Chapter 8. Hedley in his Own Words: three essays

To say of a number of things that together they display order is (in the simplest and most general sense of the term) to say that they are related to one another according to some pattern, that their relationship is not purely haphazard but contains some discernible principle. Thus a row of books on a shelf displays order whereas a heap of books on the floor does not. But when we speak of order in social life what we have in mind is not any pattern or principle in the relations among individuals or groups, but a pattern that produces a particular result or facilitates the achievement of a particular purpose. Order in this purposive sense is displayed by a row of books that are not merely placed together on a shelf but arranged in alphabetical order so as to facilitate the object of finding a book by a particular author. Augustine defined the term in this relational or purposive way: he spoke of order as ‘a good disposition of discrepant parts, each in its fittest place’ (my italics).^[2]

‘Good’ or ‘fittest’ for what? A disposition or pattern of social relations that is good for one purpose will not be good for another. What was ‘order’ in France in this sense for the court of’ Louis XVI was not for the Jacobins, what is ‘order’ in the world today in this sense for the United States is not for China or Cuba or North Vietnam. The term ‘order’ like the term ‘stability’ is in fact often used in this way in the West today to refer to patterns or dispositions of international or domestic political relations that embody the preferred values of the West.

Our present concern, however, is not to state what is the preferred order of the West or of some other group of powers but to define social order as such, order as opposed to disorder, order that will be found to exist both in the France of the ancien régime and in post-revolutionary France, both in an American-preferred world order and in a Soviet-preferred or Chinese-preferred one. By order in social life I mean a pattern or structure of human relationships that sustains not the special purposes of this or that sort of society but the primary or elementary goals of social coexistence; goals that are common to social life at all times and in all places. Social life in any form requires, for example, some restriction on the liberty of members of the society to resort to violence, a presumption that promises will be kept; and a means of securing stability of possession.

International order is a pattern or structure of human relations such as to sustain the elementary or primary goals of social coexistence among states. A number of independent political communities might in principle exist without forming together an international system in the sense that they are related to one another as a set of interacting parts, as indeed the independent political communities of pre-Columbian America did not form an international system together with those that existed in Europe. When a number of independent political communities do together comprise an international system they do not necessarily constitute an international society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with each other and to share in the working of a common set of institutions. Turkey, Japan and China, for example, were part of the European-dominated international system before they were in the full sense part of the European-dominated international society. That is to say, they interacted significantly with European powers in war and commerce before they and the European powers came to regard each other as subject to the same set of rules and as cooperating in the operation of common institutions.

The element of international order that exists in the world reflects the fact that sovereign states today constitute, however precariously, an international society as well as an international system. It is difficult to conceive of international order apart from norms or rules: in particular, elementary or primary rules requiring states to limit the violence they bring to bear on one another, to honour undertakings and to respect one another’s spheres of jurisdiction. It is true that some of the most important sources of international order are the consequence simply of certain brute facts about the international system that would make for international order even if what I have called international society did not exist: the fact, for example, that military power is distributed in such a way that no one state is preponderant; the fact of the fear of war; the fact of economic inter-dependence. But while these facts provide a basis for the perception by states of common interests in international order, actually to achieve it they must be able to arrive at guidelines or signposts that show them how they must behave if they are to advance these common interests: that is to say, they must articulate norms or rules and agree upon them.

These rules are prior to international law, international morality and international institutions; they may have the status simply of operating procedures or ‘rules of the game’. Their existence in some form is a necessary condition of what I have called an international system, as well as of an international society: it is difficult to conceive that sustained military or commercial intercourse could be carried on between independent political communities, without some degree of expectation of conformity to general imperative principles of conduct, however crudely and tentatively formulated. But these rules of the game are strengthened if they are embodied in institutions, as some of them have been in the institutions of modem international society: international law, the diplomatic system, the principle that there should exist a balance of power and acceptance of the special managerial role of the great powers.

It may be helpful to indicate the relationship between international order, in the sense in which it has been defined, and a number of different although connected concepts. If international order pertains to the elementary conditions of social coexistence among states world order may be thought of as the patterns of behaviour that sustain elementary social coexistence among mankind as a whole. In the present phase of universal political organisation, the dominant feature of which is the division of mankind and of the earth’s surface into separate sovereign jurisdictions, world order may be thought of as the sum of domestic order and international order, the order that is provided within states and the order that exists among them. But of course world order could in principle be achieved by other forms of universal political organisation, and a standing question is whether it does not require other forms.

