THE PRICE OF PEACE. Just war in the twenty-first century. By Charles Reed and David Ryall, editors. 358pp. Cambridge University Press. Paperback, Pounds
15.99 (US $29.99). - 978 0 521 67785 1.
It is difficult to imagine a more impressive analysis of the just-war tradition today than this brilliantly edited and introduced collection of essays under a joint Anglican-Roman Catholic aegis. The end of the Cold War gave just-war considerations renewed relevance, and anyone considering the ethics of war will think within its framework, whether or not they share the Christian natural-law tradition on which it is based. That is why it has been possible to bring together for shared reflection such distinguished people, American and British, from the military and the civil service, alongside international relations experts, moral and political philosophers, and theologians. Given the casual remarks sometimes made about the preponderant contribution of religious motivations to the causal nexus of war, it is interesting how often contributors address the "functional pacifism" of the mainstream Churches in Europe and North America. Furthermore, given some current ideas about the military, the contributions from those whose business is to think about armed intervention and defence are truly impressive. In his Foreword General Sir Richard Dannatt says he became interested at the invitation of Major General Ian Durie, who commanded British artillery in the first Gulf War, was later ordained, and tragically died visiting Romania to promote spiritual and moral understanding in that country's army. Churches may have given up the Pauline imagery of spiritual combat embedded in "Onward Christian Soldiers", but it seems a milites Christi still exists.
When Tony Blair said he would answer to God for his decisions on war and peace, he underlined just how central the morality of military action is to the Christian conscience, schooled in the most adamant interdictions of violence.
Over against the Sermon on the Mount stands the secular and practical wisdom of seeking peace by preparing for war. The dilemma of the Christian confronted by this practical wisdom is shared with all those forms of secular and secularist thinking that have sought peace and identified specific enemies of peace against whom it may be necessary to go to war. That is quite apart from those secular traditions of necessary and even exemplary violence, not without their own moral justifications, associated with statecraft, raison d'etat and national exigency. To identify religion as specially implicated in violence by way of contrast with secular ideologies either extends the definition of religion to cover secular violence or elides the history of the twentieth century and the endemic resort to violence in complex societies. In effect it claims an innocence exempt from the human and social condition.
Once you reject strict pacifism as abandoning the world to those exemplifying the will-to-power, you encounter the dilemmas set out in The Price of Peace.
There is, however, a governing paradox lying outside its remit, and that is the way key secular ideologies develop two tracks with regard to peace and war parallel with the two tracks adopted by Christianity: pacifism and the just war. These are not options adopted in free ideological space, but dictated by the structure of political action.
Bertrand Russell provides a paradigm case of how that structure governs the options of individuals, as well as of ideologies. From being a pacifist in the late 1930s, Russell came to contemplate a pre-emptive nuclear strike in the late 40s. The point is that if your framework is based on perceived consequences in terms of aggregate happiness and misery then you may at one point calculate that the optimal option lies in the rejection of the logic of armaments, and later revise that calculation in favour of a pre-emptive nuclear strike. The switch is inherent rather than capricious, and in The Price of Peace the theologian Nigel Biggar points out the logic inherent in the consequential approach and the way it may potentially be in tension with the constraints built into the just-war tradition.
As far as the two-track structure of ideologies is concerned, anarchism divides into a pacific and a violent wing. Liberalism perhaps provides a more familiar example. Liberal internationalism either adopts the functional pacifism characteristic of (say) John Bright, or ventures abroad to crusade against inhuman and violent regimes, as in Rwanda and now in Darfur. As more than one contributor to The Price of Peace suggests, this functionally pacifist option is what many in the mainstream Churches of Europe, Britain and America now adopt as though mandated by the just-war tradition. They do this in part because they are liberals, but also because they are wary on Christian and liberal grounds of the alternatives: the liberal tendency to turn all wars into crusades, and the pursuit of foreign policy mainly on the basis of the contingent twists and turns of perceived national interest. Liberal crusades are prone to collapse once the consequences turn out costly in life and treasure, while a contingent foreign policy seems very dicey, given the problems Christians have with the idea of legitimate national interest, their suspicion of power and emphasis on altruism.
