God and International Relations: Christian Theology and World Politics 9781501301452, 9781441138668

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In appreciation of Professor Vilho Harle, for telling me how difficult it would be. The modern man is in general, even with the best will, unable to give religious ideas a significance for culture and national character which they deserve. —Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904.

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Let me begin this book by telling a brief story about what brought me to write it in the first place. While this may not be a highly original way of so doing, it does introduce the academic context where, when, and why most of the central ideas of the present study were conceived. I am not sure if I ever had much ambition to make the world a better place when I pursued my studies in International Relations (henceforth IR). If there was, my altruism never let go of opportunism, hope of an international career or something. Rather soon after getting a grasp what it meant to study IR as a discipline of science, I began having doubts about the enterprise. This was in the late 1990s: about the time when “critical” and “dissident” appeared in titles of articles and books with increasing frequency, and my mentors had no problems introducing me to this kind of literature and encouraging me to think things anew. Being a junior academic I was careful to let my doubts loose at first, but becoming a postgraduate and finding a community of like-minded colleagues helped me to hold on to them and see where they were leading me.1 The question of the age was whether or not IR was really a scientific discipline studying international politics from an objective point of view, or rather a cunning way of doing international politics and serving the purposes of power. This is still a relevant question by the way. To me there seemed to be two sorts of people involved in IR. The first sort was the “serious” mainstream, who employed the tools of empirically oriented social science to study the ongoings of world politics. These were people who swallowed the political premises of the worldview of the day and looked for ways to serve purposes of power within that worldview.2 While most of them identified themselves realists of some description, students of “hard” facts and makers of “cold” conclusions, they always seemed like idealists to me. What I mean by this is that they really seemed to believe that world was not entirely unlike a colored map or a billiard table, and that it made sense to make hypotheses and construct theories on such metaphorical models. I could not get my head around

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the fact that some of them had math in their papers! It is my understanding that most of the IR-community in the United States falls into this category even today. Then there was a more limited group of people, the critical “sideshow” of serious IR, who had issues with most of what the mainstream held dear. They were Marxists, criticals, dissidents, “posties,” call them what you will. Most of them brought our own philosophies and worldviews with them, but shared a political concern over the state-of-the-art of IR. They slipped in a couple of panels under the door of the International Studies Association’s annual conference every year—if there was a roundtable on some topical issue, one of them was included just to make it look the “criticals” had a part to play, whatever it was. I belonged to this group, I suppose, as did most of my closest colleagues in Finland and in the United Kingdom. What bothered me most within the state-of-the-art was its proprietary political subject. IRs was a “reality” where 200-or-so imaginary group persons—states is what we call them—live in an imagined state of society. The globe and humanity are, as it were, cut up among these beings and delineated with imaginary lines. Though they have a highly developed and exceedingly institutionalized symbolism at their disposal, no-one has ever actually seen a state, witnessed the existence of a single one. Yet it is absolutely necessary for every living person in the world today to believe that states exist, and relate to the existence of their state in a manner of obedience. With very few exceptions every child born on our planet is subjected under the sovereignty of a state, depending either on the location in which they were born or the nationality of their parents. For many a child this is one of the most important decisions made on their behalf—for some it may become a question of life or death. And again: states are not really real, but imaginary entities we must believe to see. I will write more about this in the following chapter. I think it dawned on me when I was teaching one of my first political theory tutorials: whatever IR is or is made to be, it is certainly much closer to theological speculation than theoretical explanation. I maintain this view and this is basically what this book is about. It began to grow from seeds of doubt planted by questions like these: What would happen if everybody suddenly stopped believing that there existed a thing or a being called a state? Would all the states in the world disappear that instant? What would a world without states be like? These questions questioned the ontology of IR—International Relations—which is metaphysically married, so to speak, to the political entity of the state.

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The turn of the century was a time when religion surfaced on IR’s research agenda—to extend the metaphor: it popped up like a cork on the surface. The violent break-up of the state of Yugoslavia contributed to this, inasmuch it showed the world that religious faith could, given chance, be just as potential political force as nationalist sentiment and lead to yet another holocaust on the European “continent.” The chain of events which began in the United States on September 11, 2001 and continues today mainly outside America guarantees that religious fundamentalism will remain on the global political agenda for the foreseeable future. The focus of my work is, however, neither on Jihad nor “War on Terror.” I am interested in the world we identify as international relations, the IR that studies this world, and their religiosity. This is to say: rather than appropriating religion as a phenomenon of the world political or assigning it as an object of study for IR, I will further problematize the secular image both this world and the discipline that studies it represent. Since these “events,” IR has put in a lot of effort to come up with something (see e.g. Fox 2001; Fox and Sandler 2004; Thomas 2005; Hanson 2006) to explain the meaning and significance of religion in contemporary international relations. Despite, as Daniel Philpott argues in a recent review of religion in the study of world politics, “it remains the case that religion’s place in political science scholarship is vastly underproportioned to its place in headlines around the globe, and to scholarship in political economy, security studies, international institutions, and the like” (Philpott 2009, 184). While all this is a valuable body of work, and I am aware there is more to come, the problem with most of the current scholarship is the fact that it is striving to grasp religion in IR’s terms: its ontological and epistemological presuppositions, its concepts and theories. While all this can be an interesting and useful undertaking to an extent, most of it presumes a secular worldview that does not have a leg to stand on. I will come back to this argument later on, but some of the questions I will ask and attempt to answer in this book are: What if it is not the Christianity or Islam IR needs to come to terms with, but itself as a religion and its own “religiosity”? If we accepted this analogy, recognized that identity, what would it make our politicians and diplomats? Our political scientists? Could a slight change of intellectual perspective completely transform the way we look at and act in the world political? Or would it make us ever more aware of the fatal shortcomings of this perspective? These are crucial questions which have not yet been asked in the present state-of-the-art.

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William E. Connolly touches the heart of the matter discussing the problem of evil in his Identity/Difference. To live is to suffer—in theology this frame of experience is known as the problem of evil and discussed under theodicy. Before suffering becomes an evil there must be someone or something responsible for it and the laying of the blame, so to speak, is predominantly a political matter. Sometimes, not often in this day and age, this politicization of suffering takes the form of a theistic discourse, which locates the origin of evil on the negative side of, say, a Christian worldview. A Christian can excuse most of the world’s hardship, violence, and pain by Adam’s fall and mankind’s consequent rebellion against its creator—the key here is patience, as all will be mended in good time. Much more often responsibility for evil is located in non-Christian, “secular” terms: there is much suffering in the world and someone here, now is responsible. Even so, as Connolly notes, “some secular doctrines, cutting off the god of theism at the head, retain too much of its body in the ideals of identity, responsibility, and difference that they pursue” (Connolly 1991, 2). This is to say that even though we like to think that contemporary world politics is primarily a secular sphere of thought and action, the political philosophies and theories underlying our contemporary political identities have been constructed “out of the debris of broken theologies” (ibid.). While in political theory search for the debris is well underway (see e.g. Gentile 2006), very few scholars in IR have shown interest in looking for theology in the state of their art. R. B. J. Walker did write in his Inside/Outside that the theory of international relations built on the doctrine of state sovereignty “can be read as a very elegant specifically modern resolution of [. . .] philosophical problems that had once received a more theological treatment” (Walker 1995, 320). According to Walker (ibid., 314–15), IR is a theological discourse of “eternity” despite the extent to which it has been and is being framed in the secular terms of the Enlightenment. Another notable exception is Vendulka Kubalkova, who brings the study of IR and religion together with her notion of International Political Theology (IPT) that involves “the systematic study of discourses and relations amongst them concerning world affairs that search for—or claim to have found—a response, transcendental or secular, to the human need for meaning” (Kubalkova 2000, 676–7). While I address this book to the field of academic IR, the premises of my argument are in continental political theory. I see this work as a sort of a pilgrimage. I was trained in IR and am most familiar with the field, its history, and current developments. Over my short career as a

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social scientist I have worked in different universities, in Finland and the United Kingdom, and done a fair share of interdisciplinary work, in research as well as in teaching. Even though my experiences are limited I have noticed a pattern I find, for a lack of a better term, curious: it is always the IR-people that are most keen to maintain their disciplinary identity and to guard the orthodoxy of its teaching. I can imagine other reasons for such protectionism, but the one that comes first to my mind is that more doubtful you are of the foundations of your art less likely you want other people tampering with them. Thinking about these things I heard Carl Schmitt’s argument on the secularization of theological concepts—I had read his Politische Theologie while working on my master’s thesis and never really got over the experience—nagging for attention. Having said that I have to admit Schmitt himself did not make much of the argument: there were no premises, just a conclusion which declares that the most important political and juridical concepts are secularized theological concepts. Even though it was little more than a provocation, I could not help wondering: what if he was right? IR is not a natural science or a branch of mathematics, and like all the other social “sciences”—I will explain the apostrophes in the following paragraph—it has had to abandon the idea of a single, universal rationality introduced to us by the Enlightenment philosophes. What we have had to yield to in our IR, some of us more eagerly than others, is an ingredient of social construction mediated by different and sometimes even contradicting traditions of rationality. Since being established as an academic discipline between the World Wars, and especially over the last 20 years or so, IR has been very busy coming up with a variety of modes to temper the ingredient of social construction and has often come back to take another look at its ontological and epistemological assumptions in its attempt to understand the world and comprehending its politics. This book takes yet another look and attempts to make explicit that IR demands a mode of inquiry that is closer to theology than it might want to admit. I am very doubtful about IR as an enterprise and firmly believe its foundations need a good tampering. If people somewhere have even the slightest impression that this project of ours is serious science—serious as in labcoats, hadron colliders, and cure for cancer—then it is our responsibility to be quite clear that what we do is far far from it. Before coming up with one students of international politics need to take a good look at some of their presuppositions and reflect on the politics of studying international politics.

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This book is also an attempt to consider—or indeed reconsider— international politics with the premise that “the world” is not all there is to it: that there is a God whose existence is relevant to the life of individuals, their communities, and the conditions they accommodate. I well understand that this is not a conventional ontological position in IR and writing a book carrying it along may raise some eyebrows and a number of questions. Has not science disproved the existence of God? Has it not proved that the human being is a species undergoing evolution and not, as Christianity claims, created by God in his image? Is it not belief in God, or “religion” itself, that largely explains many of the political problems in the history of our world and at the heart of those of contemporary international politics? The first of these questions is easy to answer—the last one will be addressed in the concluding chapter. Science has not disproved God. This is an idea that has been around for some centuries now, but most recently been popularized by the so-called new atheists: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens to name a few among them. Their accomplishments are many, but among them is no empirical evidence or scientific proof that falsifies the existence of God, but merely highly profitable promotion of a system of belief of their own: that God does not exist. These questions rest on a dichotomy of science apart from religion: IR is a scientific discipline that studies facts and employs the scientific method, whereas God is a belief we may or may not hold, but one that lies outside the circle of science, being a subject of theological speculation or something calling for a psychological or anthropological explanation. This is, as the Oxford Professor of mathematics John C. Lennox (2009, ch. 2) has shown, a simple category mistake: that science is a thing that deals with reality and religion is something else altogether. There is no inconsistency involved between doing committed and rigorous science while simultaneously recognizing the fact that science can not answer every kind of question, among them some of the deepest questions human beings can ask: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why did the universe come into being? What is the meaning of human existence? What happens after we die? I have accomplished what I set out to do with this book if the reader, having given me a chance to present my case, comes to contemplate three things: 1. The political potential of symbolism. We are surrounded by symbols of a myriad kind: corporate logos on packages, traffic signs on the

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roadside, application icons on our computer desktop, and so on. There are also symbols we do not immediately recognize as such if we do not come to think of them as symbols. Some symbols have political functions and are of particular interest to those who study politics as a phenomenon, but just as well to everyone else: since personal became political one can no longer stand outside “the political.” States are conglomerates of political symbols: they have flags, songs, representatives, offices, buildings, soldiers, weapons, and ammo—almost inexhaustible amount of “signs” that point to the state-hood of a particular national state. In the following chapter I will introduce a historically important form of symbolism or a mode of representation of the state, which is the state as a person with a body. Carl Schmitt’s political theology provides an argument from which I will attempt to locate the origins of the symbol, thread of it a historical tradition, and also flesh out—pun intended—conceptual and theoretical substance to the idea of a corporeal, personal state. In the third chapter I will extend this discussion to academic IR: its historical and current debates. This will lead the reader to contemplate the following: 2. International relations is a religion and the state is its god. What this makes IR-the-discipline is a theology of sorts, hiding under the canopy of secular social science. This argument derives from Schmitt’s political theology and secularization of theological symbolism (issues I discuss in the following chapter) and a definition of religion as a systematic anthropomorphism, that is application of humanlike models to nonhuman phenomenon (which will be laid out in the third chapter). From its interwar beginnings IR has elaborated on a political worldview, recycling the classical symbols of the state, where the state is a person with a body and international society is a community of such political “people.” This is the state-of-the-art today and it is difficult, if not impossible, for the academic as well as for the layman, to imagine and communicate world politics in any other terms. This is exactly what makes the political imagination of IR religious: that the “gods” it worships—that is national states—are central in its worldview. The problem with this is the following: 3. States do not hold within themselves the solution to the problems of contemporary world politics, but instead are one of its problems in themselves. National states were conceived as territorial solution to end religious war—so the story goes—between some European states by instituting the principle of cuius regio eius religio. This is a controversial historical narrative, which I will come back to in the beginning of the third chapter,

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but the myth of the state as a “peacemaker” lingers on despite glaring historical and ongoing evidence to the contrary. According to the classical account of state sovereignty we have surrendered our right of self-protection to our state on the condition that they protect us at home and abroad. While there are states that do something to this effect, there are many that do not, and an alarming number of states that do anything but protect their (or anyone else’s) citizens. What all this adds up to is an ethical paradox I will make discernible in the fourth chapter, which is essentially a reading of the political theology of the Millennium Declaration composed and signed under the auspices of The United Nations in the year 2000. I am not claiming originality with my argument(s). All of this and much more has already been said, years ago. What this book does is bring ideas together, give credit to the thinkers behind the ideas, articulate them in terms of the IR-tradition, and make some connections in between. The aim of the whole exercise is criticism pure and simple: criticism of the state of academic IR. It is a call to humility before a world that expects and often takes heed of our expert analysis and opinion. There are many angles one can go about doing this, but the one I am taking is that inspired by political theology, which begins from but is not limited to Schmitt. What I will do in the inside chapters is make excursions into some issues, which I think are central when we think about God and IR. I have written my excursions with the literary form of commentary in mind: presenting a contemporary idea or debate and working backwards from there, attempting to illuminate what is often concealed or left in the shadows in conventional discourse. This book is not a systematic treatment of either of these conjunctions: God and IR or Christianity and world politics. More exhaustive reflections on these issues are subjects of future scholarship, but they may be able to tap into some of the connections made in this study. Every author also has a personal context and I would like to make explicit some details of mine that may be relevant to what follows. First: I believe in the God of Christianity. Mine is a Lutheran congregation, but I am not picky about creeds: C. S. Lewis’ “mere Christianity”3 is, at the same time, particular and general enough description of my faith. Secondly: I must apologize for my lack of expertise in other religions apart from Christianity. This is the reason why the God addressed in this book is that of Christianity and majority of theology discussed belongs to the Reformed Christian tradition. Thirdly: I am Finnish

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and often find myself using the national state of Finland as example to illuminate something conceptual and/or theoretical. Reading my examples I do not think the reader will find it too difficult to substitute Finland with, say, any other member state of the European Union or, with some modifications, any state in the “Western” world. I can imagine it may be a lot trickier when one begins to think about the states we “Westerners” have exported beyond the limits of this world of our making. *

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It is well nigh impossible to name all those people who have contributed to what follows. I have been helped out, in one way or another, by so many colleagues in so many seminars and conferences over the last five years or so it has taken me to work out what to do in this book. In collecting and compiling the bits and pieces into the form of a monograph over the last year or two I recognize my debt and express my gratitude to Julian Reid and his Governing Life Globally—research project funded by the Academy of Finland. I have benefited a lot from my discussions with Ira Chernus, Vendulka Kubalkova, Aini Linjakumpu, Péter Losonczi, Sergei Prozorov, Michael J. Shapiro, and Aakash Singh. Everyone else who feel they have contributed to this book or the thoughts it attempts to think out aloud, I offer this: I am deeply grateful and hope to be able to pay, one day, my intellectual debts back in full. And of course: deepest thanks to all my colleagues at the University of Lapland and my wonderful family. I have been blessed with the job of my dreams and a home I always love to return to at the end of the day. I would also like to express gratitude to the thoracic surgeon Martti Lepojarvi, cardiologist Heikki Miettinen, and everyone else who took such good care of me when I was ill—without you there would not be a book about God and International Relations. Furthermore: the arguments that follow have been reviewed, revised, and rejected by at least 20 anonymous referees over the years and I am grateful to every single one for their benevolent effort to assess and improve my work. I am especially thankful to the boost in motivation given by one, whose feedback to my argument on IR being a religion boiled down to this: [T]he authors claim that this point has not been properly made in IR “at least not in these terms”. If this is true, then I suggest that all academic IR departments should be closed, the professors fired, the

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students sent home and their tuition fees returned. Indeed, if this is true then someone somewhere is not doing their job properly. In my opinion this suggestion reflects an intellectual disposition before which IR needs to take a few steps back, so to speak, and give some serious thought to its mission in the world before someone somewhere figures us out and starts doing their job properly.

Notes 1

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Professor David Campbell’s reading group at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne made what in today’s parlance might be called a “cell” of critical thought, and I was privileged to participate in its sessions during 1999–2002. I use the term worldview as it has been defined by James W. Sire as “a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic makeup of our world” (Sire 2004a, 19). In the following chapter I will introduce two political worldviews: one based on the relative order of international relations and the other on the absolute order of God. I essentially agree with Lewis’ assessment that “the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbours was to explain and defend the belief that has become common to nearly all Christians at all times” (Lewis 2003, VIII).

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Chapter 1

Secularization of Theological Concepts

According to Oliver O’Donovan (1996, 4), the modern use of the term political theology is generally held to begin with Carl Schmitt’s Politische Theologie published in 1922.1 Schmitt is widely known these days; no reason for me to go into his life and the controversy there.2 Over the last few decades Schmitt-scholarship has grown massive as a new generation of political and legal theorists have found to his work now widely available in translation. Schmitt’s significance to contemporary IR theory was a topic of a recent anthology titled The International Thought of Carl Schmitt (Odysseos and Petito 2007). Most of the attention there is paid on Schmitt’s interwar The Concept of the Political and the postwar The Nomos of the Earth; both highly relevant texts, of course, that address many of the international issues of our neo-Schmittean moment. There are (at least) two other texts the theorists of IR should, in my opinion, give a read: the 1922 Political Theology, and the 1970 Political Theology II.3 What I am offering here is a reading of Schmitt that aims to make political theology— “the explicit attempt to relate discourse about God to the organization of bodies in space time,” as it is defined by Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh (2004) in their Companion to Political Theology—momentous for IR today. The crux of my reading is the metaphysical image that, for Schmitt, connects the political to the theological, making the presence of the latter endemic in the former. In Political Theology Schmitt declares that “[a]ll significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development [. . .] but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts” (Schmitt 1985, 36). Schmitt does not provide us with a definitive list of concepts in this manner secularized, only a few ideas—“the omnipotent God [has become] the omnipotent lawgiver” and “the exception in jurisprudence is analoguous to the miracle in theology” (Schmitt 1985, 36)—and some fleeting

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references to continental legal theory. What Schmitt is trying to make out of these bits and pieces is an approach he calls the “sociology of concepts,” the task of which is to trace legal and political ideas to their metaphysical and theological roots and look for structural similarities between conceptual systems across historical “epochs” (ibid., 45). What he does with his sociology of concepts becomes a very interesting analysis of the concept of state sovereignty, which, for Schmitt, shares a “spiritual but at the same time substantial” identity with belief in God: In the theory of the state of the seventeenth century, the monarch is identified with God and has in the state a position exactly analogous to that attributed to God in the Cartesian system of the world [. . .] A continuous thread runs through the metaphysical, political and sociological conceptions that postulate the sovereign as a personal unit and primeval creator. (Schmitt 1985, 46–7) The systematic structure inherited from Christian theology serves a secular purpose, Schmitt clarifies in his 1923 essay Roman Catholicism and Political Form, because “[n]o political system can survive even a generation with only naked techniques of holding power. To the political belongs the idea, because there is no politics without authority and no authority without an ethos of belief” (Schmitt 1996b, 17). The idea of representation is, Schmitt argues, “completely governed by conceptions of personal authority” (ibid.). On this symbolic premise Schmitt elaborates his well-known definition of the sovereign as the person who decides on the exception (Schmitt 1985, 5; see also Hirst 1987). There is an emphasis on the person here, because Schmitt argues that “[t]o represent in an eminent sense can only be done by a person, that is, not simply a ‘deputy’ but an authoritative person or an idea which, if represented, also becomes personified” (Schmitt 1996b, 21). Representation invests the representative person with dignity, because “the representative of a noble value cannot be without value” (ibid.). God, “the people” in democratic ideology, or abstract ideas like freedom and equality can all constitute a representation. Representation is, thus, a discourse, but it is not a political discourse in the Schmittean sense: one that aims to make the friend/enemy distinction. As he (Schmitt 2008a, 239) teaches in his 1928 Constitutional Theory, representative discourse does not divide but unites a people politically. Representation takes place in the public sphere and renders concrete the spiritual principle of political existence: “to make an invisible being visible and present

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through a publicly present one” and conceiving “a type of being that is higher, further enhanced, and more intense in comparison to the natural existence of some human group living together” (ibid., 243). Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty is Hobbesian through and through.4 The extent to which he was influenced by Thomas Hobbes’ thought and his symbolism is revealed in Schmitt’s 1938 essay on Leviathan. “In the long history of political theories,” Schmitt (1996a, 5) writes, “a history exceedingly rich in colorful images and symbols, icons and idols, paradigms and phantasms, emblems and allegories, this leviathan is the strongest and most powerful image.” Schmitt backs his argument with an impressive history of an idea behind the copper-plate engraving on the title page of the 1651 English edition of Leviathan: “a gigantic man, composed of innumerable midgets, holding in his right hand a sword and in the left one a crosier, guarding a peaceful city” (Schmitt 1996a, 18). Above the figure of the gigantic man a biblical motto: “On earth there is not his like, a creature without fear” (Job 41.33 ESV). The starting point of Hobbes’ construction of the state is fear: state of nature drives anguished individuals to come together, rally behind the strongest party. A sovereign is a representative person or a corporation that comes into being by way of a covenant between individuals: I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition; that thou give up, thy right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a commonwealth; in Latin, CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great leviathan, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence. For by this authority, given him by every particular man in the Commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him that, by terror thereof, he is enabled to form the wills of them all, to peace at home, and mutual aid against their enemies abroad. (Hobbes 1996, pt. 2, ch. xviii, capitals in original) The crux of this covenant is its personalism: that it is made with “this man” or “this assembly of men.” (Let us keep the term covenant in mind, because I will return to it in Chapter 4.) Schmitt argues that when we give up our right to govern ourselves it is absolutely necessary that we give it to someone—a person in the actual or corporeal sense of the term—who then uses it for our protection at home and abroad. What

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Schmitt in fact does is decontextualize sovereign subjectivity as it was imagined by Hobbes: Whether God alone is sovereign, that is, the one who acts as his acknowledged representative on earth, or the emperor, or prince, or the people, meaning those who identify themselves directly with the people, the question is always aimed at the subject of sovereignty, at the application of the concept to a concrete situation[:] Who is supposed to have unlimited power? (Schmitt 1985, 10) This is concrete sovereignty: the highest, legally independent, underived power that radiates from an authoritative person, or something authoritative personified, within a state, in every state. What Schmitt refuses to accept is any attempt to substitute a person with something else, a legal abstraction or a political theory perhaps. We need someone, a “god” mortal or immortal, to assume authority over matters which are not dictated by law. Abstractions and theories can do little against the enemy (Schmitt 1985, 16–35). Schmitt’s vitriol is in self-defense. The second essay in Political Theology is a defense of concrete sovereignty against precisely such theories and abstractions. Schmitt singles out “association theory” and monistic jurisprudence as the embodiments of his antithesis, but what he is criticizing is the early-twentieth-century liberal notion of a modern state. Most of Schmitt’s polemic is set against Hugo Krabbe and Hans Kelsen. In his The Modern Idea of the State Krabbe absolutely opposed the doctrine of sovereignty; the idea that political authority is a person standing outside the law. Krabbe argued that the term belonged to a political theory of the absolutist era, whereas in the Rechtsstaat positive law has superseded the sovereign claim to unconditional obedience. For Krabbe the authority of the state was nothing other than the impersonal authority of the law: “[h]ence there is only one ruling power, the power of law” (Krabbe 1922, 2). This was the revelation of the modern idea of the state: We no longer live under the dominion of persons, either natural persons or fictitious legal persons, but under the dominion of norms, of spiritual forces. [. . .] The old foundation which heretofore had mainly supported the life of the community, the personal authority of the sovereign, has been compelled to give place (or at least is more and more giving place) to another foundation which is derived from the spiritual nature of mankind. [. . .] These forces rule in the strictest sense of the

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word. Obedience can be freely rendered to these forces, for the very reason that they do proceed from the spiritual nature of mankind. (Krabbe 1922, 8–9) Unfortunately, for Krabbe I suppose, political theory had not kept up with the modern idea of the state, but persistently clung to the “old” idea of sovereignty. It was difficult to dissociate from the conception of power that was supported by centuries of tradition and a highly elaborate symbolism adapted to this conception. This is also what Hans Kelsen’s “pure jurisprudence” was about: de-personalization of the concept of sovereignty. Kelsen identified the state with its legal order and deprived sovereignty of all relevancy to any person, physical or corporate. State was a normative order, and the idea of a person-hood of the state could only symbolize this order, if it was needed at all. Indeed, after World War II, Kelsen relegated the idea to the historical and ideological domain of totalitarianism: Political absolutism [has] a political theory at its disposal which describes the state as an absolute entity existing independently of its subjects. According to this theory, the state is not merely a group of individuals; it is more than the sum-total of its subjects. It is a collective, and that means here a super-individual, body which is even more real than its members, a mystic organism and as such a supreme and super-human authority, whose visible representative or incarnation is the ruler, whether he be called the monarch, Fuhrer or Generalissimo. It is the concept of sovereignty serving the purpose of this deification of the state which implies the worship of the ruler as a god-like being. (Kelsen 1948, 909–10) Kelsen agreed with Schmitt in that the image of the person-hood of the state had a religious origin, but argued that this image had antiquated along with medieval theology and that democratic legalism no longer needed deification. Here is the chasm between Kelsen and Schmitt. For Schmitt the key for understanding Hobbes’ concrete sovereignty is in the biblical origin of the Leviathan metaphor: that it illustrates, by means of Job’s sea monster, the strongest temporal power to keep all the weaker ones in check (Schmitt 1996a, 17–26). To be sovereign is to be deus mortalis: a “Mortal God, to which we owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence” (Hobbes 1996, pt. 2, ch. xvii, emphasis in original). This was

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a logical position to take, for Hobbes as it was for Schmitt, because it is premised on an ontology of violence: without a sovereign authority, absolutely alone and without rival, there will be violence and death. This is what William T. Cavanaugh calls the soteriology of the state: “It is cold fear and need for security, the foundation of both religion and the social contract, that drives humans from their nasty and brutish circumstances and into the arms of Leviathan” (Cavanaugh 2002, 36).

1.1 Symbolism and Beyond In the previous section I discussed a debate concerning the possibility of containing the sovereignty of the state in the symbol of the person. Schmitt argued such a representation was indeed necessary, Kelsen and others were critical. Why such an argument over an image, a metaphor? Is it not more important what the state does than how it appears, what we make it look like? Every practitioner of academic IR who has done semiotic work is at least aware of an attitude, which has a tendency to make itself explicit every now and then, according to which studying international relations from signs—that is language and other forms of symbolism—is of secondary importance to the study the material reality signified by these signs: something “harder,” empirically or otherwise. Such an attitude brushes aside at least a century of semiotic anthropology. According to Umberto Eco culture is essentially signification and communication: “humanity and society exist only when communicative and significative relationships are established” (Eco 1979, 22). Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics argued that the whole of culture should be studied as communicative phenomenon based on signification systems: “[t]his means that not only can culture be studied in this way but [. . .] only by studying it in this way can certain of its fundamental mechanisms be clarified” (ibid.). Peter L. Berger, the sociologist of knowledge, wrote in his The Sacred Canopy that as individuals we make sense of reality and themselves as part of that reality in conversation with others, and maintaining this conversation is one of the most important imperatives of social order (see also Berger and Luckmann 1967). For Berger the human being is incapable of conceiving their experience in a meaningful way unless such a conception is transmitted to him by means of social processes: The individual is socialized to be a designated person and to inhabit a designated world. Subjective identity and subjective reality are

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produced in the same dialectic [. . .] between the individual and those significant others who are in charge of his socialization. (Berger 1990, 16, emphasis in original) This socialization is an ordering of experience, and a meaningful order socially constructed Berger calls nomos—this is an interesting and useful term, and I will pick it up later in this chapter. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue cast further doubts over the attempt to do social science from a strictly materialist perspective. For MacIntyre, being human is essentially a narrative existence: “man in his actions is and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a storytelling animal” (MacIntyre 2007, 216). Human beings are semiotic creatures by nature: we all live out our lives in narratives and likewise narrative is the form we understand the lives of others. Accepting this as premise makes it impossible to study the behavior of human beings without taking account their intentions, beliefs, and the settings in which they “behave.” “And what would be utterly doomed to failure,” MacIntyre writes, “would be the project of a science of, say, political behaviour, detached from a study of intentions, beliefs and settings” (ibid., 208, emphasis in original). I hope this suffices to carry my inquiry into political symbolism beyond reasonable epistemological doubt. I am now going to proceed and define what I mean by the term symbol. My reading of the meaning and use of the term owes a good deal to Paul Tillich’s existential philosophy, Peter L. Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge, Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, and Sallie McFague’s theology.5 Tillich defines symbols as signs that point beyond themselves to something else, but the fundamental difference between symbols and signs is that the latter do not participate in the reality and power of that which they point: “[s]ymbols, although they are not the same as that which they symbolize, participate in its meaning and power” (Tillich 1999, 45). Religious and poetic languages are typically symbolic languages, words like “Christ” and “God” symbols. There are also nonlinguistic symbols like a flag or a crucifix. According to Tillich symbolism opens up levels of reality which otherwise are hidden and cannot be grasped in any other way.6 Religious symbolism does the same thing essentially, but the reality opened by its symbols reaches deeper in the human soul: We can call this the depth dimension of reality itself, the dimension of reality which is the ground of every other dimension and every other depth, and which therefore, is not one level beside the others but is the

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fundamental level, the level below all other levels, the level of being itself, or the ultimate power of being. (Tillich 1999, 49) All other symbols either stand for things that also have an idealized “nonsymbolic” existence, like a flag can symbolize a state, or they are forms giving expression to things that have no empirical existence except in its symbols. This is to say that the nonreligious symbol points to levels of reality which are limited or conditioned, the religious symbol points to the absolutely unconditioned: the properly basic level of reality presupposed by all other levels (Rowe 1968, 132). Discussing the distinction between religious and other symbols Tillich laments that the first step toward secularization was made by religion itself when theologians began to explain symbols standing for the ultimate in literal terms: when they brought ideas of God from the “depths” to the reality of everyday experience. “If the symbol of creation which points to the divine ground of everything is transferred to the horizontal plane,” he argues, “it becomes a story of events in a removed past for which there is no evidence, but which contradicts every piece of scientific evidence” (Tillich 1999, 4). Berger and Luckmann (1967, 43–6) also write about the transcending capacity of symbolic language, identifying it with an ability to bridge different zones of everyday life and “span discrete spheres of reality” (ibid., 40). On the symbolic level linguistic signification attains the maximum detachment from the “here and now” of everyday life, and language soars into regions that are not only de facto but a priori unavailable to everyday experience. Language now constructs immense edifices of symbolic representations that appear to tower over the reality of everyday life like gigantic presences from another world. (Berger and Luckmann 1967, 40, emphasis in original) Religion, philosophy, art, and science, Berger and Luckmann argue, are historically speaking the most important symbolic systems, but symbolism of course extends these fields. Symbols that are conceived as high “above” from here and now can “descend” and over time made into objectively real elements of our day-to-day experiences: “In this manner, symbolism and symbolic language become essential constituents of the reality of everyday life and of the commonsense apprehension of this reality” (Berger and Luckmann 1967, 40–1).

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In his The Symbolism of Evil Ricoeur understands symbol as a gathering together at a single point a mass of significations which, before giving rise to thought, gives rise to speech. Symbolism is fundamental to philosophy as it points to the original unity between humanity and being: Man first reads the sacred on the world, on some elements or aspects of the world, on the heavens, on the sun and moon, on the waters and vegetation. Spoken symbolism thus refers back to manifestations of the sacred, to hierophanies, where the sacred is shown in a fragment of the cosmos, which, in return, loses its concrete limits, gets charged with innumerable meanings, integrates and unifies the greatest possible number of the sectors of anthropocosmic experience. (Ricoeur 1969, 10–1, emphasis in original) According to Ricoeur symbols are signs that aim at something beyond themselves and stand for that something. Contrary to conventional signs, which say only what they want to say in positing the thing(s) they signify, symbols are “opaque” in that the first, obvious meaning itself points to a second meaning which is not otherwise given. It is by “living in” the obvious meaning one is led by it beyond itself. Unlike a comparison, a symbol is “movement of the primary meaning which makes us participate in the latent meaning and thus assimilates us to what is symbolized without our being able to master the similitude intellectually” (Ricoeur 1969, 16). Also unlike allegories, symbols do not attempt to make their meaning fully transparent, but present it “in the opaque transparency of an enigma and not by translation” (ibid.). Metaphorical language is not, however, a mere ingredient in language, because each spoken or written word is in itself a metaphor and language as a whole is a system of metaphors that composes the understanding we have of our world (Beer 2001, 94–5). Perhaps we need an example to make this “discernible.” Take paradise, Garden of Eden: this is a place certainly enigmatic enough to the post-foundational mind. We remember, however, that Genesis conceives and locates the place as follows: And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river flowed out of Eden

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to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. (Gen. 2.8-14) Eden is an exceedingly magnificent location created by God himself: a land where rivers come together, trees are full of fruit, precious minerals aplenty. What we have here is language of fantasy. By reading Genesis we can not establish for a fact that the place actually existed, and if it did, that it was as described. We have not seen the place and these are merely pictures we can choose to believe or doubt. But can you speak of a place like paradise except in pictures? In his theological exposition of the Genesis the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that pictures like this are not lies ridiculing facts of history or geography, but rather kind of signals that enable a meaning of a different kind to shine through. To be sure pictures will vary: paradise is a different place for a child than it is for an adult, for a man and a woman. But, Bonhoeffer argues, “[o]ne way or another, however, they remain true, to the extent that human speech and even speech about abstract ideas can remain true at all” (Bonhoeffer 2004, 81). Take another example: the state of Finland. That most certainly exists, yes? Have you seen it? There is an agreement on a certain territory belonging to it, we have a picture of it drawn on a map, it has a flag and lots of other “Finnish” things, and of course there are more than a 5 million Finns. That is: we have many a thing that symbolizes Finland, filled to the brim with meaning, but do we have Finland? These are all (more or less) tangible pictures of Finland, but none of them exhaustively express what Finland is. Say it was somehow possible to “untie” all the symbols, words, and pictures of Finland: set free everything that signifies the reality of that state accumulated since 1917 (or some time before that) up to this day. This would mean letting the Finnish flag fly away with the wind, but not only that: language, history, political institutions, legal system, armed forces &c. all have symbolic functions and would no longer be peculiarly Finnish. What would be left after getting rid of the whole body of Finnish symbolism? There would be flagpoles planted in backyards, people speaking a

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peculiar language, pompous buildings in downtown Helsinki, plenty of guns and ammo secured in warehouses throughout the country. There would not, however, be anything to tie any of these down to anything, a state or a sovereign. Would a state without symbolism be able to do anything? Would Finland “survive” such a trial? This is the big question: are all the states and nations of the world nothing but aggregates of highly elaborate symbolism? It depends on whether or not there is meaning there, under all the national emblems we just removed, that shines through and can literally be expressed. Like God shines through Eden. Language of symbolism has the quality of both expressing and communicating at the same time. When we use symbols or metaphors we communicate with each other by using terms known to us, but, by setting the familiar in a new context, we can express more than the familiar— this is how we arrive at meaning. McFague writes of the theology of metaphors in her Speaking in Parables and Metaphorical Theology. According to McFague, metaphorical language conveys meaning through the “body of the world”; it is “a mirror of our own constitution: the unity of body and soul, outer and inner, familiar and unfamiliar, known and unknown” (McFague 2007, 15–16). Metaphors communicate meaning by making connections, seeing resemblances, uniting ordinary experiences with the extraordinary. But, McFague emphasizes, the meaning is nowhere literally expressed: we only get at the meaning through the metaphor. Let us go back to the excellent commentary that is Creation and Fall, which originates in lectures Bonhoeffer gave at the University of Berlin in 1932–33: a time of profound discontent in Germany. In the midst of all the social turmoil and political upheaval Bonhoeffer called his students to focus on the word of God as the word of truth in a time of chaos. He writes that when Genesis speaks of God it remains “in the world of pictures, in the world of the magical” (Bonhoeffer 2004, 82) and what is left to the reader is translation of the underlying message therein delivered to the human condition—what it means for us today? We differ from the people who had read the same exegesis and thought in the terms of the worldview of, for example, first century Judea, but, Bonhoeffer-theexistential-evangelical-theologian argues, “we are the same as they were in that [. . .] we can only live through Christ as people who have been lost and, whether in hope or in fulfillment, have been graciously pardoned” (ibid., 83, emphasis in original). What he is saying is that if we want to believe in the Christian God, today, we must let Him address us and our

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worldview. What, then, is the meaning of God that shines through the story of paradise? The tree of life is its symbol: The life that comes from God is at the center; that is to say, God, who gives life, is at the center. At the center of the world that has been put at Adam’s disposal and over which Adam has been given dominion is not Adam himself but the tree of divine life. Adam’s life comes from the center which is not Adam but God; it revolves around this center constantly, without ever trying to take possession of this centre of existence. (Bonhoeffer 2004, 83–4) According to Bonhoeffer, God alone holds the center of life and man owes the fact of his existence to His divine fiat: “Adam, you are who you are because of me, your Creator; so now be what you are!” (ibid., 85). God given life is at the same time life from God and before God. This is to say that while humankind is free as a species, this freedom is possessed under the terms in which Adam has life—“[t]he life that human beings have happens in an obedience that issues from freedom” (ibid., 84). Does this at all relate to our discussion about symbolism and Finland? It does. We can answer the question we posed a few paragraphs back, about the symbolism of all the world’s states and nations, in two mutually exclusive ways. On the one hand we can think of these symbols as reflecting something really real about Finland and/or being Finnish. The menagerie of symbols there are point to something essentially nonsymbolic about this particular state and/or nationality: True Finland, if you like. On the other hand we can argue that there is no true meaning to Finland or Finnishness. In other words: symbolism is all there is. What we have in Finland—and this would apply to any other human community—is a potentially infinite regress of signs pointing to an empty space: maps, flags, institutions, conventions, and narratives is all there is, and nothing essentially nonsymbolic at the center. To put this in other words: there is nothing but symbols holding us together in obedience. This would make Finland a myth—hold on to this term too: I will define what I mean by it in the following chapter—we either believe in, or just play along as if we did believe it.