International order is closely related to what in the language of the UN Charter is called ‘peace and security’. It has often been pointed out that peace and security do not necessarily belong together: while in the circumstances of the Soviet–American strategic stalemate there exist both peace and a degree of security, at the time of Munich there was peace in Europe but not security, while at the time of the San Francisco Conference there was security but not peace. The coupling of the two terms together in the Charter reflects the judgements that the requirements of security may conflict with those of peace, and that in this event the latter will not necessarily take priority.

International order cannot be identified with peace in the sense of the absence of war because achievement of the minimum goals of coexistence between states may be found to require the use or threat of force. Nor can international order be identified with security, which may be defined as safety from war and military defeat. The provision of a degree of security or safety from violent attack is one, but only one of the basic goals of international coexistence, which must be taken also to refer to the acceptance by states of one another’s rights to a sphere jurisdiction and to engage in peaceful intercourse.

International order is sometimes defined (e.g. by Quincy Wright) in terms of the predictability of future international behaviour.^[3] As I have defined it, order in international relations bears a close relationship to predictability but should not be identified with it. If there is international order, then to the extent the statesmen understand what the patterns are that sustain coexistence, a consequence will be that some basis for prediction will exist. Moreover, the desire to be able to predict the behaviour of other states, to avoid the anxiety into which we would be plunged if we could not count on others to follow certain guidelines or signposts, helps to explain why it is that we regard international order as valuable. But order is not the same as predictability for there are patterns or regularities of international behaviour, of which we may be aware and from which we may form expectations about the future, which are in fact patterns of disorder or anarchy: the breakdown of restraints on international violence, the disregard of established undertakings and the infringement of sovereign jurisdiction may occur in a regular and predictable way but international order, as I have argued, is not any pattern or regularity but a pattern of a particular sort.

It is obvious that in taking international order to concern the primary or elementary conditions of international coexistence I am concerning myself with what is sometimes called minimum order rather than with optimum order, with what, for example, Myres S. MacDougal calls ‘minimum world public order’ rather than with the more inclusive ‘world public order with human dignity’.^[4] The question I am trying to raise here is how ‘minimum international order’ is related to ‘optimum international order’, to a framework of international relations that provides for other values besides that of ‘order’.

Unlike order, justice is a term which can ultimately be given only some kind of private or subjective definition. I do not propose to set out any private vision of what just conduct in world politics would be, nor to embark upon any philosophical analysis of the criteria for recognising it. My starting-point is simply that there are certain ideas or beliefs as to what justice requires in world politics and that demands formulated in the name of these ideas play a large role in the course of events.

Clearly, ideas about justice belong to the class of moral ideas, ideas which treat certain human actions as right in themselves and not merely as a means to an end, as categorically and not merely hypothetically imperative. Considerations of justice, accordingly, are to be distinguished from considerations of law, and from considerations of the dictates of prudence, interest or necessity.

In thinking about justice there are certain familiar distinctions which it is helpful to bear in mind.^[5] First, we may distinguish what has been called ‘general’ justice, justice as identical with virtuous or righteous conduct from ‘particular’ justice, justice as one species of right conduct among others. The term ‘justice’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘morality’ or ‘virtue’, as if to say an action is just were simply another way of saying that it is morally right. It is often argued, however, that ideas about justice constitute a particular subcategory of moral ideas, as we imply when we say that justice should be tempered with mercy, or that independent political communities in their dealings with one another are capable of justice but not of charity. It has often been contended that justice is especially to do with equality in the enjoyment of rights and privileges, perhaps also to do with fairness or reciprocity; that whatever the substance of the rights or privileges in question demands for justice are demands for the equal enjoyment of them as between persons who are different from one another in some respect but should be treated in respect of these rights as if they were the same.

