed only at providing definitive fully-fledged institutional projects.

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Of course, there is also the attempt at identifying the institutions better suited to implementing the above-mentioned a priori postulate of reason. But this discussion situates itself at the level of application of a principle, and must not be confused with the philosophical justification of such a principle. In fact, in a Kantian perspective, whereas there might be doubts as to what institution is better suited to the intended end, no doubts can emerge over an a priori principle of reason. The distinction between these two levels of argumentation, sometimes intermingled in the texts, can in my view explain why Kant fluctuates – sometimes even within a few pages, as in the Second Definitive Article of Perpetual Peace – between the proposal of a world state and that of a free confederation of states. Many have noticed this tension without explaining how it can possibly be so.29 I think it can only be so because Kant holds that, while at the level of the philosophical justification of a principle we can expect knowledge that is certain, when moving to the application of such a principle we have to take into account the contingency and multifaceted variety of the empeiria and cannot expect the same degree of certainty. This is a crucial point which deserves further attention. We have seen that, using the language of the contractualist tradition, Kant asserts that states can be judged as individuals in the state of nature and must therefore, like individuals, enter into a lawful condition through a social contract. But how did Kant conceive of this latter? What kind of necessity is implied in his view? What kind of knowledge is he talking about when he says that states should give rise to a social contract? This necessity is neither drawn from past experience, nor from a simple rule of prudence. In fact, in Kant’s view the social contract is neither a historical fact which explains the origin of power, nor a helpful means to obtaining a given end, as it would have been if he had conceived of it according to the mainstream contractarian tradition. Against the first interpretation, Kant explicitly argues that an inquiry into the origins of (state) power is not only useless for the purpose of perpetual peace, but also dangerous, for it could be used as an excuse for breaking the law (Kant 1991d: 162). In contrast to prudentialist readings, he argues that political maxims must not derive from the prospect of any benefit or happiness which might accrue to the state if it followed them, that is, by an end which each state takes as the object of his will; on the contrary ‘they should stem (ausgehen) only from the pure concept of rightful duty, i.e. by an obligation whose principle is given a priori by pure reason’(Kant 1991c: 124). According to On the Common Saying: This may be True in Theory, but it does not apply in Practice, we need

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by no means assume that this contract (contractus originarius or pactum sociale) based on a coalition of the will for the purposes of rightful legislation, actually exists as a fact, for it cannot possibly be so … It is in fact merely an idea of reason, which nonetheless has undoubted practical reality, for it can oblige every legislator to frame his laws in such a way that they could have been produced by the united will of a whole nation (Kant 1991b: 79). To sum up, in Kant’s view, the social contract is an a priori idea of reason – not a means to obtaining a given end, nor still less the explanation of the historical origin of power. And reason, in Kantian terminology, is the faculty that, given its transcendent character, is the practical faculty30 par excellence. That is, it is the faculty of determining the will only through the idea of duty itself, without taking into consideration what experience has to say.31 Therefore, in Kant’s thinking, the necessity of abandoning the state of nature could never have been drawn from experience – as it would have been if Kant had conceived the exit from the state of nature as a rule of skill for finding means to one’s purposes. It is, rather, the a priori determination of the will that is at stake here. In fact, a rule of skill, in Kant’s view, would have involved a theoretical necessity, since, as we read in the Critique of Practical Reason, the rules of skill only point out the set of possible actions that are sufficient to produce a certain effect, and are thus as theoretical as any proposition that asserts the connection of a cause with an effect: whoever approves the effect must also be willing to approve the cause (Kant 1998b: 159). On the contrary, what is at stake in the exit from the state of nature is a practical necessity, that is to say, the necessity stemming from an a priori determination of the will that is not subject to the approval of any further end but is an end in itself (namely, duty in the sense of a categorical imperative). We can also address the issue from the point of view of the Kantian distinction between the ‘moral politician’ and the ‘political moralist’. This is a distinction that Kant introduces in the Appendix to the Perpetual Peace to counterpoise two possible approaches to the problem of peace. First Kant says that there cannot be any conflict between politics, as an applied branch of right, and morality, as a theoretical branch of right (Kant 1991c: 116). Then a clear division is made between the political moralist, who follows maxims from experience (such as the sophistries Fac et excusa, Si fecisti nega, Divide and impera) and who treats the problem of peace as a mere technical task (Kunstaufgabe); and the moral politician, who rightly conceives of it as a moral task (sittliche Aufgabe). For Kant, only the second approach is appropriate, since to bring about

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perpetual peace is desirable not just as a physical good but precisely as a state of affairs which must arise out of recognising one’s duty (Kant 1991c: 122). Furthermore, according to Kant, the solution of the first problem (that of Staatsklugheit) requires a great deal of knowledge of nature in order to use nature’s mechanism to promote the intended end. Even then, all this is uncertain so far as its repercussions on perpetual peace are concerned, no matter which of the three departments of the public right one considers. On the contrary, the solution of the second problem, that of the Staatsweisheit, presents itself as it were automatically; it is obvious to everyone, it defeats all artifices, and leads straight to its goal, so long as we prudently remember that it cannot be realised by violent and precipitate means, but must be steadily approached as favourable opportunities present themselves. (Kant 1991c: 122) As clearly emerges from this passage, the solution to the problem of peace not only should not be drawn from experience: it could not possibly be. Any attempt at doing so is doomed to failure, because as we have seen such knowledge would be uncertain. This knowledge is indeed unreliable because, as we read in the same passage, ‘history gives examples which go in opposite directions’ in reference to the means by which to reach this goal (Kant 1991c: 122). There is no space here to discuss at length the reasons why, according to Kant, such knowledge is uncertain. I will only briefly point out the importance to Kant’s political thinking of his attribution to human beings of what he sometimes calls ‘transcendental freedom’, namely, the capacity to choose and determine a new course of action, independently of natural causality. Thus, whereas we can predict with certainty what falls under the category of natural causality, in the realm of history and human actions we have to take into account humans beings’ independence from natural causality. This is not to say that we cannot have any secure guide in this field. It is only to say that the necessity at stake is not theoretical, but rather practical. In fact, if experience cannot provide any secure guide to the goal of perpetual peace, pure reason, as the highest legislative moral power, absolutely condemns war and prescribes the exit from the state of nature as an immediate duty (Kant 1991c: 122). Over the necessity of this duty no doubt can be raised, precisely because it is prescribed a priori by reason and does not rely on contingent experience.

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Therefore, to conclude this part of the argument, only an empiricist reading, which neglects the distinction between the philosophical justification of an a priori principle and its application to the multifaceted cases provided by experience, could attribute to Kant what I called the second condition of domestic analogy. On the contrary, as I have tried to show, this latter reading is not only patently rejected in the texts, but also contrary to the philosophical outlook of the Kantian approach to the problem of peace. Even if Kant cannot simply be considered a supporter of the domestic analogy because he refuses one of its conditions, at different points he refers to the states–individuals analogy and, furthermore, as we have seen, he endorses the statement of the proportion ‘states : international relations = individual : state of nature’. The problem therefore arises as to how Kant’s references to these elements of the domestic analogy should be read. In the first place, I think we should read them as rhetorical devices aimed at persuading rulers to apply those principles in their policymaking. This is true in particular for Perpetual Peace, whose international treaty-law structure seems to be aimed at persuading policymakers of the desirability and feasibility of this project (Kant 1991c: 115). This aim is made clear in the section entitled Secret Article of Perpetual Peace, where Kant explicitly invites rulers to listen to and even to consult philosophers on the conditions under which peace is possible. It is interesting to note that, when introducing the Second Definitive Article (which interpreters usually refer to when attributing to Kant the domestic analogy), Kant argues that since we regard the way in which ‘savages’ cling to their lawless freedom as barbarism, coarseness and brutality, we would expect that the European ‘civilised peoples’ would hasten to abandon so degrading a condition as soon as possible (Kant 1991c: 103). Here the series of dichotomies – state of nature/lawful condition, barbarism/civilisation, freedom of folly/freedom of reason – are clearly intended to play a rhetorical role. This seems also to be confirmed by the order of argument. Kant begins by insisting on the general and uncontested contempt for the savages’ lawless freedom, and only in a second step turns to accuse European sovereigns of behaving like those savage peoples they despise. It is in this manner that Kant first introduces the parallel ‘international relations’ = ‘state of nature’. On the other hand, I think that the elements of domestic analogy that are present in the text play a further role, which I would define as heuristic. By this I mean that the states–individuals analogy helps to formulate the problem at the beginning. This is to say that the problem

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is presented by addressing the question, ‘Can states be judged in the same way as individuals living in a state of nature?’ As we have seen, there are many passages where this and similar formulations can be found. However, this is only the starting point of the formulation of the problem. Once it is found that the solution to the problem requires not the reference to the experience of individuals but the a priori justification of a principle, those formulations are of no further help. As we have seen, the final structure of the whole reasoning upon which the Kantian project ultimately rests is in fact that of justification and application of a principle. In addition, once the principle in question has been applied, the analogy is thereby overcome. As we saw in section 1.2 of Chapter 1, when we apply a norm to new cases we are not, properly speaking, reasoning by analogy: an analogy may help at the beginning, but once we have found that the new case falls within the same principle, the analogy is thereby superseded, because there is no longer a separation between the two terms of the analogy, which as we have seen is one of the necessary conditions of analogical reasoning. Applying this to Kant’s argument, once we have found that the a priori principle (that whoever finds her/himself in the position of influencing others must enter into a lawful condition) holds for states as well as for individuals, the analogy is thereby overcome, because there is no longer any separation between the domestic and the international domain; rather, we are in the unique domain of right. This domain is unique and the difference ultimately consists only of the different points of view for considering and institutionalising it: namely, that of individuals within a nation (Staatsrecht); of states in their relationships with each other (Völkerrecht); and, finally, of individuals and states as far as (since the earth’s surface is spherical) human beings must also be considered as citizens of a universal state of humankind (Weltbürgerrecht). These are only three possible forms of the unique concept of rightful state (rechtlicher Zustand), so that if only one of these is lacking the whole structure is undermined and must finally collapse (Kant 1991d: 137). Thus, what I have called the first condition of the domestic analogy – namely, the separation between the two domains – has an uncertain status too. It is true that it plays a central role in the distinction between the three domains of public right. However, this distinction must be read merely as an approximation to a system. In fact, according to the preface to the Metaphysic of Morals, the concept of right, despite being a pure concept, is oriented towards practice, because it finds application in the multifaceted cases provided by experience. This is the reason why Kant calls his theory

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of rights ‘The metaphysical elements of the theory of rights’ (metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Rechtslehre) – and not simply ‘metaphysics of right’. According to him, there cannot be a purely metaphysical system of right (aus der Vernunft hervorgehendes System) – that which would have implied a perfect division of its parts which, while having to take into account the multiplicity of the experience, is impossible – but only an approximation to a system (nur Annährung zum System) (Kant 1991d: AB, III, IV). This may also explain why, in dealing with the crucial issue of the subjects of the jus gentium, Kant asserts that this latter involves not only the relationship between states but also between individuals. To quote from the Metaphysics of Morals: A state of nature among individuals or families (in their relations with one another) is different from a state of nature among entire nations, because international right involves not only the relationship between one state and another within a larger whole, but also the relationship between individual persons in one state and individuals in the other or between such individuals and the other states as a whole. (Kant 1991d: 165) Therefore, even in considering the relationship between states, we cannot but simultaneously consider individual human beings. This also confirms what we suggested before, namely, that the Kantian outlook is cosmopolitan from its inception, and it remains cosmopolitan even when he considers the ius gentium – it does not matter whether he takes a world state or a free confederation as the institution better suited to implementing his cosmopolitan principles. But if the perspective is cosmopolitan, then it is counterintuitive to think that Kant could move from justice in the domestic sphere to its application to the global one. On the contrary, as we have seen, he moves from an a priori principle and then applies it to different forms of right, but always with the awareness of their interdependence. This was clear to him from 1784, when in the Seventh Proposition of the Idea for a Universal History he wrote that ‘the problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution is subordinate to the problem of a law-governed external relationship with other states, and cannot be solved unless the latter is also solved’ (Kant 1991a: 47). Since then Kant was well aware of the interdependence of the three levels of right Staatsrecht, Völkerrecht and Weltbürgerrecht, interdependence which he derived from the observation that the surface of

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the earth being spherical, individuals and peoples cannot indefinitely spread, but have to re-encounter.32 Precisely because of this awareness, Kant occupies a peculiar position in modern political philosophy. And, as Katrin Flikschuh recently noticed, this position also counterpoises Kant to many contemporary liberals: whereas these latter conceive of justice at the domestic level and then apply it to the global context, Kant does not distinguish between different theories of justice, but simply considers different levels of institutionalising his cosmopolitan conception of right (Flikschuh 2000: 170). Indeed, many of those who consider themselves Kantian recover Kant through an empiricist reading which neglects its dependence on a metaphysical approach, and this may finally explain why their reasoning often appears closer to the domestic analogy than that of Kant. The best example of this tendency is Rawls’s treatment of The Law of Peoples. After having considered justice in the domestic sphere, he applies the same conceptual apparatus (original position, veil of ignorance, etc.) to the international one, by merely adjusting it to the situation of sovereign states, which he considers the unitary, self-enclosed actors of the international arena (Rawls 1999b). There is no space here to discuss Rawls’s position in detail. Suffice it to note that his approach, which takes states and not individuals as the starting point and which entails a radical refusal of the hypothesis of a world state, is much closer to the domestic analogy than Kant’s cosmopolitanism, which appears, at least at times, to embrace this hypothesis. Therefore, in conclusion, to adopt a cosmopolitan perspective does not automatically imply support of the domestic analogy. As this analysis of Kantian thinking has shown, the domestic analogy finally rests on an analogical reasoning that is alien to Kant’s approach, which is based, on the contrary, on the deduction and application of an a priori principle. On the other hand, one might object that it is precisely in adopting such an approach that Kant is wrong; but this is another criticism, which calls up for questioning a different set of problems. Bull and Wight’s conception, according to which those who apply to international relations both the concept of the state of nature and the social contract are therefore supporters of the domestic analogy, begins to reveal its limits. Whether or not the domestic analogy is adopted ultimately depends on the type of argumentation used and a deduction starting from a normative proposition cannot be considered a form of reasoning by analogy. Now it remains to see, with Bull, to what extent

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the rationalist tradition can be considered the most critical towards the domestic analogy. To this end, I will examine the reflection of Hugo Grotius who occupied a central role in this tradition, so much so that he is considered its founding father in the same way as Kant is for the idealist current.

2.3 Grotius and the rationalist tradition As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, the rationalist tradition occupies an intermediate position between the realists, who consider the perpetual struggle of states for power the central element of international life, and the idealists, who, on the basis of the same reconstruction, call for a radical turnaround of this state of things by establishing a cosmopolis, a civitas maxima. The rationalists oppose these two extremes thanks to a moderate faith in the possibility of progress, putting forward the idea that far from consisting wholly of perpetual bellum omnium contra omnes, relations between states are characterised by a certain degree of order, that is, a manner of interaction aimed at pursuing the elementary goals of social life. Since they are bound by the observance of some fundamental rules, as well as by the perception of common interests, in their interaction states constitute a society that is unique because it is not incompatible with the use of force by its members. This particular trait is reflected in the expression ‘anarchical society’, which many considered almost an oxymoron,33 proposed by Bull as a provocation to underline how the existence of an ordered social life is also possible in absence of a super partes power holding a monopoly over physical coercion. Therefore, like realism, rationalism accepts international anarchy as the starting point,34 but at the same time departs from it, denying that it leads to relations between states becoming mere competition for security and power; in other words, while approaching idealism, rationalism recognises that the sense of belonging to a great common society (magna societas) has somehow left its mark on international relations. A fundamental part of this tradition, which, as we have seen, is the point of reference both for Wight and his disciple Bull, is constituted by the reflection of international law theorists. These jurists indeed formulate the idea that states, despite not being subject to any superior power, are nevertheless held together by some fundamental rules, that is, law, the observance of which allows us to speak of the existence of an international society. Those who maintain that a social life is possible between sovereign states despite the absence of a common power holding them under subjection, implicitly refuse the classic form of

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domestic analogy, that is, the idea that the conditions for social order are the same between states as between the individuals within them. Among the scholars favoured by Bull, therefore, there had to figure Hugo Grotius, one of the founders of modern international law. His principal work, De iure belli ac pacis (1625), preceded by De iure praedae (written in 1604 but only published after his death) and Mare liberum (1609), achieved immediate success as the first complete and systematic treaty on international law, a claim to date unaffected by the passing of the centuries.35 According to most interpreters, this is where we find the very first formulation of the idea that states, despite being sovereign and therefore superiorem non recognoscentes, are nevertheless subject in their relations to a set of juridical regulations, which must still be observed even in the ultimate expression of sovereign prerogative – war. Of course, we are still at the very dawning of modernity; the system of national sovereign states is slowly emerging from the decline of the two great universal authorities of the Middle Ages, put to a dramatic end by the bloody religious wars. Nevertheless it is significant to note that the drafting of the Westphalia Treaties, traditionally considered the beginning of the modern system of sovereign states, is also seen by Bull as compounding the birth of an international society, or rather the states’ acceptance of rules binding their interactions and perception of a common interest in preserving them. According to this viewpoint, the peace of Westphalia showed in practice what Grotius – who did not have time to see any more than the preparatory negotiations to the peace – had already shown in theory, that is, that the independence or sovereignty of states is not incompatible with their subjection to international law (Bull 1992: 78). In supporting such a position, like all the members of the rationalist tradition, Grotius finds himself having to fight a two-sided battle: on the one hand, against those realist thinkers according to whom in relations between states there is no place for law because as Plutarch had Mario say ‘the law spoke too softly to be heard in such a noise of war’;36 on the other hand, against those who, like his compatriot Erasmus from Rotterdam, deny any legitimacy in the use of arms on the basis of the Christian moral of love. While against the latter Grotius restricts himself to observing that it is an ‘excessive reaction’ which needs to be moderated, this close encounter with the realist tradition, which counts among its ranks the most hardened opponents of the possibility of effectively regulating relations between states by juridical means, ends up being a fundamental step. From the very first the paragraphs of Prolegomena to De iure belli ac pacis, the head of the realist tradition, Thucydides, pops up, in particular the passage from the Peloponnesian War which sets out the

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saying by Euphemus according to which nothing that is useful for a king or a sovereign state is unjust (Grotius 1939, VI, 85: 1). Grotius’s response first of all is to generally dispute any form of utilitarian scepticism, which in his Prolegomena is placed under the name of Carneades.37 Grotius observes that it is not true that man, like all other animals, by nature only pursues what is useful for him, as among the characteristics specific to man is the appetitus societatis, that is, the search for a rationally ordered social life.38 Indeed, §6 of the Prolegomena reads as follows: On the other hand, among those things belonging to man is the desire for society, not just any society, but peaceful society ordered according to reason alone, with those who belong to the same species: what the Stoics call relation. Thus, what is said, that is, that by nature every living being has only the capacity to pursue its own utility, should nevertheless not be taken as a general assumption.39 (Grotius 1939; Prolegomena, §6) By saying that the type of society that this appetitus tends towards is not just any life of association (non qualiscumque), but one that is peaceful (tranquilla) and ordered according to reason (pro sui intellectus modo), Grotius opens the way to the rationalist claim. In so doing he revives the natural law tradition, meant as dictatum rectae rationis (Grotius 1939, 1, I: 10). It is indeed upon the rule of natural law pacta sunt servanda, raised by Grotius to the position of fundamental principle of the juridical order, that positive laws are founded, as emerges clearly from this passage: Since it is a rule of natural law to be loyal to covenants (because there needed to be a means of reciprocal obligation among men, and in truth it is impossible to imagine another that is so by nature), this was the source that prompted positive laws. Those who were members of some group, or who had submitted to one or more men, had explicitly undertaken, or, given the nature of the agreement, had evidently tacitly undertaken to conform to what either the majority of the group or those whom had been granted power would establish. (Grotius 1939; Prolegomena, §15) In this passage, Grotius clearly claims that positive laws stem from a contractual origin and does so by hinting at the contractualist categories of pactum societatis and pactum subiectionis. However, this does not authorise us to reprimand him for having taken the social covenant to

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be an empirical fact and therefore for stumbling, like other natural law theorists, into the pseudo-historical mythology of the original state of nature.40 As a matter of fact, Grotius makes no mention whatsoever of a state of nature real and proper or of passing from this to the societas civilis through the covenant. In this passage, he does state the contractual origin of positive law and during his work he does place social covenants at the basis of the single juridical institutions, but never at the origin of society itself; as society is connate with man, the two must be coeval. Therefore, there is no point posing the problem of whether Grotius understood the social covenant in an empirical sense, as a historical fact, or in a rational sense, as a logical device for justifying that limitation of individual freedom implied by the state. Hence, though philologically correct, Grotius can only be partially interpreted as an abstract rationalist who detheologises law by basing it on that dictatum rectae rationis that is valid even if ‘God does not exist’.41 Besides, it seems that Grotius dealt with the topic of the social contract as the foundation of state authority only incidentally: for him, whose aim was to establish a set of juridical regulations for relations between states, the value of the stare pactis principle consisted wholly in the fact that it was the only possible foundation for unbreachable international covenants. If in terms of political doctrine his conception of the covenant gave rise to no few ambiguities, this is due to the fact that on the one hand, like the contractualists, he maintains that society is something artificial, but on the other hand, in line with the natural law model, he conceives society and law as connate with man. The key to his whole construction is nevertheless his conception of human nature as made of both sociality and rationality, which we saw emerge from his theory of appetitus societatis. Indeed, deriving from this image is that moderate faith in the possibility of peaceful relations between individuals and peoples that places Grotius a long way distant from political realism and close to rationalism. Having founded law in the way that we have seen, the next step is to confute the idea that it is necessary for citizens, but not for nations and their heads, to observe laws. According to Grotius, the error of those who uphold this argument consists in their not having considered anything but the utility gained from observing the law; a utility that is evident in the case of single individuals, dependent on each other for all necessities in life, but by no means for states, which apparently seem to possess everything needed for self-preservation. It is in these pages that the analogy between states and individuals, which we have seen to be at the basis of the classic form of domestic analogy, appears.

