George Weigel Expounds on Role of U.N., Just War

George Weigel was one of the featured speakers and organizers of a conference last month on "Catholic Thought and World Politics in the 21st Century", which was held on May 7th at the Gregorian University. On May 27th, Zenit News Service published an interview with George Weigel in which he expounded on his criticisms of the U.N. as well as his views on just war tradition.

• On the United Nations:
  "Blessed John XXIII made clear that he was not supporting "world government," or international structures that would impinge on the legitimate prerogatives of national governments or local governments.

  So, from a Catholic point of view, this is a both/and, not either/or, matter. Both the U.N. and sovereign states are facts of international public life, and Catholic international relations theory has to take account of both.

  On the question of the U.N.'s authority, and as I indicated in my paper at the April conference, it would be hard to say that, as a matter of fact, the world's nations have agreed that the only entity that can authorize the use of armed force is the U.N. . . . On the other hand, the nations of the world are obliged, morally, to build a world of "order," which is Augustine's understanding of the meaning of "peace," and that has to be done, politically at least, through transnational and international organizations.

  Work to reform the U.N. system is thus a moral and political imperative. But while that work goes on, it doesn't make much sense to me, from a moral-theological or political point of view, to ascribe to the U.N. capacities it doesn't have and a moral authority it has rarely demonstrated in practice.

• On the "presumption against war" [asserted by Cardinal Stafford and others]:
  Of course Catholic thinking about war and peace begins with a "presumption against war," if by that we simply mean that war should not be the first recourse in an international conflict.

  But those who use that phrase today often mean much more. They mean that the use of proportionate and discriminate armed force is always morally suspect, and this has not been the stance of the Catholic just war tradition for 1,500 years.

  The classic tradition believed that the morality of the use of armed force depended on who was using it, why, to what ends, and how. Thus the classic just war tradition begins with a presumption in favor of justice: legitimate sovereign authority has the moral obligations to defend those for whom the public authorities have assumed responsibility.

  There are many ways to fulfill that obligation; in certain circumstances, proportionate and discriminate armed force can be one of those ways.

  If you begin your analysis this way, with the responsibility of sovereign authority to advance the peace of order, you can bring the full riches of the tradition to bear on the situation; if you begin somewhere else, you can get confused. And your vision can become blurred.

• On the Vatican's response to the war in Iraq, and to future military engagements:
  It would be inappropriate for the Vatican's secretary for relations with states -- the "foreign minister" -- or officials like the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace to announce, publicly, and in so many words, "These are the good guys, these are the bad guys; good guys, go to it, and God bless you." The diplomats of the Holy See should press for non-military solutions; that's their job.

  Similarly, the moral witness of Pope John Paul II has been directed, appropriately, toward pressing the nations to resolve their conflicts without violence. We can be sure that future popes will do the same thing.

  That witness and that diplomacy should be conducted in such a way that it does not suggest that the Church has, as a matter of moral principle, adopted a stance of "functional pacifism," which it has not.

  How to do that is a delicate matter that requires, among other things, careful coordination of statements from all the organs of the Holy See. It also requires a measure of self-discipline on the part of senior churchmen in Rome.

  American and other reporters falsely assume that every senior official of the Holy See speaks "for the Vatican." They don't. In this kind of media environment, senior churchmen have to be very careful to let the Holy See speak in its own voice, through its own appropriate organs.

Cardinal Stafford responds to Weigel

Zenit News Service recently interviewed Cardinal James Francis Stafford, major penitentiary of the Apostolic Penitentiary, a tribunal of the Holy See, and a former archbishop of Denver. Cardinal Stafford responded to several questions -- Is there a presumption against war in Catholic teaching? What does the Pope mean when he speaks of humanitarian intervention? What is the Holy See's position on the United Nations, an organization that not infrequently opposes Catholic teaching? -- and addressed the criticisms of scholars James Turner Johnson and George Weigel (most recently in "World Order: What Catholics Forgot" First Things 143 May 2004: 31-38).

Questioning what he calls the "functional pacifism" characterizing recent statements by the Vatican curia, Weigel asked: "what is one to do with John Paul II's insistence on a 'duty' of 'humanitarian intervention' which would presumably include the use of proportionate and discriminate armed force, in cases of impending or actual genocide?"