Demands for justice in world politics are often of this form: they are demands for the removal of privilege or discrimination, for equality in the distribution or in the application of rights as between the strong and the weak, the large and the small, the rich and the poor, the black and the white or the victors and the vanquished. It is important to distinguish between ‘justice’ in this special sense of equality of rights or privileges and ‘justice’ in the wider sense in which we are using it interchangeably with ‘morality’. The question needs to be raised whether justice in this larger sense will always be satisfied by equality of rights, whether it does not sometimes require discrimination between great powers and small, Have states and Have Nots, nuclear and non-nuclear, and so on.

Justice may be held to lie in the recognition of certain specified rights or duties—political, social or economic—but the demand for justice in the sense of the equal enjoyment of rights or equal imposition of duties for like individuals and groups is heard irrespective of what the substance of the rights and duties is. Thus another important distinction is between ‘substantive’ and ‘formal’ justice, the former lying in the recognition of specified rights or duties and the latter in like application of them to like persons. Demands for ‘equality before the law’, demands that legal rules be applied in a like manner to like classes of people, are an example of demands for ‘formal justice’ in this sense, but the latter arise in relation to all rules, legal or non-legal. When Britain and France attacked Egypt in 1956 and President Eisenhower insisted that the duty of member states of the United Nations to refrain from the use or threat of force except in self-defence applied to the allies of the United States as well as to others, he was demanding ‘formal justice’ in this sense.

Equality may be envisaged as the enjoyment by a like class of persons or groups of the same rights or duties. But it is obvious that equality in this sense will often fail to satisfy other criteria of justice. For one thing, given that persons and groups are sometimes unequal in their capacities or in their needs, a rule that provides them with the same rights and duties will have the effect simply of further underlining their inequality: as Aristotle wrote, ‘injustice arises when equals are treated unequally and also when unequals are treated equally’.^[6] Thus the distinction is sometimes drawn between ‘arithmetical justice’ in the sense of equal rights and duties, and ‘proportionate justice’ in the sense of rights and duties that are distributed proportionately to the object in view. Marx’s principle ‘from each according to his capacity, to each according to his need’ embodies a preference for ‘proportionate’ justice over ‘arithmetical’ in relation to the distribution of wealth. In world politics certain basic rights and duties, such as the right of sovereign jurisdiction and the duty of non-intervention, generally held to apply equally to all states, exemplify ‘arithmetical justice’, while the doctrine that the use of force in war or reprisals should be in proportion to the injury suffered, may be taken illustrate ‘proportionate justice’.

Another distinction, closely connected with the latter, is between ‘commutative’ or reciprocal justice, and ‘distributive’ justice or justice assessed in the light of the common good or common interest of society as a whole. ‘Commutative justice lies in the recognition of rights and duties by a process of exchange or bargaining, whereby one individual or group recognises the rights of others in return for their recognition of its own. To the extent that the bargaining strength of the individuals or groups concerned is equal, this reciprocal process is likely to result in what we have called ‘arithmetical justice’ or the same rights. ‘Distributive justice’, by contrast, comes about not through a process of bargaining among individual members of the society in question, but by decision of the society as whole, in the light of consideration of its common good or common interest. It is clear that ‘distributive justice’ in this sense may often take the form of justice which is ‘proportionate’ rather than ‘arithmetical’, requiring, for example, that the rich pay higher taxes than the poor.

To the extent that world politics is principally a process of conflict and cooperation among states having only the most rudimentary sense of the interests of the world as a whole, it is the domain pre-eminently of ideas of ‘commutative’ justice rather than ‘distributive’. The main stuff of contention about justice in international affairs is to be found in the attempt of sovereign states, through a process of claim and counter-claim, to iron out among themselves what rights and duties will be recognised and how they will be applied. But ideas of ‘distributive’ justice, I shall try to show, have also come to play a significant part in the discussion of justice in world politics, if not yet to be prime movers of events.

Finally, it is important to consider in what agents or actors in world politics moral rights or duties are taken to be vested. Here one may distinguish what may be called interstate or international justice, individual or human justice, and cosmopolitan or world justice.

By interstate or international justice I have in mind the moral rules held to confer rights and duties upon states and nations, e.g. the idea that all states, irrespective of their size or their racial composition or their ideological leaning, are equally entitled to the rights of sovereignty, or the idea that all nations are equally entitled to the right of self-determination. The rights of states and of nations may, of course, conflict with one another. The principle of national self-determination has been invoked to destroy the sovereign integrity of states and even now threatens a great many of them; but to the extent that there is now a broad consensus that states should be nation-states and that the official doctrine of nearly all states is that they are nation states, there is a measure of harmony between the ideas of interstate justice and international justice.