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Nonetheless Grotius’s response moves along two quite different lines. On the one hand, we have the utilitarian line which we could say goes in the direction of the domestic analogy: in the same way that individuals, weak and in need of many things to live well, have been driven to join together in a social covenant, states have also, with an act of will, given rise to a set of juridical standards in view of their utility (Grotius 1939; Prolegomena, §16 and 17). States, like individuals, also need each other, both for trading reasons and for their own defence, which often leads them to seek out alliances. And Grotius writes: [T]here is no state so powerful that it may not require external help at some time, either for trade, or to repel the forces of many foreign peoples allied against it; thus we see even the most powerful nations and kings seeking out alliances: and all their effectiveness is denied by those who confine law within state borders. (Grotius 1939; Prolegomena, §22) And in the next paragraph: If there exists no community that can stay alive without law – as shown by Aristotle with his memorable example of the brigands – that which joins the whole of humankind or several peoples together will surely need law. (Grotius 1939; Prolegomena, §23) We can say that this argumentation moves along the lines of the domestic analogy: just as individuals come together in states in view of their common utility, states, on the basis of the same criterion, give rise to a magna societas. But in reality there is another line of argument, which becomes much more important than the utilitarian one; paragraph 22 begins with a parenthesis42 in which Grotius makes the premise, in the guise of a reservation, that the issue is put forward from a utilitarian point of view ad abundantiam, because, ultimately, utility is not the foundation of the law of peoples. Indeed, as we have seen, the first source of law is an appetitus societatis, that is, the tendency to seek a rationally ordered social life, something which is as true for states as for individuals, since it is deeply connatural to man. In order to understand how in reality Grotius’s position implies criticism of the domestic analogy, it is necessary to make a more detailed analysis of his conception of ius gentium. Grotius distinguishes the law of peoples from both natural and civil law, since, unlike either, it

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originates from the common consent between sovereign states, whether it is the tacit consent implicit in customs or the consensus formally expressed in international treaties. As observed by most interpreters, in actual fact Grotius states that international law is autonomous, defining it as ‘id quod Gentium omnium aut multarum voluntate vim obligandi accepit’, that is, as something whose binding strength depends on the consent of every or most states (Grotius 1939, 1, I: 14). This is the inauguration of modern international law, that is, of the idea that since states are sovereign, and therefore superiorem non recognoscentes, they can only be bound to respect those standards which they themselves have given their consent to. Indeed, it is not by chance that a large part of the first book of the De iure belli ac pacis is devoted to the concept of sovereignty, the true core of the modern system of states which was emerging at that time from the chaos of the religious wars. It says: On the other hand, the power whose actions are not dependent from other authority, meaning they cannot be annulled by any other new human desire, is called sovereign authority. I say other human desire as I exclude he who holds sovereign authority; he is permitted to change his will, as is his successor who enjoys the same right; as a consequence, he has the same power and not another. Therefore, these are the subjects that the sovereign authority possesses.43 (Grotius 1939, 1, III: 7) Although Grotius again proposes the old medieval conception of the societas generis humani, the main actor in his system is the modern sovereign state, as was coming into being as a result of the fight against the universalist claims of the Pope and Emperor. The role played by states as subjects of the ius gentium emerges in particular in their handling of war, the supreme expression of the sovereign’s prerogative. Indeed, on the one hand, they alone possess the criteria for ius ad bellum, due to which only they can legitimately commence a war, excluding the indiscriminate use of force by private persons who caused so much disaster in medieval times. This is why Grotius insists on the necessity for the outbreak of hostilities to be preceded by a formal declaration of war from the sovereign authority: we must be sure that war is never begun upon private initiative, but only upon the desire of the respective nations.44 On the other hand, Grotius maintains there is the duty to conduct war itself following the criteria of ius in bello: we are looking at the process

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of taming war that many consider as one of the conquests of modernity. Progress on the medieval conception of ius belli consists in making the fundamental question the problem of who can make legitimate use of the instrument of war: behind this change in perspective is the emergence of the sovereign state as holder of the monopoly on legitimate coercion. If we are to make a detailed analysis of the rules going to make up the ius gentium, which mainly reflect the dominating praxis among states at the time, it clearly emerges that in comparison with the scholarly tradition of just war (as we will see in certain respects Grotius is still very bound to this), the restrictions on war are significantly pared down. First of all, Grotius no longer strictly subordinates the ius ad bellum to the injustice sustained; in his opinion, war can also be brought against those who violate natural law (Grotius 1939, 1, XX: 40)45 or who offend the godhead (Grotius 1939, 1, XX: 44); moreover, once the exclusive hold over ius ad bellum is conferred to the sovereign authority, we can deduce that every war undertaken in the name of the sovereign power, and preceded by a declaration of war, conforms to ius belli. Secondly, the ius in bello, which scholars had founded on the strict exclusion of all pointless or excessive violence, in particular against civil peoples, sheds all restrictions in Grotius’s writings, as he considers it legitimate for the purveyors of war to kill all those in enemy territory (Grotius 1939, 3, IV: 6), including women, children (Grotius 1939, §9) and prisoners (Grotius 1939, §10). From what has been said, we can conclude that Grotius’s position is an implicit refusal of the domestic analogy: states, as subject to international law, form a unique societas in that, unlike societies within the state, it is not incompatible with the use of force by its members. Indeed, far from denying states the right turn to arms, Grotius recognises their exclusive entitlement to that right. On the other hand, he denies the realist stance against the right to arms: despite being superiorem non recognoscentes, and therefore free to turn to Mars as the arbiter of their disputes, states are equally subject to the legal regulation of their relations, even in war, the ultimate manifestation of their sovereign prerogative. Nevertheless, as shown by Bull, Grotius’s work makes significant concessions to the domestic analogy, which emerge even more clearly if compared to the conception of nineteenth-century theorists of positive international law. Indeed, according to Bull, they deserve recognition for fully acknowledging the uniqueness of international society:46 this works perfectly through institutions, such as international law, war itself, but also diplomacy, the balance of power and the role played

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by the great powers, which are totally distinct from those that can be traced back to the state model. During the essay quoted above, Bull analyses Grotius’s conception, using as a term of comparison of the work by the jurist Lassa Oppenheim, and in particular the system of international law that he put forward in the first edition of his International Law.47 Although both acknowledge the existence of an international society and laws binding its member states in their reciprocal relations, they disagree on fundamental issues such as the sources and subjects of international law as well as the delicate question of the role of war, especially the problem of its legitimacy. According to Bull, as far as the sources of international law are concerned, or, to use Grotius’s terminology, ius gentium in the strict sense, we can say that the two substantially agree: for both it is prompted by the states’ will, whether expressed by tacit consent in customary law or explicitly through treaties. But, during his exposition, Grotius does not fail to refer to natural law as the source of those rules dictated through reason to all men, which need to be turned to should positive international law not pronounce itself. Nevertheless, the question as to which of the two should prevail in the event of conflict remains open, a point upon which Grotius is by no means clear, arousing criticism from no few commentators. According to the jurist Hersch Lauterpacht, for example, if we consider De iure belli ac pacis as setting out a system of law, as Grotius himself invites us to do from the very first paragraphs of the Prolegomena, rather than an essay on political philosophy, it displays the grave weakness of telling us everything that is laid down by the various types of law (natural law, the law of peoples, divine law, canon law), without forging all this material into a single system by saying what law is once and for all. It is legitimate to go a step further and state that in Grotius’s conception natural law enjoys primacy over the other sources of law: this is what prompts the principle of pacta sunt servanda upon which positive law itself is based and without which there would be no law of peoples, as it is this principle that gives all juridical institutions their validity (Grotius 1939; Prolegomena, §15). Bull observes that Grotius’s ambiguity over the issue of the subjects of ius gentium is linked to this conception of the sources of law. In the first paragraph of the Prolegomena Grotius clearly expresses his intention to systematically set out all of ‘that law that regulates relations between a group of nations or governments’, which permits us to say that the states are the only subjects to whom this law is applied. But natural law, which he labels as the first of the sources, is a type of right that binds all human beings. The rights and duties of individuals can therefore be directly

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declared in international law as shown by the position that Grotius takes up concerning the possibility of humanitarian intervention (Grotius 1939, 2, XXV: 8) and the right to refuse to carry arms for a cause that one considers unjust. Thus, what at first sight may have seemed to be but uncertainty over terminology, that is, talk of a ‘great community of humankind or peoples’ (magna communitas generis humani aut gentium), turns out to be a fundamental ambiguity: while for Oppenheim international society is composed of states, due to which they alone possess rights and duties in international law, in Grotius’s system the members of such a society are not states alone, but also individuals. Nevertheless, Bull goes on to observe, the issue on which the distance separating the two, and therefore all the ambiguity of Grotius’s system, emerges most clearly, is without doubt that of the legitimacy of war. For Oppenheim war is legitimate when it conforms to the law, or is undertaken by the sovereign authority with the entitlement to the ius ad bellum and conducted in observance of the rules of the ius in bello. War is an act of politics, the expression of the states’ sovereign prerogative; the law need not do anything but accept it, when necessary, and take care of regulating how it should be conducted. On the other hand, not only does Grotius strictly limit the entitlement of the ius ad bellum to the authority invested with the sovereign power and introduce the restrictions set out by the ius in bello to his system, he also places a further restriction on the legitimacy of war, imposing that it only be undertaken ex iusta causa: by reusing the medieval doctrine of just war, he states that the law must distinguish between just and unjust causes, limiting the legitimacy of turning to arms to the former alone. The whole of the second book of De iure belli ac pacis is then devoted to providing a detailed explanation of the just (which can be boiled down to defence, recovering property and inflicting a punishment) and unjust causes (among which the desire for wealthier lands, refusing a proposal of marriage, assets already possessed by others, the desire to dominate others against their will with the pretext of doing so in their interest, or – and here we really are in the end phases of the Middle Ages – the desire to take the title of emperor or to impose one’s faith on an atheist and the truth on a heretic). On taking a closer look, the reasons that justify turning to arms are but one, that is, compensating for a wrong (inuiria); Grotius writes: There can be no other just cause for commencing a war other than to compensate for a wrong.48 (Grotius 1939, 2, I: 14)

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The issue that now comes up is if this offence, and therefore its repair, only concerns the two directly involved parties or the whole of the magna societas generis humani. In other words, it is a matter of understanding if war, undertaken in such a case, should be understood as repairing the wrong through the deeds of the offended party or as a punishment inflicted by that party in the name of the whole of international society. Grotius’s answer is crystal clear: When above I dealt with those who make war, I said and showed that naturally not only does everyone exercise their own right, but also that of the others. Thus, those causes for which the thing is undertaken are just, and are equally so for those who give help to others.49 (Grotius 1939, Prolegomena, 2, XXV: 1) Contrary to Oppenheim’s claims, Grotius allows for a general right to take part in a just war, conferred by that reciprocal bond of brotherhood between men which on its own gives it sufficient justification (Grotius 1939, 2, XXV: 6): an offence sustained by a state and therefore its punishment not only concerns the directly involved party, but the whole of international society, hence war conducted for a just cause ultimately derives its legitimacy from the service rendered to such a society. Consequently, the kings or peoples who embark upon a war to repair an offence are authorised to consider themselves the instruments of a general will; their aim will therefore not only be to repair the damage sustained, but also to inflict a punishment in the name of the whole of international society. Hiding behind Grotius’s theory of just war is what Suganami called the ‘police analogy’: his conception of just war as a sanction is based on the analogy with what happens within domestic society, where the use of force can only be a crime, violation of the law, or its punishment by the whole community. According to Bull this concept entails no few consequences in practical terms, as clearly emerges from the detailed explanation of the rules of ius gentium in De iure belli ac pacis. First of all, as far as the rights and duties of the purveyors of war are concerned, we see that while for Oppenheim, who makes no distinction between just and unjust causes, it is natural that the rules of ius in bello are applied equally to both conflicting parties, for Grotius the question is whether the party combating to claim their right should suffer the same limitations as he who breached it.

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In theory, there is no contradiction in maintaining that war must only be undertaken for a just cause and in saying at the same time that it must be conducted in a just manner. Nevertheless, when applied in practice a clear tension emerges between the two perspectives: if war is to be considered as a clash between he who violated the law and he who is trying to apply it, it is desirable that no obstacle be placed in the way of the latter; but if, on the other hand, the main worry is to ensure that war, whatever reasons there may be for its outbreak, is conducted within the limits provided for by the ius in bello, then the duty to observe its norms must be reciprocal, because only in the perspective of reciprocity is there some hope that they will be observed. On this point, Grotius’s position again remains ambiguous, oscillating between the natural law viewpoint, which tends towards the first solution, and that of the ius gentium in the strict sense (which I will call positive international law), whose inclination is towards the second. Nevertheless we cannot fail to notice how, while setting out his system, Grotius grants a privileged position to those combating for the just cause; for example, they are explicitly entitled to the exclusive right to violate a neutral territory if need be (Grotius 1939, 2, II: 10), while their adversaries are even denied the right to defend themselves against their just invaders. Bull points out another important consequence, concerning the concept of neutrality. Grotius definitely gave a very important contribution to developing this institution, which was not present in any of his predecessors’ thought: he claimed the rights of ‘those who belong to neither of the two warring parties’ against the tendency for their being involved by warmongering states and explicitly denied that they have the duty to enter war to support the just cause. On the other hand, in the name of solidarity towards international society’s assertion of justice, he maintains that in the event of a possible war in which one party fights ex iusta causa, all the other states have the right to intervene at their side and, if they decide to remain neutral, this status does not oblige them to take an impartial attitude, but requires them to make a qualified discrimination in the favour of justice. All of Grotius’s solidarist ideology also emerges on the issue of observing alliances. While for Oppenheim, given their importance in preserving international order, they are always binding, Grotius maintains that the principle according to which war must be fought for a just cause alone must prevail over the restrictions in any alliance treaty, which should only be observed in the event in which one’s own alliance is on the side of justice.

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The distance between Grotius and Oppenheim, both exponents of the rationalist tradition, is underlined by Bull by contrasting the ‘solidarist’ conception of international society put forward by the former, trusting in the possibility that there is consensus between the states as regards applying the law, and the latter’s ‘pluralist’ conception in regarding the dissent between states as cutting too deep to ever create that solidarity described by Grotius. In other words, although both recognise that international society is unique as it is not incompatible with the use of force by its members, hence it cannot be traced back to the domestic society model, in Oppenheim’s system his refusal of the domestic analogy is absolute, while, with his theory of just war, Grotius grants it significant concessions. On the other hand, we can say that the role played by the domestic analogy in Grotius’s thought is a leftover from the Middle Ages, while his originality lies in having perceived the direction in which history was moving. From this point of view, it does not count so much that Grotius placed notions such as ‘sovereignty’, ‘ius belli’, ‘neutrality’ and ‘alliances’ alongside the solidarist doctrine of just war inherited from the Catholic tradition; what is of somewhat more significance is the fact that he drew up these categories in a moment of history when their status was as yet unsure and their outlines blurred. Besides, as I noted at the beginning of this chapter, we are still at the dawn of modernity: the reality has not yet run its course, and it is too early for Minerva’s owl to have begun its flight. These circumstances can perhaps explain why Wight, despite the ambiguities that I have traced in Grotius’s thought, makes this author the leader of the rationalist tradition. Yet the image that emerges from my reconstruction is that of a thinker who does not allow himself to be enclosed within a single tradition but lies on the crossroads between the rationalist current, with its emphasis on the degree of order in relations between states, and the idealist tradition with that surplus of normativity implicit in the idea of a universal societas generis humani. For the purposes of my investigation it is nevertheless relevant to note that Bull’s classification, which I took as a starting point, presents some significant limits. Hobbes does make an analogy between the individual and the international state of nature, but ultimately, the negative moment of the analogy prevails over the positive one. Although he applies both the category of the state of nature and the social contract to relations between states, Kant bases his project for perpetual peace not so much upon analogical considerations, but on applying a principle derived a priori from reason. Lastly, by recognising the possibility

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of regulating relations between states juridically even in the absence of a common power, Grotius refuses the domestic analogy, but with his theory of just war, which makes the resort to force a sanction inflicted in the name of the whole international community, he makes significant concessions to it. Instead, the domestic analogy is refused out and out by other international law theorists such as Samuel Pufendorf and Emmerich de Vattel. These authors are most definitely engaged in underlining that the conditions for order among states are not the same as those for order among individuals. All the same, this does not detract from the fact that the domestic analogy exercised notable influence on the peace projects drawn up in the modern age. Suffice it to think of the Abbé de SaintPierre’s Project for Perpetual Peace (1710), William Penn’s Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe (1693) or Saint-Simon’s project On the Reorganisation of European Society (1814), to quote but a few. All these projects are based on the conviction that the type of arguments used by Hobbes to demonstrate the need for individuals to unite in states can be taken a stage further to show that states themselves also need to submit to a common power (Suganami 1989). However, as we will see, more than a century later, the birth of International Relations as an autonomous academic discipline will be accompanied by a more firmly distant stance towards the domestic analogy: it was when reflection began on the specificity of relations inter-nationes that the need was highlighted to draw up specific scientific tools which do not depend on analogies drawn from the state model of political order. My task now is to look at the contemporary theories of world politics and to try to verify if, and if so, to what extent, the domestic analogy continues to make its influence felt on them.

3 The Domestic Analogy in Contemporary Theories

International Relations is one of the last branches of social science to have gained the status of an autonomous discipline. It was only officially accepted in academic circles in 1919, in the wake of the dramatic experience of the First World War, with the establishment of the first university teaching post at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales. Given that to a large extent it has progressed along a separate path from political philosophy and that this book is aimed at both political philosophers and international relations theorists, it may be useful to give a quick summary of the history of the discipline. It is common for academics to briefly describe the history of this discipline by pinpointing the three ‘great founding debates’.1 The first is the original debate counterpoising the ‘liberal’ (or ‘idealist’) hopes of creating a collective security system on the basis of spontaneous harmony among the different states’ interests with the fierce criticism of the realists who instead point out the brutal reality of the fight for power that dominates international relations. The second great debate, which took place between the 1950s and 1960s, revolved around methodological questions and in particular the use of natural science methods to investigate this type of phenomena. Finally, the third, ongoing debate is centred around the state’s role as a rational and unitary actor, something that is now being questioned on several sides. As a result of these debates, the original opposition between realism and idealism has been diversified and enriched by new perspectives: to mention but a few, in addition to the renewed realist and cosmopolitan traditions we now have sociological approaches, international regime theories, Marxist theories, those drawing on Horkheimer’s ‘critical theory’, various forms of constructivists, postmodern and gender approaches. 81

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As I cannot deal with all these conceptions systematically, I will dwell on those of most significance for my investigation. In particular, my task is to highlight how the desire to make reflection on international relations an autonomous discipline led to greater scepticism towards the domestic analogy. While sticking to Wight’s tripartition, I will analyse the conceptions of the neoidealist or cosmopolitan theorists, the neorealists and, lastly, that of the supporters of neoliberal institutionalism, while trying to cast light on how the different traditions have evolved over time. For each conception, I will concentrate on one author whom I have found to be particularly representative. As we have already seen in the case of classic international relations theories, even within the same author, and at times even within the same work, there are significant oscillations and diverging stances concerning the domestic analogy (suffice it to think of the oscillations of Kant, at times within the same text, between the world state and free federation of states solutions). As I have tried to demonstrate, this is to a large extent due to the fact that the domestic analogy is not a single block that can be either accepted or refused, but a label for a form of reasoning comprising different segments that may also be separated (what I have called the presuppositions of the domestic analogy). Where possible, I will therefore try to concentrate on a single author in order to dissect the theory. I will look in particular at the conceptions of C. Beitz for neoidealism, K. Waltz for neorealism and R. Keohane for neoistitutionalism. Although I will be mainly dealing with contemporary world politics theories, I must nevertheless point out that the window of time will be relatively wide (approximately from the 1970s to date). Often the situation behind the various theories analysed is also different: while the academic triumph of neorealism, with its emphasis on the qualities of the bipolar system, was closely linked to the Cold War situation, on the other hand now that world seems to have come to an end and international life is increasingly marked by new phenomena such as globalisation. As a consequence, today the tendency is to rethink the old conceptual categories, while at the same time trying to draw up new ones. As we will see, new challenges, new actors and perhaps also a new script have now irremediably taken their place on the world stage. In order to grasp this new complexity, Wight’s three traditions seem to be somewhat insufficient. In particular, issues that are utterly central to understanding the contemporary world of globalisation, such as the political economy, the role of the sovereign states and that of gender, are not sufficiently addressed by the three traditions. As I suggested at the beginning, Wight’s tripartition should be considered but a ladder

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which can be thrown away once we have reached the top. My final task will therefore be to go on analyse those conceptions of international relations that have more clearly tried to go beyond the three traditions, addressing problems that the latter did not take into account. Constructivism, both in its radically postmodern and moderate versions, feminism, and Marxism all tend to implicitly distance themselves from the domestic analogy by emphasising categories other than the modern states (such as gender or economic imperatives), or by questioning the unqualified centrality of this notion. While the authors I analysed in the second part of this book were more clearly philosophers, the ones that I will approach here are mostly labelled as ‘international relations theorists’. One of the core arguments of this book is that we should question not only the distinction between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘international’, but also the division between political philosophy and International Relations. In the epilogue, we will see how globalisation contributes to challenging these boundaries. For the time being, suffice it to observe that the very same theories I am about to analyse are also philosophical theories. Once we abandon the reductive view of philosophy as only concerning normative approaches to the world, and we conversely recognise that even an allegedly ‘scientific’ approach to world politics can have a significant philosophical connotation, we no longer need to argue for a separation between political philosophy on the one hand and International Relations on the other.

3.1 Neoidealism In the aftermath of the Second World War, the triumph of realism, especially in American academia, seemed to have completely ruled out any possibility of regenerating the idealist tradition. While texts like The Twenty Years’ Crisis by Carr and the extremely successful Politics Among Nations by Morgenthau claimed to be a scientific analysis of international life, idealist conceptions, branded by Carr as utopias, seemed to have been superseded once and for all by the great massacre of the Second World War, together with the hopes for peace that had accompanied the birth of the League of Nations. Playing no small role in many of the proposals to reform the latter was the idea that only by transferring some of the institutions which maintain order in the state to the international level could long-lasting peace be guaranteed (Suganami 1989). The realists contrast this idea, embodying the classic form of domestic analogy, with that of an unfathomable distance

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between domestic society as the place where progress is possible and therefore it makes sense to pose the problem of the choice between different options, and international relations, the realm of the eternal struggle for survival (Linklater 1996). In the 1970s we saw a timid but conscious attempt to recuperate the idealist tradition which took into account the criticism railed against it by its adversaries.2 Part of this new awareness lay in the conviction that it is problematic to say the least to take up the domestic society model unquestioningly as the telos towards which the projects to reform international relations should tend. An important moment in this return was, among others, the reflection of Charles R. Beitz and in particular his Political Theory and International Relations, published for the first time in 1979 and then published again with a new afterword in 1999. I have chosen this work for my investigation since it has the twofold advantage of having as its points of reference Wight’s three traditions and offering a contemporary rethink of the syntax of natural law theories applied to international relations. In this book, Beitz develops the idea that due to the recent phenomena of interdependence and globalisation, international society is becoming increasingly similar to the situation within states. Hence, the principles of justice applied in the latter can and must be transported to the international sphere. In particular, it is a matter of justifying the adoption of the principle of distributive justice in international relations on the basis of extending by analogy the argument on state justice put forward by John Rawls in his Theory of Justice to relations between states (Beitz 1979, 1999). According to Rawls, when placed in a hypothetical original position under a ‘veil of ignorance’ that covers their own values, personal talents and position in society, individuals would choose to live in a society where all the primary goods (freedom, opportunity and wealth) are distributed fairly, unless unequal distribution were to be to the benefit of the less advantaged.3 Likewise, according to Beitz, we should adopt the same principle of distributive justice in the international sphere. My task now is to establish to what extent such a line of argument is based on the domestic analogy, on an extension by analogy of the domestic society model to international relations. As I will try to demonstrate, the structure of the argument Beitz uses to show the need for a principle of distributive justice on an international scale is not analogical by any means, despite the presence of certain formulations seemingly alluding to this.4 In contrast, in the pars destruens of his work, Beitz criticises the analogy between states and individuals, the keystone to the domestic analogy.

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Before going on to outline his conception of justice which, drawing from Kant, he defines as ‘cosmopolitan’, Beitz clears the ground with a harsh criticism of both the ‘realists’ scepticism’ which reduces international relations to the Hobbesian state of nature (first part), and the ‘morality of states’ idea found in certain natural law theorists such as Pufendorf and Wolff (second part) (Beitz 1979, 1999). For my investigation, it is interesting to note that this criticism, and then also the relative pars costruens, are based on refuting the elements constituting the domestic analogy, or, in the first case (criticism of realist scepticism), the idea that the state of nature can be applied to international relations, and, in the other (criticism of the ‘morality of states’), the states–individuals analogy itself. As I will try to demonstrate, far from embodying a form of domestic analogy, Beitz’s cosmopolitan conception is based on the conviction that the analogy between states and individuals is unfounded on the empirical level and misleading in normative terms. He criticises both the descriptive and normative application of the Hobbesian state of nature concept to international relations. In empirical terms, Beitz observes, it is not true – or at least it no longer is today – that relations between states can be analysed in terms of interaction between self-sufficient units upon meeting, or rather clashing, since their pursuit of self-preservation, in a condition of anarchy, can only bring about a condition of war (meant in Hobbesian terms as the predisposition towards this type of situation, always about to explode). Such an analogy would be acceptable if the four following conditions were to come to pass in international relations: 1. if the states were the only actors; 2. if they had equal power, hence the weakest could defeat the strongest; 3. if they were also able to conduct their internal affairs in an independent manner; and 4. if, finally, due to the lack of superior power, there was no guarantee of all observing the rules. According to Beitz, the first condition is no longer applicable to contemporary international life, characterised as it is by the increasingly important role of non-state actors, such as both governmental and non-governmental international organisations, multinational corporations and transnational associations which can have a great influence in mediating conflicts. What does not adapt to international relations

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at all is that radical individualism in Hobbes’s conception that leads to his expecting the state of war since he denies that there are any other actors that can mediate and coordinate the action of the individuals (or states in the case of an international state of nature) to lessen the predisposition to conflict. While it is already questionable that this atomistic individualism characterises the state of nature between individuals, as far as states are concerned it is even more so: whoever characterises world politics in these terms can only do so by ignoring the fact that states, unlike people, are groups of units (individuals and intermediate groups) which are capable of independent political action. Beitz also maintains that the second condition of the equal distribution of power is not at all applicable to relations between states: in history, and foreseeably also in the future, there have always been enormous inequalities between small and large powers, hence the latter have never had anything to fear from the former. Beitz also takes into consideration the hypothesis that the dissemination of nuclear weapons can balance things out in this respect, but refutes it on the basis of observing that not all countries are developing nuclear arsenals, nor can we say that all will do so in the near future. As to the additional objection put forward by David Gauthier, according to which it is not the equal nuclear capacity but equal vulnerability to a nuclear attack that ensures the analogy between international affairs in the nuclear age and the state of nature (Beitz 1979: 41), Beitz gives an equally negative answer: states are profoundly unequal in these terms too, because not all nuclear powers have the same second strike capacity and therefore the same power of deterrence. According to Beitz, even the third condition, that is, the presumed independence of states in internal political affairs, no longer reflects the contemporary world: in the world of interdependence and globalisation, a state is no longer able to pursue an effective policy, let’s say, on employment, or to successfully fight inflation without coordinating its action with that of the other international actors. This interdependence explains the emergence of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund or the GATT, set up to coordinate the economic and financial policies of governments, and their increasing importance on the world stage. These institutions or ‘regimes’ do pose some restrictions on the states that adhere to them, but they also give them the opportunity to take part in making decisions on those processes that are now global in scale. Finally, Beitz takes an equally critical position regarding the idea that there is no guarantee that rules will be respected by all in relations

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between states: although there is no international police force, the international community has a series of mechanisms for promoting the observance of rules; these range from simple sanctions, such as censuring international organisations, to much more effective mechanisms such as economic embargoes. Furthermore, insofar as international institutions are growing in importance, it is quite probable that exclusion from the benefits and opportunities that they offer will increasingly become a form of sanction. Besides, Beitz continues, without considering the problem of whether or not there are effective mechanisms for applying the law, there exists an ample number of areas of cooperation between states with a high level of spontaneous observation of the rules. Suffice it to think of what happens in the various specialised agencies (Postal Union, World Health Organisation, etc.), in limited associations such as military alliances (NATO for example) and also in regional economic development and trade organisations (NAFTA, etc.). Beitz comes to the conclusion that not only have the actors in contemporary international life and how they interact changed, but this is also the case for the goals that the international system can pursue. Although international relations can still be characterised as a potential ‘state of war’ because conflict is always possible, at the same time they have become much more than this – and perhaps, according to Beitz, they already were so before. But this new complexity, important both in descriptive and normative terms, risks becoming obscured if we accept the model of international relations as a state of nature, in which war, and the ways to avoid it, are the only problem. Beitz is not claiming that high politics issues have become irrelevant, just that today they are one of the many problems needing to be dealt with on the international level. Nor on the normative level, Beitz continues, can we accept the realist conception. First of all, it includes a self-misunderstanding that needs to be clarified. On the one hand, it is claimed that there is no room for morals in international relations,5 with an unfillable gap between the domestic sphere, about which we can make normative considerations, and the international sphere, the domain in which these considerations are not only inopportune but could even be harmful. On the other hand, it is claimed that the only criterion on the basis of which it is legitimate to judge the states’ action is the pursuit of their own national interest. Is this not a ‘moral of egoism’? The issue can be cleared up if we are to claim that it is not a moral because what makes a set of rules specifically moral is the possibility that they require action that does not promote personal interest (Beitz 1979, II).