Cardinal Stafford responds to Weigel by asserting that the Pope spoke first not of humanitarian intervention but of humanitarian assistance, and specifically in the context of "armed conflicts taking place within states," rooted in "long-standing historical motives of an ethnic, tribal or religious character," and which, because of their use of small-caliber weapons, "often have grave consequences which spill over the borders of the country in question, involving outside interests and responsibilities."

"In the first place, the Pope speaks of humanitarian aid," Cardinal Stafford continued. "He described this as 'the pre-eminent value of humanitarian law and the consequent duty to guarantee the right to humanitarian aid to suffering civilians and refugees.' He then insists on the greatest importance of continued negotiation in such conflicts.

"Then the Pope speaks of humanitarian intervention. He says, 'When a civilian population risks being overcome by the attacks of an unjust aggressor and political efforts and non-violent defense prove to be of no avail, it is legitimate and even obligatory to take concrete measures to disarm the aggressor.'"

"So the context of humanitarian intervention is: How does one get aid to people who are being oppressed by internal conflict within a given state?" noted the cardinal. "George Weigel's interpretation of the Pope's teaching on humanitarian intervention is excessively abbreviated and even misleading in what he omits."

"Weigel says that he presumes that such intervention would 'include the use of proportionate and discriminate armed force in cases of impending and actual genocide,'" Cardinal Stafford said.

"I find it curious that he makes no mention of the Pope's immediate qualifiers regarding the decision for 'humanitarian intervention,' which are severe and specific," he added. "'These measures must be limited in time and precise in their aims. They must be carried out in full respect for international law, guaranteed by an authority that is internationally recognized and in any event never left to the outcome of armed conflict alone.'"

The cardinal continued: "The chief qualifier is that, 'the fullest and best use must therefore be made of all the provisions of the United Nations Charter.' That's important, the qualifiers that are not mentioned either by Weigel or Turner; that is, you must have respect for international law, you must involve the internationally recognized organization."

As we noted earlier, Weigel and Johnson have both questioned the contension that Catholic teaching contains a "presumption against war" as contrary to classical Catholic just war teaching. According to Cardinal Stafford, the U.S. Catholic Bishop's novel assertion of a "presumption against war" coincides with the Pope's teaching in his message on World Peace Day 2000:

'War is a defeat for humanity. Only in peace and through peace can respect for human dignity and its inalienable rights be guaranteed. Against the backdrop of war in the 20th century, humanity's honor has been preserved by those who have spoken and worked on behalf of peace. ... Those who have built their lives on the value of non-violence have given us luminous and prophetic examples.'"

"It should be noted," Cardinal Stafford said, "that the Pope explicitly places his emphatic choice of peace against the background of 20th-century total warfare, not the tribal conflicts of fifth-century North Africa where the first enunciation of the just war criteria were developed by St. Augustine. I think that one should look at the bishops' statement in light of the Pope's abhorrence for war and when he says it is a defeat for mankind.

"The Pope himself is building upon the experience of the 20th century and modifying, as he perceives it, the just war criteria. Augustine says nowhere as clearly as the Pope does, 'War is a defeat for humanity.'"

". . . It doesn't lead to functional pacifism but it is leading to a presumption against preventive war," Cardinal Stafford said. "The Pope is saying that we must exhaust every possible means including the U.N. before this presumption is able to be overcome. I don't think that's being emphasized by neoconservative arguments."

Personally, I think that 'neocons' Weigel, Novak, Johnson, et al. might contend that "every possible means" had in fact been exhausted at that point -- the various U.N. resolutions against Iraq; the weapons inspections that could be easily thwarted; the economic sanctions (which in themselves were having a detrimental effect and could be justifiably criticized as immoral for "punishing the people" for the crimes of their tyrant).

Furthermore, the increasing evidence of corruption in the administration of the "Oil-for-food" program implicating not only members of the United Nations but two nations of the Security Council (France and Russia) has, in my opnion, cast some doubt on the United Nation's in facilitating "every possible means" in averting a conflict with Saddam Hussein. As the author of Friends of Saddam, a blog which has been chronicling the "Oil-For-Food" scandal, explains:

It is not just about which bureaucrat had his hand in the till. Nor is it just about which company slipped a dictator a few (or many) bucks. It is about the UN and its legitimacy. During the run-up to the Iraq war, George Bush's opponents accused him of many misdeeds. Chief among them was "going to war without the UN." But if, the UN was, in fact, Saddam's enabler, if the UN Secretariat was effectively on Saddam's payroll, if important people in major antiwar countries were likewise beholden to the Iraqi regime, then that casts a wholly different light on "unilateralism."