By individual or human justice I mean the moral rules conferring rights and duties upon individual human beings. In the form of the doctrines of natural law and natural rights, ideas of human justice historically preceded the development of ideas of interstate or international justice and provided perhaps the principal intellectual foundation upon which these latter ideas at first rested. That is to say, states and nations were originally thought to have rights and duties because individual persons had rights and duties, the rulers of states being persons and nations being collections of persons. But the ideas of interstate and international justice by the eighteenth century reached a point of take-off, after which they became independent of the means by which they had become established as rights and duties were held to attach to the notional personality of a state which was other than its rulers and the collective personality of a nation which was other than, and on some views more than, the sum of its members.

In this system in which rights and duties applied directly to states and nations, the notion of human rights and duties has survived but it has gone underground. Far from providing the basis from which international justice or morality is derived it has become potentially subversive of international society itself, a position reflected in the classical doctrine of international law that states are the only subjects of international law and that individuals are merely the objects of understandings between states, The basic compact of coexistence between states, expressed in the exchange of recognition of sovereign jurisdictions, implies a conspiracy of silence entered into by governments about the rights and duties of their respective citizens. This conspiracy is mitigated by the practice of granting rights of asylum to foreign political refugees, by declaratory recognition of the moral rights of human beings in such documents as the Atlantic Charter, the U.N. Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and by practical cooperation between governments to take account of human rights in such fields as the treatment of prisoners of war and the promotion of economic and social welfare. But the idea of the duties of the individual human being raises, in international politics, the question of the duties he has that conflict with his duties to the state—the question that the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal raised in relation to German soldiers and political leaders, and which as Judge Telford Taylor has pointed out, they have raised also in relation to the American soldiers and leaders responsible for the prosecution of the Vietnam War.^[7] And the idea of the rights of the individual human being raises in international politics the question of the right and duty of persons and groups other than the state to which he owes allegiance to come to his aid in the event that his rights are being disregarded—the right of the Western powers to protect the political rights of the citizens of eastern European countries, of Africans to protect the rights of black South Africans, of Australians or New Guineans to protect the rights of Indonesian citizens in West Irian. These are questions which, answered in a certain way, lead to disorder in international relations or even to the breakdown of international society itself.

In addition to ideas about interstate or international justice, and about human justice we need to recognise a third category of ideas which concern what may be called cosmopolitan or world justice. These are ideas which seek to spell out what is just or right or good for the world as a whole, for an imagined civitas maxima or cosmopolitan society to which all individuals belong and to which their interests should be subordinate. One thinks, for example, of Kenneth Boulding’s attempt to spell out the idea of a world economic interest, of C. Wilfred Jenks’ notion of an emergent common law of mankind that will replace law between states, and of much of the presently fashionable discussion of the global or cosmic problem of man and the environment.^[8] This notion of justice as the promotion of the world common good is different from that of the assertion of the rights and duties of individual human beings all over the globe for it posits the idea that these individuals form or should form a society or community whose common interests or common good must qualify or even determine what their individual rights and duties are, just as the rights and duties of individuals within the state have in the past been qualified or determined by notions such as the common good, the greatest happiness of the greatest number or the general will. It calls for distributive rather than purely commutative justice.

These notions of world or cosmopolitan justice are at present inchoate and of slight practical importance. The world society or community whose common good they purport to define does not exist except as an idea or myth which may one day attract enough followers to become of practical importance, but has not done so yet. Political mankind as such does not have the means of interest articulation and aggregation, of political recruitment and socialisation which, we are told, are the hallmarks of a political system. Insofar as the interests of mankind at large are articulated and aggregated, this is through the mechanisms of the society of sovereign states. For authoritative guidance as to what the interests of the world as a whole might be with regard, for example, to the distribution of economic resources, or the control and distribution of population, or the conservation of the environment, we can only look to the views of sovereign states and of the international organisations which they dominate. There is, indeed, no lack of self-appointed spokesmen of the common good of ‘the spaceship earth’ or ‘this endangered planet’, and indeed there are non-governmental international bodies with valid claims to express the ideas of transnational groups of various kinds. But the views which these private individuals and bodies express are not the outcome of any political process of the assertion and reconciliation of interests; they provide indeed less in the way of an authoritative guide to the interests of the world as a whole than do the views of sovereign states, even unrepresentative or tyrannical ones, which are at least the authentic expression of the perceived interests of some part of the globe. But if it is chiefly through the views of states that we must seek to discover the world common good, this is bound to be a distorting lens; universal ideologies that are espoused by states are notoriously subservient to their special interests, and agreements reached among states notoriously the product of bargaining and compromise rather than of any consideration of the interest of the population of the countries they represent treated as a whole.