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This is the central point of Beitz’s critique: what sense is there in speaking of having to pursue ‘the interest of a nation’ if this is distinct from that of the individuals comprising it? Is there something like a ‘states’ right to self-preservation’? The answer can be ‘yes’ only if the states– individuals analogy is taken to be valid. But states, Beitz continues, are not individuals. Even if on a merely descriptive level we can admit that it is useful to consider them unitary actors that respond to the different circumstances of international life on the basis of calculating their interest (but the previous considerations suggest this is not the case), in prescriptive terms, we should not be looking at the states but at the rights and interests of the individuals. If the idea of national interest plays a role in justifying rules for how states should behave, it can only do so because it derives its normative importance from these deeper considerations. This is where his criticism of the second position makes its appearance. Beitz attributes this second position to natural law theorists and calls it the ‘morality of states’ because it is based on the conception of the world as a community of largely self-sufficient states6 which are nevertheless linked by their observance of some limited norms. The central dogma of this conception is the principle of the autonomy of states conceived of by analogy with personal freedom. The extreme version of this conception leads us to maintain that, like people in domestic society, states in international society must be dealt with as autonomous sources of ends, immune from outside interference and morally free to conduct their internal affairs in the way the respective governments consider most opportune (this is the non-intervention principle).7 But states, Bietz once again objects, are not people, and while the latter can be considered ends unto themselves and must be dealt with as such, the same thing is by no means true for states. To sum up, according to Beitz the analogy between states and individuals must be rejected both on the descriptive level because it prevents us from grasping the complexity of the increasingly variegated world of global politics, and on the prescriptive level, because when considering a field of this type in the end we must look towards individuals, not states. It is on the basis of these considerations that Beitz dusts off Rawls’s theory of justice which, as we will see, he will nevertheless significantly modify. The fundamental idea behind the Theory of Justice is to supply a justification8 of two principles of justice through the expedient of the social contract. One concerns the equal right to the greatest possible amount of freedom each, with a similar measure for all; the other is

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the so-called difference principle according to which all economic and social inequalities must be distributed so that they provide the most benefit to the least advantaged, in line with the just savings principle and equal opportunities. According to Rawls, these are the principles upon which rational individuals in a hypothetical original position, concerned with pursuing their own interests, decide to base their society. The characteristics of this original position are, first of all, not being aware of those contingent factors that bring individuals to disagree and leave them at the mercy of their own prejudices. What must be placed under what Rawls calls the ‘veil of ignorance’ are our social position, natural talents, which are assigned to each of us by chance, and finally the conceptions of good which are usually at the bottom of disagreement among individuals. These two principles, Rawls underlines from the beginning of his exposition, refer to ‘a special case of the problem of justice’ (Rawls 1971: 7), that is, justice within the national society, where Rawls, like Hume, takes society to be ‘a scheme of cooperation without which no one could have a satisfactory life’ (Rawls 1971: 15). In other words, these principles do not concern international justice in any way nor relations between states in general; indeed in 1971 Rawls wrote: The conditions for the law of nations may require different principles arrived at in a somewhat different way. I shall be satisfied if it is possible to formulate a reasonable conception of justice for the basic structure of society conceived for the time being as a closed system isolated from other societies. (Rawls 1971: 8) This passage clearly shows Rawls’s intention to programmatically restrict his investigation to the problem of justice within states; to this end, the model of society he uses is a closed system of social cooperation which he considers to take place within the borders of single nations. If, like Rawls, we are to assume that national confines outline discrete and (more or less) self-sufficient schemes of social cooperation, then the problem of justice between people situated in different nations becomes of secondary importance. Indeed, Rawls develops his theory so that it is only after the principles of social justice have been chosen within the single societies that they are considered in relation to the international sphere (Rawls 1971: 377–8). Only at this point in his Theory of Justice does Rawls deal with the problem of international justice, proposing the

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idea of a second original position composed, like a sort of international conference, of representatives of the single countries (Rawls 1971: 378). As is well known, Rawls came back to the issue of international relations several times after this, first of all with a long article in 1993 (Rawls 1999a) and then with his latest great work, The Law of Peoples (Rawls 1999b). Here Rawls deals directly with the question of which principles well-ordered peoples would choose following the idea, first developed in his Theory, of justice as equity. Nonetheless, as has been noted, and as Rawls himself suggests several times in the text, the model of justice that Rawls is referring to here is not that of the Theory, but rather the one drawn up 20 years later in Political Liberalism (Maffettone 2001: VIII). In the latter Rawls started from the presupposition that not all members of a pluralist society will be ‘liberals’, convinced of the principles of justice as equity, so that we must therefore find a theory that allows them to co-exist in a stable and morally justifiable manner. Similarly, The Law of Peoples Rawls begins with the presupposition that the world is made of peoples who are not all governed by the principles of ‘political liberalism’ (Sadurski 2003: 1).9 Nonetheless with respect to the few hints at the subject made in the Theory, what does not change is the very idea of a second original position in which the contracting parties are not individuals, but the representatives of the single peoples (Rawls 1999b). Rawls argues at length in favour of this choice of the peoples as contracting parties and at several points seems to clearly suggest that the preference for the latter derives from the fact that they can be conceived, by analogy with individuals, as having a moral nature.10 In particular, according to Rawls, we can assume that liberal peoples, like liberal individuals, will be reasonable and rational in their conduct (Rawls 1999b, I: §2). Once placed beneath a hypothetical veil of ignorance adjusted in tune with the international situation,11 according to Rawls these parties would choose the following eight principles of international justice: (1) peoples are free and independent; (2) they are to observe treaties; (3) they are equal; (4) they have a duty of non-intervention; (5) they have the right of self-defence; (6) they are to honour human rights; (7) they are to observe restrictions in the conduct of war; and finally, (8) they have a duty to assist other peoples living under unfavourable conditions that make it difficult for them to be part of the ‘society of peoples’ (Rawls 1999b, I: §4). Like Beitz, among others, he underlined that one of the main problems of this theory is precisely having chosen peoples, conceived of as reasonable and rational subjects like individuals, as the contracting parties in the original position (Beitz 2000; Pogge 2001). This seems to

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create problems not only on the level of empirical analysis, but also in terms of the foundations of the whole theory, which no longer manages to unhook itself from this presupposition (Maffettone 2001). Such an assumption, as Beitz had already highlighted in 1979, is not only problematic on the normative level, because the moral subjects are ultimately human beings, and states have rights and duties only insofar as they are derived from those originally belonging to individuals, but is also completely misleading on the empirical level: in the world of globalisation, in which the very confines between the domestic and international spheres are being questioned, in which societies are increasingly mélanges of different cultures, the image of a world made of peoples, meant as unitary and rational actors, goes off track in terms of the reality we have before us. In this sense, far from being a ‘realistic utopia’ (Rawls 1999b, Introduction), Rawls’s law of peoples risks becoming a utopia for a world – the Westphalian world made of single sovereign states – which, if it ever existed, is now disappearing (Buchanan 2000). Given the general foundations of his theory, based as it is on the presuppositions of peoples as basic units, it does not come as a surprise that Rawls criticises the cosmopolitan proposals of global justice such as the one by Beitz. Rawls primarily looks at peoples, and argues that the single political cultures themselves are often the causes of poverty. As a result, he proposes to restrict the law of peoples to a limited duty to provide assistance. Such a duty has to be limited to the attainment of a certain threshold of welfare (Rawls 1999b, III: §16.2). To conclude on this point, Rawls’s Law of Peoples admits at least two of the presuppositions for the domestic analogy, that is, the separation between the domestic and the international realms, and the peoples– individuals analogy. Both play a central role in his theory. On the contrary, Beitz’s cosmopolitan proposal, as developed in his Political Theory and International Relations, is fundamentally critical towards the domestic analogy. While Rawls starts from justice between individuals in the domestic sphere and then tries to extend it by analogy to peoples, Beitz, like Kant before him, adopts a cosmopolitan perspective from the outset and therefore begins with a normative assumption that he then applies on a global level. Consequently, despite what certain formulations would seem to suggest, the structure of his argument is not that of an inference by analogy, but of a logical deduction from a normative proposition. The initial axiom is that the principles of justice apply when there are ‘benefits […] produced by “social cooperation.” If there were no such “cooperation”,

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there would be no occasion for justice’ (Beitz 1979: 131). With this the case of the global economy, since the interdependence and globalisation of markets produces substantial economic advantages, in the shape of a higher rate of global economic growth and greater productivity, it follows that the principles of distributive justice (in particular the difference principle) must be applied on a global level. Compared to the world that Beitz had before him in 1979 when he was writing the first edition of Political Theory and International Relations, in 1999 he observed that since then the growth of the world economy and the development of global finance and regulatory regimes had gone to only reinforce the existence of a global social structure: the structures of the global political economy are so far entangled with those of the single nation states that it becomes impossible to assign the causes of structural economic inequalities to one or the other party alone (Beitz 1999: 202). For this reason, as has been observed, hiding behind Rawls’s proposal of a duty to assist is a deep misunderstanding of the nature of the world economic system: indeed, it is not so much a matter of the duty to assist those who by chance find themselves in a more disadvantaged position, as an increased awareness among the more developed countries of their responsibility in prolonging a regime for regulating the world economy that is a direct cause of situations of extreme poverty (Pogge 2004). On approaching the conclusion, according to Beitz, since the world economy therefore shows that there is a global scheme of social cooperation, we must assume that national confines do not have any moral relevance, that is, they are not what determines the limits of social obligation. Therefore, unlike Rawls, we cannot assume that the parties in the original position know they are members of a particular national society and, as a consequence, limit international justice to a mere duty to assist the poorer nations. The veil of ignorance must be extended to all the issues concerning the nation’s citizens and the principles of justice as equity must therefore be applied globally (Beitz 1979, 1999). Indeed, Beitz observes that if we assume Rawls’s argument for the two principles of justice to be valid, then there is no reason to suppose that their contents should change only in order to extend their scope of application. In particular, if the difference principle were chosen in the original position of domestic society, then it would also be chosen in the global original position (Beitz 1979: 151). At this point we need to clarify to which subjects these principles must be applied. According to Beitz, it is obvious that they should be

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applied to individuals, in the sense that we should be maximising the position of globally less advantaged people. Hence, if the global difference principle requires a reduction in the unevenness of distribution between the different nations, this is because such inequalities are the effect of intolerable inequalities between people. Besides, since the difference principle is applied first of all to individuals, it also requires the minimisation of inequalities within states if the position of (globally) less advantaged people needs to be maximised. It is not inconsistent with this position to conceive of states as the subjects primarily responsible for this redistribution, since they may be in a better position to go ahead with policies to implement the principles of global justice (Beitz 2000). But, in any case, it is necessary to recognise that the obligation of states is in some way derived from the original obligation that individuals acquire as a result of the (global) relationships they find themselves in (Beitz 1979: 153). The conception of international justice that we have outlined is defined by Beitz as ‘cosmopolitan’ because it concerns the moral relations of the members of a universal community in which the state borders merely have a derived significance (Beitz 1979: 182). In this connection, I must distinguish between philosophical cosmopolitanism which takes all the inhabitants of the planet as the normative point of departure and therefore is implicitly critical of the states–individuals analogy, and institutional cosmopolitanism which aims to reproduce the institutions typical of the modern state on a global scale and hence wholly accepts it. Beitz’s referral to Kant, though only in a footnote, could not be more striking; as we have seen, Kant’s argument was also based not on an analogical inference, but on a logical deduction starting from a normative proposition. In Kant the basic axiom was that those who find themselves in the condition of being able to harm the other must enter a juridical condition with them; instead in Beitz’s conception the axiom is the notion by which the principles of justice are applied every time the social activity produces benefits which would not have existed had that activity not taken place. The difference between the two instead consists of the fact that Beitz seems to be even more sceptical towards the domestic analogy. As a result, he is concerned with clearly pointing out that his cosmopolitan conception does not imply reproducing the institutions of the state sphere on the international level. In terms of the relationship between his theory and the real world, Beitz indeed recognises that the current

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system of states could be the best one possible for applying the principles of justice. According to the concluding passage of Beitz’s exposition: It is important to distinguish moral structures from political ones, and to recognize that global normative principles might be implemented otherwise than by global institutions conceived on the analogy of the state. This is true in the context of ideal theory and even more so in the nonideal world. Much of the misunderstanding of cosmopolitan normative theories, among their opponents, and of naiveté about universalist political programs, among their advocates, stems from failure to understand this fact. (Beitz 1979, 1999: 183) Beitz’s conclusion is that by making the image of states as self-sufficient political entities obsolete, the recent phenomena of interdependence and globalisation have caused international relations to no longer be so ‘rebellious’ to the gaze of the political philosopher (Wight 1996). Now that we can clearly perceive a choice in international affairs, the hiatus between political theory and International Relations must be filled by a more satisfactory ‘international normative theory’ (Beitz 1979, 1999: 5). He presents his conception of international justice as a first step in this direction. This is the project that the renewed idealist tradition began to propose to the academic world at the end of the 1970s. The realist tradition responded by constructing one of the most rigorous and refined international relations theories. In the same year as the publication of Beitz’s Political Theory and International Relations, Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics, which I will now analyse, came to the public’s attention.

3.2 Neorealism The main objective of the realist tradition is to grasp those constant and recurrent elements beneath the changing sequence of historic events that have characterised international life over the centuries. It is not rare for exponents of this tradition to make reference to their predecessors, in particular the Greek historian Thucydides and his analysis of the causes of the Peloponnesian War, which portrays the image of international life as an eternal struggle for power and security.12 Among the elements that characterise Thucydides’s conception, three were to appear as constant assumptions among the realist tradition: (1) the idea that states (or in Thucydides, the city-state) are the main

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actors; (2) that they behave in a rational manner, hence their action is comprehensible to the eye of the observer; (3) finally, the idea that this behaviour is ultimately inspired by the pursuit of power, at times as a means to obtaining some other goal, or as a goal unto itself. These three elements were taken up again in the modern age in the reflection of thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza and Rousseau. While some underline that in an anarchical condition with prevailing uncertainty as to the intentions and behaviour of others, the pursuit of power by states is the only means for guaranteeing their own security (Rousseau), others see power as an end in itself, because the desire for power is seen as an inclination connatural to man (Spinoza). Nevertheless often the two levels of analysis, on one hand power as the only means that states can turn to in an uncertain condition such as relations between single sovereigns, and on the other power as a goal whose pursuit man has a natural bent for, find themselves united in a single system of thought. This twofold explanation is found, as we have seen, in Hobbes’s conception, but also in more recent realist thinkers such as Morgenthau (Morgenthau 1948). What unites all these thinkers is nevertheless the desire for a scientific analysis of international life which, starting in the 1930s, would fire the aspiration to make International Relations an autonomous academic discipline. One of the driving forces behind Carr’s criticism is in fact the idea that this discipline will only achieve full maturity when a scientific approach that looks at reality as it effectively is takes the place of its first utopian phase which used an image of the world as it should be as its starting point.13 Morgenthau’s attempt to apply the positivist methodology to the study of international relations is an answer to Carr’s invitation to create a ‘science of international politics’: which is where the use of natural science language with its constant reference to laws, principles and theories stems from (Morgenthau 1948). Waltz’s conception proposes to realise this scientific aspiration, which in his judgement his predecessors failed to do, at least in part. The intention of the Theory of International Politics (1979), his greatest work, is in fact to create a theory of international politics through the procedure used in natural sciences, that is, by isolating the subject of investigation from its context (in this case by abstracting it from the complex economic and social situation in which relations between states take place) and retrieving the recurrent and constant elements which can be used as a basis for building and sorting some laws. The isolation and abstraction procedure is necessary, according to Waltz, because a theory not only has the task of assembling a series of

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laws, but of providing an explanation for them: while on the basis of an inductive procedure laws identify unchanging elements or probable associations of facts (following the formula ‘if a, then b’), theories have the task of indicating which factors are more important than others and specifying the relations between them. All this cannot take place by simply producing a faithful reproduction of reality. As Waltz writes: If theory is not an edifice of truth and not a reproduction of reality, then what is it? A theory is a picture, mentally formed, of a bounded realm or domain of activity. A theory is a depiction of the organization of a domain and of the connections among its parts. (Waltz 1979: 8) A theory must serve to make the meaning of what is observed manifest, by arranging the phenomena in such a manner as to make them appear dependent on each other. Therefore, in order to create a theory, we need to imagine a model that is not just a sum of the elements making up the actual situation. No, the more distant this model is from reality (i.e. it only identifies the most important factors), the greater its ability to explain. It is on this basis that Waltz criticises those political scientists who strive to build models that reflect reality in the most faithful way possible. In his opinion, they use the theoretical models as if they were model aeroplanes; they criticise the state-centric model of international politics, accusing it of adhering less and less to reality, and try to counterpoise it with models that reflect reality in a more complete manner. Waltz observes that if they were to succeed in this enterprise, the real world and the model would be one and the same; thus, what use is there in such an operation (Waltz 1979)? Instead, according to Waltz, the example to follow in building a theory of international politics is that of physics and economics; physics builds its theories by isolating a limited number of factors on the basis of the ceteris paribus assumption and economics does very much the same. Waltz uses the latter in particular as a constant point of reference. Built using this abstractive procedure, economic theories have produced notable results in terms of their ability to explain and forecast economic phenomena, and because they have resolved the level of analysis problem, one of the central elements of Waltz’s reflection, as can already be seen in the title of his first work, Man, the State and War (1959). Economic theory indeed divides into micro and macro economics; the first exemplifies a reductionist type of approach, due to which the whole is understood by studying the attributes and interaction of its parts (corporate theory); whereas the second adopts a systemic

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approach, that is, it looks at the how the organisation of a certain sector (the market) sorts and limits the units working inside it. In both cases the same phenomena are analysed; what changes is the way in which the theory explaining them is built. By adopting this criterion, in the Theory of International Politics Waltz proposes an even simpler manner of classifying the various International Relations theories than the one used 20 years earlier in Man, the State and War. In this work Waltz pinpointed three ‘images’ of international politics on the basis of the level on which the respective causes of war were identified; these, as the title itself suggests, are man, the state and the international system itself. In relation to their explicative capacity, Waltz observed that theories based on the first image find themselves in the embarrassing situation of having to explain why on earth the same cause, that is, human nature, can at times produce the effect of a state of war, and at others peace. In a similar way, despite appearing quite useful in explaining the predisposition of certain types of state to war, those that look to the structures within the states to explain the emergence of war, as both Hobson’s and Lenin’s imperialist theories and democratic liberalism did, cannot explain why very different states behave in a substantially similar manner. This is why in his first work Waltz already favoured the third type of approach which places the causes of war on the level of the structure of the international system; this approach is exemplified by Rousseau’s theory that in an anarchical system like the international one where there is no third party to settle disputes and where therefore there is a prevailing uncertainty as to the conduct of others, it is inevitable that the states will use force. In the Theory of International Politics this division into three levels of analysis is narrowed down to the dichotomy between reductionist theories which explain international politics through elements and combinations of elements on an individual or national level, and systemic theories that instead look to the causes operating on an international level. The inability of reductionist approaches to explain why very different states have produced similar results causes Waltz to try to draw up a systemic theory of international politics.14 Indeed, a theory must be able to explain regular and recurrent facts and, on the basis of that explanation, allow us to make forecasts. Can a reductionist theory that only looks to the units composing the international system and their attributes meet such a condition? Waltz’s answer is a blunt no. His text reads: Theory explains regularities of behavior and leads one to expect that the outcomes produced by interacting units will fall within

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specified ranges. The behavior of states and of statesmen, however, is indeterminate. How can a theory of international politics, which has to comprehend behavior that is indeterminate, possibly be constructed? This is the great unanswered, and many say unanswerable, question of international-political studies. (Waltz 1979: 68–9) The problem that emerges here is that it is impossible to predict the behaviour of free agents. As we have seen, according to Kant, even if we were to know the whole mechanism of nature, we would not be able to resolve this problem, insofar as man is also a free being and not merely the effect of natural causality. Kant’s solution was to shift the problem onto a completely different level, that of morality. What other way out remains if we, like Waltz, instead adopt the realist presupposition that politics is autonomous from morals? Are we to conclude that a ‘science of international politics’ is not possible? According to Waltz, the only way to break out of this stalemate is with a systemic theory of international relations that looks towards the way in which the system’s very set-up sorts and limits the states acting inside it: only insofar as the dynamics of the international system limit the freedom of its units, do their behaviour and the effects of these dynamics become predictable. In order to draw up such a theory, we need to devise a structure behind the international system and show how it produces its effects. According to Waltz, it is only by looking at the forces operating on the level of the system that we can explain the reasons why the possible expected results vary within determined limits, that is, explain the reasons for the recurrence of certain models of behaviour and the repetition of certain events, including those only wanted by a few or none of the actors. If it is possible to come up with some constants and therefore to make forecasts, this is because something, a structural cause, comes between the intentions of the single actors and the effects achieved. Once again the analogy with economic theory is enlightening: only systemic restrictions operating on market level can explain why producers who would like to work less and sell at higher prices are instead forced to work more and sell at the lowest possible price. But Waltz points out that international structures are analogous to economic ones in another respect too, that is, they are both anarchical structures: given the absence of any hierarchy, states are in competition among themselves for power in the same way as businesses are for profit.

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Before going on to deal with international structure, we need to see how a political structure is defined in general. Waltz observes that we should take three elements into consideration in this definition: the principle sorting the parts, the functions carried out by the single units, and finally the distribution of potential among the parts. International political structures stand apart from national ones because they are ordered upon an anarchical, not a hierarchical principle. Hence, while coordination among units with equal functions that tend to preserve their independence prevails in the former, what dominates in the latter is the superiority–subordination relationship among units that tend to carry out specialised functions while becoming increasingly integrated.15 The distribution of potential among the units is also of systemic importance: as the capacities of the single units change, both their relative position and therefore also their structure change. Indeed, since the units in an anarchical system are equal in terms of function, it is this dimension alone, that is, the distribution of power, that determines the passage from one international system to another. According to Waltz, since it is ordered according to the anarchical principle, it is the very structure of the international system that makes states in the pursuit of their own self-preservation16 try to accumulate more and more power to deal with any external threats that might arise. It is by strictly analysing the structure of the international system that Waltz draws the conclusion that a perpetual struggle for power characterises relations between states, as held by the realist tradition. This is the greatest result of neorealism: the importance of Waltz’s theory lies not so much in having prompted a new direction of research, but in arranging political realism into a rigorous and deductive systemic theory of international politics (Keohane 1986: 15). In Waltz’s opinion, on this basis it is possible to draw up a theory of the balance of power that is not subject to the same criticism levelled against Morgenthau of excessive vagueness. Such a theory must not be restricted to underlining the importance of power and the balance of power as Morgenthau did, but must take into account its repetition in history and show how it is influenced by changes in the distribution of power. From the anarchical nature of the international system and the assumption that states ‘are unitary actors who, at a minimum, seek their own preservation and, at a maximum, drive for universal domination’ (Waltz 1979: 118), Waltz deduces that the balance of power, that is, the tendency to create a balance through strategic alliances, must

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necessarily emerge independently of the state’s desire. In a system like the international one based on self-help, those who do not defend themselves or who do so in a less effective manner than others, are destined to end up in a situation of danger. It is the fear of such undesirable consequences that stimulates states to behave in ways that tend to create balances. The strong point of this theory, Waltz observes, is that it does not require the presumption that the actors’ conduct is by nature rational or constant: it simply states that if some obtain good results, the others will imitate them or will fall by the wayside, as the structure of the international system serves to select those with efficient conduct. This is a broad outline of the international politics theory drawn up by Waltz; a theory built to meet the scientific criteria drawn up for the natural sciences. Therefore, one would expect this to have finally led the International Relations discipline to exit its initial phase in which, according to Bull, it was still dependent on analogies taken from other fields of knowledge. Waltz’s system should include no form of domestic analogy whatsoever. Nevertheless, as H. Suganami observes, things are by no means quite so self-evident. Insofar as Waltz attributes the cause of war to the anarchical structure of the system of states, and therefore to the absence of a common power preventing them from turning to combat, we can say that he implicitly adopts the domestic society model. While referring primarily to Man, the State and War, but with a line of argument that could also refer to Waltz’s more important work, Suganami writes for example: Despite the obvious fact that what Waltz calls a ‘permissive’ cause of war can thus be found in all the three images [man, state, the system of states], Waltz insists on the view that somehow the third image is of particular significance. This curious bias on his part could be explained as a consequence of his implicit commitment to the fundamental tenet of the domestic analogy: that the disorderly features of the international system, exemplified by the recurrence of war, are due to the absence from the international system of those mechanisms which sustain social order within the borders of states. Waltz admittedly is not a advocate of a world state or of its negative surrogates. Yet, at the level of diagnosis, as opposed to prescription, he seems unselfconsciously to have been guided by the domestic analogy. (Suganami 1989: 136)

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Therefore, paradoxically, however much Waltz tries to give international relations a wholly independent epistemological status from political theory, it seems that his theory accepts a form of domestic analogy. As we have seen, the procedure Waltz uses to construct his theory is based on methodological criteria borrowed from natural sciences, which we would expect to take us towards a theory obtained autonomously from other fields of knowledge. What is more, Waltz explicitly claims this autonomy to be a quality of the systemic theory of international politics, in contrast with the situation of reductionist theories. Waltz observes that reductionists often find themselves using methods from other disciplines while studying their subject, and neither can we say how far this dependence can go, because it is not possible to establish a priori what level of reduction will be sufficient; on the contrary, a systemic theory looks at the structure operating in that specific domain which is conjectured to be isolated from its context. And yet the idea that the international system is unstable due to the lack of a common power definitely takes us back to an assumption implicit in the domestic analogy model. In addition, the lexical use of the term ‘anarchy’, at times tending to go from the etymological meaning of a lack of government to the broader sense of disorder, betrays a certain bowing to the domestic analogy, that is, the idea that subjection to a superior power is a condition for social order. Finally, the very fact that Waltz poses the problem of international relations in the terms of what Ashley called ‘the anarchy problématique’ (Ashley 1995), that is, establishing how order is possible in the absence of an orderer (Waltz 1979), is a sign that the model he is implicitly referring to is that of the domestic society. Nevertheless this does not mean that we can conclude that Waltz is a supporter of the classic form of domestic analogy. Such reasoning implies transposing a proposition that is borne out empirically in the national sphere to the international scale, on the basis of finding similarities between the two levels. Only some of the elements constituting this type of inference can be found in Waltz’s thought. As we saw in the first chapter, in order to be able to uphold the extension by analogical inference of a proposition borne out in relation to the domestic sphere to the level of relations between states, three conditions must be met: (1) the validity of the proposition predicating the extension must be derived from domestic experience, (2) there must be two separate levels between which to trace the analogy, (3) there must exist a level of

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similarity between them that can justify the analogical inference. These three assumptions are necessary in order to hold that the domestic analogy is possible, whereas wishing for this project to be realised constitutes a wholly different level, the normative one. Of these elements, only the first two are an integral part of Waltz’s conception. As far as the first presupposition is concerned, we can see that in the case of the classic form of domestic analogy, the extension concerns the model of domestic society and therefore the idea that the existence of a sovereign power holding a monopoly over legitimate coercion is a guarantee of social order. Waltz analyses this model in structural terms: in hierarchical political structures such as state structures, the single units tend to specialise in terms of functions, hence the function of guaranteeing social order ends up under the competence of the state agencies set aside for this. But it is particularly evident that Waltz adopts the domestic society model in the continual use throughout his work of the sovereignty versus anarchy dichotomy typical of the modern politics tradition. According to the interpretation given by Ashley, those who, like Waltz, deal with the world of international politics in terms of ‘the anarchy problématique’, that is, of how order is possible in the face of no orderer, do so by implicitly assuming the sovereign state model. Thus, they make what is a model anchored to a specific historic experience, that is, the modern experience, an eternal truth, on the basis of which to judge the anomalies and shortcomings of international society (Ashley 1995: 98). Today, on the other hand, this dichotomy is being questioned on several sides, in particular by those approaches that underline how the meaning and importance of such institutions are constructed over time and are therefore subject to change. On the one hand, there is Wendt’s constructivist criticism of the concept of anarchy, that is, the idea that it can be considered an immutable structure which explains the behaviour of states in a similar way to how the concept of a field in physics explains the behaviour of the objects that belong there. Anarchy is ‘what states make of it’, observes Wendt (1995), that is, something that changes together with the mode of interaction that states give rise to, at times turning into a posture of war, and at others cooperation. The characteristics that the condition of anarchy takes on are closely linked to that process of socialisation that builds the identity of the single actors and determines their expectations of each other. What Wendt accuses Waltz’s neorealism of is reification: with his conception of anarchy as an unchangeable structure, he presents a product of human social activity as if it were given by nature and out of our control (Wendt 1995: 147).