1.2 The Two Political Worldviews Either there is a Finland behind the word Finland, or the Finland-theword is all there is. We have come to a fork in the road where one must

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proceed with a theory of language. Being a part of philosophy, a theory of language is something we adopt and employ with a more general worldview in mind. In his excellent volume on the history of the concept David K. Naugle (2002) teaches us that worldview—or Weltanschauung in the language of the origin of the term—has over the first two centuries of its conceptual history become a close associate to philosophies of relativism, that is denial of any absolute or objective standards, especially in ethics, but also in epistemology (Evans 2002, 101). In a world where truth has been made dependent on the worldviews held by individuals or communities, making connections between signs of language and the things signified is getting increasingly difficult. This problem is not one that is limited to theoretical debates on meaning in language, but one that has far reaching implications to the identity claims made not only by religion, but also those secular political institutions such as the state. McFague sums up the prevalent mood well: [M]any of us no longer believe in a symbolic, sacramental universe in which the part stands for the whole, the things of this world “figure” another world, and all that is is connected by a web of being. No longer believing in connections of this sort and hence afraid that our images refer to nothing, we literalize them, worshiping the icon in our desperation. Furthermore, we find them irrelevant for they connect us to nothing transcending ourselves: they are “just symbols”. (McFague 1982, 10) Here McFague identifies two systematic worldviews I think are central when we think about world politics today. Implicit in both these worldviews is a personal relation: between “man” and “body politic,” and their embodied political theologies. While speculation on the meaning of man—and the question whether or not we do share a nonsymbolic element in our anthropology—is interesting and important in its own right, it will in this analysis be secondary to the contemporary forms the other party of the relation: the body politic, or rather the bodies politic man identifies with today. The political significance of these two relationships is the social order, or nomos, they impose upon our experience of the world. Before proceeding with this thought any further let me clarify what I mean by nomos. Using the term today evokes once again Schmitt’s name and the title of his magnum opus of IR, The Nomos of the Earth.7 He derived the term from Greek where it was originally understood, Schmitt argues, as “the first land appropriation and classification of space” for “primeval division and distribution” (Schmitt 2003, 67). Keeping in mind the

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“majesty” of its original meaning, he went on to conceptualize nomos further as the legal measure “by which the land in a particular order is divided and situated,” and also as the “form of political, social, and religious order determined by this process” (ibid., 70). In other words Schmitt himself used the term in at least two meanings: on the one hand nomos was a constitutive act of dividing land, appropriating a territory; and on the other it meant the political form of a people settled down, in orderly relations, on a certain spatial location. This was the theoretical insight on which Schmitt began a broader discussion reported in The Nomos of the Earth: one of the most important arguments made in this work is that in the “contemporary” world nomos is not only constitutive of peace and order within territorial states, but increasingly to those in international relations—of “world order.” Nomos is not, Schmitt emphasizes, only a concept for the archaeological or antiquarian, but one as open and fluid as history itself. “[A]s long as human beings and peoples have not only a past but also a future, a new nomos will arise in the perpetually new manifestations of world-historical events,” Schmitt writes and adds: “Every new age and every new epoch in the coexistence of peoples, empires and countries, of rulers and power formations of every sort, is founded on new spatial divisions, new enclosures, and new spatial orders of the earth” (ibid., 78–9, emphasis in original). Peter Berger teaches us how all this happens and why we nominize our world. He begins from the famous premise articulated in The Social Construction of Reality (see Berger and Luckmann 1967) that society is essentially a man-made object and, above all, an ordering of experience: “A meaningful order, or nomos,8 is imposed upon the discrete experiences and meanings of individuals [. . .] To say that society is a worldbuilding enterprise is to say that it is ordering, or nominizing, activity” (Berger 1990, 19). Humans are social beings by nature and this sociality brings into the world forms of collective order, nomoi: “Every social action implies that individual meaning is directed toward others and ongoing social interaction implies that the several meanings of the actors are integrated into an order of common meaning” (ibid.). The most important function of society, Berger argues, is nomization, and when this fails either institutionally or individually—the sphere of order and meaning disintegrates or one is radically separated from it—the socially constructed nomos faces collapse into anomy: Seen in the perspective of society, every nomos is an area of meaning carved out of a vast mass of meaninglessness, a small clearing of

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lucidity in a formless, dark, always ominous jungle. Seen in the perspective of the individual, every nomos represents the bright “dayside” of life, tenuously held onto against the sinister shadows of the “night”. In both perspectives, every nomos is an edifice erected in the face of the potent and alien forces of chaos. This chaos must be kept at bay at all cost. (Berger 1990, 23) Society provides us with a variety of methods to stave of anomy and stay within the safety of ordered meaning and experience. The sheltering quality of nomos becomes apparent in the marginal situations of human existence: situations in which we are driven near or beyond the boundaries of normal life. These are times that reveal the innate precariousness of all social worlds, and the marginal situation par excellence, Berger argues, is death. Witnessing the death of other people and anticipating your own pose a challenge to the operating premises of everyday life in society. Death makes a formidable opponent for society “not only because of its obvious threat to the continuity of human relationships, but because it threatens the basic assumptions of order on which society rests” (Berger 1990, 23). If we are only made of matter and when that matter disorganizes, we simply disappear as persons and individuals. If this is the death all of us will face one day, extinction of our personality and individuality, how we spend our time waiting for it in this world is ultimately inconsequential. According to Berger the social world constitutes nomos both objectively and subjectively. Objective nomos is given in the fact of language: “language nominizes by imposing differentiation and structure upon the ongoing flux of experience,” and when an item or an experience “is named, it is ipso facto, taken out of this flux and given stability as the entity so named” (ibid., 20, emphasis in original). To say that something is this and not that is, for Berger, the original nominizing fact, which aims at “a comprehensive order of all items that may be linguistically objectivated, that is, intends a totalizing nomos” (ibid., 20, emphasis in original). Human beings want to live an ordered and meaningful life and, to that end, construct nomic worlds for themselves: we have a “craving for meaning that appears to have the force of instinct” (Berger 1990, 22). Society, with its objective institutional structures, is the guardian of order and meaning in our nomic world. Nomos also works subjectively by ordering experience in our individual consciousness. Society has a way of taking itself for granted: we not only look upon the social order as something useful, desirable, or right, but often see it as something

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inevitable, as part and parcel of the universal nature of things. Whenever orders of meaning and experience attain such fundamental status, wherever they are “endowed with a stability deriving from more powerful sources than the historical efforts of human beings,” nomos and cosmos appear to concur (ibid., 25). “Whatever the historical variations,” Berger writes, “the tendency is for the meanings of the humanly constructed order to be projected into the universe as such” (ibid.). “Religion” is the name often given to those cosmizations of the universe that take on a “sacred” element. What is sacred and for whom varies with its context of course, but what unites as experience is what sticks out from everyday life as something quite extraordinary, immensely powerful, and potentially even dangerous. The reality of religion both transcends and includes the human being: it “addresses itself to him and locates his life in an ultimately meaningful order” (ibid., 26). Hendrik Berkhof’s Christ and the Powers is a wonderful little essay that systematizes nominization and cosmization in Saint Paul’s letters. Paul uses neither term directly, but referring to “world powers” has in mind something we have already said about nomos. Paul observed that life is ruled by powers9 like time, space, life and death, politics and philosophy, which carry and guide human life: they are “the forces which hold together the world and the life of men and preserve them from chaos” (Berkhof 1977, 22). The powers, Berkhof explicates, are human prescriptions and doctrines that form the social structures within which the pagan and Jewish societies of the day depended upon: “the forces which hold together the world and the life of men and preserve them from chaos” (Berkhof 1977, 21–2). What makes Christianity a radical political ideology is that from its very beginning it explicitly challenges the nomos, attempts to undermine the present structures of state and society, tradition and morality. The meaning of atonement is not limited to redemption of sinners from their guilt, but also an end to their bondage to the powers. In his letter to the Colossians Paul encouraged to follow their Lord rather than the powers that be: “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world [stoicheia], and not according to Christ” (Col. 2.8 ESV). Since the cross of Christ had “disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame” (Col. 2.15), Paul asks his brethren: “If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world [stoicheia], why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations [. . .] according to human precepts and teachings?” (Col. 2.20-2). Where Jewish apocalyptic discussed these

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powers in supernatural terms, as heavenly angels10 intervening in the earthly realm, in Paul’s letters they are thoroughly demythologized as forms of earthly existence, “[w]hether they be conceived as persons or as impersonal structures of life and society” (ibid., 26), “things that all perish as they are used” (Col. 2.22). Rather than cosmisizing from scripture, “secular” society tends to project meaning and experience into the universe through the prism of naturalism. There are different worldviews within its spectrum, but what all of them share is belief that there is no supernatural realm and/or it does not intervene in the world (see Sire 2004b, ch. 4). For a naturalist, writes John Lennox, “[T]here is nothing but nature. It is a closed system of cause and effect. There is no realm of the transcendent or supernatural. There is no ‘outside’” (Lennox 2009, 30). There is no need to consult The Holy Bible, because truth is something based on facts and results of scientific investigation. In IR this worldview resonates in the political authority of laïcite secularism, which presumes a neutral public space in which religious beliefs, practices, and institutions have no political significance: they have “fallen below the threshold of political contestation, or pushed into the private sphere” (Hurd 2008, 5). Laicism, as Elizabeth Shakman Hurd calls it, “presents itself as having risen above the messy debate over religion and politics, standing over and outside the melee in a neutral space of its own creation” (ibid.). The problem with naturalism is, however, that it does not provide a foundation for contemporary social order—it can not come up with a nomos for Finland or any other state in the world—nor international “order,” a nomos for the earth. There are no truths behind the state or any other appropriation of order in the world: no reason why we have this and not something different altogether. Since there no longer exists a plausible divine legitimation to political institutions in our secular age, the state now has a “problem of meaningfulness” (Berger 1990, 125). This is a problem that has not only theoretical relevance to philosophers and theologians, but makes answering many practical, yet fundamentally political, questions about everyday life very difficult indeed—questions people come up with if they take a minute to think about the world they live in and things that go on. Can any single person or a group of people, no matter what office they hold or how important they may be, have a right to decide on behalf of a nation made up of millions of people that they should go to war, send loved ones to kill and die in a land far away? How can it be that a certain document issued by a national government held by the mother when they give birth has such

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a huge impact on the rights the newborn baby holds as a human being? Why is every able-bodied and -minded Finnish male obliged to do a minimum of six months of military service11 before their 28th birthday, or risk 182 days in jail without chance of parole? I could go on. People have answers to these questions, of course, but the foundations of those answers lie on assumptions that are anything but natural. The institutions that embody the nomos of our time—and I mean “national states” are not empirically verifiable matters of fact that avail themselves for scientific investigation, but their existence depends on that the people involved either believe in their existence or are at least willing to act as if they existed. States are not something our scientists have discovered, but something we make for ourselves, now. Naturalism is not, and it does not have, a political theory. Let us go back to the two worldviews I mentioned earlier—the one that only had symbols and the other that figured another world, a sacramental universe—and the social order they impose upon us. On the one hand there is the relative nomos of the international relations based on the personified state. Our world is carved up between the territorial entities of national states the citizenship to which we inherit from birth, at least in principle. This is a political worldview based on a philosophy of relativism: at the end of the day it denies any authority above that of national sovereignty, to which it confers a freedom without obedience. On the other hand there is an other nomos that identifies an independent source and a transcendent standard for everything, including of course international relations. This is a worldview premised on the existence of a personal God: one that has an answer to the question why there is something rather than nothing at all, one that gives a reason for things being the way they are. The reasonable question one may ask at this point is that are there any good reasons to subscribe to a theistic political worldview, to believe in God or any god, to begin with? There are numerous reasons, but the one I will push no further than basic general revelation: the fact that there positively exists authority above the moral order founded on national sovereignty. I will make an empirical argument on this in Chapter 4, but let me give a brief example here. We know a number of instances where a state has done someone wrong, an evil even: this is the stuff that makes up most of international history. We are well aware, however, that such acts do not belong to history only but may again be perpetrated against us in the future, even by states we may now call “liberal democracies” it

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would be naive to think otherwise. What this testifies to is an existence of a standard of measurement which we, human beings, can use when thinking about states and our relationship to them. Even though states always find ways to somehow legitimize their actions, even the wrong and evil ones, this does not and must not commit us to agree with them—no: we can and should listen to our conscience instead. We should listen to it, because it transcends the relative nomos of international relations. Even though the last few centuries have seen the world’s landmass divided between states and philosophy become dominated by different flavors of relativism, these developments have not been able to completely overrule human moral sense. This is good. Sure enough there may be other nomoi intervening the world political, but in this book I will talk about these two—call them the relative order of states and the absolute order of God—because they are by far the most important when we think about international relations and the IR that studies them. There are times when these two orders happily coexist; they may even be seen supporting one another, struggling against the same enemies and anomies, making progress toward shared purposes. But there is no denying that when we take a look under the surface we see how fundamentally unsettled they are on some of the most fundamental issues of world politics. States’ relative order and God’s moral order are held in an unresolved compromise with each other, and it also seems as if only one of the parties benefited from the lengthening of the status quo. Looking at them from some historical distance one does understand how and why the Westphalian settlement was reached and from there began its spread outside Europe, but looking at the universal system or society it makes up today one can not help wondering: how can it be that a 1648 arrangement to end sectarian warfare between some European heads of state can be considered a going concern for the earth and everyone on it today? Besides: our world systematically manifests numerous problems and innumerable injustices—where to begin: war and insecurity, extreme poverty and hunger, lack of primary education, gender inequality, treatable disease going untreated?—from which the international order has failed to redeem us. Of course we must not blame the state for every evil in the world, but it stands to reason that, since states are human institutions, they should reflect human moral instincts. Having said that it is also possible the state has grown to embody other human instincts instead.

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1.3 Body Politics-Tradition Let us now return to our discussion on Schmittean political theology and the image of the person-hood of the state. Why does Schmitt insist that concrete sovereignty must always be personified? And this case does not imply Schmitt alone: how is it that we often choose to represent politics in personal terms? Before answering the questions above let me give a historical example of what I am talking about. Rudolf Kjellén was a prolific Swedish geographer in his time, whom we might remember coming up with the now notorious term of “geopolitics.” In his 1916 book Staten som Lifsform (State as a Living Organism) Kjellén outlined the essential nature of the state by asking the following question: what should be the terms used to describe political entities? Before giving an elaborate theoretical answer to his question, Kjellén opened the morning paper, and in what could be described as an early exercise—pun intended—of discourse analysis, had a look what were the terms actually used to describe them. States were territorially defined subjects the identities of which revealed themselves in their external relations vis-à-vis other states, and the nature of which reflected by their representation in everyday use of language (Kjellén 1916, 17–18). To make his point, Kjellén cited a paragraph from an issue of The Standard writing on current affairs in the Balkans: “Austria”, it writes, “stands now as the champion of armed despotism, as an enemy of the law of nations—it is scandalous that one of the most civilised nations of Europe has ambushed Turkey and robbed it on a public highway”. Elsewhere, Austria is accused of “cheating Bulgaria to go forward with its silly attempts”; and of “pushing Bulgaria forward in a resort to subterfuge”, in a bid not to “unscrupulously break agreements and breach the peace”, on the pretext of which it itself “taking security measures” and is “ready to compensate”. Then it writes that “Germany has its hands on every development”; Germany “stands behind”; it has “taken revenge and isolated England, and won Russia on its side by making references to the Dardanelles and the promise made by Italy”, etc. And elsewhere, it is saying that “Germany is looking angrily at Bulgaria while pretending not to see, and excusing the infringement of Austria-Hungary”. For Serbia, it is a “matter of life or death”; it is “looking worriedly at Austria’s advance towards the sea”; and now, “bitter and jealous”, feeling “powerless rage”; it “will not be acquiescent”. Even Italy is expected to “make demands”. England is

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“angry”; but seems “willing to spare France’s emotions” and “compensate for its role as an arbitrator”; and France, along with England and Russia, wants “to put its influence at stake for the attainment of peace”. England and France are “demanding a congress”, but Russia “does not feel that a congress is necessary”, although “the word has left Russia” and Germany “is dictating terms”. The question is: “will Turkey acquiesce to Bulgaria’s actions”. This seems unlikely: “it protests”, it “continues to arm itself”, it “works with all its strength”, it has “made mistakes it must now mend”. According to another version, Turkey is “unhappy, but not belligerent”, and in a bad way: “everything the Porte does is marked by tiredness, melancholy, and indisposition; it is still a sick man”. In all this fuss, “Greece is sitting calm and quiet, glancing hopefully at Crete”. (Kjellén 1916, 18–19, Luoma-aho’s translation) Kjellén’s point was, of course, that in the realm of international relations, as it was represented in everyday speech and writing, there lived a group of humanlike beings in amicable and disagreeable relations with each other. Kjellén’s issue of his morning paper dated back to 1908, but he firmly believed that such a mode of representation had not changed much in the eight years it took to get his book out. We are in a position to make out that this mode has not fundamentally changed in the last century: states today are systematically represented in discourse as “big people” with capabilities and characteristics of individuals, socializing with other states in a state of international society. We hear and read about it every day: The United States of America is a “bully,” North Korea a “rogue,” and the European Union a “schizophrenic”12 &c. Come to think of it, it is very difficult (if not nearly impossible) to communicate about international relations without paraphrasing states and their relations in personifying metaphors. When imagining abstract phenomena difficult to grasp and coming to terms with things that do not, properly speaking, have a “body”—like the Garden of Eden or Finland—human purposes require to draw boundaries to make such things discrete from other things, mark them with “images and symbols, icons and idols, paradigms and phantasms, emblems and allegories” (Schmitt 1996a, 5). Schmitt reasons that “[a]s long as the human being is anthropomorphic, that is, a being modelled on humanity, he understands himself and his social relations in such ‘images’ ” (Schmitt 2008b, 57). Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is difficult not to quote here: “[A]ll communities larger than primordial villages of faceto-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities

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are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (Anderson 1991, 6). However, Anderson has predecessors. Already in the 1950s Eric Voegelin wrote of the “selfillumination” of society through symbols, which was “an integral part of social reality, and one may even say its essential part, for through such symbolization the members of a society experience it as more than an accident or a convenience; they experience it as of their human essence” (Voegelin 1952, 27). In the 1960s Michael Walzer claimed that community can only be imagined, because it has no palpable shape or substance: “[t]he state is invisible; it must be personified before it can be seen, symbolized before it can be loved, imagined before it can be conceived” (Walzer 1967, 194). So: states avail themselves to us in metaphorical use of language. Hayden White (1978, 91) teaches us that the function of the metaphor is to tell us what images we should look for when determining how we should feel about things represented to us. Sallie McFague teaches that metaphorical language not only makes connections, sees resemblances, but demands that at least one partner of the association be concrete, familiar, bodily: “[i]t will abide no abstractions, no head without a body, no mystical flights, but because it is the method of human movement it insists on taking along the whole human being in all its familiarity, messiness, and concreteness” (McFague 2007, 61, emphasis in original). It is simply human nature to make sense of objects of discourse in our own terms: human motivations, goals, actions, and characteristics. We have, I suppose, an instinct to abstract according to our own nature, imagine things we can not see as something not altogether different than what we are. According to Leonard Barkan “the human body is both phylogenetically and ontogenetically one of the first and most basic entities the mind can grasp” (Barkan 1975, 62); and according to Mary Douglas “the body is a model which can stand for any bounded system [. . .] its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious” (Douglas 1984, 115). When we imagine and represent states and nations as bodies politic we bring them into close relation with the organicist world, and as “[a] single vocabulary describes animal bodies and political communities and makes the second appear almost as familiar, as natural, as well organized as the first” (Walzer 1967, 195). This way we can make the polis of the state, the community of the nation, which in themselves have no empirical essence or substance, intelligible and meaningful to Everyman as well as to the academic. But, the inexorable implication of such a mode of representation, its political baggage so to speak, is that it

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makes the state a matter of preexisting fact—an entity that appears just as natural as you and I today and again tomorrow—and not something pinned down on the ground by threat of violence. Not only human cognition, but also “our” cultural tradition seems to prefer one mode of political representation over others. The most influential symbols of community in the history of occidental political thought have been organicist (see Coker 1910). Walzer emphasizes that the image has not been used simply as a decorative metaphor, applied by a writer who has already grasped the nature of political community and wishes to convey this understanding. Rather, the image is prior to understanding as it is to articulation, and necessary to both. When we imagine the state as a humanlike being we make available to it a particular nature, which does not so much reinforce existing political ideas—though it may later be used for that purpose—as underlie them: “[i]t provides an elementary sense of what the political community is like, of how physically distinct and solitary individuals are joined together” (Walzer 1967, 194). We know that bodily figurations have been employed in political discourse since the Ancients, though they are likely to have a much richer history than we can tell (see Coker 1910). In his Associations and Law Otto Gierke documents the forms of association in Ancient Greek political thought. For the Greeks the individual did not have a legal personality, but whatever rights and duties they had derived from their being parts of a whole, a polis: “The entire concept of individual freedom, which was untouchable in so far as the community was concerned, remained alien to the Greeks. All freedom was political freedom. It was participation in the freedom of the state” (Gierke 1977, 76). In his “ideal state” Plato carried this premise into its ultimate conclusion by advocating the total amalgamation of the individual into their community: ideal citizens did not belong to themselves, he reasoned, but to the polis. In Greek political thought state was considered a natural phenomenon organically extending from the first family: “[i]t was assumed that its origin was due to a mixture of older forms but the development of the state was seen as the unfolding of a completed organism which had contained its full potential from its inception” (ibid., 77). In his Republic, Plato makes an analogy between state and the human being, the former differing from the latter only in terms of size (see e.g. books II, IV, and V). Aristotle’s Politics also concludes that the state is arranged of heterogeneous parts that complement one another so as to form a composite, organic whole (see e.g. book 2, parts 3, 5). Legal subjectivity in Aristotle’s state, Gierke writes, is not with the heterogeneous parts, but with the organizationally

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collectivized unity represented by “the head of the whole”: “[h]owever he has been created, he never executes political power on the basis of his own right but does so only as a part of an organic whole which is based upon an objective order” (Gierke 1977, 83). Even though the organicist notion of state was widely shared by the Ancient philosophers, the metaphor was not extended to include an idea that the organic polis could have a peculiar personality of its own. This is a later development. John of Salisbury was probably the first medieval writer to employ a detailed bodily analogy in an explanation of the nature of the territorial state (Coker 1938, 180). His Policraticus of 1159 derived state sovereignty from divine providence and made a substantial comparison of the human body with the state: The state is a body [. . .] Within that state, the prince occupies the place of the head; he is subject to the unique God and to those who are his lieutenants on earth, for in the human body the head is also governed by the soul. The senate occupies the place of the heart, which gives good and bad deeds their impulses. The function of the eyes, the ears and the tongue is asssured [sic] by the judges and the provincial governors. The “officers” and “soldiers” can be compared to the hands. (Quoted in Coker 1938, 1189–90) Bodily metaphors buttressed both sides of the political controversies between the church and the secular estates from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. The three main uses of the analogy in these controversies were in the description of the nature of the state, the nature of the church, and the relationship between the two. Both kings and popes competed for the title of the “head” and denied that the other could be described by bodily analogies (Hale 1973, 68–9). This mysterious theologico-political identity could not be reproduced in politics after the secularization of the state, but over time became to symbolize a perfection which the state might approach or in terms of which it might convincingly be described. The image of the body politic has provided a starting point for political imagination by joining solitary human bodies to form a singular corporeality, thus giving a permanent guarantee for individuals to a place in the world and a symbolic reference for their political existence (Walzer 1967, 193–4). Even while the image lost some of its charm by the middle of the seventeenth century with the metaphor of the contract gaining general currency, body politics lost little of its effectiveness.

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We already mentioned Hobbes, but the other influential theorist of the social contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, also capitulated to the organicist metaphor in description of the state in his A Discourse on Political Economy; an account which is not unlike John of Salisbury’s six centuries before: The body politic, taken individually, may be considered as an organized, living body, resembling that of man. The sovereign power represents the head; the laws and customs are the brain, the source of the nerves and seat of understanding, will, and senses, of which the Judges and Magistrates are the organs: commerce, industry and agriculture are the mouth and stomach which prepare the common subsistence; the public income is the blood, which a prudent economy, in performing the functions of the heart, causes to distribute through the whole body nutriment and life: the citizens are the body and the members, which make the machine live, move and work; and no part of this machine can be damaged without the painful impression being at once conveyed to the brain, if the animal is in a state of health. (Rousseau 1973, 131–2, emphasis in original) Thus, the metaphor of the contract did not entirely break from the body politics-tradition, but rather elaborated it by using the metaphor of the contract, which represented a voluntary act of foundation on behalf of a people, alongside the metaphor of the body, which represented the existential outcome of this act of foundation and the ultimate territorial form for use of power over a people. For Abraham Kuyper the French Revolution was different from the other great revolutions before it in the manner it ignored God altogether; refused to ground politics on anything that went beyond nature, above man itself. What was revolutionary about France was that it conceived a form of authority that was not only held by men, but as something that proceeded from man: “[T]he sovereign God is dethroned and man with his free will is placed on the vacant seat” (Kuyper 2007, 88). On God’s place was then implanted an explicitly nontheist ideal of the will of the people, which was, for Kuyper, “perfectly identical with atheism” (ibid., 88). Claude Lefort argues that the democratic revolutions actually ended up strengthening the theologico-political symbolism of the ancien régime. As the divine person of the monarch was decapitated—virtually as well as literally—the bodily substance for representation of social identity and integrity disappeared, and the ensuing democracy inaugurated, for Lefort, “the experience of an ungraspable, uncontrollable society in

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which the people will be said to be sovereign, of course, but whose identity will constantly be open to question, whose identity will remain latent” (Lefort 1986, 303–4). This ungraspable society has given rise to a multilayered discourse trying to grasp it, and “[t]he attempt to sacralize institutions through discourse is directly related to the loss of the substance of society, to the disintegration of the body” (Lefort 1986, 304). Eric Voegelin, who opposed the Nazis in his time, essentially agreed with Carl Schmitt on the secularization of theological concepts. According to Voegelin, political communities can not be defined in secular terms only, because they always embrace religious forces in the community and the symbols in which these forces were expressed: “[t]he political community is always arranged in relationship to man’s experience of world and God, be it that the political sphere assumes in the hierarchy of Being a lower degree of divine order, be it that it is itself deified” (Voegelin 1986, 77–8). In a precise sense political symbolism signifies “the penetration of secular experience by the transcendental-divine” (ibid.). When the bond with God and authority was severed by the modern state the transcendental-divine idea of the corpus mysticum Christi was not denied as much as it was affirmed: “when God has become invisible behind the world, then the things of the world become new gods” (Voegelin 1986, 59). The state not only became to embody political power but also spiritual power, because the power to judge what was appropriate to preserve and to further the unity of community was now invested in the sovereign— not in the pope or any other ecclesiastical authority. In this sense, “[t]he state [. . .] is at the same time a Church, with the sovereign as head of the Church, immediately under God, without the intercession of the Vicar of the Christ” (Voegelin 1986, 50–1).

1.4 Jesus Christ as Model The metaphor of the embodied polis we know today is not as much related to Greek political thought or the Enlightenment philosophes, as it is to the Christian civilization. Christianity destroyed the foundations of Ancient political thought by transferring its ideal state from the worldly sphere to the transcendental. “The state no longer appeared as the universal expression of the human community,” Gierke writes, “[t]here was a higher and more thoroughly integrated society that encompassed both heaven and earth” (Gierke 1977, 143). The Judeo-Christian tradition has always been personalistic and relational: images of God such as “father,

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mother, lover, friend, savior, ruler, governor, servant, companion, comrade, liberator” have always been central to its theology (McFague 1982, 20). Since man was created in the image of God (Gen. 1.27) there is every reason to believe that God is something like a person. Since God became man in Jesus Christ (John 1.1) it is pure logic to think that God can also have—which is not to say that He necessarily has—a physical body in time and space. John Howard Yoder reckons that it was Paul who popularized this metaphorical theology into our social imaginary, where the corporeal metaphor “is so widely used in our language to describe a social group” (Yoder 1994, 47). We can discern two layers of meaning in Paul’s use of the metaphor: the anthropological and the ecclesiastical. Anthropologically the body stands for man in all his potentialities—all that he can become as a living being—but there was something he could never become: a truly independent being. Instead the body designates man “as the one who never belongs to himself, but always has a master set over him, sin, death, or the Lord” (Bornkamm 2005, 130–1). Because of this man is always asked the following question: “To whom do you belong?” (ibid., 131). According to Paul, in this world our potentialities are forfeit and all we can look for is their release. Created and owned by God, the Christian is released, in his body, as an obedient slave to righteousness (Rom. 6.12-23). The symbol that joined the members of the early Christian community together was the body of Jesus the “fully man.” For the first disciples bodily community with Jesus did not only mean participation in his teaching, but living and suffering with him in bodily community—this is exactly what the Lord’s Supper commemorates. The Supper has of course become the site of a symbolic struggle in the Christian tradition and a subject of much theological debate, especially in the sixteenth century. Abstract debates on the meaning of bread and wine first led to Protestants condemning the Catholics and later Calvinists and Lutherans parting company, and a number of people were burned at the stake for heresy in between. For Yoder, a Mennonite political theologian himself, these eucharistic controversies are an anachronism and have since clouded a simple reading of the Gospel text. If we want to properly understand the New Testament, Yoder argues, we must pass medieval debates by and think about what was it that Jesus meant when he said “Whenever you do this, do it in my memory”? What were the first Christians doing, there and then, when they broke the bread? Yoder’s answer to these questions is explicitly political. The meal Jesus claimed

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as his memorial was an ordinary partaking together, in the fellowship of his disciples, of food for the body. The Lord’s Supper goes deeper than the mere ceremonial meaning inasmuch it also was an example in economics: bread eaten together is sharing in fact and draws a wider circle of solidarity than the one normally surrounding a single family. The “original” Eucharist was an act of political economy: “[t]o do rightly the practice of breaking bread together is a matter of economic ethics” (Yoder 2001, 21, see also ch. 3). For Cavanaugh the Eucharist is a political act that poses an antithesis to the totalizing nomos of the national state. For him the state is “but a false copy of the Body of Christ”: “a monstrosity of many separate limbs proceeding directly out of a gigantic head” (Cavanaugh 2002, 44, 46). Modern politics, as mediated through the body politic of the state, is of centripetal nature: it does not cohere directly among the members of the body, but the members are related to one another by the formal mechanism of a contract. Participation with the real Body of Christ is to practice something like an anarchy “not in the sense that it proposes chaos, but in that it challenges the false order of the state” (ibid., 47). Taking part in the The Lord’s Supper does not commemorate a contract, something that binds men to the visible power of the Leviathan, but is a gift that undermines the contractarian understanding of modern social relations: The Eucharist aims at the building of the Body of Christ which is not simply centripetal; we are united not just to God as to the centre but to one another. This is no liberal body, in which the centre seeks to maintain the independence of individuals from each other, nor a fascist body, which seeks to bind individuals to each other through the centre. Christ is indeed the Head of the Body, but the members do not relate to one another through the Head alone, for Christ Himself is not found not only in the centre but at the margins of the body [. . .]. (Cavanaugh 2002, 49) In the nomos of the state local and particular are mediated by the universal represented by the body politic of the state. The Eucharist, writes Cavanaugh, gathers everyone together13 in “anticipation of the eschatological unity of all in Christ, but the local is not therefore simply subordinated to the universal” (ibid., 49). But it is not merely a symbol of a promise of future bliss, he emphasizes, but also a practice of earthly peace and reconciliation: “[w]here peace is lacking, the Eucharist appears as an

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eschatological sign of judgement requiring that people reconcile before a true Eucharist can take place” (ibid., 52). Peace and reconciliation are not only matters of legal adjudication or political negotiation, but imply a direct encounter of Christians fully belonging to one another and the body of their Lord. “In Christ,” Cavanaugh proclaims, “the dichotomy of centre and periphery is overcome” (ibid., 49). When the physical body of Christ died on the cross, its place on earth was taken by the ecclesiastical entity of the “church.” The first Christian churches, congregations the likes Paul corresponded with, were loosely organized spiritual and ethical communities. According to Gierke the first Christian centuries developed the notion of church from this spiritual origin toward an existential identity centered on an external organization: “[e]verything that related to the origin, being, and purpose of the existing community with God that had been founded by Christ was transferred to the visible and emerging church” (Gierke 1977, 144). Increasingly church began to take on attributes of other corporate beings and, in the Christian consciousness, to consider itself as a kind of a polis that linked the divine and temporal realms. Paul writes that “[f]or as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another” (Rom. 12.4-5; see also 1 Cor. 6.15, 10.16-17, 12.12-27; Col. 1.24; Eph. 1.22-23 ESV). Statements like this enunciate the idea that humanity is a united spiritual and ethical organism in structure and purpose: “[t]he totality, representing the transcendental centre, was endowed with a living spiritual unity having the highest personality” (Gierke 1977, 146). This personality was shared by both the organism and its parts, both in “perfectly reciprocal condition” (ibid.). Paul’s statement on many being one establishes, Gierke argues, “a union in the sense if an exclusive mediation between the members and the head, a mystery administered by the church” (ibid.). This is how the church of God was given a unified life and purpose, a “soul,” and the form of an external associational subject, a “body,” that claimed a share over the temporal sphere. This is how the church-as-organism metaphor has been worked out in contemporary political theology. Bonhoeffer’s is a classic exposition within the Protestant genre. For him the church is the Christ himself, today: “While we are used to thinking of the church as an institution, we ought instead to think of it as a person with a body, although of course a person in an unique sense” (Bonhoeffer 2003, 218, emphasis in original). His doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio (1930), elaborates

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the sense in which this holds true. Bonhoeffer writes that a community can be interpreted as a “collective person” with the same structure as the individual person. Having said that he made a difference between the “social forms” of community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft) (see Bonhoeffer 1998, 86–96). According to Bonhoeffer only genuine communities (like the church) can be ascribed a personal character, because in them the center of activity lies not in the individual member, but in the “concrete unity” of will shared by all members. Only genuine communities are capable of agape: spiritual love that “does not desire but rather serves, it loves an enemy as a brother or sister [and] originates neither in the brother or sister nor in the enemy, but in Christ and his word” (Bonhoeffer 2005, 43). In the church one cannot speak of the priority of either personal or social being, because both have equal weight. Societies, states, were not persons in this sense, because they were “only a means to an end, while a person can never be only a means to an end” (ibid., 104, emphasis in original). He warned against the “organology” of some of his German contemporaries for aiming to completely subordinate the individual to the whole: “[t]his subordination must be rejected as contrary to the equal weight of personal and social being” (ibid., 77). A genuine collective person exists wherever “[i]ndividual personal spirit lives solely by virtue of sociality, and ‘social spirit’ becomes real only in individual formation” (ibid., 75). No kingdom on earth, Bonhoeffer figured, could achieve such a fundamental synthesis. A more recent classic in the exposition of Paul’s ecclesiastical symbolism is Bishop Lesslie Newbigin’s Household of God (1953). According to Newbigin, Paul’s corporeal metaphor involves a conception of membership in a fellowship, which was to represent Jesus in the world: “being in Christ means being incorporated in a visible society which is—in principle—undivided and continuous, binding all men and all generations in the one body of Christ, from His coming until His coming again” (Newbigin 1953, 73–4). Body of Christ, church in other words, is not constituted by a series of disconnected responses to the supernatural acts of divine grace as they are reported in Scripture, but is “the continuing life of Christ among men in a body which grows by the addition of new members but is itself essentially continuous and indivisible” (ibid., 77). The church today—or should we rather talk about churches?—is thus of the same body that existed in Rome and Corinth, where Paul sent his letters. The visible sign of bread broken together is the center of ongoing life in the body of Christ, today as it was in Rome and Corinth back then.

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Likewise, the visible sign of baptism incorporates man into this body, in whom there is neither Greek nor Jew, neither free nor slave. Newbigin disagreed with Bonhoeffer inasmuch he saw the person of Christ as both a means and an end: church can be witness as well as instrument of the kingdom of heaven. For Newbigin, who long served as a missionary in India, this was not merely an academic matter, but one of real practical importance: “[t]here is a kind of missionary zeal which is forever seeking to win more proselytes but which does not spring from and lead back into a quality of life which seems intrinsically worth having in itself” (ibid., 148). Like Lord’s Supper, the sacrament of baptism is also a political act. When Paul explained his Gentile mission to his peers, he wrote: From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. (2 Cor. 5.16-20 ESV) According to Yoder the concrete meaning of this statement is that, for a Christian, “the inherited social definitions of who each of us is by class and category are no longer basic” (Yoder 2001, 3). “According to flesh” means according to worldly standards and values that derive from living as if one’s present physical life is all that matters (Crossway Bibles 2008, 2230). Literally “worldly standards” can be translated as “ethnically” (Yoder 2001, 28–9). What Paul means to say here is that for a Christian being Jew or Greek are no longer as important as it may once have been, because, having been born again in baptism, they now serve as ambassadors to “new creation,” a kingdom above all ethnic division. It is because of the newness of creation, Yoder argues, that Paul no longer respected the ethnic distinctions that previously had divided people: “The reason those distinctions are gone is the inclusiveness of the cross. Because Christ died for all, that all might live through him, there can be no more discrimination” (ibid., 31). No more discrimination, because, as Bonhoeffer puts it, Christendom is a

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community where men do not stand for themselves or under national flags, but for each other: Christendom is one great people composed of persons of every country in concord in their faith and their love because there is One God, One Lord, One Spirit, One Hope. That is the marvellous mystery of the people of God. Above all differences of race, nationality and custom there is an invisible community of children of God. (Bonhoeffer 1965, 77) The political meaning of baptism is, in other words, the polis it maintains: it admits all peoples of the world into the same people. The body of Christ—that is the church here on earth—is its symbolic form. The church is not merely a religion of this or that society and simply can not be required to adapt itself to the worldviews dominant in contemporary society. It is the mission of the church to struggle against human division, and theology has its role to play in this struggle: it too must, writes Moltmann, “engage with views of history and historical world-views in a struggle for the future of the truth and therefore also in a battle for the reality of the resurrection of Jesus” (Moltmann 2002, 169). The purpose of this struggle can not be to gain political influence, but to support a political ethics that is capable of “speaking truth to power” (Cavanaugh 2002, 88). What, then, is the relationship of this people of God to the peoples of the world “below”? Berkhof argues that since the church as sanctorum communio has an ability to see the anti-Christian dimension of the world, distinguish “between movings of spirits which are of and unto God and those which are of and unto the evil one,” it has been given privilege to take a definite stance toward the powers that be, that is social structures and political authorities (Berkhof 1977, 47). This is a perspective that, according to Berkhof’s reading of Paul, “shrinks” the powers when beheld by the eye of faith: “They may well have inflated themselves into omnipotent total value systems, but the believer sees in them their true proportions, as nothing more than one segment of creation, existing because of the Creator, and limited by other creatures” (ibid., 49). People of God do not flee the creaturely reality of the world, but avoids deifying it: “we do not belong to the nation, the state, the technique, the future, the money, but all this is ours, given us by God as means of living a worthy life before God and in fellowship with our neighbor” (ibid., 50).

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Christianity is radical politically, because it is a worldview that calls all others into question. Since its proclamation it has been a constant irritation to anything—that is: anyone—grasping the world from a certain perspective, no matter how simple or sophisticated, altruistic or necessary it may be, which figures out a cosmos and on it universalizes a nomos, takes it all for granted, makes it a matter of fact, and uses every resource it can afford to call upon against us or somebody else in order to, ultimately, make “peace” in the world. Yes: Christianity too has its cosmos and universalizes a nomos—it cannot help being a worldview for the simple reason that it itself also exists in the world! But Christianity is not just another worldview, because it holds within a promise—word documented and declared by an authority, with authority—of a cosmos that transcends the evils of creaturely existence and a nomos that, instead of holding the human being in bondage, sets them free.