How are order and justice in world politics related to one another? There are some who would say that there is little or nothing of either and therefore no basis for pursuing the question. But the two things whose relationship I wish to consider are quite concrete. On the one hand there are the institutions and mechanisms whereby international society does provide a framework of international order or minimum coexistence. On the other hand there are the ideas or beliefs about justice in world politics that I have outlined. To what extent does the framework of international order satisfy the various aspirations for justice that are prevalent in the world? And what would be the effects on international order of the attempt to realise their aspirations or to realise them more fully?

It is obvious that the existing framework of international order fails to satisfy some of the most deeply felt and powerfully supported of these aspirations for justice. It is true that justice in any of its forms is realisable only in a context of order, and that international society, by providing this context, may be regarded as paving the way for the equal enjoyment of rights of various kinds. It is true that international society as such, through such nearly universal organs as the United Nations and its Specialised Agencies is formally committed to much more than the preservation of minimum order or coexistence: it espouses ideas of interstate and international justice, and of individual or human justice, although perhaps not of world justice; and it facilitates intergovernmental cooperation in many fields to promote the realisation of these ideas.

But, to begin with, the framework of international order is quite inhospitable to projects for the realisation of cosmopolitan or world justice. If the idea of the world common good were to be taken seriously, it would lead to the consideration of such questions as how the immigration policies of states throughout the world should be shaped in the general interest, which countries or which areas of the world have the most need of capital and which the least, how trade and fiscal policies throughout the world should be regulated in accordance with a common set of priorities, or what outcomes of a host of violent civil and international conflicts throughout the world best conformed to the general interests of mankind.

These are of course the very issues over which governments have control and do not seem likely to be willing to relinquish control in the absence of vast changes in human society. The position which governments occupy as custodians of the perceived interests of limited sections of mankind imposes familiar obstacles to their viewing themselves simply as so many agencies jointly responsible for the implementation of the world common good. It is sometimes said that the commitment of the donor countries through aid and trade policies to the objective of a minimum level of economic welfare throughout the world implies and presupposes acceptance of the idea of the interests of the community of mankind. Kenneth Boulding, for example, argues that since the transfer of resources from rich countries to poor is wholly one-sided or non-reciprocal it means that the rich see themselves as part of the same community with the poor. ‘If A gives B something without expecting anything in return, the inference must be drawn that B is ‘part’ of A, or that A and B together are part of a larger system of interests and organisations.’^[9] It is not clear, however, that the idea of the community of mankind does actually underlie the enterprise of the transfer of resources to any important degree; or indeed that the transfer of resources yet has a secure and established position as part of the permanent business of international society, assailed as it is on the one side by the idea that the rich countries should reduce their involvement in the Third World to the minimum, and on the other side by the doctrine that aid is essentially a means of perpetuating domination and exploitation and hence prejudicial to the true interests of the Have Nots.

The framework of international order is inhospitable also to demands for human justice, which unlike projects for cosmopolitan or world justice represent a very powerful ingredient in world politics at the present time: in the form, for example, of the demands of poor countries for economic justice for their inhabitants or the demands of African states for racial justice in southern Africa. International society takes account of the notion of human rights and duties that may be asserted against the state to which particular human beings belong but it is inhibited from giving effect to them, except selectively and in a distorted way. If international society were really to treat human justice as primary and coexistence as secondary, if, as Professor Mazrui says the African and Asian states want, the UN Charter were to give pride of place to human rights rather than to the preservation of peace and security, then in a situation in which there is no agreement as to what human rights are or in what hierarchy of priorities they should be arranged, the result could only be to undermine international order and, incidentally, such prospects as there might be for justice as well. It is here that the society of states—including, I should say, despite what Professor Mazrui says, African and Asian states—display their conviction that international order is prior to human justice. African and Asian states, like other states, are willing to subordinate order to human justice in particular cases closely affecting them, but they are no more willing than the Western states or the states of the Soviet bloc to allow the whole structure of international coexistence to be brought to the ground.