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On the other hand, there is the post-structuralist approach of Ashley who underlines how behind the sovereignty versus anarchy dichotomy there is the voice of modern man, who, faced with the ambiguity and changeability of history, implements a ‘logocentric’ strategy, tracing confines and imposing hierarchies where there is opposition. Domestic society therefore becomes the limited space inside which sovereign man exercises his activity to ‘tame’ reality, while outside there is only chaos and anarchy (Ashley 1989). The second presupposition of the domestic analogy, that is, assuming the existence of two separate levels, the domestic and the international, is also deeply rooted in Waltz’s thinking. This derives from his methodological procedure to abstract and isolate the subject of investigation: Waltz takes into consideration international relations as a whole independently from the complex economic and social reality where they take place and therefore also from what happens on the national level. This separation between the national and international spheres has been questioned by constructivist and post-structuralist criticism alike. According to Ashley, resting on the analogy with Adam Smith’s exposition of the spontaneous emergence of market structures and above all on the Cartesian practice of spatialisation dividing the inside from outside, Waltz finds himself excluding the most important part of the problem from his investigation and assuming it to already be resolved, that is, that such a separation is legitimate. Hence, he leaves ground for the presence of an orderer – the paradigm of sovereign man – whose task it is to order the global space and define the confines that separate national from international politics (Ashley 1989). What is instead missing in Waltz, as a result of which we cannot classify him among the supporters of the classic form of domestic analogy, is the idea that between the two levels, the national and the international, there are sufficient similarities to justify extending an empirically borne-out proposition relating to the former by analogy to the latter. By considering states as unitary rational actors, Waltz accepts the analogy between states and individuals that I have said is the keystone to the domestic analogy: international, like national society, is composed in his opinion of single units that interact with each other in a rational manner. But if we analyse the political structure that operates in both cases, the distance between the two seems unbridgeable. The national political structures are ordered on the basis of a hierarchical principle, meaning that the interaction between their units which, from a functional point of view, tend to become specialised and integrated, is characterised by a relationship of superiority-subordination; on the

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other hand, the principle ordering international political structures is anarchy, the units interacting in such a system are equal from a functional point of view and they tend to preserve their independence by all possible means. For that matter, Waltz denies that the recent phenomena of interdependence and globalisation have changed this state of affairs. It is the very structure of the international system that works against integration, limiting cooperation in two ways: on the one hand, the condition of uncertainty as regards the future actions of others means that states always fear that a possible division of gains may favour the others more than themselves, while on the other hand, what works against interdependence is the concern over becoming dependent. All Waltz’s efforts are aimed at underlining the particular traits of the international system and the way in which its anarchical structure exercises systemic restrictions on the units operating in them, rewarding some forms of conduct and punishing others. These difficulties could perhaps be overcome, thus placing Waltz closer to the supporters of the domestic analogy, were his conception to perceive a change from one structure to the other. But for Waltz, seeing as they are composed of units similar in functional terms, differing in capacity alone, international systems only change in relation to the distribution of power, as happened for example in the passage from the multipolar system of the first half of the century to the bipolar system of the Cold War. Waltz’s conception can explain continuity and recurrence in international relations, but it is not capable of taking far-reaching changes into account. According to Rothstein, this is the price that Waltz pays for considering states as billiard balls interacting on a table, that is, the international system, which is assumed to be immutable. The result is a static theory, unable to take into account great changes and primarily only concerned with finding the way to maintain the status quo (Rothstein 1991). Cox too makes an analogical criticism. Starting from Horkheimer’s critical theory and Habermas’s distinction between the different interests driving knowledge (technical, practical and emancipatory), he differentiates between problem-solving theory, such as that of Waltz, and critical theory. The first accepts the world as it is given as the point of departure and, with the single aim of finding the way to make it function without any hiccups, deals with the particular problems in relation to the areas of activity where they emerge on the basis of the ceteris paribus assumption. Precisely because it considers a limited number of variables, it is often able to come up with laws with general validity.

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Cox contrasts this type of theory, exemplified by Waltz’s neorealism, with a type of approach that looks to political-social relations in their entirety and that therefore questions the status quo, asking how it originated and how it might be modified. By adopting a rigid state-centric model, Waltz prevents himself from grasping the further-reaching, as well as structural changes introduced by the emergence of new actors on the international scene: isolating certain elements of reality in order to understand their dynamics may be useful, Cox admits, but when the changes that actually happen are for this reason overlooked, this procedure simply becomes arbitrary. Instead, a critical theory does proceed by taking a particular sphere of human activity as a starting point, but is then concerned with tracing that activity back to the set of relations where it takes place. Plus, thanks to this holistic approach, it is more sensitive to perceiving possible directions of change (Cox 1986). In order to underline neorealism’s inability to take great changes into account, the example given by Ruggie is the passage from the medieval to the modern system: in this case, what determined the change was a phenomenon that took place on the unit level, that is, the emergence of a different principle for separating the entities in the system: modern territorial sovereignty (Ruggie 1986: 142). With its insensitivity to interaction between the national and international levels, Waltz’s theory is unable to provide a suitable explanation for this sort of change. According to Linklater, Waltz also greatly underestimates the power that the single units in the system have to promote changes on a structural level; for example, the process currently eroding state sovereignty, both due to globalisation and the pressure exercised by sub-national groups, in his opinion is opening the way to the possibility of profound changes in the system of states and in particular to the possibility of moving towards forms of ‘global governance’ (Linklater 1996: 250). Again, Waltz’s theory is unable to account for this. All these critical approaches agree in questioning the state-centric model of international models that Waltz strenuously defends. It is based on the analogy between states and individuals that we have seen is the keystone to the classic form of domestic analogy, but is increasingly less suited to understanding the ever more variegated world of global politics. The recent phenomena of interdependence and globalisation have shown once and for all that states, unlike individuals, are complex entities, groups of units that are also capable of autonomous political action. Of course, states are still fundamental actors on the international scene. But at a certain point if we do not manage to rid ourselves

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of the idea that they act in a unitary and rational manner, as if they really were individuals, we run the risk of excluding too large a slice of contemporary international life from our analysis. As Bonanate underlines in the introduction to the Italian edition of the Theory of International Politics, Waltz insists on the analogy between enterprises in a competitive market and single states in competition for power, without realising how much difference there is between the two cases. On the one hand, we have businesses or economic subjects with a clear-cut, autonomous configuration, while on the other, with the state-person we are dealing with a purely artificial creation of the juridical mind. I will come back to this point later (section 3.4). To sum up what has been said until now, we can observe that the analogy between states and individuals, and in addition the state-centric model, are proving to be increasingly problematic, because they hide the fact that political and social institutions have a different ontological status to that of individuals. These entities are the product of human action and in primis have an intersubjective type of existence: it is the individuals that act as if they existed and, by doing so, reproduce them. Adopting the realist model of the billiard balls may at times prove useful, as Waltz’s theory demonstrates, when trying to make forecasts on the conduct of states, in particular concerning questions of security. But we need to avoid ‘reifying’ these structures and presenting them as if they were natural given facts, removed from time and the human ability to change them. Neorealism’s inability to take far-reaching changes into account leads it to underestimate the impact of new phenomena such as interdependence and globalisation. Other models must be drawn up to take in these new situations. Neoliberal institutionalism, which I am now about to analyse, is at least a partially alternative model to answer this challenge. Further alternatives are provided by theories of world politics that go beyond Wight’s tripartition and that are analysed in section 3.4.

3.3 Neoinstitutionalism So far we have seen how the realist and idealist traditions have undergone far-reaching changes in contemporary times, gaining a different epistemological awareness which has also resulted in a certain scepticism towards the domestic analogy. Today International Relations is an independent discipline which debates its very epistemological foundations and is therefore less willing to unquestioningly adopt models taken from other disciplines.

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Now it remains for me to see how the Grotian or rationalist tradition has evolved, the one which we have seen to be the most critical towards the domestic analogy. The main theory bringing together the thinkers belonging to this tradition consists of the idea that despite the lack of sovereign authority, relations between states are nevertheless characterised by a certain degree of order. The condition of anarchy does not imply an absence of norms, which play a significant role in international life from two points of view, both because states perceive themselves as tied by them and because they are in actual fact binding. This conception was used by the members of the English School of International Relations, whose position towards the domestic analogy was illustrated in the first chapter. Within the contemporary debate, the conception that comes closest to the rationalist tradition is the one that, to use quite a general term, I could label as neoinstitutionalist. In using this term I am not referring to a specific school of thought but to a variegated group of positions in the contemporary debate united by the emphasis placed on the role played by international institutions in enforcing order.17 What this conception has in common with the English School is the idea that despite the absence of a sovereign authority, international relations are characterised by a significant level of institutionalisation, but it departs from the School in its emphasis on the phenomenon of growing interdependence as one of the increasingly powerful engines in that process. While Bull and Wight, who mainly looked to the world of the Cold War, denied that this phenomenon and the associated case of transnationalism had caused a fundamental change in the international system, for contemporary institutionalism it is precisely interdependence, in particular economic, that has significantly transformed international politics and modified the role of physical force, now less and less functional in certain areas. As we will see, in order to grasp this new situation, neoinstitutionalism draws up a more complex conception of the international institutions (Evans and Wilson 1992). What mainly puts the English School and neoinstitutionalism under the same banner is nevertheless their appearance as middle ground between the extremes of realism and liberalism: both conceptions, mindful of the realist lesson, criticise the liberals’ faith in the emergence of a spontaneous harmony of interests between states, hidden behind which, as Carr had already shown, are the interests of those in power; but, at the same time, they agree with liberalism in their faith in the possibility of progress, even though this is imbued with more scepticism towards the ability of the ‘commercial spirit’ to spontaneously create peace in international relations.18

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Thus, both these schools are the offsprings of the realist lesson: the starting point is the idea that the main actors on the international stage are the states, meant as unitary and rational actors pursuing their own interests; both come away from this in that they recognise that, while rationally pursuing their own interests, states are induced to give rise to institutions that lessen their predisposition to conflict. Instead, the difference between the two consists in the fact that neoinstitutionalism not only refers to the classic realism of Carr and Morgenthau, but also to Waltz’s structural neorealism. Indeed, as we will see, the thought of the main exponent of contemporary institutionalism was strongly influenced by the appearance of Waltz’s Theory of International Politics. While in the 1970s, together with Joseph Nye, Keohane had drawn up a model of international relations within situations of interdependence which departed greatly from realism (Keohane and Nye 1977), by making comparison with Waltz’s neorealism Keohane draws significant cues which he would then reshuffle into a further version of institutionalism known as ‘neoliberal institutionalism’ (Keohane 1989a).19 The debate between Waltz and Keohane marked a very important page in international relations theory. From the basic text in which Keohane outlines his conception, International Institutions and State Power (1989a), it clearly emerges that neoliberal institutionalism agrees on some key points of the neorealist programme: the idea that by taking into account a limited number of variables we can come to understand the deep dynamics of international life; the structural approach, aimed at grasping the systemic restrictions exercised by the environment; and finally, the assumption that the actors are rational.20 In Keohane’s mind, the latter becomes necessary if a structural approach is used: only by assuming that the conduct of states can be judged as responding to the situation in an optimal manner – this is what Keohane calls the substantive conception of rationality (Keohane 1995) – is it possible to make inferences from the structure of the international system as to the behaviour of states. But, Keohane adds, assuming that the actors are rational does not necessarily result in foreseeing a state of war: this, together with a structural approach modified in relation to that of Waltz, can be used to investigate the conditions in which cooperation takes place and to try to explain what it is that drives states to create international institutions. Keohane agrees with Ruggie’s observation according to which Waltz’s concept of structure, limited to identifying anarchy as the main enforcer of order and failing to differentiate the functions of the

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different parts, is ‘truncated’ (Ruggie 1986); among the elements constituting the international system, in Keohane’s opinion, there is indeed also the increasingly conspicuous presence of institutions that influence the states’ lives (Keohane 1986). By this he is not claiming that states are always strongly bound by this in their actions, just that their deeds also depend on the institutional contexts prevailing at the time, due to which changes in the institutionalisation of international life have a significant impact on the behaviour of governments. By changing the neorealist programme in this manner, it is possible to remedy what, in Keohane’s opinion, is the worst defect of Waltz’s neorealism, that is, its inability to offer an explanation as to the great changes in international political life. In order to explain how institutionalising international life exercises action on states’ behaviour, Keohane adopts quite a broad definition of institution. By institution he means an interconnected and lasting set of rules of conduct (formal or informal) which place limits on the actors’ activities and define their expectations (Keohane 1989a, 1995). Under this definition it is possible to include: 1. Formal governmental and non-governmental organisations; 2. International regimes, that is, institutions with explicit rules agreed by the governments for specific issues; 3. Conventions, that is, informal institutions made of implicit rules. Falling into the first category are all bureaucratic organisations, and true institutional bodies such as the United Nations; instead, regimes include all those sets of rules, principles and decision-making procedures concerning a specific issue, such as the international monetary regime set up in Bretton Woods in 1944, or the regime against the proliferation of nuclear arms; finally, included among the conventions are all those informal rules, such as the tradition of diplomatic immunity for example (before it was codified in international agreements in the 1970s), which, by implicitly providing incentives for certain modes of conduct, help to define the actors’ expectations. Reciprocity is also a convention: political leaders expect reciprocal treatment, whether positive or negative, and can foresee that they will be caused substantial losses if they openly violate this rule – for example, by reacting out of proportion to the barriers against their exports imposed by other states. Keohane observes that institutions favour cooperation as they reduce the uncertainty as to the actors’ intentions and actions, an uncertainty that ever since Hobbes has been recognised as a fundamental

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characteristic of the international system. This does not mean that their presence immediately leads to cooperation on a global scale. On the contrary, certain institutions, among which military alliances in primis, have the explicit task of dealing with conflicts; moreover, most of the institutions can be used for particular purposes, at times to the detriment of other actors (Keohane 1995). Nevertheless there is no doubt that cooperation can only take place within a supportive institutional context, by defining its actors’ expectations, placing restrictions on their action, and even defining the whole sphere of meanings through which each action will be interpreted. Institutions define expectations in that they are vehicles of high quality information, an element central to being able to predict the conduct of others. To underline the importance of the communication factor, Keohane once again looks at the so-called ‘prisoners’ dilemma’, according to which two criminals interrogated in two separate rooms without the possibility of communicating will certainly obtain the worst result for both, because they will end up confessing, driven by the fear of betrayal by their accomplice. In this case, what might have seemed rational behaviour – confessing in order to obtain better treatment – turns into the worst result. But the situation of international relations in the presence of institutions is not, Keohane observes, that of a single game, but an undefined series of games: it is in this situation that it becomes rational for the players to cooperate (Keohane 1989a: 137). Therefore, working in its favour is not only the possession of information on the intentions and behaviour of others, but also the fact that the game is played in light of the future. This is where another characteristic of international institutions facilitating cooperation emerges: if rules and contexts of interaction last in time, or are at least perceived to do so by the actors, and we expect to have to interact with the same entity in the future, the incentive to stray is reduced. International institutions also favour cooperation as they place limits on the states’ conduct. Keohane does not think that the international community as a whole can apply rules centrally.21 The point of departure is international anarchy, hence rules can only be applied in a decentralised manner. Besides, the application of rules is much more incisive as it is done in different forms from the resort to force. In particular, Keohane thinks that exclusion from future benefits, from belonging to a certain institution, is becoming an increasingly effective form of sanction. What we are seeing is indeed an increasingly complex entanglement of different issues, hence what the deserter is faced with is exclusion from the benefits of cooperation in different spheres.

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According to Keohane, we cannot expect a sense of obligation towards rules to emerge from international life comparable with that of national institutions. And yet, we need to make distinctions and specifications here too. Neoliberal institutionalism’s view of international institutions is quite a lot more variegated than that of the English School: we do not have an international society with institutions that all states are part of, but a complex world of formal and informal institutions, some of which are specific, that is, concerned with a particular issue, such as regimes, and then regionally based institutions (NAFTA; EU), which flank global and general institutions like the United Nations (Evans and Wilson 1992). In such a complex panorama, it is possible for situations to come into being with great issue density, that is, with a high number of important issues at play. In these cases, relations between states at times take on traits of ‘diffuse reciprocity’ which becomes evident in the emergence of a sense of obligation towards institutions. In international relations the normal condition is that of ‘specific reciprocity’, that is, the condition in which two partners exchange goods of equal value in a limited sequence; but in some situations it is possible for a ‘diffuse reciprocity’ to emerge, in which one’s partner may be a group rather than a particular actor, and in which the goods exchanged are not wholly equivalent in value (Keohane 1989a: 134). Long-term successful involvement in ‘specific reciprocity’ can generate the faith, based on reciprocal experience, that can create the conditions for ‘diffuse reciprocity’ to take place. This only happens in the case of international cooperative regimes that link countries with strong, shared interests, such as the case of European integration. Only in these cases, despite recognising that a ‘veil of ignorance’ separates them from the future, do the actors offer benefits to the others on the basis of assuming that they will be to their own advantage in the end (Keohane 1989a: 148). However, institutions do not only have a regulatory role: Keohane observes that they also have a constitutive role. Insofar as they define the sphere of meanings surrounding the states’ behaviour, they help to define the motivations for action and therefore also the interests behind them. The meanings are communicated through general conventions, such as those that reflect the reciprocity principle, and through more specific conventions, such as those that indicate what is meant by ‘frank exchange of views’ in a diplomatic bulletin. Meanings are also embodied in the rules of international regimes, such as those of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which specified and implemented the reciprocity principle (Keohane 1989a: 6).

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In recognising that institutions have such a function, Keohane shows that at least in part he has adopted the lesson of the ‘reflectivists’.22 On dealing with the concept of institution, he separated out two types of approach: the ‘rationalist’ approach looking at the role of states as rational and unitary actors trying to maximise their interests, and the one he christens ‘reflectivist’ which instead looks at the impact of impersonal forces and cultural practices that are not derived from a mere calculation on the states’ part. By underlining the importance that international institutional activity has in creating ‘intersubjective meanings’, the ‘reflectivists’ such as Ruggie and Ashley maintain that institutions do not merely reflect the preferences and power of those who constituted them, but themselves help to define them: it is not sufficient to consider the states’ interests as exogenously given, because they are themselves influenced by institutional arrangements and the rules in the socialisation process (Keohane 1995: 283). Although Keohane claims the need to take both approaches into account, he does distance himself quite a lot from the ‘reflectivist’ view; while they tend to underline how the identity of the single actors is also built through processes of interaction, however attentive it is towards socialisation dynamics, institutionalism remains individualist on the ontological level and positivist in methodological terms (Keohane 2002: 5). International institutions can influence the states’ behaviour in all these ways – by laying down rules of conduct, providing high quality information and thus helping to define the actors’ expectations and interests. Thus, although with differences in time and space, they can reduce the uncertainty characterising an anarchical system like the international one. The absence of a common authority does not imply that it is impossible to have a sure social life, that is, a regular pattern of interaction aimed at pursuing common goals. Of course, institutionalising international life does not immediately lead to cooperation: this emerges in certain situations, it can have the tendency to come to a halt, and it can involve a limited number of actors and is often aimed at pursuing very particular and selfish ends. But what interests me in my investigation is that by underlining how institutionalising political life reduces the uncertainty that characterises relations between states, neoinstitutionalism implicitly refuses the domestic analogy: the absence of a sovereign authority does not imply the absence of an ordered social life. On the contrary, contemporary international relations show that cooperation is also possible in a condition of anarchy. As Keohane wrote in 1989:

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World politics is commonly referred to as anarchic, meaning that it lacks a common government. Yet a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ does not usually ensue: even sovereign governments that recognize no common authority may engage in limited cooperation. The anarchic structure of world politics does mean, however, that the achievement of cooperation can depend neither on deference to hierarchical authority nor on centralized enforcement. On the contrary, if cooperation is to emerge, whatever produces it must be consistent with the principles of sovereignty and self-help. (Keohane 1989a: 132) Therefore, according to Keohane, the domestic society model in no way provides a point of reference on a theoretical level to understanding the conditions that make cooperation between states possible. At the same time, although still valid in many respects, the neorealist model is incomplete; in particular, it does not seem to adapt at all to the situation characterising relations between strongly industrialised democratic countries. Keohane’s latest reflections seem to be heading towards a reinterpretation of the realist model that retrieves elements of the interdependence model drawn up by Keohane together with Nye in the 1970s before it came up for comparison with Waltz’s neorealism (Keohane 2002). As Keohane recently observed, in a certain sense the concept of globalisation that Keohane himself uses in his last works has simply replaced that of ‘interdependence’ as the keyword for describing a situation of growing openness and economic integration (Keohane 2002: 14). The complex interdependence model was built on the basis of three factors which, on taking a closer look, bring as many assumptions of the realist model into question (Keohane and Nye 1977: 24). First of all, we have the presence of multiple channels of connection between the various societies, channels which include formal and informal restrictions between governing and non-governing elites, but also between transnational organisations, such as multinational corporations. If the existence of transgovernmental relations brings into question the realist assumption that states act coherently as unitary actors, the increasingly conspicuous existence of transnational channels creates difficulties for the very assumption that states are the only actors on the international stage. Secondly, the regions or issues where complex interdependence prevails are characterised by the fact that force often ends up being an

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ineffective means: the military tool is not used against subjects in the same region or to resolve controversies on certain subjects even though this option is still open outside the region or in relation to other types of issues. Linked to this is the third characteristic of complex interdependence, that is, the absence of a clear hierarchy as regards the different issues, a hierarchy which according to the realist concept sees the high politics of military security dominate issues of low politics such as economic and social affairs. This element refers to one of the key aspects of contemporary international life, that is, the fact that today the international affairs agenda is much more variegated and complex than it once was: it includes economic, social and environmental issues alongside the traditional ones concerning security, and there is no possibility to establish a clear order of priority. In a condition of complex interdependence, as seems to dominate relations between the most developed and democratised countries for example, the political process also takes on different traits: the interests pursued by the actors change, as does their way of pursuing them, since force is no longer the determining factor. Of course, the dominating states can try to ensure their objectives by using their economic power, but insofar as the various issues are increasingly interconnected and transnational actors come into play with interests which may be different from national ones, it is not always guaranteed that the appointed result will be accomplished. In this world of closely interconnected issues, where transgovernmental and transnational coalitions are formed, international institutions take on a bigger role: they act as catalysers for possible coalitions and above all help to define the international agenda by establishing which issues should take priority each time and which can be grouped together. In 1977 Keohane and Nye had already observed that in these situations we are witnessing a dimming of the distinction between internal and international politics, as a result of which it is increasingly problematic to keep the two levels separate.23 Issues which before could be successfully dealt with within national confines today require joint action with other states. And so issues like monetary and economic policy, over which states once autonomously exercised their sovereignty, are now linked to the destinies of international cooperation. In developments subsequent to his institutionalist conception, Keohane seemed to deny the hypothesis that interdependence and globalisation could bring into question the principle of the sovereignty of states (Keohane 1991b). In a world of growing interdependence, Keohane

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observed in the 1990s, states are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the action of other states, hence they are forced to concede part of their operational sovereignty, that is, their juridical freedom of action to make their power effective through participation in international institutions. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the states’ formal sovereignty is questioned, that is, the fact that they maintain juridical supremacy over all the other authorities inside a territory. Hence participation in international institutions that restrict a state’s freedom of action somehow goes to reconfirm the central role played by the states’ sovereignty itself (Keohane 1991b: 5–6). Compared to the world that Keohane and Nye were describing when they formulated the interdependence model for the first time and what Keohane was looking at when speaking of neoliberal institutionalism, what we find ourselves facing today following the emergence of globalisation seems to lead to a further change. Although the world is still only partially globalised, that is, it is characterised by thick networks of interdependence, where states and borders still count (Keohane 2002a), Keohane himself recognises the possibility that the emergence of new terms such as ‘globalisation’ and ‘governance’ may be signalling a change in the situation (Keohane 2002; Keohane and Nye 2000). In the epilogue I will take a closer look at the role that the domestic analogy could play in this new situation. But before going onto this, I must first of all linger over those conceptions of international politics that go beyond the three traditions which I took as a starting point for my investigation.