1.5 Appropriation of Secular Authority Many of the doctrinal statements and the interpretations made from them have often been subjects of deep controversy in the history of Christianity. Disagreement on the fundamental statements and their interpretation have often broken communion within the church. A lot could be written about this, but here I will try to keep close with the grand narrative of Christianity’s political worldview and place an emphasis in the formation of that of the Protestant Reformation. According to Otto Gierke (1913, 11–12) medieval political thought proceeded from the idea that not only those who shared communion, not only the church, but mankind in its totality was conceived as corpus Christi. This universalist understanding was not alien to biblical theology. Jesus, like Adam before him, was both an individual as well as a personification of humanity—when Adam fell, the old humanity fell; when Jesus was crucified, the new humanity was crucified. How can we make such identifications, between individuals, whether we understand them to exist historically or mythologically, and, well, everybody. Underlying such reasoning is the Christian concept of humanity as it has been worked out by patriarchs and theologians for two millennia now. The premise here is that one finds the human condition coming back to certain individual cases: Adam’s deed is replicated in sin and Jesus’ sacrifice is applicable to all. According to Bonhoeffer humanity is the comprehensive community and participation in it is demonstrated

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by affirmation of community life in general. For him it takes the shape of a moral person: Wherever individuals recognize themselves both as individuals and as the human race, and submit to the demand of God, there beats the heart of the collective person. This ensures its moral unity; insofar as every human being is Adam, the collective person really has one conscience. (Bonhoeffer 1998, 121, emphasis in original) In the Christian political imagination there are two kinds of corpora. The first of them is the peccatorum communio: the collective person of Adam marked by sin and revealed in each of its individual parts, in sinners, by the consciousness of guilt. Then there is the sanctorum communio: the body of Christ, represented by the eschatological entity of the church, which operates to restore the primal unity between humanity and its creator. Those in Adam face God’s law in isolation, but Christ unites all in himself and acts as their vicarious representative before God (Bonhoeffer 1998, chs 4–5). Thus, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are events which imply every human being. Those who had been baptized and thus become members in the body of the Christ were different from the lot in that they no longer lived in the flesh of Adam, but had won death in Christ. This is the theological context, and this is where interpretation really begins. Interpretation is where the Roman Church has traditionally played an active role, as in the overall administration of the affairs of the universal corpus Christi. If the new humanity was one, there could only be one hierarchy, one authority, one state; and that state could be no other than—this is what Rome insists on—the Church God himself had founded. Pope, the Vicar of the Christ, was the living symbol of its unity and its legitimacy was based on a definite historical mission: to restrain (ho-katechon) the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the world. According to Schmitt, “the belief that a restrainer holds back the end of the world provides the only bridge between the notion of an eschatological paralysis of all human events and a tremendous historical monolith like that of the Christian empire” (Schmitt 2003, 60). From these politico-theological premises the Roman Church deduced the proposition that God stood on the highest summit in temporal as well as ecclesiastical matters. The political conclusion of this proposition was, at least for Rome, unequivocal: creation itself places temporal rulers hierarchically under the pope, the head of the sanctorum communio, for were there

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additional heads for emperors in the corpus Christi we would have before us a monstrosity instead of the son of God. In his The King’s Two Bodies Ernst H. Kantorowicz (1957, 193–232) brilliantly documents the history of this image in medieval theology and jurisprudence. Bodily metaphors were employed at the time to reinforce the idea of the Christian community as whole as well as its secular parts. There is another symbol of political significance in medieval theology worth mentioning here. In 1302 the pope Bonifacius VIII issued a bull to Philip IV of France decreeing that the spiritual authority of Rome is categorically above all temporal authority. What this meant was that, in principle if not always in fact, all the emperors of the Christian empire of the Middle Ages, the respublicana Christiana, owed their obedience to the Holy See. The political intention of the bull was, simply put, to give pope the right to crown kings in Europe and licence to watch over their moral discipline. All this was predicated on a symbolic reading of the Gospel according to Luke, in which a passing reference14 is made to the swords yielded by the Apostles upon Christ’s arrest, which were said to have been buried next to the Apostle Peter (Schaff 1957, 19–20). Even though New Testament scholarship today agrees that here Jesus makes no comment whatsoever on the division between the ecclesiastical and the secular, the Roman Church has kept its swords as emblems of two forms of political authority, one subordinate to the other. As the Roman Church bid for more influential secular presence after the investiture controversy it began to reimagine itself as a temporal body: a political and legal organism on a level with secular political entities, which were at this time beginning to assert their political presence vis-à-vis the church. With this image of the corpus mysticum Christi the church itself secularized its symbolism, politicized the body of Jesus Christ, which resulted in that the ideologues of the nascent territorial state followed suit and also began to employ bodily metaphors. While the Roman Church was the “perfect prototype of an absolute and rational monarchy on a mystical basis,” at the same time “the State showed increasingly a tendency to become a quasi-church or a mystical corporation on a rational basis” (Kantorowicz 1957, 194). Deciding this struggle in the favor of the territorial state the role played by one German monk, Martin Luther, was key. This is basically what Luther had to say: Christian is not a humble subject of a universal hierarchy administered by the pope in Rome, but instead belongs to two different kingdoms ruled by two separate governments. The two kingdoms refer to the two overlapping spheres of Christian existence, and the governments to the two ways

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in which God governs the world (Steinmetz 2002, 115). The kingdom of God is the realm of revelation and faith—in this spiritual realm all Christians are equal, that is there is no need for authority in the church. The dialectical partner of the spiritual realm, kingdom of the world, is the temporal realm of unbelief that is ruled hierarchically and “by the sword.” This was the wedge Luther drove between the church and state: one was not a part of the other, but both separate and distinct and with clearly defined roles and spheres of influence. The church had no influence in the temporal sphere. The ecclesiastical officer had no coercive authority; the state alone possessed the sword (Whitford 2003, 180–1). For McFague the Protestant Reformation is an era of profound questioning of the symbolic mentality: “a loosening of the connections between symbol and its reference” (McFague 1982, 12). Luther’s eucharistic doctrine is revealing in this regard: the bread and wine were still symbols of Christ’s body, but they were not to be taken as identity statements, that is the eucharistic bread and wine did not really turn into flesh and blood. According to McFague (ibid., 13) the critical difference between symbolic and metaphorical statements is that the latter always contains the disclaimer “it is and it is not,” and one of the distinctive characteristics of the Protestant Reformation is the insistence on the “and it is not.” Where the Catholic tradition tries to hold onto symbolical meaning in its theology, the Protestant sensibility is metaphorical: “it tends to see dissimilarity, distinction, tension, and hence to be skeptical and secular, stressing the transcendence of God and the finitude of creation” (ibid.). This development, one that leads to the questioning of the symbolic mentality in theology, was not something the reformers suddenly came up with, but part of a development that had begun centuries before Luther. Michael Allen Gillespie identifies the Reformation as a milestone in what he calls a “nominalist revolution” against scholasticism. The scholastics of the High Middle Ages were ontological realists, that is they believed that all the individual and particular things of this world were reflections of universal entities existing in the mind of God. Creation embodied divine reason and the human being, “as the rational animal and imago dei, stood at the pinnacle of this creation, guided by a natural telos and divinely revealed supernatural goal” (Gillespie 2008, 14, emphasis in original). Nominalism turned this worldview on its head: it claimed that no real universals existed, all things were particular, and words for them merely signs useful for human understanding. The theological implications of this shift in theory of language were profound: God could no longer be understood by reason alone, but only by biblical

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revelation or mystical experience; and human being had no natural or supernatural telos to fulfill. Luther subscribed to a nominalist worldview, its God unknown and man overthrown, but by insisting on sola scriptura he brought God from its scholastic distance into a power within each and every human being. The God of Scripture speaks, he argues, not only to the Roman clergy, but directly to all of us. The implications of the Reformation, as we know, were not only theological. It was suddenly possible to ask questions like: What if Jesus’ passing comment on the swords offered to him on his arrest had nothing to do with his views on secular authority? Was it not possible to reinterpret what Jesus may have meant by the swords in that passage in Luke, as well as in many other passages recorded in Scripture, and comprehensively reexamine the Christian view on the distinction between church and state? These are kind of questions Luther asked and answering them as he did, providing a theological apologia for the principle of nonintervention in worldly affairs, he sided with the temporal authorities of his day, that is the princes of Germany. In his 1520 To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate Luther demands pope to stick to ecclesiastical matters and to leave the “lands” to take care of themselves: It should be decreed that no temporal matter is to be referred to Rome, but that all such cases shall be left to the temporal authority, as the Romanists themselves prescribe in that canon law of theirs, which they do not observe. It should be the pope’s duty to be the most learned in the Scriptures and the holiest (not in the name only but in fact) and to regulate matters which concern the faith and holy life of Christians. He should hold the primates and archbishops to this task, and help them in dealing with these matters and taking care of these responsibilities. This is what St. Paul teaches in I Corinthians 6:715, and he takes the Corinthians severely to task for their concern with worldly things. That such matters are dealt with in Rome causes unbearable grief in every land. It increases the costs, and, moreover, these judges do not know the usage, laws, and customs of these lands, so that they often do violence to the facts and base their decisions on their own laws and precedents. As a result the contesting parties often suffer injustice. (Luther 1999c, 160) With this letter Luther told German princes that they not only can, but should declare their “lands” politically independent territorial states,

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never mind Rome. By telling the princes God was on their side—that it was only because their kingdoms were ruled under God’s eye that they continued and that, left to themselves even for a moment, they would surely be overthrown—Luther gave his blessing for territorial political rule. Though the treaties were signed in Westphalia hundred years after Luther, the core principles of our modern, secularized international society were articulated here. For Luther Hess Waring, Martin Luther was not only a prophet or a forerunner, but “the founder of the modern theory of the state; not that he secularized it, but he declared it to be absolutely separate and distinct from the church and the sole possessor of coercive authority and sovereign power” (Waring 1910, 278–9). Though the Reformation can be written into the master narrative of enlightened governance, along with incidents like the Revolution in France and artifacts like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the teaching you will not easily find therein is civil liberty. What you will find instead is the Pauline ethos of civil obedience. For Luther, the fourth commandment16 was the constitutional norm for all authority in the kingdom of the world: For everybody must be ruled and subject to other men. So we see here again how many good works are taught in this commandment, for in it all our life is made subject to other men. That is the reason obedience is so highly praised, and all virtue and good works are included in it. (Luther 1999a, 182) The theology behind Luther’s “quietist” social ethic is in his two-kingdoms doctrine, a central doctrine in the Lutheran view of the world. We inhabit two realms, hold two “passports” as it were: one for the earthly kingdom, now, and another that will take us to the kingdom of heaven. In the earthly kingdom, in the world, we always stand in relatione: perpetually bound to one another. In the world a Christian holds many vocations—as father or mother, husband or wife, master of one’s servants, superior of one’s lieges—and all these services are so oriented that they service the other, our neighbor. It is only in heaven where we stand alone: good works and vocation exist for the neighbor, not for eternity and God—this is the crucial difference between the two kingdoms. In heaven all are alike, but the world is full of gradations and differences, and as long as we remain here we owe all our authorities unquestioning obedience (Wingren 2004, ch. 1). In his 1525 diatribe against Erasmus of Rotterdam, The Bondage of the Will, Luther makes clear his stand on

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authority: it is a capacity bestowed upon. God invests all stations and offices with authority to operate downward, but confers no authority over against himself: “man was constituted lord over those things which are beneath himself; over which, he has a right and a Free-will, that those things might do, and obey as he wills and thinks” (Luther 2007, 378–9). God, standing above the world, has “a Free-will on over man, that he should will and do what God wills, and should be able to do nothing but what He wills and does” (ibid.) The French reformer John Calvin echoes Luther in that he preaches the sovereignty of God in the whole cosmos, in all its visible and invisible kingdoms. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion Calvin investigates the terms of the first covenant made between God and the human being. According to Calvin the first of Moses’ commandments decrees that the name “Lord thy God” is enough to denote power and lawful dominion over human being: “If all things are from him, and by him consist, they ought in justice to bear reference to him” (Calvin 2008, bk. 2nd: 8.13). The mere name is enough to bring us under the authority of the divine majesty “for it were monstrous for us to wish to withdraw from the dominion of him, out of whom we cannot even exist” (ibid.). Christian revelation is relatively straightforward on this: without God-the-Creator there would not be human-the-creation. According to Mosaic law God delivered Israel from miserable bondage and now is the time “to yield prompt submission and obedience to him as the author of their freedom” (ibid., bk. 2nd: 8.15). Calvin draws the conclusion of civil obedience from the eighth commandment17: [L]et each of us consider how far he is bound in duty to others, and in good faith pay what we owe. In the same way, let the people pay all due honour to their rulers, submit patiently to their authority, obey their laws and orders, and decline nothing which they can bear without sacrificing the favour of God. (Calvin 2008, bk. 2nd: 8.46) The state is, for Calvin like it was for Luther, a means of preservation in a world of sin. The authority to contain sin in the secular realm must originate from God. According to Kuyper Calvinism teaches that the right of rule can not be based on “men alone,” because such government becomes, necessarily and immediately, a rule of the strongest. “As the tiger in the jungle rules over the defenceless antelope,” Kuyper writes, “so on the banks of the Nile a Pharaoh ruled over the progenitors of the fellaheen of Egypt” (Kuyper 2007, 82).

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Thus: according to the Protestant fathers one’s political authority over others flowed directly from God, and the burden of the Christian was to submit. Luther was an advocate of civil obedience because he feared the chaos of anarchy more than he did the tyranny of authority (Whitford 2003, 181). Chaos was the devil’s handiwork: it always hurt the weak more than it did the powerful, the innocent more than the guilty. Luther was adamant in his view that there could never be an authority tyrannical enough to justify riot and rebellion against the body politic: For God has appointed subjects to care for themselves as individuals, has taken the sword from them, and has put it into the hands of another. If they rebel against this, get others to join them and break loose, and take the sword, then before God they are worthy of condemnation and death. Overlords, on the other hand, are appointed to be persons who exist for the sake of the community, and not for themselves alone. They are to have the support of their subjects and are to bear the sword. Compared to his overlord the emperor, a prince is not a prince, but an individual who owes obedience to the emperor, as do all others, each for himself. But when he is seen in relationship to his own subjects he is as many persons as he has people under him and attached to him. So the emperor, too, when compared with God, is not an emperor, but an individual person like all others; compared with his subjects, however, he is as many times emperor as he has people under him. The same thing can be said of all other rulers. When compared to their overlord, they are not rulers at all and are stripped of all authority. When compared with their subjects, they are adorned with all authority. (Luther 1999c, 126) This is also the image pictured on the frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan. A Christian acts as an image of God when he gives up his right of rule and joins the corporeal community of his polis, becomes one of those innumerable midgets on the gigantic man. Why should he submit? Calvin hits the nail on the head by arguing that a philosopher can never give an exhaustive answer to this question. The only possible answer the world can give is a necessity postulated by this or that human purpose, which cannot be resisted—if indeed one can not resist or escape it. A Christian, however, obeys because it is unlawful to resist; bears patiently because impatience is rebellion against the order of creation. Like Jesus had to testify and prove his obedience to his father, so must every Christian deny himself and take up his cross: “[w]hy then should we exempt

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ourselves from that condition to which Christ our Head behooved to submit; especially since he submitted on our account, that he might in his own person exhibit a model of patience” (Calvin 2008, bk. 3rd: 8.1). The relationship between God and an obedient Christian is that between a lord and his servant: you give your body and life to God, offering no resistance to your master’s will. Luther’s and Calvin’s theologies digressed on certain points, but regarding secular authority they essentially agreed.18 In order to preserve life and property of the law-abiding at home and to defend against enemies abroad, God has ordained a second government: the government of the state to which a Christian, one expecting salvation, must yield. All government contains within an element of “good order” without which there can be no society, a peace to begin with. This is the bottom line of Christian’s respect of and responsibility to secular authority. Having set all this as an example of civil obedience the Protestant Reformation paved way to what J. N. Figgis, one of the “association theorists” calls the modern doctrine of sovereignty, which has reigned, so the story goes, ever since the Thirty Years War. According to this doctrine there is, within every state, one and indivisible sovereign; whether it is represented by a single person or some kind of an assemblage is not material. The sovereign stands at the highest summit of authority: they are above the law, because they can alter the law and any talk of rights and obligations against the sovereign is, by definition, nonsense. As long as a state exists, there must be a sovereign and its sovereignty must be held self-evident by the populace. If it is not, Figgis writes, “it is because the state is in a condition of incipient dissolution and anarchy is already setting in” (Figgis 1989, 123). For Figgis theory of sovereignty may well hold de jure, but not de facto, as it depicts a political hierarchy of a despot ruling over slaves, and in practice is “limited by the fact that the slaves are, after all, human; deny their personality as you like, there comes a point at which it asserts itself, and they will kill either the despot or themselves” (ibid., 124). A sovereign state thus represents “a state which is a super-man ruling individuals who are [sub] men” (ibid.). Since we are now gazing down to the history of secularization of theological concepts, we need to think about how is it that this notion or behavioral expectation, civil obedience, has passed on from the respublica Christiana to the order of the jus publicum Europaeum? I can not be certain, but I think that, among most of world’s people in most of the nations of the world, Christian piety no longer dominates discourses of

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political authority as it quite possibly may have done in sixteenth-century Europe. This poses a question: why submit to sovereignty today?

1.6 Fear and Modern Order Figgis writes that “in a sense of absolute superhuman unity” there has never existed, and there never will exist, a Leviathan-state properly so called (Figgis 1989, 124). In theory supreme and without limit, sovereign power is limited in too many ways: “in practice very materially, psychologically by its own nature, and externally by the fact that there are certain things which no government can do without provoking resistance” (ibid.). It is easy to agree with Figgis on this matter. There is something we can learn from this discussion, however, and it is represented by the image of Hobbes’ Leviathan. A gigantic man above a peaceful city: the symbolic form of the polis of the ancien régime. What Kelsen and Krabbe argue is that we do not need this image in the modern state. What Schmitt argues is that even though the picture may change it always tells us the same story: it does not have to be a king holding a sword and a crosier, but there will always be a figure, there, hovering above the political horizon. Hobbes agrees: “subjection, command, right, and power, are accidents, not of powers, but of persons” (Hobbes 1996, pt. 2, ch. xxxxii). A single person can be the highest, but so can an assembly or a majority capable of making political decisions on behalf of a people. What matters is that there is someone to represent political unity: If the formula is no longer: One God—One King, but: One God—One People, and if the political side of political theology is no longer oriented towards the single monarch but towards a people, then we turn to democracy. (Schmitt 2008b, 72) As you can see democracy does not constitute a break in Schmitt’s conceptual sociology. The reason why we have retained this symbolic image— human beings becoming one in body politic—is because it seems to be the only thing we got against evil; the last “man” standing between it and us. Luther reckoned that without the body politic Christian life would not be possible, because the kingdom of the world is a kingdom of evil, where “men would devour one another, seeing that the whole world is evil and that among thousands there is scarcely a single true Christian” (Luther 1999b, 91). In this world reduced to chaos “[n]o one could support wife and child, feed himself, and serve God” (ibid.). The

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community we imagine above the political horizon is not unlike corpus Christi in that it gives our becoming one a symbolic form, identifies us as one of the midgets making up Finland, Britain, Russia, the United States of America, whatever. What tells the mortal gods of this world apart from Christ is that they do not embody the love of God and promise of eternal life—no: not agape—but fear of the neighbor in this life. The politics of national security is, essentially, a politics of anxiety and terror: “Because we have anxiety we demand security. Because we demand security, we increase our armaments. As we increase our arms we give terror to our adversaries. Therefore our adversaries also increase their arms” (Moltmann 1984, 127). We need personal authority, or authority personified, because we need a sword: not any one of us alone can boast enough power and strength to overcome the terrors of this world. Is it really that bad, living in this world? To be in a position to ask this question, seriously, today, is a privilege unlike anything seen outside of Eden. Let me quote Calvin, in length, writing in Institutes of the Christian Religion, to answer this question: Innumerable are the ills which beset human life, and present death in as many different forms. Not to go beyond ourselves, since the body is a receptacle, nay the nurse, of a thousand diseases, a man cannot move without carrying along with him many forms of destruction. His life is in a manner interwoven with death. For what else can be said where heat and cold bring equal danger? Then, in what direction soever you turn, all surrounding objects not only may do harm, but almost openly threaten and seem to present immediate death. Go on board a ship, you are but a plank’s breadth from death. Mount a horse, the stumbling of a foot endangers your life. Walk along the streets, every tile upon the roofs is a source of danger. If a sharp instrument is in your own hand, or that of a friend, the possible harm is manifest. All the savage beasts you see are so many beings armed for your destruction. Even within a high walled garden, where everything ministers to delight, a serpent will sometimes lurk. Your house, constantly exposed to fire, threatens you with poverty by day, with destruction by night. Your fields, subject to hail, mildew, drought, and other injuries, denounce barrenness, and thereby famine. I say nothing of poison, treachery, robbery, some of which beset us at home, others follow us abroad. Amid these perils, must not man be very miserable, as one who, more dead than alive, with difficulty draws an anxious and feeble breath, just as if a drawn sword were constantly suspended over his neck? It may be said that these things happen seldom, at least not always, or to all, certainly

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never all at once. I admit it; but since we are reminded by the example of others, that they may also happen to us, and that our life is not an exception any more than theirs, it is impossible not to fear and dread as if they were to befall us. (Calvin 2008, bk. 1st: 17.10) The more I reflect on Calvin’s pessimism the clearer it becomes to me how little our civilization has actually progressed in its aversion from the scourges of illness and death over the last five centuries or so. Of course: we have come up with cures to a number of diseases and seen improvement in logistics, agriculture, and construction, &c., which must have improved the lives of a fortunate minority within our condition. Having said that it must be added that everyone of us, today, has to tackle with the very same perils as everyone had to in Calvin’s day. The sword has not been sheathed and, at the end of the day, there is nothing to secure us from the insecurities of being alive. But: as long as there is something that—no: someone who—promises even limited deliverance in this valley of the shadow of death, we want to turn to them for comfort. It seems that, in the kingdom of the world, the body politic not only makes Christian life possible, but separates the living from the dead. *

*

*

Let us think back to the question asked above in this chapter: is there true meaning to Finland? I can imagine there being a God, shining through Eden—if there is anything out there that transcends human capacities to conceive and understand by nature, it must be Him. If I look through the Finnish flag, maps, and all the other political symbols one can think of I see, to be absolutely honest, nothing. Behind the language, customs, and everything you might identify as Finnish culture I see an important tradition, one that I call my own, but not anything shining through from the center: anything that would transcend my limited abilities to conceive and understand. I can not—no: I will not—see Finland in terms of true meaning: I believe there is not an “uncontainable” thing there. I have read something about the history of Finnish as a language and a people who have spoken it (or something like it at least) near the river Volga; I well know the history of my home country, from its independence in 1917 to its joining the United Nations in 1955, the European Union in 1995, up until to where “we” are today. I think I am literate in Finnish political symbolism: I can identify official and less than official signs that point to the existence of such a state and its people. This is not it. The thing is that I will not admit to the existence of a spiritual center

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of Finnishness—for a lack of a better term—which is not of the “visible” Finland or its Finns. Thinking in Yoder’s categories: being Finnish is a worldly standard, that is not a properly basic social definition. It is commonplace to talk about Finns as a community, but it is not a genuine community in Bonhoeffer’s terms: it does not represent a fundamental synthesis between individual and social spirituality, but is rather an accumulation of social signs pointing toward an empty space, and of course a convenient arrangement for some public services in a territory located between Sweden and Russia. But I can acknowledge that one can make their state or flavor of nationalism into a properly basic social definition, and that many are doing that today. I can understand that states can be given—and some of them may even welcome it—an appearance of transcendence. This is precisely what Schmitt means with secularization of theological concepts: worldly things begin to take ecclesiastical shapes. This is also the topic of one interesting and important correspondence between Bonhoeffer, who had left Germany for his first visit to the United States in 1930, and Helmut Rossler, an old friend and close colleague of his in Berlin. In his letters Rossler wrote about the church in Germany and its copulation with “some popular movements of the time,” that is national socialism, thereby doing damage to the gospels “radicalness and exclusiveness” (Bonhoeffer 1965, 71). In this situation, Rossler laments, it is not easy “to count the kingdom of God higher than the tormented Fatherland” (ibid., 73). He then describes what he sees the greatest tragedy of the church and the German people, which is that nationalism links up with “a new paganism” which was by now getting more and more difficult to criticize as it “goes around in Christian clothing” (ibid.). The “religion of the Fatherland” taking shape in Germany was a result of an encounter of two “most deeply related fronts: consistent secularism of a consciously this-worldly nature and secularism with a religious flavour which can only reach a pragmatic understanding of religion” (ibid., 74). According to Rossler church had to change its game altogether: “today we need no longer threaten men with hell, because reality today is complete hell” (ibid., 75). News from Germany reflected in Bonhoeffer’s ministry in America. He tried to communicate his distress over Germany and the church in his sermons, at the same providing brilliant analysis on secularization of theological concepts and the modern order: Before the war we lived too far from God; we believed too much in our own power, in our almightiness and righteousness. We attempted to

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be strong and good people, but we were too proud of our endeavour, we felt too much satisfaction with our scientific, economic and social progress, and we identified this progress with the coming of the kingdom of God. We felt too happy and complacent in this world; our souls were too much at home in this world. (Bonhoeffer 1965, 79) Luther’s revolution was that he helped the national state to break off from a single political hierarchy. National socialism is an example of an effective integration of Christianity within the political hierarchy of a single nation. Belief in power, almightiness, and righteousness; complacency over human progress; feeling at home in the world—all of this has survived the disillusionments of national socialism and communism. All of it absolutely prospers today in conditions of liberal democracy. Charles Taylor teaches that, ideally, the society “we” have today is one of disembedded political authority. Premodern society was the one where political authority was inconceivable without God: where its structures could not be understood separately from the divine, the higher, the numinous. According to Taylor, this imposed a certain verticality to society, which depended on the fact that it was God’s creation and had its origins in “higher time.” Thus, order in premodern society is personal, as its “subjects are only held together within an order that coheres through its apex, in the person of the king, through whom this order connects to higher time and the order of things” (Taylor 2004, 158). Modern, secular societies are, Taylor argues, markedly different: the modern order no longer gives hierarchy or any structure of social differentiation an ontological status. By contrast, contemporary social imaginary sees us all taking part in forming our political entity, to which all of us relate in the same way, as equal citizens. This is what Taylor means by the modern principle of horizontal society: “We have moved from a hierarchical order of personalized links to an impersonal egalitarian one; from a vertical of mediated access to horizontal, direct-access societies” (ibid.). This is what Krabbe tried to say when he argued that we no longer live under the dominion of persons, but under the dominion of norms: “in every field, even in that of international relations, the authority of law is growing” (Krabbe 1922, 10). Taylor has lived to see it: This whole development reaches its culmination in our time, in the period after the Second World War, in which the notion of rights as prior to and untouchable by political structures becomes widespread—although they are now called “human” rather than “natural”

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rights—and in which this consciousness is given expression in the entrenchment of charters of rights, by which ordinary legislation can be set aside when it violates these fundamental norms. These declarations of rights are in a sense the clearest expression of our modern idea of a moral order underlying the political, which the political has to respect. (Taylor 2004, 173) As citizens of secular modernity—say: as passport holding Britons, Finns, and Germans—we enjoy full membership privileges since it is us standing there on the horizon; we are the ones that make up the singularity represented by the symbol of the body politic. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, alongside a wide variety of local particulars, but this can be called the pre-political foundation of liberal democratic order. But how about the political foundation? “The political entity cannot by its very nature be universal in the sense of embracing all of humanity and the entire world,” writes Schmitt, “[t]he political world is a pluriverse, not a universe” (Schmitt 1976, 53). If the different states, religions, and all the other human groupings on earth should be so unified that conflict among them would be impossible, a political foundation would no longer be required—we would need “neither state nor kingdom nor empire, neither republic nor monarchy, neither aristocracy nor democracy, neither protection nor obedience” (ibid., 57). This is what Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political is about: potential or actual conflict between states in international relations. How did we end up with these political “beings” divided by territorial lines? Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch Reformed theologian, teaches that human political impulse is buried deep in our social nature: human being is, as Aristotle wrote, a zoon politikon (Kuyper 2007, 79). God could have created human beings as disconnected individuals, but He did not: by virtue of our birth we are genealogically united with the whole race of humanity. Humanity is of one blood, Kuyper argues, but the states that “subdivide the earth into continents, and each continent into morsels, does not harmonize with this idea” (ibid.). The organic unity of the human race can be realized politically only in a universe: “if one State could embrace all the world, and if the whole of humanity were associated in one world empire” (ibid., emphasis in original). This is probably what we would have, Kuyper argues, had sin not intervened. Gierke agrees in that the basis of the state, “rule of men over men,” was the result of the sinful deterioration of human nature “[i]t was the fall [from grace] that brought into the world political rule and property” (Gierke 1977, 157).

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How the first states and the pluriverse came about in the first place is an interesting question, but one we know preciously little about. Just about the only historical document we have is the Old Testament, which narrates the origin in the migrations after the flood. According to the biblical myth Noah’s flock began to spread along the Tigris and Euphrates and over time the settlements increased their wealth and power. This is when man came up with an idea to build a political and cultural center for the post-flood empire: the tower of Babel (Gen. 11.4). This was against God’s wishes, as he had commanded man to multiply and have dominion over the whole earth. This was, as another Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck notes, the first time in history man thought upon himself, with all his strength and wisdom, to organize against God: an idea which was to arise “again and again later on, whose realization has been the goal of all kinds of allegedly great men in the course of the ages” (Bavinck 1956, 50). God intervened in human aspirations to world domination by “confusing his tongues,” making people physiologically and psychologically different from each other. In consequence humanity was divided into races and peoples, and dispersed in all directions of the earth (Gen. 11.9). This is when the seed of the human political instinct—sense of nationality, enmity, and hatred—was planted and the world separated into nations without a supreme authority among them. International society is, thereby, general revelation: “an astonishing punishment and a terrible judgement,” one which Bavinck argues “cannot be undone by any cosmopolitanism or leagues of peace, by any ‘universal’ language, nor by any world-state or international culture” (Bavinck 1956, 51). We continue to live under this curse. Why is injustice and force necessary for politics? Christian worldview has an answer to this question: because the state is stained by its illegitimate origin, sin. Although some of us have made some movement from a vertical toward a horizontal society and may have something to call pre-political foundations at home, it needs to be said—even though we know this well enough already—that this is not (yet) so in our international relations. In the “world outside” there is no political entity and we are not even the ones making up the society. Yes: the authority of law is growing in international relations, yet the states are the ones carrying all the swords and embodying their respective peoples in an essentially nonhuman community we identify as “international society.” Political theology is an attempt to relate discourse about God to the organization of bodies in space time (Cavanaugh and Scott 2004).

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International relations is a discourse firmly embedded on an ontology of order: it is a sublime act of faith in the positive existence of a vertical society above and premodern authority over man. What we need to do in IR is to relate the state as one of the gods. Political theology of IR is a cratological19 political theology: it is premised—for the time that remains—on a radical non-autarchy of the human being in the world political and questions those who are in charge of this bystander, from the highest authority downward, in “international relations”? What is the foundation of this authority? How is it executed? How is it legitimated?

Notes 1

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For a good contextualization of Schmitt in the history of political theology, see Hollerich (2004). William E. Scheuerman’s (1999) Carl Schmitt: The End of Law is a balanced account of Schmitt’s life and work, warts and all. It also reveals some interesting “hidden” dialogues Schmitt had with other leading thinkers of his time. Schmitt made a habit of writing sequels to his earlier works in later life. Political Theology II is a rejoinder to some criticism of political theology published in between Schmitt’s volumes, particularly Erik Peterson’s Monotheismus als politisches Problem and Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. The second volume does not make new arguments inasmuch it sheds light on the central claims of the first. What makes II important is that it testifies Schmitt’s continuing faith in the claims made in Political Theology more than 50 years after their publication. Ellen Kennedy’s (2004) Constitutional Failure is an excellent volume contextualizing Schmitt’s political theology and conception of the political. Where Ricoeur writes about symbols McFague refers to metaphors, but both mean the same thing: there is no going around the image when communicating meaning (see McFague 2007, 40). For an extended discussion on Tillich’s use of signs and symbols see Rowe (1968, 97–126). Schmitt used the term in a variety of contexts before the publication of Der Nomos der Erde im Volkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum, for example identifying it with Adolf Hitler’s will (see Luoma-aho 1999, 49). Unlike Schmitt Berger does not derive the term nomos from Ancient Greek, but indirectly from Emile Durkheim’s concept of anomie (see Durkheim 1951). Paul uses the Greek term stoicheia, see for example Gal. 4.1-11. See for example the heavenly messenger who appeared to Daniel in Dan. 10. They may opt out of this by doing a full year of educational, social, or medical civilian service instead. Then again: the EU is not a state properly so called. “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor. 10:17 ESV).

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50 14

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17 18

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“And he said to them, ‘When I sent you out with no moneybag or knapsack or sandals, did you lack anything?’ They said, ‘Nothing.’ He said to them, ‘But now let the one who has a moneybag take it, and likewise a knapsack. And let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one. For I tell you that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: And he was numbered with the transgressors. For what is written about me has its fulfillment.’ And they said, ‘Look, Lord, here are two swords’. And he said to them, ‘It is enough’” (Lk. 22.35-38 ESV). “To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded?” What Paul is trying to say here is that “the righteous” are able pass judgment on worldly matters without outside intervention. The fact that some of Paul’s Corinthian brethren had lawsuits against one another before “unrighteous” Jewish arbitrators was very shameful for the whole Christian community in Corinth (Malina and Pilch 2006, 82). “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Exod. 20.12, ESV). “You shall not steal” (Exod. 20.15, ESV). One of these disagreements concerned the terms of civil obedience. Where Luther’s ethos was that of obedience to ordained authorities without exception, Calvin’s teaching emphasizes obedience to the principle of government, that is as long as the secular authorities lived up to certain requirements of rule, then and only then they were in a position to claim the sanction of divine institution. This is the adjective used by Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, Aleida Assmann, and Jan Assmann in their afterword to the transcript of The Political Theology of Paul by Jacob Taubes—a book that is, by the way, compulsory reading for anyone doing anything with political theology. In contrast to Taubes’ horizontal or sociological political theology, Schmitt understands the political theology vertically, as interpretation and foundation of sovereignty “as a nexus of authority, revelation, and obedience” (Taubes and Assmann 2004). According to Hartwich, Assmann and Assmann, the difference between the horizontal-sociological and vertical-cratological political theologies stems from their religious reference; in Taubes’ case Judaism and Schmitt’s Christianity.

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Chapter 2

Sacralization of International Relations

The genesis of the modern international system is conventionally dated to the year of 1648 and the peace of Westphalia. The peace was preceded by 30 years of “Wars of Religion”—apostrophes will soon be explained— between the Catholic Habsburgs and Reformed German, Swedish, French, and Danish princes. If there was an intention in the Protestant Reformation it was universal reform in the Catholic Church, but the conflicts that followed resulted in the consolidation of national states and the formation of state churches. What the treaty codified was the principle of cuius regio eius religio, which essentially meant that both Catholic and Protestant states simply had to tolerate each other’s existence. This is the reason why Westphalia is important for international history. Such is the story of the birth of the modern, secular state you can read from most IR textbooks, but it is a contested story. Andreas Osiander (2001) argues that the prevalent image of Westphalia is actually a myth utilized by the realists of IR to sacralize state sovereignty. According to Osiander, the pre-Westphalian system did not disappear overnight, but over a longer period in which the revolution in France was probably a more significant turning point. Daniel Philpott (2001, 98–9) argues that Western Europe would have seen a modern state-system even without reformation and ensuing wars of religion, but the process would have taken longer than it did. Osiander’s and Philpott’s deconstructions of Westphalia are subtle: they correct some of the historical details, but leave the myth intact. José Casanova does not. The cuius regio eius religio established first in the peace of Augsburg and reiterated in Westphalia was not the formative principle of the modern secular democratic state, Casanova argues, but rather that of the modern confessional territorial absolutist state: Nowhere in Europe did religious conflict lead to the secularization of state and politics, but rather to the confessinalization of the state and

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to the territorialization of religions and peoples. Moreover, this early modern dual pattern of confessionalization and territorialization was already well established before the religious wars and even before the Protestant Reformation. (Casanova 2008, 110) For William T. Cavanaugh the “Wars of Religion” is a false narrative altogether. The story according to which secular state was a solution to violent conflict between Christian denominations puts the matter backwards: the Wars were not an event that made it necessary to invent a secular state, but were in fact themselves the birth pangs of the state. Conflicts between Protestantism and Catholicism were fought for the political interests of the emerging state over the decaying remnants of the medieval ecclesiastical order, those embodied in the Roman Church. According to Cavanaugh Wars of Religion is an anachronism, because no such thing as “religion” existed at the time. What was really at stake in the Wars was the creation of such a category, a container for private beliefs without political relevance, which was made necessary by “the new state’s need to secure absolute sovereignty over its subjects” (Cavanaugh 2002, 22). The principal culprits behind the Wars were not pastors and peasants arguing about the solas, “but kings and nobles with a stake in the outcome of the movement toward the centralized, hegemonic state” (ibid., 31). The concept of religion born in this context was one of domesticated beliefs which could be used as means of binding the individual to the sovereign: “[r]eligion is no longer matter of certain bodily practices within the Body of Christ, but is limited to the realm of the ‘soul’, and the body is handed over to the state” (ibid., 35). This is the state of religion today, in our “secular” moment. Why the apostrophes around the secular? It seems easy to think that the states today are secular institutions, even though we know, having read Chapter 2, that the history of the idea, the symbolic image of that society has its origins in Christian theology. It is easy now, because of everything that has happened to our social imaginary since the premodern era, in “(post-)modernity.” One of the things Luther and the Reformation, and especially the democratic revolutions brought about was a new, secularized embedding for temporal authority. Since the state was no longer a part of the universal hierarchy of God’s cosmos, it had to come up with a new understanding of history and modes of narration for its existence in time and place—this is basically the story Taylor (2007) tells us in his A Secular Age. Even though we can tell such a story, of humanity turning away from God, we must yield before the fact that human beings may

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remain religious even though the “age” has become secular, or been secular at some point. Indeed Peter Berger proclaimed The Desecularization of the World more than a decade ago, and since the turn of the millennium we have even more evidence of the world today being as religious as it ever was (see Berger 1999). Theologians have known this all along: we humans are religious by nature. Saint Augustine begins his Confessions by addressing God: “to praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation [. . .] you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Augustine 2008, 3). John Calvin, a very well-read man for his time in issues of world religion, argued that “there is no nation so barbarous, no race so brutish, as not to be imbued with the conviction that there is a God” (Calvin 2008, bk. 1st: 3.1). According to Calvin there has never been a kingdom or a city without religion. For him this amounts to a confession “that a sense of deity is inscribed on every heart” (ibid.). A modern Orthodox theologian, Alexander Schmemann, defines man as homo adorans, a worshipping being: when God had created the material world, he finally created the human being as “the priest of this cosmic sacrament” (Schmemann 1982, 15). What goes quite a long way toward testifying to our being in homo adorans, even in times of most intense secularization, even if one did not believe in God or creation, is the case of idolatry. The question is not whether we believe or not, but rather the things we choose to believe in. Langdon Gilkey sums it up: Whether he wishes it or not, man as a free creature must pattern his life according to some chosen ultimate end, must center his life on some chosen ultimate loyalty, and must commit his security to some trusted power. Man is thus essentially, not accidentally, religious, because his basic structure, as dependent and yet free, inevitably roots his life on something ultimate. (Gilkey 1959, 193) One of the most powerful of these ultimate ends since the secular move away from God has been, as we know, the nation: the idea that people belong together in virtue of a common language, common culture, common religion, common history, and so on. The national state is the legitimate political subject of international relations par excellance, and has been that for some centuries now. We have already established that even though nationalism may often seem embedded on a secular foundation, we do not have to dig too deep to make out the pre-secular premises in these narratives, today. In the Millennium’s 2000 special issue on religion

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and IR Anthony D. Smith puts into words the fact that, in our world political, nationalism “has a prima facie role as the expression of the identities and aspirations of a series of territorial nations who together compose the vast majority of the earth’s surface” (Smith 2000, 795). He goes on to explain how the central categories of nationalist thought derive from ethno-preceding ethno-religious motifs and beliefs, which have been “combined, redirected, and in varying degrees, transformed for new political ends” (ibid., 810). The paper goes on to argue that “religion”, far from being squeezed out of the frame of a secularising modernity, re-emerges within it in new guises. Its legacies are not buried and forgotten, rather they are transmuted in and by nationalism. For, not only are specific motifs, symbols, and traditions of earlier world religions taken over and used by nationalists, at the official and popular levels; nationalism itself, through its conception of the nation as a sacred communion, with its own doctrines, texts, liturgies, ceremonies, churches, and priests becomes a novel kind of anthropocentric, intra-historical, and political “religion”, a (rival or allied) functional equivalent of the old, transhistorical religions, but one that like them fulfils many of the same collective functions through analogous rituals, myths, and symbols. (Smith 2000, 811) What Smith means by “sacred communion” is an imagined community not unlike what Benedict Anderson had in mind, but “one that lives not just in the imagination [. . .] but equally in the conscious will and mass sentiments” (Smith 2000, 802–3). That is: the nation is not only imagined, but also willed and felt fellowship among those who assert a moral faith and feel an ancestral affinity. The “sacred properties” of nations help to create cohesive national identities and, on those, a sense of confidence and exclusivity, “attributes which in turn feed into the conduct of international politics, as a force for stability as well as disorder and destruction” (ibid., 792). Smith’s is a view that employs nationalism as a conceptual link between conventional categories of religion and international relations, to channel “beliefs about the sacred” onto the world political through the national state. While I do not disagree with Smith in principle—quite the contrary: the point he makes fits in well with my reading of the secularization of theological concepts presented in the previous chapter—I would like to point out that this is only one of the aspects of the political theology of IR. The other aspect I now have in mind is a more

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unconventional one, I well recognize, and does not directly rely on the beliefs held by any of today’s world religions, not even Christianity, nor the channeling of these beliefs by any of its national states. The problem with most of us in academic IR is that we do not see that the project we are involved in—this particular form of cultural tradition we partake in by asking questions in the name of “IR” and coming up with educated answers too—serves a highly political purpose. We may like it or we may not, but in so doing and bona fide, there is no escape from the fact that we are employed by an idol, an imaginary being of the unseen world, to legitimize a political hierarchy over human life. We already know that some of the “secular” and “theoretical” concepts we accept as premise when we do IR today we have inherited from Christian theology. What we need to do now is to properly understand that these concepts are no less spiritual than those we today may categorize as “religious” or “theological,” and see that the political purposes these concepts served—no: still serve—in institutional religion serve the same purposes in IR today. Having done both of these we will have grounds for a radical rethinking of the role and purpose of our art.