There is another obstacle to the realisation of human justice within the present framework of international order. When questions of human justice achieve a prominent place on the agenda of world political discussion, it is because it is the policy of particular states to raise them. The world heard about the war guilt of the Kaiser and later witnessed the trial and punishment of German and Japanese leaders and soldiers by international procedures for war crimes and crimes against the peace. It did not witness the trial and punishment of Allied leaders and soldiers who prima facie might have been as much or as little guilty of disregarding their human obligations as Göring, Yamamoto and the rest. This is not to say that the idea of the trial and punishment of war criminals by international procedure is unjust or unwise, only that it operates in a selective way. That these men and not others were brought to trial by the victors was an accident of power politics.

In the same way the world has heard of the human rights of non-European persons in southern Africa, and may even come to see redress of the wrongs they have suffered, because it is the policy of black African states to take up this issue, just as the world once heard of the rights of the Christian subjects of the Sultan of Turkey because it was the policy of Gladstonian England to uphold them. But the rights of Africans in black African states, or of intellectuals in the Soviet Union, or of Tibetans in China or Nagas in India or communists in Indonesia are less likely to be upheld by international action because it is not the policy of any prominent group of states that they should be. The international order does not provide any general protection of human rights, only a selective protection that is determined not by the merits of the case but by the vagaries of international politics.

There is a further obstacle. Even in cases where, as the consequence of these vagaries of international politics, international society permits action directed towards the realisation of human justice, the action taken does not directly impinge upon individual human beings but takes place through the mediation of sovereign states, who shape this action to their own purposes. Take the case of world economic justice, towards the realisation of which the transfer of resources from the rich countries to the poor is bent. The ultimate moral object of this process is to improve the material standard of life of individual human beings in poor Asian, African and Latin American countries. But the donor countries and international organisations concerned transfer resources not directly to these individuals but to the governments of the countries of which they are citizens. As Julius Stone points out, it is left to these governments to determine the criteria according to which the resources will be distributed to individuals, or indeed to distribute them arbitrarily or not distribute them at all. As he says, the unspoken assumption of the business of transfer of resources is that the actual claimants and beneficiaries of what he calls the ‘justice constituency’ are not individual human beings but governments.^[10] The doubts which donor countries entertain about the way in which the governments of recipient countries distribute or fail to distribute the resources transferred to them of course constitute one of the principal disincentives to foreign aid. Yet one has also to agree with Stone’s conclusion that although the transfer of resources, as it takes place at present, necessarily falls short of the realisation of what I have called human justice, it is not possible, given the present nature of international society, for it to take place in any other way: donor countries and organisations cannot determine in detail the way in which recipient governments distribute resources transferred to them so as to realise notions of cosmopolitan justice without violating the most fundamental norms of the compact of coexistence.

If international society is quite inhospitable to notions of cosmopolitan justice and able to give only a selective and ambiguous welcome to ideas of human justice, it is not basically unfriendly to notions of interstate or international justice. The structure of international coexistence, as I have argued, itself depends on norms or rules conferring rights and duties upon states—not necessarily moral rules, but procedural rules or rules of the game which in modern international society are stated in international law. These rights and duties which states have, moreover, they have to an equal degree, as Emer de Vattel pointed out in his celebrated argument that equality is a corollary of sovereignty: ‘A dwarf is as much a man as a giant is, a small republic no less a sovereign state than the most powerful kingdom.’ Whereas ideas of world justice may seem entirely at odds with the structure of international society and notions of human justice to entail a possible threat to its foundations, ideas of interstate and international justice may reinforce the compact of coexistence between states by adding a moral imperative to the imperatives of enlightened self-interest and of law by which it is defined.