3.4

Beyond the three traditions: Constructivism, postmodernism, feminism and Marxism

We have seen that as a consequence of its consolidation as a distinct academic discipline, international relations theorists have become increasingly sceptical of any immediate reliance on the domestic analogy. If we compare the three authors (Hobbes, Kant and Grotius) analysed in the part on the modern political thought with more contemporary theories we can perceive a more critical stance towards the various presuppositions of the domestic analogy. Moreover, we have also seen the limits of Bull and Wight’s classifications, as idealism (or cosmopolitanism) does not automatically mean endorsement of the domestic analogy, whereas both realism and rationalism are not necessarily immune from it. Still, surprisingly, the domestic analogy has not been a central theme of the debate. Political philosophy has to a great extent completely

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neglected it, and even within the field of international relations theory the impact has been marginal. Since Suganami’s The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposal (1989) there has hardly been a sustained debate on it.24 Far from becoming a major theme in international relations as one would have expected given its centrality in both the history and the epistemological foundation of the discipline, the domestic analogy has remained a secondary theme. This is partly due to the current lack of a strong tradition of historical studies on the origins and development of the discipline, but it is also rooted in an attitude that takes the discussion on the topic for granted, so to speak. If the domestic analogy is rapidly dismissed as a sign of infancy of a discipline which makes recourse to analogies taken from political theory because it has not yet established its own method and objects of analysis, it is natural not to even mention it once we have reached the stage of an academically well-established discipline. Still, as we have seen, the recourse to analogical reasoning is not the mere sign of infancy in a discipline and can on the contrary play a crucial role even in time-honoured disciplines such as mathematics and natural sciences (section 1.2). The result of not problematising the domestic analogy enough is that it has kept circulating unnoticed in the literature – at least to a certain extent. If arguments based on the classical form of domestic analogy, that is, on the idea that given that states are still in a conflictual state of nature they should, like individuals, transfer their power to a sovereign world authority, have long been discredited, more nuanced forms of such a reasoning are still present in the literature. Let us take, for example, the very analogy between states and individuals, which, as we have seen, is the cornerstone of the domestic analogy. Far from having been dismissed, the attitude of treating states as if they were individuals is still quite widespread. As Manning noticed some 70 years ago, this is partly due to the fact that human beings have a natural tendency to treat states as if they were individuals, by attributing them properties of human beings such as desire, hate, fear and rationality. Still, while Manning vigorously problematised this tendency to rely on common language, which, like many others generated by it, can be a source of error in scientific enquiry, many contemporary theorists took it unproblematically.25 This is particularly remarkable given that what is ultimately at stake is the nature of states themselves, which are, at least nominally, the primary object of analysis of the discipline called ‘inter-national’ relations. The result is that, as Jackson recently noticed, international relations largely remains a field marked by an absence of theorising about its basic object of analysis (Jackson 2004: 256).

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Perhaps it is not true, as Wendt claimed, that there has not been any sustained discussion on the issue and that the state is routinely treated as a person by international relations theorists and ordinary citizens alike (Wendt 2004: 289). As we have seen for instance in the discussion of the presuppositions of the domestic analogy (section 1.3), in Beitz’s theory of international justice (section 3.1) and in the criticism of neorealism (section 3.2), the tendency to treat states as individuals has been problematised by different sides. Certainly, this still remains an attitude rooted in common language and its tendency towards the use of analogies and metaphors, but it does not follow that we are allowed to forget the difference between metaphors and analogies and the reality to which they refer. Lomas’s reply to Wendt that one of the strongest and clearest trends in international relations writing over the past half-century has been a series of attacks on realism and its associated conceptions of the state as individual, that is, as a monolith and primary agent in world affairs, is therefore well grounded (Lomas 2005: 349). Still, the extent to which such a critical discussion has actually taken place26 can only be determined if we distinguish between two concepts that have often been conflated with one another: that of persons and that of individuals. An individual is simply what cannot be divided, something which counts as single for the purpose in hand. Therefore, it can be said of any object that for some purpose should count as a primary unit and should not be divided.27 A person is not simply an individual, there is much more at stake here. If it is true that any person is an individual, the reverse does not hold: animals and even physical objects like a horse or a chair that cannot be divided without ceasing to be that particular thing are individuals, but they are not ipso fact persons. As we will see in more detail later on, a person is an individual who can be held responsible for its actions and is therefore the subject of moral and legal obligations.28 Now, it is the image of the states as individual actors that has been subject to most debate, whereas there has been much less on the concept of the state as a person.29 Within international relations, the idea that states could be treated as persons seems to have been dismissed together with the classical form of the domestic analogy. Thrown out of the door, it came back through the window. Recently, for instance, Alexander Wendt, who is one of the most prestigious representatives of international relations constructivism, did not simply claim that the analogy between states and persons has not been given enough attention in international relations. He actually argued that states are persons (Wendt 1999, 2004, 2005).

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Before discussing Wendt’s view in detail, let me dwell on the more general attitude of constructivists towards the domestic analogy. Constructivism is an approach to the social world which emphasises two major theses: the social construction of knowledge and the construction of social reality (Guzzini 2000: 149). The main idea is that neither the social world nor our knowledge of it is independent from our interpretations and the language we use to describe it, but it is largely shaped by them. The thesis does not automatically imply the further assumption that no objective knowledge is possible; indeed, just because something is constructed does not mean that it is ipso facto not objective or unreal. Something may well be constructed but nonetheless real and objective. According to the degree of constructedness and the objective character that one is ready to grant it, we can distinguish between more or less radical forms of constructivism. In this sense, constructivism is quite a large category that crosses different paradigms of international relations, so much so that some authors have argued that more than a paradigm of international relations it should be considered a ‘paradigm of paradigms’ (Adler 2002: 96). I would rather call it a meta-paradigm to stress the different level on which it is situated and therefore the fact that we can have constructivist strands or elements in very different conceptions of international relations (for instance, constructivist feminism or postmodernism, but also constructivist idealism or cosmopolitanism). As a result of its emphasis on constructedness, we would expect constructivists to adopt a problematising attitude towards the domestic analogy. This is the case for many constructivists, but not all of them. Among the central claims of international relations constructivism, at least three of them help explain the scepticism among constructivists towards the domestic analogy. First, we have seen that constructivism considers intersubjective knowledge and ideas as having constitutive effects on social reality and its evolution; by concentrating on communication, constructivism has focused on the way in which collective understandings enable agents to fix the meanings of reality, thus contributing to the institutionalisation of practices and reproduction of social structure. Second, and partly as a consequence of what we have said, constructivism has been able to explain change, taking it less as the alteration in the positions of material things than as the emergence of new constitutive rules. Third, in doing so, constructivists have been in the best position to perceive and thematise the emergence of new actors on the global scene, such as epistemic communities, non-governmental organisations, multinational corporations and moral communities.

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Why should all this bring about a more critical stance towards the domestic analogy? First, because by focusing on the constructed rather than found nature of social structure, constructivists are more likely to problematise it. Not by chance then are most of the authors who have problematised the states–individuals analogy constructivists, whether postmodern (Ashley) or not (e.g. Ruggie). Second, by emphasising change in world politics they are more likely to underline the fact that the modern state is a relatively recent creature in history which may well disappear or change its fundamental nature in the future. In other words, constructivists are more likely to stress the contingent nature of the experience of modern states and therefore should be less prone to transforming it into a universal paradigm. Third, as has been observed, by uncovering previously unrecognised ‘chunks’ of international and transnational social reality, constructivist work about new actors on the global scene suggests diverse ways of organising studies of international politics which transcend the domestic analogy (Adler 2002: 104). It is therefore striking to find a constructivist (Wendt 1999: 215, 2004) arguing that ‘states are people too’. This may be due to the fact that Wendt’s conception ultimately relies on a sort of undeclared Durkheimian organicism (Neumann 2004). But my impression is that it is more the result of the power of analogical reasoning in general, of the fact that even ‘adults’ in the discipline, so to speak, may be tempted to make recourse to it. Let us dwell on Wendt’s reasoning and see to what extent he endorses the domestic analogy and how well founded his argument is. His claim that states are people rests on the idea that states, like other social structures, are corporate agents. As he openly puts it, in order to become an agent a structure must have three particular features: (1) an idea of corporate agency, (2) a decision structure that both institutionalises and (3) authorises collective action (Wendt 1999: 218). The first requirement is that individuals’ shared knowledge reproduces an ‘Idea of the state as a corporate “person” or “group self”’(Wendt 1999: 218).30 Now it certainly is true that modern collective identities have been shaped by discourses about loyalty to the state, about the story ‘We, the People of ...’ and the memories of a nation state. And it is equally true that all these narratives have proven to be particularly resistant over time. Still, it is precisely in the present day that they are being questioned from different sides: it is in the epoch of globalisation, when people live in increasingly multicultural societies, crossed by a variety of

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claims of loyalty (situated at different levels: national, sub-national, regional and global), that the narrative ‘We, the People of this or that State’ loses its importance. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, both collective and individual identities rest on a narrative structure, but the difference between the two is that in the second case there is always a narrating body who can tell the whole story: an individual identity continues over time until the narrating body itself perishes (Bottici 2007: 237–45).31 But in the case of collective identities there is no guarantee that the different narrative voices will be recomposed in a single macronarrative and, even less so, that such a recomposition will last in the same form over time. Different narrating bodies may develop alternative narratives to tell and therefore refuse to identify with the dominant ones. Indeed, there is always the possibility that people will find an alterative narrative more significant for them. As a consequence of the compression of the time and space, globalisation may precisely be the epoch in which the number of possible narrative plots is multiplying, due to the horizon of individual actions shifting to a transnational and global scale (Bottici 2002). The second claim is equally problematic. It is true that states have internal decision structures that institutionalise collective actions, and have certainly done so to a great extent in the past. But what guarantees us that they will continue to do so in the future? Of course, in the past individuals have internalised state corporate norms in defining their interests and identities – at least to a certain extent. But even such norms are subject to change and I think there are reasons for suspecting that we are in a time when this change is visible to a considerable degree. Certainly, they are norms incorporated in a series of social practices such as procedures, codes or also memories and symbols, which change quite slowly. But this slowness should not be mistaken for impermanence. Finally, and this seems to be the strongest argument put forward by Wendt, states have an internal decision structure that authorises collective action on the part of their members (Wendt 1999: 218). This argument recalls Hobbes’s theory of representation as ‘authorisation’, which we have seen lies at the basis of his conception of the state as a person (section 2.1). Wendt even seems to go beyond Hobbes: ‘authorisation means that individuals’ actions are constituted as the actions of a collective’ (Wendt 1999), and not simply as actions that we can attribute to it by fiction. Wendt gives the example of war: we do not hold the soldier who kills an enemy in war responsible for his actions because his state authorises him to kill (Wendt 1999: 221).

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Wendt recognises that drawing this boundary between individual and corporate responsibility is a ‘complicated issue’ (Wendt 1999: 221). But the point is not simply that it is ‘complicated’: it is a complexity that makes the entire edifice collapse on a normative level. At least since the Second World War, both on a moral and on a legal ground, ‘corporate responsibility’ has not been recognised as a valid argument in defence of war criminals for their actions. The idea is that it is ultimately individual human beings who are responsible for their own actions, because in every moment they are considered free to choose to act in one way or another – even to disobey state norms when they contrast with a moral code. Certainly, Wendt can reply that these are normative considerations that concern ethics and law more than theories of international politics where morality is not at stake. Here, one may argue, we are concerned only with making scientific predictions that work. Still, it could be answered that no theory is separate from its social context and promoting a theory that conflates individual and collective responsibility can help diffuse conceptions and discourses with which people identify. Theories matter, as Wendt himself has taught us. And, as we noticed before (section 1.3), it is at least problematic to promote a view of the world in which people such as Adolf Eichmann can be recognised innocent of their crimes – in this case killing millions of Jews – just because they were ‘authorised’ by their state to do what they did. But, as I have suggested, the image of the state as a person is also empirically misleading from a variety of points of view. We have seen how the new context of the globalisation of economy, politics and culture renders the unitary image of states outdated, a point I will come back to in the epilogue. What is interesting to note here is the conflation that Wendt, among others, seems to make between two different things. The sentence ‘states are people too’ can be taken to mean three things: (1) states are unitary and undividable like individuals; (2) states have attributes similar to those of human beings such as desiring, thinking, etc. and (3) states are persons. Wendt seems to be aware of the difference between persons and individuals but at times conflates persons and human beings. This is patent in his claim that anthropomorphism and personification are synonymous (Wendt 2005: 360). This may be true for common language, but the latter is quite often misleading. Not all human beings are persons, as is clear in limit cases. For example, people suffering from severe mental disease are human beings, but have often been denied the status of persons who can be held accountable for their actions and deeds. Another significant

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example is embryos: most theories agree that they are human beings but their personality is contested, and some argue that they are not persons until they reach the status of foetus. Conversely, some may argue that animals are persons because they are (or should be) entitled to rights, but they are certainly not human beings. In synthesis, the concept of person entails a normative connotation (moral or legal) that is not necessarily implied by the concept of human being.32 As a consequence, anthropomorphism means attributing to states the characteristics of human beings such as thinking, memory, self-consciousness, desiring and even hating. By contrast, personification means attributing them the status of moral subjects and bearers of rights. In my view, it is important to distinguish between all those concepts because treating states as if they were individuals may be legitimate for the purpose of theorising (although previous remarks suggest that the theories that can be obtained thereby risk becoming models for a vanishing Westphalian world). But what is ultimately a helpful fiction for the theoretical mind seeking to construct models of the world or, as in the case of Hobbes, an artifice for the justification of a political model that is today to a large extent contestable, should not be conflated for something that is ‘real’ in any possible sense of the term.33 Given how strongly embedded the states–individuals analogy is in Wendt’s thinking, it does not come as a surprise that he has recently been pushing this analogy to the extreme consequence of an argument in favour of a world state (Wendt 2003). This argument, which appeared to some as a betrayal of his constructivism, follows from his endorsement of the domestic analogy, however sophisticated and intellectually refined it may be in this case. In Wendt’s view, a global monopoly on the legitimate use of organised violence, that is, a world state, is inevitable because of both micro-level dynamics and macro-level constraints. At the micro level, world state formation is driven by the struggle of individuals and groups for recognition of their subjectivity, while at the macro level this struggle is constrained by the logic of anarchy itself, which generates a tendency for military technology and war to become increasingly destructive. The cornerstone of this argument is the statement that the struggle for recognition between states will have the same outcome as that between individuals, that is, collective identity formation and in the end a world state (Wendt 2003: 493). Again, the claim is supported by the idea that ‘the state is a corporate actor’ and that it ‘is made up of many individuals and as such is also a structure, but the particular characteristics of that

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structure constitute a collective intentionality, an ability of its members to act consistently as a single agent’ (Wendt 2005: 505). This means that, to take Wendt’s example, we can legitimately say that on 21 June 1941 it was the intention of the ‘German state’ to invade the Soviet Union the next day (Wendt 1999: 216). This sort of statement, although deeply rooted in common language, is, as I have tried to argue, both empirically misleading and normatively problematic because it erroneously suggests that all the members of that state were unified by one and the same intention. This is ultimately the reason why both the states–persons analogy as well as the entire domestic analogy that rests on it are inevitably problematic. While we can find a constructivist who supports the domestic analogy, we should nevertheless recognise that the very ideas central to constructivism rather point towards its criticism. This is particularly clear in the most radical forms of constructivism, where we can say that constructivism meets post-structuralism and postmodernism. As the terms themselves suggest, both post-structuralism and postmodernist imply a critical attitude towards structures and categories such as that of modernity and the modern state. The concept of ‘deconstruction’ has indeed become paradigmatic of such approaches.34 Richard Ashley’s thinking is perhaps paradigmatic of the way in which such a critical and deconstructive attitude leads towards a critique of the domestic analogy. Not only does he explicitly engage in such a critique (see in particular Ashley 1995), but more generally problematises all the presuppositions of the domestic analogy. In the first place, there is an attempt to ‘untie the modern sovereign state’ (Ashley 1988, 1989). As we have seen, in the classical forms of domestic analogy the experience that is said to be exported from the domestic to the international sphere is precisely that of the modern state. Ashley problematises this very experience by showing the limits of modernity itself and sharply criticising any attempts to mistakenly transform it into a standard of truth in itself (Ashley 1995: 98). Ashley’s critique of modernity, seen as a regime of truth in which historicity is marginalised for the sake of theory and the sovereignty of the reasoning ‘man’ prevails (Ashley 1989), at times embodies a one-sided view of modernity. Yet it has been and still is decidedly beneficial for the doubts it contributes to raising towards the universal value of such an experience. By emphasising the contingency of the modern sovereign state, postmodernism rejects both any attempts to transform it into a universal paradigm as well as any sort of homogenising and monolithic view which assimilates it to individuals (Ashley 1986).

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In so doing, postmodernism also rejects another presupposition of the domestic analogy, that is, the very possibility to distinguish between the two levels of the analogy: the domestic and the international. As Ashley underlines, far from being a distinction that we can take for granted, the very separation between the domestic and the international realms should be strongly problematised. This separation is said to be the contingent product of variegated and ever-changing social practices, which assume different meanings in the different contexts. As a consequence, it should be the primary object of analysis of the study of international relations rather than its starting point (Ashley 1988, 1989). Taking the distinction as an unquestioned presupposition means attempting to domesticate global life by imposing the heroic practice of the sovereign rational ‘man’ who imposes clear-cut and fixed boundaries to the contingency of experience (Ashley 1989). But boundaries are as contingent as the very distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (Walker 1993). Once one recognises that the very distinction between the domestic and the international is a problem in itself and cannot be taken for granted, it is no longer possible to apply the domestic analogy. This, as we will see in the epilogue, holds even more in an epoch of globalisation when boundaries are being questioned from different sides: economic, cultural and political. Among the theories of international relations that have also had a beneficial impact on international theory by questioning the established boundaries of the discipline are feminist approaches, which I will now briefly analyse. Gender approaches have long been marginalised if not completely neglected within the discipline. This is particularly striking if one considers the important role of gender for political philosophy and political theory. Gender has been mainly perceived as a domestic problem, and, as a consequence, international relations were perceived as ‘gender neutral’, concerning no more women than men (Light and Halliday 1994: 45). As A. Tickner observes, with its traditional emphasis on high politics issues, and notably war, the discipline has privileged issues that grow out of men’s experience; we are socialised into believing that war and power politics are spheres of activity with which men have a special affinity and special expertise (Tickner 2002: 275). It is therefore not coincidental that feminist perspectives entered the discipline at the same time as the end of the Cold War and the consequent lessening of the predominance of security issues that had tended to dominate the discipline since its founding (Tickner 2002: 275). This was also a time of deep change within the discipline, when new issues arose together with the awareness that a fundamental questioning of

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the epistemological foundations of the discipline was needed. Since the early 1990s, feminist approaches have brought their peculiar concern into the debate (or, at least, they have tried to).35 The key concern for all types of feminist theory has always been women’s subordination and the unjustified asymmetry between women and men’s social and economic position. Not alien from such a concern was also the desire to seek solutions to put an end to women’s inferior position. Bringing this concern into the reflection on international relations has had a deep impact both on the raising of new issues and on sowing a new awareness of the bias in the traditional ways of looking at them. The discipline had before almost wholly neglected the role that gendered divisions of labour and power play in the definition and maintenance of the state as well as the implications of the fact that most of the public world of state and interstate power politics is the domain of men. By disentangling the different strategies at work in ‘gendering states’ and the relations among them, feminism has promoted a new vision of international relations theory (Peterson 1992). It has pointed out not just the above-mentioned fact that most of the public world of international politics has been (and still is) reserved to men, but also that the general understanding of the nature of the state had been shaped by men’s analysis and experience. In so doing, feminism has put a new emphasis on gender both as something we should look at, but also as a lens through which we look at the world.36 In other words, gender has been shown to be more than a mere variable we should take into consideration, or a mere addition to the agenda of mainstream International Relations. As we will see, taking gender seriously cannot but lead to a fundamental questioning of the traditional categories and assumptions both of traditional political theory and International Relations. This is ultimately the reason why feminists tend to be more sceptical towards unproblematically relying on the ‘domestic’ analogy. Once gender enters the debate, it is the very distinction between the domestic and the international that is questioned. Among the presuppositions of the domestic analogy, feminists tend to question both the distinction between the two levels of the analogy and the traditional Westphalian image of the sovereign state. Feminists argued that the sovereign state could not be taken as an objective reality that was ontologically privileged (Steans 2003: 434). Sovereignty is not an objective, a settled condition for statehood, but a form of legitimation through which power was converted into authority. Sovereignty required recognition so states engaged in certain practices that established and consolidated norms of behaviour.

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In this process of legitimation, women were – and to a certain extent still are – largely excluded. Historically, the principle of sovereignty legitimised the state’s claim of being the primary community to whom citizens owed loyalty, while loyalty has largely been conceived as the disposition to act and speak in the interests and defence of the state. The linkage between state political loyalty and combat meant that the traditional view of loyalty was strongly gendered. The first loyalty of the good male citizen is to his state, while the first loyalty for a good woman had to be to her family, not directly to the nation. Having been excluded for a long time from the right to citizenship, women’s relations with the state had been mediated through the patriarchal family structure. This is something that we tend to forget nowadays: when we are told the story about the modern constitution of the sovereign state out of a social contract between human beings, most often half of the story gets lost. The social contract that, as we have seen, according to many modern political theorists generated political obligation towards the sovereign state, is at the same time a sexual contract (Pateman 1988). The reason for this oblivion is easy to understand: the social contract is a story of freedom, whereas the sexual contract is a story of subjection. Still, the former could not have been maintained without the latter, that is without the systematic exclusion of women from the political and public sphere and their relegation into the private one. The traditional story of the social contact is an account of the creation of the public sphere of civil freedom while the other, the private one, is seen as not politically relevant (Pateman 1988: 3). Yet the former cannot subsist without the latter. Together with the distinction between public and private, it is also the domestic/international dichotomy that is challenged. Here ‘domestic’ assumes its fullest meaning of both what is national and what concerns the family, the private sphere. The fact that in mainstream discourses ‘domestic’ is taken to be simply the opposite of ‘international’, therefore concealing the other meaning of the term, is the sign that feminist approaches to international politics still remain a view ‘from the margins’ or from the outside looking in (Steans 2003: 449). Despite attempts to set up a dialogue with other approaches to world politics, feminist critiques are far from being systemically incorporated in the study of international politics. Hence the title of this book: ‘men’ and not more generally ‘human beings’ because it is still in the first place of ‘men’ that we think when we enter the stage of official international politics. Drawing rigid boundaries between the international (outside) and the domestic (inside) thus understood is a way to remove gender relations

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from the field of enquiry (Steans 1998). Feminists challenged this distinction not just by pointing to the knowledge practices that had constructed it over time, but also by highlighting new issues for the study of international politics that go beyond it. Feminists identified new areas of investigation in the struggle over the appropriate demarcation of boundaries between the national/international and public/private, for example the growth and expansion of a discourse on women’s human rights, along with their application in diverse societies. By drawing attention to phenomena such as the codification of women’s human rights, feminists inevitably challenged the traditional demarcation of boundaries (Steans 2003: 434). Therefore, we can conclude that both feminists that have pointed to gender as a lens and those who have looked at it as a variable have challenged the distinction between the domestic and the international, and therefore, implicitly at least, have distanced themselves from the domestic analogy. This distinction is challenged even when gender is considered a simple variable among others – which most feminists refuse to do. If one raises questions such as ‘do countries with highly inegalitarian gender hierarchies behave differently from those with less inequality at home?’, we automatically recognise that even ‘private’ issues can have a significant impact on international ones. The gender approaches that I have unified here under the general label of ‘feminism’ can vary a lot from one author to another. We can have liberal, Marxist, radical, socialist, psychoanalytic, standpoint, postcolonial and postmodern feminists, to name but a few (Tickner 2002: 277). For our purposes, it may be helpful to identify three major ideal types: liberal feminism, Marxist feminism and radical feminism (Jackson and Sørensen 2003: 278). Liberal feminism holds that the concession of equal rights to men and women can overcome the strong asymmetry between the two. In their view, the basic liberal rights of life, liberty and property have not yet been extended in equal measure to women. For some authors, this kind of feminism is a potential ally for other types of liberalism. Keohane, for instance, argued in favour of an alliance between neoliberal republicanism and liberal feminism, because such a theory can help examine international relations ‘from below’, that is from the standpoint of those who have been traditionally excluded from power (Keohane 1989b). Still, many feminists remain rather sceptical as they fear this proposed alliance could be another strategy for subordinating gender approaches to an established mainstream theory which seeks to mould the gender view according to its own agenda and priorities (Steans 2003).