And that is precisely why so many people, on both sides of the global debate, weigh in strongly on the Oil-for-Food scandal.

Stafford then responds to the contention that the United Nations is an inefficient organization, incapable of carrying out its mandates and, worse, supportive of policies that directly oppose the teaching of the Catholic Church. Stafford admitted that he, too, was "discomforted" by the U.N.'s endorsement of policies contrary to Catholic moral teaching, nevertheless:

"The Pope in various World Youth Day messages emphasized the importance not simply of relying upon the U.N. as it exists now, but of a further enhancement of its peacemaking capacities," the cardinal said. "As a matter of fact, we are living in a world in which the only pre-eminent, internationally recognized authority is the U.N.

"I'm convinced that the Holy See must critically discern the role of non-governmental organizations which are very strong activists for the anti-family, anti-life, anti-conception, pro-abortion positions and pro-gay positions that the U.N. has adopted or is seen to be moving towards. But that is a different tract and I think there are important allies that transcend cultures, including Islamic nations, that the Holy See and Catholic and Christian peoples throughout the world can rely upon regarding these issues."

"We're living in a very ambiguous moral situation in which both the wheat and the tares are growing together and you know what Jesus said about that: Let them grow together," said Cardinal Stafford.

"How long does one tolerate that?" he asked. "The time has not yet come to say that we must jettison the Church's support of the U.N. based upon the immoral positions they're taking on family, marriage and life issues."

I found Cardinal Stafford's last response especially disappointing -- and actually, I believe Zenit.com set up a straw man, as it were, by neglecting to provide in greater detail Weigel's complete criticism of the U.N. and the role of the Security Council as sole arbiter of justified force:

Since 1945, 126 out of 189 UN member states have been involved in 291 armed conflicts in which some twenty-two million people have been killed. Given this record, it is difficult to argue that the “international community” has agreed in practice to be bound by the UN Charter and its rules on the use of force. It is even more difficult to argue that the “international community” has ceded an effective monopoly on the use of force to those actions sanctioned by the Security Council. Perhaps it should; perhaps it someday will. But to assert as a matter of fact that this transfer of authority has taken place seems counterfactual today.

. . . the present structure of the Security Council is thoroughly unrealistic. Granting veto power on the Security Council to five states -- China, France, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States -- does not reflect the realities of contemporary world politics, but rather a set of political accommodations reached for various reasons at the end of the Second World War. The rotation of the other nine Security Council seats takes place through a process which, again, does not reflect the realities of power. These structural problems themselves should raise questions about the moral standing of the Security Council and the claim that it alone is the locus of moral authority over the use of armed force in world politics.

If we probe a little deeper, other problems emerge as well. How, for example, is moral legitimacy conferred by the Security Council when three of its permanent members -- China, France, and Russia -- formulate their foreign policies on explicitly realpolitik grounds that have little or nothing to do with moral reasoning about world politics as the Catholic Church understands it? Can an amoral calculus yield a morally determinative result? If so, it remains to be shown how.

Weigel's call for the revitalization of "Catholic international relations"

The May 2004 issue of First Things has an excellent article by George Weigel -- "World Order: What Catholics Forgot" -- in which he contends that "the difficult period [between the United States and the Vatican during the Iraq war] was itself a by-product of a forty-year 'time of forgetting' -- a forgetting of the distinctive way Catholics have thought about world politics for centuries." It's a lengthy article, and worth reading in full if you have the time, but I'll attempt to summarize its key points. ¹

Weigel describes Catholic international relations theory as forged by Augustine & Aquinas, refined by s Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez in the Counter-Reformation, and further developed during the pontificates of Pius XII and John XXIII. This Catholic "tradition of moral realism" was marked by three key insights:

