Volume 4, Issue 1, Summer 2014
Infinity Journal
Page 18
There is a paradox at the heart of the contemporary
understanding of international law. Use of force is considered
appropriate only for humanitarian ends and must fulfill a set
of predetermined axioms laid down in chapter 7 of the UN
charter, developed in the convention of the responsibility to
protect. Yet strategy, to be effective, requires a clear political
aim which might deviate from the general rule; preoccupied
with an abstract model applied generally, it has lost sight of
the particular.The failure of contemporary western statesmen
in the twenty first century to address this anomaly or to
prioritize their political ends has thus led to strategic confusion
from Afghanistan to Syria and Ukraine. In this context, it might
be useful to reappraise the utility of modern rationalism and
return instead to an earlier understanding of statecraft that
prudently avoided ‘premature generalisations’.[i]
The failure of contemporary western
statesmen in the twenty first century
to address this anomaly has thus
led to strategic confusion from
Afghanistan to Syria and Ukraine
The sixteenth century political thinkers who defined the
modern understandin§g of sovereignty and the nature of
political obedience had much to say about the relationship
between the state and the strategic use of force, yet this
aspect of their thought is largely neglected. These early
modern theorists of
raison d’etat
clarified the identity of the
modern state and how it maintained and defended its right
to exist, offering a practical counsel that modern western
democracies, in their efforts to maintain internal order or
conduct wars of choice, could do well to attend to.
The century from the Counter-Reformation to the Peace of
Westphalia was almost as bloody as the twentieth in terms
of the devastation it wreaked upon Europe. Between 1550-
1648, Europe suffered divisive internal as well as external
war, and witnessed the often brutal severing of traditional
political and religious allegiances from Prague to Edinburgh.
Between 1618-48, the gross domestic product of the lands of
the Holy Roman Empire (covering most of central Europe)
declined by between 25-40 percent. The war devastated
and depopulated entire regions of contemporary Germany,
Italy, Holland, France and Belgium. In 1635, Jacques Callot
captured the miseries and misfortunes of the war in a
devastating series of lithographs (see fig 1).
It was in the context of confessional division and internecine
war that the modern unitary state emerged unsteadily from
the disintegrating chrysalis of the medieval realm. With
it arose a new scepticism about morality, law and order
that came to be termed ‘politique’, or reason of state. The
realist thinkers that outlined this political project from Nicolo
Machiavelli at the start of the century, to the neglected
but far more influential Dutch humanist, Justus Lipsius, at
its end, were notably wary of abstract moral injunctions
when it came to difficult questions of war and governance.
Instead they offered a distinctive counsel of prudence, or
practical morality, when considering the use of force. Unlike
the contemporary human rights lobby, practical sixteenth
century guides to statecraft offered maxims or aphorisms,
not axioms, to address difficult cases like war. This practical
advice to princes and republics on morality and war
contrasts dramatically with contemporary international law
and its application of a universal moral and legal standard
to all cases of the use of force for humanitarian ends.
Yet a return toaprudent rhetoric of reasonableness,especially
in foreign policy debates, could restore the balance which
abstract theoretical rationalism, and its preoccupation
with certain rules and systems has disturbed. In a world of
David Martin Jones
University of Queensland
Australia
David Martin Jones is Associate Professor of Political
Science and International Studies, University of
Queensland and Visiting Professor, War Studies, Kings,
London. His recent publications include Sacred Violence
Political Religion in a Secular Age (Palgrave2014) and
Asian Security and the Rise of China (Elgar 2013); and
The New Counter Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective
(edited with Celeste Ward Gvetner and M.L.R. Smith,
(Palgrave 2014).
To cite this Article:
Jones, David Martin, “Politics, Statecraft and the art of War,”
Infinity Journal
, Volume 4, Issue 1, summer 2014,
pages 18-24.
Politics, Statecraft and the art of War