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Marxist feminists ascribe the inferior position of women to the economic, social and political structure of the capitalist system. They point out that capitalism has established a division between productive work in the factory and invisible work in the private sphere at home and that, even in the contexts where women have reached the labour market, they are mostly in low-paid, low-status jobs. As a consequence, they argue that the only road to equal treatment of women is an overthrow of the capitalist system (Barrett 1980). In contrast to both Marxist and liberal feminism, radical feminism rejects any possible cooperation with other approaches to international politics. Radical feminists aim at developing an independent feminist analysis that avoids subordinating gender to other more traditional agendas in the study of international politics (Peterson and Runyan 1993). By vindicating the specificity of a gender approach to international politics, radical feminism is more likely to engage in a critique of the traditional assumptions of the discipline and therefore also of the domestic analogy. Still, liberal and Marxist feminist are also likely to at least implicitly distance themselves from the domestic analogy: by emphasising phenomena that go beyond the traditional separation of the domestic from the international they implicitly criticise one of the pillars of the domestic analogy. The same holds true for Marxist theories. Indeed, by underlining the role played by social classes and the interests that stir them, often in contrast with the supposed national interest, they implicitly deny the assumption that states are unitary actors which, as we have seen, is perhaps the keystone to such an analogy, while not denying the role they play on the world scene. This is not just true for Hobson and Lenin’s classic theories, but also for the structural imperialism theory put forward by Galtung and Wallerstein. By distinguishing between countries that belong to the centre and those instead on the periphery of the world, Galtung underlines the existence of a community of interests among the former and the elites that are in power in the latter, thus showing how states are often anything but monolithic agents (Galtung 1991). Marxist approaches to international politics differ greatly from one another. Simplifying things, we can say that all Marxists share the idea that politics is to a large extent determined by the socio-economic context (if this idea has now become a sort of commonplace among Western intellectuals, this is due to the great impact that Marxism has had). Economy is however perceived as the site of exploitation and inequality between social classes, which, in traditional capitalist societies, are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. As a consequence, the dominant

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economic class is also deemed to dominate politically. Still, global capitalist development is uneven and bound to produce crises and contradictions, both between social classes and between states. Marxists therefore point to the history of global capitalist expansion and to the struggle between classes and states to which it has given rise around the world. In so doing, they also aim to investigate the conditions for a revolutionary transformation which may relieve the subordinate classes from exploitation and poverty.37 The various Marxist approaches have further developed this view, enriching it with other strands of analysis. For instance, Robert Cox bases his analysis of world politics and political economy on the concept of historical structures defined as ‘a particular configuration of forces’ which include material capabilities, ideas and institutions (Cox 1992; Cox and Sinclair 1996). Thus, he moves away from an exclusive focus on the economy and complexifies the picture by including both ideas and institutions. Cox theorises the complex interplay between politics and economics as the interaction between social forces, forms of states and world orders. In his view, the social forces of capitalism are currently involved in a process of economic globalisation meaning an internationalising of production as well as migration movements from South to North. Globalisation is therefore driven by market forces, but Cox holds that new social movements critical of globalisation will grow increasingly strong and this will open a new phase in the struggle between social forces over the control and regulation of economic globalisation.38 Among those who have recently been insisting on the role of the new social movements are Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. With their very successful book Empire, they have entered, though uninvited, the field of international politics theories.39 In their militant approach they combine Marxism with an emphasis on new forms of immaterial labour perceived as means for a biopolitical production of new subjectivities (Hardt and Negri 2000). All this is summarised by a new view of empire which contrasts with the classical view of empire as hegemony. Hardt and Negri insist on many occasions on the fact that empire does not mean US hegemony.40 No state, not even the US, can go it alone in the contemporary world. In their definition, the concept of empire is characterised precisely by a lack of boundaries: ‘Empire’s rule has no limits’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: xiv). In their use of the concept, ‘empire’ is by definition acephalous. Let us briefly dwell on the salient theses of this book. As we will see, they imply a further scepticism towards the domestic analogy. First

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and foremost, Hardt and Negri’s use of the concept posits a regime that encompasses the spatial totality. Second, ‘empire’ denotes a de-centred and de-territorialised system where no centre can be identified. In order to render this idea, Hardt and Negri employ the category of the ‘mixed constitution’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 304–20). Third, ‘empire’ denotes a regime that operates in all registers of social life. In the words of the two authors, ‘empire not only manages a territory and a population but also creates the very world it inhabits. It not only regulates human interactions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature. The object of its rule is social life in its entirety, and thus empire presents the paradigmatic form of biopower’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: xv). In the view of the two authors, the roots of this form of biopower are the transformation of production brought about by the advent of what they call ‘immaterial labour’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 29). The central role previously occupied by the labour power of mass factory workers in the production of surplus value is today increasingly filled by intellectual, immaterial and communicative labour power exercised through networks. This new form of labour, despite its still being limited to a relatively small part of world production, is hegemonic in the sense that it tends to permeate all spheres of production and social life. Immaterial labour not just produces goods, but also effects and modifies bodies. In a word, it produces a new form of subjectivity. Finally, according to Hardt and Negri, despite arising from conflict, the concept of empire is always dedicated to peace – a perpetual and universal peace. As they observe, recovering the tradition of Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus (along with Machiavelli), empire is formed not on the basis of force itself but on the basis of the capacity to present force as being in the service of order, justice and peace. Interventions by imperial armies are solicited by the parties involved in an already existing conflict: ‘empire is not born of its own will but rather it is called into being and constituted on the basis of its capacity to resolve conflicts. Empire is formed and its intervention becomes juridically legitimate only when it is already inserted into the chain of international consensuses aimed at resolving existing conflicts […]. The first task of empire, then, is to enlarge the realm of the consensuses that support its own power’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 15). To conclude on this point, in Hardt and Negri’s use, the concept of empire therefore denotes not only an absence of borders but also a union of juridical concepts and ethical values. The re-emergence of the medieval category of the bellum iustum in both intellectual and policy discourses is perhaps the most striking evidence of this change. In their

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view, the modern principle of mutual respect among sovereign states has given way to the contemporary emergence of a right of intervention, which is based on a permanent state of exception justified by the appeal to universal values such as justice and freedom (Hardt and Negri 2000: 18). By emphasising the lack of boundaries that characterises contemporary world order, Hardt and Negri implicitly criticise all the presuppositions of the domestic analogy. If there are no boundaries, then it is impossible to trace a clear-cut separation of the domestic from the international. It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that they start their argument in favour of a new concept of empire with a vigorous and explicit critique of the domestic analogy (Hardt and Negri 2000: 7). The critique of the domestic analogy is not simply an argumentative strategy but is deeply rooted in their fundamental theses. In particular, by emphasising that the new modes of production based on immaterial labour are generating a new form of subjectivity, what they call the ‘multitude’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004), they pose a challenge to the concept of sovereignty, which, as we have seen, is one of the cornerstones of the domestic analogy. Hardt and Negri define the multitude in opposition to the concept of ‘people’ that has been traditionally associated with that of sovereignty. In order to be sovereign the people has to be one, it has to be defined by clear-cut boundaries. The population is of course composed of numerous different individuals and classes, but the ‘people’ synthesises or reduces these social differences into one identity. In contrast to it, the multitude cannot be unified and remain plural: and this is the reason why traditional political philosophy argues that only the people can rule as a sovereign power. The multitude is composed of a set of singularities, that is, of social subjects whose difference cannot be reduced to sameness: it is a ‘difference that remains different’ (Hardt and Negri 2004: 99). This does not mean that the multitude is fragmented or anarchical, as it differs from the people but also from the crowd, the mob. The components of the latter are not singularities and can easily collapse into the indifference of the whole, and this also explains the passivity of the mob. On the contrary, the multitude designates an active social subject, which acts on the basis of what the singularities have in common (Hardt and Negri 2004: 100). I cannot further discuss Hardt and Negri’s view here. For my purpose, suffice it to point out that the concept of multitude is the correlate of that of the absence of boundaries in empire and that both question the central assumptions of the domestic analogy. In conclusion, we can

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therefore say that recent Marxist thinkers, even in the variety of their approaches and their most recent theory, tend to distance themselves from the domestic analogy. By putting emphasis on categories other than the modern state (respectively class, modernity and gender), Marxism, postmodernism and feminism implicitly distance themselves from the idea that the experience of the modern state is one that could be assumed as a paradigm of universal value. The same, as we have seen, holds for constructivism, although significant exceptions are always possible. To sum up, we have seen how more recent theories of international politics which go beyond the three traditions from which we started tend to more drastically question all the assumptions of the domestic analogy. At this point of the argument, one could still argue that it is in the conditions of globalisation that new paths are opened for its recovery: by radically questioning the boundaries between states, globalisation can be thought to open the way for a world state. As we shall now see, the very simplicity of such reasoning is also the sign of its crucial fallacy.

Epilogue: The Domestic Analogy in the Global Era

Hobbes, together with a large part of modern political thinkers, denied that an equal amount of misery derived from international as it did from civil anarchy. He argued that states do face each other in the posture of gladiators, like individuals in the state of nature, but precisely because they are sovereign (and therefore superiorem non recognoscentes) they can guarantee the conditions within the states in which the citizens can thrive (Hobbes 1968: XIII). The sovereignty that establishes the condition of anarchy and war towards the outside is what guarantees the possibility of an ordered social life on the inside. In the Hobbesian perspective, the international state of nature is not as troublesome as that within the state because states are not as vulnerable as individuals to violent attacks and above all they are not so to the same extent; thus, they do not share the same radical fear of death as individuals which leads them to submit to a common power (section 2.1). When writing Why Is There no International Theory in 1966, Martin Wight observed that the time had come to ask ourselves if these considerations still had an empirical foundation (Wight 1996: 31). It was the period of the Cold War and the terror that the arms race caused seemed to come very close to Hobbesian fear. During that same period, in Italy Norberto Bobbio was writing: In the same way as for men in the state of nature it was first necessary for all to renounce using force individually and then attribute their collective force to a single monopolising power, so states, plunged back into the state of nature due to the system of threatening and unstable relations that has been called the balance of terror, need to make the same passage from the current system of multiple centres of power to concentrating power in a new and supreme body that 133

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has the same monopoly of force over the single states as the state has over single individuals. (Bobbio 1984: 85) The appearance of nuclear weapons, with their inherent possibility of annihilating humankind, really seemed to have taken the world back to a ‘state of nature’. Since the 1990s, Cerutti has observed that if we are to portray the world of states with nuclear weapons as a second state of nature, then ‘rightful reason’ undeniably commands us to exit from it (Cerutti 1991: 114) and therefore put an end to the threat of annihilating humankind, or at least its civilisation, that nuclear weapons contain. But here we are speaking of the normative level, which does not immediately result in proposals of a cosmopolitan institutional solution. As we have seen in the case of Kant and Beitz (sections 2.2 and 3.1), where the structure of the argument is a logical deduction from a normative proposition – in this case the duty to guarantee the survival of humankind – we cannot speak of a domestic analogy. In Cerutti’s line of argument (1991, 2007), the need to face up to the global challenges ultimately derives from a moral duty applicable due to its normative weight and not because it is analogically based on experience gained within domestic society.1 It cannot be a priori excluded that after shocking events such as a potential regional nuclear exchange, fear acts to protect in the Hobbesian way, allowing for the creation of a common power (Cerutti 2007: 197). But there are different factors that work against such a development. Other more tangible concerns (joblessness, terrorism, crime) are usually felt first among the public and therefore stimulate decision-makers to take action. Second, the type of fear that should bring human beings closer on a planetary scale may work somewhat differently and less powerfully than the Hobbesian fear that made them join together in a limited community with some common factors (borders, cultural affinity, etc.). Third, fear for such a global disaster seems more likely to produce a denial mechanism or fatalistic acceptance, whereas normative concerns arise about the danger of a such a Super Leviathan transforming itself into a world tyranny (Cerutti 2007: 197–8). Therefore, while some refuse to immediately adhere to cosmopolitantype solutions (Cerutti 2007: 196–9), as we have seen Bobbio goes further and, while arguing along the lines of the domestic analogy, transforms the duty to exit this state of nature into a precise institutional solution: the world-scale reproduction of an authority holding a monopoly over coercion which has the same relationship with the single states as the state has towards single individuals (Bobbio 1984).

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Nevertheless, to date at least, history has not produced any world state as Bobbio, with his argument along the lines of the domestic analogy, had hoped. And yet there seems to be reason to wonder whether the intensification of interdependence on a planetary level produced by globalisation might not open a new road towards the domestic analogy. With its necessary plurality of factors – economic and financial, but also environmental, technological, political and cultural – globalisation seems to have created such a situation that events and decisions that take place in one part of the world end up having significant consequences on communities and individuals living in quite distant regions of the earth. Globalisation consists of a series of acceleration processes that tend to project the space of human activities onto a transcontinental or interregional level. It implies extending and intensifying human relations in time and space, to the extent that, on one hand, day-to-day activities are influenced by events that happen on the other side of the globe, and, on the other, the practices and decisions of local groups or communities can have significant consequences on a global level.2 On the other hand, while our lives depend increasingly on people and activities situated in distant regions of the globe, the traditional places of politics seem to be progressively drained of their effective power, both bottom-up, in favour of supernational processes and institutions, and up-down, towards sub-national actors, such as groups and single individuals. Paradoxically, the sovereign state, which was one of the main promoters of globalisation,3 seems to be one of its most illustrious victims (Sassen 1996; Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton 1999). While in the modern era exercising sovereign power depended on the capacity for ordered dominion within a specific territory, today, to use Habermas’s words, the sovereign is no longer he who has the monopoly of legitimate physical force within a specific territory, but rather he who is the quickest (Habermas 2001). The compression of space and time produced by economic, technological and environmental globalisation tendentially implies an erosion of the distance that guaranteed the modern sovereign state the possibility of controlling the space where its sovereignty was exercised (Harvey 1990; Bauman 1998). The sphere in which the power = speed equation is perhaps most evident is that of financial markets. Contemporary communication technologies and market liberalisation have created a condition in which it has become impossible for a single state to control financial transactions (Strange 1996). The speed at which bytes travel over IT networks has wiped out the distance between Tokyo and Wall Street, but at the same time has also enormously increased the importance of these activities: this electronic herd of financial transactions that travels instantaneously from

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one side of the globe to the other has now reached such proportions that it determines the destiny of individuals, groups and entire communities. Analogously, other key sectors of the contemporary economy, in particular the hi-tech segments, are also tending to shake off spatial restrictions. Capital globalisation and market liberalisation mean that whole sectors of production now have a transnational capacity. Thanks to the revolution in communication, which has allowed us to reduce transport costs and above all to transmit complex information at zero cost, the production process can be broken up and the various sectors of production scattered over different regions of the globe. Hence, the global elites find that they can eschew territorial restrictions and therefore elude the resulting social responsibilities (Beck 2003). Then, alongside the economic globalisation processes we have the so-called global challenges, that is, those processes that many group with the phenomena of economic, political and cultural globalisation, but which in reality have different characteristics (Cerutti 2001, 2007). Indeed, only the threats resulting from human action tending to concern the globe’s inhabitants in an equal manner are peculiarly global, and, for some chance of success, can only be dealt with if not by humanity as a whole, at least by its majority (Cerutti 2001: 86, 2007: 2). Figuring among the global challenges are nuclear weapons and the environmental threats to the whole ecosphere, such as man-made global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer. The field of global challenges is therefore sector where the whole meaning of the term ‘global’ comes out. While economic globalisation has quite a variegated impact in the different regions of the globe and different spheres of production, and the same can be said of cultural and political globalisation, in the case of global challenges the lengthening of the social chains of interdependence reaches the utmost threshold: the globe. Not only in the sense that phenomena such as global warming of the planet are genuinely global in their capacity (because no one has the guarantee of being able to avoid them nor of doing so in time and successfully), but also because they mark the limits of availability of natural and spatial resources on a global level. It is in relation to these challenges that there has been the most pregnant talk of the era we are living possibly marking the end of modernity and the passage into a new ‘global’ era (Albrow 1996). Among the global challenges, the one that perhaps most clearly marks the end of the modern era is the nuclear challenge. Although there could not be greater inequality in the distribution of these weapons

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(there are few nuclear powers – among whom some have second strike capacity and some do not – many states who are a long way from being able to develop nuclear technology, and others who, backed by the nuclear defence shield of others, have decided not to pursue this goal), we still live in a nuclear age. As a consequence, we cannot but continue to reflect on the philosophical meaning of the nuclear threat, which contains the possibility of a sort of suicide of humankind. But this also causes difficulties for what was the main product of political modernity, that is, the sovereign state – perhaps more than any other global challenge. While the latter founded its claim for legitimacy on the ability to guarantee, following Hobbes’s conception, the security of its citizens (despite asking for some of them to give their lives to preserve the whole community), today no Leviathan can any longer guarantee to protect its citizens’ lives of its own accord. In addition to nuclear weapons, we also have other evolutions in the field of war technology (chemical and bacterial weapons, and today also the terrorist war) which, through a dramatic increase in destructive capacity, seem to mark a decisive leap in quality (Bottici 2006). In a world in which the outcome of war could now potentially be absolute, in which all states, small and large, seem to be exposed to the contingency of superiority, because they could be brought to their knees by other states, or even by small groups of individuals, it seems legitimate to ask if the analogy between Hobbes’s war of all against all and international relations might not have become perfect. Taking the domestic analogy to its extreme consequences, it has been suggested for example that in the face of globalisation and global challenges the main route to guaranteeing peace and prosperity is a new ‘global covenant’ aimed at establishing a ‘cosmopolitan social democracy’ (Held 2004). It is not just a matter of arguing in favour of applying cosmopolitan principles of international justice like in the case of Beitz’s philosophical cosmopolitanism, but of acknowledging the reproduction on a global level of the institutions typical of the state sphere as the main route to peace (Held 2004). Starting off from the idea of a hiatus between the processes of economic, financial, technological and military globalisation and the traditional mechanisms of democratic representation still imprisoned in their traditional seats, now drained of effective power, the proposal is to reproduce the same institutions on a global level. Rather than the most naïve form of domestic analogy, at least in the case of the global covenant put forward by Held, it would be an internationalist form of domestic analogy, insofar as the institutional design proposed by such a covenant does not involve the total elimination of

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the current system of states but places the new institutions of a global comsopolis alongside it (Held 2004). No matter how influential and widespread,4 this form of reasoning nevertheless arouses suspicions due to its very simplicity, which should apparently prove its strength. We could say that a sort of Gulliver syndrome lies behind this simplicity: it announces the decline of a world – that of the sovereign state – and the journey towards a new land – that of cosmopolitan democracy – but once this destination has been reached, it seems difficult to shake off the impression of being in the same world, only presented on a different scale. On taking a closer look, one can observe that far from opening up the way to the domestic analogy, globalisation has brought all its presuppositions under debate. As we have seen (section 1.3), those who support a reasoning centred around the classic form of domestic analogy find themselves taking up the following presuppositions: (1) proposing the extension of a proposition borne out by domestic experience to the international sphere where, in the classic form of domestic analogy, the latter consists in the idea that subjection to a common power is the condition for social order; (2) claiming that the two spheres, the domestic and the international, are two distinct realms, but that, (3) at the same time, there is a sufficient degree of similarity between them to justify the first presupposition. Of these three presuppositions, none seems to be applicable to the world of global politics. Indeed, globalisation has shown that subjection to a common power is not a condition of social order because some form of government is also possible in the absence of a sovereign authority with a monopoly over physical coercion. But if we stay anchored to the model of government embodied in the historic experience of the sovereign state, then it becomes difficult to perceive what new forms of government globalisation may have produced. The many factors of the globalisation do not have an immediately homogenising impact and rather produce contrasting effects, to capture which it has become common parlance to speak of ‘glocalisation’.5 The world of global politics appears an extremely variegated and complex world, at times schizophrenic, with some regions of the globe now seemingly globalised; others where these same phenomena are felt to a much smaller degree; regions where the tendency is to respond to the challenges of globalisation by increasing interdependence, such as in the case of the European Union; regions whose reaction to globalisation tends to be to close themselves off from the rest of the world; individuals for whom borders are no longer a barrier to their activities in the

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world; and others for whom confines can still represent fortresses. The two figures of the cosmopolitan traveller, for whom distances no longer exist, and the aspiring émigré from the poorest regions in the world, who does not even have access to the most rudimental means of transport, is a good illustration of this aspect of globalisation. Despite this extremely variegated panorama, a government of globalisation already exists, however far it may be from being democratic. As it has been attempted to underline in coining new terms such as ‘multilayered global governance’, we do not necessarily need a single sovereign authority to govern globalisation: while the idea of government implies the idea of a formal centralised structure, that of governance suggests the image of a network structure, in which authority is widespread and it may be difficult to identify a single seat of power (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton 1999). The field in which the existence of a governance of globalisation is most evident is, paradoxically, the economic sphere. Despite some greeting globalisation as the economy’s triumph over the stiffness of politics, it seems difficult to deny that economic globalisation itself is the result of precise political choices. Indeed, it would have been impossible outside the complex institutional framework that accompanies it (Stubbs and Underhill 1994). Of course, it is not just a matter of state institutions, but rather a variegated set of institutions (super-, trans- and sub-national) and more or less formalised rules of conduct which, however, place limits on and define the expectations of the actors’ activities to no lesser extent. Similar arguments can be made for other spheres of globalisation. Although in other areas, the institutionalisation of global politics is perhaps less conspicuous or is felt much less, it is undeniable that the growing institutionalisation of global political life is perhaps one of the most salient characteristics of the contemporary world. In spite of the lack of a great world Leviathan, the institutions of globalisation exist and do not fail to have the effect of ordering global political life. At this point of my argument, the temptation could nevertheless still arise to claim that though the idea of extending the state model of political order to the international sphere may have reached the end of the line, perhaps other forms of domestic analogy could still prove to be useful. As we have seen, it is above all the reference to modern paradigms that makes the domestic analogy problematic, not that it is a weak form of reasoning as Bull had criticised: the use of analogies is not only due to ‘infancy in a discipline’, rather it performs an extremely important heuristic and argumentative function, even in natural sciences.

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An argument in favour of this hypothesis could be the example of functionalist theories and the successes they have obtained in explaining and foreseeing integration trends such as those in Europe (Mitrany 1975; Haas 1964, 1970). The functionalist theory, formulated by David Mitrany and applied to the case of Europe by Ernst Haas, is based on extending by analogy to the international realm the proposition, borne out by experience in the domestic sphere, due to which individuals tend to develop loyalty towards those institutions that are able to meet their needs. The fundamental idea is that what drives cooperation between states is the need to face up to functional imperatives such as economic and financial interdependence, technological and environmental challenges; this, and not political construction, is therefore the route to forming supernational institutions. The functionalist theory seems to have proved itself in its ability to explain international cooperation, and we could thus say it is an example of how the use of analogies taken from experience gained in the domestic sphere is not just legitimate, but at times also bears fruit. Therefore, while the classic form of domestic analogy is proving to be increasingly problematic and less and less useful in understanding the contemporary situation, this does not mean that there should be a total ban on forms of analogical inference taken from experience gained within the state realm. Nevertheless, on taking a closer look, in a world of global politics, the very idea of an analogy between two distinct domains has become problematic. In the context of global politics, it is the very presupposition that there may be a separation between the domestic and international spheres that is shaky. In a world in which the destiny of some islands in the Pacific depends on a few million car drivers on the other side of the globe, in which the electronic herd of financial transactions travelling instantaneously from one side of the globe to the other escapes the control of the single states, in which no state is any longer able to guarantee the security of its citizens of its own accord or to autonomously pursue certain choices as to domestic politics, the political map, in which each state appears to be sovereign on the inside, while on the outside it comes face to face with other sovereigns, risks, in the best of cases, becoming anachronistic. The very idea that there is a separation between the two domains of the internal and external spheres of sovereignty seems to be in crisis, not so much because sovereignty itself has been superseded (Camilleri and Falk 1992) or because the distinction between the two realms has proved to be a mere construct of the imagination – something that in short has always been the case (Walker 1993) – but because by staying

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attached to this image we risk failing to capture the most significant developments in the contemporary world. What is neither domestic nor international, and therefore cannot be described by a simple Westphalian political map with its world of sovereign states, risks being too important to be exposed to the possibility of being ignored. But if the very image of a political world divided into the two spheres of the domestic and the international is dimming, it also becomes problematic to speak of similarity between the two. It is the whole framework of the domestic analogy that crumbles in the global era: no matter how much it may be argued that the sovereign state is one of the fundamental actors on the global stage, that frontiers, especially against immigration from the poorest countries, can become fortresses, it nevertheless seems difficult to deny that the boundaries of what is politically and philosophically important are now changing and no longer correspond to the traditional Westphalian ones. In a world in which confines are becoming blurred and the very distinction between the domestic and the international has become unstable, political thought is called upon to rethink its conceptual categories and, first and foremost, the very separation between ‘political theory’ and ‘international relations’ that has accompanied them for centuries. If the sovereign state is destined, under the hammer of history, to cease to be the pole of attraction of political thought, we can no longer claim, as Wight complained (1996), that ‘political theory’ is only possible on the inside, while only mere ‘relations’ remain on the outside. The time seems to be ripe for a ‘global political theory’.