1. The insistence that politics is an area of rationality and moral responsibility -- precisely because politics is a human activity, and moral judgement a defining characteristic of the human person. Furthermore, says Weigel, this recognition was grounded in the Catholic theological conviction that: "mankind is not "totally depraved," as some Reformation traditions taught; that society is a natural reality; that governance has a positive, not merely punitive or coercive, function; that political community is a good in its own right, an expression of the sociability that is part of the God-given texture of the human condition."
2. The classical understanding of power as "the capacity to achieve a corporate purpose for the common good") -- that is to say, politics cannot be "reduced, or traduced, to violence"; nor is politics the antinomy of peace; rather, politics has a positive dimension, its proper exercise a form of human creativity:

   The Catholic question was never, should power be exercised? Rather, the Catholic question was, how is power to be exercised? To what ends, by what authority, through what means? Power, in this understanding, is not the antinomy of peace (which is one of the goods to be sought by public authority); power, rightly understood, is a means to the achievement of the good of peace.

3. A distinctive understanding of peace -- not the peace of the human individual achieved by a right relationship with God, nor "the eschatalogical peace of a conflict-free world," but rather the peace of political community, "in which order, law, freedom, and just structures of governance advance the common good."

Catholic international relations theory stressed international legal and political institutions as a remedy for the threat of modern war and as the natural evolution of human political development -- the highlight of which was John XXIII's 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris. Unfortunately, charges Weigel, this distinctively Catholic "international relations theory" has not had significant influence among Catholic moral theologians and international relations specialists since the mid 1960's. This neglect of Catholic international relations theory is particularly regretful given two developments in the Church's involvement with world politics during John Paul II's pontificate which "call for a development of Catholic international relations theory -- and precisely at the level of theory.

The first development is John Paul II's insistence that human rights are the moral core of the "universal common good" and that religious freedom is the first human right to which institutions of international public life must attend. This is "a function of the Pope's teaching that all thinking about society, even international society, must begin with an adequate philosophical anthropology, which recognizes in the human quest for transcendent truth and love the defining characteristic of our humanity."

The second is "the emergence of the Papacy as a global moral witness, with real effect within and among nation-states." Weigel cites several examples, such as the Pope's role in the collapse of European communism ²; the Pope's support for democratic movements in the Phillipines and Latin American nations; and the Vatican's role in organizing effective international opposition to the Clinton Administration's efforts to have abortion-on-demand declared a fundamental human right in the 1994 Cairo World Conference on Population and Development.

Weigel sees a tension in the fact that the Pope carries his moral witness directly to the people (of individual states or the world in general), in many cases circumventing governments or relevant international organizations, while the various congregations of the Holy See continues diplomatic relations through normal channels ("of bilateral relations and multilateral institutions"). This tension was made explicit in the Church's role in the debate over the U.S. war with Iraq:

John Paul II has been a moral witness speaking truth to power in world politics; his diplomatic representatives, by definition, must be "players" according to the established rules of the game. Sometimes those roles can get confused. Some would argue that this happened during the debate prior to the recent Iraq War, when the prudential judgments of Vatican diplomats and agency heads were often reported (and perceived) as if they were decisive moral judgments by the man the world has come to recognize as its foremost moral authority -- Pope John Paul II. Then there is the question of how the Holy See, which is not a state, is to function in international fora in which every other actor of consequence is a state. How is it possible for the Holy See to function like a state without being a state and without damaging the Catholic Church's moral witness? To take one pressing issue here: Can the Holy See, without damaging the moral witness of the Catholic Church, form practical alliances for purposes of defending the family and the inalienable right to life with Muslim states whose policy and practice deny what the Catholic Church claims is the moral core of the universal common good -- religious freedom?

Weigel does not believe this ambiguity and tension can be resolved -- more importantly, "nor should it be prematurely resolved in either direction (i.e., by muting the moral witness of the Office of Peter, or by the Holy See's withdrawal from bilateral and multilateral diplomacy)." In the face of utiliatarianism ("the default position in international politics"), the Church must continue to assert the dignity of the human person. In the face of militant Islamic fundamentalism, the Church must demonstrate that religion is not necessarily violent or aggressive. If this comes at a cost of ambiguity and tension, says Weigel, so be it.