2.1 “States Are People Too!” If there is anything of an ontology in this project of ours, a fulcrum around which everything in IR seems to turn, the polity of the state is it. Most of us inherit our state from our parents, no questions asked.1 Not having a nationality is an exception in our world, and a risky one, because we live our lives in a world inhabited by states. I want to emphasize inhabited, because this is the image we have before us when we gaze the world political: a society of 200- or-so group persons in a state of international society characterized by enmity or cooperation depending on which one of the two you talk to, Thomas or Hugo. But it is crucially important to here indicate and ever so closely observe the fact we may have already made implicitly, but not yet explicated: that the states are not, properly speaking, real. This is an ontological claim, one that demands a definition of real. What states do not possess as entities is a physical essence that exists independently outside the human mind. Having said that states do have, like we discussed in the previous chapter, a capability to signify reality in different ways: there are people acting in their name, we have them demarcated on maps, identified by flags, worn them on sleeves and mobilized them in green metal. But: the state

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is no-one in particular, not a picture, a flag, or a tank—all of these are symbols for something which cannot be seen, but we either believe is there, or are just ready to play along. What gathers all these symbols into a single cluster we call a nation-state is, as William T. Cavanaugh defines, “a disciplined imagination of a community occupying a particular space with a common conception of time, a common history and a common destiny of salvation from peril” (Cavanaugh 2002, 2). Philosophically this is hardly a revelation: there is little novelty in the claim that the state is a question of collective belief. This has been the state of the art ever since IR opened shop. E. H. Carr writes in his The Twenty Years’ Crisis that: it is difficult to see how orderly international relations can be conducted at all unless Englishmen, Frenchmen and Germans believe (however absurd the belief may be) that “Great Britain”, “France”,’ and “Germany” have moral duties to one another and a reputation to be enhanced by performing those duties. The spirit of international relations seems more likely to be improved by stimulating this belief than by decrying it. (Carr 2001, 139) Hans J. Morgenthau in his Politics Among Nations: A nation[al state] as such is obviously not an empirical thing. A nation as such cannot be seen. What can be empirically observed are only the individuals who belong to a nation. [. . .] Therefore, when we speak in empirical terms of the power or of the foreign policy of a certain nation, we can only mean the power or the foreign policy of certain individuals who belong to the same nation. (Morgenthau 1993, 115) Ditto Kenneth N. Waltz in Man, State and War : In studying international politics it is convenient to think of states as the acting units. At the same time, it does violence to one’s common sense to speak of the state, which is after all an abstraction and consequently inanimate, as acting. (Waltz 1954, 175) And another contemporary neo-Realist: Of course we “realists” know that the state does not really exist. [. . .] Only individuals really exist, although I understand that certain schools

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of psychology challenge even this. Only individuals act, even though they may act on behalf of one of these collective social entities, the most important being the group. (Gilpin 1984, 301) What the IR has done for around hundred years today is helping to sustain, by objectifying over and against the human being, the positive existence of an international hierarchy of states, their territories, and corresponding populations. Even if this world expects the human being to fill some of its logical gaps—like the one that the state does not really exist—it does make perfect sense in its own sphere: that of international relations. Once you imagine the state, believe in it or just play along, then world politics begins to make sense. What makes this a problem, is that the state we imagine is a cause of pain to many of us here in the world. Hold on to this thought—I will come back to it as I conclude the chapter. According to David Campbell (1998, 75), the discursive economy of the body politic is a central element in the construction of political identities and stems from two factors. First, there is a well-established history of representing the social as a body that precedes the rise of the state in Europe; and second, it is a figuration that authorizes and empowers the representation of danger to the social body in terms associated with the representation of danger to the physiological body. The body politic thus provides the resources for representing difference as danger to the social, where the social is understood as a naturally healthy body. Furthermore, and as noted by Antoine de Baecque (1997, 6), the body politic makes the management of a human community comparable to the scientific management of the physiological body—an illusion that gives politicians and men of letters alike a scientific claim to observe and organize it as one. Intellectuals of statecraft associating with the academia have generally been quite willing to make such a claim. In his presidential address at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association in San Diego in April 1996, Davis Bobrow identified concepts provided by medical research and practice appropriate to the study of insecurity in international relations. Bobrow proposed that insecurity, “the fear in prospect and pain in experience of severe loss,” should be viewed by “insecurity professionals” through the metaphors of disease, illness, and decline (Bobrow 1996, 442). The professional goal of such a metaphorical perspective would resemble that of the health professions: “a more effective and comprehensive portfolio of strategies for recognizing, preventing, and treating threats” (ibid.). In short, Bobrow perceived

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the analysts of insecurity as “physicians” of bodies politic, whose work involved diagnosing and ultimately treating political pathologies. Even though states or nations are not empirical things, but rather questions of collective belief, they provide the starting point for the practice of academic IR today. Little has changed in this register in the past century or so. In his 1899 Philosophical Theory of the State, the British idealist Bernard Bosanquet wrote that [t]he Nation State [. . .] is the widest organisation which has the common experience necessary to found a common life. This is why it is recognised as absolute in power over the individual, and as his representative and champion in the affairs of the world outside. It is obvious that there can be but one such absolute power in relation to any one person; and that, so far as the world is organised, there must be one; and, in fact, his discharge from one allegiance can only be accepted by another. (Bosanquet 1899, 320) We might phrase it differently today, but the “world outside” is still a world of states. Yes: “people talk, and within certain limits behave as if there were a world community” (Carr 2001, 147), but at this point in time we do not have such a community, a civitas maxima to use one of Martin Wight’s (1992, 40–4) terms. There are of course exceptions, but this is the rule: the world political is an international society (or community) that has states, not people, as members. What does contemporary theory of IR make of all this? With his Social Theory of International Politics Alexander Wendt did not only make constructivism a household approach in IR, but, by claiming that “states are people too,” also (re-)introduced the metaphor of the body politic—the history of which we discussed in Chapter 2—to IR theory. Indeed, it was the analogy between the actor-ness of human individuals in society and that of states in international society that made Wendt’s theory social in the first place. For Wendt (1999, ch. 5), states were human-like actors in a state of society. Review of International Studies took up with the idea and hosted a highprofile symposium on the person-hood of states in IR theory, with Wendt (2004) again as keynote author. In his introduction to the forum, Patrick T. Jackson (2004) notes that Wendt’s discussion on the person-hood of state marks a watershed in the conceptualization of the state in IR theory, and entails many theoretical and normative issues. Some of these issues were discussed, while others were not. Amidst all this innovation it needs

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to be said that theorizing on person-hood of the state is hardly a novelty. As we established in the previous chapter, body politics is a remarkably persistent mode of representation for the state, one the history of which we can easily document from the Ancients to post-Modernity. Students of medieval political thought will have read about the schism between popes and kings on who had the right to be represented as the “head” of the state. Students of geopolitics—German or critical (see Toal 1996)— will remember Friedrich Ratzel, Karl Haushofer, and the “political organisms” of states locked in a Darwinian struggle for existence. Wendt argues that behind personification there are “real actors to which we can legitimately attribute anthropomorphic qualities like desires, beliefs and intentionality” (Wendt 1999, 197). For a narrativist like Iver Neumann (2004), states are not “really” persons, only like persons, and personification should not be more than an analogy, a comparison, a metaphor. Colin Wight, another with a realist mindset, criticizes metaphorical treatment of theoretical terms (such as the state) for allowing the theorist an escape from ontology: “If theoretical posits are not attempts to refer to real entities the theorist has no obligation to give an account of them” (Wight 2004, 272). For Wight, this is a “misdescription of the practice of science”: if metaphors are not scientifically measured against reality, for example if we do not inquire into how like a person a state is, “[w]hy do we need the state and other political fictions when religions have always had perfectly adequate ‘as if’ entities that have the added advantage of explaining everything?” (Wight 2004, 273, emphasis mine). This is an interesting question, but one that assumes IR is not a religion, in which the entity of the state has not provided or at least attempted to provide an adequate explanation to everything. Wight’s remark is a typical example of secular IR arrogating to itself the right to define religion and its role in politics and science, pretensions of universality and claims of superiority over non-secular alternatives implied. As rightly noted by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (2004), the demarcation of the category of “religion” from “politics” is a highly politicized decision that has yet to be fully accounted for in Western social theory and practice, IR included. IR is not the neutral observer it pretends to be, but implicated in religion by its own secularist self-perception (Laustsen and Waever 2000, 739). When we think about the state-as-person metaphor in IR we see in it a certain kind of metaphor, which is the model. Models are sustained and systematic metaphors. More so than mere metaphors, images that ordinarily pass through discourse, models are “metaphors with staying power”

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(McFague 1982, 23). They are images that retain the tension between “is and is not” typical of metaphors, but take steps from toward conceptual language in that they give us more organic, consistent, and comprehensive ways of thinking about the unknown in terms of the known (McFague 1982, 23). The institution of the Lord’s Supper, bread-asbody, is an example of a metaphor that has become a model. When Jesus broke the bread and said “[t]his is my body” (1 Cor. 11.24, ESV), he was speaking metaphorically.2 After the Eucharist this metaphor has been worked into a model of Christian existence in the world, and on this model entire sacramental theologies have been built. Models are not important for theology only, but for political science also. Martin Landau points out that “political science has always resorted to metaphors, to the device of proceeding from the known to the unknown. Those who criticize the use of models need to understand that they too must use them” (Landau 1972, 102). Even if we do rely on the guidance of scientific method—instead of, say, Christian theology— practicing our IR, we are just as dependent on metaphors as the classics we like to cite in our introductions and add to our bibliographies. Even though we can trace the history of body politics far and away, the contemporary notion of the state-as-person in IR dates to the nineteenth century and the origins of “political science.” The pioneers of state person-hood were European: this is where the idea took root and was exported across the Atlantic in the turn of the twentieth century. Let us first make three short excursions to European theorists of the state—the Swiss Bluntschli, the Englishman Spencer, and the Swede Kjellén—and then move on to contextualize the idea in the history of American political thought. Johann Kaspar Bluntschli was a professor of political sciences at the University of Heidelberg, whose interesting and influential works have received little contemporary attention. The sixth German edition of his Lehre vom Modernen Staat (“The Theory of the State”) was translated into English in 1885 and may be described, as it was by its translators, as no less than “an attempt to do for the European state what Aristotle accomplished for the Hellenic” (Bluntschli 1885, b). Bluntschli championed the cause of the historical study of “the nature and essential characteristics of actual States,” as opposed to “imaginary perfection” of “philosophical speculation” (Bluntschli 1885, 15). Bluntschli’s most central conceptual commitment was to the organic state. According to Bluntschli, “the State is in no way a lifeless instrument, a dead machine: it is a living and therefore organised being” (Bluntschli 1885, 18). This organic nature of the state had not always been understood, although “political peoples had

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indeed an image [. . .] of it, and recognized it consciously in language” (Bluntschli 1885, 18). Bluntschli’s organic state was a natural organism only indirectly, for it was the realization of the political tendencies of human nature: “the State is a product of human activity, and its organism is a copy of natural organism” (Bluntschli 1885, 19). The organism of the state did not stand on the same level with “lower” organisms of flora and fauna, but was of a “higher” kind: a moral and spiritual organism capable of taking up into itself the feelings and thoughts of the nation, uttering them in laws and realizing them in acts—“History ascribes to the state a personality which, having spirit and body, possesses and manifests a will of its own” (Bluntschli 1885, 19). Bluntschli’s English contemporary Herbert Spencer—often identified as one of the “fathers” of sociology—founded his definition of society on an elaborate organicist paradigm. According to Spencer, “a whole of which the parts are alive, cannot, in its general characters, be like lifeless wholes” (Spencer 1906, 436). The similarity of society or the body politic—terms which Spencer used interchangeably—to a living body became clear as a parallelism of principle in the arrangement of their components. To begin with, social organisms, like individual organisms, underwent continuous growth; “compared with things we call inanimate, living bodies and societies so conspicuously exhibit augmentation of mass, that we may fairly regard this as characterizing them both” (ibid., 437). Social growth usually continued either up to times when societies divided, or up to times when they were overwhelmed. Secondly, while social organisms, like individual organisms, increased in size they also increased in structure; “like a low animal, the embryo of a high one has few distinguishable parts; but while it is acquiring greater mass, its parts multiply and differentiate” (ibid.). Progressive differentiation of structures is accompanied by a progressive differentiation of functions, like development of organs within a living body. According to Spencer social organisms were not strictly speaking comparable to animal or vegetal organisms, but “discrete instead of concrete, asymmetrical instead of symmetrical, sensitive in all its units instead of having a single sensitive centre” (ibid., 580). Even if the political contexts and motives of Bluntschli’s collectivist organicism and Spencer’s individualist organicism were fundamentally different, if not contradicting, both fit comfortably within the body politics-tradition. In his Staten som lifsform (“State as a form of life”), Rudolf Kjellén defined geopolitics as “a doctrine of the state as a geographical organism or a manifestation in space” (Kjellén 1916, 39). Kjellén defined the

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state as a territorially defined subject the identity of which manifested in its representation in everyday use of language (Kjellén 1916, 17–18). He further distinguished two different “faces” of this identity: the first represented the state as a legal subject and use of power on its people within its boundaries; and the second represented the state as a subject of external relations with other states. Whereas domestic politics was a realm of rationality and legality, in the external realm of interstate relations natural instincts of states reigned. The “nature” of states revealed itself in everyday discourse of international politics; they were strong or weak, bullying or acquiescent, bellicose or amicable, and some were depicted as individuals with names like “Uncle Sam” or “Svea-mamma” (Kjellén 1916, 1–32).3 Thus, for Kjellén, there was no escaping from the empirical fact that “states, as we follow them in history and as we experience them in the present, are perceiving and thinking beings—much like human beings” (Kjellén 1916, 27). Bluntschli’s, Spencer’s, and Kjellén’s ideas are all representative of what Abraham Kuyper calls Germanic philosophical pantheism (Kuyper 2007, 88–9). What they postulate is a reality of ideas in which the state was the highest, richest, and most perfect idea of human community. What this movement taken as a whole has accomplished is making of the state a transcendental entity: “The state was considered as a mysterious being, with a hidden ego; with a State-consciousness, slowly developing; and with an increasing potent State-will, which by a slow process endeavored to blindly reach the highest State-aim” (Kuyper 2007, 88–9, emphasis in original). Elaborated in organicist terms as they were, states necessarily had to have organs by which they operated, and every other form of life soon had to bow down before the will of this super-organism. States have revealed themselves in different forms—democracies, monarchies, dictatorships, &c.—but whatever form its mystical being took in time and place, its idea remained supreme: “the State shortly asserted its sovereignty and for every member of the State it remained the touchstone of wisdom to give way to this State-apotheosis” (ibid., 89). Having traveled across the Atlantic, American political thought began from a different set of metaphors. Landau teaches that before organism the dominant metaphor there was state-as-machine. In the political thought of the American Revolution, which was heavily influenced by Newtonian principles of rational inquiry, society and state came to be thought in terms of mechanics. Society was no more than the sum of its constituents, state no more than the sum of its discrete parts, and political processes resulted from the action of separate parts on one another.

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The founding fathers thought that the government they were constructing replicated nature’s design, and establishing “checks and balances” they were following a natural blueprint. When scientific models are transferred from their literal domain they often give rise to a set of moral principles: “[w]hat is in science an empirical hypothesis becomes in society a system of norms; what is in the original domain a descriptive proposition becomes in the social context a prescriptive instruction” (Landau 1972, 86). “Moral newtonianism” of the Enlightenment explains, Landau argues, the later rise of utilitarian ethics (Landau 1972, 84–91). Towards the end of the nineteenth century “germanic philosophical pantheism” washed ashore the New World, the language of physics began to give in to that of biology, and organism take over from the machine as the root political metaphor. The paradigm had already shifted in 1913 when Walter Lippmann, a prominent American journalist and political commentator, published his influential A Preface to Politics. America had outgrown its naive faith in machine philosophy and mechanistic language belonged to the past, Lippmann argued, and added that “[t]he Fathers had a rather pale god, they had only a speaking acquaintance with humanity, so they put their faith in a scaffold, and it has been part of our national piety to pretend that they succeeded” (Lippmann 1914, 14). According to him one of the paradoxes of the “religion of humanity” embraced by the democratic movement was that it “loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it” (ibid., 16–17). While Lippmann well understood that this is easy to explain by democracy’s fear of tyranny, it will always fail to justify the self-contradiction: “Governments have to be carried on by men, however much we distrust them. Nobody has yet invented a mechanically beneficent sovereign” (ibid., 17). Politics had become literally eccentric: “We have, it seems, been seduced by a fictitious analogy: we have hoped for machine regularity when we needed human initiative and leadership, when life was crying that its inventive abilities should be freed” (ibid., 23). Lippmann declared that the symbolism of the machine was wrong: the proper analogy was to evolution, the appropriate model was the biological organism. This Darwinian metaphor served as the symbolic foundation on which American political science has since been built (Landau 1972, 94). We are looking back at history of imagination, basically, but there is a crucially important thing to understand while so doing: using one model instead of another in political discourse has consequences that go far beyond decorating language. When we personify the state—in other words: use the organic model where citizens are seen as parts of

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the body politic—we make it meaningful in principle to think that one part of the body may be sacrificed for the good of another or that of the organism as a whole. Such a thought is meaningless if we think about the state as a machine, which functions properly only when all of its parts are in place. Landau (1972, 83) warns we must be very careful with the models by which we structure our world and ourselves, because models tend to congeal, to harden into identities: assertions of fact that usually are entirely erroneous. We live within the models of our making and may forget the tension between the “is and is not” that is crucial to their use— states are people and they are not people. When the distance between the model and the modeled collapses “we become imprisoned by dogmatic, absolutistic, literalistic patterns of thought” (McFague 1982, 74). “To take a metaphor literally,” Landau argues, “is to create a myth, and the more conventional myths become, the more difficult they are to dislodge” (Landau 1972, 83). In political science this danger is aggravated by the fact that the most important models we have, those describing the very units we analyze, are not subjects of explicit formulation and continuing revision, but rather expressions of the implicit continuity of a political tradition within the state of the art. As one of the subdisciplines, IR is not any less dependent on metaphors than political science in general. Indeed we might have a case here to go on and argue that IR is even more dependent on them. What I mean by this is that IR often accepts as premise symbolic entities which have been modeled by political theorists, often centuries before the fact. Be that as it may, the metaphors and models of IR have received limited attention in the literature. A notable exception to this is Francis A. Beer, who has heralded a “post-realist” metaphorical approach in the American social science of international studies (see e.g. Beer 2001; Beer and de Landtsheer 2004). Among the menagerie of metaphors employed in discourses of international politics, Beer appreciates “the fundamental importance of the human body” in our understanding of the political world: “[o]ur bodies provide the basic relational system that guides our understanding of the world and out place in it” (Beer 2001, 95). The metaphor of the body politic and its language of embodiment, Beer argues, “brings us from the physical to the metaphysical, from the profane to the edge of the sacred” (ibid., 103). We are subjected to the limits of our existence and embodied political language “helps us to see and code the words that express the struggle against death with its field of stasis, despair, end, decomposition, loneliness, and sorrow” (ibid.).

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Beer’s take on the matter is developed in the context of a study of congressional debates on the First Gulf War. Expecting to find political leaders using their faculties of reason in making informed decisions of peace and war, the research showed something completely different. Even though the debates took place within institutions of secular democracy and were conducted in language of political reason, they soon transcended this setting altogether: We see the figurative language of metaphor—the metaphor of the body, the body politic. If we looked a bit farther, we should see very specific body types and body parts appear vividly in the debate. We should see the profane, the devil in the details. We should see the divine, God’s vicar on earth, in the secular garb of the president. We should also see the sacred. Death is there, but so are birth and rebirth, life and eternal life. The devil appears and also the deity. The story of the Gulf War, in this light, might resemble a medieval passion play. (Beer 2001, 104)4 This empirical revelation disparages the role given to theology within contemporary IR scholarship. According to Beer “[p]eace and war are ultimately about millions of people engaged in an enormous, perhaps apocalyptic, struggles of life and death on a global scale” (ibid.). The American social science of realist IR, attempting to look like a “proper” science, does not seem to notice any of this subscribes to the modern philosophy of being and with it swallows some hard dualities, the likes that tell church apart from state and religion from science. What I am going to do with the rest of this chapter is to comment on the recent revival of the symbol of the body politic in IR scholarship, working backwards from Wendt to some of the “founding fathers” of IR and their thoughts on the matter. Then I will move on to discuss a certain theory of religion, which I think makes a compelling case of including IR in that category.

2.2 Personality, Morality, and Community To the question of whether or not states should be imagined as having person-hood, Wendt replies in the affirmative: [S]tates help bring order, and yes, even justice to the world, and if we want to have states then it is better they take the form of persons rather

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than something more amorphous, because this will help make their effects more politically accountable. (Wendt 2004, 316) For Wendt the person-hood of states is not a vernacular for totalitarianism, but, quite the opposite, it “provides a metaphysical basis for liberalism” (Wendt 2004, 292). If we do not have to “beware of organicism,” as even a cursory reading of history of body politics-tradition might suggest and Kelsen, Neumann (2004), and Hannah Arendt5 certainly do, we have to read Wendt within the tradition of E. H. Carr, who introduced personification to IR. From its very beginning in the early twentieth century, the only form of agency understood by the discipline has been body-political, and though the content of this understanding has been revised, its form has remained intact. In his The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939 E. H. Carr defended the idea of the person-hood of states from its “utopian” critics.6 For Carr, personification of the state provided a foundation for the creation of international law on the basis of natural law, which rendered possible conferring duties and rights to states in international relations; that is an international morality. The utopians denounced the idea of personhood of the state, first, on the grounds that it was fictitious unlike living human beings; and secondly, that it denied or took precedence to an international morality based on individuals. Despite having a liberal and progressive origin, the growth of the power and complication of the institutions of the embodied state have made its rights more conspicuous than its duties. For its critics, personification had by the early twentieth century become little more than an assertion of unlimited rights of the state over human beings, and was thereby an authoritarian idea to be rejected with fervor, much like Kelsen did (Carr 2001, 136–7). For Carr, the controversy over the truth or falsehood of the attribution of person-hood to the state was meaningless and misleading, “because it does not purport to be a fact, but a category of thought necessary to clear thinking about international relations” (Carr 2001, 138). Personhood of the state was certainly fictitious, but as such “a necessary fiction or hypothesis—an indispensable tool devised by the human mind for dealing with the structure of a developed society” (Carr 2001, 137). According to Carr, personification did not mean authoritarianism per se: like any other tool, it was always prone to misusage, and “to decry it on the ground of the use to which it is sometimes put is no more intelligent than to abuse a tool for killing a man” (Carr 2001, 139). Personification

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could just as well be used for liberal purposes by emphasizing the duties of the state vis-à-vis both the individual and other states. Personification neither meant that the modern territorial state was the only imaginable form of political organization, but only that as long as it was generally accepted as such, body politics was necessary for the human mind to come to terms with it: The fiction of the group-person, having moral rights and obligations and consequently capable of moral behaviour, is an indispensable instrument of modern society; and the most indispensable of these fictitious group-persons is the state. In particular, it does not seem possible to discuss international politics in other terms. (Carr 2001, 137) It was clear to Carr that the “spirit of international relations” seemed more likely to be improved by accepting personification than decrying it, and in any case, human political imagination would have to undergo a radical change before it would discover an equally convenient and effective political fiction to replace personification (Carr 2001, 139). Clearly Carr’s thoughts on person-hood of state carry the imprint of Reinhold Niebuhr’s 1932 Moral Man and Immoral Society, a work he often cites in The Twenty Years’ Crisis. Niebuhr had already acknowledged the spirit of international relations: that it belonged to the political fiction of the national state and whatever form of political imagination lied beyond it, some form of global community of mankind, was “too vague to inspire devotion” (Niebuhr 1960, 92). Already in the 1930s states had a virtual monopoly of legitimate violence in the world, but not only that. What they also had gathered by that time was adequate symbolic resources to impress and control large groups of people: The nation possesses in its organs of government, in the panoply and ritual of the state, in the impressive display of its fighting services, and, very frequently, in the splendors of a royal house, the symbols of unity and greatness, which inspire awe and reverence in the citizen. Furthermore the love and pious attachment of a man to his countryside, to familiar scenes, sights, and experiences, around which the memories of youth have cast a halo of sanctity, all this flows into the sentiment of patriotism; for a simple imagination transmutes the universal beneficences of nature into symbols of the peculiar blessings which a benevolent nation bestows upon its citizens. (Niebuhr 1960, 92)

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Niebuhr also makes explicit the connection between individual and collective forms of ethical behavior. He writes that a working conscience is judged in the light of something absolute, “man’s own highest ethical aspirations,” and its obligations are felt to be obligations toward a person: “[t]he holy will is a personal will” (Niebuhr 1960, 52–3). Morality develops most sensitively in person-to-person relationship, and since communities are made up of more abstract than immediate personal relationships, they seem further away from the human moral intuition, less powerful in defining what is right and good. What communities can do and have done is “restore that power by making a person the symbol of community” (ibid., 54). “The nation is an abstraction which cannot be grasped if fitting symbols are not supplied,” Niebuhr writes and adds that “[a] living person is the most useful and potent symbol for this purpose” (ibid.). For Carr, the question concerning the basis of international morality was more complicated: if international morality is the morality of fictitious entities, is it not itself fictitious? Carr’s answer was affirmative, but again he emphasized the hypothetical nature of personification: “we need not to regard as ‘unreal’ a hypothesis which is accepted in certain contexts as a guide to individual behaviour” (Carr 2001, 139). In other words, as long as states were the primary entities on the international stage and the people representing these entities agreed in that states have duties and rights just as individuals do, the hypothesis remained effective. According to Carr, any useful examination of international morality or community had to start from the recognition of this fact. Carr did identify some differences between individual and state morality. The morality of the state seemed more limited to self-interest than did that of the individual, and what was sometimes expected as moral behavior on behalf of the state would at the same time be regarded as immoral in the individual.7 The most significant difference was that there was no authority above the state capable of imposing moral behavior on it, as there generally was for the individual. From this derived Carr’s claim that the morality of group-persons could only be social morality, that is morality based not on authority but on solidarity. Principle of equality and the imperative of the good of the whole taking precedence over the good of the part did not apply in international community, because it did not and could not possess the unity and coherence of a community of “real” human beings (Carr 2001, 143–53). The analogy between the ethical subjectivity of communities and “real” human beings is not something Carr first came up with, but is

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firmly grounded on Baruch Spinoza’s politico-theological thought. What Spinoza dismantles in his Political Treatise is morality grounded on theological or, at least, ecclesiastical foundation, and in its place erects a system of practical ethics based on “the nature and condition of men in general” (Spinoza 2000, 36). Even though God created the human being in His image and teaches that each should love his neighbor as himself, this has been of little avail against “the passions”: “since all men are equally desirous of preeminence, they fall to quarrelling and strive the utmost to best one another; and he who emerges victorious is more elated at having hindered someone else than at having gained an advantage for himself” (ibid.). The moral condition of states in international relations is essentially the same: just as each individual in the natural state has as much right as is the power he possesses, the same is true of the body and mind of the entire state. So the individual citizen or subject has that much less right as the commonwealth exceeds him in power [. . . ] Consequently the individual citizen does nothing and possesses nothing by right beyond what he can defend by common degree of the commonwealth. (Spinoza 2000, 48) Spinoza also assumed states are people too: while displaying a capacity to act in sociable manner, they were by their nature “led by blind desire more than reason” and had to be defined “not by reason but by any appetite by which they may be determined to act and by which they try to preserve themselves” (Spinoza 2000, 38–9). What this makes up is an anarchy, but Spinoza qualifies it accepting the fact that man is a social animal and people always strive to maintain some kind of civil order. The analogy from the individual to the international reaches its theoretical sophistication in Waltz’s Man, the State and War. It is in the nature of man to overcome the uncertainty and violence of anarchy by combining, and wars among these combinations are as inevitable as are defects in the nature of man. Sovereign states, “with no system of law enforceable among them, with each state judging its grievances and ambitions according to the dictates of its own reason or desire—conflict, sometimes leading to war, is bound to occur” (Waltz 1954, 159). Sovereignty is key to this image, as the state can only be described as an entity only when there exists some power within so established that its decisions are accepted as “official” decisions of state: “If we have a state, we have a foreign policy, and in foreign policy the state must on occasion speak with a

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single voice” (ibid., 179). This is the foundation for ethical subjectivity in international society: collective morality based on decisions made state by state, guided by anything between the ideals of democracy and whims of the dictator, represented by people involved in a variety of activities under the umbrella of “foreign policy.” To make another excursion within the topic under discussion, but to literatures beyond Carr, part five of Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations (1948) offers a historical analysis on how it did come about that the notion of ethical behavior was transferred from the individual to the collective level. This is a development, Morgenthau argues, that began with the dismantling of the European aristocracy. Until the end of the nineteenth century an “international aristocracy” was running foreign affairs in most states involved in the international relations of the time. Diplomacy was, thus, a very personal business that came with a moral obligation to be met by those responsible for it: the individual members involved felt themselves to be personally responsible about the morals of their conduct, “for it was to them as rational human beings, as individuals, that this moral code was addressed” (Morgenthau 1993, 236). If a monarchy violated his or her obligations this would set in motion not only their moral conscience, but also a universal condemnation on behalf of the supranational aristocratic society. As the “new age” of democracy dawned most of the international aristocracy was gradually dismantled from the institution it had established and replaced by the democratically elect, which is essentially a group of individuals that represents whatever majority the population happened to support in the last election. This will be a group of people we can not trust, Morgenthau reasons, to promote international morality without exception: “[t]he individual members of the electorate [. . .] may have no moral convictions of a supranational character at all which determine their actions on election day and in between, or, if they have such conditions, they will be most heterogeneous in content” (ibid., 238). International morality will not come forth out of lifeless states, because [m]oral rules operate within the consciences of individual men. Government by clearly identifiable men, who can be held personally accountable for their acts, is therefore the precondition for the existence of an effective system of international ethics. Where responsibility for government is widely distributed among a great number of individuals with different conceptions as to what is morally required in international affairs, or with no such conceptions at all, international

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morality as an effective system of restraints upon international policy becomes impossible. (Morgenthau 1993, 239) In other words: the only international ethics we ever had was one based on the conscience of individuals personally responsible for their actions, and this system democracy destroyed. This transformation within the nations has since taken place across the board and “changed international morality as a system of moral restraints from a reality into a mere figure of speech” (ibid., 238). “International society” was the institution that had housed aristocratic cosmopolitanism in international affairs before the democratic revolution in diplomacy, but that was pulled down by the ideology of nationalism. The vitality of any moral system, Morgenthau writes, depends on how it can resist competing claims on conscience made by an other moral system. The year 1789 marks the beginning of an era where “the ethics of self-advancement and power of modern Western society” began its challenge against “the ethics of humility and self-denial of the Sermon on the Mount” (Morgenthau 1993, 240). When loyalties between these two systems clash, the state has, Morgenthau argues, far the superior ability to exert moral compulsion on its members to decide the conflict in favor of the nation. This victory, of ideology over “man,” puts human nature in a predicament: “the continuous discomfort of a perpetually uneasy conscience is too much for him to bear; [. . .] he is too strongly attached to the concept of universal ethics to give it up altogether” (ibid., 242). There are two ways out. It is possible to resist the pressures of nationalism, follow the call of one’s conscience, and choose universal ethics. This is what some people do, as Morgenthau notes, but what the majority does, however, is supplant the call of the Sermon by making on the foundation of their particular national morality a universal moral system: [nationalism] pours, as it were, the contents of a particular national morality into the now almost empty bottle of universal ethics. So each nation comes to know again a universal morality—that is, its own national morality—which is taken to be the one that all the other nations ought to accept as their own. The universality of an ethics to which all nations adhere is replaced by the particularity of national ethics which claims the right to, and aspires toward, universal recognition. There are then potentially as many ethical codes claiming universality as there are politically dynamic nations. (Morgenthau 1993, 242)

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When the “messianic” nations face one another, each with a universal moral code of their making, the moral standards of old diplomacy no longer hold when it is the standards themselves that have become stakes in the conflict. “[T]he claim to universality which inspires the moral code of one particular group is incompatible with the identical claim of another group,” Morgenthau writes, “the world has room for only one, and the other or must yield or be destroyed” (Morgenthau 1993, 245). When all members within a society claim in their way of life to possess the whole truth of morality and politics—which the others must either accept and live by, or reject and risk the consequences—there is very little society left to speak of. The influence of that remnant of the original international society of supranational values, founded as it was on the conscience of individuals personally responsible for their actions, “is like the feeble rays, barely visible above the horizon of consciousness, of a sun that has already set.” The hypothesis on which Carr based his conception of international community provides the paradigm on which Alexander Wendt bases his Social Theory. Wendt begins with a direct analogy: “There cannot be a states system without states any more than there can be a (human) society without people. The units make their respective systems possible” (Wendt 1999, 194). Thus, states are people too; “purposive actors with a sense of Self” (Wendt 1999, 194). Wendt needs personification to make an assumption of the state-as-actor, which draws from and develops substantially Kenneth N. Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (see Waltz 1979). According to Wendt, though the state-as-actor assumption is central to international relations, it has been in a state of neglect in IR theory (Wendt 1999, 195). Wendt also notes that it is not just academics who personify the state, but all of us: “In our daily lives citizens and policymakers alike routinely treat states as if they were people, talking about them as if they had the same kinds of intentional properties that we attribute to each other” (Wendt 1999, 195). For Wendt, as well as for Carr before him, it is through personification that the realities of international community (Carr) or system (Wendt) become real in the first place. Wendt’s argument on states being “real” is premised on two identifications. The first identification is that the state-as-actor has a “body” that provides “the necessary platform [. . .] to begin doing systemic theory” (Wendt 1999, 201). For Wendt, all forms of state in time and space have a common core or a shared essence. This “essential state” is “an organizational actor embedded in an institutional-legal order that constitutes

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it with sovereignty and a monopoly on the legitimate use of organized violence over a society in a territory” (Wendt 1999, 213). Central to this Weberian definition is the notion of territorial sovereignty, that is that the state is recognized as having supreme territorial authority both internally by its domestic society and externally by the states system. The second identification in Wendt’s testimony of the reality of the state is that it has a “life,” that is it is an “emergent phenomenon which cannot be reduced to individuals” (Wendt 1999, 215). Although the production and reproduction of the essential state depend on shared ideas and actions of individuals, [c]ommon knowledge is neither necessary for corporate actors, which can believe things that their members do not, nor sufficient, since individuals can have common knowledge and not constitute a corporate actor. What matters is that individuals accept the obligation to act jointly on behalf of collective beliefs, whether or not they subscribe to them personally. Acting on this commitment is how states acquire their causal powers and get reproduced over time. The concept of state agency is not simply a useful fiction for scholars, in other words, but how the members of states themselves constitute its reality. (Wendt 1999, 219, emphasis in original) Due to the irreducibility of its ontology, the essential state has intrinsic identities and interests relative to the states system. For Wendt, the common core or essence shared by all forms of state in time and space generates national interests: “States need to do certain things to secure their identities, and it is in their nature to try to discover what these things are and act accordingly” (Wendt 1999, 238). Though there cannot be a states system without states any more than there can be a society without people, Wendt opts for individualism by asserting that, just as individual and society, state and the states system are not mutually constitutive, but that the former is ontologically prior to the latter. Although he dissociates his exercise from a “biology of the state” and defines it rather as a “sociology of the states system,” the postulates and corollaries of Wendt’s (1999, 211) definition of state-as-actor are curiously similar to the political organicism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this sense, Wendt certainly is close to the organicist tradition in political thought, as Neumann rightly suggests (Neumann 2004, 262–3). First, states are human-like entities with minds and bodies; secondly, states have inside and outside sources of person-hood, which are

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embodied in the doctrines of internal and external sovereignty respectively; thirdly, the identity of states is independent or exogenous of the identities of its constituent human individuals. The fourth and I think the most interesting similarity is in the epistemology of the conception of state as a person: it is either reflected (Bluntschli and Kjellén) or constructed (Wendt) in language and related symbolism. Again, I am not arguing that contemporary theory of the person-hood of the state is identical with Bluntschli’s organicism or Kjellén’s geopolitics, but merely pointing out metaphorical parallels between theories then and now. But it most certainly can be very close to that, even today: we do not have to back centuries to find a reference. Take Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order published in May of 2011 for example: Darwin’s theory of evolution is based on two very simple principles, variation and selection. Variation among organisms occurs due to random genetic combinations; those variants that are better adapted to their specific environments have greater reproductive success and therefore propagate themselves at the expense of those less well adapted. In a very long historical perspective, political development has followed the same general pattern: the forms of political organization employed by different groups of human beings have varied, and those forms that were more successful—meaning those that could generate greater military and economic power—displaced those that were less successful. (Fukuyama 2011, 22–3) This is basically what Friedrich Ratzel (1901) argued in his Der Lebensraum. Over the last couple of centuries the notion of person-hood of the state has integrated within itself elements not only from human physiology, theory of mind, but also biological evolution. This root-metaphor just keeps on giving. In his 1990 reading of the metaphors of the Gulf War George Lakoff describes the contemporary metaphorical ensemble surrounding the state in IR as the “State-as-Person System”: A state is conceptualized as a person, engaging in social relations within a world community. Its land-mass is its home. It lives in a neighborhood, and has neighbors, friends and enemies. States are seen as having inherent dispositions: they can be peaceful or aggressive, responsible or irresponsible, industrious or lazy. (Lakoff 2011, 3)

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The “health” of the state is understood in economic terms, its “strength” as military strength, its “maturity” in terms of industrialization and development, and its “rationality” as the maximization of self-interest (Lakoff 2011, 3). What Wendt wants to say with his theoretical reification of the System is that “it is necessary to treat states as, at some level, given” (Wendt 1999, 244, emphasis in original) in IR. For as long as there remains no viable alternative metaphorical basis for understanding world politics, states should be treated as persons: “[G]iving up the concept of state personhood would result in a substantial loss of extant scientific knowledge about world politics. Insofar as IR scholars want to justify and retain this knowledge, therefore, realism about state persons provides an essential foundation” (Wendt 2004, 316). In other words: IR is a disciplinary tradition that conserves the life and the body of the state—the State-as-Person System—as long as it does not come up with something else to conserve and justify, that is. If we give up the System, no longer take states as given, we flush out everything or nearly everything we (thought we) knew about international relations. The stakes are high.