Notes Introduction 1. For a detailed reconstruction of this debate, see Suganami (1989). On Grotius’s conception, see section 2.3. 2. See, for example, Held (2004). Held’s proposal of a global pact with the aim of establishing cosmopolitical social democracy is discussed in more depth in the epilogue. 3. See, for example, one of the most widely used handbooks of contemporary international law: Cassese (2001), in particular, pages 5 and 6, which analyse the decentralisation of international law. Another form of domestic analogy seems to be implicit in the tendency, common above all among contemporary international law theorists, to consider the United Nations’ Charter a constitution (Dupuy 2003). 4. Rationalist indicates the fact that according to Wight the authors belonging to this tradition share a moderate trust in the possibility that men, as rational beings, can live together according to reason, even in the absence of a common government (Wight 1991). 5. In this work, I will use them synonymously. 6. On the concept of globalisation as ‘glocalisation’, that is, as a complex interplay between the global and local spheres, see the Epilogue.

1 The Domestic Analogy 1. See Jones (1981) and the debate that this essay triggered. 2. See, for instance, Bain (2007), Brown (2001), Buzan (2001, 2004), Finnemore (2001), Guzzini (2001), Hurrel (2001), Navari (2007), Neumann (2001) and Watson (2001). I cannot go into the details of such a rich and stimulating debate here, as I am interested in reconstructing the history of the concept of domestic analogy. Still, it can be argued that, given the importance of the domestic analogy for the founding fathers of the English school, rethinking the former is also relevant for the ‘re-launch’ of the latter, as first promoted by Buzan (2001). 3. In a recent forum on the ‘re-launch’ of the English School of International Relations, Guzzini warned against defining American International Relations as the ‘target’ (Guzzini 2001). 4. As we will see, unlike Bull, Manning uses the terms ‘system’ and ‘international society’ synonymously (Manning 1936). 5. On the role of Manning as a supporter of the independence of International Relations as an academic discipline, see Suganami (2001). 6. Among those who underlined this point, see Suganami (2001) and Wilson (2004). 142

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7. As it has been observed, this image is so far removed from the ‘billiard ball’ model that it has become customary in International Relations textbooks to associate it with realism, neorealism, the English School and other approaches to the subject (Wilson 2004: 763). 8. Read, for example, the following polemical parenthesis: ‘Build the superState if you know how; amend the Covenant if you can; but make meanwhile the most of such instruments and institutions as already are available for use.’ (Manning 1936: 167). 9. As we will see later, the first teaching post for International Relations was created in 1919 at the University of Aberystwyth. 10. ‘By an institution,’ Bull writes, ‘we do not necessarily imply an organisation or administrative machinery, but rather a set of habits and practices shaped towards the realisation of common goals’ (Bull 1977: 74). 11. Bull takes this term from the German jurist Georg Jellinek, who, in Allgemeine Staatslehre (1922), labels international law and the community of states as anarchisch. 12. For a more detailed discussion of the realist tradition’s attitude towards the domestic analogy, see Chapter 2, section 2.1. 13. The differences between the pluralist and the solidarist conception of international society have been the object of a lively debate in the recent attempt to ‘re-launch’ the English School. See, in particular, (Buzan 2004: 45–61). 14. This observation refers to the 1905 and 1906 editions of International Law; indeed, according to Suganami, his position, mainly with regard to the possibility of introducing organised sanctions, was to change profoundly following the devastating events of the First World War (Suganami 1989). 15. For a discussion on Grotius’s position, see Chapter 2, section 2.3. 16. On the concept of analogy in scholasticism, in addition to Abbagnano (1971) and Kluxen (1971), also see the entry ‘analogy in theology’ in Edwards (1967) and Ferré (1967). Scholastics distinguished between the proportional analogy, according to which it was said for example that ‘the divine attributes : divine nature = the attributes of creatures : human nature’, and the analogy of attribution indicating the different meaning that a term can have depending on what reality it is attributed to, as a result of which, for example, the same predicate could be attributed to God and to creatures by specifying that it was an attribution by analogy. 17. On the difference between analogy and identity in the logic of juridical argumentation, see, for example, Becker (1973). 18. On the importance of the concept of isomorphism in determining the validity of reasoning by analogy, see Weitzenfeld (1984). 19. According to Cellucci, for example, in the field of mathematics we can say that at least 50 percent of problems and successful ideas have originated from analogies (Cellucci 1997: 367). 20. The reference is to Weber’s well-known definition of the state. Read, for example, the definition found in Politics as a Vocation: ‘the modern state is an institutional form of rule that has successfully fought to create a monopoly of legitimate physical force as a means of government within a particular territory. For this purpose it has concentrated all the material resources of organization in the hands of its leaders. The modern state has expropriated

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22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

Notes all the autonomous officials of the ‘estates’ who previously controlled such things as of right and has put itself in the shape of its highest representative in their place’ (Weber 2004: 38). According to Norberto Bobbio, a dichotomy is a pair of concepts acting to divide a universe into two jointly exhaustive and reciprocally exclusive spheres, that is, such that all the members of our universe belong to one of them and, at the same time, those who belong to the first cannot contemporarily belong to the second, and vice versa. The dichotomy also has to be principal, in the sense that other conceptual couples can converge in it. The two concepts may then either be defined one independently of the other, or the first may be defined in a positive and the second in a negative way; in this case, the first is held to be the strong term, while the second, the derivate, is called the weak term (Bobbio 1985: 3). Among recent contributions on the concept of sovereignty, see Bartleson (1995), Biersteker (1996), Ferrajoli (1997), Gilson (1984), Hinsley (1966), Krasner (1999) and C. Weber (1995). There is a huge amount of literature on this topic. See, for instance, recent contributions by Matteucci (1993), Pierson (1996), Poggi (1990) and Spruyt (1994). For a more philosophical approach, see Morris (1998). See (Ruggie 1993: 149). I dealt with this topic more widely in Bottici (2001). I will return to this point later on in the epilogue where I will analyse the role that the domestic analogy plays in the global era. The Latin term ‘person’ seems to derive from the Greek prosópon, indicating precisely the theatrical mask (literally, what is placed before the eyes) which then went on to denote wearing the mask (Cotta 1983: 160). On the other hand, according to some, it derives from the Etruscan word
ersu; however, this derivation seems unsure (Albanese 1983: 170). As Campitelli observes, the extent to which the two traditions, the one of Germanic origin and the one of Roman derivation, helped to form the modern concept of legal personality, is still a matter of debate (Campitelli 1983: 188). On the concept of representation, see, for example, the classic Pitkin (1967) and, more recently, Accarino (1999). On this point, see above all the debate between Skinner and Runciman on Hobbes’s conception of the state as a persona ficta (Skinner 1999; Runciman 2000). On Eichmann’s trial and the relationship between individual and collective responsibility, see Arendt (1999). See, for instance, the realist Gilpin, who makes use of this assumption but recognises that strictly speaking only individuals are actors (Gilpin 1981: 18). Gierke is cited explicitly as having inspired this concept, even though it was in a note (Wendt 1999: 218), while, although not openly quoted in his name, in substance Hobbes’s theory of authorisation is taken up under the name of ‘authorising effect’ (Wendt 1999: 220–221). To get an idea of the debate that this aroused, see Jackson (2004), Neumann (2004), Lomas (2005), Wendt (2004) and Wight (2004). I will come back to this point later. As already observed by Hans Morgenthau after the Second World War, applying the domestic juridical and institutional experience to international law is definitely ‘the main stock in trade’ of modern reflection on international relations (Morgenthau 1948: 113).

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2 The Domestic Analogy in Modern Political Thought 1. On this point, see, for example, the volume edited by Airaksinen and Bertmann (1989), a collection of reflections on international relations which make various references to Hobbes, but which develop positions that go way beyond his texts. For an approach more focused on the text, see Bull (1981), from which I have been largely inspired. 2. Skinner also observes that it is remarkable how many surveys of Hobbes’s thought, even the most recent ones such as Tuck (1989), Flathman (1993) and Martinich (1997), glide past these issues in silence. As he further notices, this is particularly true in Anglophone literature. In the latter, exceptions are the above-mentioned Skinner (1999), Runciman (1997, 2000), and for its link with the concept of representation, the classic Pitkin (1967). 3. ‘A CITY therefore (that we may define it) is one Person, whose will, by the compact of many men, is to be received for the will of them all; so as he may use all the power and faculties of each particular person, to the maintenance of peace, and for common defence’ (Hobbes 1983, V: 9). 4. As early as 1967, Pitkin was already underlining how representation was central to Hobbes’s construction (Pitkin 1967). On the concept of representation, also see Accarino (1999). 5. On theatricality in Hobbes’s account of the personality of the state, see (Runciman 1997: 224–9). 6. The whole passage, subject to debate over its interpretation by Skinner and Runciman (Skinner (1999); Runciman (2000)) reads: ‘Of Persons Artificiall, some have their words and actions Owned by those whom they represent. And then the Person is the Actor; and he that owneth his words and actions, is the AUTHOR: In which case the Actor acteth by Authority’ (Hobbes 1968, XVI: 218). 7. Since individuals in the state of nature judge what is needed to preserve them in a wholly subjective manner, there can consequently be no limit to their natural right to self-preservation (Hobbes 1968). 8. In the Hobbesian system, the covenant is at the same time a pactum associationis and pactum subjectionis. 9. It is evident that in Hobbes the state-of-nature concept is meant as a rational device for justifying political obligation. 10. The source of this doctrine is the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, which Hobbes translated as a young man. 11. I will not take into account either the interpretation given by Warrender, according to which there are moral rules in the state of nature, or the one according to which this and other similar passages do not refer to the state of nature in all its phases, but to a supposed first phase. I will make use of the traditional interpretation which is dominant in literature on the domestic analogy (Bull 1966a, 1981). 12. Concerning the use of the term ‘law’, Hobbes observes: ‘These dictates of Reason, men use to call by the name of Lawes; but improperly: for they are but Conclusions, or Theoremes concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of themselves; whereas Law, properly is the word of him, that by right hath command over others’ (Hobbes 1968, XV: 216–7).

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13. The whole passage reads: ‘In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea, no commodius Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Hobbes 1968, XIII: 186). 14. In his Political Treatise, Spinoza writes: ‘For since the right of the supreme authorities is nothing else but simple natural right, it follows that two dominions stand towards each other in the same relation as do two men in the state of nature, with this exception, that a commonwealth can provide against being oppressed by another; which a man in the state of nature cannot do, seeing that he is overcome daily by sleep, often by disease or mental infirmity, and in the end by old age, and is besides liable to other inconveniences, from which a commonwealth can secure itself’ (Spinoza 1951, III: 11). 15. For Hobbes, as we have seen, law is the sovereign’s command. 16. The whole passage reads: ‘[…] the Libertie of the Common-wealth […] is the same with that, which every man then should have, if there were no Civil Laws, nor Common-wealth at all. And the effects of it also be the same. For as amongst masterlesse men, there is perpetuall war, of every man against his neighbour; […] no propriety of Goods, or Lands; no security; but a full and absolute Libertie in every Particular man: So in States, and Commonwealths not dependent on one another, every Common-wealth, (not every man) has an absolute Libertie, to doe what it shall judge (that is to say, what that Man, or Assemblie that representeth it, shall judge) most conducing to their benefit’ (Hobbes 1968, XXI: 266). 17. Among the most recent works in the field of International Relations, see Cavallar (1999) and Franceschet (2002). A much broader contribution is given by philosophical literature, among which Flikschuh (2000), Habermas (1999), Höffe (1995, 2006), Kersting (1993) and Marini (1998). 18. Kant (1991c: 102). I will follow H. B. Nisbet’s translation, Kant: Political Writings, Cambridge University Press, 1991, indicating the points where I am diverging from it. Original passages are quoted from the Akademie Ausgabe, Gesammelte Schriften, hrsg. Königlich Preuβiche Akademie der Wissenschaft, Berlin, 1902. 19. Kant (1991c: 103). See also (Hobbes 1968: 187). 20. Kant (1991d: 133). The translation of Kant’s noun ‘Recht’ has always been a problem for translators, since, in contrast to the English term ‘right’, Kant’s usage points to a total condition of external lawfulness – as counterpoised to inner morality. In order to keep the symmetry with the corresponding adjective recht (right), I will also follow H. B. Nisbet’s translation ‘Right’, sometimes resorting to unusual terminology such as ‘international right’. 21. What Kant meant by Völkerbund is a very controversial point. For instance in Religion in the Limits of Pure Reason we twice found the expression Völkerbund als Weltrepublik (Kant 1998c: B 30–1, B 182–3). In this passage, however, he seems to indicate what we would today call a confederation of sovereign states, that is, a free union of states. 22. Respectively, (Kant 1991c: 102 and 113); (Kant 1991d: 171).

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23. Kant (1991c: 113). 24. See Höffe (2006), Marini (1998). In the Second Definitive Article Kant defines the republican constitution as the constitution which is founded upon three principles: firstly, the principle of freedom for all members of a society (as men); secondly, the principle of the dependence of everyone upon a single common legislation (as subjects), and thirdly, the principle of legal equality for everyone (as citizens) (Kant 1991c: 99). In the following passages, he qualifies this definition by saying that republics differ from democracies because republicanism is that political principle whereby the executive power (the government) is separated from the legislative power, whereas democracy, in the truest sense of the word, is necessarily a despotism, because the laws are made and arbitrarily executed by one and the same power (Kant 1991c: 101). 25. This theory is today discussed under the heading of ‘democratic peace’. Among his supporters, see Doyle (1983; 1997), who explicitly refers to Kant, Russett (1993) and more recently Rawls (1999b). For a critique, see Barakawi and Laffey (1999). 26. Kant (1991c: 98); (1991d: 136). As we have seen above, Kant also uses the separation between Staatsrecht and Völkerrecht as an argument against the hypothesis of a world state (Kant 1991c: 102). 27. There are many passages supporting this view. See, for instance, (Kant 1991d: 137). 28. On this point I am indebted to Katrin Flikschuh; see particularly, Flikschuh (2000: 170). 29. See, for instance, Hurrel (1990) who carefully reassesses the balance between the statist and the cosmopolitan elements of Kant’s thinking but without explaining why those elements can possibly coexist (Hurrel 1990). 30. In Kant’s conception ‘practical’ is what concerns the determination of the will, where the will, according to the Critique of Practical Reason, is the faculty of determining behaviour through the representation of rules (Kant 1998b: 163). 31. According to Kersting the idea of a social contract can be interpreted as a variant of the text of universalisability, that is, as the political counterpart of the categorical imperative: just as the categorical imperative as a moral principle allows for the evaluation of the lawfulness of maxims, so does the original contract as the principle of public justice serve to measure the justice of positive laws (Kersting 1993: 355). 32. The spherical surface of the earth is central to Kant since the earlier writings on the philosophy of history (Kant 1991a). It also continually recurs in his political writings, where it plays the central role in the foundation of the cosmopolitan right. 33. In truth, it is not an oxymoron if we take the etymological meaning of anarchy, by which this term simply indicates the absence of a super partes power and not an ordered social life in general. Those who consider it an oxymoron do so by implicitly taking the state model as the point of reference. 34. See the incipit in Bull’s essay Society and Anarchy in International Relations, which reads: ‘Whereas men within each state are subject to a common government, sovereign states in their mutual relations are not. This anarchy it is possible to regard as the central fact of international life and as a starting point of theorizing about it’ (Bull 1966a: 35). As clearly emerges from this

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35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40. 41.

42.

43.

Notes passage, Bull uses the term ‘anarchy’ in its etymological meaning of a lack of government and not in the broader meaning of disorder; indeed, all of Bull’s reflection on international relations is aimed at showing that the two meanings must be kept totally separate upon pain of implicitly taking up the domestic analogy. As there is not yet any complete, recent and accredited English translation of Grotius’s major work, I have decided to translate quotations myself. In the case of controversial passages, it has been decided to leave the original Latin text in footnote. My thanks go to Alessandro Cecchieri for his consultancy on Latin (note of the translator). See De iure belli ac pacis, Prolegomena §3. The quotation is taken from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. As we will be able to see, Grotius makes ample use of quotations from auctoritates, not just as a formality, but because, in line with his both rationalist and empiricist method, he was profoundly convinced that ‘when in different times and places many men claim the same thing to be certain, this must arise from a universal cause which, in our discipline, can only be a direct deduction from natural principles, or a form of common consent’ (Grotius 1939; Prolegomena, §40). According to the reading by B. Kingsbury, hiding behind the name of Carneades is Montaigne, that is, he who had reproposed the sceptical theory in Grotius’s times (Kingsbury 1996). The appetitus societatis, which Grotius makes the primary source of the law, obviously brings to mind Aristotle’s theory of man as a ‘social animal’ (Politics, I: 1). There is nevertheless a profound difference between Aristotle’s conception which, in conformity with the spirit of classical thought, has an objectivistic meaning, and Grotius’s which is touched by Renaissance and modern subjectivism: for Aristotle man is destined to society from nature in its objective sense; while for Grotius the nature that is the source of society is the nature of man (Fassò 1979). ‘Inter haec autem quae homini sunt propria est appetitus societatis, id est communitas non qualiscunque sed tranquillae, pro sui intellectus modo ordinatae, cum his qui sui sunt generis: quam οικειωσιν stoici appellant. Quod ergo dicitur natura quodque animal ad suas tantum utilitates ferri, ita universe suntum concedi non debet’ (Grotius 1939; Prolegomena, §6). On the extent to which the category of state of nature can work as a myth, see Bottici (2007), Chapter 7. The whole passage, one of the most commented on of all the Prolegomena, reads: ‘And all that we have said so far would hold true in some way even if we were to admit – something that cannot be done without committing the gravest of impious acts – that God does not exist or that He does not attend to humanity in any way’ (Grotius 1939; Prolegomena, §11). The passage began by saying: ‘But without wanting to insist on what I have already said, that is that utility is not the only end of law […]’ (Grotius 1939; Prolegomena, §21). ‘Summa autem illa dicitur, cuius alterius iuri non subsunt, ita ut alterius voluntatis humanae arbitrio irriti possint reddi. Alterius cum dico, ipsum excludo qui summa potestate utitur; cui voluntatem mutare licet, ut & successorem, qui eodem iure utitur; ac proinde eandem habet potestatem non aliam. Haec ergo summa potestas quod subjectum habet videamus’ (Grotius 1939, 1, III: 7).

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44. The text reads: ‘On the other hand, the reason for which the peoples resorted to declaring that war, which I have defined as just on the basis of the right of peoples, was not that which some claim, and they would not have done so covertly or by deceit, indeed that is more a question of force than of right, and the same goes for the claim that the peoples also set the day and site of the battle. It was certainly a matter of making war not due to a particular act of daring, but due to the will of each of the two peoples or he who held sovereign authority over said peoples: indeed, it gave rise to particular merits that do not come into being either in the case of war against marauders nor in the war of a king against his subjects. A propos, Seneca quite clearly said: wars have been declared on neighbours or fought against fellow citizens.’ (Causa autem cur gentes ad bellum illud, quod iure gentium iustum diximus, denuntiationem requirerent, non ea fuit quam adferunt nonnulli, ne quid clam aut dolo agerent, id enim ad fortitudinis praestantiam magis quam ad ius pertinet, sicut nationes quaedam etiam proelii diem et locum condixisse leguntur. sed ut certo constaret non privato ausu sed voluntate utriusque populi, aut populi capitum geri bellum: nam inde nati sunt effectus peculiares, qui neque in bello adversus praedones, neque in eo quod rex gerit in subditos locum habent. Ideo Seneca distincte dixit: Indicta bella finitmis aut gesta cum civibus) (Grotius 1939, 3, III: 11). 45. In book 1, ch. XX, par. 15 there is a direct reference to the scholarly tradition. It reads: ‘And thus far we follow the view of Innocent and the others who say that war can be brought against those who sin against nature: expressing their opinion against this are Victoria, Vasquius, Azorius and Molina, others who seem to necessitate that in order to justify war he who undertakes it should either be affected by it in his person or his country, or should have jurisdiction over whom he is attacking. Indeed, they consider that it is civil jurisdiction that gives the power to punish, while I feel that this is also given by natural law, about which I said something at the start of the first book’ (Et eatenus sententiam sequimur Innocentii et aliorum qui bello aiunt peti posse eos qui in naturam delinquunt: contra quam sentiunt Victoria, Vasquius, Azorius, Molina, alii, qui ad iustam belli requirere videntur, ut qui suscipit aut laesus sit in se aut republica sua, aut ut in eum, qui bello impetitur, iurisdictionem habeat. Ponunt enim illi puniendi potestatem esse effectum proprium iurisdictionis civilis, cum nos eam sentiamus venire etiam ex iure naturali, qua de re aliquid diximus libri primi initio) (Grotius 1939, 1, XXI: 15). 46. As we saw in the first chapter, it is from a German jurist, Georg Jellinek, and in particular his Allgemeine Staatslehre (1922), that Bull takes the expression ‘anarchical society’. 47. Suganami points out that in the editions of International Law that followed the devastating events of the First World War, Oppenheim’s position as to the possibility and expediency of introducing sanctions in international law, earlier denied on the basis of his refusal of the domestic analogy, would undergo a great change. 48. ‘Causa iusta belli suscipiendi nulla esse alia potest, nisi iniuria’ (Grotius 1939, 2, I: 14). 49. ‘Supra cum de his qui bellum gerunt egimus, dictum ostensumque a nobis est, naturaliter non tantum unumquemque sui iuris esse executorem, sed et alieni. Quare quae causae iustae sunt ipsi cuius res agitur, eadem iustae sunt iis qui aliis opem ferunt’ (Grotius 1939, Prolegomena, 2, XXV: 1).

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3 The Domestic Analogy in Contemporary Theories 1. For a critical discussion of the traditional image of the ‘three founding debates’, see Neufeld (1995), Schmidt (2002), Thies (2002) and Wilson (1998). 2. Beitz himself, whose thought I am about to analyse, starts off from such an observation, as clearly emerges from this passage: ‘For many years, it has been impossible to make moral arguments about IR to its American students without encountering the claim that moral judgements have no place in discussions of international affairs or foreign policy […]. All the more remarkable is the fact that the realists’ skepticism about the possibility of international moral norms has attained the status of a professional orthodoxy in both academic and policy circles, accepted by people with strong moral commitments about other matters of public policy’ (Beitz 1979: 15). 3. For now, I will only refer to the general conception of justice, according to which all main social goods – freedom and opportunity, earnings and wealth, and the bases of self-respect – must be distributed equally, unless the unequal distribution of one or more of these goods is to the benefit of the less advantaged (Rawls 1971: 60–1). 4. An example is this programmatic declaration: ‘Finally, I return to the analogy of international society and domestic society to discuss whether the two realms are sufficiently similar that arguments for distributive justice within the state carry over into IR. Current debate about a new international economic order clearly presupposes some principle of international distributive justice; I argue that a suitable principle can be justified by analogy with the justification given by John Rawls in a Theory of Justice for an intrastate distributive principle’ (Beitz 1979: 8). Beitz also uses formulations that seem to suggest a form of analogical reasoning in the Afterword to the 1999 edition (Beitz 1999, 2000). 5. This position is clearly expressed in this passage by George Kennan taken from Realities of American Foreign Policy (1954), cited at the beginning of the first part of Beitz’s essay: ‘Morality as a channel to individual self-fulfillment − yes. Morality as the foundation of civic virtue, and accordingly as a condition precedent to successful democracy − yes. Morality in governmental method, as a matter of conscience and preference on the part of our people − yes. But morality as a general criterion for the determination of the behavior of states and above all as a criterion for measuring and comparing the behavior of states − no. Here other criteria, sadder, more limited, more practical, must be allowed to prevail’ (Beitz 1979: 12). 6. These authors are also known as ‘post-Grotian’. As we saw in the last chapter, Grotius considers states elements in a magna societas generis humani. Hence, their confines are not considered barriers to moral assessment or political inference (Beitz 1979: 71). 7. For Beitz, in order for intervention in the domestic affairs of another state to be legitimate, it depends on whether the principles of justice are applied there. Analogous to individual autonomy in the international realm is not domestic autonomy but the conformity of the basic institutions in that society to the principles of social justice: only if that state applies the principles of justice is an intervention from the outside illegitimate (Beitz 1979: 90). 8. The idea is to trace the problem of justification to that of rational choice, of which the contract, as conceived of by Rawls, is considered the paradigm.

Notes

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

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The social contract concept is therefore used as a logical device for justifying certain principles of justice (Rawls 1971: 16). Rawls thus distinguishes between ‘well ordered peoples’, comprising ‘reasonable liberal peoples’ and ‘decent peoples’, on one side, and ‘outlaw states’, ‘societies burdened by unfavourable conditions’ and societies governed by a ‘benevolent absolutism’ on the other (Rawls 1999b, Introduction). Only the first two are part of the ‘society of peoples’. For a critical reconstruction of the notion of national character, see Terrier (2004). For a critical reconstruction of the similarities and differences between the original condition of individuals and that between peoples, see, for example, Beitz (2000) and Pogge (2001). After discussing the apparent causes of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides observes that ‘The real cause I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable’ (I, 24). The desire to grasp the constant and cyclical elements of international life is already evident in the head of the realist tradition. Indeed Carr writes, ‘The impact of thinking upon wishing which, in the development of a science, follow the breakdown of its first visionary projects, and marks the end of its specifically utopian period, is commonly called realism. Representing a reaction against the wish-dreams of the initial (utopian) stage, realism is liable to assume a critical and somewhat cynical aspect. In the field of thought, it places its emphasis on the acceptance of facts and on the analysis of their causes and consequences. It tends to depreciate the role of purpose and to maintain, explicitly or implicitly, that the function of thinking is to study a sequence of events which it is powerless to influence or to alter’ (Carr 1995: 14). Waltz dedicates a whole chapter to showing how Rosencrance, Kaplan and Hoffmann’s international politics theories, often labelled as systemic, are as a matter of fact substantially reductionalist approaches (Waltz 1979). Note that for anarchical systems there is no criterion for systemic change derived from the second part of the definition, since the system is composed of units with the same functions; on the contrary, hierarchical systems change if the functions are defined or distributed in a different manner (Waltz 1979). Waltz admits that states can pursue an infinite number of objectives in addition to security; but survival is a prerequisite to achieving any goal other than not disappearing as a political entity. For a definition of institutionalism in this sense, see Keohane (2002). As we will see, Keohane is perhaps the main exponent of this approach, and he also classifies the theories of Marc and Olsen and Ruggie as institutional. For a discussion of the relationship between institutionalism and realism, see above all Keohane (1986), while on the relationship between institutionalism and liberalism, see Keohane (2002b). As we saw above, Keohane recently dissociated himself from this label, preferring that of institutionalism (Keohane 2002: 3). The term ‘liberal’ is often meant as the opposite of realist. In this chapter I will use the term ‘neoliberal istitutionalism’ to indicate the position devised by Keohane himself in the 1980s and 1990s.