That said, Weigel believes we must "reconvene a conversation that has lapsed for almost forty years", developing Catholic international relations theory to counter "realpolitik that has corrupted Western European thinking about world politics." This development must address the current realities of international public life:

• "[T]he emergence of a plethora of international legal, political, and economic institutions, and the impact of nonstate actors on world affairs" -- ranging from global financial instutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to the pervasive threat of transnational terrorist organizations and criminal cartels.
• "[T]he enduring reality of the nation-state system [which remains] the basic organizing unit of world politics"
• The failure of the UN to adequately address "the new reality of aggressive nonstate actors (including terrorist organizations) and with the often-lethal reality of what are sometimes called 'failed states' or 'collapsing states'." Here Weigel cites a litany of post-Cold War crises:

  "the Rwandan genocide, the collapse of Yugoslavia, the hijacking of Afghanistan by the Taliban, widespread famine in sub-Saharan Africa, the African AIDS pandemic, and the spread of SARS from China. Catholic international relations theory must, in other words, face squarely the moral and political failures of a UN system in which Libya can become chairman of the UN Human Rights Commission, in which Saddam Hussein's Iraq can be slated to chair a major international meeting on disarmament, in which the Security Council has become dysfunctional because its structure and procedures are incongruent with the realities it must address, and in which UN peacekeeping operations (as in Kosovo) too often serve to create new dependencies rather than functioning civil societies.

• "[T]he antidemocratic (and often anti-Catholic) bias in regional associations such as the European Union" -- which Weigel touched on in a previous article "Europe's Problem, And Ours" (First Things 140 (February 2004): 18-25)
• "A new and dangerous form of judicial activism in international legal institutions", in which "international courts or national courts claiming international jurisdiction have imitated activist U.S. appellate courts and have become vigorous contestants in an international culture war over such issues as the family, abortion, and human sexuality"

Reading these "signs of the times," Weigel concludes by presenting four priorities for the intellectual development of Catholic international relations theory:

1. Catholic international relations theory must take into account the relationship between "hard power" and "soft power," and between the rule of law and the use of armed force, in international public life.

   Refering to the terminology of Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye, Weigel calls for better familiarization with the relationship of "hard power" and "soft power,"in the pursuit of an ordered peace, composed of freedom, justice and security. The effective deployment of "soft power", or nonviolent tactics of persuasion, requires a certain historical context. Its application cannot universalized as a matter of policy. (Ex. "Had the nascent state of Israel opted for a "soft power" approach to being invaded by several Arab states in 1948, the Jews would have been driven into the sea in a mass slaughter.)

   Likewise, says Weigel, we must recognize that "law is not self-vindicating or self-enforcing":

   To juxtapose an undefined "law of force" over against the "force of law" in an absolute antinomy seems unsatisfactory, empirically and morally. All law, of whatever sort, ultimately requires the sanction of enforcement if "law" is to mean anything other than a vague expression of good intentions. This is a perennial feature of the human condition."

   Given the human tendency to "breach the peace," even a world of just and democratically-accountable international institutions as envisioned by John XXIII in Pacem in Terris would have to be backed by proportionate and discriminate armed force. ³
2. The rediscovery of the classical Catholic view of the morally legitimate deployment of armed force -- Contemporary international law and recent Catholic commentary (including the Vatican) have settled on the view that first use of armed force is always bad (a "presumption against violence"), which both Weigel and just war scholar James Turner Johnson has questioned as contrary to the classical Catholic view. ⁴

   According to Weigel: "twenty-first-century Catholic international relations theory is going to have to think about these various uses of armed force in a more nuanced way. This, in turn, requires refining our understanding of 'aggression' and refining the criteria by which the international community and individual states can judge, with moral legitimacy, that aggression is 'underway.'" Case in point:

   During the Iraq War, the president of the American Society of International Law suggested that aggression could reasonably be said to be underway when three conditions had been met: when a state possessed weapons of mass destruction or exhibited clear and convincing evidence of intent to acquire weapons of mass destruction; when grave and systematic human rights abuses in the state in question demonstrated the absence of internal constraints on that state's international behavior; and when the state in question had demonstrated aggressive intent against others in the past. The author suggested that these three criteria set a high threshold for the first use of armed force in the face of aggression, while recognizing that there are risks too great to be countenanced by responsible statesmen. A revitalized Catholic international relations theory would engage this proposal, help to refine it, and indeed open a broader discussion that would include filling in the criteria by which the duty of humanitarian intervention is satisfied by the use of armed force when other remedies fail.