Yet international order is preserved by means which systematically affront the most basic and widely agreed principles of international justice. I do not mean simply that at the present time there are states and nations which complain that they are denied their rights, and perhaps are denied their rights, as Laos and Cambodia are denied their rights of sovereignty or Kashmir or Quebec or Tibet is denied its right of self-determination. It is the normal condition of any society that some of its members should feel that their rights are infringed. What I have in mind is that the institutions and mechanisms that sustain international order, even when they are working properly, indeed especially when they are working properly or fulfilling their functions, necessarily violate ordinary notions of justice.

Consider, for example, international law. It is not merely that international law sanctifies the status quo without providing for a legislative process whereby the law can be altered by consent and thus causes the pressures for change to consolidate behind demands that the law should be violated in the name of justice. It is also that when the law is violated, and a new situation is brought about by the triumph not necessarily of justice but of force, international law accepts this new situation as legitimate, and concurs in the means whereby it has been brought about. As Mazrui writes, international law condemns aggression, but once aggression has been successful it ceases to be condemned. The conflict between international law and notions of international justice is endemic because the situations from which the law takes its point of departure are a series of faits accomplis brought about by force and the threat of force, legitimised by the principle (distinguishing international law from municipal) that treaties concluded under duress are valid. Ex factis jus oritur.

Moreover, contrary to much superficial thinking on this subject, it is not as if this tendency of international law to accommodate itself to power politics were some unfortunate but remediable defect that is fit to be removed by the good work of some high-minded professor of international law or by some ingenious report of the International Law Commission. There is every reason to think that this feature of international law, which sets it at loggerheads with elementary notions of justice, is vital to its working; and that if international law ceased to have this feature, it could not play any role at all.

Or consider the role that is played in the maintenance of international order by the special position of the great powers. Great powers contribute to international order by maintaining local systems of hegemony within which order is imposed from above, and by collaborating to maintain the global balance of power and, from time to time, to impose their joint will on others. But the great powers, when they perform these services to international order, do so at the price of systematic injustice to the rights of smaller states and nations, the injustice which is felt by states which fall within the Soviet hegemony in eastern Europe or the American hegemony in the Caribbean, the injustice which is written into the terms of the UN Charter which prescribe a system of collective security that cannot be operated against great powers.

Consider again the role that is played in international order by the ‘balance of terror’ or relationship of mutual deterrence between the superpowers, or the wider historical role of the institution of the balance of power, of which the former is in some respects a variant. Here is an institution which offends against ordinary and widely agreed notions of international justice and also human justice, in ways that need not be elaborated here, and yet whose role in the preservation of international order at the present time is a central one.

Given that the framework of international society fails to satisfy these various ideas of justice that have been considered, what would be the effects upon international order of attempts to realise them? Can justice in world politics, in its various senses, be achieved only by jeopardising international order? And if this is so, which should take priority?

It is possible to distinguish three ideal types of doctrines which embody answers to these questions. There is first the conservative or orthodox view that recognises an inherent conflict between the values of order and of justice in world politics, and treats the former as having priority over the latter—international society as a society in which ‘minimum order’ or coexistence is the most that can be expected, and in which demands for a just or ‘optimum order’ threaten to remove the small area of consensus upon which this coexistence is built.

There is secondly the view of the revolutionary which also is founded upon the idea of an inherent conflict between the present framework of international order and the achievement of justice, but treats the latter as the commanding value: let justice be done ‘though the earth perish’. The revolutionary, however, does not believe that the earth will perish, only that the damned will perish: the saved may look forward to the re-establishment of an order that will secure the just changes he wishes to bring about, after a period of temporary and perhaps geographically limited disorder. This has been the doctrine of some black Africans in relation to the African continent, or Arab nationalists in relation to the Arab lands, and of the early Bolsheviks and now of China in relation to the world as a whole.

Thirdly, there is the liberal or progressivist view that has always represented one important strand in thought about foreign policy in the West, that (perhaps without denying it altogether) is reluctant to accept that there is any necessary conflict between order and justice in world politics, and is constantly seeking after ways of reconciling the one with the other. It is inclined, for example, to see the righting of injustices as the true means to the strengthening of international order: the removal of apartheid or of ‘the last vestiges of colonialism’ as the way in which the black African states can best be integrated into the system of ‘peace and security’, the provision of economic justice for the poor peoples of the world as the means of avoiding an otherwise inevitable violent confrontation of Haves and Have Nots. It is inclined to shy away from the recognition that justice in some cases can be brought about only by violent change, to cling to the idea that just change may be brought about through processes of consent or consensus, to argue that attempts to achieve justice by disrupting order are counter-productive, to cajole the advocates of ‘order’ and of ‘justice’ into remaining within the bounds of a single moral system that provides for both and permits an adjustment that can be mutually agreed.

