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The Police in the Temple: Order, Justice and the UN- A Dialectical View
II
The two great problems for international thought have related, in their most abstract formulation, to the conditions of order and the possibility of justice among States.17 The problem of order is about how to establish and maintain effective authority among States that recognize no secular superior or common values - in conditions of `anarchy' as political theorists like to put it.18 This seems, at first glance, to be a purely causal-technical problem and has been so treated by much `realist' political theory from Machiavelli and Hobbes onwards: power and its derivatives - fear and force - become the conditions sine qua non for its resolution.
The problem of justice has to do with the relationship of order with normative standards. Such standards are sometimes classified as political, sometimes legal, and people disagree about such (and other) classifications.19 But the point is that they are external to the fact of power and claim to provide a measure for its acceptability and, at least implicitly, a programme for transformation. So described, justice is a purely normative phenomenon, by definition independent from the factual world for which it provides an evaluation.
The contrast (or indeed tension) between solutions to the two problems structures international thought and is present in the controversy about the Security Council. Hard approaches stressing the primacy of the order-problem (the Council's capacity to police its commands) conflict with soft approaches emphasizing the foundational character of justice (the need to assess the sanctity of its commands in the Temple of Justice). Though labels such as `realism' and `idealism' seem both tendentious and old-fashioned, the fact remains that as a matter of psychological orientation or literary genre, `policing' approaches conflict with `Temple' ones in any discussion of international issues - including the competence of UN bodies.
This persistence of the dichotomy may seem surprising inasmuch as it has long been clear that the two problems cannot be treated in abstraction from each other. Machiavelli conceded it to be an indispensable condition of an effective order that it enjoy what sociologists (shunning directly normative statements) nowadays call legitimacy. An illegitimate order is an unstable order. This argument is internal. It pays no regard to the pedigree of legitimacy: a `feeling' of legitimacy induced by ignorance or manipulation is as good in supporting existing order as legitimacy based on critical reflection. In a corresponding manner, the complete absence of social institutions makes it impossible to realize standards of justice. Among people and States - unlike among angels - institutions are needed to undertake the distributive and retributive tasks that justice calls for. This argument, too, is internal: it looks at social institutions from the perspective of an anterior conception of justice.
Sophisticated contemporary legal and political theory concedes the interdependence of the problems of order and justice. The modern policy-maker or lawyer is neither a (pure) Hobbesian realist nor a (pure) Rousseauian utopian.20 Today, everybody is a suave (Grotian) eclectic.21 We readily recognize that a single-minded pursuit of order will create self-destructive politics. The Nazi order may have been optimally effective; but this could only be so at the cost of the tremendous injustice of its institutions which finally accounted for its breakdown. A single-minded pursuit of justice in secular conditions, failing to pay regard to the effectiveness of (existing or proposed) institutions degenerates into utopian politics that will sooner or later lead to anarchy or dictatorship.
However, such eclecticism works from within the dichotomy between `police' and `Temple'. The relationship between order and justice is conceptualized as internal to the chosen approach, or instrumental: justice as a means to uphold order, order as a means to realize justice. It fails to pay regard to the external relationship between the two, the extent to which both are constitutive of each other.
The very need for and definition of order are normative statements in their own right: conceptualizing `order' in terms of stability, peace, or the `securing of the elementary needs of the relevant group'22 creates an axiological system with a normative premise. So does the definition of the basic units (States, say) or the basic concepts describing their relations (sovereignty, say). The causal-technical world of power emerges from a normative description.23 But conversely, in the absence of natural justice (or at least of our capacity to know it), social norms emerge from the activity of social institutions. Customs, kings and parliaments make laws. Though these laws are sometimes unjust, and we recognize them as such, as Max Weber well knew, in a general sense our ideas about right and wrong emerge from the factual a priori that is constituted by our existing social (economic, cultural, religious, etc.) institutions.
The failure of modern internationalism to grasp the external dependence between order and justice means that its proposed reforms have normally been tilted in favour of solving one or the other problem24 - while of course stressing the need to take account of its counterpart. Such thought, already initially out of balance, is constantly in danger of sliding into supporting what could be called cynic or utopian tyranny.