2.3 Anthropomorphism and Religion If we agree with Schmitt historically in that all modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts,8 a theoretically interesting question arises whether or not modern discourses of international relations have retained the systematic structure, as Schmitt would probably put it, of its religious origin. In other words: is international relations—as it is represented in the worldview of everyday commentary of world affairs as well as its theoretical perfection in the discipline of IR—kin to religion? The answer I am about to give is affirmative, and person-hood of the state is its fulcrum. Before answering my question, I have to define religion and its relation to personification of the state in political discourse. Defining a term, I well understand, is walking on treacherous ground, but let us begin from a brief look at the history of the term itself: it derives from the Latin religio, which was first used in a great variety of senses to describe forms of belief in Roman society, but in the later Roman period often used to describe rituals, ceremonies, and other expressions of belief. A development began later that understood religion as something which we associate not primarily with the ritual, but with the transcendental reality in whose name

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the ritual is observed: religion became what Wilfred Cantwell Smith calls reverence for a “Great Objective Something” (Smith 1991, 21). With Christianity varieties of new meaning to the term were introduced and, over time, one of these began to dominate the Mediterranean world: namely, an understanding of religion as a systematic and organized community united by faith in God. During the movements of Reformation and Enlightenment religion was conceptualized further and an understanding began to develop which identified Christianity as the religion, its God the One. Since there were other religions in the world, the term communicated less and less the relationship between human beings and God, but rather became a conceptual umbrella for all systems of belief, irrespective of whether or not they elicited a genuine personal or collective relationship with gods. This is where we are now: religions can be compared, they may be regarded mutually exclusive, and judged true or false in an intellectualist sense (ibid., ch. 2). For a good long while Clifford Geertz’s understanding of religion as a “system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and longlasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence” was gold standard in the conceptualization of religion (see Geertz 2004). Religion, for Geertz, was a universal something that encouraged and motivated people by making them believe that universe was a meaningful and coherent place. Then came Talal Asad and argued that there cannot be universal definition of religion, “not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product discursive processes” (Asad 1993, 29). One of the inherent difficulties of defining religion, argues Gordon H. Clark, arises from the fact that there are many mutually exclusive religions: “they may all be wrong, but no more than one can be true” (Clark 1981, 247). If we make the idea of God essential to religion, what do we do with Buddhism that has no belief in God? If we do not make the idea of God as a defining criterion and broaden our definition, include among religions whatever worldview people look for guidance in their life, there is no reason to exclude secular humanism or even atheism—central to all “creeds” of nontheism is the belief that there is no God. Hent de Vries, the editor of a recent anthology attempting to map religion-beyond-the-concept, laments that the task of defining religion is one of “infinite proportions, following an infinity of potentially infinite dimensions, with endless repercussions for thought, action, judgement, and sensibility, whose at once specific (‘minimal’) and global relevance will be with us for some time to come”

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(de Vries 2008a, 7). Essentially agreeing with Asad de Vries argues that there is “no simple linear narrative or causal explanation [or] a univocal designation to any ‘concept’ of religion” (de Vries 2008a, 2). One of the implications of this stance is that no-one can tell with any certainty whether or not something is really religious since there are no publicly ascertainable criteria, no epistemic or other procedure, to distinguish the true from the false. This premise leads de Vries to the conclusion that “there can be no ‘true religion,’ just as there can be no ‘false religion’ ” (de Vries 2008a, 9). I choose not to take the plunge into the deep end on the definitiondebate9 in this chapter, but since I am making a religion out of IR I will subscribe to one of the more plausible universal definitions of religion. This definition is part of a tradition of coming to terms with human religiosity that addresses the theme of personification, which is not only essential to my argument, but also, it needs to be said, a persistent theme in the contemporary theorization of religion. I will begin by making two short excursions to the tradition, then outline the definition, and finally provide some answers. As a starting point, take two articles published 20 years apart under the same title, The Evolution of Religion, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first one written by Bernard Bosanquet defines religion in terms of unity of two modes of human experience: first, experience of the “object” of the world, “the region of things which we see and hear and touch”; and secondly the experience of the “subject” of the self, “our mind and will and affections” (Bosanquet 1895, 435). Whatever unifies these two modes of experience, “brings the world and the self to correspond, making the world to answer to the self, and the self to have faith in the world,” may be called God, and the consciousness of this unity may be called religion (Bosanquet 1895, 435). Bosanquet then narrates three evolutionary phases of religious consciousness. In the most primitive of these phases, that of the “Objective” religion, the unity of the self and the world does not recognize any reality per se, but only things: objects that are outside of the self and of each other. Typical to Objective religious consciousness is anthropomorphism: connecting the self with the world of things by attributing human characteristics to nonhuman objects. According to Bosanquet, this does not mean that “savage10 man endows natural objects with a human mind,” but rather that “he has not become aware of the difference between mind and nature, and so far from exalting other things to his own level, he rather fails to exalt himself above the level of other things” (Bosanquet 1895, 440). As

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man’s religious consciousness evolves, that is when he begins to worship a self that is more than or above other objects of the natural world, the role of anthropomorphism abates. The second article written by Edward C. Hayes defines the substance of religion as “beliefs concerning relations with unseen powers or beings, whether here or hereafter, and the emotions and practices elicited by those beliefs” (Hayes 1915, 45). All religion, “masses of the most various belief and practice, characteristic of peoples of every stage of ethical development,” has grown out of four historical “roots” (Hayes 1915, 62). One of these is zoomorphism, which denotes “the practice of conceiving [the unseen] to have the form and attributes either of men or other animals, or of fantastic combinations of human and beastly shape and character” (Hayes 1915, 49). Zoomorphism is based on the idea that every effect in the natural world implies an actor; wherever there is a deed there must be a doer: “there must be great and mighty beings to produce the grand effects in nature, and there must also be a multitude of little beings to produce the countless small effects, too trivial to occupy the dignitaries of the unseen world” (Hayes 1915, 45). According to Hayes, zoomorphism is typical of the religious imagination of the child and the savage;11 “[t]o the imaginative mind at this stage of education it appears that the unseen population of the world may well be far more numerous than the seen, and that there must be among them diverse beings, some friendly and some unfriendly to man” (Hayes 1915, 50). And, once people have imagined their gods, “these conceptions are likely to survive, filled with an enriching symbolism, as ancient ceremonies survive with changed interpretations” (Hayes 1915, 52). These two fragments of a body of literature grown over centuries of thought illustrate the fact that religion connects with anthropomorphism, though in both of them the connection made is historical; anthropomorphism characterizes religions in the early stage of their “evolution.” The implied anachronism is slightly amusing as the Christian tradition, which has itself gone through many historical stages, is built on identical foundations: it has, from the very beginning, formed its concepts and ideas of God in human terms, in accord with the shapes and metaphors of this world and our experience of it (Zwi Werblowsky 1987). Jacob Neusner, a prominent scholar of ancient Judaism, reads Torah as witness to YHWH incarnate: as “representation of God in the corporeal form of women or men, exhibiting human traits of heart and mind, carrying out the deeds human beings do in the way they do them” (Neusner 1988, 12). The Torah does not only point out spiritual and other traits shared

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by God and humanity, but represents God’s physical traits and attributes as identical to those of a human being. This is what makes Christianity a religion founded on anthropomorphism: its “God in the flesh, God represented as a person consubstantial in indicative physical traits with the human being” (Neusner 1988, 166). The conviction that the union of humanity and divinity was fully realized in the God and man of Jesus Christ—a historical case that ended up making Christianity Christian—is, Neusner argues, merely a development of incarnational thought from the Judaism of the dual Torah. Some contemporary theorists of religion go beyond specific cases by identifying anthropomorphism as a universal characteristic of not only Christianity, but all religion. Of such theorizing, Faces in the Clouds written by the anthropologist Stewart Elliott Guthrie is unparalleled in its lucidity. Guthrie defines religion as “systematic application of human-like models to non-human, in addition to human, phenomenon” (Guthrie 1980, 181). Anthropomorphism, like other forms of human cognition, results from a need to find or impose a pattern to reality, and the most important pattern in most contexts is that with the highest organization, and the highest organization known to humans are humans themselves (Guthrie 1993, 90). In other words, we anthropomorphize because guessing that world is humanlike is a good bet: it is a bet because the world is uncertain, ambiguous, and in need of interpretation; and it is a good bet because the most valuable interpretations of the world disclose the presence of what is most important to us, that is, other humans (Guthrie 1993, 3). When we look for humans and humanlike things and events in the world we find apparent instances all around us. Many of these instances will prove to be mistaken, but those that are correct, Guthrie argues, more than justify the strategy: “[b]ecause betting on the most significant interpretations is deeply rooted, anthropomorphism is spontaneous, plausible, and even compelling” (Guthrie 1993, 3). Theorizing religion in terms of betting recalls a classic argument of apologetics, namely the Pascal’s wager. In his Pensées, Blaise Pascal makes an attempt to rationalize belief in God. He begins by defining God as something infinitely beyond human comprehension and a being whose existence bears no relation to ours. This effectively denies us any possibility of finding certainty on the existence of God, but at the same time the case is left open: God either exists or He does not exist. Reason can not decide the question, because an “infinite chaos” separates human being from God, but “[a]t the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails” (Pascal 1995, 122). This

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toss of a coin is one we can not opt out of, Pascal argues, and the only rational guess is to try to believe, even if it seemed unlikely, that God does exists. Since if we do so and are right we may gain eternal reward, but lose relatively little even if we were wrong. If we choose not to believe and prove to be in the wrong, we run the risk of losing everything: “thus, since you are obliged to play, you must be renouncing reason if you hoard your life rather than risk it for an infinite gain, just as likely to occur as a loss amounting to nothing” (Pascal 1995, 124). Such is also the rationale behind human tendency to anthropomorphize: “when we see something as alive or humanlike we can take precautions” (Guthrie 1993, 5). It is a strategy that yields bigger wins with success than it costs in failures. Defining religion as anthropomorphism Guthrie does not mean that religion necessarily attributes human characteristic to Gods—like it certainly does in the Christian tradition—but that in claiming Gods exist it attributes human characteristics to the world: “Gods may have animal or other nonhuman forms, or no visible form at all, but all interact symbolically with humans: they communicate with humans through language or an allied system of symbols, or both” (Guthrie 1993, 177). This is what the God of Christianity has always done: communicated with human beings. There are numerous instances of symbolic interaction between God and us documented in Scripture, but let us take the narrative of the Mosaic covenant for a brief example. Exodus 3 records God appearing to Moses, not as a bearded man, but as the burning bush, and addressing him directly as “the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exod. 3.14). Having promised to deliver his covenant people from slavery, God reveals his name to Moses: “I am who I am [. . .] This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations” (Exod. 3.14, 15 ESV). In Ancient Hebrew names embodied entire essence of identity and personality. By revealing himself to Moses and his people, God not only gave them sacred understanding and experience of His person, but also a promise of help in covenant faithfulness. If Moses and his people were to respond to God’s promise, kept His commandments, “they will be a kingdom of priests, having access to God and the joy of mediating him to all the people” (Driscoll and Breshears 2010, 195). This one of the major acts in the unfolding of the drama that is Christian covenant theology and a topic I will return to in the following chapter. Most religious attributions of human characteristics to the world are not limited to special revelation, like the story of Moses and the burning bush is in Exodus 3. Anthropomorphism does not require empirically verified

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miracles to occur—like a talking plant or a staff turning into a reptile and then back again—to make the claim religion makes: that God(s) exist(s). What is required is some kind of transcendental communication, between the human being and the transcendental divine, a simple ritual or exchange, like a prayer or meditation, one holds in private or shares in some kind of communion. Anthropomorphism is a pervasive worldview that flourishes not only in religion, but also in science, art, and everyday common sense. So, is any system of thought and action that anthropomorphizes by definition a religion, or religious in character? Religion can be dissociated as a domain of thought and action only with difficulty, because religious accounts of the world and religious activities constantly overlap, resemble, and compete with those of secular life. One of the grounds on which many people treat religion as a separate mode of thought is that it deals with the supernatural, or, in other words, the nonempirical realm. Priests, shamans, or scriptures may tell us what the gods think of or do with this or that, but such claims are hard to prove or disprove given the lack of any other empirical evidence apart from that given by mediators (Guthrie 1993, 194). As long as we do not see or hear gods personally, we can choose not to believe in them. But how is secular political life different from this? In everyday international relations heads of state, journalists, and social scientists tell us what states think of or do about this or that, and it is equally hard to prove or disprove their claims empirically and to go on without holding some elementary beliefs about the state: that they exist and are capable of thought and action. Wherever there is a deed there must be a doer, indeed. But has anyone ever made an unmediated observation based on verifiable sense data of a state doing anything? The other ground on which the separation of the religious from the secular often stands is that religion contradicts and is largely incommensurable with another domain: science. According to this notion, the function of religious language is the expression of self-commitment, ethical dedication, and existential life-orientation; whereas that of scientific language is the prediction and control of nature. This is a notion built on a foundation of anachronisms. Concluding his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life Émile Durkheim draws no lines between the two domains and argues that the conflict between science and religion is an elementary misunderstanding of conceptual thought. Durkheim defines conceptual systems as collective representations, which add up all the wisdom and knowledge that collectivity has accumulated in the course

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of centuries: “[t]o think in concepts is not simply to see the real through the most general; it is to project onto sensation a light that illuminates, penetrates, and transforms it” (Durkheim 2008, 331). Defined in this way concepts always speak of their origins: “[i]f it is common to everyone, this is because it is the work of the community” (Durkheim 2008, 329). His analysis of totemism among the aborigines of Australia, as mysterious as it must seem to scientific logic, actually testifies that the “realities” subscribed to by religion are the same realities that will later serve as objects of scientific reflection: “[t]he mystery that seems to surround them is entirely superficial and dissipates upon closer observation” (Durkheim 2008, 324). Religion is a medium that translates the realities of nature, man, and society into an intelligible language that bears no essential difference between that employed by science: “both involve connecting things to one another, establishing internal relations between them, classifying them, and systematizing them” (Durkheim 2008, 324). According to Durkheim science is not only “an offspring” of religion, but actively replicates some of its categories in its view of reality. Even though science perpetually elaborates its worldviews, “purges them of any adventitious elements” and “brings to bear a critical spirit that religion ignores,” these methodological developments do not differentiate science from religion: “[b]oth, in this respect, pursue the same goal; scientific thought is merely a more perfect form of religious thought” (Durkheim 2008). “Scientific” concepts do not derive their authority from their objective value: it is not enough for them to be true for them to be believed if they are not in harmony with other beliefs and opinions held dear by the community. “If today the stamp of science is usually sufficient to give them a kind of privileged credit,” Durkheim argues, “that is because we have faith in science,” but “this faith is not essentially different from religious faith” (Durkheim 2008, 334). This is quite a claim. But it is a compelling claim when we omit conventionalized “domains” of thought—like “science” and “religion”—and focus on the medium used to express them. Ian G. Barbour shows that the difference between science and religion is rather that of degree rather than absolute contrast: both are evocative as well as descriptive and rely on metaphor and analogy (Barbour 1974, 171–81). Barbour’s claim is based on the similarities between religious models and theoretical models in science12: while neither is a literal picture of reality, they should not be treated as useful but meaningless fiction. Models are ways of imagining what we can not directly observe: they are symbolic representations of aspects of reality which are not directly accessible to us. “The use of scientific models to

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order observations has some parallels in the use of religious models to order the experience of individuals and communities,” Barbour writes, “[o]rganizing images help us to structure and interpret patterns of events in personal life and in the world” (Barbour 1974, 69). This is an important point. The goals and interests of theory are not objective as they are perhaps less subjective in comparison to theology. To phrase it in even more ambitious terms: the distinction of knowledge from belief, which underpins the projects of enlightenment and modernity, is rhetorical rather than ontological. According to Frederick Ferrè (1968, 379–86), the reasons for using metaphysical models in science are three: they provide conceptual definiteness, suggest connections among apparently diverse things, and offer some sense of intelligibility essential to any theoretical enterprise. A metaphysical model draws from a familiar aspect of experience and, on it, imagines “a vision of reality” to what is otherwise simply formless. Just as theological models in religion, theoretical models in science aim to interpret and influence the world: anthropomorphic theistic imagery can function on its speculative side as a vivid metaphysical model. It can give [1] conceptual definiteness to the ultimate nature of things by picturing all of reality as constituting either creature or Creator, each with specifiable characteristics; it can [2] suggest patterns and unity in the totality of things in terms of its representation of the various relations between the entities so pictured; and it can give [3] a sense of intelligibility, an aura of meaning and familiarity, by virtue of the appeal to personal purpose, volitional power, and moral principle as the ultimate explanatory categories. (Ferré 1968, 379–80) The visions of reality in both domains—theory and theology—must be imagined, but this does not necessarily contribute to their weakening. On the contrary: what was imagined in the first place can always be reimagined and evidence against it reinterpreted, making models of both kind highly resistant to falsification. According to Ferrè, the reasons for embracing a biblical model in depicting human community today in thinking and talking about international relations are eminently practical. A metaphysician’s worldview is essentially the same as a theologian’s: it is all wrapped up in conceptual models. Theories may be overhauled and rethought to preserve, if possible, a fundamental vision of reality: “[v]arious theories may be seized upon as the conceptual vehicles for

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the model, as can be clearly observed in the Christian doctrine” (Ferré 1968, 381). We could easily say the same about theories of international relations and the model of the state as a person. Ideas such as the state and God are not significant as regards to their truth or falsity—whether they really exist or not, although they can be and have been approached from this angle—but because people act as if they existed. One can of course roll back from ontology and argue, like Martin Wight (1978, 28–9) does, that no-one really believes that states are people too—all this is merely a harmless use of decorative language. Useful fiction does not a religion make. While this is clearly common sense, current sociology of religion teaches us that, in some circumstances, belief in useful fiction can fall into the religious category. In her “radical desubstantialisation of religion” Danièle Hervieu-Léger argues that religious believing does not have to refer to the objects of a particular set of beliefs, to specific social practices, or even to representations of the origins of the world. Rather, believing encompasses “the totality of both individual and collective convictions that do not arise from verification, experimentation or, more generally, from isolation and control criteria that characterize scientific knowledge” (Hervieu-Léger 2008, 254). Thus, to believe implies that “both individuals and groups submit themselves (consciously or unconsciously) to an exteriorly imposed order, or to kind of gamble or choice, more or less elaborated, more or less argued” (ibid.). What makes such believe religious is, for Hervieu-Léger, more or less explicit or entirely implicit invocation of the authority of a tradition that serves as support for the act of believing: “one designates as ‘religious’ all forms of believing that justify themselves, first and foremost, upon the claim of their inscription within a heritage of belief” (HervieuLéger 2008, 254, emphasis in original). Thereby, any ideological, practical, and symbolic framework that constitutes, maintains, develops, and controls the consciousness (individual or collective) of membership to a particular heritage of belief, qualifies, for Hervieu-Léger, as a religion. Even though these symbolic frameworks have taken many historical forms, Peter Berger argues that among those the form of religion has been the most widespread and effective. The secret of its resilience is its ability to relate contingent social constructions with something ultimate: “[t]he tenuous realities of the social world are grounded in the sacred realissimum, which by definition is beyond the contingencies of human meaning and activity” (Berger 1990, 32, emphasis in original). Times change and human institutions must change with them, but a religious framework makes a good foundation for a lasting nomos, because the

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ultimate “reality” it presupposes outlives people and other empirical matters of fact. Political power can survive generations if it is properly legitimated: Let the institutional order be so interpreted as to hide, as much as possible, its constructed character. Let that which has been stamped out of the ground ex nihilo appear as the manifestation of something that has been existent from the beginning of time, or at least from the beginning of this group. Let the people forget that this order was established by men and continues to be dependent upon the consent of men. Let them believe that, in acting out the institutional programs that have been imposed upon them, they are but realizing the deepest aspirations of their own being and putting themselves in harmony with the fundamental order of the universe. In sum: Set up religious legitimations. (Berger 1990, 33, emphasis in original) Legitimation is an area broader than religion, but there does exist an important relationship between the two. Religion legitimates social institutions by giving them an ontological status, making them properly basic, by elevating them from the plane of the temporal to that of the sacred. In politics those with authority can be conceived as agents of gods, or indeed gods themselves, and to obey is to be in a right relationship not only with them, but also with the cosmos as a whole. This is basically how states have stood the ravages of time, become immortal: “[t]hey transcend the death of individuals and the decay of entire collectivities, because they are now grounded in a sacred time within which merely human history is but an episode” (Berger 1990, 37). Expressed in terminology of comparative religion, states and “the international” are religious myths.13 According to the pioneer of comparative religion Mircea Eliade the function of myths is to communicate a sacred history of events that happened at the beginning of time. The persons or beings of the myth are not human beings, but “gods or culture heroes, and for this reason their gesta constitute mysteries; man could not know their acts if they were not revealed to him” (Eliade 1987, 95, emphasis in original). Telling how everything began, “how a reality came into existence, whether it be the total reality, the cosmos, or only a fragment—an island, a species of plant, a human institution,” explains them and answers an important question on why did they come to exist in the first place. Myths can, however, be more than mere historical reminders. According to Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit myth is a living myth for a

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community “if it is perceived as a true description of reality” whether or not it is believed literally (Halbertal and Margalit 1992, 80). Living myths do not have to have a supernatural component: the important point is that “[t]he lives of the people who live this myth are significantly different from what they would be if the myth did not shape their world” (ibid., 81). On this account the states and the international order certainly qualify. Furthermore, the figures that populate living myths appear larger than life, “as all their actions, even the most trivial ones, have the status of constituting the order of things” (ibid., 82–3). Most of what makes international news in the media today is the actions—at times highly official and by that definition very important, but surprisingly often in this day and age the frivolously personal—of the people who represent states in world politics. These actions are not merely impressive in their symbolic sense, but play an important role in shaping a moral community. We will return to this topic in the following chapter. One more thing needs to be said about myths. When we think about the relationship between religion and science, we must not make the elementary mistake of understanding, on the one hand, myths as primitive things that are obviously false; and modern theories of science as things developed from a body of empirically verifiable facts. Halbertal and Margalit emphasize that the difference between the two, myths and theories, is social: myths serve a closed society, theories an open society. “In a closed society,” they write, “the traditional theory is not confronted by rival theories—this is the sense in which it is closed—but is handed down from parent to child by force of tradition” (Halbertal and Margalit 1992, 86). The power of a myth derives from the authority of tradition rather than the test of empirical experiment: we might already have an idea of the social function of IR. If anything sets religion off from nonreligious forms of anthropomorphism, it is, Guthrie argues, the centrality of humanlike beings: “it makes them more complex and more humanlike, takes them more seriously, and does all this more systematically” (Guthrie 1993, 197). It makes them more humanlike by attributing the most distinctive feature of humans, a capacity for language and related symbolism, to the world: Gods are persons in large part because they have this capacity. Gods may have other important features, such as emotions, forethought, or a moral sense, but these are made possible, and made known to humans, by symbolic action [. . .] The anthropomorphism of assuming language in gods appears ineluctable: there is no religion without relationship, no relationship without significant communication, no

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significant communication without language, and no language without likeness. (Guthrie 1993, 198) To emphasize: religion takes anthropomorphism more seriously by being more generalized, systematized, and integrated than its other, more idiosyncratic forms. What is recognized as religion is to some degree institutionalized and rationalized, and must appear relatively coherent and credible to a broad spectrum of people. Religion also covers a broad range of experience; not just immediate things and events, but also those distant in time and space (Guthrie 1993, 200). If we agree with Wendt generally in that “[i]nternational politics as we know it today would be impossible without attributions of corporate agency” (Wendt 1999, 10), are we not taking the fiction of the humanlike state seriously indeed? Are we not making it central in our political worldview? If we go further and accept Wendt’s (and Bluntschli’s, and Kjellén’s) elaborate assumption that “states are actors with more or less human qualities: intentionality, rationality, interests, etc.” (Wendt 1999, 10), are we not making the fiction more complex and humanlike, and doing it very systematically indeed? And on this the fulcrum turns: are we not, in fact, subscribing to a form of religion, as defined by Guthrie? After all, it does not require critical IR to see that this assumption is clearly false: states are not people—even if it is true that we speak of them as thus—but a part of the inorganic world. Such an assumption may be preached as a “useful instrument for organising experience and building theory” (Wendt 2004, 290), but like any other sermon it conceals an ethos of belief. States need living human beings to do the deeds they do, all the way down. For some curious reason this seems to be the only way for human beings to act politically in and with the world: not as living human beings, as ourselves, but always in the name of or struggling against these dead gods. You can call it collective illusion, a cult, even a conspiracy, but do not hold your breath. States would disappear the instant everyone stopped believing in them, but everyone will not. I can only assume we need the state even more than it needs us.

2.4 Political Dogma of IR Wendt argues that anthropomorphism pervades IR scholarship; whether you are realist, liberal, institutionalist, Marxist, constructivist, behavioralist, feminist, postmodernist, or something in between, the chances are that the idea of state personhood, at some fundamental level, makes

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sense to you: “[i]n a field in which almost everything is contested, this seems to be one thing on which almost all of us agree” (Wendt 2004, 289). And it is not just the academics, but all of us “systematically personify the state”; “this is how most of us, most of the time, think about the state in world politics” (Wendt 2004, 289). I agree with Wendt: anthropomorphism is central for understanding and communicating international relations, and fundamental for academic IR, where it is almost impossible to go on without assuming some form of corporate agency. I have argued that this theory of international politics—and I use the term theory now in the sense of a comprehensive worldview that pervades both academic and lay discourses of international relations—is rather a theology. I have made this identification on two grounds, which are interrelated. On the one hand, the central ideas structuring discourses of international relations, especially those concerning agency, are of theological origin. “Secular” forms of political rule employ a mode of political representation identical with the omnipotence of God over the Christian “man” and world. In the modern era, the doctrine of state sovereignty has become sacrosanct, and the world political a pantheon of states. The mere notion of the “international” evokes this principle precisely, and implicates academic international studies to an exegetics of this principle, conservation of its theological heritage. Accepting all this as canonical, making it basis for a worldview Wendt (2004, 292) calls “liberalism,” is settling with the relative nomos of international relations. What this means is making the state an element properly basic—that is self-evident and incorregible axiom that does not depend upon justification of other beliefs—to one’s political existence in the world. All this we may choose to do willingly, even hold the belief in our national state dear to our hearts, or merely accept, more or less consciously, as something we just have to get along with, a belief-system so comprehensive there is simply no point fighting against it. On the other hand, the complex manner in which anthropomorphism also structures discourses of international relations is typical of religion anthropologically defined. Humanlike models are frequently chosen to interpret ambiguous phenomena, and generalization and systematization of this choice is the cognitive basis of religion (Guthrie 1980, 187). The most pervasive and persistent representations of the state in history of political theory have relied on bodily metaphors; and in history of international theory the most elaborate representations of the world political have relied on personification of the state. The myths and models utilized in IR are closely akin to those utilized by religion.

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Admitted: religion has no clearly bounded domain and the boundaries of the domain of politics or the political are hardly any clearer. Even with all the diffusion the two domains have significant overlap, which has been made discernible by the political theologians such as Schmitt or Eric Voegelin. What, then, are the uses of anthropomorphism in political discourse? Can human cognition and cultural tradition explain its remarkable persistence? It is instructive to ask the same questions about religion. For the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach the essence of (Christian) religion was in the relation of man to his own nature and all attributes of divinity were thereby attributes of the human nature—in short: religion was, by definition, anthropomorphic (Feuerbach 1989, 14). To negate God of his human nature meant, for Feuerbach, irreligion, even atheism: [T]hat which has no predicates or qualities, has no effect upon me; that which has no effect upon me has no existence for me [. . .] Where man deprives God of all qualities, God is no longer anything more to him than a negative being. (Feuerbach 1989, 14) Negative existence means nonexistence or self-contradictory existence indistinguishable from nonbeing. Thus, for Feuerbach, to make any sense in the world of men divine existence had to have the qualities of men; “[a]n existence in general, an existence without qualities, is an insipidity, an absurdity” (Feuerbach 1989, 15). In other words: stripping God of anthropomorphic qualities means denying the possibility of religion. Likewise, eliminating anthropomorphism from political discourse would quite possibly result in the elimination of the possibility of international relations. If we cannot say anything anthropomorphic about the state, can we say anything at all? Would not the state without determinate positive qualities—a state we would not be able to imagine in our minds as anything we can imagine—be a meaningless non-state? *

*

*

The world political does not itself constitute a civil order of any kind— where, for men, “there is no visible power to keep them in awe, and tie them by fear of punishment to the performance of their covenants” (Hobbes 1996, ch. xvii)—but is mapped out as no-man’s land, where nations are in a state of nature, or war, irrespective of whether or not there are actual hostilities. Even though it seems intuitively true and inextricably human to think that, above all the political division, our

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species makes all “men” “brothers,” it also seems, as Arthur Allen Leff puts it, that the ruling model in this relationship is Cain and Abel: “[n]either reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us ‘good,’ and worse than that, there is no reason why anything should” (Leff 1979, 1249). Given this it is easy to agree with Oliver O’Donovan: because human beings abhor a vacuum of order and conditions of political arbitrariness, we always move to invent legal and constitutional bonds between one another, if not by voluntary federation then through imposed relations (O’Donovan 1996, 278–81). Because international relations does not make up a civil order of itself, we make it an order between states. The important thing here is to note that, as an order, it is always posited: it does not arise out of cultural history, human geography, social anthropology, or whatnot, but is always created by political authority. Ever since the state emerged as the “peacekeeper” from the so-called Wars of Religion, we have seen it making itself more formidable in political and military power than any church or sect it replaced since the Reformation. When the sword was taken from the church and given to the secular state, the early Protestant movement saw in this a possibility to emancipate political authority held captive in Rome, and some saw in the national state a promise of the original Christian quest for unity and peace. This was not to be: far from using the sword to maintain peace, Cavanaugh writes, “[t]he wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries testify that the transfer of ultimate loyalty to the liberal nation-state has not curbed the toll of war’s atrocities” (Cavanaugh 2002, 46). Hosting a liberal society without shared aims or objectives apart from survival, the national state only has its “claim to the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical violence within a particular territory” to hold it all together, manage its social process (Weber 2004, 33, emphasis in original). This is why violence, the actuality or potentiality of brute force, is now the state’s religio, “its habitual discipline for binding us one to another” (Cavanaugh 2002, 46). Though modern IR did not invent the state, it does everything in its power to conserve it. IR reifies state’s monopoly of use of force, stands witness to its secular religion of violence. I believe (sic), that the most important use of anthropomorphism in political discourse is location and reification of the authority of the humanlike state over the actual human beings belonging to and believing in these states. Or, as Voegelin put it, “legitimacy for the rule of man over man is realized in the symbol of radiation from a divine summit, through a hierarchy of rulers and offices, down to the last obedient subject” (Voegelin 1986, 29).

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But, personification of the state is not only a devious political dogmata to rule the hearts and minds of men. It is a key, perhaps even the master key, in the chain of political authority today, but does not reveal the secret behind the longevity of the state. Admitted: there are sound, rational arguments to believe that states “really” exist and impose themselves in our lives. “If I just obey, the authority is likely to leave me alone”—this would be my gut-reaction. If that does not do it, then the state has vested upon it a capacity of brute force “to keep me in awe.” But surely my relationship with my state is more complicated and, well, profound than a banal fear of punishment is. The meaning of awe is not fear of punishment, but involves an element of transcendence—“[i]t is a meaning wrapped in mystery” (Heschel 1965, 77). Transcendent meaning may not be reduced to an object of acknowledgment, something we may accept or reject at will. “It is not to be grasped as though it were something in the world which appeared before us,” Heschel (1965, 78) teaches, but “[r]ather it is that in which the world appears to us.” Indeed: the human being, generally speaking, is not in a position to opt out of the political worldview of international relations: it is not an object we may say “yes” or “no” to, but an ultimate presence we are involved in from the day we are born to the day we die. Rational choice can not fully explain why human beings submit, why the state dominates our view of the world political, how has it come to transcend the value of the human being, what makes it an ultimate concern? I understand it may have something to do with our instinct for security. In his Theological-Political Treatise Baruch Spinoza laments that in conditions of uncertainty and fear of the future we human beings “know not where to turn, begging for advice from any quarter; and then there is no council so foolish, absurd or vain which they will not follow,” making us “the readiest victims of superstition of every kind” (Spinoza 1998, 1). Treating our anxieties with superstition we often come to worship our rulers as gods. The mystery of despotism, “its prop and stay,” Spinoza writes, “is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation” (Spinoza 1998, 3). It was against all such political forms of idolatry, their broken secular soteriologies, Spinoza wrote his Theological-Political Treatise in the first place. I do not want to come out as a conservative, but the world is a complex, even a frightening place where uncertainties superabound, and the political dogma of international relations replaces some of that complexity

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with simplicity, uncertainty with conviction. Even though living one’s life on the body of a fictitious group-person does not make perfect sense or any sense at all, it may even be that it does not have to: it could just be one of those things that lie beyond the limits of our understanding. We do not have to agree with him on all accounts, but Joseph de Maistre was perhaps onto something with his view that Either every imaginable institution is founded on a religious concept or it is only a passing phenomenon. Institutions are strong and durable to the degree that they are, so to speak, deified. Not only is human reason, or what is ignorantly called philosophy, incapable of supplying these foundations, which with equal ignorance are called superstitious, but philosophy is, on the contrary, an essentially disruptive force. (de Maistre 1974, 80, emphasis in original) This is far from an adequate arrangement for many today, I well understand, but works for me and my state. On a personal level, my state was there when I came and is likely to stay there when I’m gone, and all this is fine. I am a Finn and Finland has prepared me a table in the presence of my enemies. As a professional scholar I am a “mediator” of affairs of state, a theologian of IR. But is there anything that sets my profession apart from, say, scholasticism in the church from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries? Even if contemporary IR—in its attempt to understand, explain, and even predict international politics, possibly with an aim to relieve some of our earthly miseries—might seem to the unschooled eye just as speculative as medieval theology, you just cannot opt not to believe in our gods. Even though the Church has had its crusades, it has nevertheless held as its primary political deterrent an abstraction of personal damnation. Our gods do not leave their punishments and rewards to afterlife: the states we live and believe in can release hell on earth, and have done so, over and over, the world over.

Notes 1 2

This is what Smith (2000, 804–5) calls the principle of “ethnic election.” This is my interpretation of the exegesis and one widely shared within the Lutheran denomination. 3 This is precisely the claim made by Wendt: “[I]n both academic and lay discourse we often refer casually to states ‘as if’ they have emotions and are

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therefore conscious. States are routinely characterized as angry, greedy, guilty, humiliated, and so on—all conditions that, in individuals at least, are associated with subjective experience” (Wendt 2004, 313). See also George Lakoff’s (2011, 2003) articles on the metaphors employed to legitimate the Gulf Wars. To quote On Violence: Nothing, in my opinion, could be theoretically more dangerous than the tradition of organic thought in political matters by which power and violence are interpreted in biological terms. [. . .] [S]o long as we talk in non-political, biological terms, the glorifiers of violence can appeal to the undeniable fact that in the household of nature destruction and creation are but two sides of the natural process, so that collective violent action, quite apart from its inherent attraction, may appear as natural a prerequisite for collective life of mankind as the struggle for survival and violent death for continuing life in the animal kingdom. (Arendt 1969, 75) Peter Wilson (1998) gives a very useful contextualization of Carr’s arguments in the so-called First Debate. This is the central problem Niebuhr (1960) addresses with his Moral Man and Immoral Society. Hans Blumenberg did not. For Blumenberg (1983, 89–102), Schmitt’s analogy between theological and political concepts was metaphorical, not historical. This is to say—if I am reading him correctly—that even though modern political theory can be traced back to medieval theology, this does not imply that the structure of one can be derived from the other or both from a common prototype. Religion: Beyond a Concept edited by de Vries (2008b) is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the ongoing discussion on this topic. I am merely replicating the supremacist ethos of the article. It was 1895. Again it was 1915. Barbour does identify a number of differences between religious and scientific models. Most importantly, religious models serve noncognitive functions which have no parallel in science. Monotheistic religions like Christianity have always disliked the concept of the myth—see for example the debate aroused by the German Lutheran Theologian Rudolf Bultmann documented in the volume on Kerygma and Myth edited by Hans Werner Bartsch (1961)—but it has been very useful in the description and systematization of “pagan” religions.

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Chapter 3

Political Theology of the United Nations

In September 2000, 191 member states of the United Nations (henceforth UN) committed themselves to achieve what became known as the Millennium Development Goals (henceforth MDGs). The MDGs were a culmination of intentions drafted earlier in the 1990s, with some ideals going back to the postwar years and the inauguration of the UN. The MDGs are a set of eight internationally agreed goals to improve the human consequences of poverty in the developing world. The MDGs are: (1) eradicating extreme poverty and hunger; (2) achieving universal primary education; (3) promoting gender equality and empowering women; (4) reducing child mortality; (5) improving maternal health; (6) combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; (7) ensuring environmental sustainability; and (8) developing global partnership for development. The longue durée objectives of the Millennium-project are strengthening of “Peace, Development, [and] Human Rights” and improving “UN’s Ability to Act on Behalf of Humanity’s Priorities” (United Nations Press Release GA/9758). “[F]reedom, equality (of individuals and nations), solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature and shared responsibility”: these are, the leaders of the world declare, the “six values fundamental to international relations for the twenty-first century” (ibid.). What is agreed upon in the Millennium Declaration (henceforth MD), the document that formally inaugurates the MDGs, is not as much the details of getting rid of poverty—things that are outlined of course on some general level there and in more detail in many other documents agreed upon later—but something more fundamental and profoundly political. The declaration articulates the premises of what is life like in the world today and makes an argument on how this life should develop—or rather: how it should ideally be developed—in the near future. This is what the MD is about: What exists prior to what the signatories of the declaration are about to declare? Who are they? Where are they? Why are they

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there, doing what they are about to do? The first three verses of the document set up everything else that is there declared and the rest of what has been and is being written in the ever growing corpus of political, financial, and technical agreements on the MDGs. Make no mistake: poverty is a cause of too much suffering in the world. There is no need to trivialize this matter or needlessly criticize those who, in good faith, make effort to alleviate it. One of the tasks political theology has set itself is to look for “recycled” theology in contemporary world politics (see Cavanaugh and Scott 2004). Why bother, one may ask? Quite simply because ours is a social moment that makes some very sophisticated assumptions about itself and one of these assumptions is, to make a short story out of a much longer one (see Taylor 2007), that society no longer needs theological ideals for anything: it is human reason that reigns in world politics, as it does in just about everything. According to this worldview religion is a remnant of a bygone era, harmless when made as a personal choice but reactionary when articulated as a political position. Political theologians do not subscribe to such binary distinctions and work to make discernible the religiosity of secular political reason itself. This is not a difficult task, actually, but is it an important one? I believe it is. Where the enlightened mind grows more confident in its alienation from theism, there the need for political theology is most urgent. For example, let us take again the fourteenth-century scholastics: they were dead certain they had it all figured out and were willing to bet their lives on it. Look what they are to us now: a mere caricature of the medieval mind. We are just as serious about doing IR now as the monks were with their biblical exegesis back then. How ridiculous will our scholarship become over the centuries I can only imagine. The purpose of this chapter is to read the contemporary history of the UN from a politico-theological perspective. I will begin my exercise by commenting the development discourse as it is articulated in the MD and, from there, work myself backwards to the history of the UN and beyond. I will not get far in the MD, I must say, but most of the political theology in the document is written into its first three articles. From there I will make excursions to other documents in UN’s history and to some strands of thought prominent within the Christian tradition. I will not make much of the connection between the millennium explicit in the MDGs and that tradition of Christian apocalyptic. For most of us the term associates with kitsch: a cornucopia of memorial merchandise sold about a decade ago. The term millennium used to have a very specific meaning, but it has been used in an increasingly liberal sense

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nearing the end of the twentieth century. Since the millennial year of 2000 passed—fortunately (?) without major apocalyptic incident—the term has regained some of its original substance in becoming a loose category of understandings about Christian eschatology. There exists a body of literature discussing Christian millennialism from past to present, but I will not attempt to review it here as it is not of first importance to the arguments made in this chapter.1

3.1 The UN and Its Indispensable Foundations We, heads of State and Government, have gathered at United Nations Headquarters in New York from 6 to 8 September 2000, at the dawn of a new millennium, to reaffirm our faith in the Organization and its Charter as indispensable foundations of a more peaceful, prosperous and just world. (MD, 1) What do the leaders mean when they identify, first, the UN and, secondly, its Charter as “foundations”? Let’s treat these two “cornerstones” separately and begin with the organization. If we read the UN-as-foundation metaphor as literally as we could, we might have to conclude that the concrete foundations of the UN headquarters (47 E River Dr New York, NY) provide the physical infrastructure on which the better world will be built. But this is certainly not what the leaders are trying to say, for this would be silly. Let us read carefully what they say they are doing instead: they are reaffirming faith in the UN. Faith is reaffirmed for the simple reason that the foundations under discussion are not physical, neither cast in concrete nor sealed in ink, but are rather of spiritual essence. If we want to have a more peaceful, prosperous, and just world—again this is what the leaders say, in our name—we must have strong faith in the UN. One may of course ask whether or not we need more than mere faith to eradicate poverty and conceive a better world. Of course we do and this is what the rest of the MD is about: promises. For example: promises to spare no effort “to free our peoples from the scourge of war, whether within or between States, which has claimed more than 5 million lives in the past decade” (MD, 8); and likewise “to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty, to which more than a billion of them are currently subjected” (MD, 11). When you read further promises turn into more tangible goals, which then become the MDGs proper.

