Conceptualizing Politics by Cerutti Furio

Author:Cerutti, Furio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2017-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

6

The states

Power, peace and war in anarchical society

The journey we are going to undertake has two intentions. It is going to check the validity of the fundamental categories examined in the first three chapters of this book outside of the domestic realm and facing the present state of the world. But it also wants to build up a batch of conceptual knowledge related to the evolution of peace and war, poverty and cooperation in order to know what we are talking about when we deal today with the normative problems that come up with these issues and require more than a generic ethical answer.

The journey unfolds in this chapter in four stages. In §1 it draws a general picture of international relations in the modern era under the label of an ‘anarchical society’, while §2 focuses on war, a crucial feature of those relations. How to restrain war or how to establish and protect peace is discussed in §3, but also in §4, in which a paramount example of pacification by political means of previously bellicose populations is presented, also in its theoretical aspects: the process of European integration.

States face each other in the international arena as sovereign states, though in our time not all actors that confront each other in the international arena are states: think of liberation movements, terrorist groups, worldwide advocacy groups, powerful multinational corporations (MNCs), and, of course, international institutions, whether political or economic or scientific – the so-called ‘epistemic communities’ such as the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change).

In this dimension, states exert the external dimension of their sovereignty: external with respect to other states or actors, in the sense of a state’s recognised claim to autonomy that is to govern itself by its own statutes, held valid in the same territory and over the same population, as we saw in Chapter 4. We also remember that sovereignty, in particular external sovereignty, depends very much on the recognition granted by other states (since 1945 it is a vote in the General Assembly of the UN that makes the difference). In other words, sovereignty means independence from other countries or superior bodies and allows for autonomy or self-rule. External sovereignty is a pre-condition to the domestic one: a community can succeed in giving itself a state-like power structure, but without recognition even its domestic sovereignty remains uncertain and subject to anybody else’s claim or intervention. Sovereignty as recognised international actorhood lastly entails equality among the states, a formal or legal equality that matters regardless of different levels of individual wealth or might.

This first description makes the two opposing sides of external sovereignty neatly visible. On the one hand, it signals the state’s ability to act as it pleases on the international stage: it can wage war, break up peace or negotiate a truce, invade and occupy, withdraw from treaties and deny cooperation or burden-sharing. On the other hand, as far as it seeks and achieves the recognition of other states, it is expected to bow to elementary diplomatic rules and to reshape its behaviour according to international law.

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