It is clear that where the states concerned are willing to give their consent to a change brought about in the name of an agreed notion of justice (as when India demanded for herself and Britain conceded the right of national self-determination) this may take place without prejudice to the foundations of international order. It is clear also that even where there is not consent by all the parties affected, but there is overwhelming evidence of a consensus in international society as a whole in favour of a change held to be just (especially if the consensus embraces all the great powers) the change may take place without causing other than a local and temporary disorder, after which the international order as a whole may emerge unscathed or even appear in a stronger position than before. The action taken by Britain, on the authority of the Congress of Vienna, to suppress the slave trade, fell into this category.

The conflict between international order and demands for justice arises in those cases where there is no consensus, or no sufficiently overwhelming consensus, as to what justice involves, when to press the claims of justice is to reopen questions which the compact of coexistence requires to be treated as closed. If there were a consensus within the United Nations, including all the great powers, in favour of military intervention in Southern Africa to enforce national self-determination for black majority populations and to uphold black African political rights, it might be possible to regard such intervention as implying no threat to international order, or even as strengthening international order by confirming a new degree of moral solidarity in international society. In the absence of such a consensus, demands for external military intervention imply the subordination of order to considerations of international and human justice. The argument that has been advanced by black African states in the Security Council since 1963 to the effect that apartheid is not merely a violation of human rights but a threat to the peace, whatever merits it may or may not have as a construction of the law of the Charter or as a political tactic, obscures the position: it is the proponents of intervention who wish to threaten the peace, and they are moved by considerations not of peace but of justice.

The military action taken by India against Portugal in 1961 and by Indonesia in West Irian in 1962 also represented the breaking of the peace for the sake of change conceived to be just. It is interesting that in these cases, as in relation to proposed military intervention in southern Africa, the justifications provided related to order as well as to justice, Krishna Menon defending India’s action in terms of the need to respond to Portugal’s aggression of 1510 (since when there had been ‘permanent aggression’), as well as in terms of India’s right to conduct a just war of national liberation. Thus the revolutionaries accommodate themselves to the prevailing modalities of the system.

When then, demands for justice are put forward in the absence of a consensus within international society as what justice involves, the prospect is opened up that the consensus that does exist about order or minimum coexistence will be undone. The question has then to be faced whether order or justice should have priority.

It would not make sense to argue that one or the other value should always have priority in any given case. In fact, ideas of both order and justice enter into the value systems, the justificatory or rhetorical stock-in-trade of all actors in world politics. The advocate of revolutionary justice looks forward to the time when a new order will consolidate the moral gains of the revolution. The proponent of order takes up his position partly because the existing order is, from his point of view, morally satisfactory, or not so unsatisfactory as to warrant its disturbance. The question of order vs. justice will always be considered by the parties concerned in relation to the merits of a particular case.

When the merits of any particular case are considered, moreover, the priority of order over justice cannot be asserted without some assessment of the question whether or not or to what extent injustice is embodied in the existing order. Why do we regard order as valuable? As Mazrui writes, ‘the importance of peace is, in the ultimate analysis, derivative. Taken to its deepest human roots peace is important because “the dignity and worth of the human person” are important’.^[11] Those who are unwilling to jeopardise international order for the sake of anti-colonial or racial or economic justice reach their conclusions because of the assessments they make about justice as well as order, whether the former are acknowledged or not.

When all these qualifications have been made, it may still be contended that international order is prior to justice—international, human or cosmopolitan—in the sense that it comprises the elementary or primary conditions of international coexistence, which have to be satisfied at least in some measure before justice in any of its senses can be realised. It cannot be concluded from this, however, that the preservation of international order should be preferred to the realisation of justice in any particular case; and to the extent that the framework of international order is a strong one, it is able to withstand the shock of violent assaults carried out in the name of justice. The nuclear peace, in particular, has made the world safe for just wars of national liberation, carried out at the sub-nuclear level, and the international or interstate peace has made the world safe for just internal or civil violence.