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Anyone who has done their reading in the history of international politics or international law very well knows that words of promise are a cheap commodity. What should make of these promises? Most of those who signed the MD are long gone, replaced by other people who may think otherwise about issues of development. But we might do well to remember that when the leaders of the world come together and make promises, they do not do so only as themselves, in their personal capacity, but as representatives of a body politic—“their” people, more or less.2 In other words: the leaders do not come together only to talk lightly and give cheap promises, but—and again this is something our leaders do will their utmost to convince us—to invest the hope and effort of the nations to keep their promises. A commitment to alleviate—never mind eradicate!—conditions of extreme poverty in the developing world is a challenging one. It is that because it involves not as much discovering new resources to give to those desperate in need, but rather a reallocation of existing resources, most of which the developed world currently owns and is of course finding rather difficult to separate with. The UN, for its part, is an intergovernmental organization with a relatively modest budget and is currently at pains to do more than what it is already doing. Does not the developing world hold the keys to a solution even without investing much hope on the UN? Well yes: in a way it does, but sooner or later all of the promises will come to nothing if “we” lose faith in the humanitarian mission of the UN and stop delivering it the resources and support it needed to carry out its mission, “our” mission. The fact that we now agree on certain things and have some plans does little toward a better world. Promise is of course a stage in making the world a better place, but left itself it is insufficient: to change the world, you need the UN and you need faith. This is what we are told. If we must have faith it stands to reason that we would want to know more about the nature of the thing we have to believe in. The final item on the MD reveals that the thing standing on our faith is, indeed, a house: We solemnly reaffirm, on this historic occasion, that the United Nations is the indispensable common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and development. We therefore pledge our unstinting support for these common objectives and our determination to achieve them. (MD, 32)

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This is not the house we can locate on Manhattan, but one we must imagine. The “indispensable common house” is symbolic of the unity of man: while we may be different in many ways, live in different “apartments,” we are one species and occupy the same world political. Symbols are like containers for something we understand to be uncontainable: words and images that bridge the gap between our limited abilities to conceive and understand, and something that by its nature transcends those limited abilities (Chernus 1986, 6). We have already read the last two chapters, but let us ask this question one more time: why should we be interested in metaphors and other “decorative” uses of language? This is, as Francis A. Beer notes, how we often relate language in politics: “We attend to the message, not the medium; we notice what we say, not how we say it. Language appears transparent and inconsequential. We take it for granted, as though it were trivial and unimportant. It is neither” (Beer 2001, 24). George Lakoff writes that there is an extensive, and mostly unconscious, metaphorical system we use automatically and unreflectively to understand things complex and abstract, and “[p]art of this system is devoted to understanding international relations and war” (Lakoff 2011, 1). That is: we only have the metaphor to contain the uncontainable. Metaphors employed in the discourse on the MDGs are important because they tell us at least two things. First: they tell us a lot about the political understandings and points of agreement influential people share when they come up with a document like the MD. Secondly: they also tell us something about the terms in which people reading such documents are then able to think about these important issues, like development. There is much more than simple decoration here. House is a tangible representation for a “reality” that is in itself intangible. While we may never actually see the one species on the one globe, we can nevertheless understand the UN-as-house metaphor. We understand that a house must have “foundations”: universal aspirations and common objectives, in this case. We remember that it was “built” after the World Wars and that at more than 60 years of age today it could use some “renovation.” Make it good again is precisely what leaders are now promising: the house of UN will be the house of peace, cooperation, and development for all. Our house has another indispensable foundation: the UN Charter. What do we need to know about this document? It was signed in San Francisco, CA, on June 26, 1945 by 50 original member states. The Charter is a constituent treaty, which not only binds all of its members, but also decrees that obligations to the UN prevail,

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at least in principle, over all other international treaties (Simma and Mosler 1994, 26–8). Most legal histories of the UN Charter begin from the Treaty of Versailles and The Covenant of the League of Nations within: both harbingers in the contemporary history of international law and organization. To get a picture different from the stock photograph, so to speak, I suggest we look past the League, go far beyond Immanuel Kant’s draft treaty in Zum ewige Frieden of 1795, and zoom into the prehistory of the Charter in force today. For a prototype of UN’s constitution we must go all the way back to the Ancient Middle-East and the suzerainty treaty. The political relationship of suzerainty is often identified with medieval political order, but this is an anachronism because we know that suzerain/vassal-relations have existed thousands of years prior. In his Systems of States Martin Wight (Wight 1977, 23–5) reports a suzerain states system in the Near-East in the latter half of the second millennium bc. In this system, Wight sums up, Egypt and the Hittites were the protagonists, with Babylonia and Crete holding balance between the two. International institutions were in place: Babylonian was the lingua franca of diplomacy, and treaties pertaining to peace, war, and political alliance existed. A suzerainty treaty was one where a lesser king parted with some sovereign independence by swearing obedience to a greater king, who extended his sphere of sovereignty over the latter. Wight defines the suzerain as “the sole source of legitimate authority, conferring status on the rest and exacting tribute or other marks of deference” (ibid., 23). Before anyone objects to my reasoning let it be known that I fully acknowledge there are differences—some of them actual no doubt, but others remarkably superficial—between the UN Charter in force today and Hittite treaties before the conquest of Canaan. Quite a few could be listed here, but most important of them might well be this: the UN Charter does not constitute power greater than the sovereign equality of its “clients,” that is national states. This is true: the Charter does not identify the UN as the source of political authority, the “king of the world,” but it does presuppose that there exists a political authority above the norm of state sovereignty. I will come back to this argument later on in this chapter—let us first identify the ways in which the UN Charter is similar to the ancient suzerainty treaty. Michael Horton (2006, 23–34) describes five elements that can be located in all Hittite suzerainty treaties. First is the (1) preamble that identifies the suzerain who makes the treaty and names the vassal willing to donate sovereignty. Let us remember that this is a relation of

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imbalance: Hittite suzerainty treaty is not a contract one negotiates, but a pact the bigger king grants to the lesser with the expectation of unconditional obedience. Second element is the historical (2) prologue that tells the story of how did things come to this: why did the subordinate kingdom seek the benefits of major power in the first place? This is the context that basically justified the treaty and all the (3) stipulations within. These were the terms of the treaty: not merely a list of do’s and dont’s, but articulation of all the reasonable duties the vassal owed to his suzerain. The Hittite treaties typically involved the following stipulations: no alliances with other kings, no murmuring against the suzerain, and payment of an annual tax to the great king. It is important to note that suzerainty treaties were much more than legal contracts: they symbolized a relationship of trust, love, and genuine faithfulness. It is also important that the suzerain never in these treaties took an oath himself: all the stipulations fell on the vassal. The vassals who kept their stipulations were covenant-keepers, while those who violated them were covenant-breakers—as simple as that. Stipulations were followed by (4) sanctions that spelled out what happened to the latter. Just as the suzerain pledged to move against anyone invading his vassal territory as it was his own capital, he would move against the vassal state itself should the terms of the treaty be violated. The fifth basic element provided for the (5) deposition of the treaty tablets in a sacred place as well as their public reading, so that each generation clearly understood its obligations. (See also Hillers 1969, 29–45; Robertson 1980, 168–70.) Now let us locate contemporary counterparts to these basic elements in the UN Charter: (1) Article three of the Charter identifies that “The original Members of the United Nations shall be the states which, having participated in the United Nations Conference on International Organization at San Francisco, or having previously signed the Declaration by United Nations of 1 January 1942, sign the present Charter and ratify it in accordance with Article 110.” Article four adds that “Membership in the United Nations is open to all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter and, in the judgment of the Organization, are able and willing to carry out these obligations.” What we have here is a list of the original vassals and instructions for anyone looking to join them later on. But who is the suzerain: the Charter seems rather vague at this point? In the

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Hittite treaties you find the overlords name in the very beginning of the document—take this for instance: “These are the words of the Sun Mursilis, the great king, the king of the Hatti land, the valiant, the favorite of the Storm-god, the son of Suppiluliumas, the great king, the king of the Hatti land, the valiant” (Hillers 1969, 29). Who, then, is the author of the UN Charter? Let us read the first words of the preamble: “We the Peoples of the United Nations . . .”. (2) The preamble continues from there: “. . . determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person [. . .].” This is the crucially important historical introduction of the UN Charter. In the Hittite treaties the historical prologue told a story of the parties involved and had a function to perform: it placed the relation on a basis of mutual consent rather than power politics (Hillers 1969, 30–2). The story leading to the Charter recalls World War I, the failures of the Treaty of Paris and the Covenant of the League of Nations, and World War II—we must remember all this is present history to those involved. The declaration continues by telling how We The Peoples have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the UN and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the UN. Note here how the peoples mandate their “respective Governments” to accomplish the tasks they have collectively agreed upon at this historical juncture, and to establish the international organization of the UN to help them in the effort. (3) The preamble continues with a summing-up of the most important stipulations of the Charter: “and for these ends to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples [. . .].” When we read this bit carefully we clearly see that it is the Governments-through-representatives—that is not we-the-peoples

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(compare items (1) and (2))—that do the obliging here. In Hittite treaties the suzerain overlord does not promise a thing to its vassal. Likewise: nothing is expected of the peoples of the UN—no: we are fine, it is our representatives that must submit to clauses. So the peoples is the major power in the Charter: “we” are the suzerain author of the UN. (4) Article five is written for the covenant-breakers: “A Member of the United Nations against which preventive or enforcement action has been taken by the Security Council may be suspended from the exercise of the rights and privileges of membership by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.” This means not only eviction from the institutional framework of the UN, but “outlawing” a whole nation before international society. (5) Article 111 states that “The present Charter, of which the Chinese, French, Russian, English, and Spanish texts are equally authentic, shall remain deposited in the archives of the Government of the United States of America.” What I am pointing out above is manifest structural identity between Hittite suzerainty treaties and the UN Charter: the basic elements typical of the former can easily be located in the key points of the latter. What we may ask now is whether or not this tells us something we do not already know about the UN and its Charter, the “indispensable foundations of a more peaceful, prosperous and just world”? For one it does locate the organization within the tradition of Christian covenant theology.3 The Christian narrative begins with harmony and unity between God and the human being He created and ends in the restoration of this harmony. Covenants are chapters, as it were, in a great drama of human redemption. The new covenant instituted by Christ is related to and fulfills the four covenants (with Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David) God initiated before sending His son. Old Testament exegetics have identified remarkable similarities between the Hittite treaties and the Mosaic covenant: both the Mount Sinai portion of Exodus (19–24) and the book of Deuteronomy have been studied from this perspective (Robertson 1980, 169). Israel’s oath at the foot of Sinai is, essentially, a suzerainty treaty. The context of the oath is God’s deliverance of Israel out of Egypt: “if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine” (Exod. 19.5, ESV). Hearing the stipulations of the Decalogue Israel replies, with one voice: “All the words

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that the Lord has spoken we will do” (Exod. 24.3). There are sanctions with the usual blessings and curses, with the warning that the Israelites were not the owners of the land, but mere “strangers and sojourners” (Lev. 25.23) subject to eviction upon violation of their covenant with God (Horton 2006, 29–34). Horton writes that [i]t is not surprising [. . .] that God adapted the international treaty as the template for his relationship to creatures. That relationship really is a matter of “foreign relations”. The creature, even the one made in his image, is never divine or semidivine, but is always other than God. [. . .] At the same time, created in God’s image, humankind can be described as an analogy of God: similar but never the same. Covenant is exactly the right concept for such “foreign relations”. (Horton 2006, 29–30) O. Palmer Robertson defines covenant “a bond in blood sovereignly administered” (Robertson 1980, 4). It is a bond because it binds people together: “[n]othing lies closer to the heart of the biblical concept of the covenant than the imagery of the bond inviolable” (ibid., 4). It is a bond in blood because God never enters into a casual relationship with man: “[i]nstead, the implications of his bonds extend to the ultimate issues of life and death” (ibid., 8). In the Hebrew bible the phrase “to make a covenant” literally reads “to cut a covenant”: this reminds of the Ancient Middle East custom of slaughtering an animal in ritual ceremony (see e.g. Gen. 15). The dismembered animal symbolized the curse that the covenant-maker called down on himself upon violation of the commitment he had made. This is what sets covenant apart from a testament, which marks the end of a relationship and activates its inheritance to those left behind. In the case of covenant death stands at the beginning of a partnership in that it represents the pledge-to-death of the covenantbreaker. This distinction is also identified by St. Paul: “For where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established. For a will takes effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive. Therefore not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood” (Heb. 9.16-8). Robertson writes that only one body is required to activate a testament, but “a multiple of dead bodies is associated immediately with the inauguration of a covenantal relationship” (Robertson 1980, 8–15, 139). Finally a covenant is a bond in blood sovereignly administered, because no such thing as bargaining, bartering,

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or contracting characterizes divine covenants: “[t]he sovereign Lord of heaven and earth dictates the terms of his covenant” (ibid., 15). Now that we have a sketch of the historical tradition behind the document of the UN Charter, we are in a better position to appreciate its political premises. The Charter is not a testament of the nearly hundred million of dead over the World Wars—I see little point in looking for meaning behind such an idea. But when we read the Charter as a secularized form of a biblical covenant things begin to lock into place, the whole make sense. This covenant is inaugurated in the shadow of the untold sorrow of the World Wars and the threat of a third looming, like the sword of Damocles, above mankind. The leaders did not want to write off the dead bodies of the World Wars as a meaningless loss of human life. What they did instead was that they wrote of it a new beginning: made it into a meaningful sacrifice that commits—no: must commit—the succeeding generations to one another. The Charter also incorporates in it every single element found in the prototype of the Hittite suzerainty treaty—a template replicated in the covenants between God and Israel documented in the Old Testament (see Hillers 1969). Analogy between covenant theology and international treaty law should not come as much of a surprise. We already discussed Carl Schmitt’s thesis that all modern political concepts of significance are “secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development [. . .] but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts” (Schmitt 1985, 36). Schmitt’s sociology of concepts was concerned with tracing juridical ideas to their metaphysical and theological roots and looking for structural identities between different political images and forms of organization between historical epochs. I am sure many of the basic elements of suzerainty treaties could easily be located in whole variety of legal treaties. Does this relate all of them to biblical covenants? It would be interesting to interrogate Schmitt on this point, explore the field of jurisprudence for theological reception, but I am not going to into this here and now. I rather suggest we stick to the MD and the cited Charter, see how far we can go within this institutional context. We have now had a look at the foundations, imagined the house built on them. Let us now move back to the MD. Let us ask our leaders this question: why is it the UN we must strongly believe in? First: it is of course polite to give homage to the one who invited everyone over to address the issue of the day, remind of all the effort invested in and by the UN

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since 1945. Having said that we must recognize that throughout its history the UN has been a subject of much criticism and controversy. In 2004, the former Israeli ambassador to the UN Dore Gold published his book Tower of Babble, which criticizes the UN of moral relativism in the face of genocide and terrorism that has occurred between its founding period and the present day. According to Gold the organization’s architects had been united in their war against Nazi Germany and founded the UN “on the bedrock of a great ideal: that the nations of the world could draw together and defend certain fundamental principles that were common to all of mankind” (Gold 2004, 221). But, like in the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, this unity of purpose was about to change: member states all spoke the same language in the beginning, “but as new members flooded into the organization, they brought with them their own political languages—that is, completely different values and concepts of international morality” (ibid., 13). In the half century since the foundations of the organization were laid its standards and hopes have been systematically eroded to the ground—“[t]hat erosion is at the heart of the global disorder we know today” (ibid., 24). Despite all of its shortcomings there are still those who hold the UN in high regard, “the source of international legitimacy.” “This is utterly ridiculous,” spits Gold, “and shows how unaccountable the UN and its officials remain” (ibid., 225). We have to read Gold with a grain of salt, but it is hardly an over-exaggeration to say that the UN has let its ideals down since its inauguration, and can hardly be taken as a global covenant sovereignly administered today. It would be a fallacy to assume that either the UN (or its Charter) would themselves be (or even become) the suzerain source of legitimate authority in the world political. Say that the UN—not unlike like that tower mentioned in Revelation (11.1-9)—somehow ended in failure and its builders “scattered abroad.” What would happen to all the principles: international peace, prosperity, and justice? They would be salvaged, of course. If we so wanted we could abandon the “common house” we now have in the UN and leave the city. We would take its principles with us, of course, and build something else on them: we would write up a better constitution, something that addressed the problems of today’s world politics; come up with a better organization; purge the ruling class of a time gone by—this is what the UN did in its day! UN needs its values, but the values themselves can do without the UN—if they must, that is. In other words: the UN is not the source, but a vessel for legitimate authority in the world political. It is helpful inasmuch as it contains a promise of a more peaceful, prosperous, and just world—but the promise it is not.

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In his The Symbolism of Evil Paul Ricoeur writes that the covenant of the Jewish Berit is the initial moment of being “before God”: a preliminary dimension of encounter and dialogue where “can appear such a thing as the absence and the silence of God, corresponding to the vain and hollow existence of man” (Ricoeur 1969, 51). The covenant is more than a law given by a legislator and sanctioned by a judge: rather than words of command to be applied into a situation, a covenant embodies values that are valid and make demands by themselves. The notion of law will of course appear as commands become applicable in situation, but not until the word of command is on the point of detaching itself from that initial moment of dialogue between man and God. Thus, what there is in the first instance is not the essence of a norm, but the presence of a person, and commandments, “expressions of a holy will,” are modalities of this presence (Ricoeur 1969, 50–4). What is the initial moment of being in the MD? Before whom are the leaders standing, making their promises? “All the world’s people, especially the most vulnerable and, in particular, the children of the world, to whom the future belongs” (MD, 2). The Heads of State and Government come out as a collectively responsible subject not because there is a law or a treaty that commands them to do so, but because in the world there is a presence of life living the vulnerabilities of extreme poverty, war and insecurity, environmental hazard, and bad governance. The covenant of the UN—from its postwar inauguration to the recent updates addressing the diversity of problems posed by the “force” (MD, 5) of globalization—is a symbol of a quasi-personalistic relation between “the leaders” and “the vulnerable” in this world.

3.2 Insisting on True Meaning We recognize that, in addition to our separate responsibilities to our individual societies, we have a collective responsibility to uphold the principles of human dignity, equality and equity at the global level. As leaders we have a duty therefore to all the world’s people, especially the most vulnerable and, in particular, the children of the world, to whom the future belongs. (MD, 2) Let us read this article very carefully. These are highly influential people, “leaders of the world’s societies,” declaring what is written here. What

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ever they agree upon to declare is important, always something worthy of anyone’s attention, but even more important is what they are actually saying. It seems as if they were saying that, at the end of the day, contingencies of world politics, like national independence and international law, are not quite as important as the fact that we are human beings, all of us. Any reading of this article must comment whether or not does it posit that there exists true meaning quite apart from—and perhaps even above?—what the leaders themselves represent. What is true meaning? Any meaning that is, say, processed democratically or legislated according to law is relative meaning: we may reach a provisional agreement on the value of the principles of democracy and rule of law, but the meaning generated by them is perpetually subject to change. Epistemologically speaking relative meaning is something Hans Kelsen has in mind with his doctrine of “philosophical relativism,” according to which “reality exists only within human knowledge, and that, as the object of knowledge, reality is relative to the knowing subject” (Kelsen 1948, 906). Kelsen’s relativism accepts no absolutes, moral or political, with the possible exception of those enacted “in a thoroughly democratic way” and under the authority of international law.4 However: true meaning is not something someone can decide by vote or negotiate with their lawyers. The leaders are acting responsibly toward their subjects in their individual societies—taking care of matters relative, each to their own—but there is more than this: an another society and an additional responsibility. On the global level, the leaders declare, lives a human being whose “dignity, equality and equity” must be upheld. We must not give these criteria any more credit than they deserve: there must have been an interesting discussion among the leaders on what should be listed here and one embarrassing compromise after another before they ended up with these three. True meaning is hardly exhausted by them or any other list of principles we can come up with. What the leaders represent in this declaration is the member states of the UN, but we are now talking about the human being divorced from the political form of the state: their true meaning. Of the three criteria listed by the declaration dignity comes closest to what I have in mind talking about true meaning. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (henceforth UDHR, 1948) makes, in its first article, a fundamental anthropological distinction between human dignity and human rights by identifying (1) the inherent dignity and (2) the equal and inalienable rights of “all members of the human family” as “the foundation of freedom, justice

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and peace in the world.” Jurgen Moltmann expounds on the meaning of the distinction: Human rights are plural, but human dignity exists only in the singular. Therefore, the dignity of human being takes precedence over the many rights and duties which are bound up with being human. The dignity of humanity is the one indivisible, inalienable and shared quality of the human being. The different human rights portray a wholeness because the human being in his or her dignity is a totality. The completeness of the catalogs and lists of human rights is not identical with this totality. The light of totality falls much more from the human being’s dignity onto every fragment of his or her human rights. (Moltmann 1984, 9) In other words: the dignity of human beings is not a human right in itself, but the source and the ground for everything we include in that category. It is the one, indivisible, and inalienable quality within every human being that transcends the particularities of beliefs and ideologies the world can come up with. This is to say that the human being is never mere being, what Giorgio Agamben (1998) might call “naked life,” but always involves a dimension of meaning. According to Abraham J. Heschel, this dimension is one that can not be reduced to a material relation: it is not a property like hot or cold which we can empirically ascertain. Nor is it an abstraction or an idea, but something that arises “out of the full situation of the living man, embracing the dynamics and concrete reality of his individual existence” (Heschel 1965, 72–3). Most importantly, meaning is compatibility with the hard-wired fact that human life is precious: Imbedded in the mind is a certainty that the state of existence and the state of meaning stand in a relation to each other, that life is assessable in terms of meaning. The will to meaning and the certainty of legitimacy of our striving to ascertain it are as intrinsically human as the will to live and the certainty of being alive. In spite of failures and frustrations, we continue to be haunted by that irrepressible quest. We can never accept the idea that life is hollow and devoid of meaning. (Heschel 1965, 54–5) Heschel is absolutely right: as long as I will to live I can not accept that life is devoid of meaning, and neither can you. I also agree with his view on that human existence can not derive its ultimate meaning from society, simply because society is in need of meaning itself (Heschel 1965, 59).

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But think about this: having a duty to all the world’s people—that is not only to one’s “subjects” as statespeople—must be the biggest responsibility anybody or any body can have! The leaders do not collectively take this massive responsibility upon themselves simply because they want to be reelected in office or because they are sanctioned by law to do so. These motives are no good, because the human being does not have a vote to cast or a court to keep his case alive—this is what citizens might have, if they have been lucky. There are, of course, political ideals and legal norms working toward realizing such institutions in world politics. Take, for example, the notion of human rights: we can tell a historical story of their consummation identifying documents such as the Magna Carta (1215), the American Declaration of Independence (1776), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), and UDHR as landmarks along the way. While we may do this we must define true meaning as something that must have existed before these ideals were articulated in terms of policy; principles listed, papers signed. But there seems to be a problem here: humanity, being a human being, is much older than the notion of human rights.5 Let us go back some thousand years: did human life have meaning in Ancient Middle-East, before the conquest of Canaan? We know people looked a lot like we do, spoke languages their successors today might be able to partly comprehend, loved and suffered in life just as dearly as you and I do now. Even though they must have lived in a world different than ours today—perhaps there were less politicians and lawyers keeping themselves busy with issues concerning human dignity, equality, and equity than there are today—their life must have been just as filled with meaning as ours is. If our life today has true meaning—remember: this is what our leaders have declared!—so did theirs. Indeed: it must have been so from the very beginning. In his (very interestingly titled) book The Global Covenant Robert Jackson discusses different conceptions of responsibility in statecraft. The first and most conventional of these is national responsibility according to which the responsibilities of what Jackson calls “statespeople”—that is those of us who, in the name of national sovereignty, represent states in world politics—are determined by their obligations to the citizens of their own country. This responsibility is clearly extended by MD 2 in its declaration that, in addition “to separate responsibilities to our individual societies,” there is a “duty to all the world’s people.” The second conception is international responsibility according to which world politics is not merely an anarchy of national interests, but an institutional

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arrangement that constitutes a society of states. This means that our leaders are answerable not only to their citizens, like Finland’s heads of state are to me, at least in principle, but also to those people living in other states. That is: they are responsible for upholding international law and the society of states as a whole (Jackson 2000, 169–74). The third in Jackson’s conceptions is humanitarian responsibility according to which our leaders have a fundamental obligation not only to respect, but also to defend human rights at the global level: “[s]tatespeople are people and therefore they are not exempt” (Jackson 2000, 174). This conception goes beyond international responsibility by asserting a moral reference, “universal human morality,” beyond the domestic/ foreign-divide: “human beings everywhere and regardless of the country in which they happen to live or be citizens of” (ibid., 174). The UDHR points to this direction when it proclaims that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” (Art. 1) and “no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs” in their entitlement (Art. 2). Whence such a criteria? We can of course locate the foundation of universal human morality in a document like the UDHR, but again: this would be going back to relative meaning and what we have here, remember, is something apart from and probably above that. If the UDHR is the “World Constitution of Human Rights,” before 1948 we either were not human or we had no rights. According to the controversial philosopher of the counter-Enlightenment Joseph de Maistre “[n]o constitution results from deliberation; the rights of the people are never written, or never except as simple declarations of pre-existing rights not written, of which nothing more can be said, than that they exist because they exist” (de Maistre 1977, xi). This statement may not hold without exception, but certainly has something going for it in the case of human rights. If and only if we give human life true meaning, that is. How can it be that in the MD the leaders volunteer to carry such a massive burden of responsibility: to uphold the dignity, equality, and equity of man? The simple answer: they do it because it is the right thing to do. The trickier, epistemological question is this: how do they know this is the right thing to do? Well: we may gather from the MD that most of the leaders seem to hold the dignity, equality, and equity of man dear to their hearts, from which we may then infer that right it must all be. But: Immanuel Kant teaches in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) that while we certainly may do this—look at how things appear to us today and induce a hypothesis from that basis—it will not take us to a transcendental conclusion,

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not let us rise above the empirical world so to speak. “Experience presents us with rules and is the source of truth,” Kant premises, “but in relation to ethical laws experience is the parent of illusion, and it is in the highest degree reprehensible to limit or to deduce the laws which dictate what I ought to do, from what is done” (Kant 2008, 179). True meaning, if we insist on having that, is not something our leaders have deliberated on ever since Magna Carta or the democratic revolutions, and finally articulated at the UN headquarters in September 2000—this would bring us back to relative meaning, yet again. What it means to be human has throughout history been a subject of much debate, controversy even, but most of the meaning we may agree upon today has passed on for millennia. Even though our right to be human is covered by declarations, treaties, and even laws, this does not make me somehow more human than, say, Hittites. The meaning of being human is something that predates all this paperwork, by thousands of years. You will not find it in political constitutions, but in what is immanent: we are human, we know what life feels like. Heads of State and Government feel it too, and the reason they come out to bear collective responsibility is the profound social distress they must feel—or at least feel they should feel—knowing about the gross inhumanity among the peoples of the world, their “constituents” plus the rest of humanity. This is the ethical predicament the MD addresses: in our condition millions of people die of poverty and hunger, children are not going to school, women systematically oppressed, mothers perishing of childbirth, manageable disease spreading out of control, environment exploited for economic gain, and the list goes on. We can not explain the MD existing in a world like this without assuming that the leaders, those who have signed this document and accepted to carry out duties laid therein, judge it, in a manner properly basic, bad or wrong for anyone to have to live such a life. Can we not but assume this? Is there a plausible alternative explanation to MD, 2? The question here is this: do the leaders have a reason to deceive the peoples of the world in committing to them? Every moral utterance is always suspect to doubt that its purpose is no more than to serve the self-interest of the utterer. E. H. Carr makes of this a premise in his realist international political science: Theories of social morality are always the product of a dominant group which identifies itself with the community as a whole, and which possesses facilities denied to subordinate groups or individuals for

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imposing its view of life on the community. Theories of international morality are, for the same reason and in virtue of the same process, the product of dominant nations or groups of nations. (Carr 2001, 74) Hermeneutics of suspicion is, I suppose, a prudent method in the study of diplomacy. Even if we did read humanitarian discourse from a Machiavellian point of view, it is important to understand that this does not force us to recant true meaning. Morality is connected with society and its obligations are meant to be publicly adopted: when we say that something is bad or wrong, against our commitment to what is good or right, we mean that it ought in general be publicly discouraged as bad or wrong. Were there among the heads of State and Government, those who signed the MD, deaf to the groans of humanity; parties unwilling to take any responsibility for the world’s people; politicians who saw the initiative only as means to promote their national interest? (I would not be surprised if there were.) Even if all the parties of the MD were, more or less, looking after the interest of their respective societies primarily and that of human dignity, equality, and equity with whatever time and effort remained. I would be very surprised if there was in New York on that September day even one leader with an agenda markedly more altruistic than this. If we accept this, what happens to humanitarian responsibility? If the leaders do not make of it an issue of first importance, how much weight should we give such absolutes anyway? Are the world’s people in a position to make demands upon the leaders? We discussed this earlier when we made an analogy between the UN Charter and the Hittite suzerainty treaties. Indeed: the initial moment of being before the world’s peoples makes national states a collectively responsible subject and even if they came up short in carrying out their responsibility—and they will always fail to make it all good—their leaders will stand in the presence of a humanity suffering in a world of evil. The fact that the leaders are doing something, gathering at the UN headquarters to affirm faith and make promises, expresses a loss of a bond between the states and the peoples, a questioning of the political ontology according to which the state is a “peacekeeper” between humanity and evil. If the ontology of this order was not suspect, if there was no loss of a bond, no failure in root metaphor, there would be no need for anyone to go to New York and say anything. The leaders would continue to take care of their separate responsibilities to their own societies, not a worry in the world. The MD (and its MDGs) is not only a new development policy, but symbolic

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of moral obligation owed by national states to mankind: a public reading of a sacred covenant to remind the leaders of their duties to the present generation. This was the reason everyone gathered in New York on that September day. If we identify human life with true meaning, a moral obligation to all the world’s people follows. This, to me, is what the leaders are trying to say in MD 2. By moral obligation I mean a thing that is good in itself: not simply a means to an end to be appealed to at will, but rather an end that has an autonomy of its own (Geisler 1999, 501–2). Subscribing to true meaning in this context is making a fundamental conviction about human good: “about what it means to be (truly, fully) human, about what is of real and ultimate value in life, about what makes a life most deeply meaningful” (Perry 1998, 19). From such a conviction follows a duty toward humanity: not a descriptive is, but a prescriptive ought that intervenes an imperfect and uncertain world, where there are “sisters” and “brothers” living lives the true meaning of which is yet to be acknowledged, who have no human rights to speak of. What makes our obligation moral is the distinction between right and wrong. Obligation “to uphold the principles of human dignity, equality and equity at the global level” is right and it is that in the absolute sense, as in binding all persons at all times in all places.6 We have come this far, but have not yet asked an important epistemological question: how do the leaders know they are defending the right principles? They do not need to consult their lawyers or take a vote: they seem to “just know,” and most of us, I believe, find it very easy to agree with them on this register. I well understand the problematique of asking this question in our post-foundational moment, but could it be possible that “the right thing” is something everybody knows by heart? What if it is truly human to “just know”? What if there exists within us, among other moral resources, something Reinhold Niebuhr describes “a sense of obligation toward the good” (Niebuhr 1960, 37). This sense does not make up the substance of our ethics, but is rather “a principle of action which requires the individual to act according to whatever judgments of good and evil he is able to form” (ibid.). The argument that is Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society is premised on the existence of such a faculty in our condition. When you read the UDHR you will find from its first article an important identification: “All human beings are [. . .] endowed [. . .] with conscience” (Art. 1). This here is a highly significant discovery. In the second of his “three critiques,” Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant opens the

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door for transcendence in his epistemology by pointing out that sense of moral obligation makes it necessary, for practical purposes, to postulate the existence of God. Though he did remain skeptical toward historical revelation as witnessed by the Christian tradition, Kant did identify conscience as a divine presence within the human consciousness (Dulles 1999, 209–10). To have a conscience, Kant defines, is “to be under a duty to recognise duties” (Kant 1898, 311). It is not unlike an internal “judge” that “threatens and keeps [‘man’] in awe”; a “tribunal” that “watches over the laws within him” (ibid., 321). Conscience is not an acquired capacity, but something that is “incorporated in our being” (ibid.). Even though one’s conscience speaks personally, duty is a transaction that necessarily requires someone else: “in all duties the conscience of the man must regard another than himself the judge of his actions, if it is to avoid self-contradiction” (ibid., 322, emphasis in original). This “other” can be an actual or merely ideal person, but must be someone “who knows the heart; for the tribunal is set up in the inward part of man”; and at the same time “possess all power (in heaven and earth), since otherwise he could not give his commands their proper effect (which the office of judge necessarily requires)” (ibid.). Such a moral being is called God, Kant concludes, and conscience is the subjective principle of a responsibility for one’s deeds before Him. According to Norman L. Geisler, Kant believed that moral laws were like laws of gravitation: they applied without exception. “God does not tolerate the breaking of any of his laws, whether ethical or natural,” argues Geisler,7 “[t]he universe runs according to universal law” (Geisler 1989, 83). Kant believed in the autonomy of ethics and independence of ethical imperatives, but this he did with a caveat: by looking into our moral conscience we have a glimpse of God and some intimation of his moral order (Kurtz 2008, 56). Kant was not the first philosopher to think that there is an ideal and universal basis for moral conduct, but it is from Kant where contemporary Christian apologetics begins expounding its moral argument. It basically states that unless there is a God, moral principles do not have an ultimate foundation. Even an outspoken nontheist admits that “moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God” (Taylor 1985, 84). The argument is premised on the universality of moral experience: regardless of time and place there is considerable agreement on normative conduct in the human condition—a fact evidenced by documents such as the UDHR and MD, and well documented in the tradition of international humanitarian law. According to one of the indisputable classics of this doctrine, C. S. Lewis, the ultimate

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foundation is something or somebody above and beyond the actual facts of human behavior: “a real law which we did not invent and which we know we ought to obey” (Lewis 2003, 21). Lewis goes on to present two pieces of evidence for the existence of “the Somebody” above and beyond man: one is the universe and the other conscience. The latter is a better piece of evidence than the former, Lewis argues, because it is inside information: “[y]ou find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built” (ibid.). Not everyone agrees, of course. One of two objections is commonly raised against the moral argument. First of them disagrees with the existence of moral absolutes. In ethics this position is known as antinomianism, according to which there is no God or not at least one that has enjoined absolute and universal moral values on human beings. Whatever moral values exist are simply mores and they may be different according to time and place. For example, the outspoken nontheist Richard Taylor argues that, in morals, the idea of absolutes is Christianity’s red herring. For the Greek philosophers, Taylor argues, ethics consisted simply of custom and derived its ideals “from human nature, from a consideration of human needs and aspirations, and from their reflections upon political life” (Taylor 1985, 5). Then the church intervened with its idea of a higher lawgiver and transformed (what Taylor identifies as) “original” ethics into ethics of duty to God. Modernity has more or less repudiated the religious foundation of morality but nevertheless tried to retain its moral categories, not noticing that in casting God aside it has “also abolished the conditions of meaningfulness for moral right and wrong as well” (ibid., 3). For Taylor obligation is something that human beings owe one another: “something can be owed only to some person or persons [. . .] [t]here can be no such thing as a duty in isolation, that is, something that is owed but owed to no person or persons” (ibid., 75, emphasis in original). Humanitarian responsibility can be also framed in these terms: In its original ethical sense, duty was characteristically thought of as duty to one’s own people, that is, to people like oneself or of the same culture. As people have become closer and their cultures have tended to merge, the idea has developed that each of us has certain obligations to any and all persons, that is, not just to group,

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or nation, or persons narrowly “like ourselves” but to the whole of humankind. (Taylor 1985, 75) According to Taylor the idea of a higher law makes perfectly good sense, but only so long as it is accompanied by the idea of a higher lawgiver. But: “if God is removed from consideration” the concept of obligation is “left suspended in thin air, devoid of any meaning at all” (ibid., 92). The atheist author and neuroscientist Sam Harris argues likewise in his The End of Faith: “It is time we realized that crimes without victims are like debts without creditors. They do not even exist” (Harris 2005, 171). According to Harris we do not need God to live ethical lives: “[o]nce we begin thinking seriously about happiness and suffering, we find that our religious traditions are no more reliable on questions of ethics than they have been on scientific questions generally” (ibid., 172). We need to understand what is at stake if we agree with the first objection. If there are no moral absolutes, if morality really is Christianity’s red herring, if its law is something we invented rather than discovered, if we human beings are no more than “accidental by-products of nature that have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe and that are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time” (Craig and Sinnott-Armstrong 2004, 18), then there is no true meaning. If there is no true meaning and morality is only an illusion masking an evolutionary struggle for survival and reproduction in a species, then we have no choice but to admit the inevitable: there are no human rights, because nothing you can do against another human being is, in the objective sense of the term, wrong or evil. If we give in to this, seriously entertain it even for a second, we accept in full measure the nihilism and meaninglessness implied by a God-less universe. We either cement our foundation with true meaning or stand on rubble. This is what is at stake. The second objection often raised likewise denies the existence of God, but retains moral absolutes. The secular humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz expounds such an ethical doctrine in his The Forbidden Fruit. According to Kurtz there exists a body of morally obligatory human rights, but it is not divinely inspired. They are not rights properly so construed, but rather “rightings” that grow out of processes of social demand and acceptance: The drama of moral progress is the struggle, ever widening, of rights claims, from smaller to larger groups of people, from what at first may

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appear to be the unreasonable complaints of a recalcitrant or dissident minority, to a majority that eventually comes to agree with it. Without the sense that we ought to respect the right, it would have no foundation. (Kurtz 2008, 232, emphasis in original) Though he does not really say why men ought to respect something rather than something else, Kurtz argues that human rights do not need a transcendental referent to be obligatory, universal, or general. The sanctification of some of these rights by religion post facto is simply taking one social process and support it with another: “[t]hough one may deceive others about the ontological status of rights, their content is still thoroughly human, which does not make them any the less morally obligatory” (ibid., 233, emphasis in original). Kurtz’s moral principles are rooted in habit and custom, feeling and fashion, and “consciously watered and pruned by critical intelligence” (ibid., 104). Kurtz’s position we may categorize as a situationist ethic. Situationism claims allegiance to one unbreakable norm, in Kurtz’s case something to the effect of “live according to reason.” There is an absolute and universal law, but it is founded on neither faith nor authority, but on human cognition: “[i]ntelligence translates arbitrary rules into informed judgements that are fashioned in the light of reason” (Kurtz 2008, 104). This position makes a lot of sense to many, but, as Geisler (1989, 57–60) argues, is not without its inadequacies. Most importantly situationism, as solicited by Kurtz among others, is unable to define the meaning of its most important idea, that is reason. If reason is dependent on circumstances, then its significance is relative and reason is not absolute and universal. If human rights are founded when a majority agrees with the right claims of a minority, how can we tell when this situation is upon us? Who exactly qualifies as “a majority,” “a minority,” and how do we know what they agree or disagree about? What if they agree on something today, make moral progress for humanity’s sake, constitute a foundation for human rights, but fall into disagreement again tomorrow? Ought we still respect human right thus constituted? Exploring the limits of situationism will reveal a formal and empty moral system: it has no content that can be known in advance, apart from the situation. The problem with all forms of situationism is that, ultimately, they reduce to the first objection, antinomianism: “for one empty absolute moral law is in practice no better than no absolute moral law” (Geisler 1989, 61). Furthermore, if we did admit the possibility that moral values and duties exist in reality, that they are not dependent on evolution nor

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public opinion, and further insist that they are not of God, then our humanitarian argument boils down to this: human rights just exist. All human beings share the same dignity, equality, and equity, simply because. Let us leave this “argument” in brackets for now and ask the following question: how does this because result in any moral obligations for me? Why should I accept duties toward the most vulnerable in our world? Who is there to impose them on me? Surely not the UN! The leaders of the world might be able to find a way of making me comply to their will, if this was something they really set out to do, but the important thing is that, at the end of the day, I do not need them to tell me the right thing. I just know—the UN or the heads of State and Government do not really figure in it. Metaethics is an open case and the subject of ongoing philosophical and theological discussion, which I will not even attempt to comprehensively review here. Moral antinomianism and absolutism are, however, representative examples of the positions one must negotiate thinking about the foundation of humanitarian responsibility. When the leaders promise to “uphold the principles of human dignity, equality and equity at the global level,” my reading of the promise is one of commitment to make an effort to maintain such values universally. I emphasize maintain, because these values are not constituted, new meaning to human life not given, in the MD or any preceding document—we are talking about true meaning here, remember? True meaning predates—no: preexists— anything you could write down. But there is something we already knew: talking about true meaning is problematic. On the one front Richard Taylor would probably criticize my interpretation by saying that there is no such thing as true meaning, because, since he has already removed God from consideration, we do not have a higher register of meaning we could call truer than something else. Paul Kurtz might flank me by agreeing on that there does exist such a register of meaning, a foundation for an ethic of humanitarian responsibility, but it rests on a secular ground, not on a transcendental plane. But, having said that, he would have to admit no such meaning existed in the Ancient Middle-East, for example, as its existence depends on some degree of agreement within a majority of people living at that time. For Kurtz the acknowledgment of human rights “is a function of the level of historical development and is relative to concrete social conditions” (Kurtz 2008, 235), which I imagine could not have been met 3,500 years (or so) ago, among the Hittites of Anatolia.