152

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20. In the introduction to his most recent great collection of essays, Keohane writes that what unites his institutionalist theory to neorealism is ontological individualism, centred around the role of rational actors in the international sphere, and methodological positivism, that is, the conviction of being able to analyse international phenomena by referring to some neopositivist standards of evidence (Keohane 2002: 6). 21. According to Evans and Wilson, what unites the English School and neoliberal institutionalism is not only their acceptance of the Grotian tradition in its broadest sense, that is, the idea that international life is regulated by norms, but also their refusal of this tradition in the strict sense, that is, aimed at underlining the international community’s solidarity in applying these norms (Evans and Wilson 1992). 22. As Keohane recently repeated, his attention to the fundamental role of ideas is what distances his institutionalist theory most from neorealism (Keohane 2002). This is also the advantage of institutionalism over neorealism as regards the possibility of understanding phenomena like the 11 September attacks (Keohane 2002c). 23. Something different still, Keohane observed as early as 1991, happened in the case of the European Union: following the integration process, which had sped up over the previous few years, community law achieved supremacy over national law on a certain number of issues, hence we can speak of a ‘pooling and sharing of sovereignty’ (Keohane and Hoffmann 1991). 24. This is in part due to the fact that Suganami’s book was more on the history of the concept than on theory. As a consequence, it did not succeed in triggering an epistemological debate on the nature of the domestic analogy. 25. Paradigmatic is the explicit statement by Gilpin, a major representative of International Relations realism, which treats states as if they were individuals, who says that properly speaking ‘the state does not exist’ without problematising it (Gilpin 1986: 318). 26. See also Wendt’s reply to Lomas (Wendt 2005: 357–60). 27. See, for instance, the definitions of person and individual in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Blackburn 2005: 273, 183). 28. On the concept of person, see (Blackburn 2005: 273), Fuhrmann (1990), Scherer (1990), Schild (1990), Schütt (1990) and Taylor (1985). 29. Among the more philosophical literature on this, see, for instance, Runciman (1997), Carrithers, Collins, Lukes (1985) and Taylor (1985). 30. Note here that ‘idea’ is capitalised, and the reference in the footnote to Gierke’s theory of the reality of the state, which, as we saw in section 1.3, is at the basis of the political theology of the modern state. 31. When there is an interruption in the story in the presence of a narrating body, we talk of a problem of personal identity. This may be caused by physical or psychological problems. 32. On this point, see in particular (Blackburn 2005: 273) and Taylor, who explicitly says that ‘a person is a being with a certain moral status, or a bearer of rights’ (Taylor 1985: 97). 33. The concept of reality itself is problematic as it changes considerably from one context to another. For instance, I analysed how the term changed from antiquity to modernity in Europe in Chapter 3 of Bottici (2007).

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34. In contrast to political philosophy and political theory, postmodernism seems to play a minor role within international relations theories. For instance, three of the most authoritative and widely used introductions to the topic accord to it very little attention: either none (Carlsnaes, Risse and Simmons 2002) or a couple of pages (Jackson and Sørensen 2003: 250–3). This is remarkable in the face of the doubts it contributed to casting on some of the discipline’s central assumptions. 35. Both Steans and Weber seem to agree that feminism remains a marginalised approach (Steans 2003; Weber 2005: 81–201). 36. For a reconstruction of the debate ‘is gender a variable or a lens through which we look at the world?’, see, for instance, Steans (2003) and (Weber 2005: 81–105). 37. For a presentation of Marxist approaches to international politics, see Smith (1994) and more recently (Jackson and Sørensen 2003: 184–191). 38. For this presentation of Cox’s view, I have followed (Jackson and Sørensen 2003: 188). 39. To have an idea of the impact of this book both among political theorists and international relations theorists, see Balakrishnan (2003), Barakawi and Laffey (2002), Callinicos (2002), Cox (2003), Shaw (2002), Walker (2002) and (Weber 2005: 123–49). 40. On the contrary, according to other authors the concept of empire should rather be used to denote the ‘neo-imperial hegemony’ exercised by the US and whose origins go as far back as to the Second World War when the strategy of uniting the world in its ‘hegemonic peace’ was first elaborated (see, for instance, Parsi 2002: 89).

Epilogue 1. It is no coincidence that Cerutti (2007) takes an explicitly distant stance towards the domestic analogy (see in particular Cerutti 2007: 197–9). In his view, the domestic analogy is the ‘guillotine under which all talk of a world state in contractarian terms ends up’ (Cerutti 2007: 197). 2. For this definition of globalisation, see Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton (1999). 3. Suffice it to think, for instance, of the role played by states in the financial market globalisation process. It is the sovereign states themselves that support interdependence and international institutionalisation: without the institutional set-up created and maintained by states, they would not have been able to emerge and they might not be able to carry on reproducing themselves. 4. Among the most influential proposals to reform the international system let us remember the World Order Model Projects (WOMP) formulated by jurists grouped around the figure of Richard Falk: these projects, formed around the idea that world order can only be guaranteed by international law evolving along the lines of state law, both in terms of its production, and its interpretation and application, are based on analogical reference to the historic experience of the modern state (Zolo 1997). 5. The first person to use this term was Robertson (1992).

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Index A Abbagnano, N. 19–21, 143 Accarino, B. 144–5 Adler, E. 118–9 Airaksinen, T. 145 Albanese, B. 34, 144 Albrow, M. 136 American Constitution 56 analogical inference 20–1 analogy 5–9, 103 anarchy 2, 5, 16, 27–31, 39, 44, 46, 50, 55, 68, 99, 101–3, 108, 112–3, 133 anarchy problématique 101 animals 122 anthropomorphism 121 Arendt, H. 144 Aristotle 72, 154 Ashley, R. 27, 31, 36, 38, 101–3, 112, 119, 123–4 atomistic individualism 86 authorisation concept 35, 120 B Badie, B. 32 Bain, W. 142 Balakrishnan, G. 153 Barakawi, T. 147, 153 barbarism/civilisation 64 Bartleson, J. 144 Beck, U. 136 Becker, L. 143 Beitz, C. 8, 36, 82, 84–8, 90–4, 134, 137, 150–51 Bertmann, M.A. 145 Bierstecker, T. 144 biopower 130 bipolar system 82, 104 Blackburn, S. 152 Bobbio, N. 5, 44, 54, 133–5, 144 Bonanate, L. 36, 51, 106 Booth, K. 52 Bottici, C. 32, 120, 137, 144, 148, 152

boundaries 131, 132 British Committee for the Theory of International Politics 12 Brown, C. 142 Bull, H. 4–7, 12, 15–9, 23–4, 26–7, 37–8, 52, 67–9, 74–9, 107, 115, 139, 142–3, 145, 147–9 Buzan, B. 142–3 C Callinicos, A. 153 Calvinism 38 Camilleri, J. 32, 140 Campitelli, A. 34, 144 canon law 34 Carlsnaes, W. 153 Carr, E.H. 8, 38, 83, 95, 107, 108, 151 Carrithers, S. 152 Cassesse, A. 142 Cavallar, G. 146 Cecchieri, A. 148 Cellucci, C. 20, 143 Cerutti, F. 16, 47, 134, 136, 153 civil responsibility 3 civil rights 58 coercion 14–5, 24, 27, 59, 68, 74, 76, 102, 134 collective identity 119–20 collective responsibility 35 Collins, S. 152 communication technology 135–6 compensation 76 constitutions 56, 58, 66 constitutive role 30 constructivism 8, 9, 14, 27, 81, 83, 117–23, 132 corporate responsibility 121 corporate theory 96 cosmopolitan democracy 4, 137–8 cosmopolitan justice 8, 93 cosmopolitan normative theories 94

166

Index cosmopolitan perspective 91 cosmopolitan right 57–9 cosmopolitanism institutional 8, 93 Kant’s 67 philosophical 8, 137 Cotta, S. 34, 144 Cox, R. 104–5, 129, 153 criminal responsibility 3 critical theory 81, 104 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant ) 62 D De Cive (Hobbes) 41, 43 De iure belli ac pacis (Grotius) 69, 73, 75–7 De iure praedae (Grotius) 69 democracy cosmopolitan 4, 138 and globalisation 9 and institutions 9 and peace 147 despotism 18, 55–6 A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of Common Law of England (Hobbes) 50 distributive justice 84 domestic analogy 5–9, 103 analogical inference 20–1 analogical reasoning 19–26 and anarchy see anarchy cognitive value 21–2, 25 conditions presupposed 26–7 and constructivism 118, 123 cosmopolitan 19 criticism of 11 definitions 6, 11, 19–20, 23–7, 58, 82 and English School 12, 15, 52, 107, 111, 142, 152 and Grotius 74, 79 and individuals 11 inductive inference 20 instability of 22 and international relations 37, 80 internationalist 19, 24 and logical deduction 25–6 and Manning 12–5

167

Marxist views 38, 81, 83, 127–30, 132 mathematical analogy 19 origin of debate on 12–9 peace and centralised power 27 problematic aspects 139–40 reasoning by analogy 11, 22 reliability 11 scepticism over 115–6 and scientific hypotheses 21–2 and sovereignty see sovereignty states uniting 52 states/individual analogy 84 see also international relations The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposal (Suganami) 116 domestic law 14–5 domestic order 3, 6, 26 domestic society 13 domestic society model 84 Doyle, M. 147 Dupuy, P.M. 142 Durkheimian organicism 119 E economic globalisation 129 economic theory 96, 98 Edwards, P. 143 Elements of Law (Hobbes) 41, 43 empire concept 129–31 Enlightenment 2, 3, 51 Erasmus 69 Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe (Penn) 80 Europe 2, 3, 24, 111, 138 Evans, T. 107, 111, 152 F Falk, J. 32, 140 Falk, R. 153 Fassò, G. 148 feminism 9, 81, 83, 118, 124–9, 132 Ferrajoli, L. 144 Ferré, F. 143 Finnemore, M. 142 Flathman, R.E. 145 Flikschuh, K. 67, 146, 147 foetus status 122

168

Index

Franceschet, A. 146 Fuhrmann, M. 152 functionalism 24 G Galtung, J. 128 Gauthier, D. 86 gender 9, 81, 83, 118, 124–9, 132 Gierke, O. 34–5, 144, 152 Gilpin, R. 144, 152 Gilson, B. 144 global challenges 134, 136–7 global cosmopolis 138 global covenant 137 global disasters 134 global finance 92, 135–6 global governance, multi-layered 139 global justice 91 global normative positions 94 global politics 10, 138–41 globalisation aspects of 33, 119–20 of capital 136 consequences of 33, 135 and democracy 9 and domestic analogy 9 economic 129 emergence of 5, 32, 115 factors in 138 government of 139 and image of world 91 institutions of 139 and international society 84 and market forces 129 and political structures 104 post-Cold War 82 and social order 138 social structure 92 and sovereignty 32, 135 transformations 7 see also international relations glocalisation 138, 142 Goldblat, D. 33, 135, 139, 153 governance 115 Grotius, H. 7, 18, 38, 68–80, 107, 115, 143, 148–9 Guzzini, S. 142

H Haas, E. 24, 140 Habermas, J. 104, 135, 146 Hamilton, J. 38 Hardt, M. 129–32 Held, D. 135, 137–9, 142, 153 Herz, J. 44 Hesse, M. 22 Hinsley, F.H. 144 Hitler, A. 51 Hobbes, T. 1–2, 7, 17–8, 24, 29–30, 34–5, 38–51, 53, 79–80, 95, 109–10, 113, 115, 120, 122, 133, 137, 144–6 Höffe, O. 52, 60, 146–7 Hoffmann, S. 152 Horkheimer, M. 81, 104 human nature 38, 44 Hume, D. 20 Hurrel, A. 142, 147 I Idea for a Universal History (Kant) 66 idealism 18, 81, see also international relations idealist theory (Kantian) 6–8, 18, 37–8, 51–68, 81, 84, 115 immaterial labour 130, 131 imperialism 97, 128 individualism, atomistic 86 individuals and equality 49 fears of 48–9 and international relations 35 need to unite in states 80 and the political body 1–2 responsibility of 120–1 rights and duties of 75–6 and states 2, 116 induction 20 institutions definition 109 international 10, 86 and regulatory role 111 role of 8 interdependence of states 86, 113–4, 138–9 international analogy 103 international community 110

Index international institutions 86, 108–10, 112 International Institutions and State Power (Keohane) 108 international justice 90, 92, 93 international law and coercion element 14–5 and Grotius 69 incompleteness 4 nature of 14–5 need for 3 pacta sunt servanda principle 26 positive 78 and UN 142 international legislative bodies 3 international normative theory 94 international order 3, 15–6, 24, 26, 57 international politics science of 95 systemic theory of 97 international relations adherence to rules 86–7 as autonomous academic discipline 80–2, 95, 106 balance of power 100 Beitz’s four conditions 85–7 birth of 80 and boundaries 131 categories 2, 37–8 conditions to 101–2 conflict 2 constructivism see constructivism and continuity 104 disorderly features of 100 distribution of power 86 and distributive justice 84 and domestic analogy 37, 80 elements in realist tradition 94–5 English School of 12, 15, 52, 107, 111, 142, 152 great founding debates 81 idealist/revolutionary (Kantian) theory 6–8, 18, 37–8, 51–68, 81, 84, 115 and individuals 35 inequalities between states 86, 93 and institutionalism 107 interdependence of states 86, 138

169

international institutions 86 and Leviathan 29 Marxist theory 38, 81, 83, 127–30, 132, 153 and nature 2 and political theory 10, 94 and power struggle 81, 94–5, 100 rationalist (Grotian) theory 7–8, 37–8, 68–80, 107, 115 rationalists 38 Rawls’s principles of international justice 90 and realism 17 realist (Machiavellian) theory 7–8, 18, 37–51, 81, 83, 87, 94–106 and recurrence 104 right and wrong 45 and state security 95 transgovernmental 114 transnational 107, 114 trends 117 and war 17, 87 see also domestic analogy international right 53 international society 13–4 international structures 98–9, 102 J Jackson, P.T. 116, 144 Jackson, R. 12, 127, 153 Jahn, B. 36 James, A. 12 Jefferson, T. 38 Jellinek, G. 143, 149 Jones, R.E. 142 juridical condition 53, 93 juridical freedom 115 juridical institutions 75, 144 juridical mind 106 juridical pacifism 54 juridical personality 33–4 juridical system 4, 7, 14, 23 just war 7, 76–9 justice between individuals 91 as equity 90 global 91 and injustice 45

170

Index

justice (Continued ) international 90–3 principles of 91, 93 principles (Rawls) 90, 150 theories 67 K Kant, I. 6–8, 18, 20–1, 37–8, 51–68, 79, 82, 85, 91, 93, 98, 115, 134, 146–7 Kantian paradox 18 Keohane, R. 8, 82, 99, 108, 109–15, 127, 151–2 Kersting, W. 146–7 Khrushchev, N. 51 Kingsbury, B. 148 Kluxen, W. 19–20, 143 Krasner, S. 144 L labour power 130 Laffey, M. 147, 153 Lauterpacht, H. 75 law civil 73 and community 72 domestic 14–5 international see international law of nations 45, 89 natural 46, 49, 54, 75 of peoples 72, 75, 91 positive 70 Roman 3–34 sources of 75 and theology 70 The Law of Peoples (Rawls) 67, 90–1 League of Nations 3–4, 15, 18, 83 legislative bodies, international 3 Leviathan (Hobbes) 1–2, 9, 29, 34, 40–1, 47–9, 53 Leviathan State 1, 2, 47, 137, 139 liberal feminism 127–8 life and brutality 47–8 Linklater, A. 32, 84, 105 Locke, J. 17, 30 Lomas, P. 117, 144, 152 Lott, T. 46 Lukes, S. 152

M McGrew, A. 33, 135, 139, 153 Mach, E. 21 Machiavelli, N. 95, 130, see also realist theory Macmillan, J. 32 Madison, A. 38 Maffettone, S. 90–1 magnum corpus 1 Man, the State and War (Waltz) 96–7, 100 Manning, C.A.W. 12–5, 48, 116, 142–3 Marc, J. 151 Mare liberum (Grotius) 69 Marini, G. 146–7 market structures 103 Martinich, A.P. 145 Marxist feminism 127–9 Marxist theory 38, 81, 83, 127–30, 132, 153 mathematical analogy 19 Matteucci, N. 144 medieval law 34 Metaphysics of Morals (Kant) 4, 53–4, 56, 58, 65–6 Mill, J.S. 21 Mitrany, D. 24, 140 modern contractarianism 30 modern power 28–9 modern sovereign man 31 modern state 8–9, 39–40, 143 modernity 123 moral of egoism 87 moral politicians 62 morality of states 85, 88, 98 Morgenthau, H. 38, 83, 95, 108, 144 Morris, C. 144 multi-layered global governance 139 multitude/mob 131 N nature human 38, 44 and international relations 2 state of see state of nature The Nature of International Society (Manning) 13 Navari, C. 142

Index Nazi war crimes 35 Negri, A. 129–32 neoidealism 82–94 neoinstitutionalism 8, 82, 106–15 neoliberal institutionalism 106, 108, 111, 152 neoliberal republicanism 127 neorealism 82, 94–106, 108, 113, 152 Neufeld, M. 150 Neumann, I.B. 119, 134, 142, 144 neutrality concept 78–9, 85–6 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 19 Niebuhr, K.P.R. 38 Nisbet, H.B. 146 notional entities 13 nuclear threat 5, 134, 136–7 Nye, J. 108, 113–5 O Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. 22–3 Olsen, J. 151 On the Reorganisation of European Society (Saint-Simon) 80 Oppenheim, Lassa 18, 75–9, 149 order domestic 3, 6, 26 international 3, 15–6, 24, 26, 57 in modern states 27 political 6 social 5, 16, 27 P Pagden, A. 36 Parsi, V.E. 153 Pateman, C. 9, 126 peace and centralised power 27 democratic 147 and empire 130 perpetual 6–7, 26, 52–4, 62–3, 79, 130 Peloponnesian War ( Thucydides) 69–70, 94, 102, 145, 151 Penn, W. 80 people concept 131 Perelman, C. 23

171

Perpetual Peace (Kant) 52, 55, 57–62, 64 Perraton, J. 33, 135, 139, 153 Pierson, C. 144 Pitkin, H.F. 23, 144–5 Pogge, T. 92, 151 Poggi, G. 144 police analogy 4, 7, 77 polis 1, 33, 40 Political Liberalism (Rawls) 90 political moralists 62 political philosophy 1, 9 political structure 103–4 political theory global 10 and international relations 10, 94 theological 35–6 Political Theory and International Relations (Beitz) 84, 91–2, 94 political thought contemporary 6 modern 6, 36 Political Treatise (Spinoza) 146 Politics Among Nations (Morgenthau) 83 popular sovereignty 30 post-structuralism 103 postitive international law 78 postmodernist theory 9, 81, 123–4, 132, 153 power balance of 100 distribution of 86 modern 28–9 prisoners’ dilemma 45, 110 problem solving theory 104 Project for Perpetual Peace (Saint-Pierre) 80 Prolegomena (Grotius) 69, 70, 75 Pufendorf, S. 80, 85 Putnam, H. 10 R radical feminism 127–8 rationalism 38, 68–80, 95 rationalist theory (Grotian) 7, 8, 37–8, 68–80, 107, 115 Rawls, J. 67, 84, 88–90, 92, 147, 150–1

172

Index

realist theory (Machiavellian) 7, 8, 18, 37–51, 81, 83, 87, 94–106 realist tradition, elements in 94–5 reciprocity 109, 111 reductionist theory 97–8 regulative role 30 Religion in the Limits of Pure Reason (Kant) 55 representation theory 120 responsibility 3, 121 revolutionary theory (Kantian) 6–8, 18, 37–8, 51–68, 81, 84, 115 Risse, T. 153 Robertson, R. 153 Roman law 33–4 Rothstein, R. 104 Rousseau, J.J. 30, 38, 95 Ruggie, J.G. 105, 108–9, 112, 119, 144, 151 Runciman, D. 41, 48, 144–5, 152 Russett, B. 147 S Sadurski, W. 90 Saint-Pierre, Abbé de 2, 35–6, 80 Saint-Simon, C.H. de 2, 3, 80 Sassen, S. 135 Scherer, G. 152 Schild, W. 33, 152 Schmidt, B.C. 150 Schmitt, C. 34, 40, 74 Schütt, H.P. 152 science of international politics 95 security dilemma of men 44 sexual contract 9, 126 Shaw, M. 153 Simmons, B.T. 153 Sinclair, T.J. 129 Skinner, Q. 40–1, 48, 144–5 Smith, A. 103 Smith, H. 153 social contract 2, 9, 17–8, 30, 61–2, 71 social cooperation 89, 91–2 social order 5, 16, 27 society anarchical 68 civil 30 domestic 13–4

international 13–4 man’s need for 71 peaceful 70 Society and Anarchy in International Relations (Bull) 147 solidarity 18–19, 78–9 Sorensen, G. 127, 153 soulless despotism 55 sovereign states 19, 73, 131, 135, 137–8 sovereignty 14, 27–8, 30–2, 39–41, 50, 79, 103, 105, 114, 133, 135, 140 Spanish conquest 36 spatialisation 103 specific reciprocity 111 Spinoza, Benedict de 38, 48, 95, 146 spontaneous harmony 81 Spruyt, H. 144 Stalin, J. 51 state authority over individuals 120–1 defined by Hobbes 42–3, 47, 144 gender bias in theory 9, 81 and individuals 2, 35, 120–2 of nature 1, 2, 5, 16–7, 30, 35–6, 43, 45, 47, 53–4, 57–9, 63, 71, 85, 133–4, 145 and person 1–2 as rational unitary actor 81 rightful 65 as socially prevalent idea 14 system 12 world 16, 18, 24, 55–6 see also sovereignty; states state security 95 states cooperation between 17–8, 25, 61, 113 as corporate actors 122 as corporate agents 119 fears of 48 federation of 7, 55 financial control by 135 image of 94 as individual 117, 122–3 and individuals 2, 35, 116, 122 individuals need to unite in 80

Index inequalities between 86, 93 interdependence of 86, 113–4, 138–9 internal decision structures 120 and international institutions 112 lawless 59 modern 8–9, 39–40, 143 morality of 85, 88, 98 and order 27 relations between 43 republican world 7 and security 95 as seen by Waltz 104 social contracts between 2, 9, 17–8, 30, 61–2, 71 and solidarity 18–9, 78–9 sovereign 19, 73, 131, 135, 137–8 spontaneous harmony 81 as unitary actors 88 uniting of 53 vulnerability of 17 see also sovereignty; state Steans, J. 127, 153 structural imperialism 128 structural neorealism 108 Stubbs, R. 139 Suarez, B. 38 substantive conception of reality 108 Suganami, H. 4, 7, 18–9, 24, 36, 52, 77, 80, 83, 100, 116, 142, 149, 152 sword and shield paradox 44 systemic theory 97 T Taylor, C. 152 Terrier, J. 151 theory according to Waltz 96 corporate 96 critical 104 economic 96, 98 imperialist 97, 128 problem solving 104 reductionist 97–8 of representation 120 of rights 66 systemic 97

173

Theory of International Politics (Waltz) 94–5, 97, 106, 108 Theory of Justice (Rawls) 84, 88–90 Thies, C. 150 Thucydides 69–70, 94, 102, 130, 151 Tickner, A. 124, 127 transgovernmental relations 114 transnational relations 107, 114 tripartition 8, 39, 82–3 Tuck, R. 145 The Twenty Years’ Crisis (Carr) 83 U Underhill, R.D. 139 United Nations Charter of 4, 18 founding 3–4 Security Council 4 specialised agencies of 24 veto powers 4 universal monarchy 56 V Vattel, E. de 80 Vincent, R.J. 12 Vitoria, F. de 38 W Wagner, P. 31 Walker, R.B.J. 38–9, 124, 134, 140, 153 Wallerstein, I.M. 128 Waltz, K. 8, 82, 94–106, 108–9, 113, 151 war according to Clauswitz 48 of all against all 113, 137 causes of 7–8, 45, 76–7, 100 condemned by pure reason 63 condition of 43 continual 42 and international relations 17, 87 just cause for 7–8, 76–9 legitimate 74 and neutrality 78 and nuclear arms 50–1 permissive cause of 100

174

Index

war (Continued ) potential 17 religious 69 and republics 57 results from 48 and state of nature 43 Watson, A. 142 Weber, C. 144, 153 Weber, M. 27–8, 143–4 Weitzenfeld, J.S. 143 welfare internationalism 24 Wendt, A. 8, 35, 102, 117–22, 144, 152 Westphalia Treaties 69, 75, 90, 122, 125, 141 Why Is There no International Theory (Wight) 133

Wight, M. 5, 7–8, 10, 12, 18, 37–9, 51–2, 67–8, 79, 82–4, 94, 107, 115, 133, 141–2, 144 Williams, H. 52 Willms, B. 47 Wilson, P. 107, 111, 142–3, 150, 152 Wilson, W. 51 Wolff, C. 85 world economy 92 government 46–7 politics, Hobbes’s theory of 40 state 16, 18, 24, 55–6 Z Zolo, D. 153