Cynic tyranny emerges when the system is tilted in favour of the problem of order and encapsulates justice only through an internal, instrumental relationship, i.e. by seeing justice as a (perhaps necessary) means towards order. It is a strategy of paying lip service to normative standards while constantly adjusting them in response to the daily requirements of the order's maximal effectiveness. Under such conditions, the distinction between normative beliefs created through manipulation and false consciousness on the one hand, and uncoerced consent on the other, disappears or cannot find institutional expression. Cynic tyranny emerges not only when no attention is paid to the acceptability of power but also (and more dangerously) when the Temple becomes a vehicle for buttressing the police.
The danger of utopian tyranny again, emerges when a society's institutions and its management problems are seen from the perspective of one normative belief. It is premised on the authentic character of an underlying normative world. Its political programme seeks to reformulate social institutions (`superstructure') - including the State and the states-system - to correspond to that foundation. In conditions of agnosticism (in today's diplomatic discourse) utopian tyranny realizes itself through a general degeneration of the Temple into preaching extremism, fundamentalism, nationalism, xenophobia, etc.25
In practice, it may be difficult to distinguish between cynic and utopian tyranny. We have seen sufficiently often that what starts out as a demand for authentic (utopian) justice may transform into cynic tyranny. And though perhaps empirically more difficult to ascertain, the psychological process whereby a cynic tyrant at some point starts authentically to believe in his own manipulations is not impossible to envisage.
The point here is that if we conceive of the relation between social order and social justice only from the internal perspective, we fail to create (indeed, even to conceive) institutions that merit political support. Having the system tilt one way or the other may be even more unacceptable than merely staying within the (pre-modern) antagonism of hard and soft, realism and utopia. For unlike the tyrant sans peur et sans reproche, the cynic tyrant is able to buttress the edifice of his rule with a string of marvellous temples while the utopian tyrant has all the sophistication of the modern security police to carry out his work of ideological (and sometimes physical) purification - dangers catastrophically realized in the unholy alliance of modernity and the holocaust.26
17 These are problems that take the existence of a states-society for granted and seek reform within it. For cosmopolitan movements that hope to replace States with other political subjects (such as `mankind'), the problems look different.
18 Cf. e.g. S. Hoffmann, `Is there an International Order?', in Janus and Minerva. Essays in the Theory and Practice of International Politics (1987) 85.
19 One classification is by T.M. Franck for whom justice, legitimacy and legality provide three related but separate standards from which to appreciate the functioning of international institutions. Cf. his The Power of Legitimacy Among States (1990).
20 As Martin Wight famously argued, the correct division is into three: those who stress the predominance of the facts of State power (realists), those who reject the state-centred model and emphasize the foundational character of a human community (revolutionaries) and the `rationalists' or `Grotians' trying to work out diplomatic and economic structures to bind States into a coordinative society. Cf. M. Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions (1991). Cf. also Yost, `Political Philosophy and the Theory of International Relations', 70 International Affairs (1994) 263-290.
21 Cf. also the discussion in Koskenniemi, supra note 13, at 2-8, 131-191.
22 H. Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (1977).
23 On these arguments, cf. generally C. Brown, International Relations Theory. New Normative Approaches (1992) and for an incisive recent summary Frost, `The Role of Normative Theory in International Relations', 23 Millennium (1994) 109-119. For a delightful general argument to this effect, cf. MacIntyre, `The Indispensability of Political Theory', in D. Miller, L. Seidentorp (eds), The Nature of Political Theory (1983) 17-33.
24 But there is no equivalence: `the quest for order in international affairs comes before that of justice', Hoffmann, supra note 17, at 118.
25 On this theme, cf. also my `National Self-Determination Today: Problems of Legal Theory and Practice', 43 ICLQ (1994) 241-269 and `The Wonderful Artificiality of States', ASIL Proceedings 1994 (1995) 22-29.
26 Cf. Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (1991).
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