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3.3 The Tao If we look for epistemological foundations for humanitarian responsibility in the sphere of secular reason only, what we can come up with is nothing unshakable really. Michael J. Perry writes that “[t]here is no intelligible (much less persuasive) secular version of the conviction that every human being is sacred;8 the only intelligible versions are religious” (Perry 1998, 11). This is not to say that nontheists/atheists cannot make a moral judgment or hold human rights in high respect, no, but that their normative evaluations will never be beyond question. If we demand an unshakable foundation, we call upon “the unjudged judge, the unruled legislator, the premise maker who rests on no premises, the uncreated creator of values” (Leff 1979, 1230). Who could that be? An atheist can live just as moral a life as a devout Christian, but if we admit that there is something true about each and every human being simply as a human being, we cannot reach this meaning within a nontheist worldview. If God does not exist and the only objective laws in the world are those limited by the worldview of materialism, moral judgments are meaningless: what they boil down to is not a cosmological conviction about the world, but “free-floating aesthetic preferences” others may or may not share, and which may float away at any time (ibid., 25). If we want to maintain our stand on true meaning, however, follow the intuition that our life today is truly and fully just as human as it was with those who lived, say, before the conquest of Canaan, and find that this makes more sense than any argument premised on relative meaning of being human, we must keep the door open to transcendence. Keeping this door open means making a commitment not only above the nihilism of materialism, but also above the secularized9 form of humanism that has, over the last half a century or so, become something a quasi-official ideology behind all things humanitarian. I do not want to take anything away from the valuable progress we have seen in legal and political humanitarianism over last decades and even centuries— most of this is embodied in the UN and its institutions—but there are some very important and urgently relevant metaethical problems there, going unsolved. The most important of these is this: humanism is, on a properly basic level, a descriptive theory of ethics. What I mean by this is that for a nontheist humanist the distinction between good and evil can only be made on the basis of what humans themselves think and make of it, today. Intelligent thought and action is the sole ultimate resource for the human being—there is no God from whom they may obtain comfort

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and courage, instruction and intervention. The problem with this system of ethics is that it is not a system of ethics to begin with! All the human beings in the world today cannot come to an agreement on, well, anything really, never mind the really important things concerning their life in and the future of the world. And, even if they were able to somehow agree on something, today, there is nothing to keep them from changing tack early tomorrow morning. From an is one can not make an ought. This is the reason Gordon H. Clark disposes humanism as an ethical project: If humanism fails to save man from the plight of his conflicts in every field whatsoever, humanism fails indeed. It may have an admirable theory of science, it may devise effective aids in education, it may stimulate professors to take part in politics; but since science and politics are only means to chosen ends and ideals, if humanism cannot rationally justify one ideal as against another, if its theory of ethics cannot give clearcut guidance in the perplexities of life, it will have failed in its main endeavour and must be abandoned. (Clark 1961, 63) The basic question which humanism can not answer is this: what is the end of a human being? An acceptable system of ethics must be able to answer—or at least provide guidance toward answering—this question, built a foundation for principles of a life that is worth living. This is not an artificial task to be evaded or passed over in silence. According to Kurtz, the situationist we debated with earlier, ethical principles cannot be deduced from the concept of God. He builds up his case on three hypotheses: first “the existence of God is questionable”; secondly “not all men and women of different cultures share the same religious beliefs”; and thirdly “granting the fatherhood of God is no guarantee that uniform moral codes will emerge” (Kurtz 2008, 103). What does philosophy of religion have to say about these propositions? Let us begin with God’s questionable existence. This is a cunning argument, because it conceals an atheist premise: that there is no God and that this is somehow self-evident enough for everyone to presuppose. What Kurtz actually does here is place the burden of proof on the apologist: show us your God or recant. The problem with theism, as well as with atheism, is that we do not have objective proof to pass a final judgment either way—what we have on both sides is degrees of plausibility backed up by circumstantial evidence and (often controversial) expert testimonies. It is late in the day of a “secular age” and a proposition like this may seem fairly unproblematic to pass, but we have to understand

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that it is far from that and neglects, among a number of other things, a body of recent evidence unearthed by contemporary natural theology. The kalam cosmological argument—an argument developed by some Christian philosophers building on the kalam tradition of medieval Muslim philosophy— actually turns the tables against the atheist. This argument proves, simply put, that everything has a cause, that there must have been a first cause, and that this first cause was itself uncaused. When properly contextualized against recent discoveries in cosmology the kalam cosmological argument makes, as William Lane Craig and James D. Sinclair have shown, a staggering conclusion: “the universe was brought into existence by a transcendent reality” (Craig and Sinclair 2009, 190; see also Moreland and Craig 2003). Such a position is even allowed by one of the arch-atheists Richard Dawkins: writing in The God Delusion he does not dispute the premises of the cosmological argument—that there must have been an uncaused cause to the existence of the universe— but only attempts to explain away the conclusion by arguing that there is no reason to believe that such a transcendent reality necessarily has the “properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts” (Dawkins 2006, 77–8). The kalam cosmological argument—which has never offered the Christian God or that of any other specific religion as a premise or a conclusion—is only one of the arguments enjoying a surge of interest in contemporary apologetics, but strong enough proof in itself to make God’s nonexistence questionable. It is easy to admit to Kurtz’s second premise: not everyone in the world shares the same religious beliefs. There are differences, even contradictions between the values held by different religions. There are discrepancies even within religions: look at the history of the creeds of Christianity, for instance. This is another cunning argument, because it will never go away: can you imagine a world where all the different cultures believed exactly the same? Neither can I, but the fact that the peoples of the world will continue to believe differently does not apostatize conscience: that there is, above all religious difference and sectarian strife, a shared corpus of understandings all the peoples of the world acknowledge in one way or another. The key here is that we humans have the ability to compare moral ideas, and [w]hen you think about these differences between the morality of one people and another, do you think that the morality of one people is

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ever better or worse than that of another? Have any of the changes been improvements? If not, then of course there could never be any moral progress. Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. (Lewis 1944, 13) The moment we compare moral ideas we measure them by a standard. How is it possible for Kurtz to talk about the “drama of moral progress” in the absence of a standard of measurement: without admitting that there is, as Lewis writes, “such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others” (Lewis 1944, 13)? How is it possible for Harris to write in his The Moral Landscape that “[d]espite our perennial bad behaviour, our moral progress seems to me unmistakable,” and that “[t]oday, we are surely more likely to act for the benefit of humanity as a whole than at any point in the past” (Harris 2010, 177)? When something is identified as making progress in colloquial language, there is a goal that certain something is getting nearer to. “Change, aimless change,” writes Clark, “that does not proceed in a determinate direction, cannot be called progress; and a determinate direction exists only in virtue of the end or goal that sets the direction” (Clark 1981, 51). The denial of a goal—say: that there exists a true humanity independent of what our “moral landscape” may look like—empties the word progress of all meaning. If we look at the history of legal humanitarianism, take the Magna Carta and compare it to what is said in the UDHR and elaborated in the MD, do we see progress made in the cause of human rights over the centuries? If we do, then we tap into true meaning: what we mean when we call upon human dignity. There will always be differences in the way we articulate this idea or whether we choose to articulate it in the first place, but at the end of the day there will always be common ground for those who look for it. Differences in belief do not vindicate nontheism. If we understand moral absolutes in terms of the divine command theory—that is moral obligation is founded on the will of God—we can appropriately include the idea that God may have, providing moral guidance in the historical development of human thought and culture, simply guided different people in different directions (see e.g. Adams 1999, 371). Alister E. McGrath discusses this issue in depth in his quest for a A Scientific Theology.10 He agrees with MacIntyre’s rejection of the idea of

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universal rationality underlying Enlightenment,11 and accepts that the world of reason is divided between competing tradition-mediated rationalities: “[t]hey may have pretensions to universality; nevertheless, the historical fact remains that they are specific to traditions” (McGrath 2004, 110). But—and this is a crucial but for McGrath’s theological ethics— rationality, even though it is always particular to a tradition, can offer a universal perspective on things despite not being universally accepted. For McGrath, the Christian doctrine of creation—that human beings have been created in imagine dei—is such a “meta-tradition”: While the Christian doctrine of creation, and particularly its understanding of human nature, is specific to the Christian tradition, the implications of this doctrine are such that the Christian tradition is able to explicate and predict both the existence of quests for beauty, truth and goodness in other traditions, as well as offer some hints as to the forms those might take. (McGrath 2006b, 96) For McGrath, the possibility of truth is founded on not merely the existence of God, but the existence of Christian God. Natural theology specific to the Christian tradition can claim universal, that is trans-traditional rationality, because “the story which it relates offers an ultimate and coherent organizing logic which accounts for its own existence, as well as that of its rivals” (McGrath 2004, 114). Christians believe that God of the Bible exists; that he created the world and humanity, and has not left us “without witness” (Acts 14.17, ESV) of his existence and works; and that these claims are true and warranted (McGrath 2004, 108–16). The fact that we have a document like the MD refutes Kurtz’s third point: that granting the fatherhood of God does not guarantee that universal morality emerges. An absolute moral obligation is, as Norman L. Geisler explains, “one that is binding on all persons at all times in all places” (Geisler 1999, 501). Let us read the MD further: We reaffirm our commitment to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, which have proved timeless and universal. Indeed, their relevance and capacity to inspire have increased, as nations and peoples have become increasingly interconnected and interdependent. (MD, 3) What we have here is a swear of allegiance, made by the heads of State and Government of our world in the millennial year of 2000, to moral

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absolutes in world politics. Universal morality has already emerged and the MD is just one of the places where it speaks for itself today. It is crucially important to understand that what Kurtz attempts to do here: to eliminate the middle ground by presenting us a false dichotomy. In order to have moral absolutes one does not have to grant fatherhood to God. The moral argument is not that belief in God’s existence is necessary for absolute moral obligation, but that God is necessary for the objective reality of moral values and duties. The conviction about the sacredness of every human being is embedded in a religious cosmology (Perry 1998, 16). It is, of course, possible to subscribe to true meaning and deny God. This is what secular humanism is mostly about: man is made the measure of his own spiritual life, his art and philosophy, his science and politics, his social and personal morality. Secular humanism often associates with unbelief, even atheism, but Paul Tillich teaches that such a worldview is not antithetical to theism. If faith is understood as quotation “the state of being ultimately concerned about the ultimate,” humanism implies faith (Tillich 2001, 72). For the humanist the divine is manifest in the human: the ultimate concern of human is the being him- or herself. What is being referred to here, Tillich explains, is “man” in his essence: “the true man, the man of the idea, not the actual man, nor the man in estrangement from his true nature” (ibid.). When the humanist identifies the human being as their ultimate concern, they see the being as the ultimate finite reality, where sacramental faith sees its religious symbolism. The difference is that religion transcends the limits of humanity and tries to reach the ultimate itself beyond the being and the world it lives in, while the humanist remains within these limits. Even though modern humanism likes to ground itself on rational terms it rests, Tillich argues, on a Christian foundation of moral absolutes: The faith of the fighters for enlightenment since the eighteenth century is humanist faith of the moral type. They fought for freedom from sacramentally consecrated bondage and for justice for every human being. Their faith was humanist faith, expressing itself in secular more than in religious terms. It was faith and not rational calculation, although they believed in the superior power of a reason united with justice and truth. The dynamics of their humanist faith changed the face of the earth, first in the West, then also in the East. It is this humanist faith of the moral type which was taken over by the revolutionary movement of the proletarian masses in the nineteenth and twentieth

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centuries. Its dynamic is visible every day in our present period. As for every faith, the utopian form of the humanist faith is a state of ultimate concern. This gives it its tremendous power for good and evil. (Tillich 2001, 78–9) If you make humanity an ultimate concern it does not really matter whether you stand inside or outside the temple: when you allow something to make unconditional demands upon you, you are in a state of faith. The fact that humanism often identifies itself “secular” does not exclude it from the community of the faithful, but rather signals inability or unwillingness to locate a metaethical foundation for its worldview: to come out embedded in a religious cosmology (Tillich 2001, 72–3). Neither does the moral argument argue that God is necessary for the leaders’ knowledge of moral values and duties: a theist’s moral epistemology—that is the voice of their conscience—need not differ broadly from that of a nontheist. Adams is absolutely correct in writing that one does not need to believe in God or to adhere to any traditional religion to “hold conscience sacred in the relevant sense” (Adams 1999, 337). Adherents of a wide variety of worldviews agree in theory and fact that “conscience claims and deserves respect of a higher order than most other interests do” (ibid.). We can assume that among the signatories of the MD there are atheists, who, having appealed to their moral intuition, see the good and the right in committing to the timeless and universal moral principles outlined in the document. This is in fact what the Bible teaches: that God’s moral law has been written on the hearts of the Gentiles “while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them” (Rom. 2.14-5, ESV). Having cited Scripture it needs to be said that the moral argument does not commit to a god of any specific religion (Craig 2008, 175–6). Moral intuition is not a Christian system of value, something we can only learn by studying the Bible, and neither does it derive from any other world religion or sacred text. What we have here is rather something that C. S. Lewis conveniently calls the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or The First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, [which] is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. (Lewis 1944, 43)

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Though Lewis was a theist and an orthodox Christian at that, speaking on behalf of the Tao need not be an indirect argument for Christianity. What he (and the moral argument as a whole) is simply arguing is that if we want to have values at all we must accept that there exists, reflected by our conscience, principles of true meaning—a “belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are” (Lewis 1944, 18)—that have authority over all other values. According to Lewis there has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world: every new system of value, “ideology,” is in fact made up of fragments of the Tao. What either stands or falls with absolute moral values, with the Tao, is none of the world’s religions or ideologies, but—and this is a point Lewis forcefully makes in The Abolition of Man—the future of the human being: moral relativism is a threat to the existence of Lewis’ “Man.” This is an argument I will now briefly contextualize. If we settle on anything less than true meaning, take on all of the Tao, what we end up doing is cherry-picking: committing ourselves, on impulse, to whatever reason we find practical from the Platitudes, speaking in the voice of the one most suitable for our political contingency. The morality selected in such manner—this is how we always come up with relative meaning, remember that?—derives its authority from the Tao, of course, but the problem with accepting only bits of it is that there will always be chunks of Tao rejected. This move is often legitimated in the name of innovation: to overcome emotional, political, or religious ideals, often identified as “prejudices” or some such pejorative, of a time gone by, not of this world, and to make way for something “rational,” “realistic,” or whatever it may be. Take the judgment society ought to be preserved as an example. Accepting this as one of the moral absolutes is clearly common sense, but if we accept it as the only more there is, we end up in a situation not unlike we have ended up in contemporary world politics. Even though our leaders have separate responsibilities to the societies they represent and a collective responsibility for global humanity, it is indeed the individual societies that will be preserved first and foremost: human dignity, equality, and equity beyond preservation continue to live bare life. Again: having a duty to your own kind is part of any traditional morality. But, as Lewis explains, “side by side with it in the Tao, and limiting it, lie the inflexible demands of justice, and the rule that, in the long run, all men are our brothers” (Lewis 1944, 43). For Lewis, Man is no mere abstraction. As long as Man remains within the Tao, he participates in the concrete

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reality of being human: “the real common will and common reason of humanity, alive, growing like a tree, and branching out, as the situation varies, into ever new beauties and dignities of application” (Lewis 1944, 75). As long as Man speaks from within the Tao he has power over his being, like an individual has self-control. “But the moment we step outside,” Lewis argues, “and regard the Tao as a mere subjective product, this possibility has disappeared” (ibid.). To rebel against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: “[t]he human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour” (ibid., 44). The authority of the Principles is that of the Tao, but the question is this: whence comes the authority to pick and choose the First ones among them? Lewis doubts “whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently” (ibid., 66). Even though what Lewis refers to as the Tao does not mean Christianity per se, Jean-Luc Nancy hits the nail on the head with his argument that Christianity seems to be especially present where it is no longer possible to recognize it. Its decorate symbolism may have been drained of its peculiarly Christian meaning long ago, “[y]et a certain conception of ‘human rights’, as well as a certain determination of the relationship between politics and religion, comes straight out of Christianity” (Nancy 2008, 384). Democratic ethic and human solidarity is what Nancy calls the “durable sediment of Christianity” (ibid., 387). The UDHR proclaims a spirit of brotherhood “without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” (Art. 2). Jackson too acknowledges that this understanding of human rights is heavily in debt to Christian religion: “it is clear that humanitarian responsibility can readily be understood as the secular version of Christian caritas” (Jackson 2000, 175, emphasis in original). If this conception is taken into its logical conclusion, humanitarian responsibility upheld in fact, we will get a world society where states lose their normative standing and are reduced to being merely instrumentalities for protecting human rights and providing for human welfare on a cosmopolitan (world-wide) scale. States are political machinery, utilitarian arrangements. States are no longer political communities in their own right; national societies have no significant moral status, and citizenship has no pre-emptive rights and duties attached to it. (Jackson 2000, 175, emphasis in original)

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Alexander Wendt (2003) predicts that such a conclusion is a teleological inevitability. One of the key premises in his argument is that the peoples of the world will eventually be emancipated from the ultimate concern of pro patria. In a Hobbesian system of states, Wendt reasons, personal sacrifice in, say, a war makes sense, because individuals are not recognized as subjects beyond their citizenship. As individuals become increasingly recognized as subjects of humanity, it becomes less clear how sacrifice on behalf of the state meets their individual needs. “Individuals do not like dying in war,” Wendt argues, and “[o]ver time we can expect individuals to make those needs apparent to their leaders, inducing the latter toward growing caution in the use of force as a tool for diplomacy, particularly as the costs of war rise” (Wendt 2003, 519). Driven by the struggle of individuals and collectives for recognition of their subjectivity, the pluriverse of sovereign states will eventually be superseded by a universal corpus mysticum, where individual recognition will no longer be mediated by states: “Individuals and states alike will have lost the negative freedom to engage in unilateral violence, but gained the positive freedom of fully recognised subjectivity. The system will have become itself an ‘individual’” (Wendt 2003, 525). Wendt’s argument hangs on two presuppositions, both of which are critical to his teleology. On the one hand it is fully conceivable that group identities will, given time, dislocate from their Westphalian references, something that IR has expected for a while already, paving way for broader, post-national categories of group identity (e.g. “Europeanness”) and, at the end of the day, global political entity, a “cosmo-polity” if you like. If there is something that the twentieth century has taught us it is that “the nation” is not an ultimate concern properly so called. When we look at the rise and fall of all the “great” nations of the last century, we must conclude that they have proved just as preliminary and transitory as all other human concerns. “The reaction of despair in people who have experienced the breakdown of their national claims is an irrefutable proof of the idolatrous character of their national concern,” Tillich teaches, “[i]n the long run this is the inescapable result of an ultimate concern, the subject matter of which is not ultimate” (Tillich 2001, 20). Emancipation from nationalism is an ongoing process, yes, but one with recurring setbacks of indeterminable duration. If there is a historical “megatrend” here toward a world society—where there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, no male and female, but all are one—then the signals are weak indeed. And if indeed we are to arrive at our destination one day, a question remains: will a universal human society fare any

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better morally? An answer to this question depends on what “we” will do with our “positive freedom of fully recognised subjectivity.” When we no longer depend on the moral order imposed on us by national states—if we ever fully depended on them—we are, I assume, in a better position to make individual moral choices. The question no longer is whether or not, say, Finland does a good or a bad job mediating morality, but what we all do with our freedom and subjectivity. Boldly assuming we will use it to pursue excellence and do good things, the question is will that be good enough? No: actually the question is will we ever be good enough? The second presupposition Wendt makes concerns the power of democracy over war. Wendt seems to argue that over time the likelihood of war will decrease as people do not like to get killed and the material costs of war rise. My only objection to this is that people have never wanted wars and they have always been too costly, but thus far these facts have done very little toward preventing wars from happening. Quite the contrary: since the democratic revolutions history has been one of warfare of increasing frequency, intensifying violence and escalating destruction. It is simply naive to assume that a democracy would give up its monopoly of legitimate violence simply because the people so wished. The problem with Wendt’s teleology is not the telos: I can not see much of an improvement in alleviating (never mind eliminating) poverty in our world in the short-to-medium term without some kind of cosmopolitan arrangement. The problem is, as Wendt recognizes, that for the time being states remain to mediate recognition of our subjectivity: “[t]he problem of war means that individual recognition must be external as well as internal, which requires breaking down its mediation by state boundaries” (Wendt 2003, 519). The MD barely gives us hope of such a development. No: it rededicates “to support all efforts to uphold the sovereign equality of all states” and to “respect for their territorial integrity and political independence” (MD, 4). Though it is us, “We the Peoples of the United Nations,” who share the authorship of the covenant of the Charter, our political subjectivity is mediated by the state: it is the political institution standing between me and you, and the political subject of humanity. This is a suzerainty treaty not unlike the one God had with Israel: the old covenant that was given to Abraham and the law mediated by Moses, and after him the task was reverted to lesser teachers and prophets. In the pre-messianic political imaginary God was not one with his people, because he needed a mediator, his covenant an administration. It was the prophet Jeremiah who foretold that under the new covenant “no longer shall each one teach

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his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest” (Jer. 31.34, ESV). It was the role of the mediator that Paul wanted to abolish with his theology. As long as there were intermediaries in the covenantal relationship, God was not one with his people: “Now an intermediary implies more than one, but God is one” (Gal. 3.20, ESV). When the new covenant came in the messianic person of Jesus Christ, salvation was dislocated from the promise made exclusively to Israel on earth and in the sphere of the law. This is how Jeremiah’s vision was consummated and unity with God and his people achieved (Bornkamm 2005, 141–6; Robertson 1980, 290–300). It appears that—for the time being at least—unity is not with humanity, which remains a political object mediated by the representatives of We the Peoples of the United Nations.

3.4 Development and Guilt Reading the rest of the MD reveals and details its goals: peace, security and disarmament; eradication of poverty; protection of the environment; human rights, democracy and good governance; and so on. These are mostly technicalities that outline in some detail the stipulations of articles one to three. The important question that derive from the stipulations we must now answer is this: how is it that our leaders collectively accept the massive responsibility of maintaining the principles of human dignity, equality, and equity among all the world’s people? When genuinely motivated by preferences of higher order such as human dignity, equality, and equity, one exhibits what Adams simply describes “love of goodness”: [If] the conception of the good around which your motives are organized in these ways is that of an ideal or standard that transcends the value of the finite goods you experience, then we can even say that your organizing, integrative principle is love for the transcendent Good, and for God if God is that Good. (Adams 1999, 191) Our leaders know that their effort toward a more peaceful, prosperous, and just world is right and good because this is what their conscience tells them, that is what God reveals in them. This is the ethical foundation of humanitarian responsibility, simply because there can be no

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other—whether or not there will be a world state one day is irrelevant: the mere existence of a right thing to do is enough for my syllogism. Whether one makes an explicit identification between Good and God depends on the degree to which their worldview is theistic. When we think about Good as “an integrational motivational system” it is hardly important whether or not we our love of God is of implicit or explicit variety: “If it is love of God, the real God, and not our for our idea of God, that is in question, the theistic conceptualisation may be less important than how faithfully the finite things we are disposed to love image of God” (Adams 1999, 191). If we read the MD as it is written, if it is indeed true meaning that the leaders of the world subscribe to in MD 2, we can accept this as no less than evidence of the existence of God. This is quite a claim to make in IR literature, I well understand, but can there be an ulterior motive behind taking on such a responsibility: committing not only one’s person, but the collective effort of the nation one represents to maintain ideals of humanity no-one directly represents at least in the democratic sense of the term? I can not think of one. This argument I make with the premise that our leaders are bona fide in declaring true meaning to human life. What this testifies to is a working conscience on their behalf. Whether or not our leaders are really motivated by love of the Good in defending human dignity, equality, and equity is another matter. There is a gap here—between promises made and those made good—but it is not between the imago dei of man and our conscience, but between our conscience and some men: heads of State and Government have a poor record in bearing the burden of all those responsibilities they valiantly accept. Adams argues that moral obligation can not be understood apart from its relation to guilt. Here the term “guilt” is not a name for a subjective feeling, but of “an objective moral condition which may rightly be recognized by others even if it is not recognized by the guilty person” (Adams 1999, 238). “With guilt,” writes Ricoeur, “‘conscience’ is born; a responsible agent appears, to face the prophetic call and its demand for holiness” (Ricoeur 1969, 143). Typically a relation stained by guilt involves a degree of alienation from the one who required or expected the other to do what they were obligated to do, and failed. Reading the annual progress reports the UN has published on the MDGs since 2005 you will find a narrative of increasing diplomatic frustration: leaders often falling short in delivering what they have promised, time and again failing to carry out their collective responsibilities,

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individual heads of State and Government nearly always out of harmony with the rest of the “international community.” To the collective moral failure of its members the UN replies with a discourse of guilt. In the foreword to the first progress report Secretary-General Kofi Annan notes that while there has been progress in achievement of some goals, “if current trends persist, there is a risk that many of the poorest countries will not be able to meet many of them” (The United Nations 2005, 3). In the 2006 report Under-Secretary-General José Antonio Ocampo reports that “some progress has been made,” but “there is still a long way to go to keep our promises to current and future generations” (The United Nations 2006, 3, emphasis in original). In his first foreword the SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-moon identifies “a clear need for political leaders to take urgent and concerted action, or many millions of people will not realize the basic promises of the MDGs in their lives” (The United Nations 2007, 3). He demands that all “stakeholders” invest adequate resources to development assistance and meet the commitments of the MD—“[y]et, these promises remain to be fulfilled” (ibid.). In the 2008 report the SecretaryGeneral again laments broken promises: Time has been lost. We have wasted opportunities and face additional challenges, making the task ahead more difficult. It is now our responsibility to make up lost ground—and to put all countries, together, firmly on track towards a more prosperous, sustainable and equitable world. (The United Nations 2008, 3) The 2009 report opens with more lamentation and closes in Ban Ki-moon’s dramatic plea: The global community cannot turn its back on the poor and the vulnerable. We must strengthen global cooperation and solidarity, and redouble our efforts to reach the MDGs and advance the broader development agenda. Nothing less than the viability of our planet and the future of humanity are at stake. I urge policymakers and all stakeholders to heed the message of this valuable and timely report. (The United Nations 2009, 3) The way things are going the “children of the world” are in for a disappointment in 2015. It seems unlikely that the leaders can deliver “universally accepted human values and rights such as freedom from hunger, the right to basic education, the right to health and a responsibility to

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future generations” in the next few years or so, if indeed ever after (The United Nations 2008, 3). What happens, then, to the duty to all the world’s people? Even if we were never realized human dignity for all in this world, why must we insist on true meaning of being human? We need that meaning to remind our leaders about what is at stake when they gather at the UN’s headquarters, or whereever it may be, to talk about their responsibilities and bearing of their burden. The reason why the MDGs will not deliver us all of their promises is that while they submit to the authority of true meaning, they do this by empowering the international status quo. The contemporary notions of development and human rights are structured around the need to security—this is Kofi Annan’s legacy in the MDGs. In Annan’s world of “larger freedom” [n]ot only are development, security and human rights all imperative; they also reinforce each other. This relationship has only been strengthened in our era of rapid technological advances, increasing economic interdependence, globalization and dramatic geopolitical change. While poverty and denial of human rights may not be said to “cause” civil war, terrorism or organized crime, they all greatly increase the risk of instability and violence. Similarly, war and atrocities are far from the only reasons that countries are trapped in poverty, but they undoubtedly set back development. Again, catastrophic terrorism on one side of the globe, for example an attack against a major financial centre in a rich country, could affect the development prospects of millions on the other by causing a major economic downturn and plunging millions into poverty. And countries which are well governed and respect the human rights of their citizens are better placed to avoid the horrors of conflict and to overcome obstacles to development. (Annan 2005, 5–6) According to Annan there will not be development without security, security without development, and neither without respect for human rights: “[u]nless all these causes are advanced, none will succeed” (Annan 2005, 6). In a globalized world threats are interconnected: “[t]he rich are vulnerable to the threats that attack the poor and the strong are vulnerable to the weak, as well as vice versa” (ibid., 25). This is also the macro-level dynamic in Wendt’s teleological prediction of world state. Enjoying security in a well-governed territory is never enough, because they are not stable in the long run: “[t]hey may be local

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equilibria, but they inhabit a system that is in disequilibrium” (Wendt 2003, 507). This complementarity between development and international security—having been repeated over and over in countless international agreements, national policy papers, and academic accounts since the end of the Cold War—now qualifies as “an accepted truth of our time” (Duffield 2007, 1). But, make no mistake, the security spoken of here is not of the countries lacking it in the first instance, no, but that of the “well governed.” States want security and they make progress toward this end by means of development. Is there a problem here? Even though it was that separate responsibility to one’s individual society that our heads of state and government allocated their resource to about 99 percent of the time, what is the good and the right thing to do may well have nothing to do with this particular obligation. Of course: we have to be able to make the judgment according to which society must be preserved among the first things and to act accordingly. But, at the same time, we must negotiate this instinct with something else we already know: that the best interest of our own society is not the object to which all other things ought to yield. An other accepted truth of our time is the one according to which development is achievable only in conditions of “freedom,” that is governed under the political form of liberal democracy. According to the MD Men and women have the right to live their lives and raise their children in dignity, free from hunger and from the fear of violence, oppression or injustice. Democratic and participatory governance based on the will of the people best assures these rights. (MD, 6) While it is easy to agree with the leaders say, there is something crucially important to remember while so doing. Democratic governance—not even to mention other forms of governance we find in the world today— can not give us moral absolutes. No political form of society, no institution made by man, can revise the Tao. Quite the contrary: societies, majorities can get it wrong and liberal democracies can do despicable things to people, you really do not have to look for examples to prove this once and for all. Democracy can reflect what is right, good, and sacred in society—this is just what a properly working democracy is supposed to do—but it is only a vessel, not the fountain of moral judgment. Likewise states in the world political: they are not ends in themselves, but means to achieve something beyond or indeed above themselves. I believe that confusion on this hierarchy of priorities is not only at the

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root of contemporary problems of development, but also some of the most pressing and persistent problems of world politics. *

*

*

William E. Connolly writes that every culture seems to contain things that are both indispensable to it and inherently problematic within it“[t]he pressure of their indispensability works to conceal their problematic character” (Connolly 1991, 3). When this indispensability becomes, for some reason, increasingly problematic and, sometimes as a result of ever increasing problematization, is compromised or lost; people begin to wonder how did they ever entertain “such superstitious or absurd ideas” (ibid.) in the first place. The UN will never have a meaningful political role to play in it as long as its members collectively hold “indispensable” the mediator of the state. Our leaders open the MD by reaffirming faith in the UN and its Charter “as indispensable foundations of a more peaceful, prosperous and just world.” When development is mediated by a minority of its richest, most powerful and selfish members of international society, it looks exactly like the development we have today. States will never be able to solve the problem of global poverty and humanity without dignity as long as they are implicit in the problem of inequality; when they hold the biopolitical line between the bare life and the insured life (Duffield 2007, 19–24). Our leaders may owe a duty to the children of the world, to whom the future belongs, but only a fortunate minority of them will be in a position to claim anything. We have built as high as we could on these foundations. And no: we do not have an excuse, have not had one in a long long time. Implicated in all the persistent problems of the world political is the discrepancy between human conscience and international relations, and we have known this all along. The paradoxes seemed irreconcilable in the 1930s when Niebuhr wrote his Moral Man and Immoral Society. The weakness in the moral lives of people is raised to the nth degree in the moral “lives” of states: “[n]ations will always find it more difficult than individuals to behold the beam that is in their own eye while they observe the mote that is in their brother’s eye; and individuals find it difficult enough” (Niebuhr 1960, 107). Reading Niebuhr’s classic today many of the problems discussed there are mostly of historical interest. Having said that we must confess that, meanwhile, we have not been able to solve its conundrum regarding the “morality of nations”: the gap between human conscience and reason of state has become, if anything, wider. We have just become better and better at

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ignoring all the glaring inconsistencies between ethics and politics the world today exhibits. It might be time to accept that the UN has members that are no longer peace-loving—if indeed they ever were—and that its vision of humanitarianism, founded as it is on the territorial integrity and political independence of all of its members, is no longer in business. In a world where states rule over men only the Tao provides a common human law of action applicable to rulers and ruled alike: “[a] dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery” (Lewis 1944, 73). We need true meaning, because humanity must be defended.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

For a classic volume on millennial movements in European history see Norman Cohn’s (1961) The Pursuit of the Millennium. Jacob Taubes’ (2009) Occidental Eschatology is an excellent piece of scholarship on the history and philosophical significance of Judeo-Christian eschatology. In this sense they are not unlike the promises God has made to his people: they do not fall to pieces along historical circumstances, but can change shape without losing (at least) an aura of inevitable certainty (see e.g. Moltmann 2002, 89–93). A good review of the history of this tradition can be found in Golding (2004, ch. 1). Kelsen argues that belief in an existence of a reality independent human knowledge implies political absolutism. Gordon H. Clark takes on Kelsen’s argument and in fact concludes the contrary: that “absolute values of political liberty and the unchanging truth of human depravity furnish far more stable opposition to totalitarianism than the position that what is right today may be wrong tomorrow” (Clark 1981, 147). Alasdair MacIntyre reminds us that the idea of human beings having rights does not appear until the close of the Middle Ages. From this it does not follow that no human rights existed before that time: what only follows is that no one could have known about them then. For MacIntyre human rights are fictions and “belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns” (MacIntyre 2007, 69). With this it does appear he denies the human being a meaning prior to and without a particular cultural tradition. Without a cultural tradition we are mere biological nature, and “man who has nothing but biological nature is a creature of whom we know nothing” (ibid., 161). I well acknowledge these are somewhat controversial metaethical claims. Robert Merrihew Adams’ (1999, 241–8) extensive discussion on the social requirement of moral obligations in his brilliant Finite and Infinite Goods helped me to overcome many of the doubts I had in my mind over the notions of premoral and universal obligation.

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Geisler makes of Kant’s notion of conscience a transcendental foundation for human moral behavior. According to Geisler’s reading of Kant “it is absolutely necessary to posit moral duties as categorical and universal in order to live moral lives” and “universal moral law, not what is simply socially or personally desirable, is rationally necessary to posit for life” (Geisler 1989, 83). Perry distinguishes two rhetorical types of the term sacred used in metaethical literature: either in the weak subjective sense—sacred to you or me—and the strong objective sense: how things really are whether we hold them sacred or not (see Perry 1998, 25–9). In contemporary discourse “humanism” is often outspoken as a nontheistic worldview. In his The Theological Origins of Modernity Michael Allen Gillespie argues that the “original,” post-Petrarchian humanists were not against religion or Christianity, but “thought that these different elements could be reconciled with one another and thus did not believe they had to choose between Athens and Jerusalem or between the city of God and the city of the pagans” (Gillespie 2008, 76). This is McGrath’s systematic theology and it consists of three volumes accounting for Nature (2006a), Reality (2006b), and Theory (2006c). For MacIntyre’s comprehensive critique of the inconsistencies and failures of Enlightenment as a project see Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (MacIntyre 1998).

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Chapter 4

Conclusion: States and Death

Carl Schmitt never stopped admiring the state. From the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, this is what he wrote in The Nomos of the Earth, the state had served as the “agency of a new, interstate, eurocentric spatial order of the earth” (Schmitt 2003, 140). This new nomos had “made possible a common, non-religious and non-feudal international law among states that lasted 300 years” (ibid.). The rationale of the state, Schmitt argued, was in its becoming a hub for the de-theologization of public life and neutralization creedal conflict in both domestic and foreign policy. In other words: the supra-territorial religious loyalties of the (so-called) Wars of Religion were resolved by dividing political loyalties among territorial states. The interstate nomos of the jus publicum Europaeum overcame the conflicts between religious factions by bracketing, that is “rationalizing and humanizing” the fare of war. The state, Schmitt hailed, was the greatest achievement of Western civilization because, as the political subject of secularization, it ended the religious civil wars of the Christian Middle Ages by limiting war to a conflict between territorial sovereigns: “[t]his made possible the overcoming the creedal disputes which, in the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, had justified the worst atrocities” (ibid., 141). When supra-territorial religious conflicts were de-theologized by the state, the meaning of war changed from an unlimited atrocity into something resembling a formal political procedure between territorial defined public persons—Schmitt uses the Latin phrase personae publicae—living on common European soil and belonging to the same European “family” of nations. Key in this solution to sectarian warfare was to think of war as a duel between territorially distinct public persons. Compared to “the brutality of religious and factional wars, which by nature are wars of annihilation wherein the enemy is treated as a criminal and a pirate” the war-in-form of the jus publicum Europaeum achieved the apex in rationalization and humanization of war (ibid.). “Both belligerents had the same political character and

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the same rights; both recognized each other as states,” Schmitt reasoned, “[a]s a result, it was possible to distinguish an enemy from a criminal” (Schmitt 2003, 141–2). The state was an instrument of peace inasmuch it succeeded in “bracketing” war: “[a]ll definitions that glorify the state [. . .] hark back to this great accomplishment, whether or not they later were misused and now appear to have been displaced” (ibid.). Narrating the history of European international law Schmitt argues that the decisive step toward the modern state and the interstate nomos of the jus publicum Europaeum was taken when “these new, contiguous, and contained power complexes” were represented as persons: when states became the magni homines they already were—we discussed the theologico-political context of how this came to be in the second chapter. States were juridically conceived as the new legal subjects of a new international law: a unified, self-contained area of European soil that became recognized as a magnum homo [great man]; only now it was in form a legal subject and a sovereign “person”. Only with the clear definition and division of territorial states was a balanced spatial order, based on the coexistence of sovereign persons, possible. (Schmitt 2003, 145) The “international personal analogy” of the state was, for, Schmitt, “a marvelous product of human reason” and in itself a sufficient juridical explanation to the “astounding fact” that after “the merciless blood-letting of religious civil wars [. . .] there were no wars of destruction on European soil for two hundred years” (Schmitt 2003, 151). Schmitt’s analysis of contemporary international order—which he began to formulate in the late 1930s and laid out in full in the postwar Der Nomos der Erde—is very compelling, firmly grounded in international history and development of legal thought, and one that addresses many of the issues of contemporary world politics in an interesting way. It certainly is an excellent piece of scholarship and there is no other book quite like The Nomos. Having said that I want to point out some issues I have with the book and Schmitt’s political thought in general. The problem is that he subscribes to the historical narrative according to which the modern secular state is founded on the need to keep peace between contentious religious factions. Read the previous few paragraphs and see how Schmitt prescribes the state as the political antidote to religious civil war. Schmitt’s states are “spatially self-contained, impermeable, unburdened with the problem of estate, ecclesiastical, and creedal civil wars”

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(Schmitt 2003, 128). We have already discussed how the states, emerging from the ruins of the respublica Christiana, conceptualized religion a phenomenon essentially distinct from political power, making it compatible with the modern Christian’s subjection to the discipline of the state. The “soteriology of the state” demands that temporal sovereign authority is absolutely alone and without rival and this is a doctrine of salvation incompatible with the political universalism of Christianity. Reading Schmitt here (and elsewhere) one can not but get the impression that “before the ‘birth’ of the body politic of the modern state world was one of violence perpetrated primarily by the church,” that is the body of Christ. The secular state, as it were, did a tremendous service to the cause of peace by intervening to save humanity from Christianity. This can not be right. And it is not. I am not contesting the fact of sectarian violence during the Reformation—OK: there were people that may even have killed and some died over what Christ’s presence in bread means exactly—but the ultimate reason why the state was conceived is not to be found in theology. There were other issues at stake and what we may identify religious violence now served temporal purposes, interests material or purely political, most of the time back then. I agree with Cavanaugh according to whom the policy of cuius regio, eius religio was more than just a compromise between people apparently divided by different creeds of Christianity, but in fact “a recognition of the dominance of secular rulers over the Church, to the extent that the faith of a people was controlled by and large by the desires of the prince” (Cavanaugh 2002, 26). The narrative of the Wars of Religion is historically and theologically a false one and even if there were Wars of Religion true to its name—even if all the blood was shed over terms of biblical exegesis and the state emerged as the savior of humankind from religious civil war—what relevance would this have to us, today? Is curbing religious civil war still the telos of the state and the interstate order? Acknowledging the fact that there might well be particular exceptions, I am relatively certain about this: if states disappeared today the world would not collapse into religious civil war by tomorrow. But: if states disappeared today maybe a religious civil war would not immediately follow, there would chaos, violence, and all sorts of material misfortune and kinds of human suffering—yes? This is the soteriology on which the state relies upon: the body politic of the state is the peacekeeper, the last “man” standing between us and the state of nature. “As in Christian soteriology,” writes Cavanaugh, “salvation from the violence of conflicting individuals comes through the enacting of a social

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body” (Cavanaugh 2002, 19). Leviathan is the new(est) Adam, “this one of human creation, which saves us from each other” (ibid., 19–20). The function of this myth is to avert all attention from the ineluctable fact that the transfer of political authority and ultimate loyalty to the national state—an event tracked back to the symbol of the Peace of Westphalia, but reified every single day in the myriad of ways states intervene in our lives—has, historically speaking, only contributed to increase the scale and intensity of political violence against the human being. There is nothing new about this: questioning the peacekeeper myth and the benevolence of the state as a political institution. History of political thought is rife with all kinds of criticism of state sovereignty and other historical forms and doctrines of centralized political authority. An outstanding example of such literature and one that especially addresses the conditions brought about the modern national state is A Vindication of Natural Society first published in 1756. The book was written by Edmund Burke, better known today as the author of Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and the “father” on modern conservatism. A Vindication, however, is anything but a conservative text. Burke begins with the premise that mankind’s every attempt at political society to improve its condition has, “from the beginning of the world to this day [. . .] only served to introduce new mischiefs, or to aggravate and inflame the old” (Burke 1803, 10). He admits that the state of nature is an “inconvenience,” but conceiving the “body politick” as solution is human political imagination running wild: “It finds out imaginary beings prescribing imaginary laws; and then, it raises imaginary terrours to support a belief in the beings, and an obedience to the laws” (ibid., 11). Burke argues that political society—state as we know it today—has given the human impulse the ultimate instrument to exercise its impulse to do evil. The history of international relations, or relations between the different “nations” of the world before there were states properly so called, is one of hostility: “the only actions, to which we have always seen, and still see all of them intent, are such as tend to the destruction of one another” (ibid., 16–17). Burke goes on: The first accounts we have of mankind are but to many accounts of their butcheries. All empires have been cemented in blood; and in those early periods when the race of mankind began first to form themselves into parties and combinations, the first effect of the combination, and indeed the end for which it seems purposely formed, and best calculated, is their mutual destruction. (Burke 1803, 17)

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From here he continues with a rough calculation of casualties of war from the beginning of the known history up to his day—“a naked and moderate calculation, just enough, without pedantical exactness, to give [. . .] some feeling of the effects of political society”—and comes up with a number of around 36 million lives lost. Of this “destruction of the species,” Burke argues, political society is to blame: “it is a perpetual force in itself of hatred and dissension” (Burke 1803, 29). The root of the problem is the fact that, instead of seeing the essential unity of the human condition, the peoples of the world have been politically divided between “artificial” societies: There is something so averse from our nature in these artificial political distinctions, that we need no other trumpet to kindle us to war, and destruction. But there is something so benign and healing in the general voice of humanity, that maugre all our regulations to prevent it, the simple name of man applied properly, never fails to work a salutary effect. (Burke 1803, 33) Burke argues, in effect, that the artificial society of the state constrains the human mind from seeing its natural condition: its moral obligation to all the world’s people. But, he rejoices, providence has implanted in us “ideas, axioms, rules, of what is pious, just, fair, honest, which no political craft, nor learned sophistry, can entirely expel from our breasts” (Burke 1803, 36). What Burke means by the antithesis of artificial political society—that “natural society” his purpose is to vindicate in the first place—is far from clear and elaborated in little detail. In the “natural state” nature moderate degree of labor provides the human being everything they may sensibly ask for, and there is no slavery nor luxury: “Life is simple, and therefore it is happy” (ibid., 74). I am well aware that Vindication may be a work of satire. This is in fact what Burke himself claims in the 1757 reprint of the work: that he wrote the essay merely to make philosophical mockery of Voltaire and some of his English contemporaries, especially the deist Lord Bolingbroke. Conventional Burke-scholarship has accepted Burke’s testimony and the consistency of his conservatism (see e.g. O’Brien 1992), but others have not. Murray N. Rothbard has claimed that Vindication is “perhaps the first modern expression of rationalistic and individualistic anarchism” (Rothbard 1958, 114) and the post facto recanting of it was to do with Burke’s budding political career. I agree with Rothbard in that a close reading of Vindication does betray a sober work of negative anarchism

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(cf. Weston 1958). What Burke does in the book is point out a “grand error” implicit in all government: people sometimes commit violence against one another and it is therefore necessary to guard against such violence and appoint “governors.” But the question is this: who defends the people against the governors? We may never know Burke’s intentions writing Vindication, but to return to the topic of the peacekeeper state Burke points his finger on something very important, something we mentioned in passing at the end of the previous chapter with Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. The stumbling block in the way of overcoming the ills of the artificial society and a return to a natural society is, Burke argues, “a mystery of iniquity [. . .] called the reason of state” (Burke 1803). This is a sort of “reason” predicated on the caprices of the “body politick” and one impenetrable to the faculty of reason providence endowed with humans beings. There it is, like a cloud blocking the sun of providential reason that prevents us from seeing a “natural condition”—we do not need to agree what that might be to understand the problematique under discussion—and ourselves as moral agents, “human beings,” within it. Roughly a century and a half after Burke Leo Tolstoy wonders the same thing in his The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894). For Tolstoy, political society requires a reason of its own for “checking the moral development of men, and by various suggestions keeping them back in the ideal of life, outgrown by mankind at large, on which the power of government rests” (Tolstoi 2010, 107). Governments exist because people believe, “as though it were something fully proved, and so needing no proof, that since all nations have hitherto developed in the form of states, that form of organization is an indispensable condition of the development of humanity” (ibid., 97). The morality embodied by these “bodies politick” seems to exist not only independent, but above of the conscience of human beings believing in their existence. “Strange and contradictory as it seems,” writes Tolstoy, “all men of the present day hate the very social order they are themselves supporting” (ibid., 111). One of the father-figures of IR, Hans J. Morgenthau calls reason of state an attitude according to which “the state is subject to no rule of conduct but the one which is dictated by its own self-interest” (Morgenthau 1946, 175). That such a “cloud” has indeed formed in the sky of reason can be explained by a “misunderstanding” made by secular thought in Western civilization, writes Morgenthau, that has set the sphere of political ethics apart from private ethics. According to the ethics underlying the reason of the state, when a statesman is confronted with a choice