3. A critical evaluation of ontemporary international organizations [such as the United Nations] and their contribution to "the peace of order and to the freedom, justice, and security that are its component parts." The Vatican's intensifying support for the UN has been questioned by Weigel and others in light of the UN's adoption of policies on abortion, family, and the proper response to the AIDS pandemic which run contrary to Catholic moral teaching. With respect to the war in Iraq, Weigel criticizes statements by Vatican officials which imply that the only justifiable use of force is that which is formally sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council:

   What is striking about recent commentary from officials of the Holy See on the Security Council's monopoly of legitimating authority in the matter of using armed force is that it has been asserted, not argued. The sheer fact of the UN system seems to be taken to constitute a new moral reality; states which adhere to the UN Charter are deemed to have forfeited attributes of their sovereignty that the Catholic Church had long recognized as morally legitimate. Perhaps that is the case. But that case has to be made, not assumed. And in arguing the case, certain facts of international public life cannot be denied.

   Weigel elaborates, challenging whether the "international community" has bound itself to the U.N.'s charter and rules concerning the use of force ("Since 1945, 126 out of 189 UN member states have been involved in 291 armed conflicts in which some twenty-two million people have been killed") and why he is reluctant to yield moral authority to the Security Council ("How, for example, is moral legitimacy conferred by the Security Council when three of its permanent members -- China, France, and Russia -- formulate their foreign policies on explicitly realpolitik grounds that have little or nothing to do with moral reasoning about world politics as the Catholic Church understands it?").

   No other global institution is as likely to bring the skills of moral reasoning to bear on the task of international organizational reform as the Catholic Church," says Weigel. It would be a tragic lost if the Church were to forsake its potential by granting an "undifferentiated embrace" of the United Nations as it is today.

4. A thorough reexamination of the just war tradition. Given the Church's vocal opposition to the Gulf War and the deposition of Saddam Hussein by the U.S., Weigel again raises the question of whether the Catholic Church's current position on armed force is tatamount to "functional pacifism" -- "a way of thinking that retains the intellectual apparatus of the just war tradition of moral reasoning but that always comes down, at the bottom line, in opposition to the use of armed force." ⁵ As Weigel observes, various statements by the Holy Father and members of the Vatican Curia can be marshalled for or against this interpretation, calling for greater clarification of where the Church stands with respect to armed force.

   Several of the "priority issues" I have been discussing here bear on the reexamination of just war thinking for the post-Cold War world: the question of what constitutes "aggression underway" (which bears on the classic just war criteria of "just cause" and "last resort"); the moral status of the UN system (which touches the just war criterion of "proper authority"). Another reality of the contemporary world with which a reexamined and refined just war tradition would have to wrestle is the fact that precision-guided munitions and other forms of high-tech weaponry now make it more likely that a responsible country can use military force in ways that satisfy the in bello just war criteria of no-more-force-than-necessary and noncombatant immunity. Refining Catholic thinking on these questions is essential to the revitalization of Catholic international relations theory.

   It is with some amusement that I read that Weigel's article is an adaptation of "the twenty-sixth annual Thomas Merton Lecture delivered at Columbia University," given Thomas Merton's own pacifistic leanings and vehement denunciation of the U.S. military. Weigel's article is a good condensation of his earlier writings on these issues, and presents a good case for what the Church has to offer to the world; let us hope his call for the "revitalization of Catholic international relations theory" will not go unheeded.

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1. Given it's comprehensive subject matter, this summary is cross-posted to both my "Catholic Just War" and "Religion & Liberty" blogs.
2. As chronicled in Weigel's book The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism
3. See "Force of law, law of force ". The Catholic Difference. Publication Date: April 30, 2003
4. See "Moral Clarity in Time of War", First Things 128 (January 2003): 20-2; "Using Military Force Against the Saddam Hussein Regime: the Moral Issues", James Turner Johnson. Foreign Policy Research Institute December 4, 2002. I previously blogged on Weigel and Johnson's questioning of the "presumption against war" on Dec. 6, 2003.
5. See my post "Pacifism and the end of the Just War Tradition", Nov. 30, 2003.