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between two actions, one of which is ethical and the other which is not, he must choose the latter over the former if there is politically advantage in so doing, that is do what in private ethical conduct would be considered amoral. In other words: there is one ethics for the political sphere and there is another ethics for the private sphere, and the former allows him to do certain things there which the latter does not allow him to do here. Political acts are subject to one ethical standard; private acts are subject to another. What the latter condemns, the former may approve. (Morgenthau 1946, 179) “The individual as such is moral by nature,” Morgenthau expounds, but “political society is amoral, also by nature” (Morgenthau 1946, 176). No civilization can be satisfied with such a moral dualism, “for through it the domain of politics is not only made morally inferior to the private sphere but this inferiority is recognized as legitimate and made respectable by a particular system of politics” (ibid., 179). Having said all this Morgenthau diagnoses the state of political ethics in “a retarded stage of development” (ibid., 180).1 Yes: we are ethical creatures by nature, but in international relations we can do wrong and be evil. Alexander Wendt addresses this problem of moral dualism in his Social Theory when he ponders whether or not states are Realist by nature. In a world of scarce resources our needs will often come into conflict with those of the other, and states depend politically on a constituency that demands their interests to be met before those of “foreigners.” According to Wendt bodies politic have an objective interest bias to “stay alive”— “[h]uman beings probably would never have survived evolution without such a self-interested bias, and the same is probably true of states”— perhaps even more so than human individuals (Wendt 1999, 241). “All other things being equal,” Wendt reasons, “the international system contains a bias towards ‘Realist’ thinking” (ibid.). The question, for Wendt, is not whether or not the international system has as its ethical foundation in the “Realist” reason of state, but whether states “are capable ever of transcending [. . .] and expanding the boundaries of the Self to include Others” (ibid.)? A good question. It is also a question that makes discernible the enigma, the paradox, the contradiction in terms we face when we try to think about morality and international order—though, again, Wendt might rather opt for the international system instead. We the people, endowed

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with conscience, a sense of obligation toward the good, are the same species that represent the imagined communities of states, their symbolic bodies politic. The opposition between man and society, personal and official, are mere figures of speech, because individuals are the ones who act, to accomplish their own ends or those of others: “[t]he action of society, of the nation, or of any other collectivity, political or otherwise, as such has no empirical existence at all” (Morgenthau 1946, 187). It is true— according to this logic, that is—that people who know by conscience that they “shall not murder” can so do, with utmost intensity and beyond measure, for reasons of state: when they have the political pardon of an entity that has no empirical existence at all, an “us” someone imagined at some point in history and is now again represented by the violence that is necessary for “our” redemption. Those who are one in their humanity are bound by moral conscience—those who are one with the corpus mysticum of the state, however, may opt out of their humanity and embrace “Realism” or whatever name you choose to give freedom without obedience. This is, as Morgenthau writes, the problem of politics and ethics in the secular age: While trying to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, we will at best strike a precarious balance which will waver between both, never completely satisfying either. In the extreme, we will abandon one completely in order fully to satisfy the other. The typical solution, however, will be a compromise which puts the struggle at rest without putting conscience at ease. (Morgenthau 1946, 190) This is to agree with an important point Terry Eagleton makes in his On Evil. Namely that most wickedness is institutional: “[i]t is the result of vested interests and anonymous processes, not of the malign acts of individuals” (Eagleton 2010, 143–4). The world is evil not because there are evil people gathering in cabinets to plot acts of moral outrage—though I have no doubt something like this happens from time to time—but primarily because evil is built into our political institutions and the individuals who serve them may well be unaware of the gravity of their actions (ibid., 143–4). Many of the people who somehow play a part in the political evils of our time are not moral monsters as human beings, but individual people who sincerely believe they are selflessly carrying out the duties they owe to their bodies politic. “[A] great deal of immoral behaviour is bound up with material institutions,” writes Eagleton, “and that, to this extent, rather like original sin it is not entirely the fault of those who engage in

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it [. . .] actions can be iniquitous without those who perform them being so” (ibid., 151). *

*

*

How do we negotiate God with international relations? How do we do it as human beings existing politically in a world He created? Should academic IR deal with this question somehow? Should we figure God into IR theory in some way? Ours is a historical moment in which it is easy to arrogate a negative answer to these questions: there is no God and there is nothing to come to terms with here. While such a premise does exist and even underlies much of secular world politics and its study within IR, it is nearly always swallowed whole so to speak: international relations is an affair that involves states and since God is nowhere to be seen—well: no-one has ever seen a state either, but this is supposed to be different somehow—there is no reason to figure Him into anything. This conclusion is made without much reasoning or critical reflection, which is a shame really. A gaze back at the history of philosophy reveals that such a systematic oversight is a very recent development indeed. I will begin by offering this as an open challenge: disprove theism as a worldview and we can put God and his absolute order, the one I have contextualized and developed in this book, to bed. Your case need not be bulletproof as long as it is reasonable, that is sound in logic and empirically plausible, and makes God’s negative existence more likely than its opposite. Do this and I will recant my criticism of academic IR and we can go on business as usual, ignore the whole notion of sacramental universe and focus on the “matter” of world politics. Meanwhile let me assume that there is a personal God and he has a stake in the nomos here on earth, and think about some of the implications this matter of fact would have on international relations. Having got that out of the way I will point out a manifest truth: namely, that there is something morally and physically wrong with the world. More than a century ago, Tolstoy wrote: “Whether he be master or slave, the man of today cannot help constantly feeling the painful opposition between his conscience and actual life, and the miseries resulting from it” (Tolstoi 2010, 68). And the same pains persist today: poverty, violence, suffering, and injustice are rife. There are some of us fortunate enough to tolerate some of all this evil somehow in our individual lives, and there are even those able to ignore all of it almost altogether, but when looked at from a distance an ineluctable conclusion emerges: the world we occupy is not the best of possible worlds. We can easily imagine a world where there is less evil: a world where one less person starved to death, one less civilian

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was be killed in conflict, one less child died of a curable disease, &c. It also seems to me that we are making little or no progress at all toward a better world, neither morally nor physically. Evil is still on the rampage: people keep coming up with ever more ingenious reasons to cause suffering to others and, while so doing, devise more and more cunning and effective ways of going about it. The world economy is able to produce more goods at cheaper prices, year in year out, but those who benefit the most from this growth are not those in most need. Natural evils— earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, &c.—are still with us, and while there may be ways to alleviate evils caused by such accidents locally, we may actually be to blame of aggravating some of them globally. It seems intuitively true—well: to me at least!—that there exists such a thing as evil in our world and, knowing some may disagree with me on this, I believe we are not making as much progress in eradicating it as we could. William E. Connolly, writing in the Identity/Difference I already mentioned in the Preface, argues that national states we have divided the world into are forms of theodicy, “justifications of the ways of God to man,” but not universal in scope as they are territorially limited (Evans 2002, 114). The rationale of this piecemeal approach to the problem of evil is that since it is difficult, if not impossible, to alleviate the pains of all mankind, why not try to mend it for a clearly mapped-out group of people? In a world God seems to have abandoned a temporary solution is better than no solution at all—yes? The “gain” of such limited theodicies is that they give evil a place in the scheme of things and protect the nomoi of the national state and society from the threat of chaotic disintegration: “it is not only natural disaster, illness, and, and death that must be explained in nomic terms,” writes Peter Berger, “but also the misfortunes that men inflict on one another in the course of their social interaction” (Berger 1990, 59). Berger continues: [T]he individual dying on the battlefield at the hands of the foreign conqueror may not look forward to his own resurrection or immortality, but he can do so with regard to his group. To the extent that he subjectively identifies himself with that group, his death will have meaning for him even if it is unembellished with any “individualized” legitimations. Such identification, therefore, posits an implicit theodicy, without the need for further theoretical rationalization. (Berger 1990, 61) But these limited theodicies are problematic. Attempting to solve the problem of evil for some people, somewhere often betrays the ugly rear

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of exclusive political identity, and leads to “defining a range of differences as heretical, evil, irrational, perverse, or destructive, even when the bearers of difference pose no direct threat of conquest” (Connolly 1991, 3). This happens the moment when these limited theodicies begin to pile on more misery to the universal account of evil: there are times when it is difficult to tell when this threshold—when pursuing our own interest becomes a cause of suffering to others—is crossed, but too often it is glaringly obvious. How many deaths on the battlefields have made a lasting contribution in eradicating evil in our world? States’ needs for security and prosperity may be goals worth achieving, maybe even worth killing and dying, but these needs are far too often mutually exclusive. In other words: curbing the threat of chaos and disintegration within its perimeter it is far too often that states overstep their marker. The purpose of the state Martin Luther helped to conceive circa 500 years ago was not to turn international relations into a global game of Risk: “[t]he authority of the government is not derived from the fact that it gives expression to a people’s genius, but from the fact that God has ordained it to thwart the devil” (Wingren 2004, 79). Even though the office of temporal authority was in itself good and divine, he argued, the persons who occupied these offices could belong to either God or devil. According to Luther authority was evil when it no longer served God’s purpose but that of its own, thus ascribing to itself the power and the righteousness that derived from and belonged to God. “Creation is available for man’s use or misuse,” Wingren reads Luther, [b]ut misuse never derives from anything in itself evil; it has its root in the corrupted human heart. Evil is the devil’s work through the heart of man. The combat between God and the devil for all vocations and orders takes place within every single human being. If God is victor, then that part of external existence which lies within man’s reach is made to serve God. If Satan wins, God’s creation is used in the opposite way. (Wingren 2004, 86) Luther’s conception of government not only acknowledged the presence of evil in the world, but also believed in the existence of the devil who was willing and able to take over the body politic, office by office, and use it against God’s plan and purpose. Luther made his choices in the political context of the peasant revolts and Calvin also had his reasons to bless the temporal authorities of his day, but we must admit there is a contrast between these exegetical

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compromises—which have proved exceedingly momentous in the history of both the Christian tradition and the modern state—and, not only the teaching and example of Jesus Christ as we know him from the Gospels, but the political ethos of the Bible as a whole. Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds that certain chapters in Scripture, of which Romans 132 is the most cited example, were not written to the leaders as divine authorization of their rule, no: “Paul does not intend to instruct the Christian community about the tasks of those in authority, but instead only deals with the tasks of the Christian community toward authority” (Bonhoeffer 2003, 244, emphasis in original). This passage does not tell whether or not authority is good or evil, but there is something important Paul says at the end of the 12th chapter: that Christians are responsible “not [to] be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12.21, ESV). To the French philosopher and lay theologian Jacques Ellul there are enough inconsistencies in the political theology of the Reformation (never mind that of Catholicism) to ground a betrayal of Christianity altogether (Ellul 1988, 79). Ellul’s reading spans across testaments, but what concerns us here is the story of the three temptations and especially the one where Jesus is taken by the devil to a mountain high, where he showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will.” (Lk. 4.5-6 ESV) Ellul points out an extraordinary detail in this exegesis, which is that in neither Luke’s or Matthew’s (4.8-9) account of the temptation does Jesus contest the fact that political power—“all authority and glory” in the “kingdoms of the world”—actually belongs to the devil. That is: Jesus does not dispute that political power has been given to the devil and he gives it to whom he wills, from which follows that those who hold political power receive it from him and depend upon him. While this may not be a very appreciative theological attitude toward political authority, for Ellul it is indisputable evidence proving the fact that at least “the first Christian generation was globally hostile to political power and regarded it as bad no matter what its orientation or constitutional structures” (Ellul 1988, 58). Ellul also finds interesting that both Gospels reference the devil, diabolos, the etymological meaning of which is the “divider” and “[t]he state and politics are thus primary reasons for division” (Ellul 1988, 58).

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Giorgio Agamben’s highly suggestive reading of the second letter to the Thessalonian’s in The Time That Remains, in which he discusses the meaning of Paul’s3 use of the term katechon, supports Ellul’s argument. Writing about the second coming of Jesus Christ Paul reminds his brethren of the one “restraining [ho katechon] him now so that he may be revealed in his time” (2 Thess. 2.6) and also “[t]he coming of the lawless one [. . .] by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception” (2 Thess. 2.9-10). Picking up an idea left behind by Schmitt, Agamben identifies the katechon with the state and every theory of the state since Hobbes’ Leviathan a secularization of this exegesis. This is to say, if I am reading Agamben correctly, that in the Christian narrative temporal authority is ultimately from Satan and will finally be overcome in messianic time: it is “a clash between two parousiai: between that of the anomos, who is marked by the working of Satan in every power [potenza], and that of the Messiah, who will render energeia inoperative in it” (Agamben 2005, 111, emphases in original). I am certainly not suggesting that we figure neither God nor the devil directly in our IR—this is probably not the way to make Christian theology relevant in today’s world politics. Rather, I am trying to make discernible the institutional role that the relative nomos of international order plays in the problem of evil. You do not have to believe in the devil working for the government to concede to this: faith in the supreme moral autonomy of national sovereignty in world politics is the first step in the wrong direction. When human beings use the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical violence embodied by the body politic against human moral instinct, states no longer qualify as instruments of God’s nomos, but vie to become Gods themselves, as Hendrik Berkhof writes, “behaving as they were the ultimate ground of being, and demanding from men an appropriate worship” (Berkhof 1977, 30). While states serve many useful and indeed necessary functions, they “undergird human life and society and preserve them from chaos,” they are like human beings in that they keep falling from grace (ibid., 30). This is the warning Burke delivered in his Vindication. It has now gone on long enough to shore a foundation for something Walter Wink calls a domination system, which “is characterized by unjust economic relations, oppressive political relations, biased race relations, patriarchal gender relations, hierarchical power relations, and the use of violence to maintain them all” (Wink 1998, 39). In this system—one we could just as well call international system—states “directly compete with each other for territory or markets preserve the system by the very interactions by which they try to destroy each other” (ibid., 56).

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The message political theology can send to IR is point out the theological, historical, and cognitive fact that the national state has, over the last three or four centuries, established itself as the most powerful and dangerous institutional form of idolatry there is. Let me elucidate, because this here is where the Christian worldview makes a sharp turn from the relative nomos of secular, business-as-usual international relations. If indeed we concede to that there is no authority above that embodied by the national state, no political reason above that of state—the worldview-challenge I presented a few paragraphs above is still open— then there is no ultimate foundation to make principled limits to the obedience we owe to our bodies politic. If we are lucky enough to be citizens of a functioning liberal democracy then we will of course object and argue that it is us, at the end of the day, who get to choose who gets to be our head of State and Government and represent us out there, in world politics. None of this has any consequence whatsoever if authority remains fixed in the absolute authority of national sovereignty: as long as we assume human political authority and institutions as absolute, we commit the sin of idolatry.4 However: only by accepting the theistic5 worldview, trusting in the plan and purpose of God’s nomos and His moral absolutes, standing witness to reasonable limits of human political authority and institutions, can overcome the “retarded ethics” of international relations. It seems to me this is the way, the only way, to engage human wickedness exacerbated by the world of states. It is common sense to say that states are not really people (even though we have a long history of imagining them in our own, human terms) and we should not really make of them a pseudo-scientific religion (as contemporary IR seems to do with increasing rigor). Unfortunately the international idolatry is something that lies deeper than appears and calls for a more comprehensive dismantling than this. Humans have been created as beings with an imagination, and if they do not reflect the image of their creator they will reflect some other image they find from or make of the world6: any thing to cling onto for earthly security (Beale 2008, 291). In biblical worldview God alone is uncreated, self-existent, noncontingent: everything else is dependent on God for existence and sustenance. In a world of His creation it is God’s prerogative to decide and define what constitutes good and distinguishes it from evil. When human beings begin—or began, as the Genesis narrates—to rebel against this order by usurping God’s moral prerogative and declaring autonomy to decide themselves the distinction between good and evil, they will end up in the condition of fallen humanity, as we have.

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God has acknowledged our challenge as a matter of fact: “Then the Lord God said, Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever” (Gen. 3.22, ESV). By this God does not mean that by reaching for the tree of life, “taking possession of the centre of existence” as Bonhoeffer (2004, 83–4) puts it, we have become gods. What he means is rather that by rebelling against His nomos we have chosen to act as though we were gods: deifying our capacities, the choices we make, and their implications. “The root of all idolatry,” writes Christopher J. H. Wright, “is human rejection of the Goodness of God and the finality of God’s moral authority” (Wright 2006, 164). In his The Mission of God he argues that idolatry blurs the distinction between God and creation, to the detriment of both: Idolatry dethrones God and enthrones creation. Idolatry is the attempt to limit, reduce and control God by refusing his authority, constraining or manipulating his power to act, having him available to serve our interests. At the same time, paradoxically, idolatry exalts things within the created order [. . .]. Creation is then credited with a potency that belongs only to God; it is sacralized, worshiped and treated as that from which ultimate meaning can be derived. A great reversal happens: God, who should be worshiped, becomes an object to be used; creation, which is for our use and blessing, becomes the object of our worship. (Wright 2006, 165) Creation, which derives its meaning from God, can not in itself give us the true meaning. If we look for a moral foundation we will not find one from the world: human life has no more meaning than any other form of life, there is no difference between good and evil under the sun, any objective reference point for moral discrimination becomes impossible. But the human species craves true meaning, it is hard-wired to “being ultimately concerned” (Tillich 1999, 11). As Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit argue in their Idolatry, we can not really help dedicating our lives to something, and this is the reason why we should care about what or who is worthy of asking such a high price: Absolute value can conferred upon many things—institutions such as the state, persons, goals, ideologies, and even a football team. In this extension of worship, religious attitude is perceived not as part of a metaphysics or as an expression of customary rituals but as a form of

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absolute devotion, an attitude that makes something into a godlike being. What makes something into an absolute is that it is both overriding and demanding. It claims to stand superior to any competing claim, and unlike merely an overriding rule it is also something that provides a program and a cause, thereby demanding dedication and devotion. The falseness of idolatry is that the object of this devotion is not worthy of it. Idolatry in this extension means leading a false life, a life dedicated to an unworthy cause. The opposition between idolatry and proper worship is not between the false and true god but between the unworthy and worthy god. (Halbertal and Margalit 1992, 245–6) As human beings and not gods—though we may very well think highly of our moral competence—we can not but commit our lives to something, dedicate and devote ourselves to something or some things absolutely; whether it be a state, person, goal, ideology, a football team, or whatnot. “To be a human being,” writes McFague, “is to interpret [. . .], to make judgements concerning similarity and difference, to think metaphorically” (McFague 1982, 65), and we are not alone making these judgments. We can never overcome the distance between ourselves and the world on our own, but need in our life somebody to follow, someone to take the lead.7 This is the human condition and it can be difficult for us human beings to come to terms with it. The main difference between the “secular” and “religious” worldviews, two possible “takes” on life within this condition today is the degree of tension between our being and reality: “[r]eligious people are less comfortable in the world, aware of the difference between things as they are and things as they ought to be; they are conscious of the metaphorical ‘is and is not’” (ibid.). The Christian worldview does not pursue political influence over “the powers that be,”8 but rather questions what kind of community disciplines we need to produce a people that represents true meaning, a blueprint of which our leaders have sketched over the years—these I discussed in the previous chapter—but one we need not look for in such legal treaties or political declarations, because its most important provisions have already been written in the human conscience. In its worldview discipline is best understood as discipleship: “whereas the discipline of the state seeks to create disciples of Leviathan, the discipline of the Church seeks to form disciples of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace” (Cavanaugh 2002, 88). Questioning the ultimate concern of the state, calling to dethrone the powers that be, is as it has always been in the history of Judeo-Christian

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tradition, Halbertal and Margalit (1992, 234) acknowledge, a stick of anarchical dynamite.9 If you need a fuse to light it up, I suggest thinking about death. Death is, as Berger writes, the marginal situation par excellence: it “presents society with a formidable problem not only because of its obvious threat to the continuity of human relationships, but because it threatens the basic assumptions on which society rests” (Berger 1973, 32–3). Confrontation with death—one’s own or that of a loved one, potential or actual—reveals the precariousness of the social world and its order, nomos, because it “radically challenges all socially objectivated definitions of reality—of the world, of others, and of self” (ibid., 52). To use Berger’s metaphors, in death the “daytime” world of everyday social existence is usurped by the anomic irreality of the “night,” where the world no longer seems quite as in the light of day. How a particular institutional order survives, another day dawns, is because of theodicy: “a religious legitimation of anomic phenomena” (ibid., 63) that maintains society beyond the death of its members. Theodicies permit collectivities to integrate anomic events (such as death) into their nomos: “[t]hese events are now given ‘a place’ in the scheme of things, which consequently is protected from the threat of chaotic disintegration that is always implicit in such events” (ibid., 66). Every human order, nomos, is a community in the face of death, and theodicy is an attempt to make a pact with death. “Whatever the fate of any historical religion, or that of religion as such,” Berger predicts, “we can be certain that the necessity of this attempt will persist as long as men die and have to make sense of the fact” (ibid., 87). Societies, like the national states we have today, have means to “transcend” the death of individual human individuals, because they are grounded in sacred time,10 in which a human lifetime is but an episode. In a sense, then, we can imagine states as immortal beings, which is characteristic of gods. Us human beings, living our actual lives in historical time, are unfortunately limited by the inevitable fact of mortality. Living as a “disciple of Leviathan,” disbelieving that there is a sacramental universe above that of the national state, one may be lucky enough to be a citizen of a state that makes an honest attempt at delivering its part of the social contract. If you do not mind me saying so, Finland does a splendid job at it. Having done my share of traveling abroad I have come to appreciate the luck and the blessing it is to live in this country.11 I know too well that not everyone is quite as comfortable with the way their respective sovereign holds onto their end of the bargain: political power can be a wickedness indeed. States can and do act against the human being and their

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interests, which is a wrong and an evil: to prove that “these policed societies are a violation offered to nature, and a constraint upon the human mind, it needs only to look upon the sanguinary measures, and instruments of violence which are every where used to support them” (Burke 1803, 35). The ways in which these measures and instruments have been perfected, and the scale in which they are increasingly put to use today, two and a half centuries since Burke published these words, have poisoned any values there ever were in the well of the Enlightenment. What is required by the Christian worldview as it intervenes world politics is a systematical questioning of the ultimate value of national state in our personal and collective lives. It demands something to the effect of what Berkhof calls the de-ideologization of the state, “a reduction to its true dimensions”: where it “no longer serves its own interest and no longer enslaves men to the world view it propagates” (Berkhof 1977, 59). States must be neutralized as ends in themselves and reoriented as instruments they were meant to be: “means of staving off chaos and ordering human relations in such a way that we can lead a quiet and stable life and follow God’s call, unhampered by external hindrances” (ibid.). Rather than being “a disciple of Leviathan” one should follow the Prince of Peace instead. There is a call to make a personal decision here: Who to follow? Who to give the lead? Jesus said that “[n]o one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other” (Matt. 6.24). His apostles agreed that “[w]e must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5.29). Centuries of Christian tradition have—for reasons as theological as they have been sometimes been political—muffled it down to a whisper, but the radical call to make a personal decision remains. States do not want you to hear it, they do not want to give you an option, something to choose between. Why would they? States need our belief and obedience in order to exist, for their order to exist. Losing both, our belief and obedience, would be the end of the state and international politics as we know it. But how about, I hear a cry, the abundance of religious violence and wars fought in the name of religion? What about Samuel Huntington and his Clash of Civilizations—was he not in the right in predicting a war between Christianity and Islam? There are at least two points of clarification one can make when thinking about accusations and arguments such as these. I will begin by addressing the latter, more specific question: the War on Terror ongoing (at the time of writing) in Afghanistan and Iraq is not a religious war in the first instance. It was not Islam that flew into the twin towers on and not Christianity that patrols the streets

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of Fallujah: this is a war involving national and economical interests, not one on who holds true religion. The former, broader question about violence properly motivated by religion is an important one and demands an answer. How else can we come to terms with, say, the violent history of Christendom? Like Ellul I will answer by making a difference between religion and revelation. It is incomprehensible how a religion whose heart is that God is love12 can give rise or take part in wars that are absolutely and unacceptable relative to the teaching and example of Jesus. “The immediate reality” of this is that the revelation we have in Jesus ought not to give rise to a religion: “[a]ll religion leads to war, but the Word of God is not a religion, and it is the most serious of all betrayals to have made of it a religion” (Ellul 1988, 26). If being a disciple of Jesus Christ implies a faith distinct of its “visible” forms in the world, churches and creeds, institutions and hierarchies, then so be it. Believing in what happened in the first Easter—that a man was crucified, died, and then rose from the dead—is true need not be a religion: it can be a radical fact that will call into question the prerogative of national state in our personal and collective lives. But political arrangements are always short term. We can choose among many worldviews to live with, but the ones we can die with are few indeed. There is something crucially important to understand what is at stake here: if there is no God, if there is no sacramental universe above the world, then human beings have nothing to do with true meaning. If there is no God, there are no moral absolutes. If we have human rights then they do not have a metaethical foundation: there is no Natural Law nor Traditional Morality to anchor to, no First Principles or Platitudes to build on—no Tao. What is evil today may be good tomorrow. We have no ground to chastise anyone outside the moral system of our traditionmediated rationality. If there is no God, death is the end and what comes to waiting for it, whether one believes there is a Jesus who is the Christ and who lived in the world and died for our sins, or generally trying to do good things and avoiding the bad things in making one’s choices in life is, to put it in the words of the Ecclesiastes, “vanity and a striving after wind”. Only one thing is certain: if there is no God, we do not have to follow anyone’s example to be saved, because in this world—“the valley of the shadow of death” (Ps. 23:4)—discipleship follows naturally from fear: fear of being forgotten by your “friends” at home and the violent hatred of your enemies abroad.

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Notes 1

William E. Scheuermann’s (2009) Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond is an excellent piece of scholarship, which draws a picture of the man far more detailed than your average IR textbook. 2 Which begins: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Rom. 13.1, ESV). 3 Even though there are grounds for questioning genuine authorship in this case, let us assume for now that 2 Thessalonians was written by the apostle (see e.g. Carson and Moo 2005, 536–42). 4 I am not going to discuss the sinfulness of idolatry here. There is little that can be added to Paul’s judgment of unrighteousness in Rom. 1.18-25 and Karl Barth’s (1968, 51–3) reading of it: how it is not only that the world now exists side by side with God, but that it has now taken God’s place and demand for devotion. 5 Notice how I am not insisting on a Christian worldview here. The moral argument for the existence of God is not a case exclusive to the God of Christianity: it merely argues that the existence of absolute moral laws requires a Lawgiver. 6 A passage in Paul’s letter to the Philippians sets a classic scriptural example of the meaning and end of idolatry: Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us. For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things. (Phil. 3.17-9, ESV) 7 Even the most radical individualists do: they merely think, in obvious paradox, that they are following themselves. 8 This phrase evokes the title of Walter Wink’s (1998) digest of his ambitious trilogy on the political theology of the “Powers” (see Wink 1984; 1986; 1992). 9 For an excellent biblical introduction to the tradition of Christian anarchism see Alexandre Christoyannopoulos’ (2011) Christian Anarchism. 10 I am not saying that a society can not cease to exist: they have done so and they will do so in the future. Without a grounding in sacred time, that is without making of themselves objects of a religious order, institutions such as the national state risk collapsing into anomy—“dying” of lost belief. 11 Having said that I do not want to come out as prejudiced against any person, actual or imagined, outside Finland. 12 Rather than making a direct biblical reference, I recommend the reader to consider the Psalter as a book of God’s love.

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Index

Abolition of Man, The 126 absolute devotion 153 Agamben, Giorgio 108, 150 American Declaration of Independence (1776) 109 anachronism 78 Anderson, Benedict 21, 54 Annan, Kofi (Secretary-General) 132–3 anomy 14–15 anthropomorphism 75–88 nonreligious forms of 86–7 antinomianism 115 Apostles 35 Arendt, Hannah 66 Aristotle 23, 47 Associations and Law 23 baptism 32 Barbour, Ian G. 82 Barkan, Leonard 22 Beer, Francis A. 64–5, 98 Berger, Peter L. 6–7, 53, 84, 147 Berkhof, Hendrik 16, 150 biblical theology 33 nominalist worldview 36–7 Bluntschli, Johann Kaspar 60 Bobrow, Davis 57 bodily metaphors 35 Eucharist 60 Lord’s Supper 60 body of Christ 52 in Christian political imagination 34 state as 28–34, 140 body politics 24–6, 42, 64 riot and rebellion against 40 Bolingbroke, Lord 142 Bondage of the Will, The 38

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Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 10–12, 30 Bonifacius VIII, Pope 35 Bosanquet, Bernard 58, 77 Buddhism 76 Burke, Edmund 141–3 business-as-usual international relations 151 Calvin, John 39, 43–4, 53 Campbell, David 57 Carr, E. H. 56, 66, 68, 72, 111 Casanova, José 51 Catholic tradition 36 Cavanaugh, William T. 1, 6, 52, 56, 140 Christ and the Powers 16 Christendom 31–2 Christian civilization 26, 42–3 Christian covenant theology 80 Christian God 11 Christianity 79 Christian doctrine of creation 123 moral absolutes 124–7 morality in 115–16 Christian political imagination 34 Christians, Luther’s views 35–6 Christian soteriology 140 Christian worldview xi, 151, 153, 155 church-as-organism metaphor, in political theology 26–33 civil obedience 39–41 Clark, Gordon H. 76, 120 Clash of Civilizations 155 commonwealth 3 Companion to Political Theology 1 Concept of the Political, The 1, 47 concrete sovereignty 4–5 Connolly, William E. xi, 135, 147 conscience 114

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168

Index

corpus Christi 33–5, 43 corpus mysticum Christi 35, 128, 145 cosmization 16–17 Craig, William Lane 121 Critique of Practical Reason 113 Critique of Pure Reason 110 cuius regio eius religio, principle of xiv, 51 culture, significance in communication 6 current affairs, representation in everyday speech and writing 20–1 Darwin’s theory of evolution 63, 74 Dawkins, Richard xiii, 121 death ix, 6, 15–16, 27, 34, 40, 43–4, 64–5, 85, 103, 146, 147, 154, 156 de Baecque, Antoine 57 de Maistre, Joseph 110 democratic revolutions 25 Dennett, Daniel xiii depersonalization of sovereignty 5 Der Lebensraum 74 Der Nomos der Erde 139 Desecularization of the World, The 53 development and international security, complementarity between 133–4 Discourse on Political Economy, A 25 Douglas, Mary 22 Durkheim, Émile 81 Eagleton, Terry 145 ecclesiastical symbolism 30 Eco, Umberto 6 Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The 81 Ellul, Jacques 149 End of Faith, The 116 Erasmus of Rotterdam 38 Eucharist 28–9, 36 evil, problem of xi, 146–9 Evolution of Religion, The 77 existential philosophy 7 Ferrè, Frederick 83 Feuerbach, Ludwig 89 Figgis, J. N. 41–2

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Finland 10 Forbidden Fruit, The 116 Free-will 39 French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) 109 French Revolution 38 Fukuyama, Francis 74 Garden of Eden 9–10 Geertz, Clifford 76 Geisler, Norman L. 114, 123 Gemeinschaft 30 Genesis 9–10 genuine communities 30 Gesellschaft 30 Gierke, Otto 23, 29, 33 Gilkey, Langdon 53 Gillespie, Michael Allen 36 Global Covenant, The 109 God concept xiii, 11–12, 26–7, 39, 80, 114, 120, 145, 151–2 God Delusion, The 121 God’s moral order 19 Gold, Dore 105 government, Luther’s conception of 148 Greek political thought 23 Gulf War, metaphors of the 74 Guthrie, S. E. 86–7 Halbertal, Moshe 85, 152, 154 Harris, Sam xiii, 116 Haushofer, Karl 59 Hayes, Edward C. 78 hermeneutics 7 Hervieu-Léger, Danièle 84 Heschel, Abraham J. 108 Hitchens, Christopher xiii Hittite suzerainty treaty 99–100 Hobbes, Thomas 3, 42 homo adorans 53 Horton, Michael 99 Household of God 30 human beings 47, 153 analogy of state and 23 behavior of 7 Berger’s views 6–7

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Index dignity of 108 ethical subjectivity of communities and 68–9 MacIntyre’s views 7 moral obligation 113 human body 22 human dignity 130 humanism 120, 124–5 humanitarian responsibility 110, 112, 118, 130 humanity, Christian concept of 33 human rights, notion of 109, 118 Huntington, Samuel 155 Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman 59 imagined communities 21–2 imagined community 54 individual personal spirit 30 Institutes of the Christian Religion 39, 43 international morality 70–1 international order, contemporary 139 International Political Theology (IPT) xi International Thought of Carl Schmitt, The 1 IR-community, in the United States ix Jackson, Patrick T. 58 Jackson, Robert 109–10 Jesus Christ, metaphorical theology associated with 26–33 John of Salisbury 24 Judaism 78 Judeo-Christian tradition 26, 153–4 jus publicum Europaeum 138–9 kalam cosmological argument 121 Kant, I. 113–14 Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 35 Kelsen, Hans 4–5, 42, 107 Ki-moon, Secretary-General Ban 132 Kingdom of God Is Within You, The 143 King’s Two Bodies, The 35 Kjellén, Rudolf 20–1 Krabbe, Hugo 4, 42, 46

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169

Kubalkova, Vendulka xi Kurtz, Paul 116–18, 120 Kuyper, Abraham 25, 47 Lakoff, George 74 Landau, Martin 60, 64 language of symbolism 8, 11 Lefort, Claude 25 Lehre vom Modernen Staat 60 Lennox, John C. xiii, 17 Leviathan 3 Lewis, C. S. 114–15, 125 liberalism 88 Lippmann, Walter 63 Lord’s Supper 27–8, 31 Luckmann, Thomas 7 Luther, Martin 35, 38, 40, 42, 148 MacIntyre, Alasdair 7, 122 Magna Carta (1215) 109, 111, 122 magni homines 139 Maistre, Joseph de 92 Man, the State and War 56, 69 Margalit, Avishai 85, 152, 154 McFague, Sallie 7, 13, 22, 36, 153 McGrath, Alister E. 122 Mennonite political theology 27 metaethics 118 metaphorical language 9, 11, 22 Metaphorical Theology 11 Millennium Declaration (MD) xv, 94, 96, 104, 106, 110 annual progress reports 131–2 democratic and participatory governance 134 goals 130 moral laws 114–15, 123–5 as a sacred covenant 112–13 sovereign equality 129 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 94, 132–3 metaphors in 98 Mission of God, The 152 monarch 5 moral antinomianism 118 Moral Landscape, The 122

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170

Index

Moral Man and Immoral Society 67, 113, 135 moral newtonianism 63 moral principles 115–17 Morgenthau, Hans J. 56, 70, 72, 143–4 Mosaic covenant 39, 80, 102 biblical concept of 102–3 Moses 39, 80 Muslim philosophy, medieval 121 myths 85–6 Nancy, Jean-Luc 127 nationalism 53–4, 128 Smith’s view 54 national socialism 46 nation-state 56 naturalism 17–18 Naugle, David K. 13 Neumann, Iver 59, 66 Neusner, Jacob 78 Newbigin, Bishop Lesslie 30–1 New Testament 27 Newtonian principles of rational inquiry 62 Niebuhr, Reinhold 67–8, 113, 143 nominalist revolution 36–7 nomization 14–16 nomos see social order (nomos) Nomos of the Earth, The 1, 13 objective nomos 15 objective religion 77–8 Ocampo, Under-Secretary-General José Antonio 132 O’Donovan, Oliver 90 On Evil 145 organic state 60–1 Origins of Political Order, The 74 Osiander, Andreas 51 paradise 9–10 Pascal, Blaise 79 Pascal’s wager 79 Paul, Saint 16 peccatorum communio 34

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Perry, Michael J. 119 personae publicae 138 person-hood of state 65–75 Carr’s views 66–7 ethical behavior 68 personification of state 67, 91 person-to-person relationship 68 philosophical relativism 107 Philosophical Theory of the State 58 Philpott, Daniel 51 Plato 23 political absolutism 5 political communities 26 political power 85 political society 141–2 political symbolism 6–12, 26 political theology 1 church-as-organism metaphor in 26–33 Schmittean concepts 1–2 Political Theology 1 political wordviews 12–19 based on a philosophy of relativism 18–19 Lutheran view 38–9 of a naturalist 17–18 nomization 14–16 as a personal relation 13–14 social order (nomos) 13–15 theistic 18 Politics 23 Politics Among Nations 56, 70 Politische Theologie, xii Preface to Politics, A 63 pre-Westphalian system 51 Protestant Reformation 33, 41, 51, 90 Ratzel, Friedrich 59, 74 Rechtsstaat positive law 4 Reflections on the Revolution in France 141 Reformation, implications of 36–8 Reformed Christian tradition xv religio 75 religion, definition of xiv, 75–7 as anthropomorphism 78–87

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Index essence of 89 legitimation functions 85 in scientific context 82–3 substance of 78 in terms of theory 79–80 religion’s place in political science x religious consciousness 77–8 religious symbolism 7–8 Republic 23 respublica Christiana 41, 140 respublicana Christiana 35 Review of International Studies 58 Ricoeur, Paul 7, 106 Robertson, O. Palmer 103 Roman Catholicism and Political Form 2 Roman Church 52 political authority 35–6 position in theological context 34 Rossler, Helmut 45 Rothbard, Murray N. 142 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 25 Sacred Canopy, The 6 sacred communion 54 “sacred properties,” of nations 54 sacred realissimum 84 St. Augustine 53 sanctorum communio 29, 32, 34 Schmemann, Alexander 53 Schmitt, Car l xii, 42, 46–7, 89, 139 political system 1–2 social order (nomos) 13–14 state sovereignty, concept of 2–3 Scientific Theology, A 122 Scott, Peter 1 Secular Age, A 52 secular authority 33–42 secular doctrines xi secular humanism 124 Sinclair, James D. 121 situationism 117 Smith, Anthony D. 54 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell 76 Social Construction of Reality, The 14 social contract 25 socialization 6–7

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social order (nomos) 13–15, 139–40, 150 objective vs subjective 15–16 social organisms 61 social spirit 30 Social Theory of International Politics 58, 144 sociology of knowledge 7 sovereign power 42 sovereignty defined 3 Figgis theory 41 of God 39 Speaking in Parables 11 Spencer, Herbert 61 Spinoza, Baruch 69, 91 spiritual love (agape) 30 state as acting units 56 authority of 4 as body of Christ 28–32 body of Christ as 28–34, 140 Calvin’s views 39 corpus mysticum of 145 Hobbesian system 128 as life form 61–2 modern confessional territorial absolutist 51–2 modern idea of 4–5 modern secular democratic 51 moral condition in international relation 69 ontological status of 55–65 organic 60–1 person-hood of 5, 58–9, 65–75 realist views 56, 144 relative order 19 and religion 84–7 Schmitt’s views 139 shared ideas and actions of individuals 73 soteriology of 140 in terms of power or of the foreign policy 56, 58 as a transcendental entity 62 state-as-actor 73

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Index

state-as-person metaphor, in IR 59–60 state-as-person system 74–5 Staten som Lifsform (State as a Living Organism) 20, 61 state sovereignty, concept of xi comparison of human body with the state 24–6 as a form of symbolism 6–12 Hobbes’ views 3 modern doctrine of 41 Schmitt’s views 2–3, 26 spiritual power of state 26 Waltz’s views 69–70 Wendt’s views 128–9 subjective identity 6 subjective nomos 15–16 subjective reality 6 supranational aristocratic society 70 suzerain states system 99 symbolic systems 8 Symbolism of Evil, The 9, 106 symbols xiii–xiv defiition of 7 early Christian community 27 as essential constituents of everyday life 8 Eucharist 28–9 of Finland 10–12, 44–5 of God 11–12 Lord’s Supper 27–8 opaque transparency of 9–10 religious 7–8 Ricoeur’s views 9 “self-illumination” of society via 22 of state 8 symbolic language 8, 11 Tillich’s views 7–8 Tao 125–7 Taylor, Charles 46 Taylor, Richard 115, 118 territorial sovereignty 73 theism 120 Theological-Political Treatise 91 theologico-political identity 24–6

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Jesus Christ as model 26–33 theology 7 Theory of International Politics 72 Theory of Semiotics, A 6 Thirty Years War 41 Tillich, Paul 7, 124, 128 Time That Remains, The 150 Tolstoy, Leo 143, 145 totalitarianism 5 Tower of Babel 105 true meaning, of declarations 106–18, 131 Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939, The 56, 66–7 UN-as-foundation metaphor 96 UN Charter 96–106 basic elements 100–2 in Christian covenant theology 102–4 faith and 96–7 Hittite suzerainty treaty 99–100, 104 legal histories 99 political relationship of suzerainty 99 UN-as-house metaphor 98 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 38, 122 distinction between human dignity and human rights 107–9 moral obligations 113–14 spirit of brotherhood 127 universal moral system 71 Vindication of Natural Society, A 141–3, 150 Voegelin, Eric 22, 26, 89–90 Vries, Asad de 77 Vries, Hent de 76–7 Walker, R. B. J. xi Waltz, Ditto Kenneth N. 56, 72 Walzer, Michael 22 Waring, Luther Hess 38 Wars of Religion 52, 90, 140

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Index Wendt, Alexander 58, 72, 88, 128, 144 Westphalian settlement 19 Westphalia treaty 38, 51, 141 Wight, Colin 59 Wight, Martin 58, 84, 99 Wingren, G. 148 worldviews 88 see also political worldviews biblical 151

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Christian xi, 151, 153, 155 metaphysician’s 83–4 Wright, Christopher J. H. 152 Yoder, John Howard 27, 31 zoomorphism 78

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